Problem is, someone has to pay for the printing of those charts, and they’re high-precision multicolor offset prints, which means a lot of setup time. Those costs are amortized across a pretty small pool of consumers, and to make it worth the printer’s time, the margins need to be pretty high.

As they say in the aviation world:
Question: “What is the force that keeps airplanes in the sky?”
Answer: “Money.”

The cartography for my GPS chartplotter is based on the same charts. $200 will buy you all the charts from Dixon Entrance to Cape Yakutage, all of Southeast Alaska and the Inside Passage. $200 seems to be the magic number! You can subscribe to an update service for $50 or so a year; they send you a new memory card and you send your old one back. If you don’t send your old one back, you get hit for another $200.

Interestingly, access to the government’s horrendously expensive GPS system is free although they reserve the right to degrade it or turn it off altogether without a “by your leave.” Alaska Airlines and the FAA prototyped the GPS landing system for civilian airliners here – with a lot of appropriation help from the evil Sen. Stevens. GPS here is so accurate that I can literally put my boat at the face of my slip without ever looking up from the chartplotter screen. I’ve done it just to be sure; just had my wife keep a sea watch and drove in strictly on the GPS.

What this bill apparently would do is to give what is rightly in the public domains to private groups who would charge us for what we’ve already paid for.

As I wrote before, this is theft of public property for the benefit of these journals, for who knows what political payback.

http://www.redstate.com/warner_todd_huston/2009/03/11/dems-push-another-fake-fair-bill-that-will-kill-online-science-research-publishing/#comment-3764

If the government web site is providing you with the downloads without paying the publishers, then they’re engaged in theft from the journal owners. If they’re paying the fee for you, then they’re subsidizing your research without any kind of oversight.

I agree that $37 is steep, and I also see the benefit to society to make scientific information available, but I just don’t but the idea that this is something the government shold be doing.

Seems to me that this was a givernment boondogle that should have been closed.

www.nutfruit.org/UserFiles/Image/pdf/reg10_feb09.pdf

Present Obama, the zero we can believe in.

I have an idea what you mean, but I’m not quite sure

please explain

I feel I lost the reason why I came here in the first place, wich was basically for political discussion, and I hope to find it again.
be back on 4-2
please no replies. thanks