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You can get a delightful spectrum of colour through the filter as well, using the large square emojis:

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HN pixel art generator, anyone?

For these publishers, that's a welcome side effect. Having a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves and their shareholders, is not how this should work at all.

Also, many users of Sci-Hub would not be able to afford the publishers' access fees anyway. The alternative, if Sci-Hub is destroyed, isn't the publishers getting loads more cash rolling in, it's such users not being able to access these research papers at all.

It's copying, not theft.

The latter deprives someone of an item, the former increases its availability. An important distinction when considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.

Was her identity well-known before the Elsevier court case, where she was named?

I thought the publicity for her efforts was made after this, in English language media anyway. Though perhaps I am misremembering the order of events.

> Let me reply to your last sentence by saying I do not think it is sexist to use the word “hysterical”, which has a well-understood meaning apart from its etymology, to someone who happens to be female.

Then do you think maybe you misread Elbakyan's tone from her word choices, in a similar way to how I misread yours? She even stated in her last reply that she wasn't being hostile.

> Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when she learned of an article on my site that describes several methods to acquire free copies of scientific articles,

Just looks like an emphatic disagreement to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20200928010251/https://twitter.c..., https://web.archive.org/web/20200928011503/https://twitter.c...

Also, considering the etymology ("of the womb"), your criticism of her replies comes across as quite sexist.

Not only should there should be no autonomous drones, the non-autonomous remote controller hardware should be wired up such that if they are shot out of the sky, this kills the human operator and anyone sitting nearby.

This would be much fairer than the current system of gamified point-and-click murder.

This proposed seizure would be conditional on such assets belonging to the royal family.

So it would only be a precedent for any additional monarchical assets discovered after the initial transfer of ownership.

> By "fill their pockets" I mean actively engage in political corruption.

But they do. For example, the Queen used her power to get an exemption from transparency laws with regards to her own personal wealth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que..., and her son Charles did the same to ban his tenants from purchasing freeholds: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/09/prince-charl....

> The fact that over 60% of people like to live in a country where birth defines a family's worth as higher than everyone else is mind boggling.

On a more uplifting note, polls indicate that this support has been slowly declining in recent years, particularly amongst the younger age groups: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/0...

I'm British and not part of that 60%, and am fervently hoping this support declines more rapidly when the current monarch dies in the next few years or so. I think a lot of the respect for the monarchy here is driven by a personal respect for the Queen. The rest being our deep-seated cultural problem of class deference.

My personal opinion is that in addition to abolishing the monarchy, the state should seize all of their private assets, and every member of the royal family should be exiled. This is probably an even less popular opinion, but I think it's the only proper way to rid Britain of this parasitic family.

> Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts?

If you ask a monarchist, they'll usually lean on one of two arguments: the financial and the traditional.

The former is the flawed belief that the monarchy is a money-maker for the UK and that it would be financially imprudent to abolish them. Usually this argument is based on the Crown Estate providing income for the Treasury, and the implied assumption that if the monarchy were abolished then that income would be gone, even though the lands are still there and there's no reason why the new republican government couldn't just seize the Estate as part of this abolishment. There's also the tourism income conjecture, but plenty of ex-monarchies have a strong tourism sector, and presumably there'd be a Royal Family Museum for tourists to visit in the new republic.

The latter is driven by cultural inertia and tends to be what monarchists lean on when the financial argument has been demolished. The talking points usually revolve around who would be the next head of state then, how could Britain possibly function without the monarchy, and so on.

Perhaps some monarchists would disagree with this characterisation of their beliefs, but having argued with many of them, these are my observations.

This supposed 'intellectual property theft' is mostly just reverse engineering of technology.

It's not really a problem anyway. If some capitalists in the US and Europe don't get to skim off a slice of profit from another country's manufacturing output, then so what?

An upload site for papers, but with a cryptocurrency scam attached. Useless.

The fact that this is a VC-backed startup pretty much guarantees it will be doing nefarious things with its users' data somewhere down the line. Even if not intended right now.

> The product is not tainted because it was made by prisoners, but because your justice system sucks.

The product is tainted because it was made by enslaved workers being exploited for their labour.

> I feel like this article is pointing a gun at the wrong faces. These companies are most likely doing this as a form of social giving.

No, they're doing it because they know they can severely underpay these workers and treat them badly, knowing that they have no recourse to push back.

People who run such businesses rarely have any pure motive. It's all about the profit and they don't care who suffers in the pursuit of it.

Now if they'd provided the prisoners with a decent wage for their work, that would be a different matter, and indicative of some good intent. But none of these companies are going to do that, when they know they have a source of people they can continually exploit.

This is the most "keyboard warrior" comment I've ever read.

> We should shut down Russian infrastructure as retaliation.

How about, instead of causing harm to innocent Russian people by such pointless escalation, the US makes a serious and meaningful effort to secure their critical national infrastructure. As they should have done in the first place.

> Given paying with crypto is as easy as a QR scan these days once someone is onboarded, the other claim that you use, convenience, is about to go out the window: see venmo, PayPal, CB integrations.

But why would you want to? In most cases, there's simply no benefit to using cryptocurrencies instead of real money.

Even if we could pay for our groceries, clothing, water, electricity, rent/mortgage, taxes, etc. with cryptocurrencies (which, for the most part, we can't) rather than real money, there's no compelling reason to do so.

The article isn't wrong though. The main uses of cryptocurrencies, other than as speculative assets, are online drug dealing and ransomware payments.

For almost every other application, real money is more useable, convenient and reliable.

Despite your unnecessary sarcasm, this is actually a good example, seeing as the company was eventually destroyed by the US government for abusing its monopoly position.

They did indeed fund a highly successful research centre, but - importantly to its success - one that wasn't run with the same ideals as its parent. It wasn't Bell Labs itself that endeavoured to monopolise an entire industry to the point where the government had to intervene.

By her own words, in creating and maintaining Sci-Hub, Elbakyan was driven by communist ideals: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc850001 https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc920674

Interesting to observe how it overlaps with this conception of the hacker spirit.

If only the world had many more Alexandra Elbakyans, and fewer Elseviers. Humanity as a whole would be a lot better off without the capitalists ruining everything with their insatiable greed.

> I have a more charitable interpretation. My impression is that the author is dealing with an ethical dilemma that most of us have not had to contend with, and that this essay is an attempt to resolve it.

That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.

> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?

Only if such lawyers are unethical in how they go about doing this.

Lawyers who defend accused rapists are a necessity for a well-functioning justice system. The alternative is a process where the accused isn't permitted a legal defence, if they're taken to trial for serious crimes like rape.

Software engineers who spend their days forcing increasingly invasive advertising technology upon us all are not necessary. For the most part, we'd all be better off if they all downed tools.

> Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along?

The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.

> I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise?

I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.

> Why couldn't we just have stuck with yellow?

It was because of a demonstrated demand for emojis with different skin tones to the default yellow. Before the Unicode Consortium had even considered this, there was a popular app called iDiversicons, which had similar emoji-like characters customisable with five different skin colour options, as images that could be copied by the user into their messages.

After trying and failing to convince Apple to allow their app to modify the iOS keyboard to make these easier to enter, the authors of the app took a broader approach, and wrote a proposal to the Consortium to include their emojis as standard:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14154r-idiversicon-emoji-re... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14085-emoji.pdf

Based on this, the Consortium refined it into their own proposal that used the Fitzpatrick scale for skin tone modifiers:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p... https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14173r-emoji-skin-tone.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf

And then, eventually, these were included in Unicode 8.0.

This reminds me of the "Cash for Ash" scandal in Northern Ireland, where people were doing exactly that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Heat_Incentive_scand...

That's a separate issue, assuming it really is an issue, and not just an indication that those private housing developments in Portland are being constructed with a cheaper, lower build quality so that their investors can generate more profit.

That's not how it turned out in the UK. As this graph illustrates, when the local government authorities were prohibited from building more housing, from the 1980s onwards, the private sector didn't pick up any of the slack: https://i.stack.imgur.com/MmJ5N.png

The capitalists instead decided to optimize for steadily increasing the price of housing by restricting supply, so these are now primarily seen as an investment with nearly-guaranteed returns, rather than places for people to live.

It all depends on how it's implemented. The usual method of controlling rent is to cap only a subset of properties in an area - for example, leaving new builds or new tenancies exempt. Which tends to create a two-tier system that benefits one set of tenants at the expense of the other, while discouraging reallocation for downsizing and suchlike. And as you allude to, without further restrictions on tenancy contract terms, the private landlords will attempt to extract their pound of flesh in other ways.

On the other hand, if rent controls are used as part of a wider strategy to gradually convert private rental stock over to social housing - that is, as a stick to encourage private landlords to sell up to the public sector - along with other measures including more state investment in building such housing, large fines for private landlords leaving their rental properties unoccupied, and so on, then this can be a long-term positive on the overall housing situation.

The end goal should be to remove this wholly unnecessary parasitic landlord class from the housing provision entirely, rather than tinkering around the edges of the problem, as this Berlin measure was doing.