Except that the British steadfastly maintained their lifestyle in the face of IRA attacks, including their historical liberties. And they ended up beating the IRA. Whereas in SE Asia, etc. they were inflexible and got their rear ends handed to them. Some would extend the correlation into causality, but i'm sure it was somewhat more complex than that. However, I am sure maintaining liberty helped.
One of the many things I find darkly funny is that all the right wingers are fine and dandy with singling out folks who look "arab" don't for a minute have cognizance of the fact that at least a third of Iran's population are blond-haired, blue-eyed caucasians. You know, state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. Yeah, that Iran. See, the Caucases mountains are nearby which is where the term comes from.
So Ann Coulter is fine with swarthy folk with dark curly hair getting the third degree constantly. I wonder if that would change if our prejudices were more completely targeted at blond-haired, blue-eyed folk like her. Because if this isn't about security theater, we ought to.
giant, slow, purple monster of a computer that is like 10 years old. It has the name Onyx on the front. i think it has like 1GB of vram.
I also have this 12-15 year-old beater of an Intergraph box. i think it has like 64MB of vram.
Just 'cause it's old doesn't mean it was or is lame.
That beater of an Onyx can still thrash your SLi.
And the Intergraph's video card was EISA or microchannel, i can't remember which.
But mostly i'm just pointing out corner cases because other repliers to the parent felt it necessary to trash old gear. remember, in 10 years today's gear will be bupkus.
80% of technical advancements in other fields in the last few decades since the advent of cheap computers are also attributable to computers. This is due mostly to their aid in the analytic, visualization, control automation, and training fields. This is just an extension the truism that holds math as the foundation upon which the other sciences are built. Have you noticed that the older and better CS departments originated in the math department? Princeton's CS department still maintains close ties to both the math department and the philosophy (for logic) department.
How did distance learning move out of the postal-mail-based correspondence class dark ages?
The subject of TFA is the CEO of SAS. His company's products are used everyday by people from many scientific and analytic disciplines, but all of them use SAS's tool on computers. My take on his dissatisfaction is to help drive schools to adopt computer training, simulation, and analysis rubrics for exploring a variety of subjects. I'm sure that deep in his heart he sees this as a natural path to kids exploring e.g. social studies by performing statistical analyses using his software. Sure beats the heck out of memorizing chief imports and exports written down by adults using the same software. Obviously, though one would need a variety of friendly, age appropriate, subject appropriate front ends and curricula to guide their use by students to help them have the epiphanies of insight that are learning.
This raises several questions: whether this is a good idea on its face; how to keep this from being just a cash cow for companies like SAS, rather than actually enhancing the learning experience; how to keep it vendor neutral; can this be picked up by a joint open source software / educational research community; etc.
Seriously, though. Science that rests on too many, too important, too questionable assumptions is pseudo-science. You're essentially reading tea leaves at that point. If you need data that aren't available, then perhaps a better contribution on your part to the community would be to publish your vacuum analysis for the topic you really want to investigate and your plan to address that vacuum. Then start filling the void by conducting the necessary experiments.
Scientific achievements are attained by standing on the shoulders of giants, not standing on a house of cards. If you have to, be your own giant (by conducting the experiments yourself) or gather the buy-in and support of your community to build up a metaphorical human pyramid to stand upon.
I'm currently working for a contract research company. Before that, I worked for Silicon Graphics. And I have industry and research experience before that. I intend to get through my graduate education and either stay where i'm at or go to a national lab. The last, though still acceptable, option to me is to play the professorial game. The reason I'd pursue it would be to teach, not to research. I've found a more satisfying work and emotional environment in application directed corporate and government research. And again, I find excellence to be a better tonic than game playing.
Another option, and the one I'm taking is to work after undergraduate and work whilst in graduate school. It just takes more effort. Of course it takes nowhere near as much effort as my one friend who took his BS and MS concurrently without omitting any cooperative education segments.
And I'd admitted I'll probably end up "playing the game", which incidentally has real world consequences for others, despite my misgivings. All along I've been expressing those misgivings in what I perceive to be the correct ethical context, which is to say one broad enough to capture the consequences for all participants, direct and indirect; willing and unwilling.
Hopefully just citizenship. While it's run by an individual it's constitutionally protected speech.
At some point in the muddied waters or tea leaves the government decides you're a business (say because you let an ad banner firm place ads on your site in order to defray the hosting cost, or say when you pass some number of daily readers, or say whatever, but definitely by the time you incorporate or get a business license.) This is an area the Internet has made difficult for the government and is another, broader issue entirely.
When that happens your company is categorized for a number of purposes, including taxes and business insurance. If you are a text/media content provider, then you are most likely some sort of publisher, which I think means for the FEC's purposes you are a media outlet, and thus in the same category as any other media outlet.
Besides which, the big boys selectively report and even endorse candidates. And given the economic pressure the newspapers are under, it won't be long before some of them have shrunk to the point that some former-individual-blog-turned-opinion-site (Drudge, anyone?) is bigger than them. Will there then be calls to strip that newspaper of their media credentials or FEC exemption?
Besides, many newspapers are divesting their printing press and contracting with a larger regional paper for printing. At what point is a paper no longer a paper?
Likewise, there are some individuals who have their own papers published (call them crackpots if you want, but remember that's how many of our more venerable papers started.)
How will you distinguish between "legitimate" media and the rest? Is it a worthy expenditure of government resources? Does it violate the rights of those determined not to be "press"?
The best solution is for the government to leave it alone and let the economy sort it out, which surprisingly enough is what the FEC chose to do. That's what we have a "free" market for, right? Oh, yeah it isn't free: it's mercantilism.
And until it isn't mercantilism we'll have people and companies calling for discrimination in order to protect larger businesses.
I'm not missing the fact that not all the best journals are among the most costly. I was omitting it to concentrate on developing my argument. However, since you bring it up, how long do you believe this will remain the case? I'll warrant that the profit driven publishers are aware of the situation and have their eyes on selectively adding more reputable journals to their stable. Will their costs remain low?
Obviously there have been some reverse trends, but where is the journal world trending on balance? Some of the better organizations are picking up on the bad habits of the worse.
Most of the change for the better has been initiated by individuals and small groups of academicians against great inertia, examples being Don Knuth and ArXiV. As described in one of the other responses to my original post, Don Knuth's new ACM journal hasn't been the most successful. The commenter seemed to think this justified the current state of affairs. And you admitted that ArXiV is held in low regard generally.
I was attempting to furnish the original discussion with Knuth's economic analysis which is cogent to the overall discussion and as an aside express my dissatisfaction with my university's dedication to spending any sum these publishers will charge in my name. It's annoying.
I'm sorry to have put words in your mouth, but nonetheless the generally accepted state of academia is such that it is stuck in a vicious cycle of:
1. As a grad student, I need to look good to my profs, so i must search through all available repositories, no matter their cost. 2. As a newly minted PhD, I need to gain reputation such that I can get a job, so this dictates which journals I try to publish in, no matter their cost-based inaccessibility to the public. 3. As a tenure aspirant, I need to maintain a bureaucratically assigned score of my impact in the field that is highly dependent on my publishing in costlier journals. 4. As a professor, I push students to search through all available repositories, no matter their cost, out of concern for their careers.
If we extrapolate this trend with public money funding universities, there is no end in sight. The publishers will claim some imaginary hardship or other to justify each year's super-inflationary price increase. the universities will claim that they are squeezed for cash. The departments will be inflexible, after all they and their students *must* have access to these journals at any cost. They're the best. The result is that the outrageous cost is passed on to the public at large with no real consideration given by academia that they might take their publishing business elsewhere and make a different publication "best."
I'm fortunate or persevering enough (take your pick or mix to suit) that obtaining a job is not something I am extremely nervous about. I have enough industry and government research experience and have done good enough work in those circles that I feel confident in my ability to get a job. I also find that excellence is a sufficient condition for obtaining employment. I also find that I would rather not work for a group that is so disinterested in their prospective coworkers that they cannot be bothered to read or pay attention to their work. And as to the 20 minute condensed history of work, I find that most research areas are sufficiently specialized that there is a large body of common knowledge and experience. If I cannot give a succinct overview of my contributions in relation to that, then I need to work on my communication skills. I am in a place where I can conceivably get by and make positive contributions to my research communities without resorting to supporting the vicious circle of soaring journal costs. This is perhaps the context that I omitted earlier.
As i tacitly acknowledged in another reply, my statement you object to is ambiguous. I am not trying to say anything about not crediting ideas. Read it the other way, which is to say that I would like it if it were acceptable to not even open and look into journals that are being milked for profit. The point there is to treat the journal world as a free market, wherein academicians dictate, through small individual decisions, or through large ones like Dr. Knuth and his board, which journals are "good" according to a mixture of cost and inertia.
Currently there is a large inelastic demand for these journals, some of whose costs have outpaced inflation by leaps and bounds. This is largely self-imposed on the part of academia: there is nothing saying researchers have to publish in certain journals, other than some monopoly-perpetuating funding reviews. What I am urging is that academics as a whole and through individual decisions take back control of the market.
Put another way: who is going to shell out $48 for ~5 pages of paper? At what point will your university come to your department and tell you the library cannot afford the subscriptions? Will you continue to subsidize the profiteering publishers at the expense of your department/college's ability to perform research or retain professors? At what point does demand become elastic again?
I was not saying anything about not crediting authors whose works I use. I was stating that I would prefer not to utilize those needlessly expensive repositories of source material. Sure I'll miss some papers, and maybe some key insights, but I won't have contributed to perpetuating the problem of the exploding cost of journals. I'm pointing out the captivity of the market of knowledge and de facto monopoly by taking an admittedly naive stand. Stated another way: if this market were a free market, there wouldn't be about six comments telling me what a blithering idiot I am for bucking the system.
That cost is pushing up to the point where subscriptions (either online or paper) are so costly that they are inaccessible to individuals, and increasingly, companies. There is thus a tremendous pressure in my company on individuals with academic access to these services to use them for work. Doing so would be, needless to say, of dubious ethical virtue. So the net result is the exclusion of individuals and small companies. Moreover it can place individuals in untenable positions, caught between their employer and their academic license.
I don't mind journals per se, and acknowledge, as Knuth does that there is a certain cost of doing business, and that when companies run a journal they need to see a profit. What I find intolerable is the exploitation of the captive market. I also do not appreciate the apparent willingness of the market to remain captive (as expressed by yourself and others, and held to be a general truism: "No-one actually reads the papers to see if they really are good or not, they go by if it's in Combinatorica then it's good...")
I also have "free" access to a large variety of journals, but I am also aware of the indirect cost those multiple $1,000,000 per year institutional subscriptions impose on myself and the taxpayers (since the university receives federal and state funding).
Personally, I prefer to find sources by finding the groups doing the research and publishing the papers. I then am able to keep closer tabs on the state of research in a focused area more easily. The problem is that increasingly the more obnoxious practices of the publishers are becoming standard. The worst of these is a prohibition on researchers publishing their own work on their own sites. Consequently I have several sources for whom I can only access a small percentage of their work truly free.
I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with the situation if either: 1. the expensive journals allowed authors to publish on their websites. or 2. they lowered their prices to be more affordable to those without access through an academic account.
I will probably end up using (and citing, of course) papers from these journals, but I nonetheless felt that Don Knuth's decision and the analysis that led to it were cogent to the discussion at hand, particularly with respect to the changing (mostly for the worse) journal landscape.
Dr. Knuth has a stark and telling financial analysis for his journal in particular and its trend in relation to the marketplace in his letter to the Editorial board of the Elsevier journal of which he was a member. It led to the resignation of the entire editorial board and the formation of the ACM journal Transactions on Algorithms. It's a must read for the current discussion.
BTW: I just started back at school for my master's and the required orientation seminars include a segment from the librarians. The librarians emphasize the importance of searching the more expensive, private journals they pay for (Springer, etc.) claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it. The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us. It was disgusting. For the scientific community to break out of this media trap, we must reject this mentality, allow researchers to answer questions on research sources on ethical grounds, and ultimately make the decisions that Dr. Knuth and the JoA board made.
not to mention the upfront costs of adding systems and personnel to identify users who are distributing copyrighted works.
This requires very intrusive and labor intensive monitoring of P2P streams. In most countries, the copyright holder is responsible for enforcing their own copyright. For good reason.
Also, the people who would work for the ISP and end up with this job would likely have even less motivation than the ISP. It'd be a pretty demoralizing job.
From the putative ISP copyright holders' protection team cubes:
"User 1, day 1: No P2P." "User 2, day 1: Linux distro." "User 3, day 1: Teenagers who can't play guitar distributing own noise pollution. Note, may be the Wyld Stalyns. Extend monitoring to check for time travel signatures and alert labels' contracting groups." "User 4, day 1: No P2P." "User 5, day 1: Avril Lavigne. Forget it; that copyright's worthless anyways." "User 6, day 1: Linux again." "User 7, day 1:...... "User 9999999, day 1: "No P2P." "Whew, we're done. What a waste of time."
Slashdot Mirror
atheism is a religion and has its zealots too. give it time, i'm sure they'll join the rest of the religions in the asshattery soon enough.
Except that the British steadfastly maintained their lifestyle in the face of IRA attacks, including their historical liberties. And they ended up beating the IRA. Whereas in SE Asia, etc. they were inflexible and got their rear ends handed to them. Some would extend the correlation into causality, but i'm sure it was somewhat more complex than that. However, I am sure maintaining liberty helped.
the practice of naming something to jerk on heartstrings while robbing the country blind?
say operation iraqi freedom which translates to operation grab the oil?
or perhaps i've missed our recent 100,000+ troop deployments to the Sudan. Oh wait, no oil.
how about "compassionate conservatism" which translates to we're really Democrats?
FEMA has a long history of demonstrating the principles of conservatism and compassion.
drip drip
oops, too much sarcasm. i'll have to work on the dose.
you know, of the Nineveah Kennedys.
on another note,
One of the many things I find darkly funny is that all the right wingers are fine and dandy with singling out folks who look "arab" don't for a minute have cognizance of the fact that at least a third of Iran's population are blond-haired, blue-eyed caucasians. You know, state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. Yeah, that Iran. See, the Caucases mountains are nearby which is where the term comes from.
So Ann Coulter is fine with swarthy folk with dark curly hair getting the third degree constantly. I wonder if that would change if our prejudices were more completely targeted at blond-haired, blue-eyed folk like her. Because if this isn't about security theater, we ought to.
giant, slow, purple monster of a computer that is like 10 years old. It has the name Onyx on the front. i think it has like 1GB of vram.
I also have this 12-15 year-old beater of an Intergraph box. i think it has like 64MB of vram.
Just 'cause it's old doesn't mean it was or is lame.
That beater of an Onyx can still thrash your SLi.
And the Intergraph's video card was EISA or microchannel, i can't remember which.
But mostly i'm just pointing out corner cases because other repliers to the parent felt it necessary to trash old gear. remember, in 10 years today's gear will be bupkus.
80% of technical advancements in other fields in the last few decades since the advent of cheap computers are also attributable to computers. This is due mostly to their aid in the analytic, visualization, control automation, and training fields. This is just an extension the truism that holds math as the foundation upon which the other sciences are built. Have you noticed that the older and better CS departments originated in the math department? Princeton's CS department still maintains close ties to both the math department and the philosophy (for logic) department.
How did distance learning move out of the postal-mail-based correspondence class dark ages?
The subject of TFA is the CEO of SAS. His company's products are used everyday by people from many scientific and analytic disciplines, but all of them use SAS's tool on computers. My take on his dissatisfaction is to help drive schools to adopt computer training, simulation, and analysis rubrics for exploring a variety of subjects. I'm sure that deep in his heart he sees this as a natural path to kids exploring e.g. social studies by performing statistical analyses using his software. Sure beats the heck out of memorizing chief imports and exports written down by adults using the same software. Obviously, though one would need a variety of friendly, age appropriate, subject appropriate front ends and curricula to guide their use by students to help them have the epiphanies of insight that are learning.
This raises several questions: whether this is a good idea on its face; how to keep this from being just a cash cow for companies like SAS, rather than actually enhancing the learning experience; how to keep it vendor neutral; can this be picked up by a joint open source software / educational research community; etc.
you know how to complete that sentence.
Seriously, though. Science that rests on too many, too important, too questionable assumptions is pseudo-science. You're essentially reading tea leaves at that point. If you need data that aren't available, then perhaps a better contribution on your part to the community would be to publish your vacuum analysis for the topic you really want to investigate and your plan to address that vacuum. Then start filling the void by conducting the necessary experiments.
Scientific achievements are attained by standing on the shoulders of giants, not standing on a house of cards. If you have to, be your own giant (by conducting the experiments yourself) or gather the buy-in and support of your community to build up a metaphorical human pyramid to stand upon.
Are they ill tempered gators? You know I asked specifically for *sharks.*
It's not too much to expect, is it? That when you make a simple request your employees follow through on it?
Mod parent up funny/insightful, please!
Congress made such a law, and by virtue of checks and balances, we're able to get rid of it. Try again coward.
I'm currently working for a contract research company. Before that, I worked for Silicon Graphics. And I have industry and research experience before that. I intend to get through my graduate education and either stay where i'm at or go to a national lab. The last, though still acceptable, option to me is to play the professorial game. The reason I'd pursue it would be to teach, not to research. I've found a more satisfying work and emotional environment in application directed corporate and government research. And again, I find excellence to be a better tonic than game playing.
"unless you happen to have rich parents..."
Another option, and the one I'm taking is to work after undergraduate and work whilst in graduate school. It just takes more effort. Of course it takes nowhere near as much effort as my one friend who took his BS and MS concurrently without omitting any cooperative education segments.
And I'd admitted I'll probably end up "playing the game", which incidentally has real world consequences for others, despite my misgivings. All along I've been expressing those misgivings in what I perceive to be the correct ethical context, which is to say one broad enough to capture the consequences for all participants, direct and indirect; willing and unwilling.
it means that it is about as different from a free market as an oligarchy is from a democratic republic, or is supposed to be, coward.
I'll refrain from the ad hominem, obscene insult. You've insulted yourself quite enough with the one you directed at me, thank you.
or at least make the primaries like in NH where anyone can vote for anyone regardless of party.
Hopefully just citizenship. While it's run by an individual it's constitutionally protected speech.
At some point in the muddied waters or tea leaves the government decides you're a business (say because you let an ad banner firm place ads on your site in order to defray the hosting cost, or say when you pass some number of daily readers, or say whatever, but definitely by the time you incorporate or get a business license.) This is an area the Internet has made difficult for the government and is another, broader issue entirely.
When that happens your company is categorized for a number of purposes, including taxes and business insurance. If you are a text/media content provider, then you are most likely some sort of publisher, which I think means for the FEC's purposes you are a media outlet, and thus in the same category as any other media outlet.
Besides which, the big boys selectively report and even endorse candidates. And given the economic pressure the newspapers are under, it won't be long before some of them have shrunk to the point that some former-individual-blog-turned-opinion-site (Drudge, anyone?) is bigger than them. Will there then be calls to strip that newspaper of their media credentials or FEC exemption?
Besides, many newspapers are divesting their printing press and contracting with a larger regional paper for printing. At what point is a paper no longer a paper?
Likewise, there are some individuals who have their own papers published (call them crackpots if you want, but remember that's how many of our more venerable papers started.)
How will you distinguish between "legitimate" media and the rest? Is it a worthy expenditure of government resources? Does it violate the rights of those determined not to be "press"?
The best solution is for the government to leave it alone and let the economy sort it out, which surprisingly enough is what the FEC chose to do. That's what we have a "free" market for, right? Oh, yeah it isn't free: it's mercantilism.
And until it isn't mercantilism we'll have people and companies calling for discrimination in order to protect larger businesses.
Does that make his economic analysis less valid?
And does that mean it wasn't worth trying?
Show some enlightened self interest.
I'm not missing the fact that not all the best journals are among the most costly. I was omitting it to concentrate on developing my argument. However, since you bring it up, how long do you believe this will remain the case? I'll warrant that the profit driven publishers are aware of the situation and have their eyes on selectively adding more reputable journals to their stable. Will their costs remain low?
Obviously there have been some reverse trends, but where is the journal world trending on balance? Some of the better organizations are picking up on the bad habits of the worse.
Most of the change for the better has been initiated by individuals and small groups of academicians against great inertia, examples being Don Knuth and ArXiV. As described in one of the other responses to my original post, Don Knuth's new ACM journal hasn't been the most successful. The commenter seemed to think this justified the current state of affairs. And you admitted that ArXiV is held in low regard generally.
I was attempting to furnish the original discussion with Knuth's economic analysis which is cogent to the overall discussion and as an aside express my dissatisfaction with my university's dedication to spending any sum these publishers will charge in my name. It's annoying.
I'm sorry to have put words in your mouth, but nonetheless the generally accepted state of academia is such that it is stuck in a vicious cycle of:
1. As a grad student, I need to look good to my profs, so i must search through all available repositories, no matter their cost.
2. As a newly minted PhD, I need to gain reputation such that I can get a job, so this dictates which journals I try to publish in, no matter their cost-based inaccessibility to the public.
3. As a tenure aspirant, I need to maintain a bureaucratically assigned score of my impact in the field that is highly dependent on my publishing in costlier journals.
4. As a professor, I push students to search through all available repositories, no matter their cost, out of concern for their careers.
If we extrapolate this trend with public money funding universities, there is no end in sight. The publishers will claim some imaginary hardship or other to justify each year's super-inflationary price increase. the universities will claim that they are squeezed for cash. The departments will be inflexible, after all they and their students *must* have access to these journals at any cost. They're the best. The result is that the outrageous cost is passed on to the public at large with no real consideration given by academia that they might take their publishing business elsewhere and make a different publication "best."
I'm fortunate or persevering enough (take your pick or mix to suit) that obtaining a job is not something I am extremely nervous about. I have enough industry and government research experience and have done good enough work in those circles that I feel confident in my ability to get a job. I also find that excellence is a sufficient condition for obtaining employment. I also find that I would rather not work for a group that is so disinterested in their prospective coworkers that they cannot be bothered to read or pay attention to their work. And as to the 20 minute condensed history of work, I find that most research areas are sufficiently specialized that there is a large body of common knowledge and experience. If I cannot give a succinct overview of my contributions in relation to that, then I need to work on my communication skills. I am in a place where I can conceivably get by and make positive contributions to my research communities without resorting to supporting the vicious circle of soaring journal costs. This is perhaps the context that I omitted earlier.
and whoever that guy steals from is wearing milkbone underwear.
As i tacitly acknowledged in another reply, my statement you object to is ambiguous. I am not trying to say anything about not crediting ideas. Read it the other way, which is to say that I would like it if it were acceptable to not even open and look into journals that are being milked for profit. The point there is to treat the journal world as a free market, wherein academicians dictate, through small individual decisions, or through large ones like Dr. Knuth and his board, which journals are "good" according to a mixture of cost and inertia.
Currently there is a large inelastic demand for these journals, some of whose costs have outpaced inflation by leaps and bounds. This is largely self-imposed on the part of academia: there is nothing saying researchers have to publish in certain journals, other than some monopoly-perpetuating funding reviews. What I am urging is that academics as a whole and through individual decisions take back control of the market.
Put another way: who is going to shell out $48 for ~5 pages of paper? At what point will your university come to your department and tell you the library cannot afford the subscriptions? Will you continue to subsidize the profiteering publishers at the expense of your department/college's ability to perform research or retain professors? At what point does demand become elastic again?
I was not saying anything about not crediting authors whose works I use. I was stating that I would prefer not to utilize those needlessly expensive repositories of source material. Sure I'll miss some papers, and maybe some key insights, but I won't have contributed to perpetuating the problem of the exploding cost of journals. I'm pointing out the captivity of the market of knowledge and de facto monopoly by taking an admittedly naive stand. Stated another way: if this market were a free market, there wouldn't be about six comments telling me what a blithering idiot I am for bucking the system.
That cost is pushing up to the point where subscriptions (either online or paper) are so costly that they are inaccessible to individuals, and increasingly, companies. There is thus a tremendous pressure in my company on individuals with academic access to these services to use them for work. Doing so would be, needless to say, of dubious ethical virtue. So the net result is the exclusion of individuals and small companies. Moreover it can place individuals in untenable positions, caught between their employer and their academic license.
I don't mind journals per se, and acknowledge, as Knuth does that there is a certain cost of doing business, and that when companies run a journal they need to see a profit. What I find intolerable is the exploitation of the captive market. I also do not appreciate the apparent willingness of the market to remain captive (as expressed by yourself and others, and held to be a general truism: "No-one actually reads the papers to see if they really are good or not, they go by if it's in Combinatorica then it's good...")
I also have "free" access to a large variety of journals, but I am also aware of the indirect cost those multiple $1,000,000 per year institutional subscriptions impose on myself and the taxpayers (since the university receives federal and state funding).
Personally, I prefer to find sources by finding the groups doing the research and publishing the papers. I then am able to keep closer tabs on the state of research in a focused area more easily. The problem is that increasingly the more obnoxious practices of the publishers are becoming standard. The worst of these is a prohibition on researchers publishing their own work on their own sites. Consequently I have several sources for whom I can only access a small percentage of their work truly free.
I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with the situation if either:
1. the expensive journals allowed authors to publish on their websites. or
2. they lowered their prices to be more affordable to those without access through an academic account.
I will probably end up using (and citing, of course) papers from these journals, but I nonetheless felt that Don Knuth's decision and the analysis that led to it were cogent to the discussion at hand, particularly with respect to the changing (mostly for the worse) journal landscape.
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html
Dr. Knuth has a stark and telling financial analysis for his journal in particular and its trend in relation to the marketplace in his letter to the Editorial board of the Elsevier journal of which he was a member. It led to the resignation of the entire editorial board and the formation of the ACM journal Transactions on Algorithms. It's a must read for the current discussion.
BTW: I just started back at school for my master's and the required orientation seminars include a segment from the librarians. The librarians emphasize the importance of searching the more expensive, private journals they pay for (Springer, etc.) claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it. The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us. It was disgusting. For the scientific community to break out of this media trap, we must reject this mentality, allow researchers to answer questions on research sources on ethical grounds, and ultimately make the decisions that Dr. Knuth and the JoA board made.
not to mention the upfront costs of adding systems and personnel to identify users who are distributing copyrighted works.
... ...
This requires very intrusive and labor intensive monitoring of P2P streams. In most countries, the copyright holder is responsible for enforcing their own copyright. For good reason.
Also, the people who would work for the ISP and end up with this job would likely have even less motivation than the ISP. It'd be a pretty demoralizing job.
From the putative ISP copyright holders' protection team cubes:
"User 1, day 1: No P2P."
"User 2, day 1: Linux distro."
"User 3, day 1: Teenagers who can't play guitar distributing own noise pollution. Note, may be the Wyld Stalyns. Extend monitoring to check for time travel signatures and alert labels' contracting groups."
"User 4, day 1: No P2P."
"User 5, day 1: Avril Lavigne. Forget it; that copyright's worthless anyways."
"User 6, day 1: Linux again."
"User 7, day 1:
"User 9999999, day 1: "No P2P."
"Whew, we're done. What a waste of time."
As in "Hackers" (movie, not real people)
i'm sorry, *cough* PDAs. *cough*