The Slashdot thread is long dead now, but I can still reply to you:
Yes, but Kepler is a relatively small and cheap telescope that's scheduled to die later next year. And it hasn't found anything really interesting yet (interesting in the context of an ET biology discovery).
In my opinion, attempts to find biological life on a planet outside our solar system. Is much more important than all the other research that NASA does. The robot cars that drive around on Mars are cute, and the pictures that the Cassini–Huygens send back from Saturn are pretty. But a space telescope finding ET life (even if it's just some spectral lines that has to be interpreted by astronomists), would shake the world. So my point is: huge, complicated, difficult, expensive space telescopes, should be the main focus of NASA's efforts. (my 2 cents, anyway. does 2 cents help?)