I'm a self-taught programmer and finishing my BS in Software Engineering right now. Something I never appreciated in my career or my first go at college was the value of access to academic papers. There is so much knowledge available in academia that's locked away from the general public. Quite frankly a lot of that knowledge ends up duplicates effort because you can't get to it otherwise.
i agree. academia needs to make this knowledge available to the public. who knows what a genius out there who doesn't have access to this knowledge can do with it? maybe we will be far ahead of where we are now, but i am just dreaming now...
