I don't know about German law, but in the US, you're innocent until proven guilty. They *DO* have proof that their music is all CC licensed, but GEMA won't accept the proof. Perhaps this can be brought into the courts and ruled to be an unenforceable law (since it presumes guilt instead of innocence)? Or is that not a basic concept in German law?

What's a windows?

hah, a mail client. How quaint.

Correct, there is no "world" overpopulation issue. For more info, see the Wikipedia page on world population growth. A few areas of the world have a massive growth rate (mainly central Africa, plus a few countries in southwest Asia), and many of those are almost certainly overpopulated (since they cannot really support themselves).

But most of the world is around the replacement rate or lower. In many areas, the current population will go extinct if current rates continue. Even in the U.S., the total fertility rate in the United States estimated for 2009 is 2.01 children per woman, which is below the replacement fertility rate of approximately 2.1 (it's more than 2 due to premature death, etc.). In other words, the current US local replacement rate isn't enough to sustain the current US population. Immigration keeps the US population numbers going up; it's not due to internal replacement. The rates for many other industrialized nations are even lower. So for most countries, there is no explosive growth; instead, they are shrinking. Even if you think world overpopulation is an issue, the birth rate is slowing overall.

Most announcements about the "world population" figures don't make it clear that population growth isn't the same everywhere, and that rapid growth is actually really localized. It'd be just as accurate to say "the US local population is declining" since it is.

Unless the build system is screwed up, recompiling after a change should be relatively fast. Usually source code is stored as lots of smaller files, and each file is compiled separately to produce a separate object file (e.g., .o). Then next time a rebuild is requested, the system should notice what changed, and only rebuild the needed parts. Some parts take the same time each time (e.g., a final link), but it shouldn't take anywhere near the same amount of time. There are lots of build tools, including make, cmake, and so on. If you use the venerable "make" tool, you might want to read Miller's "Recursive Make Considered Harmful": http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf Cue the lovers and haters of "make", here :-).

True, but not relevant. The necessary organization and infrastructure can be done quite cheaply, if organizations are willing to move from the past to the present.

I think you're grossly overestimating the costs if they switch to an exclusively digital realm, which is where they need to go. Bandwidth and running basic servers (which is all that's needed) are commodities. WebHostGiant will provide bandwidth and basic servers for $2.79/month with no bandwidth maximum. A serious journal will want more than that, yes, and there are other requirements too. For example, you'll need DNS registration (which companies like GoDaddy or 1and1 will do for cheap). But really, these are highly-competed commodities, so we're talking about petty cash budgets in most companies. You could probably set up the technical infrastructure for less than $100/year, plus 20 hours of volunteer time for the initial setup. Just get 5 people to contribute $20/year and you're done. The exact number isn't important; what's important is that it is REALLY REALLY small compared to paper-based publication.

Yes, you need some code to manage reviews, but not much. Existing programs can do the job; you really don't need more than a Wiki or mailing list. You can get some efficiencies using specialized programs, but their development could be amortized across lots of different journals (it's perfect for creating as open source software; there are probably several such programs already). It's clearly possible; Wikipedia's MediaWiki, for examples, wasn't developed by a for-profit organization, and it handles scales far beyond what journals require. You need an ISSN, not an ISBN, for a magazine, and that's a one-time expense.

The "soliciting reviewers" and so on can be done by volunteers, as is already often done.

The basic problem is that paper publishers haven't noticed that the digital economy is VASTLY cheaper (or they're scared BECAUSE they realize this).

So stop pushing the paper. Push the bits, and let people print what they want. For academic works, what people (should) want is the information, not the pretty binding.

Absolutely true. But if it's easy, it's not too bad. Also, volunteering for journals is considered something valuable in many academic circles, so it's not just charity in many cases. The paywalled journals depend on volunteerism already, so it's not a change in that respect. And when people don't feel exploited, they're more likely to volunteer.

Fair enough. But typically CS researchers are writing papers because they want to get information out to the widest possible audience that would be interested. Paywalls just get in the way, for reasons that are now obsolete.

This is big. There are a lot of parasitic journals today, that is, journals that take work the public paid for, and lock it behind paywalls. Parasitic journals typically use big-name free labor from to do the peer reviews. If the world removes from the parasites many good peer reviewers, as well as many good papers (through policies like the NIH Public Access policy), then they will have to change or fold. I don't have a problem with organizations paying for work to be done, and then charging for use of the result. For example, most fiction authors get at least some money for their labor (not a lot, but at least some). In contrast, parasitic journals typically take publicly-funded stuff away from the public; time to change. By the way, there are a number of journals and publications that have always done this, like ACSAC. If authors would simply ONLY submit their works to open access journals and publications, the parasites would disappear.

Whatever happened to cinder blocks and wolmanized deck boards? Where is the class?

Yes! I used opera on windows a long time ago. I gave it a try on Mac recently. It's actually unbearably bad. It's like using a badly unfinished alpha release of firefox.

We're going to see more of this sort of thing. Almost everyone assumes that all software is copyrighted, or that only the copyright holder can release software as free/libre/open source software (FLOSS). Neither are true!! This matters when the US government gets involved, because its "normal" rules are really different from most organization's.

For example, if a government employee develops software as part of his official duties, then in practically all cases that software is NOT subject to copyright in the US (per US law 17 USC 105). It's not just that the author doesn't have copyright; there IS no copyright in the US. Also, when a contractor writes software, the government often receives all the release rights as if it was the copyright holder yet it is not the copyright holder (these are called "unlimited rights"). In this case, the government can release the software as FLOSS, on its own initiative, even though it is NOT the copyright holder. For more details, see: Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government.

The US government spends billions of dollars each year developing software. It's my hope that, over time, it will release more of the software it develops to the people who paid for it.

You don't post much?!

You magnificent bastard! You post all the best stuff!

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

I wrote PhD thesis using Open Document Format (ODF) and it worked out very well. I used OpenOffice.org, but I expect that LibreOffice would work at least as well. You can translate to many other formats (e.g., with "Save As" or external tools).

As with any big writing effort, one key is to separate formatting from content. You should FIRST set up a template with that does all the formatting, including all the paragraph types you'll need and the right format for them. Then write your document, selecting the paragraph types for each paragraph as appropriate. Do NOT embed formatting commands in the document itself - paragraphs should NOT have font settings, etc., but instead these should be controlled by the paragraph's paragraph type. In my case, I created an OpenDocument template for George Mason University (GMU), and gave it to GMU so others could share it. If you create a template, please share it with others.

yes, and it's almost useless as a skillset considering most servers are *nix. Unless you work in a .NET shop, but why would anyone want to do that?

why would anyone want to learn powershell? MSFT got it wrong, they should have done what Apple did with OSX and used some *nix variant as the shell. sh and its offshoots are a de-facto standard. The fact that they made powershell somewhat understand nix commands is an admission of this.