Ultimately it comes down to money (and I don't mean that in a snide
conspiracy way).
It costs a fair bit of money to create and operate a system
as expansive as JSTOR, not to mention the high cost of acquiring the journals
themselves.
That's a problem with copyright mostly. Much of the JSTOR
content should be (it obviously isn't) public domain already. The high cost of journals is entirely due to for-profit companies such as Elsevier artificially raising prices. They can do that because they ask for (and receive) the copyright for the articles written by academics.
It should come as no surprise of course that even as a non-profit, JSTOR has
to charge for access to journals for two reasons.
On the contrary, this is (should be viewed as) surprising. There is no technical reason why this should be so. In an ideal world, JSTOR would scan documents, and make them available. These documents could be copied around the world, and hosted on mirror sites. Everybody would win, and nobody would have exorbitant bandwith and storage costs. The real problem is copyright prevents this technical solution.
The whole academic journal
system is one big case study in the tragedy of the commons: everyone wants it
for free, but no one wants to pay to operate the journals or the storage
systems.
Wrong. Plenty of universities operate local storage systems for preprints and local documents. It would be trivial to have another directory full of JSTOR content, but the outdated copyright laws stop this from happening.
Consequently, whether journal access is free or not is really up to Congress,
as only government can solve the tragedy of the commons.
There I agree with you. Congress should abolish copyright for academic publications.
Until then however, JSTOR will remain behind a paywall. Someone has to pay
the costs of the journals and the systems, and if it isn't the public then it
will be a private system.
Alternatively, the community will somehow figure out a way to eliminate the
publishers. Either legally, or anonymously. Let's not dismiss the power of what is euphemistically called "creating facts on the ground".
If done right, with a warrant in hand, and a gun to their head, they still
could not decrypt your files.
Duh. You're missing the crucial ingredient: a gun to the head and a blowjob at the same time. That makes every kind of encryption crackable in 5 minutes.
Interesting. But correct me if I am wrong, black mambas don't have feet. My favourite anti theft device for my luggage are feet. Thousands of tiny little feet.
Because the previous method (aka conservation of KE + PE) is not fundamental.
In mechanics, conservation of energy is a _consequence_ of Hamilton's equations: the Hamiltonian is a first integral of the motion. That is why you must look at work, and when you do it is clear that a hollywood style teleportation doesn't do any.
The original question arises because some people are used to thinking
that KE + PE is conserved. If they thought in terms of work done, that
question wouldn't be puzzling.
Christianity, and especially the vatican, are extremely pro-science compared
to other religions.
Wrong. Like any religion, they lay claim to the "higher" truth. What you are talking about is tolerance of a "lower" scientific truth as long as it doesn't usurp the more important higher truth being claimed by the religion. And even that was paid in blood.
To put it bluntly, scientific knowledge is incompatible with gods. We know it, they know it. To preserve face and influence, christian religions will acknowledge science's truth while falsely claiming that there is another truth out there (unproven and full of logically inconsistent claims) which is nevertheless claimed to be coexistent and ultimately more important. Basically, religion is like the kid who says to your face he'll clean up his room but never actually does it.
Potential energy "exists" inside the gravitational field: It represents the total amount of work you have to do to traverse a certain path while being subjected to the effects of the field. For a conservative field like the gravitational one, the amount of work is independent of the actual path when the end points are fixed, and that's the reason, the only reason, why we can associate a single number, called potential energy, with any given height above ground level.
In other words, potential energy is a mathematical shortcut, it saves you from having to compute a work path integral for each problem involving a particle traversing some path in a conservative field. Potential energy is literally a table of precomputed answers. If you have a path from 1000 feet down to 0 feet, you can 1) compute the work over that path or 2) look up the answer from the potential energy table, by subtracting the values at 1000 and 0 respectively. This works because of the fundamental theorem of calculus.
Now onto the question. If you teleport an object from 1000 feet to 0 feet, there is no traversal of the gravitational field by definition. Therefore there is no work being done against the field since there is no continuous path. Therefore there is no energy change experienced by the object since there is no physical work happening that involves it (disregarding whatever mechanism enables the teleportation in the first place).
Thus: At 1000 feet, the object has zero kinetic energy, and has potential energy V(1000). At 0 feet, the object has zero kinetic energy, and has potential energy V(0).
This does violate the conservation of (kinetic + potential energy),
however that quantity is only a convenient approximation of the truth for non-teleportation cases, where the only way of arriving at 0 from 1000 feet is by traversing a continuous path. The truth is that (kinetic + work-over-path) is conserved, in this case, since the path is not continuous.
No. All throughout 200x, there were plenty of open source browsers out there that anyone could modify. KDE's Konqueror had its own engine, and Netscape (remember them?) open sourced their browser too. And that's not counting all the other open source browsers, like Mosaic, Lynx, etc.
The web was stagnant because Microsoft's browser was dominant and didn't follow standards, so it _was_ the standard. A standard that every body else had to copy or they wouldn't render pages as intended. A standard which implemented all the stuff that Microsoft happened to care about, and (naturally) didn't implement stuff they didn't care about. And since Microsoft cared about Office and Windows, and not about web apps, the web didn't progress much.
Now we have browsers being pushed by Google and Apple. And they naturally care about some things, and don't care about others. And if we're stupid enough to define the standard as "whatever Google or Apple do", then we'll have the same bullshit stagnation that we used to have with Microsoft. Open code or closed code makes no difference.
Standards need to be thought through carefully by a wide group of engineers over many years, to make sure they make sense and meet future needs of everybody, not just Google's or Apple's customers.
No software should be a standard itself. Every bug it has becomes something others must copy. And that even includes newer versions of the same software, ie it must remain backwards compatible with itself and every stupid decision the first programmers made becomes unchangeable.
A standard should be a document that has a well defined publication date and versioning system. Unfortunately, Google's dumbass approach to making HTML5 a "living document" where nobody knows what's in and what's out over time is railroading us right back into the bad old days. Don't drink the cool-aid.
You're an ignorant fool. Did you transcribe that argument straight from the music threads or what? Listen to what people are telling you. Everyone gets paid already. In fact, the problem in academia isn't that some people aren't getting paid, it's actually that some extra people are getting paid for no reason at all.
Repeat after me.
Once a paper has been written, everyone has already been paid. Academics are paid for teaching and directing other researchers. By their employer. Which is a university or similar.
Academics also write papers and books. There's no market for those papers and books. A paper gets written to be read by about 10 or 20 people around the world, usually. Those readers aren't going to pay to read this paper, and everyone knows it. Once in a while, a paper gets written for a funding agency. That's another two people who are going to skim the paper without paying for it, and who are going to judge if the research is worthwhile.
Academics can spend years writing a book, for maybe 100 people or so, plus whoever might read it in the future. There's no money in it.
So what? Academics are paid for teaching. Huge classes of unwashed students if they're unlucky. Small groups of highly intelligent and motivated graduate students if they're lucky. Usually a bit of both. But the research they do is for fun and fame. It's like open source work, or pro-bono lawyering, etc: it's a way to give back and become known, which can lead to a better job, with less hours and more pay.
Editing journals is part of that, as is refereeing and writing papers. It's all done for free in their spare time. If it's an expensive journal with money, maybe some top editors will get paid. And that's actually bad. Because those academics will feel like they should put in extra hours to justify the extra pay they get. And so science loses the real research they could be doing instead.
But what is not true is that publishers are some kind of vital part of the academic community. They are leeches, who take journal content for free, and sell it right back to universities for a small fortune. Those $30 papers you find on the net, nobody in their right mind pays for them. They are pure con jobs, designed for gullible fools like you who vaguely know what the academic world is like.
Publishers exist because in the past, they could organize the printing and binding, and disseminate journals around the world. To do so they took away the rights to those journals. That's a useful thing, but it's not worth $30 per article. It's not even worth $0.30 per article these days.
It's worth nothing today, thanks to the Internet.
So the world is stuck in a transition pattern. The old journals which are needed to link today's work with what came before don't belong to the academic community any more, due to copyright laws. And so, every year, university libraries pay the publishers' ransom. Because everybody gets paid already, and after budgeting, there's enough money left to pay the ransom anyway. Except it's evil, and that money could do so much more.
why is DRM a showstopper if you're not purchasing the content?
Wrong question. DRM is among (my) reasons for not purchasing the content
from Netflix.
For instance, Netflix applies content protection (i.e. DRM) to their content,
but you're not purchasing the content, so at no time does it ever interfere
with your use of their service. It's transparent and seamless.
That assumes how I intend to use the service has been worked out in
advance by the company. FYI (and I don't claim to speak for anyone
else, but since you ask) I tend to watch shows nonlinearly, and at high
speed (2x), using custom audio and video filters to compensate. But not always.
As a rule, I'm not particularly interested in fitting into a
predefined use case, nor do I expect any company to cater to my particular whims.
I find an archive of files in standard unencumbered formats to be the easiest
raw material for my aims. I can use the software I want, on the platforms and hardware I want, as the mood strikes me.
You've also pulled out a few metrics that are largely inapplicable when we're
talking about streaming.
True, but the initial question was why would anyone prefer torrenting pirated content when online streaming is possible. I just listed some reasons, which apparently others agree with to some extent.
So, once again, perhaps you could better explain why your showstoppers are
showstoppers, and in what ways you see them applying to Netflix, since I just
don't see it. I could see valid objections if your downloading is capped,
you're on a slow connection, buffering is a complete showstopper, or you
don't believe in the idea of not owning your own content (though if that last
one were your objection, it'd be rather hypocritical of you to then be
torrenting the media), but most of the objections you voiced seem to be
either inapplicable or specious.
I don't torrent media (although I find the technology interesting). I have friends, and I copy bunches of gigabytes off their portable drives when they visit. Or I'll set up a script to scrape off a flash video online.
I actually like having searchable files on my own drives. I don't need to access a website or application to find something, and I can find things much more accurately, because I don't need to search through genres that have no relevance to me.
I also like to be able to find something many years later after I've seen it - how many years has Netflix been in existence? I've been on the net 20 years, and a computer user for 30. Anyway, that last point brings us neatly back to the drawbacks of DRM.
... Having a Samsung phone is like having a nametag that says "hello, i'm a
cheap fucker" on it.
Exactly! I used to be one of those cheap fuckers, and then one day I stuck a couple of home made Apple logo stickers on my Samsung. It changed my life! People in the train now look at me with smiles of awe and self pity in their eyes! It really works, you too can be popular!
why you would use torrent freak when there is Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Hulu,
and dozens of other ways to get video online.
Sorry, but ads and drm are showstoppers. I much prefer pirated content, as it is packaged nicely with attention to the details I care about: good file size and codec, no extraneous content, easily archivable, and no buffering delays.
There's absolutely no reason why a paper thin tablet needs to have RAM, CPU, battery and peripheral connectors. All it needs is one connector, for a cable that attaches to an external computer. Make that computer as big as an MP3 player or at most a phone, and you're set: you can keep the computer in your pocket, and have the screen (only) be the tablet.
People already keep their music players in a pocket, and put up with cables that end in earplugs. Same principle.
That's meaningless. A surgeon is someone who knows how to cut a person with a knife. A good surgeon is someone who knows how to patch up a person in a hospital.
All you're doing is changing the meaning of established words to fit your argument.
While I agree that it is worthwhile to _expose_ as many people as possible to programming, I think you are being overenthusiastic about the expected success rate.
Programming teaches logic,
expression of thought, and troubleshooting: all useful skills in many other
fields.
Yes, except... writing teaches logic and expression of thought too, in a much more freeform and forgiving way. It doesn't even need a computer, just a pen and paper. The fact is that as a civilisation, we aren't doing that well on the simpler problem of writing, why should we do better with the more complex task of programming?
With that said, I agree that not everyone is going to be able to learn. But
it doesn't require any exceptional skills or traits either.
Statistically, I've got to disagree with that statement.
Think about ALL the people in the world. There are billions of people who've learned to write, but how many of those can _really_ write a letter if they have to? I'll accept even people who write with bad grammar and spelling mistakes. All I want is people who can write an actual letter that is sufficiently intelligible to serve a simple purpose.
Well? I expect less than half of those who have learned to write are actually able to do so. And if they can't even write a letter after having been taught the alphabet, neither can they write a program if they would be taught BASIC..
There are plenty of other downsides. When you have 1 device to view N books, you can only do so serially. With paper books, each book has its own built in "screen" and you can open several of them on a table. With paper books, you can look up references easily without typing, whereas ebook readers are really designed to be easy for linear traversal only - just like an audio "book" - but quite unwieldy for random access. With paper books, there are several sizes to suit the content, whereas ebook readers force you to zoom around and tap the screen or some buttons unnecessarily when the size isn't right. Finally, with paper books you get two pages open at the same time, saving you a lot of fiddling with pages that you have to do with ebooks. There's nothing worse to break your concentration than having to press a "next" button after every second paragraph.
That still doesn't explain how in the fuck you get below zero movement, how
can you move less than none?
The short answer is that physicists throw out the "temperature describes amount of molecular movement" definition and replace it with something more abstract.
The abstract definition of temperature allows negative values, and that's ok because nobody cares anymore about molecular movements in that case.
K5's demise was self inflicted. Rusty pissed off the regulars when he took donations and didn't improve the site. Instead, he went off to work for daily kos. The site's main attraction, the moderation queue which filtered out crappy articles was ruined by making the rules too easy. The diaries was the worst idea ever - just a blog roll with trivial personal content nobody cares about. Worst of all, the trolls weren't actively terminated.
I'm surprised the site has "survived" this long - it's been a troll crapfest for at least 8 years now, longer than it was a great site. A great shame.
To some extent, the latter is necessary. For example, when bittorrent users
saturate the shared capacity on a subnet, other users can suffer. A standard
response now is throttling those users.
Are you retarded? That is not neutral.
Duh. That's the point of the network neutrality _debate_.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a problem with copyright mostly. Much of the JSTOR content should be (it obviously isn't) public domain already. The high cost of journals is entirely due to for-profit companies such as Elsevier artificially raising prices. They can do that because they ask for (and receive) the copyright for the articles written by academics.
On the contrary, this is (should be viewed as) surprising. There is no technical reason why this should be so. In an ideal world, JSTOR would scan documents, and make them available. These documents could be copied around the world, and hosted on mirror sites. Everybody would win, and nobody would have exorbitant bandwith and storage costs. The real problem is copyright prevents this technical solution.
Wrong. Plenty of universities operate local storage systems for preprints and local documents. It would be trivial to have another directory full of JSTOR content, but the outdated copyright laws stop this from happening.
There I agree with you. Congress should abolish copyright for academic publications.
Alternatively, the community will somehow figure out a way to eliminate the publishers. Either legally, or anonymously. Let's not dismiss the power of what is euphemistically called "creating facts on the ground".
Duh. You're missing the crucial ingredient: a gun to the head and a blowjob at the same time. That makes every kind of encryption crackable in 5 minutes.
...Unless you happen to share a train with a crowd of 12 year old girls going to a Barbie convention...
Interesting. But correct me if I am wrong, black mambas don't have feet. My favourite anti theft device for my luggage are feet. Thousands of tiny little feet.
The original question arises because some people are used to thinking that KE + PE is conserved. If they thought in terms of work done, that question wouldn't be puzzling.
That's exactly my point.
Wrong. Like any religion, they lay claim to the "higher" truth. What you are talking about is tolerance of a "lower" scientific truth as long as it doesn't usurp the more important higher truth being claimed by the religion. And even that was paid in blood.
To put it bluntly, scientific knowledge is incompatible with gods. We know it, they know it. To preserve face and influence, christian religions will acknowledge science's truth while falsely claiming that there is another truth out there (unproven and full of logically inconsistent claims) which is nevertheless claimed to be coexistent and ultimately more important. Basically, religion is like the kid who says to your face he'll clean up his room but never actually does it.
Of course it's me! I'm a doctor, not a quantum brick-layer!
In other words, potential energy is a mathematical shortcut, it saves you from having to compute a work path integral for each problem involving a particle traversing some path in a conservative field. Potential energy is literally a table of precomputed answers. If you have a path from 1000 feet down to 0 feet, you can 1) compute the work over that path or 2) look up the answer from the potential energy table, by subtracting the values at 1000 and 0 respectively. This works because of the fundamental theorem of calculus.
Now onto the question. If you teleport an object from 1000 feet to 0 feet, there is no traversal of the gravitational field by definition. Therefore there is no work being done against the field since there is no continuous path. Therefore there is no energy change experienced by the object since there is no physical work happening that involves it (disregarding whatever mechanism enables the teleportation in the first place).
Thus: At 1000 feet, the object has zero kinetic energy, and has potential energy V(1000). At 0 feet, the object has zero kinetic energy, and has potential energy V(0).
This does violate the conservation of (kinetic + potential energy), however that quantity is only a convenient approximation of the truth for non-teleportation cases, where the only way of arriving at 0 from 1000 feet is by traversing a continuous path. The truth is that (kinetic + work-over-path) is conserved, in this case, since the path is not continuous.
The web was stagnant because Microsoft's browser was dominant and didn't follow standards, so it _was_ the standard. A standard that every body else had to copy or they wouldn't render pages as intended. A standard which implemented all the stuff that Microsoft happened to care about, and (naturally) didn't implement stuff they didn't care about. And since Microsoft cared about Office and Windows, and not about web apps, the web didn't progress much.
Now we have browsers being pushed by Google and Apple. And they naturally care about some things, and don't care about others. And if we're stupid enough to define the standard as "whatever Google or Apple do", then we'll have the same bullshit stagnation that we used to have with Microsoft. Open code or closed code makes no difference.
Standards need to be thought through carefully by a wide group of engineers over many years, to make sure they make sense and meet future needs of everybody, not just Google's or Apple's customers.
A standard should be a document that has a well defined publication date and versioning system. Unfortunately, Google's dumbass approach to making HTML5 a "living document" where nobody knows what's in and what's out over time is railroading us right back into the bad old days. Don't drink the cool-aid.
Repeat after me.
Once a paper has been written, everyone has already been paid. Academics are paid for teaching and directing other researchers. By their employer. Which is a university or similar.
Academics also write papers and books. There's no market for those papers and books. A paper gets written to be read by about 10 or 20 people around the world, usually. Those readers aren't going to pay to read this paper, and everyone knows it. Once in a while, a paper gets written for a funding agency. That's another two people who are going to skim the paper without paying for it, and who are going to judge if the research is worthwhile.
Academics can spend years writing a book, for maybe 100 people or so, plus whoever might read it in the future. There's no money in it.
So what? Academics are paid for teaching. Huge classes of unwashed students if they're unlucky. Small groups of highly intelligent and motivated graduate students if they're lucky. Usually a bit of both. But the research they do is for fun and fame. It's like open source work, or pro-bono lawyering, etc: it's a way to give back and become known, which can lead to a better job, with less hours and more pay.
Editing journals is part of that, as is refereeing and writing papers. It's all done for free in their spare time. If it's an expensive journal with money, maybe some top editors will get paid. And that's actually bad. Because those academics will feel like they should put in extra hours to justify the extra pay they get. And so science loses the real research they could be doing instead.
But what is not true is that publishers are some kind of vital part of the academic community. They are leeches, who take journal content for free, and sell it right back to universities for a small fortune. Those $30 papers you find on the net, nobody in their right mind pays for them. They are pure con jobs, designed for gullible fools like you who vaguely know what the academic world is like.
Publishers exist because in the past, they could organize the printing and binding, and disseminate journals around the world. To do so they took away the rights to those journals. That's a useful thing, but it's not worth $30 per article. It's not even worth $0.30 per article these days. It's worth nothing today, thanks to the Internet.
So the world is stuck in a transition pattern. The old journals which are needed to link today's work with what came before don't belong to the academic community any more, due to copyright laws. And so, every year, university libraries pay the publishers' ransom. Because everybody gets paid already, and after budgeting, there's enough money left to pay the ransom anyway. Except it's evil, and that money could do so much more.
Wrong question. DRM is among (my) reasons for not purchasing the content from Netflix.
That assumes how I intend to use the service has been worked out in advance by the company. FYI (and I don't claim to speak for anyone else, but since you ask) I tend to watch shows nonlinearly, and at high speed (2x), using custom audio and video filters to compensate. But not always.
As a rule, I'm not particularly interested in fitting into a predefined use case, nor do I expect any company to cater to my particular whims. I find an archive of files in standard unencumbered formats to be the easiest raw material for my aims. I can use the software I want, on the platforms and hardware I want, as the mood strikes me.
True, but the initial question was why would anyone prefer torrenting pirated content when online streaming is possible. I just listed some reasons, which apparently others agree with to some extent.
I don't torrent media (although I find the technology interesting). I have friends, and I copy bunches of gigabytes off their portable drives when they visit. Or I'll set up a script to scrape off a flash video online.
I actually like having searchable files on my own drives. I don't need to access a website or application to find something, and I can find things much more accurately, because I don't need to search through genres that have no relevance to me.
I also like to be able to find something many years later after I've seen it - how many years has Netflix been in existence? I've been on the net 20 years, and a computer user for 30. Anyway, that last point brings us neatly back to the drawbacks of DRM.
Exactly! I used to be one of those cheap fuckers, and then one day I stuck a couple of home made Apple logo stickers on my Samsung. It changed my life! People in the train now look at me with smiles of awe and self pity in their eyes! It really works, you too can be popular!
Sorry, but ads and drm are showstoppers. I much prefer pirated content, as it is packaged nicely with attention to the details I care about: good file size and codec, no extraneous content, easily archivable, and no buffering delays.
People already keep their music players in a pocket, and put up with cables that end in earplugs. Same principle.
That's... Uh... I... I'd say something snarky in Chinese, but words fail me!
All you're doing is changing the meaning of established words to fit your argument.
Yes, except... writing teaches logic and expression of thought too, in a much more freeform and forgiving way. It doesn't even need a computer, just a pen and paper. The fact is that as a civilisation, we aren't doing that well on the simpler problem of writing, why should we do better with the more complex task of programming?
Statistically, I've got to disagree with that statement.
Think about ALL the people in the world. There are billions of people who've learned to write, but how many of those can _really_ write a letter if they have to? I'll accept even people who write with bad grammar and spelling mistakes. All I want is people who can write an actual letter that is sufficiently intelligible to serve a simple purpose.
Well? I expect less than half of those who have learned to write are actually able to do so. And if they can't even write a letter after having been taught the alphabet, neither can they write a program if they would be taught BASIC..
There are plenty of other downsides. When you have 1 device to view N books, you can only do so serially. With paper books, each book has its own built in "screen" and you can open several of them on a table. With paper books, you can look up references easily without typing, whereas ebook readers are really designed to be easy for linear traversal only - just like an audio "book" - but quite unwieldy for random access. With paper books, there are several sizes to suit the content, whereas ebook readers force you to zoom around and tap the screen or some buttons unnecessarily when the size isn't right. Finally, with paper books you get two pages open at the same time, saving you a lot of fiddling with pages that you have to do with ebooks. There's nothing worse to break your concentration than having to press a "next" button after every second paragraph.
nt.
The short answer is that physicists throw out the "temperature describes amount of molecular movement" definition and replace it with something more abstract.
The abstract definition of temperature allows negative values, and that's ok because nobody cares anymore about molecular movements in that case.
I'm surprised the site has "survived" this long - it's been a troll crapfest for at least 8 years now, longer than it was a great site. A great shame.
Duh. That's the point of the network neutrality _debate_.