My perspective is that we should be sharing this knowledge with people who cannot afford even that kind of money. $200/year is a lot for many people in many parts of the world.
I do understand that there is some cost involved in maintaing such vast libraries and I am not saying that it should be ignored. As I mentioned above, I would like to know more about how they arrive at these values.
The people who write these papers don't do it for the money. The people who review them don't do it for the money. So why can't we come up with something that makes these works more affordable and accessible to everyone on the planet? This debate is an opportunity to start exploring other such possibilities.
You have a great domain name that can be used to highlight this issue in general. Elsevier is only one part of the problem and it might be better to expand the list to beyond Elsevier. To have a wider impact, consider publicizing this issue on other forums as well. Here are some random suggestions:
Add some identity verification; Maybe facebook/twitter signup etc.
I suspect many in the HN community are associated with the IEEE and ACM. You might want to consider adding these two orgs to the list. (Disclosure: I am an IEEE member and a past ACM member). Both these orgs have great digital libraries and I have no idea why they are so expensive to access. Can someone with some experience serving on IEEE/ACM committees share some info on the financials?
Consider posting and starting a discussion on Chronicle.com. You might get support from a lot of people in the Arts & Humanities as well.
Why should the general public care about this issue? They pay for this indirectly through college tuition fees. Try to share this information with some parent bodies and ask them to pressure universities.
Get some alumni bodies to sign up. They have a lot of clout in Universities.
Ignoring the backing-up data issue, this seizing of sites raises a couple of questions. I had never used Megaupload and I don't have a clue about what that site did. Assumming, I had stored a bunch of files on Megaupload:
1. Shouldn't the Feds return my files? After all those files are my property. Irrespective of whether or not I had back ups, what gives the Feds the right to seize my property indefinitely.
2. Does seizing the site, give the Feds the right to read through my files? what if I had been working on the next big super-duper idea, and they steal my ideas?
3. Would the 'unreasonable search & seizure' amendment apply to people's files?
These questions would apply to all cloud-storage companies. Can someone with more legal experience shed some light?
I made an additional donation to Wikipedia because of their stand on this issue.
Seth Godin was right when he said "If the user supports it, she owns it. If support comes from anonymous government money, or some corporate sponsorship, then the interactions don't matter so much, and it's more distant from you."
I have never felt closer to Wikipedia than today.
What makes you think that the engineering teams in companies like Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi, GE etc. are "a long way behind in terms of 'software engineering'"? It is extremely misguided to think that all the thousands of engineers working in the Industrial Automation field are somehow behind others. I guess most of the HN crowd has very little exposure to the technologies in this field and most people probably consider this field uncool. But that doesn't mean the engineers working on these technologies are dumb and lagging behind others.
I guess it is not surprising anymore, but I couldn't help wondering about Microsoft being left out of consideration. Would love to here thoughts about how, and if, MS will compete among these companies.
I don't have much to add to the discussion. I just want to vent a bit of frustration. I came in this morning and found out that 7 of my co-workers were just laid off. We are a 30 people company so thats quite a big deal. And some of my good co-workers in QA were axed. I guess some management guy thought QA was unnecessary. Oh this seems to start to look like 2008 all over again!
Interesting links and comments. I did not want this discussion to morph too much in to an argument about economics and/or politics. That's why I glossed over them saying "I am aware of all the real world problems and constraints". patrickyeon captured my thoughts well with his comments below about how the system was selecting beneficiaries. That's the point I was trying to highlight.
I have heard similar restaurant stories happen to some of my friends. Jonathan's card is also a good idea.
However, I can't help wondering that with all this technology we are ending up in a situation where the Haves help the Haves and they all feel better for a little while. What can we do to make it easy to help the really needy? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could just as easily drop $10 to help someone eat a few meals a day? I am aware of all the real world problems and constraints, but I hope these examples inspire some of HN community to build stuff that will help those that really need it.
Another important 'hardware' that doesn't get enough attention is the chair & desk. I believe that having an ergonomically designed and adjustable chair and desk is as important as the PC specs to programmer productivity. In my current job I have a bad chair/table and it is breaking my back. Probably this issue also gets worse with age. Investing in good furniture might also save the company on health care costs. From personal experience I have spent quite a bit on fixing my back.
Reminds me of Dev Dutt's TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/devdutt_pattanaik.html