Short answer; none want epub formats as submissions. But this doesn't mean to say that there is not a desire to produce them from submissions. Lots of scientists and academics want to read articles on the go, without having to carry around lots of paper.
My own experience, however, is that the big move up is from PDF to HTML. This improves the reading experience enormously. EPUB on the other hand is limited. Many ebook readers don't work that well for academic content: mathematics is dealt with badly with non-scalable fonts, graphs and images are poor, citations are not well supported. I haven't see a huge use case for epub yet.
I have helped to create a site for scientists to post their articles on the web. One of the problems is that academics tend to love their tools and do not want to switch, often because they have relatively elaborate workflows and practices, which can cope with their lives; whether this involves writing lots of maths, spending lots of time offline travelling, collaboration or whatever.
We got around this just using Wordpress. Many of the tools out there can already communicate with a blog: this includes Word which, like it or not, is the main tool that scientists use. Others have mentioned things such as asciidoc (which I use). It's okay for short articles, but for a thesis, I would want to use latex. The support for editing in asciidoc is just not as advanced, particulary if you want to do crossreferences, citations, graphs and so on.
There is currently not a good latex -> HTML solution -- in the end, I used PlasTeX to create a tool unimaginatively called latextowordpress. Not perfect, but it works okay in most cases.
Once you are in wordpress epub and PDF fall out for free, as there are standard plugins for generating these. Personally, I don't do so; I have not found any substantive advantage over HTML, but they are there if you want them.
The process of publishing in this way is not entirely slick, but the results are quite nice. See http://knowledgeblog.org/ and subdomains for examples. And even if the process could be improved, my experience suggests that it is easier than using a commercial publisher. In many cases, it is even less error-prone, as you can see the final published form as you are going, without human intervention in the way.
RMS said that "if X is the case, then Emacs would in violation of GPL". But he also said that he didn't understand the full details of the situation.
Actually, I suspect there wasn't a violation, because the auto-generated lisp files contained comments describing the source. And the source files are readily available and released under GPL, even if they were not released in the tarballs. I know this because I saw CEDET being developed and have used aspects of it for years. It all depends on whether the comments in the auto-generated code were rich enough to be able to find the corresponding source.
RMS would have been seriously worried (and rightly so) if the source files were not available at all. But, in fact, they were.
So, this IS clearly an example of not terrible good practice. But it's a cock up, nothing more, and of no real significance. It will be fixed, and I would imagine relatively quickly.
The copyright owners. As this is probably the FSF this would mean that only the FSF could follow up the complaint and sue themselves.
Theoretically, they could sue other people also, who had distributed Emacs, but it's unlikely that they would be successful. If someone violates your copyright because of assurances you have given, it would be hard to then sue that person for this violation.
When you look into the problem a little more closely, you find that publishing isn't free. Hosting the PDF is cheap, but somebody has to produce it in the first place and maintain a website. And before that, someone has to arrange for the peer-review to happen, find an editorial board and reviewers, etc.
The thing is that most publishers use an antiquated model. Take one open access publisher that I have used. Their publication process is this:
First I produce a PDF. They convert this to another PDF. This PDF is then converted, BY HAND, to a word doc, which they then convert automatically to HTML and, you guessed it, another PDF. This is pretty standard in the publishing industry. It's no wonder that it is expensive.
We have been trialling out an alternative, on http://knowledgeblog.org./ It works like this. Author writes word doc, presses "publish to blog" button, and, well that's it. The peer review still happens, in the same way, by open posting. Total cost of publishing is that of hosting a Wordpress instance.
The current Open Access model is better than the alternative, but it is only half open. Like the closed model, it is too expensive. Scientific and academic publishing is stifling science. The door has been opened, not it is time to step through it and change the model entirely.
Err... there are quite a few roundabouts in this city, and they have been there for a long time. Some people don't really learn.
Roundabouts need pretty good coordination between drivers to work their best. The outbound flow limits the inbound flow, and everything flows nicely; it really is quite an elegant solution. However, it only takes one driver in the circle who doesn't know what to do to screw the entire thing up for everyone.
This is what the road markings are for. The larger multi-lane roundabouts in the UK have superb markings, making it very clear what is going on. Pretty much all you need to it is stay in the lane you want. The only way that you can get things wrong is to drive the wrong way around them; this happens occasionally but then you'd get the same problem at four ways.
Academic publishers are doing something different from wikipedia. So comparing 2 billion to 10 million is not entirely fair. But, then again, I do not believe that it is over 2 orders of magnitude unfair either.
The role of content approval is bogus in many cases. Most of this work is done by academics. Neither these costs, nor the costs of authoring are included in the 2 billion figure.
Ultimately, both wikipedia and academic publishers are disseminating knowledge. Perhaps the academic publishers process is different and does cost more and they are not just milking huge 40% profits. If this is true, the question becomes why is the process different?
This is why we have systems like LOCKSS, or any of the many archiving systems around the world.
In one sense, digitial information is more secure because the cost of archiving per paper drops year on year, as storage space gets cheaper. This is why I can now archive all my email since 1995 for less than it costs to archive my CD collection. The former just gets moved around between hard drives and machines as part of my normal work practice. My CD collection needs dusting, sorting, takes up space, weighs around 100kg, needs boxing and carrying every time I move.
Of course, there is a problem with digital information. The publishers like to release their papers in incomprehensible and hard to decypher forms. I suspect we will have the data in 50 years time, but stuffed into a PDF, will we still be able to read it?
Actually, most of the worlds scientific research doesn't come from the US, and therefore this isn't really an answer.
The real answer is because we have a overly expensive and nonsensical publishing system that costs a vast amount to both author and reader, and provides very little back. The scientific publishing industry current costs around 2 billion a year. Wikipedia costs around 10 million to run.
It is a pity that it takes illegal activity to draw attention to this, but ultimately, we need competition in this area. If the publishers ratchet up prices to such an enormous extent, that people can only access their information viably copyright violation, they really have only themselves to blame.
Everything that you say is correct. This is serious and the rise of the super injunction is not a good thing; even if they are largely aimed at the tabloid press who are a bunch of bottom-feeders.
None of this, however, changes the fact that the situation is farcical and absurd. It reminds me of the stupidity of the Peter Wright spy-catcher affair, or the entirely ridiculous spectacle of an actor lip-syncing Gerry Adams for two years because he was a terrorist.
It might be serious and because of this, it's more worthy of a good laugh than most things. What could be more British than that?
I dropped straight from unity to unity 2d -- the 3D version was just too slow on the laptop that I decided to try 11.04 out on, all for the same pointless effects that I turned off on Vista and windows 7. I have never been able to figure shadows, transparency and so forth; for me, a computer is a tool; it's like adding "go faster" stripes to a saw, or a label saying "bang" to a hammer.
The 2D version is nice, though. Ironically, the GUI feels like a shell, with tab completing type ahead thing; strange that 20 years of GUI development should finally come to the point that everyone realises that command lines are, actually, far faster especially when you only use 3 or 4 applications most of the time. The launcher stays out of the way most of the time and is less of a problem than I thought it would be. The zoom out, select thing is nice, although alt-tab works most of the time.
What I don't like is the menu bar placement (sometimes the menu is a long way from window), although this is minor because I don't use menus lots. I don't like the default windows key option because the windows key is in very different places on different keyboards (on this laptop it is above delete, top right). And the pegged left hand side is a pain for dual head -- or even on a laptop when running synergy -- move to the left, but not to far so that you disappear onto the next screen. The loss of the system monitor applet (and others) is a major pain in the ass, frankly. I need to know what my CPU and network traffic is often so I can work out whether my development tools are working.
I am curious to see how the UI works on my big screen, dual head set up at work; but not curious enough to try it. It's on 10.04 LTS and is staying there. I can put up with GUI changes to be honest -- you get used to most things in time and, in practice, they make little difference. But as it stands, my main gripe is that its rather buggy.
This means I am now using 3 versions of ubuntu, and 2 versions of windows on different computers. Oh dear.
> General Rule: > 1. The Creator shall own all rights in Copyrightable Works. > 2. The University shall own all rights in other Intellectual Property.
You missed out the entirety of the next paragraph which define the exceptions. As these cover almost all of the most likely scenarios, it's a little empty. The policy does mean that if you write a text book, or you might be able to retain copyright, although under normal employment law, the university would own that.
So the original poster was a bit strong in their statement, but he is not far wrong. For the individual scientist, there is very little value in intellectual property; it's just a burden. And as anyone who has had to wade through IP agreements with any regularity will tell you, it's a substantial one.
The interesting point is that the same most Universities also; in practice, they make very little money from third strand activities, including IP rights. There are, of course, the occasional exceptions, where a single piece of IP make a phenomenonal amount of cash.
In the case of the original article, however, he is referring to scientific research outputs. The only people who make cash out of this are the publishers, who don't actually do anything useful any more. Scientists have kind of shot themselves in the feet here. I expect it will stop eventually, but it's currently tied up with our promotion and grant awarding systems.
Have you been to the UK recently? What you say is just not true. While the standardization is now largely in metric the sales are often still in imperial. You can still buy milk by the 568ml (that is 1pint), likewise beer. And the population in general still talk in imperial ("go 100 yards up the road"). Baby milk is still given in fluid ounces, weight is given in pounds and ounces. Adult weight is usually given in stones, even though the medical community uses metric for all of these.
It's a great pity. We should just grow up. But, unfortunately, there are many sad, sad people out there who think that being different makes us better and that a unit of measure defines us as British, and besides it's all a plot from the EU that will end up with us all speaking French. After all, look what happened to Australia and Canada when the EU forced them to use metric.
Actually, it is possible that this is not legal. He's claiming that downloading the software means agreement to be bound by New Zealand law; my guess would be that this additional clause is counter to the GPL which does not allow this form of restriction.
It isn't sad that tests need to be performed. They do. We need to fill the holes in our understanding. We need to investigate any potential route for harm.
None of this is relavant though. In the case of MMR, the evidence of a link between the vaccine and autism was always very weak. I have to admit that even a cynical old lag has been surprised that even this was fraudelent. But the keypoint remains, the evidence NEVER was strong. It was at best a suggestion. And since then, all the tests have been done, the data has been replicated (or rather not), the claims about mechanisms were investigated and turned out to be wrong.
Wakefield is a problem; we can criticise him for his fraud, for not caring about the damage his claims caused. But there are many, many journalists who couldn't be bothered to check up, who interviewed and investigated without a basic understanding of science, without a basis understanding of medicine and still though that they were good enough, qualified enough to tell the public about it. MMR is a sad tell of the malicious, fraudulent and the stupid. And in the middle of all of this is the general public, lost, confused and incapable of making an informed choice because they can't get access to good information.
"Microsoft is the British Petroleum of software. "
BP hasn't been British Petroleum for well over a decade. The name just got resurrected by the American media and politicians in a desparate attempt to blame someone else for the oil spill, rather than understanding that it is their own desire for enormous quantities of cheap, but unsustainable substance that is the actual issue.
The NHS is not perfect, but generally gives a high standard of care. The free market is not a universal panacea as the banking sector shows.
The other point to remember is that this story came from the Sun. It wouldn't be the first time it has invented a story. The free market in journalism means saying what people want to believe, rather than what is true.
I think that you are confusing the UK with the US. The law on self-incrimination comes from the US constitution which is a little out of jurisdiction in the UK. As for the right to silence, well, that went quite a few years ago. This was probably a bad thing, but there you have it.
Well, entry into the US has always been unpleasant. You get large number of questions, the customs people tend to be fairly aggressive and, in recent years, the photography and fingerprints are making the situation worse. I'd much rather go to Canada or Australia (well or the EU, but as I am an EU citizen, I guess this is quite different).
However, the main feature of how it feels after 8 hours on a plane is boring and irritating. You just want to get out of the airport, out of conditioned air and away from airline food. You don't want to be standing in a long queue, behind the three booths for international travelers, while customs guards sit picking their teeth in the 10 empty US-only channels. 10 fingerprints is only going to make this worse.
Yes, you're clearly right. Companies are not going to be interested in semantic web and web services. And without companies, then nothing is ever going to work.
Contrast this with the experiences of the web. In the very early days, companies were just leaping on board, using it very early, providing large quantities of usable content with advertising attached.
Any idea that it scientists putting their papers and biogs online, musicians building up hoards of guitar tabs and thousands of trekies explaining the full details of Picards transporter accident who built the web from a protocol and markup language into a global repository of information, knowledge (and confusion) is a total misapprehension, because it is companies that are responsible for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer; none want epub formats as submissions. But this doesn't mean to say that there is not a desire to produce them from submissions. Lots of scientists and academics want to read articles on the go, without having to carry around lots of paper.
My own experience, however, is that the big move up is from PDF to HTML. This improves the reading experience enormously. EPUB on the other hand is limited. Many ebook readers don't work that well for academic content: mathematics is dealt with badly with non-scalable fonts, graphs and images are poor, citations are not well supported. I haven't see a huge use case for epub yet.
I have helped to create a site for scientists to post their articles on the web. One of the problems is that academics tend to love their tools and do not want to switch, often because they have relatively elaborate workflows and practices, which can cope with their lives; whether this involves writing lots of maths, spending lots of time offline travelling, collaboration or whatever.
We got around this just using Wordpress. Many of the tools out there can already communicate with a blog: this includes Word which, like it or not, is the main tool that scientists use. Others have mentioned things such as asciidoc (which I use). It's okay for short articles, but for a thesis, I would want to use latex. The support for editing in asciidoc is just not as advanced, particulary if you want to do crossreferences, citations, graphs and so on.
There is currently not a good latex -> HTML solution -- in the end, I used PlasTeX to create a tool unimaginatively called latextowordpress. Not perfect, but it works okay in most cases.
http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/2010/08/latex-to-wordpress/
Once you are in wordpress epub and PDF fall out for free, as there are standard plugins for generating these. Personally, I don't do so; I have not found any substantive advantage over HTML, but they are there if you want them.
The process of publishing in this way is not entirely slick, but the results are quite nice. See http://knowledgeblog.org/ and subdomains for examples. And even if the process could be improved, my experience suggests that it is easier than using a commercial publisher. In many cases, it is even less error-prone, as you can see the final published form as you are going, without human intervention in the way.
RMS said that "if X is the case, then Emacs would in violation of GPL". But he also said that he didn't understand the full details of the situation.
Actually, I suspect there wasn't a violation, because the auto-generated lisp files contained comments describing the source. And the source
files are readily available and released under GPL, even if they were not released in the tarballs. I know this because I saw CEDET being
developed and have used aspects of it for years. It all depends on whether the comments in the auto-generated code were rich enough to be able to find the corresponding source.
RMS would have been seriously worried (and rightly so) if the source files were not available at all. But, in fact, they were.
So, this IS clearly an example of not terrible good practice. But it's a cock up, nothing more, and of no real significance. It will be fixed, and I would imagine relatively quickly.
The copyright owners. As this is probably the FSF this would mean that only the FSF could follow up the complaint and sue themselves.
Theoretically, they could sue other people also, who had distributed Emacs, but it's unlikely that they would be successful. If someone violates your copyright because of assurances you have given, it would be hard to then sue that person for this violation.
When you look into the problem a little more closely, you find that publishing isn't free. Hosting the PDF is cheap, but somebody has to produce it in the first place and maintain a website. And before that, someone has to arrange for the peer-review to happen, find an editorial board and reviewers, etc.
The thing is that most publishers use an antiquated model. Take one open access publisher that I have used. Their publication process is this:
First I produce a PDF. They convert this to another PDF. This PDF is then converted, BY HAND, to a word doc, which they then convert automatically to HTML and, you guessed it, another PDF. This is pretty standard in the publishing industry. It's no wonder that it is expensive.
We have been trialling out an alternative, on http://knowledgeblog.org./ It works like this. Author writes word doc, presses "publish to blog" button, and, well that's it. The peer review still happens, in the same way, by open posting. Total cost of publishing is that of hosting a Wordpress instance.
The current Open Access model is better than the alternative, but it is only half open. Like the closed model, it is too expensive. Scientific and academic publishing is stifling science. The door has been opened, not it is time to step through it and change the model entirely.
Phil
Err... there are quite a few roundabouts in this city, and they have been there for a long time. Some people don't really learn.
Roundabouts need pretty good coordination between drivers to work their best. The outbound flow limits the inbound flow, and everything flows nicely; it really is quite an elegant solution. However, it only takes one driver in the circle who doesn't know what to do to screw the entire thing up for everyone.
This is what the road markings are for. The larger multi-lane roundabouts in the UK have superb markings, making it very clear what is going on. Pretty much all you need to it is stay in the lane you want. The only way that you can get things wrong is to drive the wrong way around them; this happens occasionally but then you'd get the same problem at four ways.
Phil
I'm afraid it was a throw away line, there for rhetorical purposes.
I don't know an easy way to measure "amount" of science, so it will be hard to get figures.
Academic publishers are doing something different from wikipedia. So comparing 2 billion to 10 million is not entirely fair. But, then again, I do not believe that it is over 2 orders of magnitude unfair either.
The role of content approval is bogus in many cases. Most of this work is done by academics. Neither these costs, nor the costs of authoring are included in the 2 billion figure.
Ultimately, both wikipedia and academic publishers are disseminating knowledge. Perhaps the academic publishers process is different and does cost more and they are not just milking huge 40% profits. If this is true, the question becomes why is the process different?
This is why we have systems like LOCKSS, or any of the many archiving systems around the world.
In one sense, digitial information is more secure because the cost of archiving per paper drops year on year, as storage space gets cheaper. This is why I can now archive all my email since 1995 for less than it costs to archive my CD collection. The former just gets moved around between hard drives and machines as part of my normal work practice. My CD collection needs dusting, sorting, takes up space, weighs around 100kg, needs boxing and carrying every time I move.
Of course, there is a problem with digital information. The publishers like to release their papers in incomprehensible and hard to decypher forms. I suspect we will have the data in 50 years time, but stuffed into a PDF, will we still be able to read it?
Actually, most of the worlds scientific research doesn't come from the US, and therefore this isn't really an answer.
The real answer is because we have a overly expensive and nonsensical publishing system that costs a vast amount to both author and reader, and provides very little back. The scientific publishing industry current costs around 2 billion a year. Wikipedia costs around 10 million to run.
It is a pity that it takes illegal activity to draw attention to this, but ultimately, we need competition in this area. If the publishers ratchet up prices to such an enormous extent, that people can only access their information viably copyright violation, they really have only themselves to blame.
Everything that you say is correct. This is serious and the rise of the super injunction is not a good thing; even if they are largely aimed at the tabloid press who are a bunch of bottom-feeders.
None of this, however, changes the fact that the situation is farcical and absurd. It reminds me of the stupidity of the Peter Wright spy-catcher affair, or the entirely ridiculous spectacle of an actor lip-syncing Gerry Adams for two years because he was a terrorist.
It might be serious and because of this, it's more worthy of a good laugh than most things. What could be more British than that?
I dropped straight from unity to unity 2d -- the 3D version was just too slow on the laptop that I decided to try 11.04 out on, all for the same pointless effects that I turned off on Vista and windows 7. I have never been able to figure shadows, transparency and so forth; for me, a computer is a tool; it's like adding "go faster" stripes to a saw, or a label saying "bang" to a hammer.
The 2D version is nice, though. Ironically, the GUI feels like a shell, with tab completing type ahead thing; strange that 20 years of GUI development should finally come to the point that everyone realises that command lines are, actually, far faster especially when you only use 3 or 4 applications most of the time. The launcher stays out of the way most of the time and is less of a problem than I thought it would be. The zoom out, select thing is nice, although alt-tab works most of the time.
What I don't like is the menu bar placement (sometimes the menu is a long way from window), although this is minor because I don't use menus lots. I don't like the default windows key option because the windows key is in very different places on different keyboards (on this laptop it is above delete, top right). And the pegged left hand side is a pain for dual head -- or even on a laptop when running synergy -- move to the left, but not to far so that you disappear onto the next screen. The loss of the system monitor applet (and others) is a major pain in the ass, frankly. I need to know what my CPU and network traffic is often so I can work out whether my development tools are working.
I am curious to see how the UI works on my big screen, dual head set up at work; but not curious enough to try it. It's on 10.04 LTS and is staying there. I can put up with GUI changes to be honest -- you get used to most things in time and, in practice, they make little difference. But as it stands, my main gripe is that its rather buggy.
This means I am now using 3 versions of ubuntu, and 2 versions of windows on different computers. Oh dear.
Phil
> General Rule:
> 1. The Creator shall own all rights in Copyrightable Works.
> 2. The University shall own all rights in other Intellectual Property.
You missed out the entirety of the next paragraph which define the exceptions. As these cover almost all of the
most likely scenarios, it's a little empty. The policy does mean that if you write a text book, or you might be able
to retain copyright, although under normal employment law, the university would own that.
So the original poster was a bit strong in their statement, but he is not far wrong. For the individual scientist,
there is very little value in intellectual property; it's just a burden. And as anyone who has had to wade through
IP agreements with any regularity will tell you, it's a substantial one.
The interesting point is that the same most Universities also; in practice, they make very little money from third
strand activities, including IP rights. There are, of course, the occasional exceptions, where a single piece of IP
make a phenomenonal amount of cash.
In the case of the original article, however, he is referring to scientific research outputs. The only people who make
cash out of this are the publishers, who don't actually do anything useful any more. Scientists have kind of shot
themselves in the feet here. I expect it will stop eventually, but it's currently tied up with our promotion and grant
awarding systems.
Phil
Have you been to the UK recently? What you say is just not true. While the standardization is now largely in metric
the sales are often still in imperial. You can still buy milk by the 568ml (that is 1pint), likewise beer. And the population in general
still talk in imperial ("go 100 yards up the road"). Baby milk is still given in fluid ounces, weight is given in pounds and ounces. Adult
weight is usually given in stones, even though the medical community uses metric for all of these.
It's a great pity. We should just grow up. But, unfortunately, there are many sad, sad people out there who think that being different
makes us better and that a unit of measure defines us as British, and besides it's all a plot from the EU that will end up with us all
speaking French. After all, look what happened to Australia and Canada when the EU forced them to use metric.
Actually, it is possible that this is not legal. He's claiming that downloading the software means agreement to be
bound by New Zealand law; my guess would be that this additional clause is counter to the GPL which does not
allow this form of restriction.
Mostly, though, this is funny.
It isn't sad that tests need to be performed. They do. We need to fill the holes in our understanding. We need to investigate any potential route for harm.
None of this is relavant though. In the case of MMR, the evidence of a link between the vaccine and autism was always very weak. I have to admit that even a cynical old lag has been surprised that even this was fraudelent. But the keypoint remains, the evidence NEVER was strong. It was at best a suggestion. And since then, all the tests have been done, the data has been replicated (or rather not), the claims about mechanisms were investigated and turned out to be wrong.
Wakefield is a problem; we can criticise him for his fraud, for not caring about the damage his claims caused. But there are many, many journalists who couldn't be bothered to check up, who interviewed and investigated without a basic understanding of science, without a basis understanding of medicine and still though that they were good enough, qualified enough to tell the public about it. MMR is a sad tell of the malicious, fraudulent and the stupid. And in the middle of all of this is the general public, lost, confused and incapable of making an informed choice because they can't get access to good information.
In a civilized world, we'd burn the lot of them.
One has an immune system, and the other looks like concrete.
"Microsoft is the British Petroleum of software. "
BP hasn't been British Petroleum for well over a decade. The name just got resurrected by the American media and politicians in a desparate attempt to blame someone else for the oil spill, rather than understanding that it is their own desire for enormous quantities of cheap, but unsustainable substance that is the actual issue.
For quite a while as far as I had noticed.
I thought it was rather funny actually.
The NHS is not perfect, but generally gives a high standard of care. The free market is not a universal panacea as the banking sector shows.
The other point to remember is that this story came from the Sun. It wouldn't be the first time it has invented a story. The free market in
journalism means saying what people want to believe, rather than what is true.
The dialog is still terrible but you are right this makes it reasonably bearable. Been a long time coming..
I think that you are confusing the UK with the US. The law on self-incrimination comes from the US constitution which is a little out of jurisdiction in the UK.
As for the right to silence, well, that went quite a few years ago. This was probably a bad thing, but there you have it.
Phil
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/ict/leg
A scary questionaire. Aside from the didactics, which are poor, there were a surprising number of factual errors.
"If you buy a legal copy of a CD, it's okay to copy it"
was marked as wrong when it could be true or false. It was riddled with this sort of error.
If you are going to talk about the law, then you should get
it correct.
How does it feel?
Well, entry into the US has always been unpleasant. You get large number of questions, the customs people tend to be fairly aggressive and, in recent years, the photography and fingerprints are making the situation worse. I'd much rather go to Canada or Australia (well or the EU, but as I am an EU citizen, I guess this is quite different).
However, the main feature of how it feels after 8 hours on a plane is boring and irritating. You just want to get out of the airport, out of conditioned air and away from airline food. You don't want to be standing in a long queue, behind the three booths for international travelers, while customs guards sit picking their teeth in the 10 empty US-only channels. 10 fingerprints is only going to make this worse.
Phil
Yes, you're clearly right. Companies are not going to be interested
in semantic web and web services. And without companies, then nothing
is ever going to work.
Contrast this with the experiences of the web. In the very early days,
companies were just leaping on board, using it very early, providing
large quantities of usable content with advertising attached.
Any idea that it scientists putting their papers and biogs online,
musicians building up hoards of guitar tabs and thousands of trekies
explaining the full details of Picards transporter accident who built
the web from a protocol and markup language into a global repository of
information, knowledge (and confusion) is a total misapprehension, because
it is companies that are responsible for everything.
Phil