At our (national) university (not in the US, but similar living cost), a tenured professor shortly before
retirement has a salary of about $80'000. Assistant professors get ~$40K. (To be fair: profs at private
universities get about twice as much). I don't know about other departments, but at least in engineering,
both tenured and assistant profs put in a lot of hours.

If you're working in the systems area (low-level stuff such as OSes, compilers, etc), it's hard to write
even two papers per year and grad student, because we actually implement our ideas, debug them,
and may not be able to publish if the results are worse than expected. And most projects are too big
for one student, so a whole team is working on it.

In computer science, we compete with everyone who has has interet access and a computer. The guys
at, for example, Tsinghua University in Beijing work extremely hard and are at least as talented as your average
grad student in the US or Europe. If we publish something new, a framework, a new scheduling algorithm,
etc., for that first paper we do have some slack. Once it's out, anyone is free to improve the ideas there
and publish a follow-up paper. From that moment on, even though we have a good head start, it's either
publish fast or work on something entirely new. Unfortunately, not everybody has a new cool idea every day.

Note that providing copyrighted material is illegal, only possession (and downloading) is legal.

Of course, the USo*AA didn't like this and have put Switzerland on the 2012 International Piracy Watch List (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/congressional-report-adds-italy-switzerland-to-piracy-watchlist/). Switzerland took the spot of Canada after they changed their laws to the liking of our *AA overlords.

I totally agree - and it's not just the US.

I might also add that the technology helped quite a bit in dumbing us down in the sense that it enables us to know what's going on anywhere on the planet almost immediatly. Most (online) newspapers scramble to get those stories out as fast as possible which then leads to the situation where all news outlets present the exact same story by Reuters. I remember when newspapers still did their own stories. Now I even get live feeds from, say, the Apple-Samsung trial: "13:30 the judge entered the courtroom." aso.

And as you mentioned above, it's the dumbass stories that generate a lot of clicks. Some vampire celebrity cheats on her boyfriend with her director, gets kicked out, is depressed, will they get together, ....and even though I was born on a different continent and currently live in yet another continent - newspapers here and back home are full of this useless information.

Same goes for TV. Everything TV has to offer these days is braindamaged 'who's got talent', 'whatever factor' and 'survivor camp' "reality shows" and a million variants of CSI.

I research/teach at a university. We have trouble getting motivated students these days, very few kids are interested in science - they might have to sit down and actually use their brains. And it will get worse - a survey among middle school kids on what they would like to do later found that they want to become a celebrity, a lawyer, or a plastical surgon.

one of my favorites, too. small correction for those who actually try it out: it should be controlmaster auto, not auth.

~/.ssh/config