Actually, in TFA they argue that it's a conflict of interest to be both a tax collector and tax preparer.
With that logic, it's also a conflict of interest for a restaurant to prepare your bill, present it to you, AND collect your money. Instead we should have third-party agencies come in and predict how much your meal SHOULD have cost, and if they're wrong the restaurant gets to charge you extra (several months after the original meal).
I'd say it's more like a replacement for a white board, one which doesn't require special pens. There are plenty of contexts where a whiteboard is currently used-- message board next to a phone or on an office door, grocery lists, daily-special signs in restaurants and stores, etc-- where this could be used just as well. (And you don't have to worry about the pen running dry; in fact, you don't have to worry about a pen at all, since people can use whatever writing implements they have handy, or even just their finger.) I think the primary drawback for those uses is that the board does not seem to allow selective erasing, which would be annoying. It appears that erasing occurs using an electromagnetic field to align the crystals; I wonder if you could put some sort of magnet into an "eraser" and use that to erase portions of the screen?
Is it worth $30? Maybe not (although it's not ridiculously more expensive than a whiteboard, and cheap enough to be an impulse buy for some). But if it's starting out at $30 the price could easily come down a lot if it catches the eye of early adopters, as other writers have suggested. And it will be easy to bring out a Mark II later, with the ability to save, etc.
The whole "software is math" argument is old and debunked. Anything which requires creativity and careful analysis, and the investment therein, is a potentially valuable addition to human knowledge.
You seem to have no idea what mathematics actually is, if you think it doesn't require creativity and careful analysis.
They charge $25/paper so that university libraries will continue to pay for full access for their users. If the papers were free, libraries could stop subscribing to the journals and the funding would dry up. As it is, I doubt that very many people pay the $25; at least I hope not. If any are, I suggest becoming acquainted with the nearest university library (and if you're a scholar, even an unemployed/underemployed one, try to become affiliated with the appropriate department of a local college or university. While I was teaching at a community college a couple years ago, I was also a Research Assistant Professor at the local university-- no salary, but I got a grand title and, more importantly, checkout and online-periodical privileges at the campus library.)
The villain never sees himself or herself as evil. To them there is a perfectly justifiable reason for their actions.
Add to that the phenomenon of emergence, where the whole is different from the sum of its parts. An organization can be evil even if its members are not.
David Brin's Earth predicted just such a society, where privacy/secrecy is distasteful and actually illegal, to boot. (That was after we nuked Switzerland....)
The light passes through all the slits UNLESS the wavefunction collapses, in which case the light goes through one specific slit. More generally, a particle's wavefunction is a superposition which describes all possible positions in the Universe, and so if the wavefunction is collapsed, there is a small but ridiculously low probability that it will appear on Mars.
Mind you, as an explanation for virgin birth, I do find quantum mechanics unsatisfying.:) The probabilities are much too low for really strange things to occur. However, quantum mechanics describes a universe in which there is so much we do not know and CANNOT know: the state of a single photon, for instance, is described by a continuous variable, but only one bit of that variable is accessible. That leaves plenty of room in which a Master Programmer can tweak with the Universe without our knowing about it. (And yes, I know about Bell's theorem on hidden variables, but I'm not trying to construct a formal theory of the physics of miracles here, just proposing a philosophical argument.)
The other thing I'd really love to see is a piratebay solely for academic papers...
I have seen web communities (e.g. on LiveJournal) where people request copies of articles; less centralized than piratebay, but more likely to fly under the radar too.
But my statement was about the marginal cost of distribution per copy.
Their optimal profit is obtained at a certain price, regardless of the initial cost of conversion. Of course, they may be making an emotional decision rather than a rational one: "We spent $30 to convert this article, and dammit, we're not going to let anyone have it for a price that doesn't recover our cost... even if that means nobody buys it, and we don't get any money at all, and it hurts our bottom line."
My problem was that I misunderstood the term "marginal cost" to mean "the cost per sale", not "the cost to make an additional copy, after initial overhead". Sorry about that.
I wonder how many people they get to pay those $30/paper fees a year? Who's their market? Professors can get the papers through their library or ILL. Maybe industry? Hobbyists? People who don't know about ILL?
a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero.
This probably isn't true in this case: unless they're popular, single academic papers from 1979 are likely to have few readers, and you might be the only person to pay the cost of translating said paper over to an electronic format. That wouldn't cost $32 to do, of course, but it's not as close to zero as the cost of a popular song or software package. I think your suggested $10 would be much more reasonable. The real reason for charging is to get university libraries to pay for the entire archive, but surely evne a $5 or $10 price point for older articles would be enough of a nuisance to convince libraries to buy archive access.
A suggestion if it hasn't occurred to you (if you'll pardon my gall in offering advice to a complete stranger): you might be able to get electronic copies of papers through ILL via your community college library. If not, you might try to get an affiliation with that university down the road: that may give you online access to those journals through their library. If that university isn't game, perhaps an alma mater would be willing to extend affilation to you. I did this while unemployed and while teaching at a community college, and it was very useful.
The distinction between a religion and a cult, to my mind, isn't the quality of their beliefs-- we all believe utterly ridiculous things. (Do you actually believe in the *electron*? Or that we're all actually collections of waves? Quantum mechanics is as ridiculous as the virgin birth-- in fact, quantum mechanics ALLOWS for the virgin birth, since everything is possible (if highly improbable) in quantum mechanics). The difference is in the sincerity of the religion/cult's founders and leadership: do *they* believe in what they're saying, and are they primarily motivated by their belief? I personally think that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, Buddhism, etc were founded in all sincerity, and even through the contempt I feel for the evangelical Christian movement, and for the Pope (speaking as a Catholic), I think they are acting from a position of sincerity.
Scientology, on the other hand, was founded by a science fiction writer who is on record saying that founding a fake religion would be a great way to make money. Now, I think there are a number of Scientologists who are sincerely so, but I don't trust their leadership, and that makes them a cult to me.
Girls play with trucks AND dolls; little boys, however, are still told that they can only play with certain toys and do certain things, and so dresses and dolls are still considered "girl" toys because they're the only ones who get to play with them. No one bats an eye if a little girl wants to wear "boys' clothes" to school, but if a little boy wants to wear a dress, we all freak out a little bit.
Not to deny the genetic differences, but the gender revolution isn't done yet: boys are still basically stuck in the same gender roles they were in in the 50's.
I'd also like to add #3: Parents taking little to no interest in their child's education,
Part of this is economics. In the days when a family could live off of one person's salary, parents had time and energy to spend with kids at home. With wages stagnant for years now, lower-class parents have to work longer hours, and are exhausted when they're at home. They're not neglecting their children's education out of laziness, they're doing it out of necessity. Those parents who can work two jobs AND teach their children are heroes, not the norm.
I'm not volunteering to run it, mind you, but this calls for a campaign directed at the artists, to encourage them to get out from underneath the RIAA's thumb. Extol the merits of Creative Commons, of self-publishing, etc. Set up a website keeping track of those artists who've reclaimed their copyright, and cheer with each new name. It looks like there is a time limit on this, and some of the artists might not hear about it or might not think it's important.
It won't work on everyone, and some artists might be just as bad or worse than the RIAA, but overall the more copyrights the RIAA loses, the better it will be for everyone (except them).
As an academic, let me say: if you can't program, please don't teach (programming). Because you will probably suck at it.
The saying "If you can't do, teach" is the reason mathematics education is so very very bad in this country: 11-12 years of math and college students can't solve 2x=6? It's because so many teachers teaching math in elementary schools hate and are scared of math. And they pass it along.
I counter your anecdote with mine: we gave up cable a year ago, but I would certainly consider paying for Hulu, so long as the price was reasonable (i.e., much less than cable or iTunes would cost for a month of television). In fact, if they offered to give me ad-free programming for something like $5/month, I might consider that as well.
And broadcast TV is useless for me anymore: I've gotten too used to watching shows when *I* have the time, not when they're scheduled to be on; and I like being able to watch from any room in the house, not just on the television. I could get TIVO, but now we're not talking "free on broadcast TV" anymore.
The question is: what sacrifice is Murdoch making by having headlines from his companies turn up on Google? The only possible answer is that he is losing money because of it, and yet you say that if he rejects Google, he also loses money. Simple logic: if accepting Google loses money and rejecting Google loses money, then maybe Google has nothing to do with it whatsoever, and he's just looking for (a) a scapegoat for the failings of his own industry, and/or (b) a handout from a wealthy company.
I know nothing about this case, but this rating system sounds like a most egregious kind of censorship. Maybe people would notice it more if governments required this sort of review for books: "Sorry, Mr. King, you'll have to excise the following pages or else you won't be allowed to sell your book in Australia." Voluntary industry system: fine. Boycott by leading stores: fine. Government control: Taliban wannabe.
Are the US (Patriot Act), the UK (cameras everywhere), and Australia (obvious) in some sort of three-way competition for "dumbest repressive laws"? Maybe in a couple of years they will tally up the scores, declare a winner, and we can return to sanity?
You're right: if a copyright is important to you, you should register it for maximum protection. I'm looking at it from the consumers' point of view, though, where every published work is a potential minefield unless it is explicitly placed in the public domain. It's in the murky gray area between registered copyright and public domain where owners and users alike get shafted.
Also, in the US you do not have to register it to own the copyright. Placing a copyright notice on the work is sufficient.
You don't even need the notice; every bloody thing you write is copyrighted unless explicitly released into the public domain. That's one of the many screwed-up things about US copyright law; you can have copyrighted material which gives you no indication as to who owns the copyright, let alone how to contact them. If you want to sue for damages, though, then registration will get you a better payoff; and registration serves as proof of ownership, in case there is a dispute over who actually wrote a particular song.
OK, so you don't give Google *THE* private key you use, but what if you allow GMail to generate a different private key for you with which it signs/encrypts emails? That would be more secure than nothing at all, though of course it depends on Google's security. If Google were geeky enough, it could allow you to prove your identity to it with your private key (or other method), and then tell your email recipients that they at least are satisfied that you are who you say you are.
The key thing is that it gets people used to the idea of email encryption and signatures, a concept which few have even considered. Once people are thinking about encrypting their emails, then some will start questioning the security of Gmail and want to know how to increase their security, and they will become interested in client-side solutions, at least for important documents.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in TFA they argue that it's a conflict of interest to be both a tax collector and tax preparer.
With that logic, it's also a conflict of interest for a restaurant to prepare your bill, present it to you, AND collect your money. Instead we should have third-party agencies come in and predict how much your meal SHOULD have cost, and if they're wrong the restaurant gets to charge you extra (several months after the original meal).
You stay special, Intuit.
I'd say it's more like a replacement for a white board, one which doesn't require special pens. There are plenty of contexts where a whiteboard is currently used-- message board next to a phone or on an office door, grocery lists, daily-special signs in restaurants and stores, etc-- where this could be used just as well. (And you don't have to worry about the pen running dry; in fact, you don't have to worry about a pen at all, since people can use whatever writing implements they have handy, or even just their finger.) I think the primary drawback for those uses is that the board does not seem to allow selective erasing, which would be annoying. It appears that erasing occurs using an electromagnetic field to align the crystals; I wonder if you could put some sort of magnet into an "eraser" and use that to erase portions of the screen?
Is it worth $30? Maybe not (although it's not ridiculously more expensive than a whiteboard, and cheap enough to be an impulse buy for some). But if it's starting out at $30 the price could easily come down a lot if it catches the eye of early adopters, as other writers have suggested. And it will be easy to bring out a Mark II later, with the ability to save, etc.
Viruses tend to find MacOS too arrogant an environment to survive in.
Making our arrogance is an adaptive self-defense mechanism. So shove off, Windoze loser. :)
The whole "software is math" argument is old and debunked. Anything which requires creativity and careful analysis, and the investment therein, is a potentially valuable addition to human knowledge.
You seem to have no idea what mathematics actually is, if you think it doesn't require creativity and careful analysis.
They charge $25/paper so that university libraries will continue to pay for full access for their users. If the papers were free, libraries could stop subscribing to the journals and the funding would dry up. As it is, I doubt that very many people pay the $25; at least I hope not. If any are, I suggest becoming acquainted with the nearest university library (and if you're a scholar, even an unemployed/underemployed one, try to become affiliated with the appropriate department of a local college or university. While I was teaching at a community college a couple years ago, I was also a Research Assistant Professor at the local university-- no salary, but I got a grand title and, more importantly, checkout and online-periodical privileges at the campus library.)
The villain never sees himself or herself as evil. To them there is a perfectly justifiable reason for their actions.
Add to that the phenomenon of emergence, where the whole is different from the sum of its parts. An organization can be evil even if its members are not.
David Brin's Earth predicted just such a society, where privacy/secrecy is distasteful and actually illegal, to boot. (That was after we nuked Switzerland....)
The light passes through all the slits UNLESS the wavefunction collapses, in which case the light goes through one specific slit. More generally, a particle's wavefunction is a superposition which describes all possible positions in the Universe, and so if the wavefunction is collapsed, there is a small but ridiculously low probability that it will appear on Mars.
Mind you, as an explanation for virgin birth, I do find quantum mechanics unsatisfying. :) The probabilities are much too low for really strange things to occur. However, quantum mechanics describes a universe in which there is so much we do not know and CANNOT know: the state of a single photon, for instance, is described by a continuous variable, but only one bit of that variable is accessible. That leaves plenty of room in which a Master Programmer can tweak with the Universe without our knowing about it. (And yes, I know about Bell's theorem on hidden variables, but I'm not trying to construct a formal theory of the physics of miracles here, just proposing a philosophical argument.)
The other thing I'd really love to see is a piratebay solely for academic papers...
I have seen web communities (e.g. on LiveJournal) where people request copies of articles; less centralized than piratebay, but more likely to fly under the radar too.
But my statement was about the marginal cost of distribution per copy.
Their optimal profit is obtained at a certain price, regardless of the initial cost of conversion. Of course, they may be making an emotional decision rather than a rational one: "We spent $30 to convert this article, and dammit, we're not going to let anyone have it for a price that doesn't recover our cost ... even if that means nobody buys it, and we don't get any money at all, and it hurts our bottom line."
My problem was that I misunderstood the term "marginal cost" to mean "the cost per sale", not "the cost to make an additional copy, after initial overhead". Sorry about that.
I wonder how many people they get to pay those $30/paper fees a year? Who's their market? Professors can get the papers through their library or ILL. Maybe industry? Hobbyists? People who don't know about ILL?
a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero.
This probably isn't true in this case: unless they're popular, single academic papers from 1979 are likely to have few readers, and you might be the only person to pay the cost of translating said paper over to an electronic format. That wouldn't cost $32 to do, of course, but it's not as close to zero as the cost of a popular song or software package. I think your suggested $10 would be much more reasonable. The real reason for charging is to get university libraries to pay for the entire archive, but surely evne a $5 or $10 price point for older articles would be enough of a nuisance to convince libraries to buy archive access.
A suggestion if it hasn't occurred to you (if you'll pardon my gall in offering advice to a complete stranger): you might be able to get electronic copies of papers through ILL via your community college library. If not, you might try to get an affiliation with that university down the road: that may give you online access to those journals through their library. If that university isn't game, perhaps an alma mater would be willing to extend affilation to you. I did this while unemployed and while teaching at a community college, and it was very useful.
The distinction between a religion and a cult, to my mind, isn't the quality of their beliefs-- we all believe utterly ridiculous things. (Do you actually believe in the *electron*? Or that we're all actually collections of waves? Quantum mechanics is as ridiculous as the virgin birth-- in fact, quantum mechanics ALLOWS for the virgin birth, since everything is possible (if highly improbable) in quantum mechanics). The difference is in the sincerity of the religion/cult's founders and leadership: do *they* believe in what they're saying, and are they primarily motivated by their belief? I personally think that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, Buddhism, etc were founded in all sincerity, and even through the contempt I feel for the evangelical Christian movement, and for the Pope (speaking as a Catholic), I think they are acting from a position of sincerity.
Scientology, on the other hand, was founded by a science fiction writer who is on record saying that founding a fake religion would be a great way to make money. Now, I think there are a number of Scientologists who are sincerely so, but I don't trust their leadership, and that makes them a cult to me.
Health care in the US may be great, but the health insurance system blows. Note the difference!
Girls play with trucks AND dolls; little boys, however, are still told that they can only play with certain toys and do certain things, and so dresses and dolls are still considered "girl" toys because they're the only ones who get to play with them. No one bats an eye if a little girl wants to wear "boys' clothes" to school, but if a little boy wants to wear a dress, we all freak out a little bit.
Not to deny the genetic differences, but the gender revolution isn't done yet: boys are still basically stuck in the same gender roles they were in in the 50's.
I'd also like to add #3: Parents taking little to no interest in their child's education,
Part of this is economics. In the days when a family could live off of one person's salary, parents had time and energy to spend with kids at home. With wages stagnant for years now, lower-class parents have to work longer hours, and are exhausted when they're at home. They're not neglecting their children's education out of laziness, they're doing it out of necessity. Those parents who can work two jobs AND teach their children are heroes, not the norm.
So #4: the economy sucks.
I'm not volunteering to run it, mind you, but this calls for a campaign directed at the artists, to encourage them to get out from underneath the RIAA's thumb. Extol the merits of Creative Commons, of self-publishing, etc. Set up a website keeping track of those artists who've reclaimed their copyright, and cheer with each new name. It looks like there is a time limit on this, and some of the artists might not hear about it or might not think it's important.
It won't work on everyone, and some artists might be just as bad or worse than the RIAA, but overall the more copyrights the RIAA loses, the better it will be for everyone (except them).
If you can't program, you teach.
As an academic, let me say: if you can't program, please don't teach (programming). Because you will probably suck at it.
The saying "If you can't do, teach" is the reason mathematics education is so very very bad in this country: 11-12 years of math and college students can't solve 2x=6? It's because so many teachers teaching math in elementary schools hate and are scared of math. And they pass it along.
I counter your anecdote with mine: we gave up cable a year ago, but I would certainly consider paying for Hulu, so long as the price was reasonable (i.e., much less than cable or iTunes would cost for a month of television). In fact, if they offered to give me ad-free programming for something like $5/month, I might consider that as well.
And broadcast TV is useless for me anymore: I've gotten too used to watching shows when *I* have the time, not when they're scheduled to be on; and I like being able to watch from any room in the house, not just on the television. I could get TIVO, but now we're not talking "free on broadcast TV" anymore.
You are right about what he's looking for. But Google is hurting his business by making access to his competitors' products easy and cheap/free.
And if he actually said, "No fair! Google is helping my competitors make money!" he would be laughed at (hopefully).
The question is: what sacrifice is Murdoch making by having headlines from his companies turn up on Google? The only possible answer is that he is losing money because of it, and yet you say that if he rejects Google, he also loses money. Simple logic: if accepting Google loses money and rejecting Google loses money, then maybe Google has nothing to do with it whatsoever, and he's just looking for (a) a scapegoat for the failings of his own industry, and/or (b) a handout from a wealthy company.
I know nothing about this case, but this rating system sounds like a most egregious kind of censorship. Maybe people would notice it more if governments required this sort of review for books: "Sorry, Mr. King, you'll have to excise the following pages or else you won't be allowed to sell your book in Australia." Voluntary industry system: fine. Boycott by leading stores: fine. Government control: Taliban wannabe.
Are the US (Patriot Act), the UK (cameras everywhere), and Australia (obvious) in some sort of three-way competition for "dumbest repressive laws"? Maybe in a couple of years they will tally up the scores, declare a winner, and we can return to sanity?
You're right: if a copyright is important to you, you should register it for maximum protection. I'm looking at it from the consumers' point of view, though, where every published work is a potential minefield unless it is explicitly placed in the public domain. It's in the murky gray area between registered copyright and public domain where owners and users alike get shafted.
True; change that to say "one of the many screwed-up things about the Berne Convention."
Also, in the US you do not have to register it to own the copyright. Placing a copyright notice on the work is sufficient.
You don't even need the notice; every bloody thing you write is copyrighted unless explicitly released into the public domain. That's one of the many screwed-up things about US copyright law; you can have copyrighted material which gives you no indication as to who owns the copyright, let alone how to contact them. If you want to sue for damages, though, then registration will get you a better payoff; and registration serves as proof of ownership, in case there is a dispute over who actually wrote a particular song.
OK, so you don't give Google *THE* private key you use, but what if you allow GMail to generate a different private key for you with which it signs/encrypts emails? That would be more secure than nothing at all, though of course it depends on Google's security. If Google were geeky enough, it could allow you to prove your identity to it with your private key (or other method), and then tell your email recipients that they at least are satisfied that you are who you say you are.
The key thing is that it gets people used to the idea of email encryption and signatures, a concept which few have even considered. Once people are thinking about encrypting their emails, then some will start questioning the security of Gmail and want to know how to increase their security, and they will become interested in client-side solutions, at least for important documents.