Possibly that is because of various special volumes of journals. Sometimes, there will be special issue of some journal for a conference or in memory of some notable researcher who just retired/died/was celebrated, and for those people are generally more willing to referee. So perhaps some of those people don't want a blanket refusal because they still would be willing to referee articles for a special issue. That's just a guess. But I hope this agreement pushes the choice of journals for such special volumes away from overpriced journals even more.

Just a couple of quick comments:

1) professorships in the humanities take a Ph.D, and Ph.D.s in the humanities have a significantly longer time-to-degree than the sciences and much much weaker funding along the way.
2) Not even 1% of the French Literature Ph.D.s will get decent professorships (let alone French literature undergrads) Those that stay in education will mainly get adjunct teaching positions indefinitely. Finding a decent faculty position in the humanities is very very difficult, significantly harder than a faculty position in the sciences or engineering, which as already exceptionally hard.
3) An assistant professor in the humanities does not make $100k. A full professor in the humanities would be lucky to make that unless they are at an elite institution. See the AAUP database for overall faculty salaries by institution, and there are many public databases of faculty salaries. See here for one at George Mason university, where the median income in this search for language department personnel was about $55k.

Part of the plan is to make sure people realize that mathematics is alive and growing, with active areas of research and isn't just a bunch of stuff people sorted out 100+ years ago. So unsolved problems in many guises will turn up.

There were three copies of the Eames exhibits- they were in various places, notably Boston and LA for many years, and are now in the New York Hall of Science (complete), Boston and Atlanta (incomplete.) My understanding is that the Eames had a lot of stipulations about how the exhibits could be displayed and they cannot be altered or updated. The NY Hall of Science guys spent a lot of time sorting out some of the broken parts of their exhibit, and are rightly proud of some of the finagling they had to do to get a few of the exhibits working again. They are the only ones who were able to get the light bulb cube for multiplication operational again as far as I know.

Felix Salmon dug deeper into the story and it's even worse than originally described, with significant deliberate obfuscation on the part of Silver Light, the financiers, mostly, as well as Skype. Wow. Supposedly, to "retain the best and the brightest," they buried a clause in a subclause in a contract which allows them to repurchase options at the original price, completely antithetical to the whole idea of vesting options. If this becomes a precedent, people are going to have to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers multiple times per year to comb through stuff looking for things like this. From Felix:

All of this makes any Skype investor saying “it’s not us, it’s the CEO” sound naive at best and, more likely, downright disingenuous. Unless and until such an investor wants to go on the record defending Silver Lake here, I’m going to believe Lee, and assume that it’s Silver Lake who’s largely to blame for the utter breakdown of employer-employee relations at Skype. I don’t know where they got these techniques from, but they’re very alien to Silicon Valley and indeed the rest of the business world. And they do no good at all for the reputation of private equity companies more generally.
 

Felix Salmon has some analysis here. He's got a fair amount of experience from the finance side and here is his take on it:

This does seem pretty evil. I’m sure it makes financial sense for Silver Lake, which will be less diluted by the immediate vesting of lots of options. But when you’ve just scored one of the biggest home runs in the history of private-equity investing, it’s generally considered polite to share the spoils with the people who actually run the company. Rather than summarily firing them for no obvious reason but sheer greed.

This stands as a contrast to the Zappos/Amazon deal where at least the proceeds were shared with the people who developed things. Presumably this makes people more resistant to bring in private capital or at least try to spend some energy writing yet more complicated contracts and conditions, where it will take volumes of boilerplate to express what a normal person could say in three words: "Don't be jerks."

That would have been as part of various copy-protection schemes, not under general purpose computing. The general OS (the monitor, Integer Basic, and later the Disk Operating System) were pretty understandable to disassemble and were quite well-constructed. The source code (from Woz) for the Sweet 16 interpreter was part of the original Apple ][ manuals and also quite good to read and document, although I don't know how many people made much use of it.

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.