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• TeX user manual
• TeX commented source code
• Metafont user manual
• Metafont commented source code
• The Metafont programms to generate the computer modern fonts

If you, say in 500 years, get a copy of these 5 volumes (and if they are printed on good paper, there is good chance that these survive). You just need some kind of computing device and the skillset to implement some easy pascal like programming language. Then you type in the programms and fonts from this book and voila, you have working a TeX system!

Of course you need to write a .dvi driver for whatever output device you want to need and have at that time.

If you now find some .tex source of one of Knuth's books, be it in print or some crude hyperflux memory cube, you are then able to reproduce that book in the quality Knuth intended it to have!

Thus TeX is explicitly developed to transfer the typographic quality of Knuth's books into the future, without depending that lots of software vendors establish lots of data format (e.g. Word 2325 to Wort 2326) converters!

Regards,
Marc

• TeX user manual
• TeX commented source code
• Metafont user manual
• Metafont commented source code
• The Metafont programms to generate the computer modern fonts

If you, say in 500 years, get a copy of these 5 volumes (and if they are printed on good paper, there is good chance that these survive). You just need some kind of computing device and the skillset to implement some easy pascal like programming language. Then you type in the programms and fonts from this book and voila, you have working a TeX system!

Of course you need to write a .dvi driver for whatever output device you want to need and have at that time.

If you now find some .tex source of one of Knuth's books, be it in print or some crude hyperflux memory cube, you are then able to reproduce that book in the quality Knuth intended it to have!

Thus TeX is explicitly developed to transfer the typographic quality of Knuth's books into the future, without depending that lots of software vendors establish lots of data format (e.g. Word 2325 to Wort 2326) converters!

Regards,
Marc

• TeX user manual
• TeX commented source code
• Metafont user manual
• Metafont commented source code
• The Metafont programms to generate the computer modern fonts

If you, say in 500 years, get a copy of these 5 volumes (and if they are printed on good paper, there is good chance that these survive). You just need some kind of computing device and the skillset to implement some easy pascal like programming language. Then you type in the programms and fonts from this book and voila, you have working a TeX system!

Of course you need to write a .dvi driver for whatever output device you want to need and have at that time.

If you now find some .tex source of one of Knuth's books, be it in print or some crude hyperflux memory cube, you are then able to reproduce that book in the quality Knuth intended it to have!

Thus TeX is explicitly developed to transfer the typographic quality of Knuth's books into the future, without depending that lots of software vendors establish lots of data format (e.g. Word 2325 to Wort 2326) converters!

Regards,
Marc

• TeX user manual
• TeX commented source code
• Metafont user manual
• Metafont commented source code
• The Metafont programms to generate the computer modern fonts

If you, say in 500 years, get a copy of these 5 volumes (and if they are printed on good paper, there is good chance that these survive). You just need some kind of computing device and the skillset to implement some easy pascal like programming language. Then you type in the programms and fonts from this book and voila, you have working a TeX system!

Of course you need to write a .dvi driver for whatever output device you want to need and have at that time.

If you now find some .tex source of one of Knuth's books, be it in print or some crude hyperflux memory cube, you are then able to reproduce that book in the quality Knuth intended it to have!

Thus TeX is explicitly developed to transfer the typographic quality of Knuth's books into the future, without depending that lots of software vendors establish lots of data format (e.g. Word 2325 to Wort 2326) converters!

Regards,
Marc

Does he get all the guests to sign a model release form? Are the shots taken in a public place (i.e. a place the photographer doesn't need permission to be). If the answer to both these questions is no, then he owns the negatives but not the copyrights. So the question is can you buy the negatives, not can you buy the copyright.

That's a common RIAA/MPAA lie that appears to be sticking. Fair Use is stated legally in 2 places that I know of.

1) Section 107 and of the US Copyright Act. This act defines US copyright law and discusses derivative works, transformed works, etc. This law determines what is and is not a copyright violation, and mentions backups, copies for educational use, etc.

2) It is clarified in several supreme court cases. These rulings were later made into laws after they were upheld several times.

Some links:
Fair Use at the US Copyright Office's web site
Fair use explained by BitLaw
Stanford Copyright & Fair Use

You are totally off base in your comparison of Java/C# to Lisps. For one thing, all lisps from McCarthy's original onward have had closures (Lisps had dynamic rather than lexical scoping rules until Scheme came along but that's a different story); Lisp doesn't make sense without them. Lisps also invented the notion of dynamic type information and the simple C-ish type systems Java and C# have are totally clobbered by, for instance, the static typing add-ons for PLT Scheme that will do full type inference including polymorphic types.

And when you say "Both Java and C# have full dynamic code generation and full reflection of existing, compiled code (you can analyze code from other methods/classes); Lisp's dynamic code generation and code reflection are more limited" I really can't take you seriously. Have you actually used the systems in question? Saying that Java's or C#'s dynamic code generation and reflection are in any way comparable to Common Lisp's is just ridiculous. I've written programs making heavy use of Java reflection and programs that use the equivalent stuff in Scheme; eval and macros (or higher-level stuff built with them like PLT Scheme's dynamic-require) are so much simpler and easier than Java's system it's absurd. Common Lisp is all about writing programs that write programs; in some sense it's what the language is for. And when I read "If the Lisp community ever got its act together and actually learned from Java/C#, they could produce a great response ..." I know you must be trolling. Look up what James Gosling and Guy Steele were known for before Java; in some way Java is an attempt to bring the otherwise C++ guys halfway to the benefits of Lisp (paraphrasing Steele). So, err, I guess I have been trolled.

1. You're not preserved and cryonics doesn't work.
You're dead.
2. You're not preserved and cryonics does work.
You're dead.
3. You're preserved and cryonics doesn't work.
You're dead.
4. You're preserved and cryonics does work.
You're alive

Ergo, cryonics is true. Of course, if Pascal's wager is also a useful guide to decision making as it was originally formulated, then we might desire a more complex matrix, so as to include the possibility that God exists and would be pissed off at you for having your brain vitrified upon death, clinging to some vain hope of a godless resurrection.

In short it's a decision matrix that says believing in god is a better choice than not believing in god. Being an atheist I have to admit it's about the most convincing argument I've ever seen, largely because it's purely logical. Here is the short of it:

God exists------God does not exist
Wager for God-------Gain all--------Satus quo
Wager against God---Misery----------Status quo

Read all about it here.

Please excuse the horrible formatting, I suck at html.

As the inventor of LISP writes:

If customary notations are to be used externally, translation programs must be written.

Another reason for the initial acceptance of awkwardnesses in the internal form of LISP is that we still expected to switch to writing programs as M-expressions. The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised.

So basically, LISP is the generic format you are talking about. LISP is just bunch of list structures in memory.

To allow humans to interact with it, the lists are often mapped to text. We can arbitrarily choose parenthesis as the list separators, resulting in the familiar lists enclosed by parenthesis.

The intention was to write the front ends you describe, but the authors of LISP found it was just as convenient to write in the generic form so didn't bother.

As the inventor of LISP writes:

If customary notations are to be used externally, translation programs must be written.

Another reason for the initial acceptance of awkwardnesses in the internal form of LISP is that we still expected to switch to writing programs as M-expressions. The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised.

So basically, LISP is the generic format you are talking about. LISP is just bunch of list structures in memory.

To allow humans to interact with it, the lists are often mapped to text. We can arbitrarily choose parenthesis as the list separators, resulting in the familiar lists enclosed by parenthesis.

The intention was to write the front ends you describe, but the authors of LISP found it was just as convenient to write in the generic form so didn't bother.

Well, obviously you dont know about their heritage

Since the prior story is about Carnegie Mellon its rather ironic that the most intriguing launch technology was left off entirely -- and it is out of the robotics department of CM: the Rotovar(tm) by Hans Moravec.

We investigate a cheaper system. A satellite in low circular equatorial orbit has two long cables extending in opposite directions. It rotates in the orbital plane, and the cables touch the planet each rotation, with the rotational velocity canceling the orbital velocity. The system acts like two spokes of a giant wheel rolling on the equator.

The orbit is stable, and the taper is minimized when the satellite's diameter is one third the planet's. On Earth it is 4000 km long and touches down every 20 minutes, every 2 hours at six points. Cable motion near the ground is vertical and uniformly accelerated at 1.4 g. The maximum velocity in the atmosphere is 2 km/sec. One eighth the strength of graphite gives it a taper of 10:1, and it can lift 1/54 of its own mass at each contact.

The central idea in this paper, of a satellite that rolls like a wheel, was originated and suggested to me by John McCarthy of Stanford. He also encouraged the work and provided many of the resources for it. The symbolic mathematics was done with the MACSYMA system being developed at MIT. This program behaves like a programmable desk calculator that deals with algebraic expressions instead of simply numbers. It is capable of solving equations, integrating formulas, taking limits and much more.

In the robotics group at Stanford they're working on human motion. Dynamic balancing is one of the issues they seem to have solved, and really well at that. Well, OK, it's "only" in simulation, but imagine plugging those algorithms into a real robot...

Last year I attended a talk about this project at a conference, and the videos were really amazing. Unfortunatley, the 'view movies' link at the bottom does not work for me -- maybe limited to their intranet?

No . . . wait . . . AAAAaaaarrggggghhhhh!

[head explodes]

Oh, well . . .

I don't get their criteria for giving out the cards. Some major-league diseases are missing like tuberculosis and cholera, but they give some small-time (yeah yeah it's not small if you've got it) diseases their own card. Damnit, I want a 1918 influenza card! It killed millions worldwide--a very pricey card I'm sure.

But they are a small non-profit, and only a fraction of Slashdot readers are EFF members (because otherwise the EFF would have a membership count closer to the ACLU's, say). That's a lot of free riders, or a lot of people who think that none of these issues will ever affect them. 99% of other lawyers / civil rights groups are just going to hear "I work in technobabble, and now I'm being sued for technobabble because of technobabble..." when you call them up with your 'intersection of technology with legal rights' legal problem. The EFF will actually understand the issue and will want to help you. And, if they can afford to help you they will- but for that they need donations. That's why you should support the EFF.

The option price is the present value of the expected employee profit. Thus, what Rubinstein proposes is equivalent to the FASB proposal in terms of dollars at the time of option grant, it's just that it's based on what did actually happen rather than what was expected to happen. As such, the Rubinstein measure is also less prone to manipulation.

If you know how to read a 10-K, you can verify that for several years in the late 1990's the employee profits on Microsoft's options were approximately the magnitude of earnings. So if Microsoft had used the Rubinstein proposal, they would have earned almost no profits for several years. That would have made for some interesting headlines: "Microsoft has no profits, piles up $40 billion in cash."

In my view the best proposal for how to expense is here.

You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.

The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.

To get a better handle on why this images are needed, read up on this article: Combining Local and Remote Visualization Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering in Medical Applications, and check out the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center Website.

Once you dive around those articles and websites, you'll realize that Java3D supports alot of exotic hardware, such as 5 megapixel LCD monitors, Projection Tables for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Virtual Surgery Tables.

Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...

FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.

I know part of the answer to the following question but not the complete answer.
How are recent graduates of Gene Golub's program doing?
If anyone should be able to get industry jobs, they should. The little I know is the getting interviews is not too hard but getting jobs may be a little harder right now. Anyone have any recent information?

I know part of the answer to the following question but not the complete answer.
How are recent graduates of Gene Golub's program doing?
If anyone should be able to get industry jobs, they should. The little I know is the getting interviews is not too hard but getting jobs may be a little harder right now. Anyone have any recent information?

If we're beaker, who's Bunsen???

BOINC doesn't run multiple projects at the same time. It runs one project at a time, but it divides its time between projects according to percentages that you choose.

There are no active, public projects besides SETI@home yet. Predictor@home is running a public alpha test of its client that anyone can participate in. climateprediction.net began a private alpha test of its client today, and plans to begin a public beta test next month. Folding@home is developing a client, but has not announced any alpha or beta testing for it yet. BOINC Beta Test is still beta testing the BOINC client and may create an Astropulse project based on the client. Einstein@Home may be developing a client based on BOINC for its project which begins in 2005.

I already split my time between two distributed computing projects on the same computer... Folding@home (Via the Google toolbar) and United Devices. Haven't run into any problems with it, so far.

Maybe the new BOINC software will allow you to split your computing time between SETI and Folding?

Whoever modded the parent down should rethink their decision.

Folding at Home seems to be another distributed computing project, just like SETI. I haven't RTFA-ed, but the original post says that BOINC will allow multiple distributed programs to run. At worst, this is redundant, but it is definitely on topic for this particular part of the thread!

If you want to learn about or share your bad experiences with URAA restored copyrights, then read up on Golan v. Ashcroft .

That just isn't so.

The key to a successful overclock is to test, test, and test until you've found the top end of the stable range, and then back down a bit. An overclock that isn't stable isn't a successful overclock.

I overclock a P4 3.0C to 3.5 GHz and use it for long-term computational biophysics. (Numerical simulation of tumor growth and chemotherapy.) It's amazing what a difference a 17% speed boost can make in a 7-day calculation. I've tested both the memory and the CPU for stability and can vouch for it. Overclocking isn't just for games; it can make the hardware you can afford more productive for real work. It sure helped me to get my research done more quickly for my master's thesis.

Other people are using overclocked computers for useful things all the time. Consider the thousands who use overclocked computers to pump out WU's for Stanford's protein folding project (find out how proteins fold and misfold, help cure diseases, etc.). The top-producing teams are overclockers.au, HardOCP (lots of overclockers), and overclockers.com at Number 3.

It's also described in one of their research papers.

Link to patent.

-jim

In my opinion, Google's market dominance has more to do with massive computing and network resources than technology. (Their reputation of being not evil doesn't hurt, either.)

Their architecture is relatively well-understood. If you want to know how google works, read The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, and some of the other papers from Google. (They probably have some special tricks they haven't revealed to the public, but the basic algorithms aren't that complicated.)

It's hard for anyone to compete with Google without having enough bandwidth to crawl a large portion of the web on a regular basis, and then store the resulting data structures in RAM.

-jim

Well, Microsoft's Darknet paper (1mb .doc file) (as referenced in Cory Doctorow's recent speech to MS) suggests they'll research the problem until they come across a solution (e.g., KaZaa) to circumvent the protection and get their files in mp3 format. Next time they'll probably eliminate the middleman and just go to KaZaa.

Are Apple really the quality leader? I don't deny that they make very attractive and cleverly designed products (as do BMW) but is the quality of manufacture really there?

My circle of friends have had a lot of reliability problems with Apple products. My girlfriend recently bought an iPod from an Apple dealer, and the screen on the first one she bought didn't work at all. She had to argue with them for five-ten minutes to get them to swap it immediately, rather than making her wait a couple of weeks to get a replacement from Apple HQ. (Great customer experience!)

My other friend had a TiBook, in which two drives failed in a matter of months, and then the motherboard failed. When he took it in to get the motherboard replaced, the apple monkeys said they could not move the hard drive across to the new machine, so he would lose all his data since his last backup, since the machine would no longer boot. They wouldn't let him remove the old drive himself either, since that would void the warranty. They thought this was entirely reasonable: maybe most of their users don't store any data they care about? This was their policy even though swapping a hard drive from one machine to another is something most nerdy twelve-year-olds could do without trouble. I think he ended up getting the new replacement machine, selling it, and getting an x86 laptop instead.

You hear similar stories about BMWs: beautiful design, but many little glitches and a large fraction of clueless dealers. I went to a BMW motorcycle shop a while ago and the salesdroid couldn't even ride, and didn't know the first thing about motorcycles. If I were a design engineer at Apple or BMW I'd feel really let down.

If I really wanted an Apple I wouldn't let this put me off -- and I do really appreciate the gorgeous whole-system design. I would just make regular backups to another (non-Apple) machine. So the situation is similar to what people say about BMW: great design, but (for the money) very unreliable quality and service. If I had the spare money I'd probably buy either a BMW or an Apple machine at least once in my life, but I'd go into it prepared to fight hard to get my warranty entitlements.

The nub of the problem is this: the two companies have built such strong brands that for many customers there is no substitute. If I'm buying a regular commodity SATA drive, I can look at price, quality reports, speed and so on and choose between many vendors. But if I have my heart set on an iPod or an M3 then I have to take it or leave it. The competitive pressure for quality is much less. Of course the downside is that when customers have such an emotional attachment they get really bitter when they're screwed around -- as did the two people mentioned.

Although the board found that the tether's insulation was more vulnerable to damage than the experiment's designers had believed, they also found that the problem "is not indicative of any fundamental problem in using electrodynamic tethers." In fact, while the tether was operating it produced currents three times higher than theoretical models had predicted prior to the flight, the board reported.

that tells more about "the beast". So far, I just can tell that it is made of linux clusters, containing about 12500 nodes, because in case of clusters you are facing bi processors systems 98% of the time.

Here is the track, if someone wants to hunt the beast.

II don't waste resources. My PC runs folding at home, the URL is

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/.

Hopefully it will help find a cure for many diseases which relate to the way proteins fold and interact. You are more than welcome to join my hotldap team :-).

I think my Linux box takes five minutes to boot, it has web servers and an LDAP server on it as well as firewalls etc. and I haven't optimised its boot time. My older Win 2K box takes well over 5 minutes to load up all the crud that is in the system tray (my fault I would stress, not Microsofts) and my XP machine takes around 5 minutes, with time being used up on mounting network drives and starting Lotus Notes etc.

While I welcome a new approach to fast and efficient mesh optimization (yes, yes, our new mesh simplification overlords), it is hard to lend credence to the description of the algorithm as highly accurate. The very first example figure in the article (a mesh of a small-case letter "a" in 3D) shows a mesh reduction result that removes all of the curvature from the end of the top left "hook" of the "a". I do not consider this a highly accurate representation, unless perhaps they are referring to the bounds of the mesh reduction.

Another troubling point is the list of possible applications; retail web sites, museums, cartoon characters/video games, and CAD. Of these, the web and video game applications are reasonable, but for CAD it would be ridiculous except in the case of a quick and dirty look at a large complex assembly. For museums I know of one solution that gives exceptional speedups in rendering, but does so without loss of visual detail: Qsplat from the Michelangelo Project at Stanford.

In any case, I do look forward to hearing more about this at Siggraph 2004.

While I welcome a new approach to fast and efficient mesh optimization (yes, yes, our new mesh simplification overlords), it is hard to lend credence to the description of the algorithm as highly accurate. The very first example figure in the article (a mesh of a small-case letter "a" in 3D) shows a mesh reduction result that removes all of the curvature from the end of the top left "hook" of the "a". I do not consider this a highly accurate representation, unless perhaps they are referring to the bounds of the mesh reduction.

Another troubling point is the list of possible applications; retail web sites, museums, cartoon characters/video games, and CAD. Of these, the web and video game applications are reasonable, but for CAD it would be ridiculous except in the case of a quick and dirty look at a large complex assembly. For museums I know of one solution that gives exceptional speedups in rendering, but does so without loss of visual detail: Qsplat from the Michelangelo Project at Stanford.

In any case, I do look forward to hearing more about this at Siggraph 2004.

also check out rdiff-backup for a very nice solution which doesn't require 10Gb every time you change a few bytes in your 10Gb file.

Backup is definitely the way to go, and if your fileserver runs something UNIXy, you can use rdiff-backup to do a remote incremental backup to another local server or an off-site server over the Internet. Cheap, fast, easy to set up, and easy to restore from (even restore multiple past versions).

Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.

All computer programs may be mapped to integers. ("It has been shown")
The integers are a denumerable set. (basic set theory 101)
The set of all computer programs that generate numbers, is itself a subset of the set of all computer programs. (Duh?)
The subset of any denumerable set is denumerable. (basic set theory 101)
All numbers, generated by computer programs that generate numbers, are memebers of a denumerable set. Trivially, QED.

Now, if you want proof of the premise-- that the set of all computer programs may be mapped to integers-- that's another story. (Hint: use a Turing machine and RTFB.) But the conclusion seems blindingly obvious.

I would like some tips, suggestions, and experience in living with an extra degree of intensity, depth, and general intelligence.

1. You may be unique, but you are not uniquely bright. Bear in mind that just because you are smart doesn't mean that everyone else is stupid. It is amazing how many people make this mistake.

I love learning, yet I never have found school enjoyable. I'm incredibly intense and concentrated

Well College should be better, then. However,

, yet I often become bored of specific projects in a few months.

2. Bear in mind that just because you are initially bored by something doesn't mean it isn't worth learning. This is true of College courses: You may find afterwards that it was worthwhile and not what you expected. That is why it's called "an Education."

My attention span is practically unlimited when I am interested in a topic, and I get intensely interested in it.

3. Yet you say you also get bored easily after a few months. Well, that's OK: keep an eye out for something that doesn't wear off. The advice of Stanford's John Perry is as good as any: At college take one third of your units learning something that will pay your wages afterwards; one third fulfilling requirements to the university; and one third for yourself, to find out who you are. It will be much more expensive to have a nervous breakdown in your '50s than to find out who you are while you're in college."

I'm just coming up on entering college, so most of my life is ahead of me.

4. Exactly. So don't panic yet. And don't drop out, for Christ sake. You're guaranteeing yourself a 35% cut in future earnings.

Last I checked, faculty was not generally responsible for doing IT software upgrades.

You must have missed this in the article: Stanford CIO Chris Handley, a former psychology instructor who joined Stanford from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1999.

Granted, he's not an instructor now but he surely is responsible for fixing the mess and has been for five years:

Handley joined Stanford in November 1999 as executive director of administrative systems. Previously, he directed the national PeopleSoft Practice for Higher Education at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Before that he held positions at the University of Toronto, where he enjoyed a 14-year career as a psychology instructor before taking responsibility for university systems there.

No mention of a CS degree or any technical background, just an affiliation to PeopleSoft? Is this why Stanford has been screwed around by their vendors for so long?

The plot thickens, he's spoken at Open Source conferences! He should know better. I'd love to know what he said.

Anyone known anything else about Chris?

"That would have been Berkeley then, no? Home of LSD and UNIX IIRC."

This former Stanford CS prof did his share of drugs.

"As if the computer science professors at stanford are the ones that set up the financial and human-resources systems."

Maybe that's a good thing. They're too busy experimenting with drugs anyway.

Surely the same institution that came up with a distributed computing software project such as Folding@Home can handle a menial financial and record-keeping software project. If they made their own, using the GPL, then other universities could adopt it as well, and contribute to its development.

I mean, after all, it's not like John McCarthy wrote the Oracle financials package.

The U.S. has a "comparative advantage" in capital-intensive industries, because we have (compared to China and India) a lot of capital. Likewise, a "comparative advantage" in land-intensive industries such as agriculture. (You don't know what "comparative advantage" is? It is the economics term for the idea that countries should produce products that they have a relative -rather than absolute- advantage at producing. Then overall production of goods is maximized. Comparative Advantage ).

The U.S. should have an advantage in industries that require educated workers since we have many of them, but in fact educated workers are relatively scarce in the U.S., and have been for many years. Unskilled workers have been more plentiful -- their wages per person have been dropping in real terms, and their share of GNP has been dropping. Both educated and uneducated labor are scarce relative to capital and land, when compared to India and China.

Economists will, if pressed, admit that free trade does have some losers in each country -- those who are in relatively short supply -- but maintain that the overall worldwide gains in productivity are worth it even though a few will be worse off. Now look at the U.S. case: capital and land are plentiful, educated and uneducated workers are in short supply. Educated *and* uneducated workers are the ones most likely to suffer under free trade. Yes, the whole world will be better off, but is the average American likely to see any benefit from those gains? The only benefit they will see will come from a drop in the cost of goods where educated or unskilled labor is a relatively important factor, which may or may not be enough to offset the loss of wages they will suffer. It is entirely possible that most of the gains will go to workers in India and China, and to those who own farmland and capital in the U.S.

the knuth letter mentioned by an earlier poster had some interesting facts regarding the payment of editors: annual salaries of a small sample of editors were "$6K, $12K, $14K, and $22.5K". if this is anywhere near representative, the cost of editing strikes me to be quite insubstantial given the price of journal subscriptions (quoting again: "Elsevier was charging Stanford $4878 for a year's subscription to Theoretical Computer Science and Science of Computer Programming.")

It's long, but a good read.

Agreed... I think it's solvable too -- just difficult, which makes it all the more fun.

Also I accidentally linked to the wrong paper in my original reply. I meant to link to this one, but that other paper was at least marginally related.

I've got to second this; every (physics) PhD I know from my time in Silicon Valley (at SLAC) is gainfully employed. Interestingly, my collegue thinks this isn't the case for CompSci PhDs, so there you go. Get a PhD in Physics!!!

Dan