Oh look, you spouted a trite cliché. Try thinking for yourself. (Maybe a better college education would help you on that front).

In the humanities, there is no alternative to academia. Take a professional historian of modern France who writes books and teaches. What exactly would they be doing if they had more "intellectual horsepower?" That's the peak of the field. There's nowhere up from there. Of course, I'm sure you think the humanities are useless, so most likely my point will fly right by you.

Actually, that's not true that they haven't spoken up. Professors regularly speak out on these issues. It's one of the reasons why the right-wing loathes and hates professors so much and demonizes them at every opportunity.

There are plenty of cases of lousy researchers who are excellent teachers and excellent researchers who are lousy teachers. However, if you think dividing research and teaching will result in long term benefit, you don't understand academia.

What we're actually seeing here is an "education bubble." Poor people have been told that if spend lots of money and get a degree, they will have access to good jobs. It isn't true.

Be careful. Some allergies, like food allergies or poison ivy, get WORSE with each exposure. Some people just have itchy throat from nuts until one day they stop breathing after eating some.

For some reason, this is the only place that it doesn't bother me to see the 10-year anniversary stuff. I can very clearly remember reading slashdot in an office when news of this began to spread.

What a terrible tragedy the event was.

And what a terrible tragedy the last ten years of response to it has been.

Yes, but if we have to account for lightsaber sounds, then we have to account for noise and fiery explosions in space.

except when such cyber warfare is directed at Iran by a join Israel/U.S. operation. Then it's just ... uh. Definitely not war.

When they invent the subjunctive.

Also, it's not inventing a language if they're programmed to do it. Let me know when the robots building cars on an assembly line start unexpectedly communicating with each other in ways that communicate concepts/ideas that were not hardcoded into them.

In any historical discussion on slashdot, it's only a matter of time until the gourd-deniers show up. Bunch of crazies. They're the only group more persistent than creationists and more dense than global warming deniers.

That their out-of-print books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that are currently making them ZERO money, could be sold for $2-$5 as pdfs. There are hundreds of books that I would like to buy, but since they are out of print (and weren't cheap to begin with and had small print runs), they cost in the rage of $70+. This means that I simply don't buy them. This means that no one makes money of my desire to own these books. What a waste.

If it's just a stunt, why were all the oil drilling companies (including the one responsible for the platform that blew up today) protesting the moratorium just yesterday?

You're saying that investigating the laws of the universe to figure out how/why the universe as we know it came to be is outside the realm of good physics?

Yes. It's worth it.

Ah, but you see, based on our sample size of ONE planet, we've determined the conditions for life on all planets.

I will never understand the "there can't be life there because most of the life from our planet couldn't survive there" argument. I think it's perfectly reasonable that life could evolve elsewhere without water. In fact, quite likely. Life will adapt to the conditions from which it emerges, not seek to replicate life on earth.

Thanks for pointing that out. Anyone who describes The Girl in The Fireplace as "whimsical" is certainly not to be trusted. I just watched the show and the other review was much closer to my response.