[gweekly] PT1a Weekly Project Gutenberg Newsletter
Michael Hart
hart at pglaf.org
Wed Nov 30 09:51:07 PST 2005
Weekly_November_30.txt
*The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter For Wednesday, November 30, 2005 PT1*
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
[Search for "*eBook" or "*Intro". . .to jump to that section, etc.]
*eBook Milestones
*Introduction
*Hot Requests, New Sites and Announcements
*Continuing Requests and Announcements
*Progress Report
*Distributed Proofreaders Collection Report
*Project Gutenberg Consortia Center Report
*Permanent Requests For Assistance:
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*Have We Given Away A Trillion Yet?
*Flashback
*Weekly eBook update:
This is now in PT2 of the Weekly Newsletter
Also collected in the Monthly Newsletter
Corrections in separate section
1 New From PG Australia [Australian, Canadian Copyright Etc.]
48 New Public Domain eBooks Under US Copyright
*Headline News from Edupage, etc.
*Information About the Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists
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*eBook Milestones*
***512 eBooks Averaged Per Year Since July 4, 1971***
17,653 eBooks As Of Today!!!
[Includes Australian eBooks]
We Are ~88% of the Way to 20,000!!!
14,591 New eBooks Since The Start Of 2001
That's ~250 eBooks per Month for ~56 Months
We Have Produced 2697 eBooks in 2005!!!
2,347 to go to 20,000!!!
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Since October, 2000 [Details in PT1B]
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This Site Is Averaging ~57 eBooks Per Week This Year
49 This Week
It took ~32 years, from 1971 to 2003 to do our 1st 10,000 eBooks
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It took ~10 years from 1993 to 2003 to grow from 100 eBooks to 10,100
It took ~2.00 years from Oct. 2003 to Nov. 2005 from 10,000 to 17,500
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***Introduction
[The Newsletter is now being sent in two sections, so you can directly
go to the portions you find most interesting: 1. Founder's Comments,
News, Notes & Queries, and 2. Weekly eBook Update Listing. Note bene
that PT1 is now being sent as PT1A and PT1B.
[Since we are between Newsletter editors, these 2 parts may undergo a
few changes while we are finding a new Newsletter editor. Email us:
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This is Michael Hart's "Founder's Comments" section of the Newsletter
*Headline News from Edupage
[PG Editor's Comments In Brackets]
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS BACKS WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY
The U.S. Library of Congress has launched an effort to create a vast
digital collection of artifacts representing the cultures of the world.
Librarian of Congress James Billington said the World Digital Library
would be "a documentary record of other great cultures of the world,"
dealing "with the culture of those people rather than with our contacts
as Americans with those cultures." The new initiative will use as
models the American Memory Project, which has digitized more than 10
million items representing "Americana," and the Global Gateway, a joint
project with five national libraries in Europe and Brazil that
highlights connections between those cultures and that of the United
States. Initial funding for the World Digital Library will come from
Google, which has pledged $3 million for the effort. Billington said he
hopes to attract other private funding for the project.
MSNBC, 22 November 2005
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10147556/
ICANN TO CONSIDER SINGLE-LETTER WEB ADDRESSES
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has
agreed to consider single-letter addresses such as a.com in response to
company requests. (Six companies with single-letter names were allowed
to keep their names when the existing system was established.) In
deciding whether to accept single-letter names, ICANN will also have to
determine how to sell the names and whether companies will have to seek
individual entries across all suffixes. Domain name brokers and others
expect intense demand for the names because of their rarity. There are
no plans to consider two-letter names because of possible confusion
with two-letter country code suffixes.
Yahoo, 28 November 2005
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051128/ap_on_hi_te/single_letter_domains
DUTCH COMPANY DUMPS COMMON TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN NAMES
Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot S&M BV has created an Internet addressing
system that eliminates top-level domains such as .com and .edu,
allowing organizations and individuals to register Internet addresses
ending with the name of their businesses or other words. The new system
can combine top-level domains with second-level domains for what the
company calls more intuitive addresses for different categories of
products and services, such as vegetables.supermarket. UnifiedRoot has
established 13 master root servers worldwide to run its domain name
system. To avoid conflicts, the company said, it will not register
top-level domain names already registered by the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Existing Internet service
providers will have to update their server directories to accommodate
the new system names.
ComputerWorld, 28 November 2005
http://www.computerworld.com/news/2005/story/0,11280,106559,00.html
U.S. SUPREME COURT TO HEAR E-BAY PATENT CASE
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a patent-infringement lawsuit
involving eBay and a patent holding company that eBay lost in 2003.
MercExchange holds a patent over sales and purchasing methods used in
online auctions. The appeal deals with whether the U.S. District Court
that handled the case should have issued a permanent injunction against
eBay. The Federal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles patent
lawsuits on appeal, ruled that the federal trial judge should have
issued a permanent injunction against eBay, which said they believe the
legal reasoning used will force district courts to issue more injunctions
in patent lawsuits. Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation that
would change how patent injunctions are issued by federal courts.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is also exploring the issue.
Wall Street Journal, 28 November 2005 (sub. req'd)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113319064690608067.html
BBC2 TO BROADCAST VIA BROADBAND
Controller Roly Keating intends to make BBC2 the first mainstream TV
station to broadcast via broadband. A broadband service pilot is
scheduled for 2006 to run concurrently with further trials of
MyBBCPlayer technology, which enables viewers to download and watch BBC
content on demand. The broadband version of BBC2 reportedly will
combine streamed media and downloads.
Silicon.com, 25 November 2005
http://networks.silicon.com/broadband/0,39024661,39154583,00.htm
MPAA AND BITTORRENT MAKE NICE
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the creator of
BitTorrent technology have announced an agreement that will keep many
BitTorrent users from finding copyrighted movie files with the
technology. In May, Bram Cohen added a service to his site,
BitTorrent.com, that allowed users to search the Web for file downloads
that use the popular technology. Under the new agreement, Cohen will
remove copyrighted content from search results on his site. Although
his technology has become a favorite for many traders in copyrighted
material, Cohen does not offer services targeted at such users and has
previously discouraged using the technology for illegal file trading.
The entertainment industry has not targeted Cohen for prosecution for
copyright violations, but a number of individual BitTorrent users have
been sued for such violations. Despite the agreement, however, several
other sites that search the Web for BitTorrent downloads remain
operational.
CNET, 22 November 2005
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5967750.html
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News from other sources:
Music On A Stick
The first album is now available for purchase on a RAM stick.
$30 will buy you an entire CD of music, plus some holiday tunes,
video, and other DVDish inclusions on a 128M RAM stick. [If you
want only a 128M RAM stick, I just bought one at Fry's for $9.]
Source:
MICHELLE MEGNA and JIM FARBER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
*DOUBLESPEAK OF THE WEEK
"Plan B"
"Thanks to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office
released this fall, we now know that the FDA's decision went against
the advice of doctors and scientific experts. In fact, the decision was
made by top FDA officials even before the scientific review was complete."
Source: Lansing State Journal
This one is a little strange:
Berenstain Bears author Stan Berenstain died at 82,
which was reported in depth on the public networks,
Canadian Networks, and even in Italy, but I cannot
find reports from CBS, NBC, or ABC.
I wonder if there is some new bias on both sides,
due to the fact there was a public broadcasting
version of the Berenstain Bears.
[The New York Times seems to have given the Bears
some grief on this occasion for not being very
politically correct. Of course, you might want
to take into account that the Berenstain Bears
started long before Policially Correct was in
our Newspeak Dictionaries.]
*PREDICTIONS OF THE WEEK
Global Warming will continue to wreak havoc the polar caps,
creating more record hurricanes, etc.
*STRANGE QUOTES OF THE WEEK
"If junk food is banned by the government," in schools,
then why shouldn't we be able to ban military recruiters?"
"Politics demands we have access to those oil fields."
[Sorry, I must have written these down wrong, as I
haven't been able to find them in my online searches.]
*ODD STATISTICS OF THE WEEK
The hurricane season is finally ending, but not without new
tropical storms appearing. The grand total appears as if a
new record has been set at 26 named storms requiring letter
names from the Greek alphabet for the first time, and going
again into the record books with the most powerful storm of
all recorded weather. The storms also struck a wider range
geographically than ever before, in over 20 nations. Three
category 5 hurricanes were included, yet another record.
Katrina, Rita and Wilma each made the Top 5 of all time and
clocked winds over 175 miles per hour.
[So much for there being no evidence for Global Warming.]
***
Still hoping for more statistical updates and additional entries.
"If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely
100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same,
it would look something like the following. There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both North and South America
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth
and all 6 would be from the United States
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer [I think this is now much greater]
1 would be 79 years old or more.
Of those born today, the life expectancy is only 63 years,
but no country any longer issues copyrights that are sure
to expire within that 63 year period.
I would like to bring some of these figures more up to date,
as obviously if only 1% of 6 billion people owned a computer
then there would be only 60 million people in the world who
owned a computer, yet we hear that 3/4 + of the United States
households have computers, out of over 100 million households.
Thus obviously that is over 1% of the world population, just in
the United States.
I just called our local reference librarian and got the number
of US households from the 2004-5 U.S. Statistical Abstract at:
111,278,000 as per data from 2003 U.S Census Bureau reports.
If we presume the saturation level of U.S. computer households
is now around 6/7, or 86%, that is a total of 95.4 million,
and that's counting just one computer per household, and not
counting households with more than one, schools, businesses, etc.
I also found some figures that might challenge the literacy rate
given above, and would like some help researching these and other
such figures, if anyone is interested.
BTW, while I was doing this research, I came across a statistic
that said only 10% of the world's population is 60+ years old.
This means that basically 90% of the world's population would
never benefit from Social Security, even if the wealthy nations
offered it to them free of charge. Then I realized that the US
population has the same kind of age disparity, in which the rich
live so much longer than the poor, the whites live so much longer
than the non-whites. Thus Social Security is paid by all, but is
distributed more to the upper class whites, not just because they
can receive more per year, but because they will live more years
to receive Social Security. The average poor non-white may never
receive a dime of Social Security, no matter how much they pay in.
*
POEM OF THE WEEK
dawn
we grow in the direction of the zenith
with sunrise rays revealing naked land
my skin is yours in the morning embrace
like pearly treasures buried in the sand
the skies are wide your eyes the deepest blue
transcend the mortal needs we feel today
we look and see above the highest clouds
the precious, secret dreams we've kept at bay
enjoy today, your fingers say to me
there's no return to yesterdays, you know
and only us will gather where we've been
and where to our hearts will want to go
we grow in the direction of the zenith
sometimes my moans embracing in a rhyme
you are in me, I have the richest heart
these sunrise rays abounding in your smile
don't rush as time awaits for lovers still
they live they die they are reborn again
in just a second as it takes the sun
to find the places where our hearts have been
rejoice! The moment welcomes you and me
into a land of pure reality; the fantasy belongs
to past attempts to get to where we are and what
we feel. A thousand years pass, I'll love you still.
Copyright 2005 by Simona Sumanaru and Michael S. Hart
Please send comments to: simona_s75 AT yahoo.com & hart AT pobox.com
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