OK, I'll bite. Assuming an average figure of $4,000 per journal per year, how much does will a university like Cornell spend per year on all journals? I work at a smallish European university, and even in my smallish field of the humanities we have access to about a hundred journals (give or take); I dread to think how many journals the university library subscribes to in total, plus dissertation databases such as ProQuest, non-academic periodicals archives, yadda yadda. For something like Cornell, I suspect the figure has to be much higher (more journals, more subscribers).
Plus, it's fine to think that Cornell can afford it; but can a second-rank public university? It probably doesn't, it has neither the money nor the bargaining power. Which means that its academics have limited access to advances in their fields. How can that be fine?
It is not about second rank universities. It is about universities in the third world and people who cannot afford to go to universities at all, and it is about the support of universities for open access to learning.
I'm all for .cat, but I can see the arguments against. People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop? Do all the regional communities on Spain get one (Basque country, Asturias, Galicia, the list goes on). Do the Saami in Scandinavia get one? (They have their own parliaments, so why not TLDs?) What about Native Americans / First Nations? At least being a country is a criterion that works 95+ percent of the time
Um, actually the constitutional status of Wales is a murky topic, and even if that were to be cleared up unambiguously, how do you compare statuses across constitutions?
They don't have their own seat at the UN for instance. They don't field their own team at the Olympics.
If Wales needs a tld, what about Texas? Texas has a distinct culture and was once an independent republic. I'm sure people from Wales think they are independent in some way that Texas is not, but people from Texas think those thoughts too.
It is actually extremely murky, because there is no single document which states what the constitutional status is, there is a patchwork of legislation which refers to England and Wales, then there are the Wales-specific acts such as the Welsh Language Acts, and then there's the devolution and the devolved legislation (which establishes that Wales is to some degree independent within the UK). The constitutional problem, in a nutshell, is that Henry VIII introduced the Laws in Wales Acts to create the legal entity "England and Wales", but there had been no legal entity "Wales" before he did.
Also, if Wales is already a country, why is independence the stated aim of Plaid Cymru :)?
Wales is a constituent country of the United Kingdom and has some devolved power. However, it is the United Kingdom which is internationally recognised.
I'd think .cym for Welsh language sites would be a good thing. I'd see a lot more point in that than .net, a general-purpose namespace which is used generally by people too slow off the mark to register the .com (yes, I know it wasn't intended to be that way).
Wales isn't a country!? I would have thought of all people, someone with a handle like "anghyflawn" might be a bit more compassionate to the plight of the cymry...
I think you misunderstand me :). I don't think .cym is a bad idea at all, but I can understand those who might think it is not. Wales is not a country in the way that Russia, Tuvalu, Kenya or even Jersey are (and even in the latter sense there are fringe cases such as Western Sahara, Kosovo and South Ossetia). If Catalonia and Wales are OK, is Sápmi? What about culturally distinct minorities with no political recognition such as the Roma? It's just too messy.
So true. Giving OK presentations is a technical skill that can be acquired with a bit of training (and a sympathetic audience to bounce off for your unsuccessful shows). Most people who are brilliant public speakers are extroverts, but many extroverts are only passable or downright terrible at public speaking, because they never have acquired the skill, while an introvert can train themselves to be quite interesting and engaging.
These are unscientific observations on the basis of a bunch of academic conferences (which give you the opportunity of observing the same person in a public-speaking context and informally). YMMV.
The first point is not too much of a downer, actually: it's not much harder to learn the IO monad as pure syntactic sugar than to learn printf and its ilk.
I use LaTeX in an academic setting (theoretical linguistics) which only occasionally requires a lot of math, but I'm still saving tons of man-hours by using the LaTeX + Emacs + AUCTeX combo. Here are some frequent use cases where LaTeX blows a text processor out of the water.
* Bibliography. The median article length in our field is 30+ pages, with reference lists of 60+ not uncommon. Maintaining these in Word/OO is a nightmare, even with (non-free) bibliography software. RefTeX allows me to find and insert citations in a matter of three keystrokes, and whenever I reshuffle the reference list I'm 100% sure it's in order (i.e. everything I cite in the text is in the references and there are no uncited references)
* We don't use math, but we do use a lot of tree-like diagrams. Drawing these by hand is a chore; using logical markup to get trees which need zero to very little tuning saves enormous amounts of time and frustration.
* Floats and numbered examples. TeX floats are notoriously unreliable, but seriously, are Word's any better? And it gets worse with numbered examples (and pictures in numbered examples). For instance, a frequent feature of linguistics papers is an interlinear gloss: two or three lines of elements that have to line up with each other. These involve tables or tab stops in a word processor, and are notoriously fragile (e. g. if your sentence doesn't fit on one line, you get horrible issues with breaking lines).
All this is in addition to the common advantages like keeping track of numbering. These are all things that can be done with a word processor, but usually require significant amounts of time and self-discipline.
A lot of people in our department use LaTeX; most are not of the "programming" type, and are not deeply "into" LaTeX, interacting with the very basics and using some googling and copy-pasting. They still get much more satisfactory results in a shorter amount of time than the Word people.
This is all true, but, in any case, whatever happened to MVC? After all, you can (and arguably should) have your business logic happen in functional and reduce the GUI or whatever (which might or might not be OO) to more or less a thin layer of piping which ships data between the user and the pure parts of the program.
I'm not sure I understand this. Are you saying that iPads are easier to connect to projectors than MacBooks, or that with iPads you don't need a projector?
Plus, it's fine to think that Cornell can afford it; but can a second-rank public university? It probably doesn't, it has neither the money nor the bargaining power. Which means that its academics have limited access to advances in their fields. How can that be fine?