> Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?

The degree is for his/her own benefit. What I care about is whether the doctor is smart and well-informed.

No, I don't think that earning the right to use the suffix "M.D." means that the doctor is well-informed and knowledgeable.

Nope but it is some form of metric that you can use to judge the doctor's capability.

With a self-taught doctor, you just have the questions that you ask to help you judge. With a doctor who's been through school, you have both your questions and the fact that he/she has been through what has been set out by the school issuing the degree.

Can the self-taught doctor apply Bayes's Theorem correctly, unlike doctors with degrees? Is the self-taught doctor a fan of evidence-based medicine? I'll take them.

>Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.

Here are 5 freely available introductory calculus books.

http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/03/04/028253.shtml

I don't think anyone is claiming that there aren't freely available resources for learning the basics of other fields, so this isn't much of a counterexample.

Free graduate-level graph theory book that I found when I was interested in graph theory: http://diestel-graph-theory.com/basic.html

> Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.

Areas differ, as always. There's an amazing amount of philosophy out there for free, for example. (I was recently impressed to see how much of Sextus Empiricus was available, and works on the Pyrrhonian skeptics in general.)

"It's all available on the internet" might be almost true if you consider P2P and rapidshare likes.