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Paper Retracted After Anti-Immigrant Scientist Bans Use of His Software (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: An 11-year-old research paper describing Treefinder, a computer program used by evolutionary biologists, has been retracted after the program's developer banned its use in European countries he deemed too friendly to refugees. In September, German scientist Gangolf Jobb announced on his website that researchers in eight European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom, were no longer allowed to use Treefinder, which builds phylogenetic trees from sequence data. The move sparked outrage among some scientists, and now, BMC Evolutionary Biology has pulled the 2004 paper describing the software because the license change 'breaches the journal's editorial policy on software availability.'
There is no question. The publisher is reacting to the change in license as well they should. Regardless of the motivation the license change violates their policy. What's the point of having a policy and then not following it?
The most egregious yet prevalent error in modern news reporting, is to conflate someone being against ILLEGAL immigration with someone being against LEGAL immigration.
If you can't understand why someone who does not want people who are by definition criminals entering the country in large numbers, then heaven help you - because reality certainly will not and history just laughs at you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.
The only interesting question here is whether this would be a controversy if it were happening in reverse - if the author was denying it to countries who are not taking in refugees.
I agree with most of that, but I think you missed the most important point: why is key academic software not open source? I'm all for this guy's right to publish software under any license he chooses, but why would you embrace such software in the academic community? IMO, that's the lesson here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Some of those street corners can be very lucrative. A newspaper survey found an intersection in San Francisco that made $85 per hour.
I've heard the exact same things said about Mexican immigrants in the US, yet I had no specific problems with my neighbours, my classmates when I was in school, or classmates of my kids. I've also heard the same thing said about Panamanians when I was in Costa Rica for a while. And for people from Botswana when I was in South Africa.
All too often people are vague when referencing problems like this because they don't have more specific things to say. Or they do have specifics, but aren't comfortable with saying what the actual problem is because some part of them doesn't think it is wrong to be upset over that. Just saying things of the lines of, "spend some time with people X and you would know why they are a problem," backfires when some people have spent time and still don't have a problem.
So. Who decides who enters the country? The citizens or everyone else? And what do you do with immigrants that do not want to conform to the norms of the parent country?
It's not simply a matter of calling someone a neo-na%i f**ta7d
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond