True but in most institutes unless you are an absolutely incredible researcher you have to have a reasonable level of teaching ability or you don't get tenure.

I'm not positive about this, but I don't think they need to turn on 'another' transponder, they just need to change their transponder code. I'm pretty sure pilots dial in the code based on what the tower tells them to use. I don't think every transponder is guaranteed unique, and traceable.

Experience of which industry? I'm a physics prof. Our grads work in fields as diverse as finance, medicine, IT, natural resources, academic and industrial research etc. in a diverse range of positions. University is supposed to give you deep understanding of a subject and a broad range of skills that are useful for a wide variety of positions both in academia and industry it is not a training scheme for job X. Being involved in research means that I can take the latest research results and bring them into lectures so the students learn about them and perhaps find ways to apply that knowledge wherever they end up. This is not only good for the student but good for society as a whole and someone from industry is unlikely to be able to do that.

Not entirely. Aristotle, Da Vinci etc were given leave to "explore". They were funded to do curiosity driven research as well as the "build a better widget" kind. Today's billionaires, very like governments, are focussed on getting better widgets rather than improving mankind's knowledge. The problem is that it can take 50-100 years before our new fundamental knowledge can be applied so by the time that they all wake up to find that applied science has slowed to a crawl it will be a long time before the damage can be undone.

That's my experience, also. Version 20 was considerably more stable than the latest version 27.01.

Yes. Someone makes this comment every time, for the last 9 years, since version 1.0.

Most people don't open a lot of windows and tabs at the same time. The people who do that are usually those doing serious research. For example, what to do about the changes in Google Voice coming in May, 2014?

The problem is much worse when many windows and tabs are open under the Windows OS and Windows is hibernated several times.

Firefox is unstable when many windows and tabs are open, even when using NoScript, Adblock, and Ghostery, as mentioned above.

Many crashes do not start the Crash Reporter.

See for yourself. Go to this URL:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/home/products/Firefox/versions/27.0#duration=14
(Mozilla does not allow links from Slashdot.)
Those are NOT ALL the crashes! Those are just the crashes that don't also crash the Crash Reporter.

The earlier version, 26.0 is crashy, also:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/home/products/Firefox/versions/26.0

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use when many windows and tabs are open. The latest version is far more unstable and crashy that earlier versions.

Firefox gets more than $100 million from Google each year. Where does the money go? Do you see that amount of development each year?

The Mozilla Foundation stopped doing more than minimal work on Thunderbird.

The Firefox instability was first reported before version 1 was released.

I have a huge number of tabs open now of discussions of Google Voice. People with technology backgrounds are saying negative things about Google and Google management.

Sure, most of that will be read only by technologically-oriented people. But a perception of bad management makes it more difficult for Google to hire competent people. (It will always be easy to hire people who are not competent with technology.)

And it's not just this one issue. There are many other issues of Google management receiving the same criticism: People are saying Google is sloppily managed. That is degrading the public perception of Google. Degraded public perception makes ALL management of the company more difficult.

Google's handling of Google Voice is getting an enormous amount of bad public relations. Google often makes changes without adequate explanation. See, for example, this information from Google: An update on Google Voice.

Obviously, no one considered the effect on Google's reputation of the fact that Google employee Nikhyl Singhal communicates in an inadequate fashion. For example: "Ward Mundy, Nov 1, 2013: +Nikhyl Singhal Your suggestion that developers have violated Google's terms of service and posed a security risk is disingenuous to put it charitably."

To me, the underlying story is that Google is no longer as well managed as it has been in the past. Projects aren't finished; maybe those working on them got bored and decided not to be adult.

I've thought about and studied the phenomenon of companies slowly degrading for decades. Hewlett-Packard was already going downhill in the 1970s; the company was making data acquisition hardware that had an obviously unfinished design.

Fairchild Semiconductor was, at one time, the best manufacturer of transistors. The company began selling power transistors with epoxy casing. The epoxy degraded the transistors. It seemed that Fairchild never recovered.

Tektronix was a great company at one time; everybody in the tech world was impressed with Tektronix oscilloscopes. I suppose the good managers decided to move to other efforts. One problem was that Tektronix was not prepared for lower-cost competitors.

More recently, Adobe seems to me to be on a long downhill slide; the PDF file formats were a gift to the world. Now Adobe seems to me to be becoming more and more aggressive toward its customers.

Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank seems to me to be becoming tired of being CEO and making huge management mistakes for which there have been multi-billion dollar fines.