Indeed there were some pretty nasty obfuscation efforts as part of copy protection- code that ran in the stack, code that relied on processor quirks/bugs, tricky self-modifying code. It was a good way to really learn assembly.

If you are interested in university-centered research in science or engineering as a career, finding someone who is currently there and relatively recently trained is a reasonable plan. Generally people in that position are either swamped with work or they have developed good skills for minimizing distractions from their own work and may not be so interested in helping random strangers, though.

Be careful, a lot of faculty are pompous blowhards whose information and career advice is long out of date if not totally obsolete. A good way to find a successful active researcher in most science and many engineering fields is to look for those with active National Science Foundation grants via http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/tab.do?dispatch=4 the NSF award search page.

My own personal experience isn't really relevant and is essentially obsolete, since finances of US higher education have changed a great deal since my experience. I had several generous scholarships and awards, so my undergrad didn't involve debt.

It is good to realize that doctoral programs in science and engineering generally give good support to strong students and generally are at least slight positive cash flow for sensible students.

What is relevant from my experience is that I likely would have still gotten into a strong grad program had I gone to Notable State Flagship University instead of Elite Research University for undergraduate work, and it wouldn't nominally have cost nearly as much. Once in a strong doctoral program, people don't really care too much about where you did you undergraduate as long as you have good preparation and progress well.

There are many factors at work here. The various studies all have flaws as there are many interrelated variables and they are difficult to separate out. There is a complex choice here, and it is never as simple as these studies or stories make it out to be. Some things that are typically omitted:

1) If your undergraduate degree is the last degree you are going to get, the importance of that institution is elevated somewhat.
2) If you plan to get an advanced degree, one main goal of undergraduate education is to increase the likeliehood that you will get into a top graduate program and do well there.
2b) Top graduate programs in science and engineering are much more likely to take strong students from research universities, particularly those undergraduates who already took some graduate-level courses or had specific productive experience with undergraduate research.

Expounding a bit:

1) For careers in finance or management, many strong firms only consider students from very strong universities. If that is your career path, that could be an important criterion. Similarly, if your only degree will be undergraduate in some other field where generally the expectation is just an undergraduate degree, that choice of institution of course matters more. In terms of studies that look at average salary, this effect can dominate others as these are often high-paying fields with great variance in salary.

2) In general, I recommend that good students go to the "best" place that they get into. That is, the most academically rigorous usually works well. Overdoing it can be a problem, if they go to a place where the expectations are simply to high and they struggle and fail. But most commonly, the advantage of going to a strong place is that the other students are also strong, and the professors can then teach at a reasonable level for their audience. That is, often the other students are the limiting factor to the depth of a course's coverage and so you want to be at the best place you can be and still succeed. That is a good route to the preparation needed for doctoral-level courses.

2b) I've had to serve on various doctoral admissions committees, and students from big research universities are much more known quantities. Professors at these institutions have more experience with students continuing on to graduate school (and seeing their own students and other graduate students in their departments) and the students have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into. There have been too many students from small liberal arts colleges, whose letters of recommendation said "this is the best student I've seen in years" who took all the available courses there and excelled grade-wise, but who struggled and turned out to be poorly prepared or just overwhelmed by doctoral level work, or simply didn't really realize what they were getting into. So occassionally there are students from such backgrounds who do OK, but it isn't common and I can't recommend it as a good route to a strong graduate program. It may be the case that their smaller college instructors there are more involved in their teaching, classes are smaller, facilities are better, and they may in fact actually learn more at their institution and be happier there, but that doesn't really carry much weight for eventual graduate study.

FWIW, I went to an elite US research university for my undergraduate, and went to a top US research university for my PhD. I have taught or held research appointments post-Ph.D. in a wide range of institutions, from one of the weaker Ivy League institutions to top tier public research universities to mid-tier public research universities and I have a strong record of research funding as a professor judged primarily on research. People from many backgrounds ask for my advice about university choices in science and engineering as there is a culture of excessive obsession about "the right institution" for their choice.

Another tangentially-related episode, again involving everyone's favorite publishing villains at Elsevier, was the fake medical journal with no credible peer review which Elsevier was happy to publish.

Two others come immediately to mind:

Mass resignation of Topology

K-Theory board resigns, with some odd weirdness described here

The Eureka journal watch page has more info, but it needs some updating.

The quickest way to accomplish good, low-cost journals is by mass resignations of editorial boards from top (expensive) journals and then starting a low-cost alternative. It has happened, under the leadership of giants like Knuth and I am hopeful this becoming more widespread shortly. The current system is not sustainable.

Actually, for "(1) who wrote it" it should be judged on what is actually in the article, not who wrote it. Though there have been some interesting studies that show that who wrote it is often an overwhelming consideration, particularly for review processes with strong time pressure, like computer science conferences.

And as far as "(2) who reviewed it": most academic journal and conference refereeing is anonymous and unpaid. Referees are asked to comment on the correctness, originality and importance of the work. A less selective journal generally has lower standards and will ask just about anyone who is willing to referee an article, and the level of scrutiny is not as high. Whereas a strong journal is very selective and to get published there, the article needs to be correct, quite novel and important as well. So there can be quite a difference with the existing system from journal to journal.

I'm not saying that it is an optimal system (editorial boards of journals essentially serving as filters and arbiters of quality/significance) but that is the way things typically work in the research areas I publish in regularly.

Many other researchers adopt a similar policy themselves- post their work on the arxiv preprint server immediately before submitting to a journal. That way at least one version of the paper is available forever for free. I've never heard of a journal (math or CS) that has had any difficulty with that, or even with putting the current version (post-refereeing and revising) on your own web page. But other disciplines, particularly medicine, control things much more tightly and I don't know as much about the standard things there.

As far as mathematics research goes, there is a huge range in journal prices depending upon the publisher. Many for-profit publishers (Springer, Elsevier, etc.) charge very high prices for journals, or have comprehensive pricing packages which make it hard to figure out how much a particular journal costs. Many journals are published by non-profit professional societies or universities, and those tend to be much more reasonably priced.

There is an effort to only submit to journals which are reasonably priced- see, for example, the Banff Protocol where prominent researchers state their commitment to only contribute to, serve on editorial boards and referee for reasonable journals. Many of the most prestigious journals are still for-profit and there is of course pressure on untenured people to publish in the best journals they can, but there is a healthy set of more senior people who choose where to submit things incorporating journal expense as a consideration.

Absolutely- the soap film computers are comparable to effective heuristic algorithms for the Steiner tree problem, but they come with no proof that their solution is optimal. And there are examples where they are demonstrably incorrect (suboptimal in total length) some fraction of the time. There are plenty of quick algorithms for problems if you drop the requirement to be correct all of the time!

Nevertheless, playing with soapfilms and pegs can be interesting and a good illustration of some of the subtleties of algorithms. I've seen decent examples in some museum exhibits although usually their explanations are a little off, and I have a pair of plastic plates with some pegs that a student built for me for demonstrating, years ago, which has been a nice thing to have from time to time.

Here is their grant and proposal abstract from the NSF. It sounds like they did exactly what they'd proposed to do- not every grant meets that metric! Theirs is a 3-year grant for a total of $386927.

There was a cute line in their FAQs:

Q. Were the tests IRB approved?

Yes, they were approved. No SSNs were harmed during the writing of this paper.