The backlash that involved the requisite "three days of hate because something changed on the Internet" and then moved on to "everyone is using it and pretending that it was always that way"?
This has about as much reasonable intellectual bearing as suggesting that language is an inequality expanding lever just like many other forms of capital and one of the reasons Google and others are so dangerous.
This is just the Luddite fallacy repeated over and over. By this logic, we should never develop new informatic methodologies, we should never develop new forms of analysis, we should never develop new software – because of economies of scale exist.
I'll the state the obvious: that's stupid. There's no way to soften that blow.
When you design a service but charge for it as if it were a product, the inevitable result is that in short order you discover that if there is a demand for the service you offer, the demand continues – but your charging does not.
You would think that the consideration of "how will people actually use this application if we're successful?" would come up a little earlier in the design process than four years after implementation and deployment. And yet…
One of these days we will effectively figure out why serious organizations can't seem to do even basic audio leveling on prerecorded videos that they intend for public consumption.
Seriously. It's 10 minutes of work, at the outside. Normalize the audio to an average of -3 dB so that people can actually understand what's being said without having to jack up their volumes beyond all reason, and then write it back down for the next thing that they have to listen to or get the ears blasted by the next notification sound that comes along.
I've been searching for a music player app that does volume normalization for years, without luck. I would like to be able to listen to normalized classical music, for example, because the volume varies a lot in this kind of audio from quiet passages to loud ones. When listening in car or on the phone while outside it becomes hard to hear the quiet passages because of all the surrounding noise, so, normally, I'd raise the volume, but then comes the loud part and my ears bleed. Normalized audio also plays nice with listening to music on the feeble phone speakers. I kind of find it nostalgic to listen on such tiny speakers, like the transistor radios from a few decades ago.
What I am talking about is raising the volume of the quiet parts, not making all the parts of the track louder. I would listen at normal volume but be able to hear at a sane volume throughout the track. I think this can be achieved offline with the compand effect on sox.
Another listening experience improvement could be to compare the relative volume of noise outside (using the mic) with the volume of the music being played and slightly adjust the volume to keep it above the background noise.
In conclusion, it is necessary to consider the fact that listening on the phone and car happens in noisy environments and quiet passages are almost drowned if the user doesn't compensate. Why force the user with mess with the volume every few minutes when it can be achieved automatically?
Maybe a brave developer will champion this idea and release a music player or even better, an app to normalize over the whole OS so we could benefit from it while using other apps like YouTube.
As the sibling comment pointed out, you are most likely looking for audio compression ("dynamic range compression") instead of normalization.
I know many people want such a thing, though I wouldn't touch it myself (I like my music to have some dynamic range). But just FYI, there already exist music players that have compression plugins like rockbox and vlc, you might want to check them out.
That is a significant and incredibly poorly defended assertion that you're making there, sir.
Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass the first smell test.
You don't just get to assert things without support. That's not only not good science, it's terrible argumentation.
It's pretty obvious that there is a revenue stream that disappears when choosing open access over a paid viewing model.. To cover that - when an author publishes a paper and wants to use the open access model, they pay the journal. The costs come from administering peer review.
The true cost of publication is unknown - "Diane Sullenberger, executive editor for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, says that the journal would need to charge about $3,700 per paper to cover costs if it went open-access. But Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal's internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper. Many publishers say they cannot estimate what their per-paper costs are because article publishing is entangled with other activities" - also from [0].
side note: I fully support open access, but using current publication system and open access would either push some costs on the scientists writing the papers which would be covered by taxpayers in the case of gov-funded research.
Another problem with open access journals is that they generally have lower impact factors. The impact factors of the journals you publish in play a big role in tenure and promotion decisions for professors.
If the potential to be rendered to a blacksite or tortured to death somewhere less polite isn't sufficient motivation for people to be careful, I'm not sure "security" is their biggest problem.
You've obviously never hung around with people with disabilities. "Political correctness" is not exactly their/our long suit.
One of my favorite experiences was watching a group of people with learning disabilities call each other "retard" and crack up every time.
Don't even get me started about Deaf people and the jokes they make about people that can hear when they think you're not watching.