Your source also says: "Climate Change isn't about the environment. It's about money and control, and the same is true with the anti-gun movement as well."
This should allow you to understand it is a really bad source. I guess that starting from that, it is easy to prove that the numbers you cite are wrong.
All in all, isn't it obvious that only gun-free zones is a better solution that only gun-allowed zones?
"The new Alpine railroad (NLFA) will cost 300M CHF less than planned, because the digging and concreting of the Gothard tunnel have cost less than expected.
The final bill is expected to be between 23 and 23.5 billions CHF instead of 24 millions CHF."
In either case, it is in my opinion difficult to determine if this is good or bad PR, and if this is good or bad in terms of morals. However, more tendency towards provocation might bring the answer.
Osamu Tezuka, author of Jungle Emperor Leo, was a huge fan of Disney's work, and he was his main influence. Personally, I love to see this as a tribute rather than as plagiarism. And I'm saddened every time this story pops up, especially when it's framed like that.
Yes, I agree that the anal-retentive nature that these big firms go after copyright cases is reprehensible. And also that copyright law hinders as much creativity and progress as it supposedly serves to protect (especially the dumb shit supreme court decision that computer loading data from a CD into RAM falls is copyright infringement)...
But, technical point, the Joel Zimmerman thing is trademark law, and not copyright law. There is a big difference between the amount of original work and money Disney put into producing Lion King (with or without inspiration from Osamu Tezuka) and how much work it takes to draw 3 black circles in Illustrator and exporting as SVG. I mean, Lion King was based around the idea of "tell Hamlet with lions", which, as an idea, isn't even copyrightable. Combined with the original lines (in fact, even the language was different), original music, original songs, vastly different coloring, different camera angles, mostly different scenes, etc., it'd be a very hard case for any copyright lawyer to win in court.
That's not to say Disney's lawyers wouldn't try their hardest to prosecute if the tables were turned on them; they would and they did. But it's unfair to merely say Disney copyright lawyers are the scum of the earth, when the truth is closer to that all copyright lawyers (and judges) are the scum of the earth - that is, they all labor under what has become a terrible system of laws that, through a select few awful decisions, have come to oppress creativity in the interest of protecting existing corporation rather than foster improvement.
About the possible flaws in the reviewing process, the open-access publisher Frontiers (recently acquired by the Nature Publishing Group) proposes to reveal the names of the reviewers once the paper has been accepted, since they take part in the writing process:
"Frontiers is striving to remove any bias from the review process and acknowledge the reviewers for the significant contributions in improving the paper. To guarantee the most transparent and objective reviews, the identities of review editors remain anonymous during the review period. Only in case an article is accepted do their names appear on the published manuscript, without exceptions. However, if for any reasons a review editor withdraws during any stage of the review process, his/her name will not be disclosed." [Source : http://www.frontiersin.org/Design/pdf/ReviewGuidelines.pdf]
Of course they see a dime: they receive public money. Elsevier are such geniuses: public money paid papers need to be paid a second time, and still, they remain unavailable for the public who has paid for it (twice). Rich geniuses.
Al-Khwarizmi was not talking about the publisher but about the scientists actually doing the peer-reviewing work: they don't see a dime from the publisher for this work (which is normal because it is part of their job as scientist to peer-review, what is abnormal is that the result of this work is given for free to private companies who put it behind paywalls).
I wasn't implying that the publishers but the reviewers were getting public money for that. Having spent around 12 hours between Sunday and Monday to write a single review for a journal paper, I must say that I am pretty surprised that this system has been working until now… The scientists are united in making their reviews, while someone on top is getting so much money for it (this catches up with your argument). I can't help myself considering us as naive people.
I see. Naive I don't know, not interested by money, certainly. Otherwise we would be following much more lucrative career paths, which are well, basically anything else than public research.
That said, I've encountered many scientists who simply never thought about it before we discussed it, and who now think the situation is absolutely crazy, as anyone would. The questions are: What can they do about it? Do they have the time to do it? How can they do it without hurting themselves?
Indeed, it's hard enough to get a position as it is, refusing to publish in prestigious journal owned by asshole publishers won't help young scientists. Older scientists often work with young ones, and they can't tell them "no we won't publish in the asshole-owned prestigious journal because it's the right thing to do", it wouldn't be fair.
The reality is that the solution can't really come only from individuals, it has to be a legal battle, not only for future publications (which is the easiest part), but also for all the past ones. The entire Elsevier "Freedom Collection" for example should be seized by governments (UN?) and made available for free to anyone on the internet and in public libraries worldwide. But in this "free-market" economy, this is not something people seems to be ready to ear, let alone understand.
I think the solution has to come from public funding agencies (i.e. from governments).
If my country's government says that from 2015 onwards, only publications that can be freely accessed count towards public grant requests, tenure and positions in public institutions, etc.; in a year no one would be published in the asshole-owned journals.
Instead, my government has policies that actively incentivize publishing in said journals (basically ISI JCR journal papers are what counts for everything).
> Indeed, it's hard enough to get a position as it is, refusing to publish in prestigious journal owned by asshole publishers won't help young scientists
It seems to vary strongly by field though, some fields seem much more bullish on "open access" than others.
>What can they do about it? Do they have the time to do it? How can they do it without hurting themselves?
Get the top people in a field to collectively decide to create/back a new journal. Because they are the top, what they publish in will "automatically" become prestigious, assuming the journal is selective. Once the journal is well established, the up and coming will start publishing there too.
> Of course they see a dime: they receive public money.
Scientists receive money for the work they do, but that money is generally in the form of grants for their own sciencing, I've never heard of "review grants".
