The Solar System is made up of nothing but hydrogen and helium basically,

Exactly, it is made of hydrogen and helium. If you can use hydrogen and helium to travel, you can certainly use the hydrogen and helium from solar system. You don't need to transport it anywhere, you don't need to make anything from it, you just use it to get somewhere else.

Somehow, I don't think they will be coming by icebike.

I do not understand why are you using "output of the human race" as unit of energy when the universe is full of nothing but energy. Besides, you first ask what would they come here to get, and then you yourself answer that.

One reason they may want to come here is to get away from all the smartasses on their home planet.

I have a problem with equating smartness with having quick access to information.

There is a difference in email, though. An unencrypted email message gets transferred through any number of other servers, ones that you have absolutely no legal agreement with, and anybody with admin access to those smtp servers can intercept and read your message. I believe that is what they are talking about when they say there is no expectation of privacy.

Now they could issue a different default for every device, but that would require printing a unique card for each device...

As noted by others, lot of consumer devices that people buy for their homes or offices do that. However, things like traffic light, pool water system or nuclear power plant control systems are supposed to be installed by some sort of qualified technician, and they should know better than to leave the default login and password in place.

TFA actually talks about all the descendants of TeX you mention, plus some more.

Actually very easy when using ConTeXt, but nearly impossible in LaTeX.

I don't know anytihing about visio, I create most of my diagrams with tikz (http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/), but I would be very surprised if did not have a way to produce decend vector format of some sort. If it can export pdf or svg, it can be included in pdflatex.

With appropriate packages, and conversion software installed (e.g. inkscape for svg) you can use both eps and svg with pdflatex. Just use the 'svg' package.

Of course, if your only decision criterium for hireing new employees is "real world experience", you are, by definition, not going to get that from people who just spent years at school studying. People with PhD, though, usually have one skill that is difficult to find in others: they spent years working on their learning skills. One of the main points of getting an advanced degree is learning how to learn, and how to figure out things that you do not know. I would agree with you that someone with BA, or even with a master degree, have no "real world experience, and pretty low ability to learn, which makes them pretty much useless. Some of the best more capable programmers I know have PhD degrees, true, none of those is in computer science, there are several physics, several mathematics, and even one english literature. Those people can look at a problem and figure out how to solve it before your non-college educated programmer with years of "real world experience" even finishes deciphering the description.

So, the question is, what justifies the cost of the raise by that much?

I don't know if that applies to your school, but most public universities state funding got severely slashed during the 11 years. I do not know the exact numbers and am not going to spend time to look them up for a slashdot comment, but roughly our school went from about 80% state, 20% tuition funded to 20% state 80% tuition funded in the last perhaps 15 or 20 years.

There are other factors that contribute the growing tuition (and you are right, professor salaries are not among them :(, I can attest to that), but the drop in state support is definitely a huge one.

Imagine ipython or isympy optimized for this terminal.

Why have a window manager at all when one may have emacs?

Because viper is not quite good enough yet.