True, but the comment I was making was in relation to Google Scholar where it is surely reasonable to assume most publications are scholarly (as I said, the main Google index is a different thing). If you're not part of an institution when using Google Scholar it doesn't matter - you just decide whether or not to pay when you get to the site.

The other side of the whole debate is whether the scholarly papers (at least those paid for by taxpayers in democracies like the US or UK) should be paywalled. I didn't mention it cos it wasn't relevant to the reply I was making, but in case you decide to raise it I think we need to press ahead with the open repositories for papers (and find a mechanism of peer-review linked to it). As someone who works in a UK university library, I think it is something that libraries need to push up the political agenda rather than meekly following the publishers lead (i'm not advocating libraries break copyright, but we should be at the forefront of the copyright debate and not leave it to the Pirate Bay et al.)

I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.

and why is that a problem?

Wikipedia's St George article has information. At least as interesting is how Germany came to have an English (!) patron saint: St Boniface

They don't make a profit. But of course if they didn't have other revenue streams then the UK taxpayers (of whom i am one) would have to provide more money to allow the galleries to provide the same level of services.

There are alternatives of course: they could provide reduced services (eg smaller digitisation programmes, reduced opening hours) or we in the UK could make it explicit that the taxpayer funded museums had provide stuff like this for free and up our tax contributions. Personally, I'm in favour of this latter option, but I suspect I'm in the minority.

On this topic, Americans need to learn that there's more than one way to do it. Just cos your state funded services provide all their stuff in the public domain doesn't mean that it is the only way. In the UK we usually go for a mixture of taxes and cost-recovery to fund these institutions. It does at least have the benefits of allowing high-quality services for less tax.

Have you got any evidence for your statement that the corrective optics only recover a fraction of the light gathering capacity. I've never heard this and looking at various websites hasn't shown this. I assume the COSTAR corrective optics must have caused some light loss for the instruments that required it, but Hubble hasn't exactly been a disappointment in terms of results. And of course, some of the most successful instruments (WFPC2, ACS, STIS) haven't required the corrective optics and so haven't had suffered any light gathering capacity at all. There's loads of information on the NASA website at the moment about Hubble, including a video with the designers of WFPC2. This was always designed with an internal mirror, and when they discovered the spherical aberration they simply ground this mirror to an alternative shape. Therefore, no loss of light.

And what is this about getting a 'visible light replacement space telescope'? Since when has anyone planned a replacement visible light space telescope? NASA are certainly not doing it, so who is? The James Webb Space Telescope which is always reported as the 'Hubble Replacement' is an infra-red telescope, which makes sense as visible light ground-based telescopes have improved so much it is probably not worth the cost of sending another space telescope up to look at visible light. Of course, ground-based telescopes can't use fancy tricks to see radiation that gets blocked by the atmosphere, which is why we need the JWST.

A quote from motorcyclist Barry Sheen seems an appropriate reply.

After a serious crash he was asked what went through his mind at the time. He replied, "My arse."

I would have thought TV might be about the most useful signal we could get. We'd learn a lot more about an alien civilisation from watching their TV than picking up the Fibonacci sequence broadcast to us by alien nerds.