Word of the Day!

I started collecting these decades ago. Amazing how apt many are and from people who have been dead decades, if not centuries.

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Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. -Frank Wilhoit

They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery. -They Live (movie), 1989

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. -- Ray Bradbury

The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. -- Robert G. Ingersoll

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty. -- Decimus Junius Juvenalis

Many more under the cut...
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This is a really great thing! The ACM is one of the premier organizations for computer science, and for them to open up their publication library to open access is an incredibly huge deal.

In their statement released in mid-December, they announced:
We are pleased to share an important milestone for our field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, more discoverable, and more reusable.

By transitioning to open access, ACM is supporting a publishing environment where:

Authors retain the intellectual property to their Work- All ACM authors retain the copyright to their published work while ACM remains committed to defending those Works against copyright and integrity related violations.
Published Work Will Benefit from Broader visibility and impact- Research will be freely available to anyone in the world, increasing readership, citations, and real-world application.
Students, educators, and researchers everywhere benefit- Whether at well-resourced institutions or in emerging research communities, everyone will have direct access to the full breadth of ACM-published work.
Innovation accelerates- Open access fosters collaboration, transparency, and cumulative progress, strengthening the advancement of computing as a discipline.

The world of research publication is tending towards increased lockdown and paywalls, plus corruption by AI slop. The ACM is fighting that by opening their doors and ensuring their authors maintain control of their IP. This is an incredibly cool thing!

There's a cool library tool that we use occasionally called Hathi Trust. They archive old material and they're a great reference place to find stuff. I was looking to borrow a book for one of our instructors, and Hathi had it online! You can download it! ONE PAGE AT A TIME. The book is 90 years old, in the public domain, and I can't find a free copy of it. So I literally started downloading it. One page at a time. I have the free time at work.

It costs $6,000 a year to become a member of Hathi. A YEAR. You have to be a pretty good-sized library to pay that, or have special needs to justify that outlay.

Fortunately my story has two happy endings. I was able to find a physical copy of the book, the United States Department of the Interior Library sent me a copy! But there's an even better ending. I was looking for something in our archive, sitting in the corner, pulling stuff down and buzzing through boxes. I happened to glance down and saw a three-ring binder in an area that I knew didn't contain what I was looking for. but the label on the binder caught my eye.

It was the same name as the book that the instructor had requested!

I pull the binder, and it was a facsimile of the book! So now I'll be able to scan the pages that I hadn't yet downloaded and assemble my own ebook! I had already assembled two sections of what I'd downloaded into ebooks: PDFs combined make HUGE ebooks!

Weirdest luck I've had in a long time. And no, it was not cataloged in our system.

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/168225/acm-to-make-its-entire-digital-library-open-access-starting-january-2026