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.
The latter deprives someone of an item, the former increases its availability. An important distinction when considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.
> 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.
> 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,
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.
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.
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?
The fact that this is a VC-backed startup pretty much guarantees it will be doing nefarious things with its users' data somewhere down the line. Even if not intended right now.
> I feel like this article is pointing a gun at the wrong faces. These companies are most likely doing this as a form of social giving.
No, they're doing it because they know they can severely underpay these workers and treat them badly, knowing that they have no recourse to push back.
People who run such businesses rarely have any pure motive. It's all about the profit and they don't care who suffers in the pursuit of it.
Now if they'd provided the prisoners with a decent wage for their work, that would be a different matter, and indicative of some good intent. But none of these companies are going to do that, when they know they have a source of people they can continually exploit.
> We should shut down Russian infrastructure as retaliation.
How about, instead of causing harm to innocent Russian people by such pointless escalation, the US makes a serious and meaningful effort to secure their critical national infrastructure. As they should have done in the first place.
> Given paying with crypto is as easy as a QR scan these days once someone is onboarded, the other claim that you use, convenience, is about to go out the window: see venmo, PayPal, CB integrations.
But why would you want to? In most cases, there's simply no benefit to using cryptocurrencies instead of real money.
Even if we could pay for our groceries, clothing, water, electricity, rent/mortgage, taxes, etc. with cryptocurrencies (which, for the most part, we can't) rather than real money, there's no compelling reason to do so.
Despite your unnecessary sarcasm, this is actually a good example, seeing as the company was eventually destroyed by the US government for abusing its monopoly position.
They did indeed fund a highly successful research centre, but - importantly to its success - one that wasn't run with the same ideals as its parent. It wasn't Bell Labs itself that endeavoured to monopolise an entire industry to the point where the government had to intervene.
HN pixel art generator, anyone?