I completely agree with you -- it's easy in theory. If all soldiers laid down their weapons at the same time, there would be no more wars. Also nice in theory.

The problem is that you need a concentrated action by the majority of qualified academics. Reviewing for closed journals is also a matter of prestige. If one reviewer alone jumps ship, he can only lose -- he will have negligeable impact on the journal, but stands to lose personally. You need a big movement, and this is not easy.

I think that the move to open publishing models is going to happen, because most academics are not happy with the situation. I personally hate it. The success of PLOS One shows that there is potential. But it will take time.

I didn't see any solutions, to be honest. Just the standard theoretical solution to the tune of "If ALL top scientists in some field ALL jump ship at the SAME TIME to a few select open journals.....", which sound so nice in theory.

I have invested 25 years in my education and sacrificed everything for that one chance of becoming a scientist and doing what I really wanted when I was a kid. My friends drive fancy cars, have houses, I have a guitar, a used car, bills, and an 80-hour week, no holidays, constant stress to the point of impaired short-term memory. All for that one shot of becoming a professor.

Imagine that I get a nice, important result. I have two choices -- publish it in the most prestigious journal imaginable, or go with the feel-good factor and a more open journal. If I make the wrong choice, I'll be flipping burgers for the rest of my life because nobody wants someone like me: old, overqualified, no work experience, no interest in anything but science.

The way I see it: I have a couple of years to land some important papers. Can I do something to make the open journals more prestigious than the best ones in the field? No. So it's an easy decision.

Things are changing, but it's a slow process, because prestige and contacts have a lot of inertia. I hope that things are different in 10 or 20 years. Right now anyone can email me and get a copy of any paper they want anyway, I won't sabotage my career because it might buy me slashdot reputation.

I write software that can actually benefit from this type of hardware.

If it is the KMS-based console, then it's framebuffer-based and not text console. And speed is a subjective impression. Try timing a large compile job with and without console output.

I guess that you don't use Linux drivers, but rely on third party blobs.

Ever since Linux switched to kernel-based modesetting, the console has switched to a framebuffer console. No accelerated VGA text mode, but pixel blitting.

It is painfully slow.

It is fundamentally broken in many scenarios, like multi-seat. I canot use Linux console, for example, because it is not multi-seat aware. It is not only not reliable, it will bork your system because it accepts all keyboard input.

Because the KMS terminal is so slow that anything that outputs stdout or stderr to it will slow down by orders of magnitude.

Note -- the old-style VGA console was HW-accelerated. This is what you get if you use binary blob drivers. The new console, using kernel modesetting and native resolution, isn't. Try compiling something large with lots of console output on a KMS framebuffer. It absolutely hurts.

Yet this is the first thing you have to disable on a multi-seat system because it will bork your system otherwise.

It's useful in some scenarios, but it is, in essence, a hack which only works in some scenarios. A multi-seat-aware VT would be a blessing.

I use FireGloves, so my browser information is randomised and different for each page I visit. Fingerprinting won't work (or at least, it will be extremely difficult).

The only thing that could happen would be if the third-party page sends my IP to Facebook. That would be a rather big stinker.

Can you recommend a page that explains this in more detail? I'm interested, but I don't understand it.

You request a page from NY Times. The NY Times serves you an HTML page (+JS) which includes a "Like" button from Facebook servers. Firefox tries to connect to FB to display the button and run Facebook JS code. Ghostery scrubs such links and you never connect to Facebook. Facebook has nothing, since you've only ever connected to the NY Times. Where's the catch?

Or do you mean that the NY Times will report your IP number to Facebook directly without you being involved?

I never go to Facebook, so any serial numbers embedded in their pages don't affect me.

You pick a nice example, that's cute.

How about sending an email to your mother talking about your cancer treatment? Is email supposed to be private? I know you can intercept it, but is it fair to expect to talk about this without Google monetizing it by selling your info to a pharma company?

Or should you lock up in your cave and die of cancer because if you get treatment, then everybody in the world MUST know about it?

I completely believe you. "Normal" conference fees in Computer Science tend to be in the $300-$500 range. I've mentioned ICPR because there was quite an uproar when the registration fee was announced last year.

There are two things you must keep in mind, though. First is that in Computer Science, conference papers are really, really important. Far more important than in any other field. Journal papers are outdated the moment they are accepted for publication and hopelessly outdated by the time they arrive in your library. So journal papers are reserved for larger breakthroughs which will remain important for a long time.

The second is that top Computer Science conferences have the status of a journal. Their proceedings are widely available, their blind review involves 3-5 reviewers who are likely bigger experts than they would be most journals, lasts more than 3 months and involves a rebuttal phase, just like a journal. So a paper at a conference like ICCV, CVPR, IJCAI, NIPS and the like will do far more for your career than most journal papers. ICPR is not quite that level, but it is just below it, and they are milking it. It's a HUGE conference, with many thousands of visitors, BTW.

I was quite disillusioned when I attended a conference primarily aimed at psychologists, biologists and behavioural scientists. Talks were accepted based on a (barely reviewed) abstract submission and some of the science on display was depressing. Conferences simply don't mean much in many fields, so you're right, it does depend on the field.

I believe that by "standard browser" he means any browser which does any of the following:

- Javascript
- Cookies
- Flash

If your browser does any of those, you are being tracked every time you open it. You don't even need a facebook account and you don't need to use google. If you wish to stop being tracked, you will have the install at least the following extensions for your browser:

- NoScript (for malicious javascript)
- Ghostery (for cross-site tracking)
- CS lite (for flexible cookie management)
- BetterPrivacy (for Flash-based cookies)
- AdBlockPlus (for more tracking)
- https anywhere (for man-in-the-middle snooping)
- FireGloves (for browser fingerprinting)

and configure all of them to only use a whitelist, and explicitly disable Facebook, Google, Twitter and anything similar. Then you'll need to restart your browser at regular intervals to deter session cookies. You'll also need to reconnect to your ISP regularly to thwart IP-based tracking.

Yes, there used to be a time when using the web was easy. Now Facebook and Google have turned it into THIS.

You don't need to tell anyone your secrets.

Google will guess them from your browsing habits, and they will sell them.

And some people tend to think that what you do at home is, well, your own business.

They don't need to click it. They serve the link from their servers so they know that you've seen the like button. Then they check your browser fingerprint and, if you are particularly stupid, your facebook cookies and voila -- they know which webpages you read, and when, and they know the exact location where you were when you read it. Every online newspaper you read, they know which stories you like, which stories you don't like.

You don't have to click anything. The "like" thing is a gimmick. As long as you SEE that button on non-facebook pages, they are tracking you. And there are other things that are tracking you that you don't even see.

I'm astonished that even on slashdot people do not understand these things.

Yeah, but "mysteriously not giving information to Facebook" requires advanced computer knowledge and about a week of your time.

You will need to install about 10 different browser extensions, block IP ranges, deal with broken pages because of JavaScript and cookie issues, randomly fake your browser ID and a number of other things. Because every time you connect to the internet, you are "mysteriously giving information to Facebook" even if you don't know it.

I still keep up with it, but my girlfriend gave up on "mysteriously not giving information to Facebook" after doing so broke her online banking (which reports to Facebook) and online payment methods (which pull in mysterious scripts from a dozen mysterious domains).

If you as much as look at "the Internet", they are stalking you. "Simply not giving information to Facebook" is a bit like Jason Bourne.