Well, I remember the monetary pain of buying textbooks, and I know a lot of kids in college today. To them, the costs of textbooks are anything but chump change.

There is indeed value there, but of course the costs for this sort of work, amortized over many copies, it comparatively tiny. And I would point to the work of places like the California Open Source Textbook Project and Flat World for examples of how very good the content can be even though produced by "alternative methods".

Like prefect42 notes, the actual reviewing that filters our the cranks and such is *also* done by the academic community, usually at no charge to the publishers.

You're quite correct, of course. I've interacted a lot with GA Tech folks over the years, and it just popped out of my fingers. Sorry, GSU!

It has amazed me how long the current academic publishing regime has lasted. This dystopian fantasy by the publishers is the logical extension of a broken business model, where the publishers provide essentially zero value yet charge enormous fees. GA Tech should use this moment as a clean break point, and demand that all campus materials be either in the public domain or be available under Creative Commons license. Award tenure based only on publications which are under CC license.

Universities need to remember that they are the folks that generate *all* the content that publishers want to use against them. They can stop giving it away to these guys any time they like. In this era of global networking, there is essentially no added value in distribution, warehousing, and organizing papers into journals. Publishers need to be reminded of this fact.

Brilliant!! Thank you for the recommendation! looks perfect and looking forward to setting it all up :)

Actually, to be quite clear, the "Travelling Salesman" problem is one of traversing an arbitrary graph, which can indeed include information representing non-straight distances and preferred edges where the "good lunch places" can be found. It's a very general optimization problem, and has been effectively solved for practial use for a number of years, using the "simulated annealing" method.

I bought a Sony MZ-R50 back in 1997 from Singapore and thought it to be the best thing in audio. loved the mini discs, loved the hardware (actually I got it out last week after a 5 year sleep and used it again without any probs listening to my old MDs from '97 to 2001).

As MP3s were a new thing back then, I gave feedback to Sony from their site, asking them to somehow incorporate the storage of mp3 files onto the MD discs and be able to play it instead of recording straight audio using ATRAC3 on them..

Their response was, yeah thanks for the feedback, we won't do that, if you want to use the MD, record it using audio and ATRAC3 cause its the best format ever...

This was even before the days of NetMD where you transfer the songs on there, you literally had to hook up optical out or analog out into the MD, please play on the CD and record on the MD.. and wait 74/80mins until it finished for you to have a usable MD!!

If only they went ahead with such a plan early on, they would've cornered the market big time. Now seems sort a little too late don't you think? Although the hardware is really nice and its something else, having all these little MDs around and using them to play them