Yeah I remember one program that got styles right: FrameMaker. Whenever I try to make a text document with OOO, I start cursing. For chrissake, vanilla CSS has better styling system. Don't reply, I'll go read the manual...
That is unlikely. I think it would require deep packet inspection to work. You do not really need your provider's DNS (although it is useful when it works properly). You should be able to run a minimal DNS server locally and set it to bypass your ISP and go to higher level servers.
I agree completely. If they had the slightest urge to innovate, they would have already. But they would rather do nothing and milk their copyright cow to death. Comparing them to SCO is very appropriate: just like the actions of SCO were inconsequential for OS development, those of RIAA are quickly becoming irrelevant for development of music as an art form.
None of the four are property, nor are intended by law to
be similar to property. The first 2 are exclusive rights, i.e. government-granted
monopolies, and are temporary by design.
They are milking a dead cow, man. It's their choice.
May be they are doing it because their bean counters told them that it will
maximize profits within next 4 quarters, which is arguably true. In defense
of this strategy (but not their ethics or public image), they may get away with it.
They don't really need to innovate. They just need to relaunch freaking
Napster with a reasonable fee: 2 cent per MiB or so. They are not missing
a train: that's a myth; there is no train to miss. Distribution is so easy,
a zombie could do it. The only way to make money for coke parties is
through clever marketing, and they have it down. They are just being royal
jerks. I sincerely hope that they will damage their image enough to
be out-competed and supplanted by just as cut-throat, but different brands.
Corporations gotta learn that they just cannot ignore long-term consequences,
if they want to see long-term profits.
To begin with, I understand that there are costs involved in preparing your research paper, so I basically agree with B) authors paying, but authors are already paying by investing an incredible amount of their personal time anyway. I am very much against A) subscribers paying, though. I am arguing that if the costs are low enough, it is better for everyone if authors absorb all costs and make their research public.
Your entire premise sounds like one of those "spherical body on a frictionless surface" problems that deal in the ideal instead of reality.
I may be guilty of oversimplifying a bit, but let's talk about it.
In the real world, you need people like editors who generally have families to feed and require salaries.
Some researchers are qualified enough not to need an editor. Most probably are not, but they can hire one. The price can be quite low, depending on the nature of the work. When one uses this option, there is no need to give up copyrights.
A lot of money goes into organizing such a publication...
Organizing what? If someone is so dense that he cannot even use MS Word to slam some paragraphs, pictures, and references together, he will still only need one typist and one editor. Once you have a PDF with your study, the act of publishing on the Internet costs almost nothing and takes almost no effort.
Journals that operate like that exist today. Not surprisingly, they're of extremely low quality.
I don't think you justify this last statement in any way. Regardless even of how subjective it is, there are many fine counterexamples of self-published research, especially in math and computer science.
You get what you pay for.
WTF? Do you prefer Britannica over Wikipedia? MS Word over LaTeX? This is information we are talking about, not potatoes or furniture.
I am not sure what your argument is anymore. I maintain that the peer review is a fundamental requirement for the advancement of science, I hope we have no disagreement here. I also recognize that publishing in a commercial journal is considered a necessity in many fields. I am simply saying: let us break this pattern. There is nothing wrong with self-publishing. There are very cheap ways to organize peer review exchange.
There are many instances where editing is cheap or not needed at all. I believe that if one can self-publish this way, they should.
There is no compelling reason to reserve copying rights for scientific research which helps to improve our society. This should be very clear to anyone who is doing science: every industrialized society has a gigantic army of people who get paid a flat rate (straight out of taxes) for doing nothing but teaching and research. Copyright or no copyright, research will be done just as well. And there is no compelling reason to believe that your research is "good" only after you got reamed from behind by a for-profit publisher, especially if that made your paper less accessible than it could have been on your personal website.
I don't see any way we can have organized, peer-reviewed science without A) subscribers paying or B) authors paying.
The marginal cost of publishing on the Internet is zero and the one time cost could as well be zero for university employees in countries with developed Internet. The only thing that takes a lot of work is peer review. Optimally, you need a mediator who assigns specialists for a double-masked review. With modern technology this can be done very cheaply, by a single non-profit that does nothing else. Notice that you do not need to pay for the actuall review: members will do it for free. A nominal fee may be collected to support a small staff of mediators. A single mediator can easily process dozens of review requests per day: they just need to go into the database, get a random pick of reviewers who meet minimum requirements (field of study, topics of works that are notorious [1] in the scientific community) and email the assignment. Gosh, a computer could probably do it almost as well, and a lot faster!
I agree almost completely. I think you do not go far enough in explaining just how whiny
distributors are. They are not completely doomed, they never will be. They merely have to scale
back a bit, but they make enough noise to make us think that they are being roasted alive.
The crowd of complacent consumers will never abandon the warmth and familiarity of Mom's Robot Oil.
Most people want to be into pop. A lot (if not most) of people want to be on the same
page with others, as far as art and opinions go. A lot of people are willing to pay premium
for utter crap just so that they can wave their expensive crap in front of hungry people.
A lot of people just outright believe ads (yes, they are that stupid). Big publishers and big
distributors will always have this crowd. They just have to charge a bit less now. They have no
excuse for being such jerks and suing non-commercial sharers.
And don't say "just publish it on the web" -- it's not going to be taken seriously in your peer community without publication in recognized journals in your field.
May be not by you, but I do not see any difference between private or corporate publishing, as long as the peer review process is similar. If someone gets her papers reviewed by 3 or 4 academics who are recognized specialists in the field and then puts them on her website, why should I trust that research any less? I would place my trust, first of all, in a paper that I personally read and understood (if I happen to be an expert), and then also in a paper that was read and understood by specialists. If you do not consider it good science, or if you do not see that we should, as academics, promote the option of non-commercial publishing, as long as it is backed up by a sound peer review, I am sorry to hear that.
As far as I understand, the built-in (TLS?) encryption is not end to end. In particular, the server can read everything. The functionality I want is provided by otr. It is really sad that this is not a part of every communication standard.
That sure sounds like zealotry that removes choice from the user.
Stop with the nonsense. Explain to us how does Stallman saying anything takes choice away from the user. Are you, personally, experiencing a lack of choice due to his actions? Does Mozilla? Can Mozilla still use GPLed code? Yes. Do they have to listen to Stallman? No. Can they put up a gigantic free poster of Stallman in their office and hurl a dart at it every time someone says "GNU/Linux"? Yes. I do not understand your beef with the guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is modding this insightful? The parent has find and grep confused, as far as I can tell.
Best. Car. Analogy. Ever.
Yeah I remember one program that got styles right: FrameMaker. Whenever I try to make a text document with OOO, I start cursing. For chrissake, vanilla CSS has better styling system. Don't reply, I'll go read the manual...
That is unlikely. I think it would require deep packet inspection to work. You do not really need your provider's DNS (although it is useful when it works properly). You should be able to run a minimal DNS server locally and set it to bypass your ISP and go to higher level servers.
It sucks that a provider's DNS is broken. Still, you can run your own caching DNS server and forward your requests to servers that work.
I agree completely. If they had the slightest urge to innovate, they would have already. But they would rather do nothing and milk their copyright cow to death. Comparing them to SCO is very appropriate: just like the actions of SCO were inconsequential for OS development, those of RIAA are quickly becoming irrelevant for development of music as an art form.
Property also is a physical object. The restriction is spatial.
Actually, the planet itself is the most intelligent thing around. I agree. Conflating intelligence and survival rate is not very intelligent.
They are milking a dead cow, man. It's their choice. May be they are doing it because their bean counters told them that it will maximize profits within next 4 quarters, which is arguably true. In defense of this strategy (but not their ethics or public image), they may get away with it. They don't really need to innovate. They just need to relaunch freaking Napster with a reasonable fee: 2 cent per MiB or so. They are not missing a train: that's a myth; there is no train to miss. Distribution is so easy, a zombie could do it. The only way to make money for coke parties is through clever marketing, and they have it down. They are just being royal jerks. I sincerely hope that they will damage their image enough to be out-competed and supplanted by just as cut-throat, but different brands. Corporations gotta learn that they just cannot ignore long-term consequences, if they want to see long-term profits.
Wow. Are you serious? Any links?
You can install adblock plus and watch it here with no ads. It's mostly funny.
Is that you, Jon Stewart?
To begin with, I understand that there are costs involved in preparing your research paper, so I basically agree with B) authors paying, but authors are already paying by investing an incredible amount of their personal time anyway. I am very much against A) subscribers paying, though. I am arguing that if the costs are low enough, it is better for everyone if authors absorb all costs and make their research public.
Your entire premise sounds like one of those "spherical body on a frictionless surface" problems that deal in the ideal instead of reality.
I may be guilty of oversimplifying a bit, but let's talk about it.
In the real world, you need people like editors who generally have families to feed and require salaries.
Some researchers are qualified enough not to need an editor. Most probably are not, but they can hire one. The price can be quite low, depending on the nature of the work. When one uses this option, there is no need to give up copyrights.
A lot of money goes into organizing such a publication ...
Organizing what? If someone is so dense that he cannot even use MS Word to slam some paragraphs, pictures, and references together, he will still only need one typist and one editor. Once you have a PDF with your study, the act of publishing on the Internet costs almost nothing and takes almost no effort.
Journals that operate like that exist today. Not surprisingly, they're of extremely low quality.
I don't think you justify this last statement in any way. Regardless even of how subjective it is, there are many fine counterexamples of self-published research, especially in math and computer science.
You get what you pay for.
WTF? Do you prefer Britannica over Wikipedia? MS Word over LaTeX? This is information we are talking about, not potatoes or furniture.
I am not sure what your argument is anymore. I maintain that the peer review is a fundamental requirement for the advancement of science, I hope we have no disagreement here. I also recognize that publishing in a commercial journal is considered a necessity in many fields. I am simply saying: let us break this pattern. There is nothing wrong with self-publishing. There are very cheap ways to organize peer review exchange. There are many instances where editing is cheap or not needed at all. I believe that if one can self-publish this way, they should.
There is no compelling reason to reserve copying rights for scientific research which helps to improve our society. This should be very clear to anyone who is doing science: every industrialized society has a gigantic army of people who get paid a flat rate (straight out of taxes) for doing nothing but teaching and research. Copyright or no copyright, research will be done just as well. And there is no compelling reason to believe that your research is "good" only after you got reamed from behind by a for-profit publisher, especially if that made your paper less accessible than it could have been on your personal website.
I don't see any way we can have organized, peer-reviewed science without A) subscribers paying or B) authors paying.
The marginal cost of publishing on the Internet is zero and the one time cost could as well be zero for university employees in countries with developed Internet. The only thing that takes a lot of work is peer review. Optimally, you need a mediator who assigns specialists for a double-masked review. With modern technology this can be done very cheaply, by a single non-profit that does nothing else. Notice that you do not need to pay for the actuall review: members will do it for free. A nominal fee may be collected to support a small staff of mediators. A single mediator can easily process dozens of review requests per day: they just need to go into the database, get a random pick of reviewers who meet minimum requirements (field of study, topics of works that are notorious [1] in the scientific community) and email the assignment. Gosh, a computer could probably do it almost as well, and a lot faster!
[1] Not "published"! Everything can be published.
Yes, I see. It does indeed look like math is exactly the kind of field where one can get away with self-publishing.
I agree almost completely. I think you do not go far enough in explaining just how whiny distributors are. They are not completely doomed, they never will be. They merely have to scale back a bit, but they make enough noise to make us think that they are being roasted alive. The crowd of complacent consumers will never abandon the warmth and familiarity of Mom's Robot Oil. Most people want to be into pop. A lot (if not most) of people want to be on the same page with others, as far as art and opinions go. A lot of people are willing to pay premium for utter crap just so that they can wave their expensive crap in front of hungry people. A lot of people just outright believe ads (yes, they are that stupid). Big publishers and big distributors will always have this crowd. They just have to charge a bit less now. They have no excuse for being such jerks and suing non-commercial sharers.
And don't say "just publish it on the web" -- it's not going to be taken seriously in your peer community without publication in recognized journals in your field.
May be not by you, but I do not see any difference between private or corporate publishing, as long as the peer review process is similar. If someone gets her papers reviewed by 3 or 4 academics who are recognized specialists in the field and then puts them on her website, why should I trust that research any less? I would place my trust, first of all, in a paper that I personally read and understood (if I happen to be an expert), and then also in a paper that was read and understood by specialists. If you do not consider it good science, or if you do not see that we should, as academics, promote the option of non-commercial publishing, as long as it is backed up by a sound peer review, I am sorry to hear that.
It's been done.
Oh, I thought it was "u sed books tore".
Funny that you bring up math in defend of pragmatism. For a practicing mathematician, purism is not even a choice: it's an occupational hazard.
I stand corrected.
You must be new here.
As far as I understand, the built-in (TLS?) encryption is not end to end. In particular, the server can read everything. The functionality I want is provided by otr. It is really sad that this is not a part of every communication standard.
That sure sounds like zealotry that removes choice from the user.
Stop with the nonsense. Explain to us how does Stallman saying anything takes choice away from the user. Are you, personally, experiencing a lack of choice due to his actions? Does Mozilla? Can Mozilla still use GPLed code? Yes. Do they have to listen to Stallman? No. Can they put up a gigantic free poster of Stallman in their office and hurl a dart at it every time someone says "GNU/Linux"? Yes. I do not understand your beef with the guy.