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Here, here! It is definitely the publisher's fault. I've worked as a student employee at North Dakota State's Varsity Mart Bookstore, and I know that the high prices are the fault of the publisher. Our store only marks things up enough to pay freight costs, labor costs, and space rent to the Union. If they do make a profit (and I think that's probably only on supplies, clothes, and tradebooks), the University uses it to pay off debts for new construction. (One local school, I think it's Minnesota State University-Moorhead will actually begin returning profits to students as dividends based on how much they purchase each year starting this fall.)

Publishers are out to make money and hate, hate, hate used books. Thus, they come out with oodles of packages with worthless CDs or website access codes or quickly-replaceable flimsy materials. Our bookstore usually works with profs to get around most of the package things. (Bookstore: "Do you really need the CD?" Prof.: "There's a CD with the book? No, they don't need that thing." is the usual conversation.) However, we have one prof who writes the Intro to Public Speaking text for our campus who thinks she needs a new edition every single year. However, I honestly think that we're going to get the administration to put a stop to that in the near future.

One reason that campus bookstores often wind up ripping students off is that they are placed within the Business/Finance branch of the University. A couple years ago, they moved the VMart under Student Affairs, and there have been a lot more used books in the store since then. They're under strict orders from the administration to get as many used books as possible. (Oh, pricing is sell used at 75% of new price, buy back (if needed for the next term) at 60% of new price, so it's a good deal for students, except when going wholesale to MBS, Nebraska Book Company, Budgetext, or Follet, based on who's there for that buy.) Of course, buying used books from the wholesalers pisses the publishers off, and they'll often threaten to withhold ancillaries (instructor's edition, test bank, transparencies, etc.) from the adopting department. This year, our math department switched to a different text for Intro to Ordinary Differential Equations, and the bookstore got about 160 used, which was all they needed. Of course, the publisher (Thomson) got upset and basically forced the store to order 25 new copies, which I'm sure they'll be promptly returning once all the books are purchased this fall.

In summary, don't blame the bookstore until you've been on the inside. Don't blame the profs, unless they're writing the book or getting kickbacks (see an article in the June Chronicle of Higher Education) from the publishers, they've got your best interest at heart. Buy online when possible, but watch out ofr those crappy paperback international editions. Finally, BLAME THE PUBLISHERS! (Except Springer Verlag, publisher of many excellent, reasonably priced mathematics books.)

Would you mind sharing those facts?

Aside from the Pokemon incident, it is based upon three decades of learning and real world experience. I can't fit that into a /. post. I am not a medical reasearcher. Perhaps I should have mentioned it before, but are you? Does the MPAA even understand such things? Why do you say anyone who says this is a risk to epileptics is calling the MPAA a "bold faced liar"? The article indicates the copy protection company doesn't think anyone will notice. No where in the article did I see anyone mention this won't cause any medical problems--they probably didn't think of it.

I am not going to dig through the internet for six hours to find relevant links. In the article it said "Researchers [whoever they are] are mindful that creating too rapid a flicker could trigger seizures in some people." This is why the seizures were brought up. There is very little information in the article about what exactly they are doing, so it is impossible to say for sure.

I did happen upon this link. It's only the abstract, and I haven't read the full paper. Apparently you have to pay to do that. ;-) It says; "Epileptic seizures were induced by local penicillin application and triggered by visual stimulation."

The only way to know be certain either way would be to do reasearch. Why do you think I mentioned the FDA? They make sure reasearch is on every new drug. No matter if the chemical structure is already known. No matter if the chemical structure is very similar to another "safe" medicine.

If there wasn't any concern over such things, then why would video game manufacturers put up warnings about it? If your mother was epileptic and a moviegoer, would you really want to find out this is not safe the hard way?

. . But if you go to Springer-Verlag's Website and search on "wavelet" in the title, it comes up with a buttload of results, including this one which looks right up your alley. And the best part is that Springer has a sale on until the end of the year, so some of the books can be had more cheaply (well, really, less expensively). And Springer books usually Don't Suck.

Also, I'd second ignoring Amazon reviews of technical books -- in general Amazon isn't the right forum to seek advice about technical books. Poplular fiction maybe, but not specialized texts.

. . But if you go to Springer-Verlag's Website and search on "wavelet" in the title, it comes up with a buttload of results, including this one which looks right up your alley. And the best part is that Springer has a sale on until the end of the year, so some of the books can be had more cheaply (well, really, less expensively). And Springer books usually Don't Suck.

Also, I'd second ignoring Amazon reviews of technical books -- in general Amazon isn't the right forum to seek advice about technical books. Poplular fiction maybe, but not specialized texts.

A (rough) definition goes as follows.

Suppose B is a subset of the natural numbers N = {0, 1, 2, 3, ...}. Then a B-oracle is a device which can correctly answer any question of the form "is x an element of B?", where x is a natural number. By "answer" we mean that given a natural number x, the oracle will in finite time answer "yes" or "no", depending on whether or not x is actually in B.

For some sets (such as the set of primes) we can build an oracle easily: just write a computer program to do it. For the primes the program could look something like this. The number, x, is given:

1. If x = 1, answer "NO" and stop.
2. Set d = 2.
3. If d * d > x, answer "YES" and stop.
4. If d divides x, answer "NO" and stop.
5. Increment d by one.
6. Goto step 3

For most sets though, we can't write a progrem to do this: under the generally accepted notion of "computability" (which comes from Church's Thesis) only countably many subsets of N are computable in this way, while N has uncountably many subsets. In these uncomputable cases, an oracle is assumed to exist as if "by magic."

Now, suppose M is a Turing machine equipped with a B-oracle. This machine is just like an ordinary Turing machine, except it can ask its oracle any question of the form "is x an element of B?".

[One way to imagine M is to assume it has a second, write-only infinte tape, on which is written an infinite string of zeros and ones. The n-th digit is one exactly if n is an element of B. Then, to "consult the oracle", M just reads the appropriate digit on its second tape. Any specific digit on this tape can be reached in a finite number of steps ("finite time"), so the second tape, along with some read logic in the machine itself, acts as the oracle.]

Further suppose that M "recognizes" the set A, which is itself a subset of the naturals. That is, suppose that M acts as an A-oracle, able to correctly answer any question of the form "is x in A?". In this case we say:

A is Turing computable relative to B

If A <=_T B and B <=_T A then we write A =_T B and say that A and B are Turing equivalent. From the stand point of computation, A and B are essentially the same.

However, the real interest lies in the relation <=_T itself. This relation turns out to give an extremely rich structure to the subsets of the natural numbers, and is the subject of much mathematical research. The modern standard reference for this field is Soare. This is targetted at graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Other good references are Rogers (warning: Amazon link) and Davis. Davis is rather out of date now, but it is published by Dover and is cheap.

It might seem that talking only about the natural numbers means that none of this is very interesting. However, with the use of Goedel numbering, any finite sentence over a finite alphabet can be encoded as a natural number, so Recursion theory applies to all sorts of structures. One example is the set, X, of (oracle-less) Turing machines. Turing showed that the subset of X which consists of those machines which eventually halt after being started with an empty tape, is not computable. This was his resolution of the Halting Problem.

Cheers,

quokka

Also, in the immediate future, publishers will likely only want to pay to digitise their bestsellers, not educational or special interest texts. But have a look on the ebooks usenet groups, and there are plenty of titles out there if you have a PC setup and aren't not that fussed about copyright - and remember, we're now talking about the impoverished here, where we're trying to educate people up to the stage where they do have the leisure and luxury to care about abstract issues like copyright.

I think you may have this backwards; the real economic benefit to publishers comes when they can do it the other way around.

A title with a huge run (in the hundreds of thousands) makes money at a resonable retail price. Publishers who can only hope to sell thousands (or hundreds, or dozens, even) of titles either make no profit or are forced to charge outrageous prices on their titles (or, often, both). Fewer units sold = more money per unit to cover the fixed costs of publication. Under the current system, the large-run mass-market books make money, while the small-run sleepers don't. Mass-market paberback titles are so cheap per unit to produce that the publishers will not even pay to have the books shipped back and re-processed. Retailers instead tear off the front cover and toss the book in the garbage/recycle bin.

With the current process for printing and selling books at a profit firmly established, don't expect publishers to move their most bankable commodities to a new, experimental technology. Rather, look for small publishers, self-publishers, and marginalized titles from the big guys to show up first on the POD machines. Only if this proves to be a widely-implemented standard will you see the bestsellers show up in this format.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

As soon as I saw this, I remembered about some experiments I had been told about. The magic phrase is "kinesthetic illusion induced by tendon vibration". Basically, by vibrating the tendons, it can create the illusion that the limb is moving into a different position. What I heard about was vibrating the Achilles tendon causes people to lean forward because it makes it seem the position of the feet is pushing them backwards. I think this might be a solution for countering the rocking of the boat.

I found an abstract describing the effect here:

Ant agonist motor responses correlate with kinesthetic illusions induced by tendon vibration