" theft of the Universities' resources and theft of the online resource material."
No, the thief here is the journal that grabbed the researchers' IP not only without compensation, but made them pay to do it. Plantation slaves had a better deal than that. Getting the papers to Sci-hub is the most moral way for the researcher to benefit most from his intellectual property.
Do you give your work/time away for free? (I am assuming you work)
When you publish in an Elsevier journal, you sign away any IP in the paper, and get no royalty from them. Worse still is that everyone who sees your paper has to do so through an institution that has to pay an expensive subscription for access.
Isn't the idea that you can pirate scientific papers sort of anti-knowledge?
No, what's anti-knowledge is the idea that research papers can be locked up behind paywalls. As a scientist, the intellectual property you worked years to create is your research itself. The paper is just a formal description of it, and that paper should be free to the world so that your peers can review it and, by building on your work, appreciate and honor your efforts.
The other problem with iTunes is that when you do use it for music, it imposes its own organization and won't let you organize your music your way. And if you want to do something like write out a given selection of music out to an SD card to play in your latest-model car audio, iTunes can't do that by itself. You need to bolt on two third-party utilities to make it work.
For most Apple users, the problem with iTunes is having to use it for functions that have nothing to do with music, such as backing up iOS devices to a computer or checking to see how much free space there is on your iPhone. Whenever I upload edited pictures to my iPad to do a slideshow, that too has to go through iTunes, while the application keeps pestering me to log on to the music store account, which is not needed for this operation, over and over again.
If I wanted to be mean and hex Bernie's SL presence, swastikas would be the last thing I would put up. I would poke fun of his platform by doing something like have a set of unicorns chained to a capstan, labeled Bernie's Energy System. Or how about a theme park called Venezuelaland, with hopeless peasants shooting each other over the last few rolls of toilet paper.
Ted Cruz was already a distant second banana, and has decided to pump up his popularity by inviting as running mate the least popular vagino-American in Silicon Valley. The only possibly worse choice would be John McAfee.
"These types of dumps are organized by a handful of the elites in order to damage their opposition."
Oooh, a metaconspiracy, a plot perpetrated by your rival conspiracy theorists. Protip: keep your pit bull feed on the top of your least leaky slideout, or skunks will nest under your doublewide.
OR...especially when flat-out piracy through torrenting is easy to get used to once you take the plunge, content providers could unite on a delivery model that is simple enough to make piracy more trouble than it's worth.
Hypercard could have been evolved into a user-level scripting system to link apps together in a safe way to accomplish high-level functions without having to go the one-large-program route.
"Of course they are exercising a sense of entitlement - you aren't entitled to anyone else's work for free, and if they choose not to make it available to you, that's their right. "
Technically true, but when technology gives you a capability, such as streaming movies and TV shows, that 'rights holders' take away again, users perceived they have lost a right. If such users were to find a way of getting around Netflix' VPN restriction to stream content through Netflix that they are no longer "entitled to" according to the changed rule, everybody still wins: Netflix and the rights holder still get paid for the viewing, and the user still sees what could view before for the same subscribed price.
The big danger from the rights holder's viewpoint is that if Netflix becomes too effective at keeping VPN usage off its system, the users will just start torrenting instead. In that case, Netflix and the rights holder both lose. My feeling is that someone will soon hack around the VPN restriction, and Netflix will quietly allow this to happen.
A dystopia is just another setting, which the characters have an opportunity to push back against. What I'm concerned about here is the futility machine, bred in academia but now broken out into general society, that detests science itself and - looking at the climate issue as an example - automatically rejects any solutions that scientists and engineers might offer.
That's why conservatives are just as afraid of Trump, but for the opposite reason, as the liberals. He's the first candidate to be getting Hitler and Stalin jokes at the same time.
By their very nature, stories which explore future scenarios are going to speculate about every imaginable type of social and political system, and the human cultures that might inhabit them. The one core value I do expect the genre as a whole to hold sacred is a deep-seated respect for science itself and the potential of mankind to use it for its own improvement.
Go ahead and make your spaceship captain a lesbian, if you think your take on such a character would interest the target audience. But make her a person who appreciates science to the extent that she would be far more interested in what new things could be seen through the Thirty Meter Telescope than any reasons the SJWs can come up with to prevent it from being built somewhere.
The opposing position to this basic appreciation for science, in case you think I'm speaking in vacuo, is here: http://dgrnewsservice.org/civi... This is the kind of thinking I want to see the Rabid Puppies blow to hell.
"There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. "
"I'd be happy if they supported Unicode here, for our European, etc., friends to properly spell certain proper nouns."
Even for the terminally xenophobic, there are words used in this country that include the macron and 'okina characters. Then there's that one county in New Hampshire with an umlaut in its name.
The article sidebar cites social VR as a way to get the tech rolling. How about a generic business meeting app? Simple avatars like the ones in Second Life would suffice here, because the participants in a specific situation already know each other and are limited in number, so there is no need to get fancy. What would be important is the ways in which people could interact virtually in a meeting space? Could they exchange meaningful informational as easily as face-to-face without the infernal overhead of arranging conference rooms and interrupting normal work routines.
Slashdot Mirror
" theft of the Universities' resources and theft of the online resource material."
No, the thief here is the journal that grabbed the researchers' IP not only without compensation, but made them pay to do it. Plantation slaves had a better deal than that. Getting the papers to Sci-hub is the most moral way for the researcher to benefit most from his intellectual property.
Do you give your work/time away for free? (I am assuming you work)
When you publish in an Elsevier journal, you sign away any IP in the paper, and get no royalty from them. Worse still is that everyone who sees your paper has to do so through an institution that has to pay an expensive subscription for access.
Isn't the idea that you can pirate scientific papers sort of anti-knowledge?
No, what's anti-knowledge is the idea that research papers can be locked up behind paywalls. As a scientist, the intellectual property you worked years to create is your research itself. The paper is just a formal description of it, and that paper should be free to the world so that your peers can review it and, by building on your work, appreciate and honor your efforts.
The other problem with iTunes is that when you do use it for music, it imposes its own organization and won't let you organize your music your way. And if you want to do something like write out a given selection of music out to an SD card to play in your latest-model car audio, iTunes can't do that by itself. You need to bolt on two third-party utilities to make it work.
For most Apple users, the problem with iTunes is having to use it for functions that have nothing to do with music, such as backing up iOS devices to a computer or checking to see how much free space there is on your iPhone. Whenever I upload edited pictures to my iPad to do a slideshow, that too has to go through iTunes, while the application keeps pestering me to log on to the music store account, which is not needed for this operation, over and over again.
If I wanted to be mean and hex Bernie's SL presence, swastikas would be the last thing I would put up. I would poke fun of his platform by doing something like have a set of unicorns chained to a capstan, labeled Bernie's Energy System. Or how about a theme park called Venezuelaland, with hopeless peasants shooting each other over the last few rolls of toilet paper.
"Not to mention that information would fall directly into the Fifth Amendment as that information would be providing witness against yourself."
Would any of our lawyers care to explain how the All Write Act takes precedence over the Fifth Amendment in this case?
Ted Cruz was already a distant second banana, and has decided to pump up his popularity by inviting as running mate the least popular vagino-American in Silicon Valley. The only possibly worse choice would be John McAfee.
But they can execute it anyway? Nice!
Yes. They'll just say the warrant fell into your spam folder.
Symantec will go into the pharmaceutical business? ;)
It has come up with a scheme to make cancer slower.
"These types of dumps are organized by a handful of the elites in order to damage their opposition."
Oooh, a metaconspiracy, a plot perpetrated by your rival conspiracy theorists. Protip: keep your pit bull feed on the top of your least leaky slideout, or skunks will nest under your doublewide.
"I have an idea, to avoid false alarms, we could require 2 more buttons instead of just one."
And we could make the code reminiscent of a well-known enemy attack. I'm headed to East Texas right now to patent this.
OR...especially when flat-out piracy through torrenting is easy to get used to once you take the plunge, content providers could unite on a delivery model that is simple enough to make piracy more trouble than it's worth.
Hypercard could have been evolved into a user-level scripting system to link apps together in a safe way to accomplish high-level functions without having to go the one-large-program route.
"Of course they are exercising a sense of entitlement - you aren't entitled to anyone else's work for free, and if they choose not to make it available to you, that's their right. "
Technically true, but when technology gives you a capability, such as streaming movies and TV shows, that 'rights holders' take away again, users perceived they have lost a right. If such users were to find a way of getting around Netflix' VPN restriction to stream content through Netflix that they are no longer "entitled to" according to the changed rule, everybody still wins: Netflix and the rights holder still get paid for the viewing, and the user still sees what could view before for the same subscribed price.
The big danger from the rights holder's viewpoint is that if Netflix becomes too effective at keeping VPN usage off its system, the users will just start torrenting instead. In that case, Netflix and the rights holder both lose. My feeling is that someone will soon hack around the VPN restriction, and Netflix will quietly allow this to happen.
A dystopia is just another setting, which the characters have an opportunity to push back against. What I'm concerned about here is the futility machine, bred in academia but now broken out into general society, that detests science itself and - looking at the climate issue as an example - automatically rejects any solutions that scientists and engineers might offer.
When my generation was that age, circa 1968, we rejected capitalism even more vocally, with protests and riots rather than tweets. Now look at us.
That's why conservatives are just as afraid of Trump, but for the opposite reason, as the liberals. He's the first candidate to be getting Hitler and Stalin jokes at the same time.
By their very nature, stories which explore future scenarios are going to speculate about every imaginable type of social and political system, and the human cultures that might inhabit them. The one core value I do expect the genre as a whole to hold sacred is a deep-seated respect for science itself and the potential of mankind to use it for its own improvement.
Go ahead and make your spaceship captain a lesbian, if you think your take on such a character would interest the target audience. But make her a person who appreciates science to the extent that she would be far more interested in what new things could be seen through the Thirty Meter Telescope than any reasons the SJWs can come up with to prevent it from being built somewhere.
The opposing position to this basic appreciation for science, in case you think I'm speaking in vacuo, is here: http://dgrnewsservice.org/civi...
This is the kind of thinking I want to see the Rabid Puppies blow to hell.
"There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. "
This is true for humans in general.
Trump went five for five today so expect their control of our lives to only increase.
It is highly unlikely that Trump has a SF plank in his platform.
"I'd be happy if they supported Unicode here, for our European, etc., friends to properly spell certain proper nouns."
Even for the terminally xenophobic, there are words used in this country that include the macron and 'okina characters. Then there's that one county in New Hampshire with an umlaut in its name.
"There is no need for Unicode here at Slashdot."
[Little yellow round face spewing a pile of vomit]
What we want to do is answer the question: can VR contribute something to the meeting experience that current conferencing tech does not?
The article sidebar cites social VR as a way to get the tech rolling. How about a generic business meeting app? Simple avatars like the ones in Second Life would suffice here, because the participants in a specific situation already know each other and are limited in number, so there is no need to get fancy. What would be important is the ways in which people could interact virtually in a meeting space? Could they exchange meaningful informational as easily as face-to-face without the infernal overhead of arranging conference rooms and interrupting normal work routines.