I realize that this may sound like a commercial, but for the overall price of this setup, it's so enticing to get started ($20USD a month). You can get virtual Linux hosting at rimuhosting.com and essentially have a linux box online all the time, accessible anytime you want with 3GB of disk space. If you want a usable desktop anywhere you go in the world that you want to access remotely--reasons for doing so can be one of many, such as accessing a remote server to run a browser to access content restricted to a certain IP, etc.--you would just need to install X and, if you wanted, one of the desktop managers (KDE, Gnome) and then the FreeNX server, and run the NX client to access the box. I have to say that before with VNC, it was next to impossible for me to do so because of the sloooowwww responsiveness, but NX is so much faster. Granted, you have to run a *Nix box running X (no other desktops are supported as in VNC), but the ability to access a desktop remotely anywhere in the world sounds awesome. Now if only I can think of why doing this would be worthwhile.
And the only person I know that owns one is Brentano on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers.".
It's funny when you start going into the discussion of PVRs/DVRs (personal video recorders/digital video recorders) in a crowd of unfamiliar faces. It's a known fact that when asked about his/her entertainment setup at home, a person will just say "I have a TiVo," when referring to owning a DVR, even if it's not even a TiVo. Why? Because TiVo has the branding, it's synonymous with DVRs and time-shifting video devices and it is immediately understood. Secondly, it's just faster and easier to say, versus saying "I have UltimateTV" or "I have ReplayTV" or "I have Comcast Digital Cable with DVR", etc. There was a recent NY Times article that went into this phenomena in depth. So when you say you only know one person who owns a ReplayTV, chances are there are more owners than you think. And there are more owners of other devices other than TiVO than you think. I'm a ReplayTV owner myself -- I love it, can't live without it and will probably never own a TiVo because by the time my ReplayTV breaks on me there will be other, better DVRs to buy or rent from the cable company.
Microsoft, which has acknowledged it lags in search, hopes to play catch-up with a broad-based search tool that allows users to also scour through e-mails, documents and even big databases.
I'm not saying that all open source software in Linux are the cutting-edge either...but considering that you have to shell out cold-hard cash for the alternative, why?
There is definitely a niche that needs to be filled (translation: make money here) -- pseudo-spreadsheets that generate best-fit curves for scientific publications. All of the more useful and intuitive applications such as GraphPad Prism, Sigmaplot, Kaleidagraph, and SlideWrite are (or were) applications developed in Windows and do not have Linux ports. These applications are geared towards non-math-centric researchers who need to generate good looking plots and line graphs without getting into the hard core formulae needed to do it. In other words, they don't want (nor have the time) to learn gnuplot, octave, Maple V, Mathematica to generate non-linear regression plots for biological data -- after all, they're not mathematicians, they're biologists.
As a grad student in biomedical sciences, this is one of the obstacles preventing me from working in Linux solely. I still need my laptop with XP because it still runs Excel and Prism, which I need to publish papers. I don't care about Excel all that much since it generates crappy plots anyway, what I would like to have is a Prism clone. Biomedical scientists are such an untapped demographic for Linux use -- these people would gladly migrate to Linux if all the applications they needed were available for Linux. All they care about is power and reliability -- both of which are fulfilled by Linux -- and a smattering of useful scientific applications. Linux has made leaps and bounds for scientists in the fields of physics, math, and engineering, and the next group of scientists it needs to concentrate on are the biologists.
Got an invite thanks. Don't send me anymore. So far I can confirm Yahoo mail sends the invite to Bulk email folder (the spam mail folder). See a screenshot here:
Quick, someone send me a gmail invite to my email at : gmailme ATT linuxathome DOTT c o m. I'll forward it to my yahoo and hotmail account and will post the results here. Okay, okay, this is a desperate attempt to get a gmail invite, but it's worth a try right?
I've come to the resolve I've been beat Looking for the simple word 1337 Don't think this one rhymes? Try substituting minds You have to be in the mode of geek speak
Please, if you give the parent poster an invite for his creativeness, can you consider me as well? Okay okay, I should have done something other than a limerick, but what can you do when you're pressed for time? You can contact me at gmailme at linuxathome com
The true test would be to publish the same or similar papers in both journals and see which one gets cited more. It's interesting to know who prefers to publish where, but as a scientist, you're more interested in maximizing exposure and getting cited more often -- and this is highly dependent on which journal you publish and how accessible the paper is, in my opinion (at least in my field). Alas, you can't do this, since you can't publish the same paper in both journals. But there is a paper out there (published in Nature, I believe) that showed papers that were more accessible were cited more often.
Mod parent post up please, because this is an important question. Many of us assume that technology reduces costs, myself included. But time and time again, I've read from supporters of the current publishing model that going digital actually increases the cost! Where are these costs? Mostly in archiving and ensuring the papers last so that people 200 years from now will still be able to access it (I assume). I'm sure there were studies made to compare costs, but I don't know who or what to believe -- I get the sneaky suspicion that the research saying that digitization is costlier was produced by those in similar circumstances where the tobacco companies were paying researchers who said smoke wasn't cancerous. Also, the cost of technology decreases over time, so that the estimation of cost for archiving digital material will have to account for this. Am I wrong to believe this? Someone prove me otherwise.
I can just see it now, the image that you paint. Less scrupulous scientists will do what people are doing now with google -- trying to bias the search engine to go to their page when a certain query is placed. As as example, try typing "weapons of mass destruction" in google and see what you get in the first few pages.
But what I want to bring up is: to get the peer review and editor value that you mention, do we still need to keep our publishing structure? Or more importantly, our pay and fee structure? Scientists are innovators, there's no reason to believe that a change can't be made. Is there a flaw in my assumption?
The researchers in my field get paid via grants. Without the grants, they also lose the support from my university. In order for their grants to be renewed, their work has to be published in the traditional publishing venues. So behind all this questioning of why on earth are we sticking with the old model when the technology is there to change it all, the answer lies behind money (as it usually does for lots of issues). The people who are in the position to change this nonsense to a positive result, happen to be people who are not scientists. But, I suspect that the change is not happening fast enough for scientists is because people outside don't really understand what's going on, or don't really care -- unless of course we bring up the fact that their money is also being wasted (i.e. tax dollars).
I agree with your comments wholeheartedly in spirit. I do want to add also that although you say scientists pay for their publishing fees, I believe that in actuality, all taxpayers are paying the publishing fee, not just scientists. If you want to know how your tax dollars are used, read on and follow the link above.
In essence grants are what pays scientists, and US grants are taken from your taxes. For a lot of the science that gets published, these publishers are in a way "double-dipping" the researcher. Why do I say this? Well, not only are they dipping into the grant money (how else do you think scientists can afford the publishing fees?), for the researchers to access the same journal they published in, they have to pay a subscription fee!
This restrictive behavior is stifling research in more ways than one. If you want a good read on some ideas that could advance with opening the research, you should read alf's blog. He once proposed a crawler to parse the cited references of a paper, whereby automatic links can be made between and among papers -- the same sort of data that you have to pay big $$$ from companies like Thomson ISI. The benefit of this is staggering for people like me -- grad student looking to see commonalities and past literature on a topic of interest (after all, I do need to know everything and anything there is on the topic I'm studying). Alas, the only way I can get to this information is to pay for it from Thomson ISI on my meager salary (something around $20K a year) or to convince my library to get a site license. Sadly, site licenses happen to be astronomically more expensive than individual fees, so apparently, it's not going to happen. Hearing about this, how do you think these types of restrictive practices are affecting the next generation of scientists? Food for thought. Talk amongst yourselves. I'm feeling a little verklempt!
I haven't RTFA yet, but I'll comment anyway. From what I learned in med school so far, you're not allowed to state that the cause of death is "old age" on a death certificate. What I'm trying to get at is, most people don't "die of old age" as the slashdot blurb seems to imply above. Usually it's a problem such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, etc. So the person submitting the story should have said "Engineering an end to problems/diseases that arise from old age." There is nothing wrong with aging per se, it's the health problems that are more probable to occur at old age that kills you. I realize it's a matter of semantics, but in such an age-phobic society (i.e. the US), I feel that things like this have to be voiced to stem other social problems such as "age-ism." Moreover, all the money spent to extend the last few years of life is overtaking needed health expenditures in other areas -- such as child healthcare and universal coverage. It seems that 90% of healthcare costs are being spent to extend life just another 10% or less. I'd rather support expenditures in areas such as hospice.
Bittorrent allows you to download in a P2P network. While downloading you are also at the same time uploading portions/fragments -- this distributed uploading works well to make the network robust. However, what if it was hacked into the code of bittorrent that you could only upload say a _specific_ 1/10th of the song? And that each user uploads a different 1/10th of the song so that any new downloader comes in can still download the song in its entirety, s/he just gets a 1/10th of it at a time from different sharers. And all the while, although you are uploading ad nauseum, you are only uploading a specific 1/10th of the song, never its entirety.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, say if you broke down the size to even smaller amounts, like 1/1000000th (Dr. Evil pinky to mouth)? Digital data is nothing more than a series of zero's and one's. If you break it down small enough, the series of zero and one's become so common that it cannot be considered a unique segment. In other words, the 1/1000000th digital piece that I'm uploading could be part of Britney Spears' new song or it could be part of Jules Verne's novel in the public domain, the onus is up to the RIAA to prove otherwise. I'm sure my logic is erroneous somewhere, someone prove me wrong.
Just two comments (and a closing statement, LOL!):
1. Just glancing at the article published under peer review (in Journal of Virology), one assumption that the authors made is that the model of virus dynamics in vivo is correct. Although it is the currently accepted model, it does not mean that it holds true -- I fear that a few more years of data will tell us truly if the mathematical model can be used, especially when pertaining to treatment via "anti-viral viruses."
2. For it to work in vivo, the "anti-virus" has to replicate near those cells/tissues that is actively replicating HIV. In fact, it probably works best if the "anti-virus" can superinfect the same cells infected by HIV -- that's the way anti-sense RNA works, in other words anti-sense RNA needs to anneal with the sense RNA of HIV. The problem is, HIV has mechanisms to reduce superinfection (downregulation of coreceptor comes to mind). The more you have to add to the anti-virus to evade such obstacles, the more difficult you make it -- i.e. the bulkier the virus, viral fitness plummets.
Only empirical studies in vivo will tell us if their treatment will work. As a grad student studying HIV, the news sounds exciting. But just like any "discoveries" made in this field, I have to take it with a grain of salt. Why? Well, think about the history of this epidemic and compare with other epidemics in modern history -- like polio and smallpox. What is taking so long for researchers to develop a vaccine with so much better technology than Jenner, Salk or Sabin ever had in their hands? The answer is in the virus itself, it has become so adept at evading the host immune system and usurping that system for its own end, that it is also destroying our body's chances of ever mounting a good enough response to keep it in check or eradicating it. I wonder if we ever will be able to develop a vaccine, and if we do, what will it take? More research into the biology of the virus? Or more research into our immune systems' biology? I personally think that studies in immunology is the key to answering this.
I will be signing up as soon as I can when they roll it out for _email_. Why? Simply because, how many people out there have extremely dull, hard to remember email accounts like joesmith2004@yahoo.com or js_in_us@yahoo.com or jsmith1214@hotmail.com? Too many. And I for one will try to at least be the first to get linux@googlemail.com or geek@googlemail.com, something that is easy to remember. Even if those are taken by squatters, I'm sure I can think of better. And with the branding placed behind google, I ensure the memorability of the address. It's in par with why people like getting the 212 area code phone number, or a post office box in a specific zip code/post office. The branding can't be overlooked -- on top of the potential of getting a valuable, unique and memorable email name leads to a very desireable service.
I'm not the first person to wish there was such a thing like Napster for journal articles. But the legalities of having this service is put in question. However, I had an idea about sharing journal articles to avoid this restrictive access nonsense -- legally. If you're an author (even if you're the twenty-third one listed) of an article published in a restricted peer reviewed journal, then find out if you are allowed to put the paper up in a personal web page/web space and let it be known to google or elsewhere (e.g. nodalpoint, pmbrowser) that it's available for download/reading. Lots of journals allow you to put it in your personal web space -- including Nature. I know what you are thinking -- why, as an author, would I want to put the effort into doing this? It's a known fact that the more freely available your article is, the more it will be cited. The more your paper is cited, the higher your scientific impact, the more valuable as a scientist you become. Please consider it, and if you aren't published yet, think about it and spread the word.
Lastly, any programmer out there want to contact me about writing a Napster-like client to share URLs -- URLs mind you, not the papers themselves? This will definitely be an open-sourced project.
Please mod this parent post up. I'd like to add that as others have correctly pointed out, that the science is usually funded by grants, either in industry or to a larger extent from the government, at least here in the US where NIH grants are the mainstay.
Those of you who are not in science might not think much of this fact, but consider this. Grants are taken from your tax dollars. You are funding the science directly with your tax dollars (and indirectly for industry grants when you buy the company's product). Would it not anger you that the published data stemming from this research has restricted access? After all, concerned tax payers would like to know how their dollars are spent.
Would it not anger you to know that the publishing companies not only reduces their cost by taking your tax dollars (authors/researchers pay the per page publishing fees), but CHARGES for access to make more money? The vast majority of the info that is published would not be available if not for your tax dollars.
Sadly, the people who are in the best position to make a change in this policy and who want to make the changes, are the very people whose "nuts are in a vice." What I mean is that many scientists don't want to "make waves" because of concern for their careers. After all, upward mobility in their status is HIGHLY dependent on publishing in the most prestigious journals. Many scientists equate engaging in activity that would make the future of publishing uncertain with an uncertain career -- so many of us just stay out of it.
I can only see a true change if individuals outside of science start making waves -- the person suffering from HIV who would like to read up on the current status of HIV research not news that is 6 months old, the mother who would like to read the current opinions of experts in the field of eczema from which her son is suffering, the US citizen and taxpayer who is just tired of all this information being exploited for profit, and the congressman who finally does something about it.
One thing slashdot readers understand well is that self-policing rarely works -- this is a similar situation. For scientists to actually make a change for the better in the field of scientific publishing requires more than a miracle. It requires non-scientists to understand the true dire situation of change that it really needs.
Following the heels of another reply to your post: yes, you should write a piece discussing your points to be published in the NY times or the New Economist or one of the financial magazines before the idea is stolen and rehashed by another author.
However your comment is just a triple and not a homerun. To make it a homerun, you'd have to go back to the GPL and pick out the crucial points in it that the likes of Mike Anderer cannot fathom due to them being fettered to the old ways of business. You are proposing a complete paradigm shift of IP law brought on by the viral acceptance of the GPL.
Perhaps as filler to your piece, you may want to add as examples other areas of IP contention not pertaining to software -- music comes to mind.
Overall a well put comment, I particularly like your new vernacular -- autopoesis, may I use it?
I think one real issue, that people are skirting, is who will be the ultimate guarantor of IP-related issues in a world that is governed by the GPL and GPL-like licenses.
It sorely disappoints me that those with money and power will always try to find a scapegoat -- Mike Anderer is no exception. Obviously he will always live up to the perpetual negative stereotypes of CEOs and upper management with comments like this.
GPL and GPL-like licenses have always been about the community and the greater good -- and it is obvious people like Mike will never "get it." Instead of finding the person to sue, they need to think about the greater good of the community and approach it as such -- i.e. "I'm here to try to work things out with arbitration and a good dialogue." Instead they come in with guns blazing and slap such a huge lawsuit hoping for such a huge payout that people will just laugh in their face and think they're just crackpots -- ruining the whole dialogue in the first place. Approaching issues such as licenses and IPs will require lots more tact than these individuals of the "old school" will care to exercise.
"Build your own" in Linux--my steps in DVD making
on
DVD Authoring Under Linux?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Shortest answer I can give you:
Use kino to do the video editing, and output/export (i.e. save as) an MPEG-2 (DVD format). To get this to work you will most likely need Mplayer installed because you'll need the mplex commandline tool to "multiplex" your audio and video files. Some like to use transcode, but I like Mplayer much better. Split the MPEG into multiple MPEGs if you want to have different chapters -- the best way to do this is to use a commandline tool called mpgtx. Or just save different MPEGs from kino. BTW, if you need to get video footage to edit in the first place then use dvgrab to get video from your DV camcorder -- it should be a part of the kino suite of tools, but if it's not, get it from one of the pages in kino.
Once you've gotten your MPEGs all created, now you can author. I use dvdauthor. What you have to first do is create a XML text file to list the MPEGs you want to burn into the DVD. And example of such a file is found here. The easiest method is to create a new chapter for each MPEG file. Then you run dvdauthor like so:
dvdauthor -o DVDdir -x xml-filename
DVDdir is the name of the output you want -- name doesn't really matter; xml-filename is the name of the text file you created.
DVDdir will be a directory from which you then need to create a video ISO. You need the commandline tool mkisofs. Example is:
mkisofs -dvd-video -o fileoutput.img DVDdir
Now you just need to burn fileoutput.img with your DVD recorder. I use dvdrecord (yes, it's a commandline tool):
Yes, I'm a glutton for punishment. There are lots of steps involved to do it in Linux, but it's quite powerful once you've gotten the basics down and have written shell scripts to automate the tasks.
If you find it difficult to install all these tools on your Linux box (as many do), may I recommend installing Debian linux? Best way to do this is to do a hard drive install from the Knoppix Live Linux CD. The scripts to do this are built-in the cd: knx-hdinstall or knoppix-installer. Why do I recommend it? Installing all the tools I have listed above are a simple apt-get away -- i.e. "apt-get install kino" or "apt-get install mpgtx" or "apt-get install dvdauthor" -- I mean how much easier can it get?
Lastly, allow me to plug my blog that has documented this and a number of other linux tips ages ago: linuxathome.com
As mentioned by other posters, here's the previous slashdot article that talked about cartalk dropping Real because it was extremely devious about making available their "free" player (i.e. it required way too much work to surf through all the clutter just to find it):
Has anyone raised this issue up? Is it just me or does this look like a hacked version of NoCatAuth that first serves as a proxy for accessing and paying via your PayPal account? For those of you who are not familiar with NoCatAuth, it's:
centralized authentication code that make shared Internet services possible.
On the wifi network, it essentially forces the wifi client to use a proxy and before allowing you to access anything else, it will pop up a web page for you to enter a login and password. By logging on, NoCatAuth can keep track of all the users on the wifi network. Hmmm, sounds a lot like linspot to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that this may sound like a commercial, but for the overall price of this setup, it's so enticing to get started ($20USD a month). You can get virtual Linux hosting at rimuhosting.com and essentially have a linux box online all the time, accessible anytime you want with 3GB of disk space. If you want a usable desktop anywhere you go in the world that you want to access remotely--reasons for doing so can be one of many, such as accessing a remote server to run a browser to access content restricted to a certain IP, etc.--you would just need to install X and, if you wanted, one of the desktop managers (KDE, Gnome) and then the FreeNX server, and run the NX client to access the box. I have to say that before with VNC, it was next to impossible for me to do so because of the sloooowwww responsiveness, but NX is so much faster. Granted, you have to run a *Nix box running X (no other desktops are supported as in VNC), but the ability to access a desktop remotely anywhere in the world sounds awesome. Now if only I can think of why doing this would be worthwhile.
And the only person I know that owns one is Brentano on G4TechTV's "The Screen Savers.".
It's funny when you start going into the discussion of PVRs/DVRs (personal video recorders/digital video recorders) in a crowd of unfamiliar faces. It's a known fact that when asked about his/her entertainment setup at home, a person will just say "I have a TiVo," when referring to owning a DVR, even if it's not even a TiVo. Why? Because TiVo has the branding, it's synonymous with DVRs and time-shifting video devices and it is immediately understood. Secondly, it's just faster and easier to say, versus saying "I have UltimateTV" or "I have ReplayTV" or "I have Comcast Digital Cable with DVR", etc. There was a recent NY Times article that went into this phenomena in depth. So when you say you only know one person who owns a ReplayTV, chances are there are more owners than you think. And there are more owners of other devices other than TiVO than you think. I'm a ReplayTV owner myself -- I love it, can't live without it and will probably never own a TiVo because by the time my ReplayTV breaks on me there will be other, better DVRs to buy or rent from the cable company.
In other news, MS admits they're lagging behind and aren't the innovators. And I quote:
Microsoft, which has acknowledged it lags in search, hopes to play catch-up with a broad-based search tool that allows users to also scour through e-mails, documents and even big databases.
I'm not saying that all open source software in Linux are the cutting-edge either...but considering that you have to shell out cold-hard cash for the alternative, why?
Software FUBAR (SFU-BAR)...how appropriate.
...oh wait, my bad, I thought you said "unleash your beast within."
There is definitely a niche that needs to be filled (translation: make money here) -- pseudo-spreadsheets that generate best-fit curves for scientific publications. All of the more useful and intuitive applications such as GraphPad Prism, Sigmaplot, Kaleidagraph, and SlideWrite are (or were) applications developed in Windows and do not have Linux ports. These applications are geared towards non-math-centric researchers who need to generate good looking plots and line graphs without getting into the hard core formulae needed to do it. In other words, they don't want (nor have the time) to learn gnuplot, octave, Maple V, Mathematica to generate non-linear regression plots for biological data -- after all, they're not mathematicians, they're biologists.
As a grad student in biomedical sciences, this is one of the obstacles preventing me from working in Linux solely. I still need my laptop with XP because it still runs Excel and Prism, which I need to publish papers. I don't care about Excel all that much since it generates crappy plots anyway, what I would like to have is a Prism clone. Biomedical scientists are such an untapped demographic for Linux use -- these people would gladly migrate to Linux if all the applications they needed were available for Linux. All they care about is power and reliability -- both of which are fulfilled by Linux -- and a smattering of useful scientific applications. Linux has made leaps and bounds for scientists in the fields of physics, math, and engineering, and the next group of scientists it needs to concentrate on are the biologists.
Got an invite thanks. Don't send me anymore. So far I can confirm Yahoo mail sends the invite to Bulk email folder (the spam mail folder). See a screenshot here:
http://www.linuxathome.com/images/gmailtest.jpg
Quick, someone send me a gmail invite to my email at : gmailme ATT linuxathome DOTT c o m. I'll forward it to my yahoo and hotmail account and will post the results here. Okay, okay, this is a desperate attempt to get a gmail invite, but it's worth a try right?
Try this one on for size:
I've come to the resolve I've been beat
Looking for the simple word 1337
Don't think this one rhymes?
Try substituting minds
You have to be in the mode of geek speak
Please, if you give the parent poster an invite for his creativeness, can you consider me as well? Okay okay, I should have done something other than a limerick, but what can you do when you're pressed for time? You can contact me at gmailme at linuxathome com
The true test would be to publish the same or similar papers in both journals and see which one gets cited more. It's interesting to know who prefers to publish where, but as a scientist, you're more interested in maximizing exposure and getting cited more often -- and this is highly dependent on which journal you publish and how accessible the paper is, in my opinion (at least in my field). Alas, you can't do this, since you can't publish the same paper in both journals. But there is a paper out there (published in Nature, I believe) that showed papers that were more accessible were cited more often.
Mod parent post up please, because this is an important question. Many of us assume that technology reduces costs, myself included. But time and time again, I've read from supporters of the current publishing model that going digital actually increases the cost! Where are these costs? Mostly in archiving and ensuring the papers last so that people 200 years from now will still be able to access it (I assume). I'm sure there were studies made to compare costs, but I don't know who or what to believe -- I get the sneaky suspicion that the research saying that digitization is costlier was produced by those in similar circumstances where the tobacco companies were paying researchers who said smoke wasn't cancerous. Also, the cost of technology decreases over time, so that the estimation of cost for archiving digital material will have to account for this. Am I wrong to believe this? Someone prove me otherwise.
I can just see it now, the image that you paint. Less scrupulous scientists will do what people are doing now with google -- trying to bias the search engine to go to their page when a certain query is placed. As as example, try typing "weapons of mass destruction" in google and see what you get in the first few pages.
But what I want to bring up is: to get the peer review and editor value that you mention, do we still need to keep our publishing structure? Or more importantly, our pay and fee structure? Scientists are innovators, there's no reason to believe that a change can't be made. Is there a flaw in my assumption?
The researchers in my field get paid via grants. Without the grants, they also lose the support from my university. In order for their grants to be renewed, their work has to be published in the traditional publishing venues. So behind all this questioning of why on earth are we sticking with the old model when the technology is there to change it all, the answer lies behind money (as it usually does for lots of issues). The people who are in the position to change this nonsense to a positive result, happen to be people who are not scientists. But, I suspect that the change is not happening fast enough for scientists is because people outside don't really understand what's going on, or don't really care -- unless of course we bring up the fact that their money is also being wasted (i.e. tax dollars).
I agree with your comments wholeheartedly in spirit. I do want to add also that although you say scientists pay for their publishing fees, I believe that in actuality, all taxpayers are paying the publishing fee, not just scientists. If you want to know how your tax dollars are used, read on and follow the link above.
In essence grants are what pays scientists, and US grants are taken from your taxes. For a lot of the science that gets published, these publishers are in a way "double-dipping" the researcher. Why do I say this? Well, not only are they dipping into the grant money (how else do you think scientists can afford the publishing fees?), for the researchers to access the same journal they published in, they have to pay a subscription fee!
This restrictive behavior is stifling research in more ways than one. If you want a good read on some ideas that could advance with opening the research, you should read alf's blog. He once proposed a crawler to parse the cited references of a paper, whereby automatic links can be made between and among papers -- the same sort of data that you have to pay big $$$ from companies like Thomson ISI. The benefit of this is staggering for people like me -- grad student looking to see commonalities and past literature on a topic of interest (after all, I do need to know everything and anything there is on the topic I'm studying). Alas, the only way I can get to this information is to pay for it from Thomson ISI on my meager salary (something around $20K a year) or to convince my library to get a site license. Sadly, site licenses happen to be astronomically more expensive than individual fees, so apparently, it's not going to happen. Hearing about this, how do you think these types of restrictive practices are affecting the next generation of scientists? Food for thought. Talk amongst yourselves. I'm feeling a little verklempt!
I haven't RTFA yet, but I'll comment anyway. From what I learned in med school so far, you're not allowed to state that the cause of death is "old age" on a death certificate. What I'm trying to get at is, most people don't "die of old age" as the slashdot blurb seems to imply above. Usually it's a problem such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, etc. So the person submitting the story should have said "Engineering an end to problems/diseases that arise from old age." There is nothing wrong with aging per se, it's the health problems that are more probable to occur at old age that kills you. I realize it's a matter of semantics, but in such an age-phobic society (i.e. the US), I feel that things like this have to be voiced to stem other social problems such as "age-ism." Moreover, all the money spent to extend the last few years of life is overtaking needed health expenditures in other areas -- such as child healthcare and universal coverage. It seems that 90% of healthcare costs are being spent to extend life just another 10% or less. I'd rather support expenditures in areas such as hospice.
Bittorrent allows you to download in a P2P network. While downloading you are also at the same time uploading portions/fragments -- this distributed uploading works well to make the network robust. However, what if it was hacked into the code of bittorrent that you could only upload say a _specific_ 1/10th of the song? And that each user uploads a different 1/10th of the song so that any new downloader comes in can still download the song in its entirety, s/he just gets a 1/10th of it at a time from different sharers. And all the while, although you are uploading ad nauseum, you are only uploading a specific 1/10th of the song, never its entirety.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, say if you broke down the size to even smaller amounts, like 1/1000000th (Dr. Evil pinky to mouth)? Digital data is nothing more than a series of zero's and one's. If you break it down small enough, the series of zero and one's become so common that it cannot be considered a unique segment. In other words, the 1/1000000th digital piece that I'm uploading could be part of Britney Spears' new song or it could be part of Jules Verne's novel in the public domain, the onus is up to the RIAA to prove otherwise. I'm sure my logic is erroneous somewhere, someone prove me wrong.
Just two comments (and a closing statement, LOL!):
1. Just glancing at the article published under peer review (in Journal of Virology), one assumption that the authors made is that the model of virus dynamics in vivo is correct. Although it is the currently accepted model, it does not mean that it holds true -- I fear that a few more years of data will tell us truly if the mathematical model can be used, especially when pertaining to treatment via "anti-viral viruses."
2. For it to work in vivo, the "anti-virus" has to replicate near those cells/tissues that is actively replicating HIV. In fact, it probably works best if the "anti-virus" can superinfect the same cells infected by HIV -- that's the way anti-sense RNA works, in other words anti-sense RNA needs to anneal with the sense RNA of HIV. The problem is, HIV has mechanisms to reduce superinfection (downregulation of coreceptor comes to mind). The more you have to add to the anti-virus to evade such obstacles, the more difficult you make it -- i.e. the bulkier the virus, viral fitness plummets.
Only empirical studies in vivo will tell us if their treatment will work. As a grad student studying HIV, the news sounds exciting. But just like any "discoveries" made in this field, I have to take it with a grain of salt. Why? Well, think about the history of this epidemic and compare with other epidemics in modern history -- like polio and smallpox. What is taking so long for researchers to develop a vaccine with so much better technology than Jenner, Salk or Sabin ever had in their hands? The answer is in the virus itself, it has become so adept at evading the host immune system and usurping that system for its own end, that it is also destroying our body's chances of ever mounting a good enough response to keep it in check or eradicating it. I wonder if we ever will be able to develop a vaccine, and if we do, what will it take? More research into the biology of the virus? Or more research into our immune systems' biology? I personally think that studies in immunology is the key to answering this.
I will be signing up as soon as I can when they roll it out for _email_. Why? Simply because, how many people out there have extremely dull, hard to remember email accounts like joesmith2004@yahoo.com or js_in_us@yahoo.com or jsmith1214@hotmail.com? Too many. And I for one will try to at least be the first to get linux@googlemail.com or geek@googlemail.com, something that is easy to remember. Even if those are taken by squatters, I'm sure I can think of better. And with the branding placed behind google, I ensure the memorability of the address. It's in par with why people like getting the 212 area code phone number, or a post office box in a specific zip code/post office. The branding can't be overlooked -- on top of the potential of getting a valuable, unique and memorable email name leads to a very desireable service.
I'm not the first person to wish there was such a thing like Napster for journal articles. But the legalities of having this service is put in question. However, I had an idea about sharing journal articles to avoid this restrictive access nonsense -- legally. If you're an author (even if you're the twenty-third one listed) of an article published in a restricted peer reviewed journal, then find out if you are allowed to put the paper up in a personal web page/web space and let it be known to google or elsewhere (e.g. nodalpoint, pmbrowser) that it's available for download/reading. Lots of journals allow you to put it in your personal web space -- including Nature. I know what you are thinking -- why, as an author, would I want to put the effort into doing this? It's a known fact that the more freely available your article is, the more it will be cited. The more your paper is cited, the higher your scientific impact, the more valuable as a scientist you become. Please consider it, and if you aren't published yet, think about it and spread the word.
Lastly, any programmer out there want to contact me about writing a Napster-like client to share URLs -- URLs mind you, not the papers themselves? This will definitely be an open-sourced project.
Please mod this parent post up. I'd like to add that as others have correctly pointed out, that the science is usually funded by grants, either in industry or to a larger extent from the government, at least here in the US where NIH grants are the mainstay.
Those of you who are not in science might not think much of this fact, but consider this. Grants are taken from your tax dollars. You are funding the science directly with your tax dollars (and indirectly for industry grants when you buy the company's product). Would it not anger you that the published data stemming from this research has restricted access? After all, concerned tax payers would like to know how their dollars are spent.
Would it not anger you to know that the publishing companies not only reduces their cost by taking your tax dollars (authors/researchers pay the per page publishing fees), but CHARGES for access to make more money? The vast majority of the info that is published would not be available if not for your tax dollars.
Sadly, the people who are in the best position to make a change in this policy and who want to make the changes, are the very people whose "nuts are in a vice." What I mean is that many scientists don't want to "make waves" because of concern for their careers. After all, upward mobility in their status is HIGHLY dependent on publishing in the most prestigious journals. Many scientists equate engaging in activity that would make the future of publishing uncertain with an uncertain career -- so many of us just stay out of it.
I can only see a true change if individuals outside of science start making waves -- the person suffering from HIV who would like to read up on the current status of HIV research not news that is 6 months old, the mother who would like to read the current opinions of experts in the field of eczema from which her son is suffering, the US citizen and taxpayer who is just tired of all this information being exploited for profit, and the congressman who finally does something about it.
One thing slashdot readers understand well is that self-policing rarely works -- this is a similar situation. For scientists to actually make a change for the better in the field of scientific publishing requires more than a miracle. It requires non-scientists to understand the true dire situation of change that it really needs.
Following the heels of another reply to your post: yes, you should write a piece discussing your points to be published in the NY times or the New Economist or one of the financial magazines before the idea is stolen and rehashed by another author.
However your comment is just a triple and not a homerun. To make it a homerun, you'd have to go back to the GPL and pick out the crucial points in it that the likes of Mike Anderer cannot fathom due to them being fettered to the old ways of business. You are proposing a complete paradigm shift of IP law brought on by the viral acceptance of the GPL.
Perhaps as filler to your piece, you may want to add as examples other areas of IP contention not pertaining to software -- music comes to mind.
Overall a well put comment, I particularly like your new vernacular -- autopoesis, may I use it?
I think one real issue, that people are skirting, is who will be the ultimate guarantor of IP-related issues in a world that is governed by the GPL and GPL-like licenses.
It sorely disappoints me that those with money and power will always try to find a scapegoat -- Mike Anderer is no exception. Obviously he will always live up to the perpetual negative stereotypes of CEOs and upper management with comments like this.
GPL and GPL-like licenses have always been about the community and the greater good -- and it is obvious people like Mike will never "get it." Instead of finding the person to sue, they need to think about the greater good of the community and approach it as such -- i.e. "I'm here to try to work things out with arbitration and a good dialogue." Instead they come in with guns blazing and slap such a huge lawsuit hoping for such a huge payout that people will just laugh in their face and think they're just crackpots -- ruining the whole dialogue in the first place. Approaching issues such as licenses and IPs will require lots more tact than these individuals of the "old school" will care to exercise.
Yes, I'm a glutton for punishment. There are lots of steps involved to do it in Linux, but it's quite powerful once you've gotten the basics down and have written shell scripts to automate the tasks.
If you find it difficult to install all these tools on your Linux box (as many do), may I recommend installing Debian linux? Best way to do this is to do a hard drive install from the Knoppix Live Linux CD. The scripts to do this are built-in the cd: knx-hdinstall or knoppix-installer. Why do I recommend it? Installing all the tools I have listed above are a simple apt-get away -- i.e. "apt-get install kino" or "apt-get install mpgtx" or "apt-get install dvdauthor" -- I mean how much easier can it get?
Lastly, allow me to plug my blog that has documented this and a number of other linux tips ages ago: linuxathome.com
As mentioned by other posters, here's the previous slashdot article that talked about cartalk dropping Real because it was extremely devious about making available their "free" player (i.e. it required way too much work to surf through all the clutter just to find it):
2 &mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/31/21020
Has anyone raised this issue up? Is it just me or does this look like a hacked version of NoCatAuth that first serves as a proxy for accessing and paying via your PayPal account? For those of you who are not familiar with NoCatAuth, it's:
centralized authentication code that make shared Internet services possible.
On the wifi network, it essentially forces the wifi client to use a proxy and before allowing you to access anything else, it will pop up a web page for you to enter a login and password. By logging on, NoCatAuth can keep track of all the users on the wifi network. Hmmm, sounds a lot like linspot to me.