My God, since when did we give up the right to choose for the right to insist?
He's not insisting the corporation provide him with an edited version; he's choosing to watch the movie with a precise, computer-controlled "hand" on the fast-forward and mute buttons.
It's like reading Nietzsche without the 'God is dead' quotes because it might infect your kids minds.
Editing Nietzsche would be like editing Pulp Fiction or Deep Throat; there'd be nothing left. But there are bastardized versions of literary texts already; Bowler got his name in the dictionary for producing a heavily cut version of Shakespeare, and the usual edition of Samuel Pepys' Diaries have all the bits not suitable for Victorian ears cut out. Do we really need a law to prevent that, or can we accept that people have that right and hope the good stuff forces out the bad?
Whammo. You have mplayer. Ok, by "easy" I mean "repeatable sequence of commands", not "point and click", I guess.:)
It may be easy, for some sense of that word, but it's tedious and annoying. I have about thousand packages installed on my system via dselect and apt-get; if I had to go through that for every one, I'd be there for months, and have hordes of devel packages installed that I otherwise wouldn't need. Windows users have to chase all over the net to get all their programs and upgrade anything; part of the reason I use Debian is because it's all right there in dselect, making it trivial to upgrade, remove and install.
Much of the rest of the world uses different charactersets.
And when posting texts in non-English languages, Project Gutenberg uses those character sets.
Gutenberg is completely impoverised with regard to, say, French, Norse, or countless other languages.
But Gutenberg has several books in French, in Latin-1. The problem Project Gutenberg has with non-English languages is that people tend to work with local e-text groups, like Projekt Gutenberg-DE or Project Runeberg, instead of working with PG.
Interestingly enough, one of the problems with PG is files in odd charsets. The PG copy of the Swedish bible is basically in CP437 (that gets the accents right), but I have no idea what character set the quotes are in.
I tried scanning a 40-year-old book - a drama script written in Indonesian - and the combination of unusual font *and* unrecognised language was enough to make the OCR software's output 50% rubbish.
ABBYY FineReader - which is a very popular OCR program in Project Gutenberg circles - will let you train the program for that font. It's not a pancea, but you can usually get decent text out of it. It also supports Indonesian - it supports just about every modern language written in Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian or Armenian.
imagine scanning a 500-year-old book hand-written in Cyrillic...
Cyrillic's no big deal; in theory, it's no harder than Latin, and ABBYY is produced by Russians, so it should handle it well enough. 500-year-old is a little worse, but not unsolvable; I've OCR'ed copies of books that were nearly that old. The handwritten part is going to be the killer, though.
It keeps it quite good for almost all European languages [evergreen.edu], thank you.
Did you read the page? "ASCII Extended Character Sets -- PC" are two of the various ways that ASCII was extended for non-English languages. Go down to the "ASCII Standard" link for the real ASCII standard, which only covers English.
Or would you prefer that Project Gutenberg supported the Unicode standard that is mired in controversy
Oh, yes, a standard that has been supported by offical acts of Japan, Chinese, Iran, India, US, the EU, and various states of the US, and is a crucial part of Windows NT, Mac OS X, KDE, Gnome, HTML, XML, Ada, Java, and C9x, but is disliked by one ranting academian who never bothered to update his page in response to corrections, that obviously means that standard is fatally mired in controversy.
Besides, English (European languages, anyway) are the real languages of the Internet.
Nice ethnocentrism. Of course, PG in many ways is not an Internet group; it only does books 80 years old. And even if you're only talking about English culture, many of the books printed 100 years had Greek, and many of the basis books for English culture were written in Greek, so PG has to go beyond ASCII for those.
(Which it does; PG only uses ASCII for English texts, and uses CP1251, Big5, Latin-1 and yes, Unicode where appropriate.)
Hart asked my wife to snail-mail a photocopy of the title page or copyright page of her chosen translation, so that PG could legally verify the work's availability.
I haven't done more to type in my copy of The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, copyright 1910.
Scan it in, and send it to me, and I can OCR it and send it through Distributed Proofreaders. That's the quickest and easiest way, and we tend to produce better copy then typing it in.
I've been thinking about simply taping me reading the book and donating *that* via mp3
I'm sure we'd prefer the text version first, but PG takes horrible computer audio versions, so I'm sure we'd be happy to take a decent human-read version.
No, it's a bad thing, because it renders Gutenberg near useless for anything other than English,
Have you ever taken an actual look at Project Gutenberg? It uses whatever character set is necessary for the language in question; Unicode, CP1251, and ISO-8859-1 have all been used.
Of course, so has DOS CP850, which is darn near unreadable unless you're a CS geek, which is why PG prefers ASCII.
But that's absolutely no reason why the source shouldn't be marked up. Marked up source can always be converted to ASCII, but you cannot derive semantic markup from ASCII.
And you don't really need semantic markup for a couple italics and titles here and there. Books that do need markup usually get it; but I'm working on a simple book in TeX, and it's taking me an order of magnitude longer than handling a book of prose or poetry the same length, so we don't do many books that need the markup.
Floppy disks get magnetized, hard drives crash, optical disks get scratched...A book can take a beating, man. All the OCR and voice rec in the world won't change this until we can get widespread, cheap cartridged optical media.
One small book also takes up the space of a hard drive, and can't be redownloaded, or backed up. If my roof leaks, or I have a fire, it will cost me thousands of dollars to replace my books, and some will be hard to impossible to replace. If my hard drive crashes, I redownload the files from Gutenberg, and/or restore them from my backups.
There is something innate in the education, learning, and daily working of a programmer that makes them not want to use 'too big' of a number for a certain task.
We have code for infinite precision integers. The problem is, if it were used for filesystem code, you still couldn't do real-time video or DVD burning, because the computer would be spending too long handling infinite precision integers.
As long as you're careful with it, setting a "really huge" number, and fixing it when you reach that limit is usually good enough.
I'm not naive -- I know that the more they get involved in sales, the less profitable it is for them.
The more they get involved in sales, the more expensive and time consuming it is for you. They have no way of knowing whether you got ripped off or not. There are intermediary services where they get the money and merchandise and make sure the buyer gets paid and you get what you ordered. It's at least $4 (IIRC), and it's takes extra time, because you have to send it to them, and they send it around.
I've never had a clearly fradulent transaction on EBay. Most people want to work with you, and people who don't quickly get negative feedback and banned. It's not worth my time and trouble to add another step to deal with the chance that someone might screw me out of ten bucks.
If I walked past an abandoned red gas station and a week later it was blue,
And if you saw it the first time while glaring into the setting sun from the top of a hill four miles away? I'd assume that it was the glare of the sun, provided it still looked abandoned and not freshly painted, because I can clearly see it's now blue, and there's no reason why anyone would change it.
Now you all understand where Windows users come from. A little bit of instability is a small price to pay for an interface that does what you expect.
Someone can actually understand Windows well enough to anticipate what it's going to do? Wow!
I understand your point; and it doesn't help that I only use Windows on others' systems; but I often can't figure out what Windows is going to do, besides assuming it's just going to do the most perverse, inconsistent thing in this situation. I use Unix because it almost always does what I would expect, promptly and quietly.
Geeks are elitists who do NOT use the best tool for the job. They use the most esoteric without regard to quality, and will maintain to their graves that the most esoteric way is the best.
I don't know of anyone who uses Teco, or Intercal, or any one of many other extraordinarly esoteric tools. Vi and emacs are near the best in their class for text editing, which only a geek does. (Managers, secretaries and the like do word processing, which is entirely different.) Professionals don't use the same tools Joe Amateur does, but that doesn't mean that they chose their tools based on their esoteric nature.
children are NOT full blown citizens with all the rights thereof.
Nope. But that doesn't mean that a 16 year old has no rights at all.
I've been saying for years that children shouldn't be allowed to buy videogames (or movies or books of anysort) without parental consent.
The sad thing is that alchol and drugs and guns are easy for them to buy and videogames and movies will be just as easy. All the crap about sex and religion and ethics you can hear on the street will still come flowing in. But Heaven help them if they want to get a hold of the Origin of Species or Humanistic Buddhism or Plato's Republic without dragging thier parents in. Their best hope will be to find an adult who would slip them a copy. So that a few narrow minded fools can clamp down on their children and not have to pay constant attention, you've made books almost impossible to get for a wide group of future readers and turned librarians into criminals (and, yes, many librarians would actively break that law.)
There are certainly peculiar geometrically shaped objects on the surface,
And there are faces in mountains on Earth without any evidence of natural plan. Humans are very good at finding order where there is none.
there has even been a suggestion that the "canals" reported in earlier times
There's been a lot of suggestions. But there's no particular reason to believe this one. Phenomina that disappear when you take a closer look are inherantly suspicious.
Don't put your kid's picture up as wallpaper (less of a gripe, I don't really care, but give an inch...).
You aren't working with robots. People personalize their space to make it more comfortable to work in; lock them in cold blank walls with everything ISO-standard, they won't be happy. Give an inch.
Pink fonts in Monotype Corsiva on a light blue background makes it tough for me to troubleshoot.
Remember who uses the computer day in and day out. Not you.
Please reread that statement again and again when you feel like it's "Your Computer".
It's not "Your Computer", either. I'm not saying you should let pirate software and porn run around the computers, but complaining when the people that use the things change the fonts and colors to something that will make them more comfortable is excessive. Would you complain if someone moved the chair in the company car?
The plain bald truth is that no one on Earth, scientist or nonscientist alike, has the foggiest idea what's under the surface of Mars, let alone orbitting alpha-Centauri.
By the same judge of evidence we don't have the foggiest what's under the surface of the Earth. We've sent probes to Mars, and orbiters around Mars. We know what the surface looks like, in great detail. We know there are no signs of life on the surface, and we know from the Earth and every measurement of every planet and moon that it's probably solid below. Given the mass and density (basic Newtonian physics), and the composition of the surface, we know what's below the surface: lots of rock, with such and such elements predominating.
If you're looking for a clear change of decision by the Supreme Court, look at West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette and Minersville School District v. Gobitis. A concurring decision by Black and Douglas in Barnette comes right out and says
[...]since we originally joined with the Court in the Gobitis case, it is appropriate that we make a brief statement of reasons for our change of view.
Reluctance to make the Federal Constitution a rigid bar against state regulation of conduct thought inimical to the public welfare was the controlling influence which moved us to consent to the Gobitis decision. Long reflection convinced us that although the principle is sound, its application in the particular case was wrong.
Unless stated otherwise by state, city/township or county law, states have all RIGHT to censorship. It's in the tenth amendment. Read it some time.
Read the Fourteenth Amendment. It may not be very clear, but the intent, and the application, is that it applies the Bill of Rights to the states and local governments too.
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My God, since when did we give up the right to choose for the right to insist?
He's not insisting the corporation provide him with an edited version; he's choosing to watch the movie with a precise, computer-controlled "hand" on the fast-forward and mute buttons.
It's like reading Nietzsche without the 'God is dead' quotes because it might infect your kids minds.
Editing Nietzsche would be like editing Pulp Fiction or Deep Throat; there'd be nothing left. But there are bastardized versions of literary texts already; Bowler got his name in the dictionary for producing a heavily cut version of Shakespeare, and the usual edition of Samuel Pepys' Diaries have all the bits not suitable for Victorian ears cut out. Do we really need a law to prevent that, or can we accept that people have that right and hope the good stuff forces out the bad?
Whammo. You have mplayer. Ok, by "easy" I mean "repeatable sequence of commands", not "point and click", I guess. :)
It may be easy, for some sense of that word, but it's tedious and annoying. I have about thousand packages installed on my system via dselect and apt-get; if I had to go through that for every one, I'd be there for months, and have hordes of devel packages installed that I otherwise wouldn't need. Windows users have to chase all over the net to get all their programs and upgrade anything; part of the reason I use Debian is because it's all right there in dselect, making it trivial to upgrade, remove and install.
Much of the rest of the world uses different charactersets.
And when posting texts in non-English languages, Project Gutenberg uses those character sets.
Gutenberg is completely impoverised with regard to, say, French, Norse, or countless other languages.
But Gutenberg has several books in French, in Latin-1. The problem Project Gutenberg has with non-English languages is that people tend to work with local e-text groups, like Projekt Gutenberg-DE or Project Runeberg, instead of working with PG.
ASCII Just Doesn't Die.
Interestingly enough, one of the problems with PG is files in odd charsets. The PG copy of the Swedish bible is basically in CP437 (that gets the accents right), but I have no idea what character set the quotes are in.
I tried scanning a 40-year-old book - a drama script written in Indonesian - and the combination of unusual font *and* unrecognised language was enough to make the OCR software's output 50% rubbish.
ABBYY FineReader - which is a very popular OCR program in Project Gutenberg circles - will let you train the program for that font. It's not a pancea, but you can usually get decent text out of it. It also supports Indonesian - it supports just about every modern language written in Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian or Armenian.
imagine scanning a 500-year-old book hand-written in Cyrillic...
Cyrillic's no big deal; in theory, it's no harder than Latin, and ABBYY is produced by Russians, so it should handle it well enough. 500-year-old is a little worse, but not unsolvable; I've OCR'ed copies of books that were nearly that old. The handwritten part is going to be the killer, though.
It keeps it quite good for almost all European languages [evergreen.edu], thank you.
Did you read the page? "ASCII Extended Character Sets -- PC" are two of the various ways that ASCII was extended for non-English languages. Go down to the "ASCII Standard" link for the real ASCII standard, which only covers English.
Or would you prefer that Project Gutenberg supported the Unicode standard that is mired in controversy
Oh, yes, a standard that has been supported by offical acts of Japan, Chinese, Iran, India, US, the EU, and various states of the US, and is a crucial part of Windows NT, Mac OS X, KDE, Gnome, HTML, XML, Ada, Java, and C9x, but is disliked by one ranting academian who never bothered to update his page in response to corrections, that obviously means that standard is fatally mired in controversy.
Besides, English (European languages, anyway) are the real languages of the Internet.
Nice ethnocentrism. Of course, PG in many ways is not an Internet group; it only does books 80 years old. And even if you're only talking about English culture, many of the books printed 100 years had Greek, and many of the basis books for English culture were written in Greek, so PG has to go beyond ASCII for those.
(Which it does; PG only uses ASCII for English texts, and uses CP1251, Big5, Latin-1 and yes, Unicode where appropriate.)
Hart asked my wife to snail-mail a photocopy of the title page or copyright page of her chosen translation, so that PG could legally verify the work's availability.
Now you can email scans.
I haven't done more to type in my copy of The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, copyright 1910.
Scan it in, and send it to me, and I can OCR it and send it through Distributed Proofreaders. That's the quickest and easiest way, and we tend to produce better copy then typing it in.
I've been thinking about simply taping me reading the book and donating *that* via mp3
I'm sure we'd prefer the text version first, but PG takes horrible computer audio versions, so I'm sure we'd be happy to take a decent human-read version.
No, it's a bad thing, because it renders Gutenberg near useless for anything other than English,
Have you ever taken an actual look at Project Gutenberg? It uses whatever character set is necessary for the language in question; Unicode, CP1251, and ISO-8859-1 have all been used.
Of course, so has DOS CP850, which is darn near unreadable unless you're a CS geek, which is why PG prefers ASCII.
But that's absolutely no reason why the source shouldn't be marked up. Marked up source can always be converted to ASCII, but you cannot derive semantic markup from ASCII.
And you don't really need semantic markup for a couple italics and titles here and there. Books that do need markup usually get it; but I'm working on a simple book in TeX, and it's taking me an order of magnitude longer than handling a book of prose or poetry the same length, so we don't do many books that need the markup.
Floppy disks get magnetized, hard drives crash, optical disks get scratched...A book can take a beating, man. All the OCR and voice rec in the world won't change this until we can get widespread, cheap cartridged optical media.
One small book also takes up the space of a hard drive, and can't be redownloaded, or backed up. If my roof leaks, or I have a fire, it will cost me thousands of dollars to replace my books, and some will be hard to impossible to replace. If my hard drive crashes, I redownload the files from Gutenberg, and/or restore them from my backups.
There is something innate in the education, learning, and daily working of a programmer that makes them not want to use 'too big' of a number for a certain task.
We have code for infinite precision integers. The problem is, if it were used for filesystem code, you still couldn't do real-time video or DVD burning, because the computer would be spending too long handling infinite precision integers.
As long as you're careful with it, setting a "really huge" number, and fixing it when you reach that limit is usually good enough.
I'm not naive -- I know that the more they get involved in sales, the less profitable it is for them.
The more they get involved in sales, the more expensive and time consuming it is for you. They have no way of knowing whether you got ripped off or not. There are intermediary services where they get the money and merchandise and make sure the buyer gets paid and you get what you ordered. It's at least $4 (IIRC), and it's takes extra time, because you have to send it to them, and they send it around.
I've never had a clearly fradulent transaction on EBay. Most people want to work with you, and people who don't quickly get negative feedback and banned. It's not worth my time and trouble to add another step to deal with the chance that someone might screw me out of ten bucks.
If I walked past an abandoned red gas station and a week later it was blue,
And if you saw it the first time while glaring into the setting sun from the top of a hill four miles away? I'd assume that it was the glare of the sun, provided it still looked abandoned and not freshly painted, because I can clearly see it's now blue, and there's no reason why anyone would change it.
Now you all understand where Windows users come from. A little bit of instability is a small price to pay for an interface that does what you expect.
Someone can actually understand Windows well enough to anticipate what it's going to do? Wow!
I understand your point; and it doesn't help that I only use Windows on others' systems; but I often can't figure out what Windows is going to do, besides assuming it's just going to do the most perverse, inconsistent thing in this situation. I use Unix because it almost always does what I would expect, promptly and quietly.
Geeks are elitists who do NOT use the best tool for the job. They use the most esoteric without regard to quality, and will maintain to their graves that the most esoteric way is the best.
I don't know of anyone who uses Teco, or Intercal, or any one of many other extraordinarly esoteric tools. Vi and emacs are near the best in their class for text editing, which only a geek does. (Managers, secretaries and the like do word processing, which is entirely different.) Professionals don't use the same tools Joe Amateur does, but that doesn't mean that they chose their tools based on their esoteric nature.
children are NOT full blown citizens with all the rights thereof.
Nope. But that doesn't mean that a 16 year old has no rights at all.
I've been saying for years that children shouldn't be allowed to buy videogames (or movies or books of anysort) without parental consent.
The sad thing is that alchol and drugs and guns are easy for them to buy and videogames and movies will be just as easy. All the crap about sex and religion and ethics you can hear on the street will still come flowing in. But Heaven help them if they want to get a hold of the Origin of Species or Humanistic Buddhism or Plato's Republic without dragging thier parents in. Their best hope will be to find an adult who would slip them a copy. So that a few narrow minded fools can clamp down on their children and not have to pay constant attention, you've made books almost impossible to get for a wide group of future readers and turned librarians into criminals (and, yes, many librarians would actively break that law.)
There are certainly peculiar geometrically shaped objects on the surface,
And there are faces in mountains on Earth without any evidence of natural plan. Humans are very good at finding order where there is none.
there has even been a suggestion that the "canals" reported in earlier times
There's been a lot of suggestions. But there's no particular reason to believe this one. Phenomina that disappear when you take a closer look are inherantly suspicious.
Don't put your kid's picture up as wallpaper (less of a gripe, I don't really care, but give an inch...).
You aren't working with robots. People personalize their space to make it more comfortable to work in; lock them in cold blank walls with everything ISO-standard, they won't be happy. Give an inch.
Pink fonts in Monotype Corsiva on a light blue background makes it tough for me to troubleshoot.
Remember who uses the computer day in and day out. Not you.
Please reread that statement again and again when you feel like it's "Your Computer".
It's not "Your Computer", either. I'm not saying you should let pirate software and porn run around the computers, but complaining when the people that use the things change the fonts and colors to something that will make them more comfortable is excessive. Would you complain if someone moved the chair in the company car?
The plain bald truth is that no one on Earth, scientist or nonscientist alike, has the foggiest idea what's under the surface of Mars, let alone orbitting alpha-Centauri.
By the same judge of evidence we don't have the foggiest what's under the surface of the Earth. We've sent probes to Mars, and orbiters around Mars. We know what the surface looks like, in great detail. We know there are no signs of life on the surface, and we know from the Earth and every measurement of every planet and moon that it's probably solid below. Given the mass and density (basic Newtonian physics), and the composition of the surface, we know what's below the surface: lots of rock, with such and such elements predominating.
(Emphasis mine.)
Section one? Seems to contradict the entire 10th amendment.
The Fourteenth Amendment is later, and is clearly intended to supersede the Tenth when they disagree.
Unless stated otherwise by state, city/township or county law, states have all RIGHT to censorship. It's in the tenth amendment. Read it some time.
Read the Fourteenth Amendment. It may not be very clear, but the intent, and the application, is that it applies the Bill of Rights to the states and local governments too.
That you call them sweatshops instead of factories is just like the Nazis calling jews rats.
"Arbeit macht frei", eh? (Literally "work makes free", the sign that hung over the entrance to various German concentration camps.)