I don't believe the authors were stating that the presence of LSD can "damage" the brain into producing schizophrenia, but that the presence of LSD is precisely what is causing schizophrenia. It's long been known that the symptoms of an LSD trip are rather similar to the symptoms of schizophrenia. But, for the most part, once you're done with the immediate symptoms, there aren't particularly any prolonged effects.
So I think the authors are hypothesizing that these buggies are basically creating LSD for the hosts which causes them to continiously trip. Interesting idea, but how do they reconcile the fact that one is immune to the effect of LSD for a short period (1-2 days) after the initial symptoms. If schizophrenia is in fact caused by LSD, then you'd think schizophrenics would continuously be "sobering up" for periods of one or two days before having symptoms again.
No, most bars in the US (at least in the dozen states in which I've frequented bars) do not use them. In fact, I think most Americans resent them. My personal opinion is that I want the bartender to have the discretion to make me a strong drink if he or she wants.
My general feeling from the bars I've been to is that the drinks are poured on the generous side. If a bartender consistently pours a weak drink, people will remember and won't go back to that bar. On the other hand, if the bartender likes you (and I'm a very likeable guy, which may account for my opinions on this matter) he can pour you a good one. I once had a vodka and cranberry poured for me in a pint glass with just the faintest whisper of pink cranberry juice added.
In other words, not having specific measures will usually benefit you in all but the crappiest bars. And it is usually, in fact, the crappy bars that resort to using optics (I have never heard of that word for it, by the way, before you used it).
There is one state in the US that, until recently, had an odd law. South Carolina law said that all liquor had to be poured from mini-bottles (like you get in airplanes or hotels). Article here.
Divde a second into 256 equal parts. Detangle an atom in the first 256th part, and there's your null character. Detangle in the 78th and there's your M. Continue once a second with a bathtub full of tangled particles.
After a few minutes, you've got an entire message sent FTL.
In case you're wondering what influence the PR people had, you can look for things like:
Did he mention any specific strength or compliment of a specific Free/OS project? E.g. "GAIM is a great IM client..."
Did he mention any specific ways that MS can learn from OS development approach? E.g. "OS development has taught us the importance of..."
"Not as bad as China" is not an acceptable standard for my country's freedom.
Agreed. I cannot understand how people justify some of the United States' actions by saying "Well, it's a lot better here than (China, Iraq, Russia, whatever)". Is Gitmo a gulag? No. Does that make it ok? Not even close. The United States I love isn't just the best country in the world, it's far and away the best country in the world. Lately, it's been sinking down to pretty good.
From TFA: The Mozilla Foundation got in touch with me to let me know that Ben Goodger currently is not an employee of this organization, something I've heard before. [...] It shouldnt be surprising then that due to Goodgers past at the Foundation and his involvement in leading the Firefox browser development, his words are often misinterpreted as representing the project.
When an open-source project grows popular (and therefore its community gains some power) the press will begin to pay some attention and publicizing quotes and statements. Unfortunately, the press usually represents any community as monolithic entity. Often, it's not such a big problem, but here Mozilla is competing with giant corporations and so the press tends to equate the mozilla community with a corporation.
Goodger make a perfectly valid statement which reflects his viewpoint of the Mozilla project. However, Goodger isn't a paid employee of the Mozilla Foundation. He is basically a highly involved community member. If the Register wants to report on his opinions, that's fine, but please don't presume that he is speaking for the community or the Mozilla Foundation.
This is pretty fascinating development we're witnessing in vitual worlds. Purchasing "virtual" goods isn't particularly new (think of domain names and banner ads, even our bank accounts can appear pretty virtual sometimes). However, what appears to be happening is that the quality of your virtual experience is now starting to be based on your real world wealth.
Putting in the time on these games to hack and slash your way to fame and power is no longer the only way to exceed. Now, if you have the real life money, you can simply buy power and fame. In fact, this will probably become the preferred way to gain items. The old slow way of working your way to the top will be a hoped-for avenue for those too poor to afford to buy their way up.
Sound familiar? The net is turning into the real world. Yes, I realize this is just a silly game, and different than what most people use the net for regularly, but these trends are going to spread (and already are: gmail accounts as status symbols?) to other areas of net usage.
You're trying to be clever but I hope you do know that having a "finite number of states" is not in and of itself a definition of a FSM.
He wasn't trying to be clever, just accurate. Your computer is a finite state machine; It is not a Turing machine. We tend to think of them as Turing machines only because they have an enormous number of states; thus they seem to act like Turing machines as long as we don't do anything that requires more states than the computer has. However, when you run out of ram and/or disk space, you've just recognized the limitation of your desktop FSM.
It is demonstrably the case that a finite state machine cannot be programmed to run a JVM or a Python interpreter.
That is incorrect. Every computer program is a FSM.
No company should ever expect their employees to be "loyal". Loyalty is a dangerous character trait; it means a person will ignore what they feel is right for the sake of allegiance to an authority.
Instead, a company should expect an employee to act essentialy in her/her best interest (and there is more to this than financial benefit of course). It is up to the company to provide a workplace that is, in fact, something the employee wakes up every day to and can say "this is something I want to be part of". It is also up to the company to hire people who are capable of making this statement.
I guarantee, if you, as a manger, president, CEO, can do this in your business, you will have a more efficient and capable (and happy, if you care) workforce than your unenlightened competition relying on employee "loyalty".
I don't necessarily condone using company property to what these guys did, of course, but the parent's comment about their lack of loyalty is off-topic and, well, old-fashioned.
Out of curiousity, what nation's currency do you use, such that this would work? I believe the Dutch and Canadians use at least some magnetic coins. The coins that currently clank in my pocket are American, however, and are all non-magnetic.
Google was a corporation and is now a publicly traded corporation. The different is quantitative, not qualitative. They are will be under a great deal more scrutiny now and will have more diverse ownership, but their primary goal is exactly the same as it was before: increase shareholder value. Making neat shit, as you say, is not their primary goal, but a means to accomplish that goal.
According to CNN, sales dropped about 7.5% from 2002 levels of 32.2 billion to 2003 sales of 32.0 billion. RIAA blames "rampant piracy" for this.
Therefore, according to RIAA, piracy accounted for 200 million in sales loss. Therefore (unless artists get 25% or more of retail) with this announcement of withholding 50m in royalties from artists, the RIAA itself is personally responsible for more monetary loss to artists than piracy.
It's not that cold. Well, depends on what you're used to, of course, but this past winter here (my first in Estonia) was comparable to the ones from the Midwest in the US. It got a little colder, but less snowfall. In any case, I don't want people to get the impression it's Arctic cold.
And yes, as software engineer living in Estonia, I can say that the economy seems very promising for the tech industry. Wifi all over country may not be that necessary, but its indicitave of the investment that the government and industy is willing to make in popularizing tech. Also, the people here are generally quite tech savvy. No checks in Estonia; everything is bank-to-bank transfer done generally through the internet (most people (literally) use internet banking here).
And just to complete the brochure here, it's a very pretty country. I live in the capital, Tallinn, which is a pretty hip town, especially in the warmer months. It's got an old downtown with beautiful medieval age architecture, but with a lot of good restaurants and bars and shops. The countryside is also pretty, relaxing, and easy to get to. Finally, every thing is dirt cheap (compared to America). Oh, and yes, the parent poster is correct: Estonia has the most beautiful women in Europe. The sidewalks may as well be runways; it's uncanny.
I think Stallman and the rest of the Free Software leadership understood the ramifications of free software: that both people you like and people you don't like will be able to use it.
This guy has every right to resign, of course; but hopefully his views ring hollow to the rest of the free software supporters. He is advocating that people with some control use their power to limit the freedoms of others. It's as anti-freedom as the Patriot Act.
You can't honestly call your software "free" if you are picking and choosing who can use it. Just as in free speech where no one has the right to silence unpopular opinions only because they are unpopular, no one has the right to decide who can use Linux and who can't. Military, nuns, terrorists, martians: as long as you meet the terms of the GPL (or whatever free license), you can use it.
If you want to assume the moral high ground--"I don't believe the majority of the people who use my program will use it so that they can share their files on Kazaa."--then you'd damn well better stick to it, instead of cutting and running for the sewer at the first sign of trouble.
What they did was fine.
Not everyone has the desire to be a martyr for the cause. Whoever developed this is clearly worried about being found guilty of a crime or fighting an expensive legal battle. They have an easy, legal avenue that allows them to do what they want without fear of renumeration. What's so dumb about that?
If you're so critical, perhaps you can be the one to take the "moral high ground" and stage some civil disobedience by hosting this stuff in the US.
Yeah, I know, use a different browser (or OS), but we all know Windows is *designed* to not interoperate well with those things, right? Sometimes, it wastes time to try to fight inertia.
In other words, it's easier to complain than do anything about it.
Sounds like the lynx browser (or links, w3m, etc) is right up your alley. Lots of other people who share your distaste for browser bloat do. Microsoft doesn't really care too much about those people who say "Ugh, Microsoft IE sucks! Oh, yeah, I still use it though". It's only until people say "IE sucks, that's why I use [whatever] instead" that they'll pay attention.
Funnel your enthusiasm into trying some different browsers that fit your needs. Donate some time or money, maybe, to an open source browser you do like.
At this point, though, a "IE is lame" post doesn't really contribute much to the discussion. Or have I been trolled?
Disabling these protocol handlers will significantly reduce the functionality of the Windows Help system and may have other unintended consequences. Plan to undo these changes after patches have been tested and installed.
What makes you all think that Google's intent is so purely benevolent?
Exactly where in my post did I place any value judgements on this? I hypothesized an avenue that Google may be pursuing.
Despite your apparent preoccupation with ethics, by the way, your ability to divine other people's ethical character from a two-paragraph posting doesn't seem to be working: I personally think that Google providing universal storage (though they may not be pursuing this, of course) is a bad idea with some potentially significant ethical issues.
And finally, regarding you sig, there are no ethics but situational ethics.
Here's my question: how are they going to make sure people only have one account each? What's to prevent people from getting dosens and backing up their harddrive?
Maybe they don't care.
Maybe this is the first step of Google trying to provide universal storage for everyone. I'd guess it's safe to say that Google now does more processing than anyone else on Earth (searching through the internet for nearly every internet user). Perhaps now they're investigating offering to be the main provider for another resource: storage.
So why not have the side its supposed to go in green, and the side where its not supposed to go in red?
That specific idea is a little flawed, as about 5% of the population cannot distinguish green from red due to red/green color-blindness (or analogous trichromat vision).
This brings up some other related concerns about having robots browse pages, even when the intent is not malicious.
Some ads on websites are sold 'per-view' and not 'per-click', but if a web-crawling robot hits it, should it count as a view? Are the authors of these bots stealing from the advertiser?
A while ago I wrote a bot that posts to slashdot. He even had decent Karma for a while, before getting a bit confused. In any case, my bot would usually post some links in his comments, which could have the effect of altering the target's page ranking on Google (this was not his purpose though). Am I somehow culpable for cheating Google?
Anyway, the point is that I think robots should have some limited rights to view pages and do human-like behavior on the net.
An excellent way to do truly astounding mathematics is to train your subconscious to work for you. Your subconscious records lots of things and basically remembers them forever. Your conscious mind often has trouble recalling certain memories or details though, but that doesn't mean it's not still there.
The trick then is to let your subconscious do the math for you, and then find a way to "pull out" the answer (like recalling a distant memory, almost). You can train your subconscious to do math a variety of ways, but one of the most effective is to electrically stimulate nerves (in your hand or arm or thigh, whatever) to count out numbers. So for instance, if you wanted to do 22+34, you'd count out 56 quick electic pulses. Practicing this for a few months, your subconscious will eventually get the idea that when you hear numbers, you want them added. The electric shocks will no longer be necessary, but your subconscious will still internall 'tick' out the answer. It works for multiplication, too, and through various mathematical tricks, you can use it to subtract and divide.
The only remaining difficulty is training your conscious mind to retrieve the result. This is accomplished via a hypnosis-like state. You can get good at it so that it only takes you a half-second to pull out the resulting number. No eyes rolling back or chanting or anything like that.
As far as I can tell the books are still available in HTML. It's just that if you want them in PDF, then they charge you a fee. I have no beef with that.
Actually PG books aren't available in HTML. Not even in the sense that they're relatively unformatted text embedded in an HTML page. Rather, the books (or plays, manuals, etc) are generally stored as zipped vanilla-text files.
It's an often complained about problem, since there's no markup to identify authors, titles, chapter headings, etc. The PG administrators use plain text because they don't want to require readers to use fancy software to read (be it proprietary or not). The consequence, though, is that it's difficult to use fancy software if you want, since it's difficult for a computer program to parse the books.
So, the service offered by this company is non-trivial and is fulfilling an expressed desire. The fact that people are willing (well, we'll see) to pay money for this service indicates that the PG administrators have underestimated (or just ignored) the need for machine-parseable text. I personally wish someone would xml-ify these books, so that there would be a number of high-quality open source PG readers out there.
Universities aren't going to change their firewall policies because some of their students are unable to download game betas. Blizzard is a reputable company, yes, but their product is not something that university administrators care about.
If instead legal business and/or education software was being distributed through BitTorrent, then you would soon see a reversal of firewall policy.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe the authors were stating that the presence of LSD can "damage" the brain into producing schizophrenia, but that the presence of LSD is precisely what is causing schizophrenia. It's long been known that the symptoms of an LSD trip are rather similar to the symptoms of schizophrenia. But, for the most part, once you're done with the immediate symptoms, there aren't particularly any prolonged effects.
So I think the authors are hypothesizing that these buggies are basically creating LSD for the hosts which causes them to continiously trip. Interesting idea, but how do they reconcile the fact that one is immune to the effect of LSD for a short period (1-2 days) after the initial symptoms. If schizophrenia is in fact caused by LSD, then you'd think schizophrenics would continuously be "sobering up" for periods of one or two days before having symptoms again.
By the way, be careful!
No, most bars in the US (at least in the dozen states in which I've frequented bars) do not use them. In fact, I think most Americans resent them. My personal opinion is that I want the bartender to have the discretion to make me a strong drink if he or she wants.
My general feeling from the bars I've been to is that the drinks are poured on the generous side. If a bartender consistently pours a weak drink, people will remember and won't go back to that bar. On the other hand, if the bartender likes you (and I'm a very likeable guy, which may account for my opinions on this matter) he can pour you a good one. I once had a vodka and cranberry poured for me in a pint glass with just the faintest whisper of pink cranberry juice added.
In other words, not having specific measures will usually benefit you in all but the crappiest bars. And it is usually, in fact, the crappy bars that resort to using optics (I have never heard of that word for it, by the way, before you used it).
There is one state in the US that, until recently, had an odd law. South Carolina law said that all liquor had to be poured from mini-bottles (like you get in airplanes or hotels). Article here.
Here's a thought experiment.
Divde a second into 256 equal parts. Detangle an atom in the first 256th part, and there's your null character. Detangle in the 78th and there's your M. Continue once a second with a bathtub full of tangled particles.
After a few minutes, you've got an entire message sent FTL.
In case you're wondering what influence the PR people had, you can look for things like: Did he mention any specific strength or compliment of a specific Free/OS project? E.g. "GAIM is a great IM client..." Did he mention any specific ways that MS can learn from OS development approach? E.g. "OS development has taught us the importance of..."
"Not as bad as China" is not an acceptable standard for my country's freedom.
Agreed. I cannot understand how people justify some of the United States' actions by saying "Well, it's a lot better here than (China, Iraq, Russia, whatever)". Is Gitmo a gulag? No. Does that make it ok? Not even close. The United States I love isn't just the best country in the world, it's far and away the best country in the world. Lately, it's been sinking down to pretty good.
I criticize my country because I love it.
From TFA:
The Mozilla Foundation got in touch with me to let me know that Ben Goodger currently is not an employee of this organization, something I've heard before. [...] It shouldnt be surprising then that due to Goodgers past at the Foundation and his involvement in leading the Firefox browser development, his words are often misinterpreted as representing the project.
When an open-source project grows popular (and therefore its community gains some power) the press will begin to pay some attention and publicizing quotes and statements. Unfortunately, the press usually represents any community as monolithic entity. Often, it's not such a big problem, but here Mozilla is competing with giant corporations and so the press tends to equate the mozilla community with a corporation.
Goodger make a perfectly valid statement which reflects his viewpoint of the Mozilla project. However, Goodger isn't a paid employee of the Mozilla Foundation. He is basically a highly involved community member. If the Register wants to report on his opinions, that's fine, but please don't presume that he is speaking for the community or the Mozilla Foundation.
This is pretty fascinating development we're witnessing in vitual worlds. Purchasing "virtual" goods isn't particularly new (think of domain names and banner ads, even our bank accounts can appear pretty virtual sometimes). However, what appears to be happening is that the quality of your virtual experience is now starting to be based on your real world wealth.
Putting in the time on these games to hack and slash your way to fame and power is no longer the only way to exceed. Now, if you have the real life money, you can simply buy power and fame. In fact, this will probably become the preferred way to gain items. The old slow way of working your way to the top will be a hoped-for avenue for those too poor to afford to buy their way up.
Sound familiar? The net is turning into the real world. Yes, I realize this is just a silly game, and different than what most people use the net for regularly, but these trends are going to spread (and already are: gmail accounts as status symbols?) to other areas of net usage.
You're trying to be clever but I hope you do know that having a "finite number of states" is not in and of itself a definition of a FSM. He wasn't trying to be clever, just accurate. Your computer is a finite state machine; It is not a Turing machine. We tend to think of them as Turing machines only because they have an enormous number of states; thus they seem to act like Turing machines as long as we don't do anything that requires more states than the computer has. However, when you run out of ram and/or disk space, you've just recognized the limitation of your desktop FSM. It is demonstrably the case that a finite state machine cannot be programmed to run a JVM or a Python interpreter. That is incorrect. Every computer program is a FSM.
No company should ever expect their employees to be "loyal". Loyalty is a dangerous character trait; it means a person will ignore what they feel is right for the sake of allegiance to an authority.
Instead, a company should expect an employee to act essentialy in her/her best interest (and there is more to this than financial benefit of course). It is up to the company to provide a workplace that is, in fact, something the employee wakes up every day to and can say "this is something I want to be part of". It is also up to the company to hire people who are capable of making this statement.
I guarantee, if you, as a manger, president, CEO, can do this in your business, you will have a more efficient and capable (and happy, if you care) workforce than your unenlightened competition relying on employee "loyalty".
I don't necessarily condone using company property to what these guys did, of course, but the parent's comment about their lack of loyalty is off-topic and, well, old-fashioned.
Out of curiousity, what nation's currency do you use, such that this would work? I believe the Dutch and Canadians use at least some magnetic coins. The coins that currently clank in my pocket are American, however, and are all non-magnetic.
Google was a corporation and is now a publicly traded corporation. The different is quantitative, not qualitative. They are will be under a great deal more scrutiny now and will have more diverse ownership, but their primary goal is exactly the same as it was before: increase shareholder value. Making neat shit, as you say, is not their primary goal, but a means to accomplish that goal.
According to CNN, sales dropped about 7.5% from 2002 levels of 32.2 billion to 2003 sales of 32.0 billion. RIAA blames "rampant piracy" for this.
Therefore, according to RIAA, piracy accounted for 200 million in sales loss. Therefore (unless artists get 25% or more of retail) with this announcement of withholding 50m in royalties from artists, the RIAA itself is personally responsible for more monetary loss to artists than piracy.
It's not that cold. Well, depends on what you're used to, of course, but this past winter here (my first in Estonia) was comparable to the ones from the Midwest in the US. It got a little colder, but less snowfall. In any case, I don't want people to get the impression it's Arctic cold.
And yes, as software engineer living in Estonia, I can say that the economy seems very promising for the tech industry. Wifi all over country may not be that necessary, but its indicitave of the investment that the government and industy is willing to make in popularizing tech. Also, the people here are generally quite tech savvy. No checks in Estonia; everything is bank-to-bank transfer done generally through the internet (most people (literally) use internet banking here).
And just to complete the brochure here, it's a very pretty country. I live in the capital, Tallinn, which is a pretty hip town, especially in the warmer months. It's got an old downtown with beautiful medieval age architecture, but with a lot of good restaurants and bars and shops. The countryside is also pretty, relaxing, and easy to get to. Finally, every thing is dirt cheap (compared to America). Oh, and yes, the parent poster is correct: Estonia has the most beautiful women in Europe. The sidewalks may as well be runways; it's uncanny.
Why couldn't they wait till the weekend, or at least after hours, instead of disrupting children's school day?
It wouldn't be nearly as good a scare tactic.
I think Stallman and the rest of the Free Software leadership understood the ramifications of free software: that both people you like and people you don't like will be able to use it.
This guy has every right to resign, of course; but hopefully his views ring hollow to the rest of the free software supporters. He is advocating that people with some control use their power to limit the freedoms of others. It's as anti-freedom as the Patriot Act. You can't honestly call your software "free" if you are picking and choosing who can use it. Just as in free speech where no one has the right to silence unpopular opinions only because they are unpopular, no one has the right to decide who can use Linux and who can't. Military, nuns, terrorists, martians: as long as you meet the terms of the GPL (or whatever free license), you can use it.
Not everyone has the desire to be a martyr for the cause. Whoever developed this is clearly worried about being found guilty of a crime or fighting an expensive legal battle. They have an easy, legal avenue that allows them to do what they want without fear of renumeration. What's so dumb about that?
If you're so critical, perhaps you can be the one to take the "moral high ground" and stage some civil disobedience by hosting this stuff in the US.
Sounds like the lynx browser (or links, w3m, etc) is right up your alley. Lots of other people who share your distaste for browser bloat do. Microsoft doesn't really care too much about those people who say "Ugh, Microsoft IE sucks! Oh, yeah, I still use it though". It's only until people say "IE sucks, that's why I use [whatever] instead" that they'll pay attention.
Funnel your enthusiasm into trying some different browsers that fit your needs. Donate some time or money, maybe, to an open source browser you do like.
At this point, though, a "IE is lame" post doesn't really contribute much to the discussion. Or have I been trolled?
Despite your apparent preoccupation with ethics, by the way, your ability to divine other people's ethical character from a two-paragraph posting doesn't seem to be working: I personally think that Google providing universal storage (though they may not be pursuing this, of course) is a bad idea with some potentially significant ethical issues.
And finally, regarding you sig, there are no ethics but situational ethics.
Maybe this is the first step of Google trying to provide universal storage for everyone. I'd guess it's safe to say that Google now does more processing than anyone else on Earth (searching through the internet for nearly every internet user). Perhaps now they're investigating offering to be the main provider for another resource: storage.
So why not have the side its supposed to go in green, and the side where its not supposed to go in red?
That specific idea is a little flawed, as about 5% of the population cannot distinguish green from red due to red/green color-blindness (or analogous trichromat vision).
This brings up some other related concerns about having robots browse pages, even when the intent is not malicious.
Some ads on websites are sold 'per-view' and not 'per-click', but if a web-crawling robot hits it, should it count as a view? Are the authors of these bots stealing from the advertiser?
A while ago I wrote a bot that posts to slashdot. He even had decent Karma for a while, before getting a bit confused. In any case, my bot would usually post some links in his comments, which could have the effect of altering the target's page ranking on Google (this was not his purpose though). Am I somehow culpable for cheating Google?
Anyway, the point is that I think robots should have some limited rights to view pages and do human-like behavior on the net.
An excellent way to do truly astounding mathematics is to train your subconscious to work for you. Your subconscious records lots of things and basically remembers them forever. Your conscious mind often has trouble recalling certain memories or details though, but that doesn't mean it's not still there.
The trick then is to let your subconscious do the math for you, and then find a way to "pull out" the answer (like recalling a distant memory, almost). You can train your subconscious to do math a variety of ways, but one of the most effective is to electrically stimulate nerves (in your hand or arm or thigh, whatever) to count out numbers. So for instance, if you wanted to do 22+34, you'd count out 56 quick electic pulses. Practicing this for a few months, your subconscious will eventually get the idea that when you hear numbers, you want them added. The electric shocks will no longer be necessary, but your subconscious will still internall 'tick' out the answer. It works for multiplication, too, and through various mathematical tricks, you can use it to subtract and divide.
The only remaining difficulty is training your conscious mind to retrieve the result. This is accomplished via a hypnosis-like state. You can get good at it so that it only takes you a half-second to pull out the resulting number. No eyes rolling back or chanting or anything like that.
Heh, ok, not really.
Actually PG books aren't available in HTML. Not even in the sense that they're relatively unformatted text embedded in an HTML page. Rather, the books (or plays, manuals, etc) are generally stored as zipped vanilla-text files.
It's an often complained about problem, since there's no markup to identify authors, titles, chapter headings, etc. The PG administrators use plain text because they don't want to require readers to use fancy software to read (be it proprietary or not). The consequence, though, is that it's difficult to use fancy software if you want, since it's difficult for a computer program to parse the books.
So, the service offered by this company is non-trivial and is fulfilling an expressed desire. The fact that people are willing (well, we'll see) to pay money for this service indicates that the PG administrators have underestimated (or just ignored) the need for machine-parseable text. I personally wish someone would xml-ify these books, so that there would be a number of high-quality open source PG readers out there.
Universities aren't going to change their firewall policies because some of their students are unable to download game betas. Blizzard is a reputable company, yes, but their product is not something that university administrators care about.
If instead legal business and/or education software was being distributed through BitTorrent, then you would soon see a reversal of firewall policy.