Bro, I've seen the documentaries "Hostel" & "Hostel 2". I know all about your little Slovakian enterprise - don't try and fool us into believing eastern Europe is anything but a hellish chamber of torture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/11/black-prison-population-increase-england

There was an update and a correction - doesn't really change the absolute numbers, but it does revise some of the comparison relative to the US penal system.

Doesn't mean the UK justice system is free of prejudice, but the correction does paint things in a slightly more forgiving light.

So anybody at your company can just randomly take DBs offline, restore a backup, and put the DB back online, and there's no automation around that, and no control built around who can do it, when they can do it, and what specific dbs they can do it to?

Yeah... that's the sysadmins fault for at least 2 reasons:
1) Failure to manage access appropriate to role: you don't give the janitor root, and you don't give the application developer root logins on production systems.
2) Failure to design an automated workflow for less-expert users to perform a risky task safely. Be it a script, a web app, or some other means, "Take down DB, restore backup, bring DB back up" should be managed by a workflow, and not left up to the user to remember, if you're letting any J. Random User who wants to execute these steps.

There's these stocks known as Blue Chips. You might want to read up on them.

The Lanham Act that covers trademarks? Please explain what provision I'm missing in understanding how that applies to the topic at hand, because I think I'm missing your point there.

There is no double-dipping - they are not granted any rights they do not already have when they join with a collection of like-minded people to engage in collective political speech.

And again: be careful what rights you wish away. If you wish to ban collective speech, you've also just banned speech by unions, religious organizations, minority rights groups, and any other grouping of people you care to name (nearly all of whom incorporate for the financial & lobbying portion of their work, and seek tax exemption as 501(c) organizations). And worth noting: it's not the corporate charter that grants members of those groups their rights to assemble & speak - they already have those rights, by virtue of their existence as individuals - they are simply *exercising it* in a collective manner.

Why should they get them again as part of a corporation?

No, the proper form of that question is: "why should they lose those rights as part of a corporation?" Or as a part of a union, or religious organization, or civic organization, or minority organization, or political party?

Unless you are advocating for a complete ban on all "collective" political speech - including collective organizations like unions, religious groups, civic groups, minority groups, and any other form of grouping you care to name, then your position is logically incoherent, and amounts to wishing away the rights of some people whose views you disagree with and wish to silence. It really is that simple. And even if your position were logically coherent and you wished to ban all collective speech, it would be a fundamental violation of the rights of individuals.

The Constitution specifically affirms that the people have the right to engage in these activities - individually, or collectively. For someone who claims to be "very careful of rights," you seem to be missing that very clear point. Rather than seeking to silence your opponents (curious undemocratic, that!), you should be seeking to propose better opposing ideas, better arguments, and better solutions - and you're free to do so by grouping together with like-minded friends and neighbors and engaging in collective political speech.

And that's WHY I point out the damage that corporations lobbying politicians does to democracy.

Ah yes, lobbying is evil! Well, as long as we disagree with the goals of the lobbyist organization, amirite?

The NRA? Oh they're evil, they lobby the government!
The EFF? They're saints! They fight for our freedoms!

Campaign for Liberty? LOL LIBERTARDIANS! They're stupid and lobby the government with their backwards ideas!
MoveOn.org? They're brave soldiers fighting the good fight for democracy!

But corporations are collections of people - and those individuals making up the corporation have the rights of free assembly and association, free speech, and petition.

A group of people - whether it's a union, a religious group, a minority coalition, a corporation, or some sort of other collective - have the right to pool their resources for a common cause because of those rights, and trying to restrict them from doing so violates anywhere from one to all of those rights.

Be careful which rights of others you start wishing away - you might not always be in the majority.

Well yes, nobody ever means we should eliminate those rights. What the "why should corporations be allowed to donate" questioner generally means is, "why should people I have political disagreements with be allowed to participate at all? Why can't we just shut them up so I can do what I want?"

The letdown that I see to PMC is that it is mandated ONLY for NIH-funded research, and allows for a delay of up to 12 months.

It seems that PMC also relies on the journals it is archiving to handle the review process for papers - managing this is probably a significant expense that the journals must still spend, and recoup somehow. I'd be interested to see what portion of the 30-some billion dollar NIH budget goes to operation of the PMC and affiliated programs, and what portion of the full publishing process PMC covers.

Which costs do you imagine will disappear?

They still have to accept submissions, evaluate them, farm them out for review, decide which to accept, publish them, and then make them available in perpetuity.

I find it doubtful that any of these costs would be reduced in any substantial fashion by a transition to open access publication. In fact, it's likely that "easy, free, open access" to 250,000 articles per year would require them to invest in significant upgrades of their infrastructure, with attendant staff and hardware expansion to go along with that. So they lose a few sales people, and have to hire a bunch of new IT guys to build out a new data center or two.

It's really not "huge compensation" until they've scaled their organization to thousands of employees around the world, publishing thousands of journals & tens of thousands of books. On a per-unit basis, their profits are pretty modest.

250,000 articles, 2.7 bn in revenues, of which 1 bn is profit - that means each article generates $10,800 in revenue, which means there's a breakdown of $4000 in 'profit' from each article, and $6,800 in 'expenses,' assuming all revenues come from publication activities. It costs money to manage and publish these articles, and you don't do away with that cost by getting mad at Elsevier. If you want everything to be "free to anybody who wants a copy," you have two choices:

1) Create a federal agency that does the job Elsevier does, funded with taxpayer money, which isn't trying to earn a profit, and mandate that all taxpayer funded scientific research must be published through that federal agency;

2) Mandate that all grant money MUST publish to "some open access" platform, and make that a condition of the grant award.

If you do #1, you've created what's almost certain to be a politicized, inefficient government bureaucracy which will arguably find a way to simply cost more than the 2.7 bn in revenues Elsevier takes in, and you've also essentially "nationalized" Elsevier by legislating them out of existence, because as others have pointed out... there's a massive amount of research that's funded by taxes these days.

If you do #2, well, the situation remains the same as it is today - Elsevier will still be a for-profit agency charging an average of $10,800 per paper to publish, and researchers will just ask for a little more money to cover their anticipated publishing costs.

Really, this isn't exactly "fuck you" money that's being gouged out of every researcher. I'm not sure I think either solution is an improvement, but I'd favor #2 if it came down to it. On a per-paper basis, Elsevier isn't exactly making "fuck you" money, I'm not sure that getting mad at them (instead of the government, for not mandating Open Access publication) makes sense.

Not a particular fan of Mr. Card, but I'm genuinely curious - for all the people trying to split hairs and convince us that Card is a reprehensible human being, and his writing deserves no attention from anybody, etc. etc. Where do you draw the line?

Are you totally fine with the public schools using Ender's Game in a classroom setting?
How about including it on a suggested reading list?
Is it okay to have his books in the school library, where any student can find it?
What will your response be the day your child comes home with one of Card's books, having borrowed it from a friend?
If supporting him supports hate speech, will you begin boycotting retail stores that sell his work?

After all, we keep hearing the term hate speech bandied about... hate speech has been criminalized in many situations, and we keep hearing that "hate speech can't go unchallenged" - so where do you draw the line, if you're not advocating censorship?

So what you're saying is the link I provided showed that the researchers arrived at 'unexplained' salary numbers from 2 to 15% lower for women than for men.

How does that support the contention that "No, men don't get paid more than women," which is, specifically, what was asserted by hedwards?

He went on to argue that the "only" studies that show this discrepancy "gerrymander" their samples to support a predetermined conclusion. Yet he falls silent when asked to provide an example of a study that doesn't "gerrymander" the samples. Any study I've found shows there is some discrepancy that the researchers can't explain even with controlling for the numerous "time off" factors he's citing, yet he still maintains that there is no discrepancy, and dismisses a multitude of studies as flawed while offering none to support his own argument.

There's a word for the tendency to draw this sort of unsubstantiated conclusion based on opinion rather than fact. It's not "science," and it's not "logic."

Strangely the government report stating all of that was publicised with the headlines "Men still earn more than women". Because if you look at all men and all women, average pay for men is higher.

Same question I asked hedwards above: which report is that? Love to see the actual report(s) you're citing, rather than just read your assertions. Surely ONE of you you can provide an example of a study that supports your argument.

And yet it seems that numerous such studies have been conducted, and concluded the precise opposite of what you just asserted:

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data for 1979 and 1995 and controlling for education, experience, personal characteristics, parental status, city and region, occupation, industry, government employment, and part-time status, Yale University economics professor Joseph G. Altonji and the United States Secretary of Commerce Rebecca M. Blank found that only about 27% of the gender wage gap in each year is explained by differences in such characteristics.

[...]

Similarly, a comprehensive study by the staff of the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the gender wage gap can only be partially explained by human capital factors and "work patterns." The GAO study, released in 2003, was based on data from 1983 through 2000 from a representative sample of Americans between the ages of 25 and 65. The researchers controlled for "work patterns," including years of work experience, education, and hours of work per year, as well as differences in industry, occupation, race, marital status, and job tenure. With controls for these variables in place, the data showed that women earned, on average, 20% less than men during the entire period 1983 to 2000. In a subsequent study, GAO found that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor "should better monitor their performance in enforcing anti-discrimination laws."

More examples abound, with references and sources, at that link. Perhaps you have some counterexamples to offer which show that all of the disparity can be adequately explained by non-discriminatory factors? Other than blanket assertions, I mean?