crumbshot
Joined 8 years ago
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860
Submissions
212
Member since
Feb 13
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View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
You can get a delightful spectrum of colour through the filter as well, using the large square emojis:
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Comment · 5 years ago
For these publishers, that's a welcome side effect. Having a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves and their shareholders, is not how this should work at all.
Also, many users of Sci-Hub would not be able to afford the publishers' access fees anyway. The alternative, if Sci-Hub is destroyed, isn't the publishers getting loads more cash rolling in, it's such users not being able to access these research papers at all.
Comment · 5 years ago
It's copying, not theft.
The latter deprives someone of an item, the former increases its availability. An important distinction when considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.
Comment · 5 years ago
Was her identity well-known before the Elsevier court case, where she was named?
I thought the publicity for her efforts was made after this, in English language media anyway. Though perhaps I am misremembering the order of events.
Comment · 5 years ago
> Let me reply to your last sentence by saying I do not think it is sexist to use the word “hysterical”, which has a well-understood meaning apart from its etymology, to someone who happens to be female.
Then do you think maybe you misread Elbakyan's tone from her word choices, in a similar way to how I misread yours? She even stated in her last reply that she wasn't being hostile.
Comment · 5 years ago
> Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when she learned of an article on my site that describes several methods to acquire free copies of scientific articles,
Just looks like an emphatic disagreement to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20200928010251/https://twitter.c..., https://web.archive.org/web/20200928011503/https://twitter.c...
Also, considering the etymology ("of the womb"), your criticism of her replies comes across as quite sexist.
Comment · 5 years ago
Not only should there should be no autonomous drones, the non-autonomous remote controller hardware should be wired up such that if they are shot out of the sky, this kills the human operator and anyone sitting nearby.
This would be much fairer than the current system of gamified point-and-click murder.
Comment · 5 years ago
This proposed seizure would be conditional on such assets belonging to the royal family.
So it would only be a precedent for any additional monarchical assets discovered after the initial transfer of ownership.
Comment · 5 years ago
> By "fill their pockets" I mean actively engage in political corruption.
But they do. For example, the Queen used her power to get an exemption from transparency laws with regards to her own personal wealth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que..., and her son Charles did the same to ban his tenants from purchasing freeholds: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/09/prince-charl....
Comment · 5 years ago
> The fact that over 60% of people like to live in a country where birth defines a family's worth as higher than everyone else is mind boggling.
On a more uplifting note, polls indicate that this support has been slowly declining in recent years, particularly amongst the younger age groups: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/0...
I'm British and not part of that 60%, and am fervently hoping this support declines more rapidly when the current monarch dies in the next few years or so. I think a lot of the respect for the monarchy here is driven by a personal respect for the Queen. The rest being our deep-seated cultural problem of class deference.
My personal opinion is that in addition to abolishing the monarchy, the state should seize all of their private assets, and every member of the royal family should be exiled. This is probably an even less popular opinion, but I think it's the only proper way to rid Britain of this parasitic family.
> Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts?
If you ask a monarchist, they'll usually lean on one of two arguments: the financial and the traditional.
The former is the flawed belief that the monarchy is a money-maker for the UK and that it would be financially imprudent to abolish them. Usually this argument is based on the Crown Estate providing income for the Treasury, and the implied assumption that if the monarchy were abolished then that income would be gone, even though the lands are still there and there's no reason why the new republican government couldn't just seize the Estate as part of this abolishment. There's also the tourism income conjecture, but plenty of ex-monarchies have a strong tourism sector, and presumably there'd be a Royal Family Museum for tourists to visit in the new republic.
The latter is driven by cultural inertia and tends to be what monarchists lean on when the financial argument has been demolished. The talking points usually revolve around who would be the next head of state then, how could Britain possibly function without the monarchy, and so on.
Perhaps some monarchists would disagree with this characterisation of their beliefs, but having argued with many of them, these are my observations.
Comment · 5 years ago
This supposed 'intellectual property theft' is mostly just reverse engineering of technology.
It's not really a problem anyway. If some capitalists in the US and Europe don't get to skim off a slice of profit from another country's manufacturing output, then so what?
Comment · 5 years ago
An upload site for papers, but with a cryptocurrency scam attached. Useless.