> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money
In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
And under that model the publishers would also do all the scummy things you're familiar with if you've been say a cable TV subscriber. For example bundling four crap things with one good thing and saying that's a 5-for-1 offer when actually it's just an excuse to increase the price of the thing you actually wanted.
This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
"Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price" This is brilliant. So much information packed into one sentence.
I thought the same thing too, when it was announced. But I suspect, in addition to the price, that not being able to buy a medium or long bed version also harmed fleet sales. The short bed being the only option is probably a pretty big limitation for groups who are buying them as fleet vehicles.
Just speculation but maybe the fact the world is in an oil glut right now and with the prospect that Russian oil could re-enter global market causing even more glut caused Ford to believe that gasoline will remain fairly cheap compared to 2008 era for the next decade.
An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based tools.
Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.
It's also quite common that the customer is now the one that drives the interface.
It's the customer's time wasted by the UI, but also the customer typically can't be expected to perform enough orders to actually learn a complicated interface.
TUIs persist in industries where there is specialized knowledge needed to even complete the order. For example, an optometrist's office.
What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app, its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would quit.
The other thing is that GUIs can be very slow to load, limiting the potential speed/efficiency. One of the most frustrating experiences is pressing a series of key commands (or just single keys) that SHOULD have performed a very specific series of actions, but the software lagged behind at some point(s) in the flow and something ended up getting messed up because my series of key presses resulted in a totally unintended action.
This is a definite reality and headache. The learning curve was steep and I literally had somebody walk out after training them for less than two hours.
@sharweek said
> Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
@JKCalhoun
> in my world-view most humans want to be kind.
These two views aren't necessarily in conflict. Individuals can overwhelmingly want to be kind but still be in a system where society pushes them to behave to the contrary.
> Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.
> If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.
I see comments like this occasionally and find it mildly amusing as a lefty who has been writing with a fountain pen for over a decade and doesn't have noticeably different hand position (either compared to righties or compared to my use of a pencil or ballpoint pen). Yes, some lefties do have hand positions that look incredibly uncomfortable and some lefties have trouble with fountain pens, but that doesn't mean it's a general/total non-starter for lefties to successfully/comfortably use a fountain pen.
Pen pushing is a problem if a writer used to a ballpoint pen or a hard pencil and needing to apply pressure to get ink to flow and applies that much pressure to a fountain pen. But once one makes the adjustment to a fountain pen's (low) pressure style, pushing is only a minor annoyance for fountain pen writing until the nib is broken in (at least that was my experience).
As others have said, it's also important to pick the right ink/pen/paper combination so that you're not laying down too much ink and so that it dries reasonably quickly.
It perhaps is a combo of cheap pens and learned pressure from pencils/ballpoints (and let's not forget smudging from hand sliding on paper if the ink takes too long to dry - I will emphatically not levitate my hand).
> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).
I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!
It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.
I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.
The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.
Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.
Indeed, pencil is one of the best writing implements for archival purposes. As long as one doens't deliberately try to get the graphite off, it'll probably stay on.
> Radio astronomy was an accidental offshoot of this project: they noticed the reflected microwave signals from space came back with some extra noise...
Perhaps you're conflating Project Echo with Karl Janksy's Bell Labs research in the 1930s? Radio astronomy's "birth" is probably best set to when Jansky detected radio emission from the Milky Way in 1932-1933 while trying to identify the source of noise in wireless telephone transmissions.
Grote Reber picked up radio astronomy in the pre-war (WWII) years and then the advancement of RF technology for radar during WWII led to some further discoveries (e.g., radio emission from the Sun). After WWII, radio astronomy initially had good participation from radar folks.
Many national radio observatories were already in existence before Project Echo. Jodrell Bank Observatory (UK) was established in 1945. ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) was founded in 1949. The US's Green Bank Observatory was created in 1956 and this led to the creation of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1959. Parkes, in Australia, was completed by 1961.
Radio astronomy was well under way before Project Echo.
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