Maxwell Fuller

“ A chandelier sends light in every direction, light of all colors and intensities. No matter where you stand, there are sparkles, some of which are aimed at you, and you alone, some of which are also seen by others: yet, there is no spot of darkness, neither are there spots of overwhelming intensity, as one might expect a sparkling source of lights to give off. Instead, the area is an evenly lit paradise, with direct and indirect light for all, and at least a few sparkles for everyone, some of which arrive, pass and stand still as we watch. ”

“ Hart was the first "normal" person to have this access to the Internet, a first non-computer-professional for social responsibility; "We should provide information to all persons, without delay. . .simply because WE CAN!" Just like climbing Mount Everest or going into space, and this is so much cheaper and less dangerous. ”

“ So far, the history of humankind has been a history of an ideal of monopoly: one tribe gets the lever, or a wheel, or copper, iron or steel, and uses it to command, control or otherwise lord it over another tribe. When there is a big surplus, trade routes begin to open up, civilizations begin to expand, and good times are had by all. ”

“ The goal of giving 10,000 books to everyone on Earth, which we at Project Gutenberg have been trying to do, virtually since the start of the Internet, is in huge danger of becoming just another tool for those we are becoming enslaved by on the Internet, and these books might never get into the high schools: much less the middle schools and grade schools because the Trillion dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall of every Congress of the United States isn't meant to educate, it is meant for something else. ”

“ The point is that can our copyright laws support the withholding of 1,000 books for 1 that is actually available. . .we don't make our driving laws for the 1 out of 1,000 that could be race car drivers, that would be one of the silliest laws on record. We have to make our laws so the law applies well to everyone, not just to make the rich richer— or in this case the Information Rich richer.
Much of this new effort not to let anything out of copyright was made by the music industry, which just had the best year of all, ever, shipping over a billion CD's, tapes, records and videos. ”

“ History is full of examples of those in position of an older variety of power using their power to deny, defy and otherwise stultify anything new, and therefore out of their own immediate forms of control. ”

“ Hart had a vision in 1971 that the greatest purpose a computer network would ever provide would be the storage, transmission, and copying of the library of information a whole planet of human beings would generate. ”

“ People will tell you "No one can own the Internet!"— but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not "Own the Internet" any more than owning my own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies, and your "rights" to the Information Superhighway are being sold with them. ”

“ If you understand that civilization was based on the new invention called "the plow," which changed the habits of "hunting and gathering" peoples into civilized cities... then you might be able to understand the the changes the computer and computer networks are making to those using them instead of the primitive hunting and gathering jobs we used to spend 90% of our time on.
In mid-19th Century the United States was over 90% in an agrarian economy, spending nearly all of its efforts for raising food to feed an empty belly. ”

“ They don't want other people to have it easier than they did. "If I did it with the hard ways and tools of the past, then YOU would threaten me if you use some easier ways and tools the present has to offer, and I don't want to learn the new tools, since I have invested my whole life to the mastery of the old tools." I have literally met very highly placed souls in the system of higher education who have told me they will quit the system on the day they have to use email because it removes the control they used to have over physical meetings, phone calls and the paper mails. ”

“ Will it be the Internet Aristocrats...
or an Internet Everyman?
The difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar who teaches as well and as many as possible. We SAY our people should have and must have universal education yet with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can obvious that we have anything BUT a widest universalness of primary and secondary education program in mind. Not to leave out college education, which has been known for the graduation of people who were totally illiterate. ”

“ Throwing billions of Etexts out there into cyberspace can not guarantee anyone will actually learn to read any more than throwing a billion basketballs out there should be a guarantee that there will be another Michael Jordan: nor will it guarantee a new Einstein, Edison, Shakespeare, or any other great person. ”

“ Power over other human being is the third kind of power— described above in the Seven Deadly Sins, a third raters' kind of power. Those who cannot control anything else... must, by definition, have others control things for them. If they don't want to depend on the voluntary cooperation of others, then they must find some way to control them.
We are now seeing the efforts by those who couldn't BUILD the Internet to control it, and the 40 million people who are on it ”

“ Why, with all this success, they want to keep copyrights on 1920 items that are 99% out of print. . .is a question worth asking— the answer is the copyright has always been extended when books, or other forms of information, have become too plentiful; we SAY we want everyone to be well read and well informed, and then the law makes it more difficult. Just look as what has happened for literacy in the United States during the period that a copyright law demanded that nothing become Public Domain coming up to 1975 . ”

“ It is just too obvious if a big wig is not answering your email, since email programs can actually tell you the second it was delivered and also the second the person "opened" it.
This is why SOME people fear the new Internet: other people fear it NOT because they lose the kind of lord position that comes with OWNERSHIP; rather they fear, in a similar manner, they will lose the CONTROL which they have used to achieve their position of lordship, such as one kind of professor mentioned below. ”

“ The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa" to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer."
Don't forget the "SneakerNet" is part of the Internet and let's you get information to or from those who do not have direct Internet connections. SneakerNet was a term developed to describe the concept of sending a file to someone nearby the person you wanted, and the person would then put on his/her sneakers and run the disk down the street for you. ”

“ For the first time in ALL history, we have the chance to ensure that every person can put huge amounts of "Public Domain" and other information into computers that should be as inexpensive as calculators in a few more years. ”

“ Light from the outside isn't allowed in, for with it could come the spears and arrows of life and the purpose of the castle was to keep the noble life in, and all other forms of life out. Thus the nobility would continue a program of inbreeding which would inevitably be outclassed by an entirely random reflexion of the world's gene pool. ”

“ After all, it has been over 25 years since the Internet began as government funded projects among our universities, and only 24 years since the Declaration was posted, followed by the Bill of Rights, Constitution, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.
Why do more people get their electronic books from others than these institutions when they spend a TRILLION DOLLAR BUDGET EVERY YEAR pretending their goal is some universal form of education. ”

“ Outfitting a kid with a decade old computer costs no more than outfitting that kid with basketball shows, much less a basketball and a hoop, and the kid doesn't outgrow that computer every year or wear it out, and regulation height of the monitor doesn't change and make all the older ones obsolete just due to some rule change. ”

“ Unless someone believes that good judgement, an informed population, and their effects are their enemies, it is a difficult stretch to understand why certain institutions and people want to limit this flow of information. ”

“ Whole rainforests of trees can be saved, not to mention the billions of hours of an entire population's educated scribbling that should have been spent between the ears instead of between paper and hand, cramping the thought and style of generations upon generations of those of us without photographic memories to take the place of the written word. ”

“ Television, on the other hand, natters on into the night, long after you have fallen asleep.
Education has all the advantages in competition with ball games and video games, not only those listed above, but a whole world insists on education, forces edcuation, which just might have caused some of the problem. ”

“ When car makers have really good years, or really bad ones for that matter, they work very hard to attract customers, with new innovations, more car for the money, financing on better terms, or whatever, and when they have record years they give their workers huge bonuses, which I am sure most of you have heard about recently, and they also compete in an aggressive manner to keep sales up.
Copyright and patents are what allow people NOT to compete in the marketplace, as least for the first decade or two a new item is in the marketplace. ”

“ If their field were open to light from the outside, then the new field would be part of their field, but by walling up the space around themselves, a once new and shining group of enterprising revolutionaries could only condemn themselves to awaiting the ravages of time, tarnish and ignorance as they become ignorant of the outside world while the outside world becomes ignorant of them. ”

“ The response to this success, a few weeks ago, was for the music industry to propose, not a rebate to their customers but just the opposite, an additional 20 years during which the music industry could have a continued monopoly on that music, and. . .purely incidentally. . .this monopoly would also be extended to books, television, movies, video games and everything else that could be copyrighted. ”

“ When school ratings go down, the ratings are changed; the show remains essentially the same, and it is often a best teacher award winner who gets cancelled while more boring teachers go on year after year to bore the children of an assortment of former students.
The Preservation of Errors
With the advent of electronic text there is no longer any reason but the Seven Deadly Sins [enumerated above] for a person not to share information. . .except. . .some value added work to make the texts better than what passed into their hands from previous editions. ”

“ Those computers are more than fast enough for the kind of studying most kids do in school, and they cost no more on today's market than a pair of basketball shoes.
Why is the centuries old blackboard still the default for classrooms around the world, when they cost much more and do much less than computers one tenth their age? ”

“ Power over oneself is the first kind of power...if you do not control yourself, you will find difficulty in control of anything.
Power over the environment is the second kind of power... if you do not control food, clothing and shelter, you are going to have a hard time controlling anything else. ”

“ Right now there are 40-50 million people on the Internet— and if someone could figure out how to make them all pay a $20-$25 fee. . .that would be $100 million a month or over a billion dollars a year. ”

“ I have said for years that by the time computers get as far into the future as they have come from the past, that we will be able to hold all of the Library of Congress in one hand, but I added, "They probably won't let us do it." ”

“ There are approximately 400 million computers today, with the traditional 1% of them being on the Internet, and the traditional ratio of about 10 users per Internet node has continued, too, as there are about 40 million people on a vast series of Internet gateways. ”

“ We are already aware that most of our great innovations are made from leaps from field to field, that the great thinkers apply an item here in this field which was gleaned from that field: thus are created the leaps which create new fields which widen fields of human endeavor in general. ”

“ Think of it this way, if it takes only 10% as long to do the work to write a research paper, we are likely to get either 10 times as many research papers, or papers which are 10 times as good, or some combination...just like we ended up with 10 times as much food for the body when we turned from hunting and gathering food to agriculture at the beginnings of civilization...then we would excpect a similar transition to a civilization of the future.
***
If mankind is defined as the animal who thinks; thinking more and better increases the degree to which we are the human species. ”

“ Today there are about 500 volunteers at Project Gutenberg and they are spread all over the globe, from people doing their favorite book then never being heard from again, to PhD's, department heads, vice-presidents, and lawyers who do reams of copyright research, and some who have done in excess of 20 Etexts pretty much by themselves ”