[time-nuts] MIT RADIATION LABORATORY SERIES 1940-1945 (28 VOLS) on eBay

Steve Rooke sar10538 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 14 14:55:32 UTC 2011


I think you missed my point Jim, sorry if I had not made it clear.

Steve

On 15 July 2011 02:51, Jim Lux <jimlux at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 7/14/11 6:08 AM, Steve Rooke wrote:
>>
>> It's a shame these, and other elderly scholarly works, can't just be
>> released for the greater good, without all this red tape tying them
>> down. I wonder how much better the world would advance if we could all
>> go back to the days when we shared knowledge and skills freely between
>> engineers before all the lawyers became involved. Does anyone else
>> remember the hay days I wonder...
>
> Oh yeah.. I remember how wonderful all that was..I think, overall, we're a
> lot better off today
>
>  Getting on the bus or driving for an hour or more to go to a library which
> happened to have a copy, and then taking notes by hand from a bound journal
> after waiting for it to be retrieved from the stacks.
>
> Waiting for several weeks while an interlibrary loan was processed and they
> mailed it to you.
>
> Paying a nickle or dime a page in the 1970s ($.50/page today) for a crummy
> "greasy" copy of a not very wonderful microfiche image.
>
> Even as recently as the mid 90s, it was very difficult to get online access
> to most things.  Search databases have been around for quite a while, and
> you could get the abstract sort of online, but then you'd have to request
> the article from someone like University Microfilms or hunt it down at a
> local library.
>
> And I think it's wonderful that most universities put dissertations online
> now.  The typical "Chapter 2" of a dissertation where the author reviews the
> literature and current state of knowledge is a gold mine for tracking down
> stuff, and for half way decent synthesis of a bunch of stuff together.
>
> I will say that it was fun to get the postcards in the mail from all over
> the world asking for a reprint of your paper.  Now, they just send you
> whining emails asking why the link on your website is so slow or broken.
>  And, letters asking for permission to cite or copy a figure.. they're
> pretty rare.  Instead, you find your words in someone else's work when
> googling, send them a nice note asking for attribution, and get an offended,
> "it was on the web, so I used it, whaddya gonna do'bout it.".  I'm just
> codger-like this morning.. get offa my lawn you whippersnappers
>
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-- 
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
- Einstein



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