Archive.org is a good idea, but may be causing complacency. The problem is simple: a) they don't keep everything, and b) a lot of people seem to believe they do. That's an archival train wreck waiting to happen. They dynamically change the archive time window even for single sites, and even completely eliminate sites without notice. Besides, long after a site has been archived, a new system admin can block all archive requests (essentially forcing the removal of all archived versions of a site as if it didn't ever exist).

At a public university, the "customer" the university is servicing is not the student, but the state. A student is more an employee to the state than a customer of the university. Even for the ordinary student attending school without any special scholarships and who is not doing any explicit research under any state or federal grants, anywhere between 50-80% of the tuition to keep you in school is payed by taxpayers. That means your education is not for your benefit, but rather the state's. That's why most of the output you produce while in school legally belongs to "the system." The university's intellectual property policy usually reflects this. I think students tend to think of their public education as being mostly their own thing, so forget that they are ultimately accountable to the public. However unfair this may seem, it is pretty much the same anywhere in life. The professors, staff, and administrators are also under the same rules. In addition, in most non-academic private industries the rules are even more strict about whose ideas belong to whom and under under what conditions. All that said, there is a proper legal means for the university to partly own your ideas while still giving you formal credit. People can't just up and plagiarize or steal your ideas and claim them as their own novel work. If you suspect this is happening, you should raise bloody hell. There is a chain of ethical accountability that is maintained in an academic settings. Universities are better than most places in giving credit where credit is due because individualism is generally respected (this does frequently break down, though). This is in contrast to the private industry which doesn't honor that individualism so much.

Last year I was flying over the Congo, this year I'm at home posting on slashdot. Weird. Go figure.

and try to reduce your cesium footprint. I know I'll do my part. Happy New Year.

Everyone mourns in different ways. Laugh, cry, tell jokes, be quiet, scream out, whatever you are compelled to do. However, I don't suggest judging the mourning styles of others.

Science in general isn't about "publishing what is right" but rather creating a network of accountability in the form of methods, ideas, data, procedures, etc. so others can try and reproduce and critique the results. Even if the published results are shown to be incorrect by other studies, this does not mean the system is broken. The scientific process is an iterative, self correcting, one. However, if after many years and many studies, a particular field fails to converge on an accepted baseline conclusions, there is a good chance something is wrong (you may even be doing pseudoscience).