Nobel prizes aren't grants, they don't fund projects. The prize is cash money you get to keep yourself; although I think most people donate it to charity. Unfortunately, google is swamped with discussion of what Obama did with his, but Smoot donated his(http://phys.org/news93885786.html), which I understand to be typical.

In fact, no.

  I accidentally posted this anonymously farther down, but in fact Bill Gates has done tremendous harm with his so-called "philanthropy"; his real contribution is "leveraged philanthropy", where you use philanthropic donations to control something so that you make more money. This is true with his vaccine so-called "charity" - which forces poor nations to spend money from other sources on expensive foreign vaccines, rather than on development of local vaccine manufacturing or of general public health infrastructure, and thus actually degrades the quality of 3rd world health care while making Bill Gates his "charitable" money back and then some. This is true of his education so-called "charity" - which forces poor school districts to spend money from other sources on high-tech gadgets and expensive consulting services, which are sold by Bill Gates' various partners, but which are actually worse than no services at all.

The Gates' foundation has announced a partnership with Pearson (for profit-education company) to develop and market materials aligned to the common core. These are the materials that your school district must agree to purchase (this particular test cost $32 million state wide) in order to qualify for Race to the Top.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-19/news/31369375_1_answer-silly-question-pineapple
    So, Bill Gates is using a small amount of his "charitable" money to force public money in much larger amounts, to be wasted on this crap.

Bill Gates wants to fit teachers with galvanic bracelets:
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/09/just-when-you-thought-it-couldnt-get-crazier/

Bill Gates needs vaccines to be a "profit center" for his pharmaceutical buddies. I spelled this out above but read the comments.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/10/what-bill-gates-says-about-drug-companies-2/

Oh, hey, Bill Gates is using his agricultural charity to force the 3rd world to buy Monsanto's crops:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto

As a current academic, I can tell you that I have no idea what it means for [b]non[/b]-University jobs.

  So if you have a job as a professional programmer, and you want to hire your just-graduated CS Master's Student, you may have to publish the job, yeah? But then you just hire your former student anyway. Is that very different from filling a job internally in the private sector? Or in a secret dungeon?

  Then for various administrative staff vacancies, there's often a policy to favor filling the job internally, but again I think they have to advertize. I'm less clear on that one.

Many public institutions - Universities, National Labs, Secret Prisons - are required to publish/advertize job openings even if they plan to fill them internally.

  So they want to promote Mustafa out of sales to a newly created torturer position, but they can't just hire him. They have to publish an advertizement and pretend to do a search and then, bang!, they thank everyone else for their interest and hire the best candidate, Mustafa; this was the plan all along.

  So don't get your hopes up, is all I'm saying.

Truth1: Chemistry reporting is as bad as all other science reporting.
Truth2: The Chemical industry is as unconcerned with "externalities" as any other business.

  Reporters will get you to panic even if they don't have a good reason; the reason that reporters are capable of spreading panic easily is because chemical manufacturers will poison you in order to make a buck. So, from a certain standpoint, the response of the general public is rational - they don't trust the chemical industry, and they shouldn't, so why not err on the side of caution when dealing with certified professional liars (marketing, PR and advertising people). Particulates are bad for you; the chemical industry (and domestic manufacturing generally) denies this, but they're lying. Vaccines are not harmful; but they are a big emerging profit center for pharma. If vaccines were harmful (again, they aren't), would pharma lie about it? Damn straight they'd lie through their teeth. So it becomes a double problem - it's difficult to educate the public about what is safe (vaccines are safe), and at the same time it's difficult to get robust action on what isn't safe (airborne particulates are not safe; neither are most chlorinated organics, heavy metals, etc.)

This is why programmers (or software architects, or applications developers, or whatever - I prefer "technology professionals" except that some people think that means someone with an MBA who works at a technology company) need unions. Or needed unions, before silicon valley was more or less gutted under the Bush II administration.

  Now, unions would only have provided a temporary respite from all this; the unions would be under constant assault, with promises from management that the union was just getting in the way. "Of course," says management, "we treat you with respect out of our magnanimous appreciation for the good work you do, and the union just muddies up the issue with red tape, and takes your money and..." bleah-de-bleah-de-bleah. But unions would've held the worst of the off-shoring at bay for a few years, which would've kept the industry in much better shape since off-shoring has been on balance a tremendous waste of money. But management likes it (regardless of the impact on the bottom line) because it gives them more power.

What if I'm a petty, vengeful, jealous God?

The military-industrial complex would much prefer to operate with no oversight at all.

  We have a perverse system where such oversight is acceptable only if it does not compromise security (rather than the other way around.)

  So by screwing this up on purpose, the military can plead security concerns and never publish anything at all, because any public oversight whatsoever will be too risky.

  Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence? Well, malice exists, even though incompetence is so powerful it can explain anything.

Actually, no.

  China's solar companies are doing well because they get *tremendous* subsidies, as is always the case for nascent, high tech industry.

  if it weren't for massive government subsidies - paying for R&D costs directly, and providing a huge protected market mainly through the defense department - then the computer revolution which drove the 1990s boom WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.

  All you free market fantasists need to get that into your thick skulls - or, you could go love on Ayn Rand's island! Please do, so that we can run our country like sane people. In 10 years, when solar power is viable, it will be the Chinese who are reaping the benefits because free market fanatics in the US aren't willing to make the basic investments required.

Mod parent up.

  However, I wouldn't discount the possibility of a prosecutor doing" the wrong thing, institutionally". The kind of places with an excess of bored civil rights attorneys also have an excess of activist/liberal DAs. So if the Oberlin DA gets such a case he, ight push it just to lose.

Wikipedia has a very good article, actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies
  With many relevant sources.

  Or you could listen to the Governor of Wisconsin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tr6zX1Z6sI
  Although, in this case, he didn't actually do it.

I exaggerate very slightly; a slight majority of all new wealth is in the hands of the top 1% of the population. The top 0.1% probably only has about half of that, so a quarter of the newly created wealth. Anyway, the details vary slightly from source to source because it depends on whether you are talking net wealth, financial wealth, income, etc. etc. Also it depends on who you lump together, which is a judgement call. It gets "worse" the closer you get to Bill.

  More information than you probably care to know about the topic can be found here:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

  Let's look at table 5a. End of 2001, the S&P500 was at 1,148.08. End of 2007, it was at 1,468.36. The S&P 500 isn't a bad proxy for the total value of the entire stock market.

  So, quick guestimate, 2001->2007, richest 1% went from 33.5% OF 1,148 to 38.3% of 1,468, that's 385 to 562 -> a gain of 178. That's more than half of the total 320 point gain.

  So, counting just the stock market (thus not housing bubbles), roughly 55% of the new wealth created between 2001 and 2007 was in the hands of the top 1% of the population.

No, it has been between Rich and Poor, although the Poor are getting stomped, as much as the Rich might want us all to believe otherwise. If you look at the last 20 years, the vast majority if the *new wealth* which has been created has been concentrated in the hands of the top 0.1% of the population. That's where all the money has gone, not towards social security, not towards Cadillac health insurance for people with jobs in manufacturing. Where is the money to provide pensions and health-care to the share of the population who doesn't have it? It's sitting in Bill f-ing Gates bank account, that's where it is.

  There's a plate with 12 cookies on it, a rich guy, a teacher and a regular working Joe.

  The rich guy takes 11 of the cookies, leans over to Joe, and says "I'd watch out, I think the teacher is trying to steal your cookie."

What makes you - or anyone else - think there is only one tipping point? What makes you (or this guy in the article you linked, which I'd already read elsewhere) so certain that we've crossed the tipping point that's crucial in determining the average temperature of the globe in the next century?

  Just because we're past the point where the siberian thaw becomes self-sustaining, that means we must be past the point where the same thing becomes self-sustaining in Antarctica?

  Global climate *is* very complicated, very hard to predict, very hard to model accurately. All of that is definitely true.

  This means that WE DO NOT KNOW what the risks are associated with burning fossil fuels, or with how much. It is entirely possible that the best-case scenarios are right, and that given how much CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) we've put into the atmosphere, everything will be fine. It is also possible (albeit much more unlikely!) that we've already pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that nothing we do can make things worse.

  Again, the claims of the Gazprom scientists must be viewed very skeptically. But when Kirpotkin talks as if he is certain about what is going to happen, that isn't accurate either. No one really knows. But we *do* know that there is a good chance that continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere can't make the situation better, and might make it quite a bit worse.