Some facts:
1. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw have as part of their business model charging people to use their service.
2. If a public library subscribes to a resource, then individuals can go there to use it without any charge to themselves.
3. Moreover, many public libraries provide remote access to electronic resources, so that people can use them from home (or from their offices).
From these it seems to follow that, if these companies agree to license their products to public libraries, then they are loosing out on income. People will just hop over to the library website, log on to the proxy server, and get access that way, rather than giving LN/Westlaw their credit card numbers.
So, ummmmm, if these companies are out to make many, why would it make sense for them to license to public libraries? Note that I'm not saying that this isn't a a bad thing, but these guys are in the business of making money, not being nice.
...I think all schools of higher learning are for-profit....
Most are. But some companies like the University of Phoenix are for-profit. Right now they have a
dot-com domain. Will that be changing soon, I wonder?
Umm... Maybe my grip on English is slipping, but I have no idea what the line "[they have] stopped simply signing up new customers for the sake of counting them" is supposed to mean. Anyone care to parse this for me? Best I can make out of is their saying "we aren't clever enough to get a current membership count at the same time as we are adding new subscribers." Am I missing something?
(30 seconds later)Jeebus! I finally got it to parse: "AOL used to sign up new members, not because it would increase revenue, but because it would increase their total number of subscribers (which presumably had some marketing value on its own). They have stopped this, and now expect to make money from their users." Someone, please explain the concept of scope ambiguity to the author of that article!!!
The first motive might be part of their thinking, but it would have some pretty bizarre upshots in other applications. Neal Stevenson worked long and hard on Crytonomicon, but suppose someone only wants to read the WWII stuff. Is it a violation of his "artistic freedom" for them to just skip over certain chapters? If publishers somehow could audit which chapters people are reading, could they then sue someone who doesn't read the whole book?
The analogy here to what ClearPlay is doing, I guess, would be someone who puts up a website that says "Chapters a,b,c are about WWII, chapters x,y,z are about the data haven." It's absurd to think that the publisher could force such a website to be taken down.
When I was a T.A. a few years ago, we were told by our department that we should have averages of B-. (That was quite harsh by the standards of other liberal arts departments in the university.) Given that, my "curve" was easy. Plot the grades -- if my exams and papers were at all fair, it would be a relatively normal distribution. The mean/median was the cut-off between B and B-. Then, the other cut-offs were the inflection points: an A was anything over the median plus one standard deviation, and a C was anything under the median minus one standard deviation. Of course, since these were philosophy classes, I had an awful time trying to explain this to the mostly-humanities students!;-)
"Apple would have been better off telling people, when they first configure the machine, to simply enter a special administrative password, separate from their normal password."
Sounds like WinXP. And, how many thousands of people never bother entering a password, and so have non-password-protected Admin accounts on their machine?
According to
this article, MLB is continuing to alienate fans, this time by threatending fan-run websites: "On July 5, a letter from Major League Baseball's legal department arrived, telling [the webmaster of a site devoted to the Houston Astros] he was in copyright violation. He had run photographs of players in Astros uniforms."
Slashdot Mirror
1. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw have as part of their business model charging people to use their service.
2. If a public library subscribes to a resource, then individuals can go there to use it without any charge to themselves.
3. Moreover, many public libraries provide remote access to electronic resources, so that people can use them from home (or from their offices).
From these it seems to follow that, if these companies agree to license their products to public libraries, then they are loosing out on income. People will just hop over to the library website, log on to the proxy server, and get access that way, rather than giving LN/Westlaw their credit card numbers.
So, ummmmm, if these companies are out to make many, why would it make sense for them to license to public libraries? Note that I'm not saying that this isn't a a bad thing, but these guys are in the business of making money, not being nice.
So, *that* is why Pete Townshend never heard back from his MP!
(30 seconds later)Jeebus! I finally got it to parse: "AOL used to sign up new members, not because it would increase revenue, but because it would increase their total number of subscribers (which presumably had some marketing value on its own). They have stopped this, and now expect to make money from their users." Someone, please explain the concept of scope ambiguity to the author of that article!!!
The analogy here to what ClearPlay is doing, I guess, would be someone who puts up a website that says "Chapters a,b,c are about WWII, chapters x,y,z are about the data haven." It's absurd to think that the publisher could force such a website to be taken down.
When I was a T.A. a few years ago, we were told by our department that we should have averages of B-. (That was quite harsh by the standards of other liberal arts departments in the university.) Given that, my "curve" was easy. Plot the grades -- if my exams and papers were at all fair, it would be a relatively normal distribution. The mean/median was the cut-off between B and B-. Then, the other cut-offs were the inflection points: an A was anything over the median plus one standard deviation, and a C was anything under the median minus one standard deviation. Of course, since these were philosophy classes, I had an awful time trying to explain this to the mostly-humanities students! ;-)
Sounds like WinXP. And, how many thousands of people never bother entering a password, and so have non-password-protected Admin accounts on their machine?
Why...must...Spock...die? Why...in eight days? Explain!
According to this article, MLB is continuing to alienate fans, this time by threatending fan-run websites: "On July 5, a letter from Major League Baseball's legal department arrived, telling [the webmaster of a site devoted to the Houston Astros] he was in copyright violation. He had run photographs of players in Astros uniforms."
Oops. There's a space between the 'dot' and the 'html' in the URL here which browsers will encode as %20. Here it is again, w/o the space: http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Kiosk-HOWTO.ht ml.