This is exactly why I love playing nethack.

Aaagh! Not that anyone will see this or care, but Subtle Is The Lord is Pais' biography of Einstein (which I'm just starting and which was why it was the quickest title out of my brain). Neils Bohr's Times is his biography of Bohr.

I don't see prestige as necessarily a bad thing because it is the community that defines what is prestigious. I think things like Open Access will make it easier, and perhaps more desirable, to publish elsewhere and still have your paper seen by your colleagues. I think the idea of everyone as their own publisher won't work in general because there is already a ton of places where you can go to find all sorts of interesting (some would say "crackpot") papers. The journal does some sort of quality cut for you and gives you a single place to find articles of interest. If that went away for some reason, there would still exist the need for a peer review system, and whatever cropped up to fill the void would fall back into a prestige arrangement.

What your colleague complains of is true for many professions. As you advance towards "management" you do less and less real work and more and more administration. Bump up the chain and pretty soon your grad students and postdocs are doing the research, under your guidance of course, but they're the ones doing the dirty work. I just finished Abraham Pais' biography of Neils Bohr: Subtle Is The Lord. Bohr was making the same complaints 80 years ago as your colleague is now.

I figured I'd do the Bill Cosby method: Wait just before the plane hits the ground then jump upwards.

I think this is overly cynical. Publishers also handle the peer review process (lining up the reviewers, managing the reviews, etc.), which is hard for just anyone to do. Sure, anyone can publish, but what is the value is doing all that work and putting together a paper if nobody will see it? Do you want to write a thoughtful editorial on foreign policy and have it published in the weekly Penny Saver, or in the Sunday New York Times? Effectively disseminating ideas is not as easy as putting it up on a web site or dumping something into arXiv. I would love to see more authors voting with their feet and publishing in more reasonably priced journals with better access policies, because some of the private journals have outrageous price structures.

The American Institute of Physics has done a lot to address these issues, and I think they lay out their position fairly clearly. The legal issues certainly aren't as black and white as you make them out to be.

+1

I saw an interview he did on The Colbert Report and I could swear that he did one year in solitary. The reason was something akin to the fact that because the DA told the judge that Mitnick had the ability to call up NORAD and whistle in the phone and cause all sorts of havoc on our defense system, part of his sentencing stipulated that he be kept away from telephones. The only place that met that condition in prison was solitary. So basically, as I recall it from the interview anyways, he was put there for a year as a last resort, not put there for years because that was the sentence handed down.

I thought here I'd escape those late light ads about special issue coins and stamps from little countries. Are these GOLD-plated with 99.99% pure gold?

Sadly, as I write this there are about 160 comments and I think yours is the first on-topic one I saw that wasn't trying to be witty.

I want to know how many cell phones this rare earth deposit is equivalent to.