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tax evasion article:
http://pittsburghcitypaper.ws/archive.cfm?type=Potter&action=getComplete&ref=80
another example of why you can't trust business:
in about 10% of programming, radio station use voice-splicing technology to make it appear that their DJ is local when in fact they are not. The business execs behind this claim that it is not lying, but "entertainment". So, don't trust anything you hear from a business unless there is a government law specifying that it is not entertainment.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/ceo/articles/0,15114,423802-2,00.html
Consolidation allowed Clear Channel to centralize broadcasts through a process called "voice-tracking." A listener in Atlanta might think the morning DJ is a local guy--he peppers his spiel with references to local happenings and hot spots--but in fact he's broadcasting from a booth in Cincinnati. Voice-tracking accounts for less than 15% of Clear Channel programming, but it helps cut costs by employing fewer DJs. To critics there's an ethical breach when a radio personality purports to be somewhere he's not, but John Hogan, who heads up Clear Channel Radio, defends the practice. "At the risk of sounding flippant, it's entertainment," he says. Voice-tracking--or as Hogan prefers to call it, "talent exportation"--is simply the next step in the evolution of radio, he says. He points out that musicians were threatened when vinyl recordings replaced live studio orchestras. "Now everything's distributed digitally," he says. "I understand why people object, because it's scary for those who can't change."
another example of why corps should not be people:
can you think of any reason why tobacco companies should be permitted to advertise their products without effectively to the axiom that corporations should have the rights of people?
(note: whether you think a group of individuals should be able to jointly purchase ad time for tobacco products is not what i'm asking. i am proposing that people are allowed to aggregate their funds to do these things, but only for convenience; that is, under my proposal, if the funds are control by an individual and not by an abstract entity then they may be treated as individual funds)
(note that people can in this case create some sort of corporate decision making structure amongst themselves if they wanted; the key difference is that there is no limited liability; that is, they are fully and individually responsible for their actions, there is no saying 'it's the corp's fault, not mine, i was just doing my job')
--- http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/1111/web-science-11-13-02.asp
More sites targeted for shutdown BY William Matthews Nov. 13, 2002 Printing? Use this version. Email this to a friend. spacer spacer spacer RELATED LINKS spacer spacer
Software and Information Industry Association
"Energy feels the online squeeze" [Federal Computer Week, Oct. 14, 2002]
"IRS deal cools debate about online services" [Federal Computer Week, Aug. 5, 2002]
"DOE site makes research easier" [Federal Computer Week, Oct. 18, 1999]
Having persuaded the Energy Department to pull the plug on PubScience?, a Web site that offered free access to scientific and technical articles, commercial publishers are taking aim at government-funded information services offering free legal and agricultural data.
"We are looking into a couple of other databases and agencies," said David LeDuc?, public policy director at the Software and Information Industry Association.
After more than a year of pressing Congress and the Bush administration, the SIIA succeeded Nov. 4 in having PubScience? shut down. The association's members include publishing companies that offer some of the same articles for sale over the Internet that the Energy Department was making available for free.
Publishers, including Dutch giant Elsevier Science, argued that PubScience? amounted to improper government-funded competition with commercial information services.
The PubScience? Web site (pubsci.osti.gov) now reads, "PubScience? discontinued (November 4, 2002)" and offers links to other Energy Department Web sites, including one that has a link to Scirus, Elsevier Science's online rival to PubScience?.
"We're delighted with the decision [to shut down PubScience?]," LeDuc? said. "The administration has done a tremendous job of hearing our concerns and responding to what we've always considered to be our legitimate concern."
But library associations, which lobbied to keep PubScience? alive, say shutting down the site is "a very significant loss," and an ominous sign for other government-funded information Web sites.
"The Department of Energy has been doing a lot of information gathering and making information available to the scientific community for decades. For them to drop out is a very, very significant loss," said Susan Martin, a Massachusetts-based academic library consultant.
Closure of the site means that articles from several small scientific publications "that aren't available anywhere else will no longer be available," she said.
Emily Sheketoff, associate executive director of the American Library Association's Washington Office, offered a harsher assessment. "The government recognized a need, designed a way to fill it and when it starts to be successful, the private sector says, 'Get out of the way, let us make a buck.'"
She predicted that the elimination of PubScience? will have a "big financial impact" on research libraries.
Libraries now will have to pay publishing companies for a service they got for free from the Energy Department, Sheketoff said. "As libraries have shrinking resources because local tax bases and state resources are shrinking, it's really tough to put more financial pressure on them."
Scirus and another online source of scientific information, Infotrieve, charge $15 to about $40 per article, according to the American Library Association.
LeDuc? said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
He said about 10 companies in the SIIA were anxious to eliminate competition from PubScience?, and member companies now want the trade association to challenge other government Web sites.
Two in particular rile SIIA members: "One is law-related, the other has to do with agriculture," LeDuc? said. He declined to identify them further.
One site the SIIA is unlikely to challenge is PubMed?, the National Library of Medicine site ({http://www.pubmed.gov} www.pubmed.gov) that provides free access to millions of medical articles and research papers. PubMed? was established much earlier and has a strong foothold, LeDuc? said. "We have no intention of going after PubMed?."
(a comment from slashdot by FuzzyDaddy?)
When I was a grad student, the taxpayers paid about $750K/year to keep our lab going. We published five or six papers a year.
Those papers were then sent to UNPAID peer reviewers (professors at other universities.) Of course, that's part of their jobs, and a good chunk of their salary comes from the same government grants.
So far so good. I think the publicly funded research has generally been good for the country and humanity as a whole.
Now, the journal we published the articles in holds the copyrights, charges $20 for a reprint, and a subscription is literally tens of thousands of dollars a year. Remember - they didn't do the work, or pay for the research, or even pay the article reviewers.
So this nonsense about "the government paying for something than can be provided privately" is nonsense. The government has paid for 99% of it already, these companies want to profiteer on the back of those government expenditures.
If the government is funding the research, should the citizens have open access to the results?
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