Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

[Masataka Ohta <[e-mail]>]

John Levine wrote:

>>>> It is a lot more time (and money) saving to search free

> I expect that most people who use those databases have site
> licenses, so they don't care whether the articles are nominally
> free or not.
> 
> When I need to do database searches, I go to the Cornell engineering
> library where I can get (quite legally) onto Cornell's network and use
> their institutional subscriptions.

> If I find something interesting, I
> click on it and download it, and have no idea whether it would have
> asked a non-subscriber to pay or not.

Though my institute also have the license for the paper, I was at
home when I wrote my previous mails, which means I must set up a
tunnel to access the paper through my institute, which is a lot
more time consuming than just search a free copy.

Worse, I might have set up a tunnel only to have found that my
institute does not have a site license for the paper.

According to the end to end principle, we should not rely on
intelligent intermediate entities such as university libraries,
ACM, IEEE and google scholar so much but just try dumb search
engines first.

						Masataka Ohta