I would like to point out that very little, if any road building projects in the USA get built with funds coming from income taxes. Federal fuel taxes are about 30 cents per gallon, with strong proposals to raise this significantly higher. State taxes are mostly 30-50 cents per gallon on top of that.
Indeed, I would dare say that for most states it tends to be an income generation tool where fuel taxes are spent on many things well beyond just highways and rest stops. And there is more food for thought here:
Income taxes in many states are restricted on what they can be spent upon as well (although federal income taxes do go into the the general appropriations funds). Utah, to give an example of a state I'm familiar with, has constitionally required that all income generated by income taxes be spent exclusively on educational related activities alone. It is fun during times when funds are getting short to see how the legislature deals with the relatively steady revenue coming from income taxes and the temptation they have to try and subvert the constitution to use the funds for other purposes. Fortunately that takes a state-wide referendum, which the voters of Utah have shown to frequently vote contrary to the general wishes of the legislature.
The point being here that your basic premise of income taxes being used for construction of highways is certainly not valid, and George W. won't care about this "change" because it is the way federal taxes are currently structured. The main issue that comes up each year is how Congress will chop up the funds generated nationwide. That is billions of dollars, and the President has very little if any real say over how that happens. Most of the time it takes a fairy god-senator to get funds to a specific state, and some strong representation in the House.
As far as shifting the tax structure, I've seen several rather interesting concepts, including some basically revenue-neutral methods of eliminating income taxes with what amounts to be something like a national sales tax on goods and services.
There are so many problems with the rail transportation network in the USA that I don't know where to start, although I will note that much of it is in part because this is a 19th Century infrastructure that seems to be very difficult to move to the 21st Century.
More importantly, intermodal transportation (aka going from airports to train to vehicles like taxis and private automobiles or even buses) is severely lacking. Particularly for passenger travel. Airports often have a clue about private automobiles, and do a fair job with busses, but there are few (I don't know of any) connections to major airports directly through Amtrak. Only a few cities that I'm aware of even have their urban rail systems (aka subway) connect to the major regional airports. Notable exceptions include New York City (JFK) and Chicago (O'Hare). Los Angeles has their rail network run within just a couple of miles of the airport (LAX), but it is a classic "bridge to nowhere" that has been debated for more than a decade if the extension will ever really happen.
Freeways usually are much better built near airports, to show priorities of governments.
Grand Central Station in NYC is a classic intermodal stop, where both the subway and Amtrak service is at roughly the same location, together with ample bus and taxi service. And that was built nearly a century ago. Too bad that same concept wasn't continued even when opportunities presented themselves. Or more to the point, outside of the north-eastern population corridor, Amtrak has failed a miserable failure because it is mostly passenger service from nowhere to nowhere in particular.
Certainly getting off of a flight from Salt Lake City international to hop on the Amtrak service (passing within only 10 miles of the airport) is something you wouldn't even realistically dream about unless you were determined to have a couple of day layover. And that is where intermodal transit would even make some rough sense in a very urban area that is nearly ideal for rail transport (Utah's Wasatch Front). Other areas of the western USA make far less sense to even consider passenger rail service both due to population density and difficult terrain, or even missing rail service of any kind.
The other issue, perhaps this is self-perpetuating, is that rail transit is usually (in the USA) several times the cost of a comparable journey by air. If you are trying to pinch pennies, you will travel by air rather than by rail. Even inter-city (aka Greyhound) bus service is less preferable in terms of cost than flying, except for trying to get to cities not served by the air transportation system. This is particularly why passenger rail service to airports was a huge missed opportunity for Amtrak, although this wasn't so obvious in the 1960's when passenger rail service was seemingly falling apart, requiring Amtrak to be formed in the first place.
I have lived in communities who have successfully been able to use the "franchise" of a monopoly (both cable and telephone) in order to get substantial concessions from the businesses in terms of improved services and reduced rates.
When the local government authority has gone against the wishes of the voters, I have even seen the entire government turned out on their ear and every elected position replaced with somebody else in less than two years. No kidding here either. Never have I ever seen the term "incumbant" carry so much baggage at an election on any level for one particularly bad municipal power decision.
Of course in all of these situations the "governments" were small enough that it was possible to know personally those involved with running the government (cities 100,000 people), had diversity of news outlets to aire the issues involved, and very active individuals willing to stand up politically to try and change the situation preventing these companies from "buying out" the government.
Somehow I doubt that the current government of South Africa is as responsive to its electorate, particularly based on other comments made on this/. thread.
The United States Postal System is run as a for-profit corporation that is wholly owned by the U.S. Federal Government.
Or more to the point, it hasn't received a dime of tax money for more than a couple of decades, and even when it has it was just a short-term subsistance "grant" until they could become profitable again. Most of this happened when the Postmaster General was dropped (a surprisingly rare event) from the cabinet of the U.S. President.
There still are quasi-governmental functions done by the Post Office, with new building approval and confirmation of local postmasters done by the U.S. Congress, as are postage rates (similar in fashion to how most state utility commissions regulate power and telephone service).
But the USPS is supported entirely through postage fees and the sales of "products" from their retail locations... like phone cards and packaging materials. It certainly doesn't come from income tax revenue.
I would like to point out that the NASA Public Relations budget is easily close to this price alone. I would rather that NASA spent that kind of money on some worthy project like this that put the data into the hands of those that have helped pay for all of this rather than on some other equally foolish endeavor that is easily going to squander many times more money. Like the Ares spacecraft.
As far as open media policy, I can't imagine anybody who is more open than NASA. They have placed everything, including even stuff they are currently generating on the most recent shuttle flights, into the public domain. That is right, not even GFDL, Creative Commons, or other nonsense. Simply into the public domain. Only joint projects with groups like the ESA do you find problems, and even then there are some very realistic attempts to try and open up that kind of data for purposes even beyond non-commercial uses.
I find it ironic when I find a copyright plastered on stuff that I know has been generated by NASA, but that is another issue entirely, and an abuse of copyright.
Digitized into what multi-media format, at what bit depth and resolution, and is it a lossy or non-lossy compression?
Digital media formats are not nearly as "standardized" as you would seem to indicate here, and such multimedia computers have not "been around a while". Certainly not the computers that "got us up into space".
In addition, even those photos which were originally done as digitized data (aka the interplanetary space probes) have all had virtually incompatible file formats from even each other, much less even from traditional web media formats like PNG, GIF, or JPEG.
On top of all of this is the sheer volume of data available that can be digitized and made available. We are not talking just a couple hundred photos here that tend to hit the cover of National Geographic, but literally millions of photos. Earth observation photos bring in tens of thousands of photos each day on just a single satellite.
Even now, I question the ability of digital cameras to capture the saturation, dynamic color depth, resolution, and other optical characteristics found with analog film. Certainly digital cameras are getting better and better, but there is room for improvement well beyond what exists even now. Over time, digital cameras may be even superior to analog photographic techniques in most situations, but it won't get rid of all of the problems.
In short, I think that you have trivialized some very real and tough problems here involved with both cataloging as well as simply dititizing these photos, not to mention other multi-media data like audio and video.
Could you list these newspapers? No? So how do you know how this correlates with their editorial line?
I'll start with one: The Washington Post
I can name others, but I do agree with the grandparent post.... many of these same newspapers who are showing so much "sensitivity" on this particular issue show no remorse when attacking Christian values. And they are very strong with their "Bush bashing" and criticism of Republicans.
BTW, the Washington Post was mentioned explicitly on the writeup as one of the papers explicitly not publishing this comic, even though they do publish most of the other Opus comic strips.
One huge difference here is that violence in the name of religion has official state support from Moslem countries and quasi-state organizations like the Palistinian Authority. I do not know of any predominantly Christian country that has as an official policy or through unofficial actions supporting and endorsing actions and policies encouraging violence in "the name of God".
I can name several countries that have offered bounties and cash rewards for those "martyrs" who blow themselves up in the name of Allah and Islam. As a matter of official governmental policy. Not to mention official support of several well known terrorist organizations who have stated genocide as explicit foundational goals of those organizations.
In the explicit situation you are referring to in Northern Ireland with the sectarian violence between the Catholics and the Protestants, there may have been an implict support of the Protestant cause by the British government, but religious freedom is still practiced within British society. This is also increasingly a moot issue as Northern Ireland as the issues are being resolved (perhaps too slowly) and eventually this will be just an embarassing issue left to history. I have ancestry from Northern Ireland, but I'm glad those ancestors got smart and moved to Canada a couple of hundred years ago.
The problem I have with this knee jerk reaction that happens from the Moslem community is the insistence that non-believers must maintain as sacred those things which belong to a specific religion, and that non-believers must completely understand just where those boundaries are in a cultural context that is far removed from that religious culture.
I don't understand why the name of Mohammed, Mecca, or any other name like this must be kept sacred, particularly when believers are obviously blashpheming their religion with threats of genocide and extreme violence against non-believers. It is precisely in this extreme context where non-Moslems are pushing back and attempting, with a little bit of humor, to try and cope with the situation and put concepts of the Moslem culture into a cultural context familiar to people from western societies. And yes, I consider Al Queida threats of violence to be blasphemous in the context of what is taught in the Koran, as are threats to nuke Mecca by Christians to be just as bad. Jesus certainly did not advocate such violence, nor did Mohammed except under extreme circumstances.
This is also a clash of cultures where particularly peoples of the Middle East are having to confront the in-your-face politics where little is really considered sacred by even "mainstream" news outlets. It is not just Islamic beliefs that are being disrespected, but a strong distrust of nearly all authority of any kind, including religious figures and philosophies. Just for some bizzare reason Moslem beliefs are the ones that get the most criticism (or perhaps criticism of Scientology could fit in this category too!) But attacks against mainstream or even fundamentalist Christianity get hardly even a second thought, perhaps because they are so common.
But missions to Uranus and Neptune did happen... regardless of when they did happen.
The technical difficulties of trying to get to those two planets in particular is enough of a challenge that even getting there in the first place was a huge accomplishment at the time... and the fact that the U.S. Congress has cut NASA funding so significantly that it is currently impossible with the current NASA budget, unless you cut manned spaceflight entirely, to organize and set up any kind of major Voyager/Cassini/Galileo type of mission. Congressional support simply isn't there.
And for those blind sighted types who push for the elimination of manned spaceflight in favor of robotic missions, I would like to point out that by cutting the manned spaceflight missions, that is all you would accomplish. Congress simply will not expand robotic missions unless a manned mission requirement is pushing the hard-core need to send more robotic missions "out there". Manned spaceflight drives robotic missions.... in terms of congressional funding, not the other way around. Eliminating manned spaceflight would eliminate all government spending on spaceflight of any kind.
The amazing story that did "leak out" after the collapse of the Soviet Union was that not only was there a tacit confirmation of the Apollo program... but that the Russians really were in a "space race" to get to the Moon as well. Discoveries of a Russian lunar lander (not just a prototype, but a real working machine capable of landing on the surface of the Moon), documents about some of the cosmonaut training for going to the Moon, and some of their plans for how they were going to accomplish the task were uncovered.
The only thing that kept the Russians from getting there first was that they made a few mistakes in trying to scale up their rocket designs, as the Russian equivalent to the Saturn V blew up on the launch pad taking out several workers and destroying nearly all of the launch equipment. Had some better engineering decisions been made at the right time not too much earlier, and it would have been a Russian instead of Neil Armstrong who could have first planted a flag on the Moon. For P.R. spin purposes, the Russian government after 1969 claimed that it was never a goal to get to the Moon in the first place and killed any attempts to restart the program.
I have no doubt that then or even now the Russians could build and develop independently the capability of getting to the Moon... and do so for a fraction of the cost of the Apollo program.
The only way to truly put these rumors to rest is to wait for the day when a Dateline:NBC reporter shows up at the site of the Apollo 11 landing and plants his foot next to Neil's and Buzz's footprints. Unfortunately that is still several decades away from happening, and is much more likely that Dateline:NBC will be canceled as a TV show first. Even then, there will still be skeptics who will claim at that time the U.S. government will have a secret committee who set up the models from the Hollywood back lot and put them on the Moon as a sort of rewriting of history... once ordinary people can go to the Moon and check it out for themselves.
And what, exactly, would a human be able to find out that couldn't be better found out by spending the same amount on automated systems? To me, it seems it would be meaningless bravado, risking human lives for no real benefits.
I hear this argument over and over again.... and I don't buy it.
You simply need to have somebody "on the ground" and able to "pick up" a rock, turn stuff over, and react to the local environment... where you don't have to discuss in "committee" what action you are going to do next.
I would have to agree that the "initial reconnaissance" ought to be done by robots.... as it was done on the Moon as well (or have you forgot the Ranger series of spacecraft?) When you have so many unknowns, as there were about the Moon back in the 1950's regarding the whole idea of even physically landing on the Moon, it was vital to get something "out there" and test what is going on. This is wise in term of nearly all sorts potentially dangerous situations, which is why even the military is setting up robots to go into potentially dangerous areas for recon purposes.
But there does reach a point where you have to physically send somebody to the place in order to conduct field research... as remote vehicles simply are far too limited and can't be designed to take on every contingency. Having somebody with opposable thumbs and fingers capable of being "programed" at a distance with just a few words and be able to fix something like wiping the dust off of a solar panel, or even being able to "think outside of the box" and come up with a totally new situation.
In spite of the fact that he was on the Moon for less than two days, Harrison Schmitt conducted far more scientific discovery on the Moon and gathered more real usable data than all of the robotic missions to all of the rest of the planets combined, except for perhaps the Earth itself. I am not making that claim lightly either. He also took decades of real experience being a professional geologist.... a PhD even in that field... and used that knowledge while on the Lunar surface to gather some samples that none of the other twelve astronauts would have even considered. Dr. Schmitt's research will literally be referred to for centuries to come as a foundation of extra-terrestrial mineralogy and "geologic" studies. He would not have been able to do any of that unless "he was there" and capable of making those crucial decisions about what to skip and what to grab.
I can't even imagine what would happen if a full scale permanent laboratory was on the Moon with full time scientists capable of doing something that wasn't so much of a rush job that it seemed like a temporary layover between international flights at an airport. And going to some of the more "interesting" areas of the Moon rather than selecting parts of the Moon that were chosen explicitly because they were boring... like trying to determine the geology of the Earth by landing in the middle of a corn field in Kansas instead of in the Grand Canyon of Arizona.
There still is some "low hanging fruit" of scientific knowledge that can be gathered by robotic vehicles to explore Mars, such as Spirit and Opportunity. But there will be a point of diminishing returns where having somebody on the ground there to conduct the research will not only return much more information, but significantly more data. And this is only the "scientific" justification for sending people into space and going to Mars. Or Antarctica to use another example of a comparatively hostile environment where scientists do go physically for research. People live year round at the South Pole itself, for crying out loud. Are you suggesting here that they should all be replaced by robots too?
There are also other reasons for going to Mars besides pure scientific rationales, but I don't want to digress any more with those further points.
I would like to point out that some of these "theories" that you are mentioning here would... under more relaxed standards of the term, be more classified as a "scientific law" instead of just a mere theory. They have stood the test of time and have been verified for accuracy by multiple independent experiments viewing the suggested relationship (aka E=mc^2) from multiple aspects of the suggested theoretical understandings. Relativity in particular is something that has been demonstrated in so many different ways that to suggest an alternative would be the equivalent of a newly minted PhD student being named as the dean of the College of science at an Ivy League school. Which is nearly what the fictional Zephraim Cochrain of Star Trek fame proposed with his warp drive FTL propulsion theories.
The Theory of Evolution is also one of these very well established theories that would have in an earlier day and age have been considered not just a mere "theory" but a scientific law as well. Fortunately (or not), few of these theories are addressed as scientific laws if they have been developed in a post-industrial age. I would suspect that some of this is intentional in the scientific community, as scientific theories like "String Theory" depend on an association through the use of this terminology to much more established theories like Relativity and Evolution, giving these ideas additional weight that may or may not be merited.
Getting back to Intelligent Design.... if it is valid or not... attempts explicitly by design to take advantage of "this is only just another alternative theory" approach to attempt peerage with concepts like Evolution. Particularly when such association is unwarranted. I would call Intelligent Design to be something akin to a conjecture on an unrefined and nebulous concept that has many different ideas on what is happening. Ranging from the Anthropomorphic Principle (aka the Universe is what is it because we wouldn't be in it if it was different) to literalistic interpretations of sacred writings (aka what happened in Genesis happened in a very real sense... and the world was really created in 7 24-hour periods of time). I fit on this spectrum as somebody who perhaps accepts a stronger Anthropomorphic Principle, where perhaps there is some higher order intelligence that has "created" the universe which we see, but using scientific principles to make things happen the way that they happen.
The universe would be quite a bit different if some universal constants, the "G" (universal gravity constant), "c" (speed of light", and Plank's Constant were different or the ratio of one of these constants to the others were different. There are other "constants" which make up the behavior of the basic elements that have not (yet) been simplified down to quantum elements, and that is just physics and chemistry. Two scientific disciplines which supposed are quite refined on their theories.
Is is possible a "God" with a cruel sense of humor doesn't occasionally send asteroids and other junk to our humble little planet? There is no scientific basis to prove or disprove that he does or doesn't exist, shy of Him presenting himself to "critics" and permitting scientific enquiry.
Consider Nielsen ratings: would you or any self-respecting Slashdotter actually be so foolish as to agree to be a "Nielsen family"? I doubt it. It's the same dynamic at play. I blogged about the relative stupidity of Nielsen families in particular a while back; those people are ruining my ability to enjoy quality programming like Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond, Keen Eddie, and countless others because of their mindless plebeian tastes.
Not only would I volunteer.... I have been one in the past. I don't think you appreciate the effort that the Nielsen company goes into in terms of trying to examine several different demographic groups, and unfortunately such fine demographic information doesn't make it into the formally published "ratings" that get released.
As far as your snootish attitude here regarding the "plebeian tastes".... we are talking about companies who specialize in mass consumer goods. If you want to stick to "high brow" television.... view PBS or start your own network instead. You obviously don't represent the rest of us ordinary folks who may enjoy Star Wars again years after its release.... or watch some of those episodes of Survivor with a beer and your wife at your side. There is a universe of people who are not hardcore geeks and have never read slashdot. If that happens to be 99% of the population of the world... live with it. Perhaps a reason why some of those SF shows you are complaining about being canceled is partly due to the fact they really are getting a lousy reception, and aren't being watched by the general population.
We are preserving all of the raw scans, and the plates will be preserved, too. Our scans resolve the photographic grains, going well beyond the actual resolution of objects in the sky. We are also saving a few more bits of intensity than are found in the photographs. This is a pretty good time to be creating this archive, not just because the scanning technology is mature and storage technology is tracking our needs. There is also a greater interest in the astrophysics of temporal variations in anticipation of the PanSTARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) and LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) projects which the Harvard plates complement into the past.
BTW, I really appreciate this comment... even if it is a little bit late for the typical/. crowd.
I'm not saying that you haven't "done your homework" here, but I've been involved with enough academic digitization projects in the past, from a wide variety of pursuits, that there are strong concerns to be raised when I see yet another digitization effort come up. I have seen just about every possible kind of mistake made on raw data archiving that you can imagine over the years.
Perhaps the one "common mistake" in an academic setting is to keep up quality control in terms of the data being acquired. For an effort like this, it is common to be using grad students and even undergraduates in the field of discipline because they work for minimum wage or even less depending on the part of the country that the university is located at, and the current economic conditions. But because they are students and not necessarily researchers, they don't really appreciate maintaining high data integrity and bypass protocols just to increase apparent productivity statistics. This is especially true if you pay piece rate instead of an hourly wage, and if you leave those performing the digitization work largely unsupervised.
I can tell you genuine "horror stories" that would fill a book about how mismanagement of such efforts has in some cases turned such a database into nearly worthless data, because the poor scans or "duplicated" effort (aka scanning the same plate/page dozens of times but claiming it is in fact independent items) or other common problems. And hanging a threat of withholding a degree if the job isn't done properly can cause other problems, and is seldom followed through even if gross incompetence or even fraud does occur. I've rarely even seen such students even get fired in such situations, as their jobs are largely seen as a sort of scholarship program. Often nobody even notices the problems until after the "student" has already graduated and moved on.
In defense of Rowling, she is a Briton and writing from her own perspective of international relations and how she fits in with the larger world community. I don't necessarily thing this is a bad thing either, and for somebody who is from the British Isles would view the Ministry of Magic as a means of organizing those in the "Magical World", meaning those who practice magic in the UK.
I would view the extension of this idea in the USA to mean something like "The Department of Magic" (aka Department of Defense, State, Energy, Education, etc.). In many ways, it is unfortunate that this little tidbit wasn't thrown into the story with a couple of "Yanks" dropping by for a visit at Hogwarts, even just as a tourist.
One potential story line involving the "Harry Potter universe" that would have been incredibly interesting along this line would be to see what happened during World War II, where at the start it would have been something mainly of interest to just the Muggle population, but eventually great battles happened between wizards who joined into the fight, with huge battles taking place over the English Channel or even the North Atlantic. Imagine a story about the Battle of the Bulge and how the 101st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army was defended by another group of wizarding folks from the USA and Brittan against the wizards from Germany, with their battle demonstrating that this was something much more significant in world history.
Many other ideas could also come up, but it should also be pointed out that JK also wanted to stay out of the current political battles and instead just stick with the "Wizarding World".
Keep in mind here that when this was originally written about (back in the 1970's), the "order" of each world was not written to describe which "system" of government was better, worse, more advantageous economically, or anything else. In other words, this was an unordered list rather than an ordered list with no distinction about which "world" was necessarily better or worse than the other.
In fact, when this concept was originally put forward, many were citing the Soviet system as being much more desirable and something that should be emulated in the "West". Certainly the 1st and 2nd worlds were considered equal in stature, and the "3rd world" was considered the parts of the world left out of the Cold War struggle directly, but often became pawns in the struggle between these other two "worlds". Certainly during the Cold War era, travel between the main two worlds (aka Russia and the USA) was very much like travel between two completely different planets in terms of what was emphasized philosophically and the relationship between ordinary citizens and their governments.
That this concept is instead used as a tool politically to demonstrate how the rich are "obligated" to help the poor by confiscatory wealth policies or fermenting political revolutions is among many reasons why the whole idea of the "3 worlds" philosophy has gone way beyond what was the original intention: To describe anthropologically speaking different groups of people in broad terms.
There are a couple of full professors that I am aware of (and not like the Essjay affair) that are contributing to Wikibooks, and a few "class projects" where a professor has assigned grades based upon a student's participation in the creation of content for a particular joint project, but you are correct that many of the books do tend to be single author projects with only occasional extra contributions.
The atmosphere does tend to be much less charged than on Wikipedia, and a much longer view to just about everything also takes place... even to the discussions about deletion of content which can take months in some cases to resolve.
Still, in terms of establishing a very high quality annotated text on Wikibooks, there really isn't a prime example. There is a Wikibook about the Harry Potter books, but they have the added problems of dealing with content that is copyrighted. I've seen some attempts at trying to annotate the New Testament, but that is also fraught with all kinds of problems of its own due to the subject. Explicitly permitted by policy, there hasn't been a good treatment of any kind of classical book.
To let you know where I'm coming from in all of this, I'm a volunteer with Wikibooks, one of the sister projects to Wikipedia that is more involved with writing book-length content.
One of the problems we (as project participants) are currently facing is an overwhelming need to somehow index the content that is currently on the website. With over 26,000 pages of content currently, about the only way that you can find anything is to perform a google search. That has some value, but there are limits on even a Google search.
One of the sub-projects that I've been trying to work on over the past year or so is to try and organize the content into something perhaps some of the people visiting the website would be a little bit more familiar with: Card Catalog classification systems.
The best "source" of people who seem to have any skills in this area seems to be the Open Directory Project, but even then the number of people who have any real skills seems to be astonishingly low.
In trying to come up with a classification system of some kind to help organize the roughly 2000 e-book on Wikibooks, I've also been interviewing libraries and trying to find guides to classification that don't require paying expensive fees and can be used for new volunteers who want to help but aren't ready for a full-time job either. When I talk to professional librarians, what astounds me is not so much their confessions of a lack of knowledge about the topic, but the utter blank look on their faces when I try to explain the scope of what I'm doing. And it has so far proven to be far more complex than even what I thought it was going to be at the start.
Currently on Wikibooks, we are using a trio of the Dewey Decimal system, the LOC classification, and something "home grown" that we call bookshelves. Our catalog tends to be very tech-heavy in terms of the kinds of books we are dealing with (over 2 dozen books just about programming languages), but there is also some strength in linguistics as well. Some very surprising books have been written about learning some languages that would normally be considered obscure, and much better written than say a book about German. On the LOC top level, however, we have books in every classification letter except military and naval science, so there is some breadth to the topics covered as well.
As this is a volunteer effort, we have to use ressources available that are free (as in beer) to perform this effort. Even on this limited library of books, I have already come across severe limits to what we can do in terms of further refining some of the categories, as guidelines like the Dewey top 1000 topical summaries are already breaking down.
A project such as this open library project, dedicated to this kind of effort, is noble and something worthwhile but I also see some real practical problems once they move beyond just a few dozen books. It will be interesting to see how they solve some of those problems.... if they solve them at all. And this group seems to be operating in a bit of a vacuum here in terms of trying to reach out to other projects that may be doing the same sort of thing. That is always concerning when you think about supporting a crazy new project idea like this when it doesn't appear as though they have done their "homework".
OK, so you are talking about annotated texts. Wikisource has a number of those, as does Wikibooks (much better done on Wikisource IMHO).
Annotated texts are exactly as you are describing them: They take an older work (say the '''Holy Bible''' to give a strong example of something very commonly footnoted and annotated) and add additional details including glossaries, alternative text, historical information from other sources, and speculative commentary about specific wording.
Another kind of very typical "book" that is annotated, and serves humanity much more powerfully than the original "source", are annotated legal codes. Aka the laws of countries, states, and municipalities. Often these get so intense on the annotations that even the annotations themselves are annoatated with subsequent commentary.
Writing these kind of books is not easy to accomplish, and it takes somebody who is an "expert" on the subject and has done additional research well above and beyond the mere words of the book itself. Most of these annotated books are commercially sold if they have any value at all, but free content books of this nature do exist already... at least in limited forms. Again, if you want to get into this kind of activity on something like say the books of Samuel Clemens (or any other author), there are forums for you to help out.
BTW, I would love an annotated copy of the Linux Kernel. At least something from one of the stable branches. What I'm talking about is something very extensive in terms of internal documentation explaining the various variables used and the explicit coding techniques and philosophies for how everything was put together. Ordinary comments simply wouldn't work in a situation like that, and it would have some very real value to the larger community. So yes, I can even see value for something like this beyond even classical literature (unless you consider the Linux Kernel to be classical literature:)
I'm confused a little bit about what you are talking about here. You are looking for original source material, but you are also insisting on having extensive bibliogrphies and footnotes.
If you have ever read a "Featured Article" quality Wikipedia entry, they will almost always have very extensive bibliographies, footnotes, and links to original source documents, so this statement that you are looking for this seems like you are missing something essential here.
Or that you are looking at older books that don't have bibliographies and dismissing them.... when in fact they are the original source documents you claim to be craving here.
If someone started a project to provide that kind of information for Project Gutenberg books, I'd get on board to help. Bonus points if they're also putting them in formats that don't suck (making plain text look good on the screen is a pain in the ass).
If I am reading this correctly, you are looking for people who mark up the Gutenberg Project files to something that isn't just plain ASCII? Check out these website:
http://gutenberg.hwg.org/ - HTML Writer's Guild - They have moved to a more XML scheme for markups, but it originally started by a couple of guys who wanted to take the PG material and formatted it using HTML. The raw ASCII is available, of course, if you really want to get it.
http://www.wikisource.org/ - Wikisource - A "sister project" to Wikipedia and sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, this project aims primarily to support Wikipedia with original source documents, although most of the "regular" participants simply are fans of old documents. You have all of the tools available on the MediaWiki software for markups (aka the same software used for Wikipedia) and some extensive work has been done with many documents to "pretty them up" and format them to something more than a plain ASCII text page. While some Project Gutenberg pages do exist on this site, it isn't exclusively PG material.
I'm sure I could find other websites to do this, but it isn't exactly a brand new idea, and there are groups of people who do agree with you that plain ASCII sucks and needs to be fixed in terms of something more visually appealing. If you want to participate with either of these groups in terms of making it easier to read some of these clasical documents, volunteers are always wanted.
Here is some additional food for thought about this idea.... coming from somebody who has only given this concept just a few minutes of thought, but having dealt with this issue extensively in the past (of trying to catalog e-books):
The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that. And developing these skills is not something very easy to accomplish either. Certainly some basic tools can be developed that would make it a bit easier to climb up the steep slope of learning various cataloging techniques and understanding ontology as a discipline, but it is unusual. Most professional librarians that I have met (I'm talking people who actually work in real libraries) may have taken a college class or two about the subject, but even they seldom get into this sort of activity.
Here is the main point about this discussion, and why this is a much harder task than is apparent: Almost all cataloging work in the USA (and the rest of the world too, BTW) is done by the national libraries (aka Library of Congress) and the thousands of other libraries largely rely upon that cataloging effort to come up with their own numbering scheme. Especially with the "cataloging in publication" process where the process of formal copyright registration assigns cataloging numbers happens well before the book even arrives at a typical local or even university library.
At even a large library, those involved in the cataloging of content are usually a small team or even a single individual who has to catalog the couple dozen books that come in each year that aren't from major book publishers (often local histories that are self-published). Even then, it is hardly a full-time job and library staff like this usually have many other job duties.
How this relates to eBooks and content on the internet is that there are many electronic resources in book-like form that are largely uncataloged. I would put it at close to 100,000 books, perhaps even more that are original "books" that have been written in the past 20 years, and are available under a free (as in beer and freedom) copyright license. The "low-hanging fruit" is the Project Gutenberg collection, but much of that surprisingly has already been cataloged in more than one form. This is because they are older books and have been cataloged years ago. While there certainly is value in preserving older documents like the PG collection, there is so much more, and in many ways more relevant explicitly because it is up to date.
BTW, in response about the cataloging numbers, you can't simply assign a book to a single cataloging ID and expect it to work in every situation (without something incredibly complicated). Every classification system; ISBN, Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal, and about a dozen other classification systems; each have their own strengths and weaknesses. And different strengths and weaknesses. If a book has any value, it covers a very unique topic that is one of a kind, and it is these books which are the ones that you need to have a clean cataloging system that is able to allow you to "place" the book in a format that there are multiple methods for being able to find that content. For the hundreds of books about how to write HTML (to pick a topic that is common) they are largely the same... but my experience in trying to deal with book cataloging is that something so common like this is a rare situation, and at least 50% of all books in an e-book library are going to be something completely unique in terms of the topic covered. In short, you need the dozens of cataloging ID numbers for each book and not just a single cataloging ID number that is cross-referenced into a much larger and more complex database.
You missed the reference. The parent was referring to http://www.wikisource.org/, one of the Wikipedia sister projects that works with original source materials.... and yes, actual books.
Often criticized as a duplication of Project Gutenberg, it does have some unique documents that you can't find elsewhere, and is *much easier* to add new documents to this project than say PG or other free text websites. I like Distributed Proofreader's approach to text quality quite a bit, but this is an alternative.
I am convinced that Armageddon and the Apocalypse are going to become self-fulfilling prophecies by modern Christians, who are hell-bent to see that the "right side" is going to win them. Eventually.
Or more to the point about what you are saying here, history tends to repeat itself, sometimes on an especially grand scale.
As a practicing Christian, I find this to be a horrifying thought and something which my co-religionists are doing which is less than worthy of the title "Christian". Armageddon doesn't have to happen, and many of the reasons why it may eventually occur are planted seeds by so-called Chritians who ignore their fundimental philosophical leader (aka Jesus)..... just as many of today's problems are happening in the Middle East because those of Islamic faith are ignoring the basic teachings of Mohammed.
Of course this thread is getting very off topic for talking about Japanese websites in elections when I bring up Al-Queida and Mohammed.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to point out that very little, if any road building projects in the USA get built with funds coming from income taxes. Federal fuel taxes are about 30 cents per gallon, with strong proposals to raise this significantly higher. State taxes are mostly 30-50 cents per gallon on top of that.
Indeed, I would dare say that for most states it tends to be an income generation tool where fuel taxes are spent on many things well beyond just highways and rest stops. And there is more food for thought here:
Income taxes in many states are restricted on what they can be spent upon as well (although federal income taxes do go into the the general appropriations funds). Utah, to give an example of a state I'm familiar with, has constitionally required that all income generated by income taxes be spent exclusively on educational related activities alone. It is fun during times when funds are getting short to see how the legislature deals with the relatively steady revenue coming from income taxes and the temptation they have to try and subvert the constitution to use the funds for other purposes. Fortunately that takes a state-wide referendum, which the voters of Utah have shown to frequently vote contrary to the general wishes of the legislature.
The point being here that your basic premise of income taxes being used for construction of highways is certainly not valid, and George W. won't care about this "change" because it is the way federal taxes are currently structured. The main issue that comes up each year is how Congress will chop up the funds generated nationwide. That is billions of dollars, and the President has very little if any real say over how that happens. Most of the time it takes a fairy god-senator to get funds to a specific state, and some strong representation in the House.
As far as shifting the tax structure, I've seen several rather interesting concepts, including some basically revenue-neutral methods of eliminating income taxes with what amounts to be something like a national sales tax on goods and services.
Q.E.D.
There are so many problems with the rail transportation network in the USA that I don't know where to start, although I will note that much of it is in part because this is a 19th Century infrastructure that seems to be very difficult to move to the 21st Century.
More importantly, intermodal transportation (aka going from airports to train to vehicles like taxis and private automobiles or even buses) is severely lacking. Particularly for passenger travel. Airports often have a clue about private automobiles, and do a fair job with busses, but there are few (I don't know of any) connections to major airports directly through Amtrak. Only a few cities that I'm aware of even have their urban rail systems (aka subway) connect to the major regional airports. Notable exceptions include New York City (JFK) and Chicago (O'Hare). Los Angeles has their rail network run within just a couple of miles of the airport (LAX), but it is a classic "bridge to nowhere" that has been debated for more than a decade if the extension will ever really happen.
Freeways usually are much better built near airports, to show priorities of governments.
Grand Central Station in NYC is a classic intermodal stop, where both the subway and Amtrak service is at roughly the same location, together with ample bus and taxi service. And that was built nearly a century ago. Too bad that same concept wasn't continued even when opportunities presented themselves. Or more to the point, outside of the north-eastern population corridor, Amtrak has failed a miserable failure because it is mostly passenger service from nowhere to nowhere in particular.
Certainly getting off of a flight from Salt Lake City international to hop on the Amtrak service (passing within only 10 miles of the airport) is something you wouldn't even realistically dream about unless you were determined to have a couple of day layover. And that is where intermodal transit would even make some rough sense in a very urban area that is nearly ideal for rail transport (Utah's Wasatch Front). Other areas of the western USA make far less sense to even consider passenger rail service both due to population density and difficult terrain, or even missing rail service of any kind.
The other issue, perhaps this is self-perpetuating, is that rail transit is usually (in the USA) several times the cost of a comparable journey by air. If you are trying to pinch pennies, you will travel by air rather than by rail. Even inter-city (aka Greyhound) bus service is less preferable in terms of cost than flying, except for trying to get to cities not served by the air transportation system. This is particularly why passenger rail service to airports was a huge missed opportunity for Amtrak, although this wasn't so obvious in the 1960's when passenger rail service was seemingly falling apart, requiring Amtrak to be formed in the first place.
I have lived in communities who have successfully been able to use the "franchise" of a monopoly (both cable and telephone) in order to get substantial concessions from the businesses in terms of improved services and reduced rates.
/. thread.
When the local government authority has gone against the wishes of the voters, I have even seen the entire government turned out on their ear and every elected position replaced with somebody else in less than two years. No kidding here either. Never have I ever seen the term "incumbant" carry so much baggage at an election on any level for one particularly bad municipal power decision.
Of course in all of these situations the "governments" were small enough that it was possible to know personally those involved with running the government (cities 100,000 people), had diversity of news outlets to aire the issues involved, and very active individuals willing to stand up politically to try and change the situation preventing these companies from "buying out" the government.
Somehow I doubt that the current government of South Africa is as responsive to its electorate, particularly based on other comments made on this
The United States Postal System is run as a for-profit corporation that is wholly owned by the U.S. Federal Government.
Or more to the point, it hasn't received a dime of tax money for more than a couple of decades, and even when it has it was just a short-term subsistance "grant" until they could become profitable again. Most of this happened when the Postmaster General was dropped (a surprisingly rare event) from the cabinet of the U.S. President.
There still are quasi-governmental functions done by the Post Office, with new building approval and confirmation of local postmasters done by the U.S. Congress, as are postage rates (similar in fashion to how most state utility commissions regulate power and telephone service).
But the USPS is supported entirely through postage fees and the sales of "products" from their retail locations... like phone cards and packaging materials. It certainly doesn't come from income tax revenue.
I would like to point out that the NASA Public Relations budget is easily close to this price alone. I would rather that NASA spent that kind of money on some worthy project like this that put the data into the hands of those that have helped pay for all of this rather than on some other equally foolish endeavor that is easily going to squander many times more money. Like the Ares spacecraft.
As far as open media policy, I can't imagine anybody who is more open than NASA. They have placed everything, including even stuff they are currently generating on the most recent shuttle flights, into the public domain. That is right, not even GFDL, Creative Commons, or other nonsense. Simply into the public domain. Only joint projects with groups like the ESA do you find problems, and even then there are some very realistic attempts to try and open up that kind of data for purposes even beyond non-commercial uses.
I find it ironic when I find a copyright plastered on stuff that I know has been generated by NASA, but that is another issue entirely, and an abuse of copyright.
Digitized into what multi-media format, at what bit depth and resolution, and is it a lossy or non-lossy compression?
Digital media formats are not nearly as "standardized" as you would seem to indicate here, and such multimedia computers have not "been around a while". Certainly not the computers that "got us up into space".
In addition, even those photos which were originally done as digitized data (aka the interplanetary space probes) have all had virtually incompatible file formats from even each other, much less even from traditional web media formats like PNG, GIF, or JPEG.
On top of all of this is the sheer volume of data available that can be digitized and made available. We are not talking just a couple hundred photos here that tend to hit the cover of National Geographic, but literally millions of photos. Earth observation photos bring in tens of thousands of photos each day on just a single satellite.
Even now, I question the ability of digital cameras to capture the saturation, dynamic color depth, resolution, and other optical characteristics found with analog film. Certainly digital cameras are getting better and better, but there is room for improvement well beyond what exists even now. Over time, digital cameras may be even superior to analog photographic techniques in most situations, but it won't get rid of all of the problems.
In short, I think that you have trivialized some very real and tough problems here involved with both cataloging as well as simply dititizing these photos, not to mention other multi-media data like audio and video.
I'll start with one: The Washington Post
I can name others, but I do agree with the grandparent post.... many of these same newspapers who are showing so much "sensitivity" on this particular issue show no remorse when attacking Christian values. And they are very strong with their "Bush bashing" and criticism of Republicans.
BTW, the Washington Post was mentioned explicitly on the writeup as one of the papers explicitly not publishing this comic, even though they do publish most of the other Opus comic strips.
One huge difference here is that violence in the name of religion has official state support from Moslem countries and quasi-state organizations like the Palistinian Authority. I do not know of any predominantly Christian country that has as an official policy or through unofficial actions supporting and endorsing actions and policies encouraging violence in "the name of God".
I can name several countries that have offered bounties and cash rewards for those "martyrs" who blow themselves up in the name of Allah and Islam. As a matter of official governmental policy. Not to mention official support of several well known terrorist organizations who have stated genocide as explicit foundational goals of those organizations.
In the explicit situation you are referring to in Northern Ireland with the sectarian violence between the Catholics and the Protestants, there may have been an implict support of the Protestant cause by the British government, but religious freedom is still practiced within British society. This is also increasingly a moot issue as Northern Ireland as the issues are being resolved (perhaps too slowly) and eventually this will be just an embarassing issue left to history. I have ancestry from Northern Ireland, but I'm glad those ancestors got smart and moved to Canada a couple of hundred years ago.
The problem I have with this knee jerk reaction that happens from the Moslem community is the insistence that non-believers must maintain as sacred those things which belong to a specific religion, and that non-believers must completely understand just where those boundaries are in a cultural context that is far removed from that religious culture.
I don't understand why the name of Mohammed, Mecca, or any other name like this must be kept sacred, particularly when believers are obviously blashpheming their religion with threats of genocide and extreme violence against non-believers. It is precisely in this extreme context where non-Moslems are pushing back and attempting, with a little bit of humor, to try and cope with the situation and put concepts of the Moslem culture into a cultural context familiar to people from western societies. And yes, I consider Al Queida threats of violence to be blasphemous in the context of what is taught in the Koran, as are threats to nuke Mecca by Christians to be just as bad. Jesus certainly did not advocate such violence, nor did Mohammed except under extreme circumstances.
This is also a clash of cultures where particularly peoples of the Middle East are having to confront the in-your-face politics where little is really considered sacred by even "mainstream" news outlets. It is not just Islamic beliefs that are being disrespected, but a strong distrust of nearly all authority of any kind, including religious figures and philosophies. Just for some bizzare reason Moslem beliefs are the ones that get the most criticism (or perhaps criticism of Scientology could fit in this category too!) But attacks against mainstream or even fundamentalist Christianity get hardly even a second thought, perhaps because they are so common.
But missions to Uranus and Neptune did happen... regardless of when they did happen.
The technical difficulties of trying to get to those two planets in particular is enough of a challenge that even getting there in the first place was a huge accomplishment at the time... and the fact that the U.S. Congress has cut NASA funding so significantly that it is currently impossible with the current NASA budget, unless you cut manned spaceflight entirely, to organize and set up any kind of major Voyager/Cassini/Galileo type of mission. Congressional support simply isn't there.
And for those blind sighted types who push for the elimination of manned spaceflight in favor of robotic missions, I would like to point out that by cutting the manned spaceflight missions, that is all you would accomplish. Congress simply will not expand robotic missions unless a manned mission requirement is pushing the hard-core need to send more robotic missions "out there". Manned spaceflight drives robotic missions.... in terms of congressional funding, not the other way around. Eliminating manned spaceflight would eliminate all government spending on spaceflight of any kind.
The amazing story that did "leak out" after the collapse of the Soviet Union was that not only was there a tacit confirmation of the Apollo program... but that the Russians really were in a "space race" to get to the Moon as well. Discoveries of a Russian lunar lander (not just a prototype, but a real working machine capable of landing on the surface of the Moon), documents about some of the cosmonaut training for going to the Moon, and some of their plans for how they were going to accomplish the task were uncovered.
The only thing that kept the Russians from getting there first was that they made a few mistakes in trying to scale up their rocket designs, as the Russian equivalent to the Saturn V blew up on the launch pad taking out several workers and destroying nearly all of the launch equipment. Had some better engineering decisions been made at the right time not too much earlier, and it would have been a Russian instead of Neil Armstrong who could have first planted a flag on the Moon. For P.R. spin purposes, the Russian government after 1969 claimed that it was never a goal to get to the Moon in the first place and killed any attempts to restart the program.
I have no doubt that then or even now the Russians could build and develop independently the capability of getting to the Moon... and do so for a fraction of the cost of the Apollo program.
The only way to truly put these rumors to rest is to wait for the day when a Dateline:NBC reporter shows up at the site of the Apollo 11 landing and plants his foot next to Neil's and Buzz's footprints. Unfortunately that is still several decades away from happening, and is much more likely that Dateline:NBC will be canceled as a TV show first. Even then, there will still be skeptics who will claim at that time the U.S. government will have a secret committee who set up the models from the Hollywood back lot and put them on the Moon as a sort of rewriting of history... once ordinary people can go to the Moon and check it out for themselves.
I hear this argument over and over again.... and I don't buy it.
You simply need to have somebody "on the ground" and able to "pick up" a rock, turn stuff over, and react to the local environment... where you don't have to discuss in "committee" what action you are going to do next.
I would have to agree that the "initial reconnaissance" ought to be done by robots.... as it was done on the Moon as well (or have you forgot the Ranger series of spacecraft?) When you have so many unknowns, as there were about the Moon back in the 1950's regarding the whole idea of even physically landing on the Moon, it was vital to get something "out there" and test what is going on. This is wise in term of nearly all sorts potentially dangerous situations, which is why even the military is setting up robots to go into potentially dangerous areas for recon purposes.
But there does reach a point where you have to physically send somebody to the place in order to conduct field research... as remote vehicles simply are far too limited and can't be designed to take on every contingency. Having somebody with opposable thumbs and fingers capable of being "programed" at a distance with just a few words and be able to fix something like wiping the dust off of a solar panel, or even being able to "think outside of the box" and come up with a totally new situation.
In spite of the fact that he was on the Moon for less than two days, Harrison Schmitt conducted far more scientific discovery on the Moon and gathered more real usable data than all of the robotic missions to all of the rest of the planets combined, except for perhaps the Earth itself. I am not making that claim lightly either. He also took decades of real experience being a professional geologist.... a PhD even in that field... and used that knowledge while on the Lunar surface to gather some samples that none of the other twelve astronauts would have even considered. Dr. Schmitt's research will literally be referred to for centuries to come as a foundation of extra-terrestrial mineralogy and "geologic" studies. He would not have been able to do any of that unless "he was there" and capable of making those crucial decisions about what to skip and what to grab.
I can't even imagine what would happen if a full scale permanent laboratory was on the Moon with full time scientists capable of doing something that wasn't so much of a rush job that it seemed like a temporary layover between international flights at an airport. And going to some of the more "interesting" areas of the Moon rather than selecting parts of the Moon that were chosen explicitly because they were boring... like trying to determine the geology of the Earth by landing in the middle of a corn field in Kansas instead of in the Grand Canyon of Arizona.
There still is some "low hanging fruit" of scientific knowledge that can be gathered by robotic vehicles to explore Mars, such as Spirit and Opportunity. But there will be a point of diminishing returns where having somebody on the ground there to conduct the research will not only return much more information, but significantly more data. And this is only the "scientific" justification for sending people into space and going to Mars. Or Antarctica to use another example of a comparatively hostile environment where scientists do go physically for research. People live year round at the South Pole itself, for crying out loud. Are you suggesting here that they should all be replaced by robots too?
There are also other reasons for going to Mars besides pure scientific rationales, but I don't want to digress any more with those further points.
I would like to point out that some of these "theories" that you are mentioning here would... under more relaxed standards of the term, be more classified as a "scientific law" instead of just a mere theory. They have stood the test of time and have been verified for accuracy by multiple independent experiments viewing the suggested relationship (aka E=mc^2) from multiple aspects of the suggested theoretical understandings. Relativity in particular is something that has been demonstrated in so many different ways that to suggest an alternative would be the equivalent of a newly minted PhD student being named as the dean of the College of science at an Ivy League school. Which is nearly what the fictional Zephraim Cochrain of Star Trek fame proposed with his warp drive FTL propulsion theories.
The Theory of Evolution is also one of these very well established theories that would have in an earlier day and age have been considered not just a mere "theory" but a scientific law as well. Fortunately (or not), few of these theories are addressed as scientific laws if they have been developed in a post-industrial age. I would suspect that some of this is intentional in the scientific community, as scientific theories like "String Theory" depend on an association through the use of this terminology to much more established theories like Relativity and Evolution, giving these ideas additional weight that may or may not be merited.
Getting back to Intelligent Design.... if it is valid or not... attempts explicitly by design to take advantage of "this is only just another alternative theory" approach to attempt peerage with concepts like Evolution. Particularly when such association is unwarranted. I would call Intelligent Design to be something akin to a conjecture on an unrefined and nebulous concept that has many different ideas on what is happening. Ranging from the Anthropomorphic Principle (aka the Universe is what is it because we wouldn't be in it if it was different) to literalistic interpretations of sacred writings (aka what happened in Genesis happened in a very real sense... and the world was really created in 7 24-hour periods of time). I fit on this spectrum as somebody who perhaps accepts a stronger Anthropomorphic Principle, where perhaps there is some higher order intelligence that has "created" the universe which we see, but using scientific principles to make things happen the way that they happen.
The universe would be quite a bit different if some universal constants, the "G" (universal gravity constant), "c" (speed of light", and Plank's Constant were different or the ratio of one of these constants to the others were different. There are other "constants" which make up the behavior of the basic elements that have not (yet) been simplified down to quantum elements, and that is just physics and chemistry. Two scientific disciplines which supposed are quite refined on their theories.
Is is possible a "God" with a cruel sense of humor doesn't occasionally send asteroids and other junk to our humble little planet? There is no scientific basis to prove or disprove that he does or doesn't exist, shy of Him presenting himself to "critics" and permitting scientific enquiry.
Not only would I volunteer.... I have been one in the past. I don't think you appreciate the effort that the Nielsen company goes into in terms of trying to examine several different demographic groups, and unfortunately such fine demographic information doesn't make it into the formally published "ratings" that get released.
As far as your snootish attitude here regarding the "plebeian tastes".... we are talking about companies who specialize in mass consumer goods. If you want to stick to "high brow" television.... view PBS or start your own network instead. You obviously don't represent the rest of us ordinary folks who may enjoy Star Wars again years after its release.... or watch some of those episodes of Survivor with a beer and your wife at your side. There is a universe of people who are not hardcore geeks and have never read slashdot. If that happens to be 99% of the population of the world... live with it. Perhaps a reason why some of those SF shows you are complaining about being canceled is partly due to the fact they really are getting a lousy reception, and aren't being watched by the general population.
BTW, I really appreciate this comment... even if it is a little bit late for the typical
I'm not saying that you haven't "done your homework" here, but I've been involved with enough academic digitization projects in the past, from a wide variety of pursuits, that there are strong concerns to be raised when I see yet another digitization effort come up. I have seen just about every possible kind of mistake made on raw data archiving that you can imagine over the years.
Perhaps the one "common mistake" in an academic setting is to keep up quality control in terms of the data being acquired. For an effort like this, it is common to be using grad students and even undergraduates in the field of discipline because they work for minimum wage or even less depending on the part of the country that the university is located at, and the current economic conditions. But because they are students and not necessarily researchers, they don't really appreciate maintaining high data integrity and bypass protocols just to increase apparent productivity statistics. This is especially true if you pay piece rate instead of an hourly wage, and if you leave those performing the digitization work largely unsupervised.
I can tell you genuine "horror stories" that would fill a book about how mismanagement of such efforts has in some cases turned such a database into nearly worthless data, because the poor scans or "duplicated" effort (aka scanning the same plate/page dozens of times but claiming it is in fact independent items) or other common problems. And hanging a threat of withholding a degree if the job isn't done properly can cause other problems, and is seldom followed through even if gross incompetence or even fraud does occur. I've rarely even seen such students even get fired in such situations, as their jobs are largely seen as a sort of scholarship program. Often nobody even notices the problems until after the "student" has already graduated and moved on.
In defense of Rowling, she is a Briton and writing from her own perspective of international relations and how she fits in with the larger world community. I don't necessarily thing this is a bad thing either, and for somebody who is from the British Isles would view the Ministry of Magic as a means of organizing those in the "Magical World", meaning those who practice magic in the UK.
I would view the extension of this idea in the USA to mean something like "The Department of Magic" (aka Department of Defense, State, Energy, Education, etc.). In many ways, it is unfortunate that this little tidbit wasn't thrown into the story with a couple of "Yanks" dropping by for a visit at Hogwarts, even just as a tourist.
One potential story line involving the "Harry Potter universe" that would have been incredibly interesting along this line would be to see what happened during World War II, where at the start it would have been something mainly of interest to just the Muggle population, but eventually great battles happened between wizards who joined into the fight, with huge battles taking place over the English Channel or even the North Atlantic. Imagine a story about the Battle of the Bulge and how the 101st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army was defended by another group of wizarding folks from the USA and Brittan against the wizards from Germany, with their battle demonstrating that this was something much more significant in world history.
Many other ideas could also come up, but it should also be pointed out that JK also wanted to stay out of the current political battles and instead just stick with the "Wizarding World".
No, this isn't made up. This is the original source of the "three worlds" concept.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world
Keep in mind here that when this was originally written about (back in the 1970's), the "order" of each world was not written to describe which "system" of government was better, worse, more advantageous economically, or anything else. In other words, this was an unordered list rather than an ordered list with no distinction about which "world" was necessarily better or worse than the other.
In fact, when this concept was originally put forward, many were citing the Soviet system as being much more desirable and something that should be emulated in the "West". Certainly the 1st and 2nd worlds were considered equal in stature, and the "3rd world" was considered the parts of the world left out of the Cold War struggle directly, but often became pawns in the struggle between these other two "worlds". Certainly during the Cold War era, travel between the main two worlds (aka Russia and the USA) was very much like travel between two completely different planets in terms of what was emphasized philosophically and the relationship between ordinary citizens and their governments.
That this concept is instead used as a tool politically to demonstrate how the rich are "obligated" to help the poor by confiscatory wealth policies or fermenting political revolutions is among many reasons why the whole idea of the "3 worlds" philosophy has gone way beyond what was the original intention: To describe anthropologically speaking different groups of people in broad terms.
There are a couple of full professors that I am aware of (and not like the Essjay affair) that are contributing to Wikibooks, and a few "class projects" where a professor has assigned grades based upon a student's participation in the creation of content for a particular joint project, but you are correct that many of the books do tend to be single author projects with only occasional extra contributions.
The atmosphere does tend to be much less charged than on Wikipedia, and a much longer view to just about everything also takes place... even to the discussions about deletion of content which can take months in some cases to resolve.
Still, in terms of establishing a very high quality annotated text on Wikibooks, there really isn't a prime example. There is a Wikibook about the Harry Potter books, but they have the added problems of dealing with content that is copyrighted. I've seen some attempts at trying to annotate the New Testament, but that is also fraught with all kinds of problems of its own due to the subject. Explicitly permitted by policy, there hasn't been a good treatment of any kind of classical book.
To let you know where I'm coming from in all of this, I'm a volunteer with Wikibooks, one of the sister projects to Wikipedia that is more involved with writing book-length content.
One of the problems we (as project participants) are currently facing is an overwhelming need to somehow index the content that is currently on the website. With over 26,000 pages of content currently, about the only way that you can find anything is to perform a google search. That has some value, but there are limits on even a Google search.
One of the sub-projects that I've been trying to work on over the past year or so is to try and organize the content into something perhaps some of the people visiting the website would be a little bit more familiar with: Card Catalog classification systems.
The best "source" of people who seem to have any skills in this area seems to be the Open Directory Project, but even then the number of people who have any real skills seems to be astonishingly low.
In trying to come up with a classification system of some kind to help organize the roughly 2000 e-book on Wikibooks, I've also been interviewing libraries and trying to find guides to classification that don't require paying expensive fees and can be used for new volunteers who want to help but aren't ready for a full-time job either. When I talk to professional librarians, what astounds me is not so much their confessions of a lack of knowledge about the topic, but the utter blank look on their faces when I try to explain the scope of what I'm doing. And it has so far proven to be far more complex than even what I thought it was going to be at the start.
Currently on Wikibooks, we are using a trio of the Dewey Decimal system, the LOC classification, and something "home grown" that we call bookshelves. Our catalog tends to be very tech-heavy in terms of the kinds of books we are dealing with (over 2 dozen books just about programming languages), but there is also some strength in linguistics as well. Some very surprising books have been written about learning some languages that would normally be considered obscure, and much better written than say a book about German. On the LOC top level, however, we have books in every classification letter except military and naval science, so there is some breadth to the topics covered as well.
As this is a volunteer effort, we have to use ressources available that are free (as in beer) to perform this effort. Even on this limited library of books, I have already come across severe limits to what we can do in terms of further refining some of the categories, as guidelines like the Dewey top 1000 topical summaries are already breaking down.
A project such as this open library project, dedicated to this kind of effort, is noble and something worthwhile but I also see some real practical problems once they move beyond just a few dozen books. It will be interesting to see how they solve some of those problems.... if they solve them at all. And this group seems to be operating in a bit of a vacuum here in terms of trying to reach out to other projects that may be doing the same sort of thing. That is always concerning when you think about supporting a crazy new project idea like this when it doesn't appear as though they have done their "homework".
OK, so you are talking about annotated texts. Wikisource has a number of those, as does Wikibooks (much better done on Wikisource IMHO).
:)
Annotated texts are exactly as you are describing them: They take an older work (say the '''Holy Bible''' to give a strong example of something very commonly footnoted and annotated) and add additional details including glossaries, alternative text, historical information from other sources, and speculative commentary about specific wording.
Another kind of very typical "book" that is annotated, and serves humanity much more powerfully than the original "source", are annotated legal codes. Aka the laws of countries, states, and municipalities. Often these get so intense on the annotations that even the annotations themselves are annoatated with subsequent commentary.
Writing these kind of books is not easy to accomplish, and it takes somebody who is an "expert" on the subject and has done additional research well above and beyond the mere words of the book itself. Most of these annotated books are commercially sold if they have any value at all, but free content books of this nature do exist already... at least in limited forms. Again, if you want to get into this kind of activity on something like say the books of Samuel Clemens (or any other author), there are forums for you to help out.
BTW, I would love an annotated copy of the Linux Kernel. At least something from one of the stable branches. What I'm talking about is something very extensive in terms of internal documentation explaining the various variables used and the explicit coding techniques and philosophies for how everything was put together. Ordinary comments simply wouldn't work in a situation like that, and it would have some very real value to the larger community. So yes, I can even see value for something like this beyond even classical literature (unless you consider the Linux Kernel to be classical literature
If you have ever read a "Featured Article" quality Wikipedia entry, they will almost always have very extensive bibliographies, footnotes, and links to original source documents, so this statement that you are looking for this seems like you are missing something essential here.
Or that you are looking at older books that don't have bibliographies and dismissing them.... when in fact they are the original source documents you claim to be craving here.
If I am reading this correctly, you are looking for people who mark up the Gutenberg Project files to something that isn't just plain ASCII? Check out these website:
I'm sure I could find other websites to do this, but it isn't exactly a brand new idea, and there are groups of people who do agree with you that plain ASCII sucks and needs to be fixed in terms of something more visually appealing. If you want to participate with either of these groups in terms of making it easier to read some of these clasical documents, volunteers are always wanted.
Here is some additional food for thought about this idea.... coming from somebody who has only given this concept just a few minutes of thought, but having dealt with this issue extensively in the past (of trying to catalog e-books):
The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that. And developing these skills is not something very easy to accomplish either. Certainly some basic tools can be developed that would make it a bit easier to climb up the steep slope of learning various cataloging techniques and understanding ontology as a discipline, but it is unusual. Most professional librarians that I have met (I'm talking people who actually work in real libraries) may have taken a college class or two about the subject, but even they seldom get into this sort of activity.
Here is the main point about this discussion, and why this is a much harder task than is apparent: Almost all cataloging work in the USA (and the rest of the world too, BTW) is done by the national libraries (aka Library of Congress) and the thousands of other libraries largely rely upon that cataloging effort to come up with their own numbering scheme. Especially with the "cataloging in publication" process where the process of formal copyright registration assigns cataloging numbers happens well before the book even arrives at a typical local or even university library.
At even a large library, those involved in the cataloging of content are usually a small team or even a single individual who has to catalog the couple dozen books that come in each year that aren't from major book publishers (often local histories that are self-published). Even then, it is hardly a full-time job and library staff like this usually have many other job duties.
How this relates to eBooks and content on the internet is that there are many electronic resources in book-like form that are largely uncataloged. I would put it at close to 100,000 books, perhaps even more that are original "books" that have been written in the past 20 years, and are available under a free (as in beer and freedom) copyright license. The "low-hanging fruit" is the Project Gutenberg collection, but much of that surprisingly has already been cataloged in more than one form. This is because they are older books and have been cataloged years ago. While there certainly is value in preserving older documents like the PG collection, there is so much more, and in many ways more relevant explicitly because it is up to date.
BTW, in response about the cataloging numbers, you can't simply assign a book to a single cataloging ID and expect it to work in every situation (without something incredibly complicated). Every classification system; ISBN, Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal, and about a dozen other classification systems; each have their own strengths and weaknesses. And different strengths and weaknesses. If a book has any value, it covers a very unique topic that is one of a kind, and it is these books which are the ones that you need to have a clean cataloging system that is able to allow you to "place" the book in a format that there are multiple methods for being able to find that content. For the hundreds of books about how to write HTML (to pick a topic that is common) they are largely the same... but my experience in trying to deal with book cataloging is that something so common like this is a rare situation, and at least 50% of all books in an e-book library are going to be something completely unique in terms of the topic covered. In short, you need the dozens of cataloging ID numbers for each book and not just a single cataloging ID number that is cross-referenced into a much larger and more complex database.
You missed the reference. The parent was referring to http://www.wikisource.org/, one of the Wikipedia sister projects that works with original source materials.... and yes, actual books.
Often criticized as a duplication of Project Gutenberg, it does have some unique documents that you can't find elsewhere, and is *much easier* to add new documents to this project than say PG or other free text websites. I like Distributed Proofreader's approach to text quality quite a bit, but this is an alternative.
I am convinced that Armageddon and the Apocalypse are going to become self-fulfilling prophecies by modern Christians, who are hell-bent to see that the "right side" is going to win them. Eventually.
Or more to the point about what you are saying here, history tends to repeat itself, sometimes on an especially grand scale.
As a practicing Christian, I find this to be a horrifying thought and something which my co-religionists are doing which is less than worthy of the title "Christian". Armageddon doesn't have to happen, and many of the reasons why it may eventually occur are planted seeds by so-called Chritians who ignore their fundimental philosophical leader (aka Jesus)..... just as many of today's problems are happening in the Middle East because those of Islamic faith are ignoring the basic teachings of Mohammed.
Of course this thread is getting very off topic for talking about Japanese websites in elections when I bring up Al-Queida and Mohammed.