Be careful that you don't make a similar mistake by confusing the meaning of individual terms used by an author (or a programmer) with the effect she's trying to achieve with her text.
Unfortunately, the effect an author is trying to achieve will differ from the effect an author does achieve, depending upon the reader, the historical context of the reader, the time of day, how attentive the reader is, etc. A 14-year old reader encountering "Shall I die? Shall I fly?" at 6 am on a summer morning in 2003 will have a completely different response to the poem (i.e., understanding of what the poem intends to say) than a 50-year old reader encountering it at 9 pm on a winter evening in 2000. So far as I know, one does not have the same problem with programming (well, maybe on VAXen).
And it isn't just politics. Sometimes it's merely a matter of what part, what fragment, of an author's message one gets. Take an example: in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, there's a famous song "Fear no more the heat o the sun" with the lines
And golden boys and girls all must,
As chimney sweeps, turn to dust
(I might have that slightly off.) Nowadays, readers assume that "golden boys and girls" are basically "princes and princesses," in the metaphorical sense, and given the context (the song is a lament for the princess Imogen, but by someone who doesn't know either that she's a princess - or even a girl! - or his sister, or that he is a prince) that might make sense; and they assume that "chimney sweeps" means what it says (poor working kids, not much wealthier - in the 1610s - than street children), too. However, in some rural parts of the English midlands (I think; someone from England can correct me), "golden boys" is the name given to dandelions in bloom, and "chimney sweeps" the name given to dandelions that have gone to seed. This is a completely different image than the one assumed by modern readers, and it likely was part of Shakespeare's purpose that the audience recognize the image. But the fact that he used "golden boys and girls" suggests that perhaps he wanted his audience to be confronted with both images, simultaneously; and for some audience members, one image would be foremost (given their context, say living in the city) and for other audience members (say those living in the country), the other image would be foremost.
This isn't a case of "if reader is in city then princes and chimney sweeps else if reader is in country dandelions blooming and going to seed". It's the analog of a single command that can achieve similiar effects using completely different mechanisms in two different contexts.
Actually, that's one of my major job functions nowadays. But the kind of ambiguity you find in Perl is nothing compared to that found in a natural language. All good postings, though.
I went off other comments...but that does not make my statement any less meaningful.
Actually, yes it does. Speaking as a former humanities teacher, if you didn't read the article, it is very unlikely you will be able to form a valid opinion; and in this case, you have provided merely uninformed opinion, which is not valid. Your comments have no value. Here's your F.
That is how humanities grading works. Unless, of course, you take a class for non-majors that is little more than a bit of self-esteem pumping (and there are plenty of those in the sciences, too; one thinks of "rocks for jocks", and "calculus for the life and social sciences") requirements padding.
If an English major answers a test question on an interpretation of some poem, it's going to get a high grade because it's based on opinion and ther eis no "right" or "wrong" answer.
No, that's not right (speaking as someone who has taught college level English). An interpretation must be 1. based upon a close reading of the work in question and 2. follow some established, or at least comprehensible, mechanism of interpretation. Opinions are not good answers in a humanities exam, any more than they would be in a CS exam. There's more room for ambiguity in the humnaities, true, but that ambiguity is always within what Eco has right called (in his book of this title) "the limits of interpretation." The job of the humanist is to invent within those limits, as is the job of the engineer.
For example, if a civil engineering student tells me that he's designed a brilliant new concept for a highway bridge using nothing but cheese doodles, I'm going to ask "do you realize that cheese doodles won't be able to hold much more than their own weight?" Bzzzt! Wrong answer! If a humanist says, "well I think The Tempest is about the search for the telluric currents in 16th century Italy," I'm going to ask "and what makes you think that Shakespeare KNEW anything about the so-called telluric currents, or anything about Italian alchemists? And what in your reading of The Tempest suggests telluric currents as a subtext to the play?" Bzzzt! Just as wrong as the engineering student.
Maybe CS is different because programming languages are just that languages and so many of the same issues are present as in the humanities, just with a technical bent but I doubt it.
Unfortunately, natural languages have almost nothing in common with computer languages. Computer languages are for the most part 1:1 codes - the same command means the same thing in whatever context it appears in a particular language. Natural languages are not codes; an idiom means different things in different contexts. That's part of the problem comparing the two.
At any rate, there is plenty of grade inflation in the sciences in the US: it should be noted that the author of the piece, Stuart
Rojstaczer is Professor of Geology, Environment and Engineering at Duke. And he says:
The last time I gave a C was more than two years ago. That was about the time I came to realize that my grading had become anachronistic. The C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of Cain on a college transcript. I have forsworn C's ever since.
So Prof. Booty's comments in the posting are unjustified by the evidence presented (see also the data linked from the article; Stanford, a darling of the technical education world, shows a good deal of grade inflation, too); and they are probably unjustified, period. I suspect that if you were to track grade inflation on both sides of Snow's Two Culture rift, you'd see the same steep slope.
Just because you don't understand the humanities doesn't mean it's not academically rigorous. I know plenty of humanists who would stupidly assume that programming doesn't require any brains; after all, "it's just writing down instructions for machines. What's so hard about that.")
I haven't been following it recently, but I believe DP is basing their markup on TEI. They don't want to use TEI itself because it is big and complicated. DP would prefer a simpler markup that is easy for volunteers to learn.
Good call. My understanding is that's what most projects do: use a subset of TEI (for instance, TEI Lite, or even so-called Bare Bones TEI, which while it is not ideal for a scholarly edition, is better than nothing.)
Actually, he didn't even invent moveable type. The Chinese did that with wooden blocks much earlier and there were existing printing presses that used moveable blocks.
Are you sure about this? My understanding was that early (pre-Gutenburg) Chinese presses didn't have sorts, because with the sheer size of the Chinese writing system, they wouldn't have been efficient with the level of technology to produce wooden blocks. But I'm willing to be corrected (with a reference, preferably).
...humanity wrote some ok books in its first 3000 years (-ish) of literacy. The Koran, the Bible, Shakespeare... yeah there's some ok books out there not covered by the stupid copyright situation we are now in.
Unfortunately, Bevington's, Taylor's, Kermode's, and even Muir's texts of Shakespeare are still under copyright. (Compare an Arden of Shakespeare to a facsimile of the First Folio some time: the printers of the First Folio were considered good in their day, but not in ours). Too bad most English translations of the Bible (the KJV and the Tyndale are two obvious exceptions) are still under copyright. Too bad most of the good translations of the Koran still are.
Yes, there's plenty of good lit before 1923, but sometimes you need to look at a more modern edition to see what the original author most likely really wrote.
Distributed Proofers is also working on a standard to mark up the books to better preserve tables, illustrations, bold text, math, etc. I suspect that effort is being slowed due to the priority of keeping material on the site.
Additionally translations might generate practical limitations. If a text was written in ancient Greece and translated to English or some other language in the 20th century, the translation might not be public domain even when the original work is. Of course you are free to read the original text or make a new translation. Anyway even if a piece of literature was public domain, the translation to your native language might not be.
Exactly. What's worse, modern texts of an ancient work are not usually considered to be in the public domain, because the work to try to clean up the errors that inevitably creep into the manuscript tradition is commonly accepted to be a copyrightable contribution. However, I don't think this is something that has ever been tested in a court (IANAL).
And many texts from before 1923 aren't very good by modern standards (too many errors).
So the solution is to try to get those who have the necessary philological skills to make translations to agree to donate their services - something that has proven an uphill struggle so far, as some translations have scored big time as bestsellers (Ciardi's Dante, Fitzgerald's Homer, Pevear's translations from the Russian, Mitchell's translations - mediocre though they are - of Biblical/spiritual "classics") and a lot of translators secretly nourish the hopes to be the next Arthur Waley.
And scholarly texts take years to produce. Again, the editors tend to nourish hopes they might supplement their income (slightly, here; we're not talking about Stephen King, or David Pogue, or even Simson Garfinkel type numbers; I doubt that editors of ancient texts even make 1/100 from their books what David Pogue makes) from the royalties from the 2,000 copies sold to libraries, or the 10,000+ copies sold to students.
Pentii is not only annoying, but also wrong;) The proper Latin plural of pentium would be pentia, cf. medium/media.
Yes, Pentium would be a neuter adjective of the second declension in Latin, and so Pentia would be the proper substantive plural. And virii is also wrong, as has been discussed many times before. I think that was his point.
Well, how about me then? I'm an indian student and it's been three years since I even saw an Apple anything. (and that was through a shop window.) Guess we third world geeks will just have to make do with assembled stuff. *Sighs, and rides his elephant off into the sunset *
Just keep at it, man. You'll be buying us in 35 years.
Hello ignorant human beings - a leading "authority" on hoax circles ADMITS THAT 20% ARE NOT HOAXES.
And what makes him an authority? And what makes his opinion valid? Nothing, frankly. There's no scientific evidence being discussed here, only the opinion of self-elevated expert who, by the way, considers himself an expert not on hoaxes, but on crop circles tout court. In other words, of COURSE he believes some of them are genuine; if he didn't, he wouldn't be an authority any more.
If you think those are scientific articles, I weep for the future of mankind.
I weep.
To quote from the first link:
After all, hoaxers and sceptics fear things they can't understand and explain away!
Crop circles can quite thoroughly be explained away as the work of hoaxers. As for the tertium quid who repeat the mantra, "do not mock what you do not understand," the problem is that I understand these perfectly: I do not need to make recourse to magical extraterrestrials or pseudo-scientific "energies" (I'm waiting for "Telluric currents" to crop up in this conversation) to explain crop circles. A lot of good planning with a computer and a few simple-to-make tools are all it takes.
Re:Of course they would dismiss it
on
SOHO Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
After all, it was once said that the moon was too bright for Hubble to image, but color tests were acknowleged to be done using clouds over Earth.
At the resolution necessary to resolve a LM, the moon probably is too bright. Color tests likely don't require any kind of resolution at all. Anyway, see this link for some discussion of this issue.
Of course, this was roughly contemperaneous with Tim Berners Lee's development of the WWW so both factors probably worked together towards making the 'net what it is in this day and age.
Not exactly. The Boucher Bill was passed in 1993; TBL invented the WWW in 1991 (the first work was in 1989; the publication of the CERN httpd was in 1991, though, and that publication - particularly these emails, dated 9 Aug 1991, offering the code for free and providing the first public http links I know of - should constitute the birth of the WWW.
What the Boucher Bill did was provide a policy framework for the public Web/Internet as we know it. Still worthy of mention in the annals of history, regardless of how Algore might have [mis?]characterized it.
Damned good posting. Only thing you forgot to point out is that nukes are designed for airburst attacks, not ground bursts, to maximize casualties. (See Richard Rhodes' discussion of Oppenheimer's briefing on this in The Making of the Atomic Bomb).
Copyrights are usually held by record and publishing corporations, not the artists. I am sure you have heard the expression, "starving artist," but have not heard anything like "starving executive."
Sort of. The original copyright is always originally held by the author/creator, and is usually transferred to the publisher. It's part of the standard deal for record companies, I imagine, and for many publishers. The exception is a work for hire, which most sound recordings and books are not.
Want them cheap? Let the GOVERNMENT handle SSL certs! After all, they're already handling drivers licenses, social security numbers, and ten kazillion other things that are supposed to prove that you are you, why not just give you a cert, too? For a small government fee, of course.
Yes, and just imagine how small the fee for an SSL certificate will be from the folks who brought you the $5,000 toilet seat.
Once in a while, if an SF book has a very good reputation, I'll pick it up, but for the most part I finished my SF reading days when I got out of college. Too much crap to wade through to find the real gems. That said, the only newer books (the former is what, 10 years old?) I've read and liked were Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's *Good Omens* and Gaiman's *American Gods*.
Non SF: I'd suggest weaning youself from SF with Jorge Luis Borges, *Collected Fictions*, which is top-flight 20th c. lit with some of the same tone you'd find in good SF (though it is more fantastic). If you have the wits to handle really complex narratives, try Rushdie's *Ground Beneath Her Feet*, which has some SF-like elements (alternate universes, e.g.) but is unassailably good lit. Also worth reading would be Eco's *Foucault's Pendulum*, about a group of editors becoming too involved with the occultists they're trying to exploit.
This is all rather difficult prose, but it is worth the effort. And if you have 4,000 books and have nothing but SF + technical books, frankly you're wasting 2/3 of your money, because there's probably no more than a few hundred SF books that are really worth owning (and I have about 600 myself, including most of the great ones except the cyperpunks, which are a little after my time.). [Apply a good filter like a book review to Sturgeon's Law and you just might get down to 66% of everything being crap.]
If you like fantasy, you really ought to look into things like the Chinese novel published in the US as "Monkey" (there was a god-awful adaptation of it on NBC about a year ago whose title escapes me), or some of the Norse sagas, which mix mythology and history. Maybe try Ovid's Metamorphoses (get the Indiana translation by Humphries, it's far and away the most readable; or try Ted Hughes' *Tales from Ovid*).
Too much SF limits you to talking about nothing but... SF. Not a good way to relate to possible future employers (the more sophisticated your small talk, the more impressive you are in such extra-curricular things as business lunches) and dates (You: 'Hey, have you read the latest Star Wars: New Jedi Order book?' Date: 'Oh, look at the time, I've got to go') - that way even if you don't know anything about the books she's read, you'll at least have a broader range of things to compare what she says about them too (I imagine if you have 4,000 books your probably past this sort of worry, but there are others on slashdot who might not be and might not realize this).
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful that you don't make a similar mistake by confusing the meaning of individual terms used by an author (or a programmer) with the effect she's trying to achieve with her text.
Unfortunately, the effect an author is trying to achieve will differ from the effect an author does achieve, depending upon the reader, the historical context of the reader, the time of day, how attentive the reader is, etc. A 14-year old reader encountering "Shall I die? Shall I fly?" at 6 am on a summer morning in 2003 will have a completely different response to the poem (i.e., understanding of what the poem intends to say) than a 50-year old reader encountering it at 9 pm on a winter evening in 2000. So far as I know, one does not have the same problem with programming (well, maybe on VAXen).
And it isn't just politics. Sometimes it's merely a matter of what part, what fragment, of an author's message one gets. Take an example: in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, there's a famous song "Fear no more the heat o the sun" with the lines
And golden boys and girls all must,
As chimney sweeps, turn to dust
(I might have that slightly off.) Nowadays, readers assume that "golden boys and girls" are basically "princes and princesses," in the metaphorical sense, and given the context (the song is a lament for the princess Imogen, but by someone who doesn't know either that she's a princess - or even a girl! - or his sister, or that he is a prince) that might make sense; and they assume that "chimney sweeps" means what it says (poor working kids, not much wealthier - in the 1610s - than street children), too. However, in some rural parts of the English midlands (I think; someone from England can correct me), "golden boys" is the name given to dandelions in bloom, and "chimney sweeps" the name given to dandelions that have gone to seed. This is a completely different image than the one assumed by modern readers, and it likely was part of Shakespeare's purpose that the audience recognize the image. But the fact that he used "golden boys and girls" suggests that perhaps he wanted his audience to be confronted with both images, simultaneously; and for some audience members, one image would be foremost (given their context, say living in the city) and for other audience members (say those living in the country), the other image would be foremost.
This isn't a case of "if reader is in city then princes and chimney sweeps else if reader is in country dandelions blooming and going to seed". It's the analog of a single command that can achieve similiar effects using completely different mechanisms in two different contexts.
Good posting, by the way.
Obviously, you've never programmed Perl :)
Actually, that's one of my major job functions nowadays. But the kind of ambiguity you find in Perl is nothing compared to that found in a natural language. All good postings, though.
I went off other comments...but that does not make my statement any less meaningful.
Actually, yes it does. Speaking as a former humanities teacher, if you didn't read the article, it is very unlikely you will be able to form a valid opinion; and in this case, you have provided merely uninformed opinion, which is not valid. Your comments have no value. Here's your F.
That is how humanities grading works. Unless, of course, you take a class for non-majors that is little more than a bit of self-esteem pumping (and there are plenty of those in the sciences, too; one thinks of "rocks for jocks", and "calculus for the life and social sciences") requirements padding.
Reading the frelling article. The author is a Geologist, not a liberal arts prof. And he's complaining about grade inflation in HIS field.
Oh, I forgot. Reading comprehension is a libarts skill.
If an English major answers a test question on an interpretation of some poem, it's going to get a high grade because it's based on opinion and ther eis no "right" or "wrong" answer.
No, that's not right (speaking as someone who has taught college level English). An interpretation must be 1. based upon a close reading of the work in question and 2. follow some established, or at least comprehensible, mechanism of interpretation. Opinions are not good answers in a humanities exam, any more than they would be in a CS exam. There's more room for ambiguity in the humnaities, true, but that ambiguity is always within what Eco has right called (in his book of this title) "the limits of interpretation." The job of the humanist is to invent within those limits, as is the job of the engineer.
For example, if a civil engineering student tells me that he's designed a brilliant new concept for a highway bridge using nothing but cheese doodles, I'm going to ask "do you realize that cheese doodles won't be able to hold much more than their own weight?" Bzzzt! Wrong answer! If a humanist says, "well I think The Tempest is about the search for the telluric currents in 16th century Italy," I'm going to ask "and what makes you think that Shakespeare KNEW anything about the so-called telluric currents, or anything about Italian alchemists? And what in your reading of The Tempest suggests telluric currents as a subtext to the play?" Bzzzt! Just as wrong as the engineering student.
Maybe CS is different because programming languages are just that languages and so many of the same issues are present as in the humanities, just with a technical bent but I doubt it.
Unfortunately, natural languages have almost nothing in common with computer languages. Computer languages are for the most part 1:1 codes - the same command means the same thing in whatever context it appears in a particular language. Natural languages are not codes; an idiom means different things in different contexts. That's part of the problem comparing the two.
At any rate, there is plenty of grade inflation in the sciences in the US: it should be noted that the author of the piece, Stuart Rojstaczer is Professor of Geology, Environment and Engineering at Duke. And he says:
The last time I gave a C was more than two years ago. That was about the time I came to realize that my grading had become anachronistic. The C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of Cain on a college transcript. I have forsworn C's ever since.
So Prof. Booty's comments in the posting are unjustified by the evidence presented (see also the data linked from the article; Stanford, a darling of the technical education world, shows a good deal of grade inflation, too); and they are probably unjustified, period. I suspect that if you were to track grade inflation on both sides of Snow's Two Culture rift, you'd see the same steep slope.
Just because you don't understand the humanities doesn't mean it's not academically rigorous. I know plenty of humanists who would stupidly assume that programming doesn't require any brains; after all, "it's just writing down instructions for machines. What's so hard about that.")
I haven't been following it recently, but I believe DP is basing their markup on TEI. They don't want to use TEI itself because it is big and complicated. DP would prefer a simpler markup that is easy for volunteers to learn.
Good call. My understanding is that's what most projects do: use a subset of TEI (for instance, TEI Lite, or even so-called Bare Bones TEI, which while it is not ideal for a scholarly edition, is better than nothing.)
Actually, he didn't even invent moveable type. The Chinese did that with wooden blocks much earlier and there were existing printing presses that used moveable blocks.
Are you sure about this? My understanding was that early (pre-Gutenburg) Chinese presses didn't have sorts, because with the sheer size of the Chinese writing system, they wouldn't have been efficient with the level of technology to produce wooden blocks. But I'm willing to be corrected (with a reference, preferably).
Anyway, see Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change for a lot of the information that Mr. Orn describes. A more accessible book, The Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns, discusses some of this in the in the earlier chapters.
Unfortunately, Bevington's, Taylor's, Kermode's, and even Muir's texts of Shakespeare are still under copyright. (Compare an Arden of Shakespeare to a facsimile of the First Folio some time: the printers of the First Folio were considered good in their day, but not in ours). Too bad most English translations of the Bible (the KJV and the Tyndale are two obvious exceptions) are still under copyright. Too bad most of the good translations of the Koran still are.
Yes, there's plenty of good lit before 1923, but sometimes you need to look at a more modern edition to see what the original author most likely really wrote.
Distributed Proofers is also working on a standard to mark up the books to better preserve tables, illustrations, bold text, math, etc. I suspect that effort is being slowed due to the priority of keeping material on the site.
Three Little Letters:
T E I
TEI is to literature as DocBook is to documentation.
Additionally translations might generate practical limitations. If a text was written in ancient Greece and translated to English or some other language in the 20th century, the translation might not be public domain even when the original work is. Of course you are free to read the original text or make a new translation. Anyway even if a piece of literature was public domain, the translation to your native language might not be.
Exactly. What's worse, modern texts of an ancient work are not usually considered to be in the public domain, because the work to try to clean up the errors that inevitably creep into the manuscript tradition is commonly accepted to be a copyrightable contribution. However, I don't think this is something that has ever been tested in a court (IANAL).
And many texts from before 1923 aren't very good by modern standards (too many errors).
So the solution is to try to get those who have the necessary philological skills to make translations to agree to donate their services - something that has proven an uphill struggle so far, as some translations have scored big time as bestsellers (Ciardi's Dante, Fitzgerald's Homer, Pevear's translations from the Russian, Mitchell's translations - mediocre though they are - of Biblical/spiritual "classics") and a lot of translators secretly nourish the hopes to be the next Arthur Waley.
And scholarly texts take years to produce. Again, the editors tend to nourish hopes they might supplement their income (slightly, here; we're not talking about Stephen King, or David Pogue, or even Simson Garfinkel type numbers; I doubt that editors of ancient texts even make 1/100 from their books what David Pogue makes) from the royalties from the 2,000 copies sold to libraries, or the 10,000+ copies sold to students.
Pentii is not only annoying, but also wrong ;) The proper Latin plural of pentium would be pentia, cf. medium/media.
Yes, Pentium would be a neuter adjective of the second declension in Latin, and so Pentia would be the proper substantive plural. And virii is also wrong, as has been discussed many times before. I think that was his point.
Well, how about me then?
I'm an indian student and it's been three years since I even saw an Apple anything. (and that was through a shop window.) Guess we third world geeks will just have to make do with assembled stuff.
*Sighs, and rides his elephant off into the sunset *
Just keep at it, man. You'll be buying us in 35 years.
Hello ignorant human beings - a leading "authority" on hoax circles ADMITS THAT 20% ARE NOT HOAXES.
And what makes him an authority? And what makes his opinion valid? Nothing, frankly. There's no scientific evidence being discussed here, only the opinion of self-elevated expert who, by the way, considers himself an expert not on hoaxes, but on crop circles tout court. In other words, of COURSE he believes some of them are genuine; if he didn't, he wouldn't be an authority any more.
If you think those are scientific articles, I weep for the future of mankind.
I weep.
To quote from the first link:
After all, hoaxers and sceptics fear things they can't understand and explain away!
Crop circles can quite thoroughly be explained away as the work of hoaxers. As for the tertium quid who repeat the mantra, "do not mock what you do not understand," the problem is that I understand these perfectly: I do not need to make recourse to magical extraterrestrials or pseudo-scientific "energies" (I'm waiting for "Telluric currents" to crop up in this conversation) to explain crop circles. A lot of good planning with a computer and a few simple-to-make tools are all it takes.
After all, it was once said that the moon was too bright for Hubble to image, but color tests were acknowleged to be done using clouds over Earth.
At the resolution necessary to resolve a LM, the moon probably is too bright. Color tests likely don't require any kind of resolution at all. Anyway, see this link for some discussion of this issue.
Of course, this was roughly contemperaneous with Tim Berners Lee's development of the WWW so both factors probably worked together towards making the 'net what it is in this day and age.
Not exactly. The Boucher Bill was passed in 1993; TBL invented the WWW in 1991 (the first work was in 1989; the publication of the CERN httpd was in 1991, though, and that publication - particularly these emails, dated 9 Aug 1991, offering the code for free and providing the first public http links I know of - should constitute the birth of the WWW.
What the Boucher Bill did was provide a policy framework for the public Web/Internet as we know it. Still worthy of mention in the annals of history, regardless of how Algore might have [mis?]characterized it.
In Songs of Distant Earth, Clarke makes the ambition to become president the one thing that disqualifies one for the job.
If you are aiming to hit a silo or command center, you do ground burst as an airburst is all but useless.
Point taken.
Damned good posting. Only thing you forgot to point out is that nukes are designed for airburst attacks, not ground bursts, to maximize casualties. (See Richard Rhodes' discussion of Oppenheimer's briefing on this in The Making of the Atomic Bomb).
It was a joke. Get a life. I pulled the number out of nihil.
Copyrights are usually held by record and publishing corporations, not the artists. I am sure you have heard the expression, "starving artist," but have not heard anything like "starving executive."
Sort of. The original copyright is always originally held by the author/creator, and is usually transferred to the publisher. It's part of the standard deal for record companies, I imagine, and for many publishers. The exception is a work for hire, which most sound recordings and books are not.
IANAL
Want them cheap? Let the GOVERNMENT handle SSL certs! After all, they're already handling drivers licenses, social security numbers, and ten kazillion other things that are supposed to prove that you are you, why not just give you a cert, too? For a small government fee, of course.
Yes, and just imagine how small the fee for an SSL certificate will be from the folks who brought you the $5,000 toilet seat.
Once in a while, if an SF book has a very good reputation, I'll pick it up, but for the most part I finished my SF reading days when I got out of college. Too much crap to wade through to find the real gems. That said, the only newer books (the former is what, 10 years old?) I've read and liked were Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's *Good Omens* and Gaiman's *American Gods*.
Non SF: I'd suggest weaning youself from SF with Jorge Luis Borges, *Collected Fictions*, which is top-flight 20th c. lit with some of the same tone you'd find in good SF (though it is more fantastic). If you have the wits to handle really complex narratives, try Rushdie's *Ground Beneath Her Feet*, which has some SF-like elements (alternate universes, e.g.) but is unassailably good lit. Also worth reading would be Eco's *Foucault's Pendulum*, about a group of editors becoming too involved with the occultists they're trying to exploit.
This is all rather difficult prose, but it is worth the effort. And if you have 4,000 books and have nothing but SF + technical books, frankly you're wasting 2/3 of your money, because there's probably no more than a few hundred SF books that are really worth owning (and I have about 600 myself, including most of the great ones except the cyperpunks, which are a little after my time.). [Apply a good filter like a book review to Sturgeon's Law and you just might get down to 66% of everything being crap.]
If you like fantasy, you really ought to look into things like the Chinese novel published in the US as "Monkey" (there was a god-awful adaptation of it on NBC about a year ago whose title escapes me), or some of the Norse sagas, which mix mythology and history. Maybe try Ovid's Metamorphoses (get the Indiana translation by Humphries, it's far and away the most readable; or try Ted Hughes' *Tales from Ovid*).
Too much SF limits you to talking about nothing but ... SF. Not a good way to relate to possible future employers (the more sophisticated your small talk, the more impressive you are in such extra-curricular things as business lunches) and dates (You: 'Hey, have you read the latest Star Wars: New Jedi Order book?' Date: 'Oh, look at the time, I've got to go') - that way even if you don't know anything about the books she's read, you'll at least have a broader range of things to compare what she says about them too (I imagine if you have 4,000 books your probably past this sort of worry, but there are others on slashdot who might not be and might not realize this).
There should be a tin-hat logo for News of the Absurd: Stuff that Inspires Laughter. Like this. I mean, come on, could this be any more laughable?
Hell, it's damned easy to forget what's what sometimes.