"Ah, Dr. Dobb's. While I - as a German - never actually got my hands on even one of those magazines, I surely know its reputation. A tragic loss for everyone."
Many U.S. publications are either not available on the Continent, or then, at outrageous(ly inflated) prices only, 5 times the U.S. price is quite common. So many of these publications have to rely on their "native" readers only, i.e. for 300 U.S. readers, there is perhaps Continental reader, and as I said in a previous post, these last years, there is an additional problem by Universities' tendency to not buy paper publications anymore whenever possible, but to "make available" expensive publications by electronic means only, which means, for everybody really interested but not belongig to the university anymore, that there will be awful reading on screen at best, most of the time without copying even of short citations, and without any printing-out, which means you will only read what's absolutely necessary to your immediate, current work, at best, and not any line else, and even for a student or prof, it makes a big difference if he can browse some paper in his spare time, for leisure, or if he must read on a screen in the university (bad 17" one of their installations, or his own, often tiny, notebook screen, by WAN) - as before, the latter alternative cause exclusive reading of some specifically needed article only, no more browsing of anything else whatsoever. (Time plays another role here, cf. changed univ curriculae by "Bologna": either it's on the list of mandatory readings, or it doesn't exist anymore.)
The outrageously overpriced dollar does not help in any way, so most people on the Continent who traditionally would have been very interested in "enlarging their horizon" are simply cut off of most of possibly horizon-enlarging stuff now, whilst many of those publications are quite readily available for U.S. readers, even if they need to buy them.
Most of these high-brow publications are written in English, but then, we all know most Americans do not have any interest in benefiting from such stuff that would be available though, free or cheap to them, in their native language; whilst it is generally assumed that the Continental (not: power) elites who are eager to read such stuff, and without problems in what's the new lingua franca for, are also eager to first pay 5 times the natural price.* (Oh yes, it's all the intermediates' fault, isn't it? Well, I call this a general, reproachable organizational fault instead.)
Most people in this forum refuse to discuss general ideas; that gives them room to endlessly chat about time and time again new symptoms of denied fundamentals.**
* and ** = Some people have to learn it the hard way. Good riddance to just some other of innumerable examples, and tendency to disappear will accelerate.
