Reading is knowledge
- Thread starter Mac Jesus
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@jay wet
What is the best translation of The Art of War by Tzu? In your own opinion. Thanks!
@MR. TYPCEE
J
@jay wet
What is the best translation of The Art of War by Tzu? In your own opinion. Thanks!
Roger T. Ames
Samuel Griffith
Cai Zhi-Zhong (translated to English by Bryan Bruya)
I'd stick to these.
Most recently finished this series. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, it's supposed to be scary but I found it eery - especially the character of Frankenstein's first creation. Dean Koontz perspective from him was mind opening to say the least.
I also read the Halo series this year which is Fall Of Reach, The Flood, First Strike, Ghosts Of Onyx, Contact Harvest, and Cole Protocol. Some were better than others, but I'd have to recommend Ghosts Of Onyx if I had to choose one. Great book, and Eric Nylund is the best writer for Halo imo.
Those are some really good books..
I'll also say this tho, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx were pretty good reads to boot.
As a libertarian/capitalist with an open mind I found Marx to be rather interesting because I viewed his ideas as nothing more than theory - I never viewed him as advocating socialism or championing the economic model but rather offering an alternative.
Then again books can be dangerous and shape the minds of madmen, I suppose Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and even Kim Jong ill/Kim Il-Sung were inspired by books..
I suppose it relies on the individual and how that individual could handle such radical ideas.
I've always had an interest in history, but history has always been shaped by books.
So when you look at it from that perspective, it kind of gives you a an insight as tho what is evil - the individual or the book that brainwashed the sadistic dictator?
I'll also say this tho, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx were pretty good reads to boot.
As a libertarian/capitalist with an open mind I found Marx to be rather interesting because I viewed his ideas as nothing more than theory - I never viewed him as advocating socialism or championing the economic model but rather offering an alternative.
Then again books can be dangerous and shape the minds of madmen, I suppose Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and even Kim Jong ill/Kim Il-Sung were inspired by books..
I suppose it relies on the individual and how that individual could handle such radical ideas.
I've always had an interest in history, but history has always been shaped by books.
So when you look at it from that perspective, it kind of gives you a an insight as tho what is evil - the individual or the book that brainwashed the sadistic dictator?
Cool, perspective. I'd argue that books alone did not influence the lives of those people you mentioned. Social interactions, economic status, culture, etc. probably all played a huge role in shaping their identities.
From an archaeologists viewpoint, history has not always been shaped by books. Writing/printing press has only been around for a short time in the grand scheme of things. Unless you mean in the prehistory/history divide of things, which is purely a way to classify shit. There was certainly history before the written word and it's been etched on the landscape.
The Burning of Library.nu
The Burning of Library.nu | Knowledge Utopia
Nearly two years ago, on February 2012, one of the largest library on Earth burned, and no mainstream media, no politician denounced it. The reason for this silence is that the library was “illegal” and that it wasn’t a physical one.
Library.nu was by far the biggest public library on the internet, with a catalogue of about 400,000 to 1,000,000 books. And, as Christopher Kelty, whom I’ll quote extensively in this essay, said, it contained “not just any books – not romance novels or the latest best-sellers – but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. The texts ranges from so-called “orphan works” (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarquable effort of collective connoisseurship.”
Library.nu was indeed an academic library, the kind of one you would expect universities and research institutes to have. But the library closed. It vanished from the internet. It was, to use the physical library metaphor, as if one morning on your way to the library, you found that the entire building had disappeared. Where the library used to be, you’d find a single book on the ground, Blue Latitudes (before shutting down for good and displaying an Error 404 page, Library.nu redirected to the Amazon page of this book).
Library.nu was shut down along with its cyber file locker, ifile.it, by the injunction of a German Judge, at the request of seventeen scholarly publishers. The magnitude of this disaster is difficult to grasp.
While the library of Alexandria probably had hundreds of thousands of scrolls (the objective of Ptolemy II was to reach half a million), there were multiple scrolls for each work, and many duplicates; thus the number of individual works is unlikely to have been as high as 100,000 – between a tenth and a quarter of the number of titles library.nu made available.
Despite this mind boggling estimate, no one seemed to care about the end of Library.nu. Torrent Freak, the Huffington Post and Christopher Kelty’s op-ed on Aljazeera English’s website were roughly the only news coverage the event had. Why? Because the website offered all these works for free. It was indeed a copyright infringing site, like The Pirate Bay but for scholars. And scholarly publishers didn’t like the fact that researchers could access publications for free instead of paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars from their own pocket or from the institutions they were affiliated with (if they had the chance to be affiliated with an institution). Publishers went at war with the site. They sent cease and desist letters which had little impact. So they hired a law firm, Lausen Rechtsanwälte, to try to find who was in charge of Library.nu to sue him and take his website down.
The law firm, which also provides “lobbying services” (they try to screw you by defending big corporations’ interests at the European Commission), estimated the revenue of Library.nu and ifile.it : “The operators made an estimated annual turnover of €8 million ($10,602,400US) from advertising buys on the sites, donations and sales of premium-level accounts, making it one of the most significant piracy websites in the world.” It’s hard to say how Lausen Rechtsanwälte came up with this ludicrous figure, but their estimate is probably totally false. Let me explain why.
Library.nu had virtually no ad or very few, and its traffic was estimated to be at about 30,000 visitors per month, thus any advertising revenue must have been quite small. Remember this site is distributing academic publications, not porn and movies like The Pirate Bay for example. Free science books won’t drive as much traffic as free movies… Donations were also coming in small quantities (Library.nu wasn’t Wikipedia), the website just had a “donate” button and wasn’t actively seeking donations. The premium accounts were of course a source of revenue, but there were little of them. Finally, Lausen Rechtsanwälte didn’t take into account the costs of running such big websites (because, you know, 400,000 – 1,000,000 books? That’s quite a lot of technical costs). But the publishers needed something big, to make them look like victims, so they made this estimation up. And to put that in perspective, Elsevier, one of the seventeen publishing houses which sued Library.nu, made a €6,902 million (that’s nearly $9,5 billion) turnover in 2011 (the year Library.nu was at its apogee, and less than a year before it closed), up 2% from 2010 – it doesn’t look like Library.nu was damaging their business.
Then the law firm tried to find a way to identify the “operators” of the website. How did they succeed? The guy behind Library.nu made a terrible mistake while setting up the donation service. First, he used Paypal, which is not a good idea when you want anonymity. When you made a donation, the receipt you received from Paypal clearly mentioned the name of the man who owned Library.nu. And when the investigators looked at which bank account the money from the donations was going, it turned out to be either his bank account or one with his name attached to it.
If Bitcoins had been used, maybe Library.nu would still be up and running because of the total anonymity it allows (or at least it would have helped the website stay online a little longer – Law Enforcement Officials would have needed to use other ways to find who owned Library.nu). ifile.it and Library.nu were allegedly owned by the same person, an Irish twenty-something from Galway with a degree in IT which, to not cause him any harm, I’ll call Jack.
John Mooney reported that Jack’s venture “showed meagre profits until 2010, when it recorded income of more than €92,000″. So though the revenues of Library.nu aren’t well known, we know for sure that Jack didn’t become a billionaire with his website. (if he wanted to become one, he should have tried to get an MBA and a great job at Elsevier).
And that’s how Lausen Rechtsanwälte was able to close Library.nu. They discovered who owned it, so they were able to use the judiciary system to pressure the guy to stop his activities. Threatened with a massive fine, Jack, understandably, preferred to close the website rather than go to prison.
Props:
Mac Jesus and Mac Jesus