Interesting since the president of the college I work at just had a letter about this in the Huffington Post. One quote: "According to the College Board's 2012 study, Trends in College Pricing, the average tuition and fee rate has increased at an average of 2.44 percent at private, nonprofit four-year colleges in recent years; in fact, when one accounts for financial aid and scholarships, the average inflation-adjusted net tuition at private colleges has actually dropped by 3.5 percent over the past five years. "

Now, that's for private, non-profit schools. Public schools it has jumped substantially, but not for any nefarious reason: it's what happens when the state legislature looks for easy cuts in the budget and axes higher ed first. When I went to William and Mary back in the mid-80s, 34.7% of the budget was covered by the state. It's 12.8% now, but they're still expected to offer everything they did before (and more) as well as give discounts to in-state students. That money can come only from two places: tuition and endowment.

Endowment is an entire 'nother subject. You might have noticed a serious drop in the stock market a few years back? We (and many other schools) run a three year trailing average on endowment draw, so that's still hurting badly. Oh, and you can't get bonds or other securities with yields higher than a percent or two these days.. Couple the two and your endowment income has cratered as well.

Can we cut budgets? Sure: I started here six years ago in IT and my budget is 20% less than was when I joined. Software vendors don't care: my SPSS licensing costs have tripled in those 3 years for example, and everyone else wants their 5% a year bump. And I'm at a healthy school: I've been at ones that aren't and it's worse.

The real abuse IMHO is the loan industry. We've somehow gotten this idea that it's ok to put yourself into debt for the rest of your life for a degree. (And that debt, unlike every other kind can't ever be vacated by bankruptcy) Nobody should take out $100k of debt for any degree, and the feds shouldn't back it, much like they shouldn't back flood insurance for people who want to live on barrier islands. That may mean you don't get your dream school. Maybe it means 2 years of community college before residential. There are plenty of ways to get an education- shop for them just like you would for an phone

Watch movies, listen to music, etc. Google docs works offline if you have local copies (or create new) No GPS though, but then again that doesn't work on my iPad without a network connection either since the maps need to be downloaded. Oh, and the Chromebook has both USB and SD card slots, so you can bring a *lot* more music and movies than you can on any tablet without them (like an iPad.)

Having just bought a (Samsung) Chromebook, I think you ought to try one. It's considerably cheaper than either a real laptop or a (full size) tablet. Unlike cheap laptops, it has an 8 hour battery life, can't get a virus and boots in 10 seconds. Unlike a tablet, it has a 13 inch screen and a typeable keyboard. It has a ton of hidden functionality if you figure out how to access it. Yes, it only runs a browser, but I can get my email in a browser, edit documents/spreadsheets/presentations in a browser, access Evernote and similar services, etc. It won't replace my main computer, but it works great as a travel device.

I'm honestly confused by your statement. TBL was able to create and deploy HTTP because CERN paid huge sums of money to run a network that could host his servers and he worked for CERN. Buying a business class data line is not hugely expensive and if you want to run a new funky server on your line feel free. The government won't stop you, nor will the ISP unless you're doing something hideously illegal. Or get hired by a company that is willing to pay the freight- most any university will have a setup you can use, ditto major research lab like CERN. You might even get paid for developing it.

Back when I was in grad school there were two guys collecting links into a nice sorted directory. Stanford hosted it for quite a while until it took up 50+% of the entire network bandwidth and the school decided that Yahoo! had to become a real company. Nobody stopped Napster or Bittorrent (technically)

Google's not stopping you from developing the next great thing, nor will they lower the priority of your packets when you do. They just don't want you doing it on a line that the TOS specifically says you can't.

Actually, 50 fps is probably not enough. When my son and I get going we can get the puck from one side to the other in substantially less than fifth of a second. Given that the robot probably needs to start moving very quickly after the opponent hits the puck you'd only have a couple of frames to work with at that speed. Half the time when I lose a point I haven't even seen the puck before it's in the goal. (Getting hit by a flying puck at those speeds hurts like hell. I thought I broke my finger once)

Read any contracts carefully before you sign

A number of years ago I worked with a professor who was writing a textbook. I wrote a quiz engine and a question bank to use with it. The professor owned the copyright to the textbook. The university owned the electronic stuff I developed, both text and code, even though it was an adjunct to the text.

Amusingly, back in 2007 Apple ran an ad showing how nice and clean the iMac was compared to the mess of cables behind a typical PC

My PC has all of its drives, video cards and the like internal, unlike the new Powermac

Perhaps the PC makers need to update their ads?

Well, it depends again on what you mean by "innovative". It doesn't all work this way- I worked at Merck for a shirt while back in the late 1980s and Crixivan was pretty much entirely internal, including the massive (and extremely expensive) effort to do the xray crystal structure of HIV-1 protease in record time. Human trials, scaleup of production and the like aren't exactly trivial things to do either- they aren't cookbook.

Politically it wouldn't fly in the US anyway. While profit motive isn't always the a great option, would you rather have political appointees deciding if Gardasil testing should go forwards? Right now there are a number of people in Congress trying to rewrite the way that NSF/NIH award grants- those sort of shenanigans would be long term far more damaging.

(I'll agree with you on the open access to trial data and advertising bits- we need to simply ban public ads for prescription drugs and dramatically restrict sales tactics to doctors. I hated seeing chemists get recruited by the sales folks at Merck- it seemed like they were going over to the dark side.)

Depends on what you mean by "research". A lot of the initial leads do come from universities, but the process to turn a lead into something you can buy over the counter is difficult, very long and hugely expensive. You frequently see a drug company buy the rights to the idea and then do the human trials. The HPV vaccine Gardasil is a good example- a group of people at several universities developed the concept. Merck then took over and ran the phase III human trials (the one that sees if it actually works in the field) as well as the R&D to manufacture it.

IMHO, this isn't a bad way to work- most drug companies can't really do the blue sky stuff and universities don't have the $$$ to bring something to market.

Almost certainly an urban legend. This behavior doesn't make sense in the context of the drug market. The first-tier drug companies like Merck and Glaxo fund everything from a few high priced, patented drugs. They have a limited amount of time to make money off of these before they come off patent and the generic makers cut the prices by 10x. This is why you see a constant stream of "me too" modifications of existing drugs- they need to something under patent to make money. Buying a drug and then burying it in favor of something existing would be stupid- you have a chance to reset the patent clock and get ~15 years of high profits as opposed to trying to compete against the generics

I'm surprised arcseconds wasn't on the list. Any astronomer is used to working with them, and many higher end amateur computerized telescope mounts are capable of a few arcseconds accuracy- flex in the tube and optics is often worse. The big guys like Keck can track to a tenth of an arcsecond

Right now there are people creating art, literature and music that will still be enjoyed a hundred years from now.

I seriously doubt any "useful" thing you do will be remembered by anyone by then.

You know, I like to both cook and play guitar, but I really don't think they work well together. An alfredo sauce covered pickup is a terrible thing and I'm pretty sure it's not good for the strings to use them as cheese knives.

Umm, really, you see and hear wider spectrums when high? You might *think* you do, but that's simply not the case. Having a wider color spectrum for vision is fascinating- I used to be a tanker and the thermal sights on them give a very different view of the world. Obvious stuff in normal vision like trees fade into the background while things like warm blooded creatures and engines stand out like beacons. (Oh, and a lot of clothing is pretty transparent, a fact that always amused my troops when we did demos at airshows.)

/These are the only two enhancements on the list that make any sense at all- all the rest are easily purchaseable as you note. I voted for wider sound spectrum personally