Oh it's not just you: although, I can agree with some of what holophrastic is imparting, his behavior makes him out to be an incredibly picayune individual.

By the same token, you are also an apologist. However, unlike the poster you berate, who came off as pragmatic, you sound like a petulant child.

I think my professional millionaire job will be safe for the foreseeable future, except in those countries with high inflation rate or with a currency with an exchange rate that is not on near-equal footing with either the US dollar, British pound sterling, or the Euro.

Speaking as an academic at one of the schools you listed, it's not worth my time to edit Wikipedia entries, as I get no credit for my contributions that go toward advancing my career, let alone the state of the art, unless I spend an inordinate amount of time to make a noticeable impact. Instead, I'm better off sharing my knowledge in a less volatile yet still easily-accessible medium, such as a freely available e-book that also offers a printed version through a publisher, e.g., one akin to Jon Dattorro's excellent treatise on convex optimization and Euclidean distance geometry (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/mybook.html); in this instance, I not only have something tangible that I can list when it comes time for a tenure review, but can also be assured that key concepts won't be wiped away by some ignorant, but perhaps well-meaning, editor.

Some of the pages are garbled, or, at the very least, a tad difficult to parse, due to the ensuing or previous page(s) bleeding through to the others during the scanning process. (Granted, this phenomena gave me an excellent idea for an IEEE CVPR/TPAMI paper about a variational, non-local image inpainting scheme for fixing such things in scanned, double-sided documents.)

I find it incredibly humorous that you have the gall to refer to us as "drones" yet can't even manage to establish the veracity of the very list you mindlessly parrot.

For starters, First Solar has neither filed for bankruptcy nor is failing; granted, they did have a rather nasty Q1 2012, as they lost $449.4M (USD), which they made up for in Q2 2012, by posting a profit of $111M (USD), and likely will do the same in Q3, given their current stock price. To find out more about their history, you can peruse their official quarterly financial results that are made available to investors:

(Q2 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=587754&filekey=43642762-a08b-47d3-bc57-62ee73d6b300&filename=Q2_2012_Web_Schedule_final.pdf
(Q1 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=566130&filekey=eb2e729f-983d-466b-bf42-d09461c40ddd&filename=Q1_2012_Web_Schedule_Final_IR.pdf
(Q4 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=546601&filekey=6975fcbc-0591-43f3-8d96-89e3e3ed2a14&filename=Q4_2011_Web_Schedule_Final.pdf
(Q3 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=514964&filekey=d9532d11-f0d6-43b8-8aec-2af1d4f57991&filename=Q3_2011_Web_Schedule_Template_FINAL.pdf
(Q2 2011) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fileid=489149&filekey=7d51e913-c933-40b8-8cf1-57cf28583eba&filename=Key_Quarterly_Financial_Data.pdf

and the 2012 reports that they sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC):

(August 1, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-33&cik=1274494
(Jun 29, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-38&cik=1274494
(May 24, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-27&cik=1274494
(April 17, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1193125-12-165498&cik=1274494
(March 19, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-19&cik=1274494
(February 28, 2012) http://investor.firstsolar.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=FSLR&fid=1274494-12-11&cik=1274494

As well, SunPower is has neither filed for bankruptcy nor is failing, as evidenced by their official annual financial reports:

(2011) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=555007&filekey=2DC44492-5900-4B57-BACA-84AC364FEE34&filename=SunPower_2011_Annual_Report_FINAL.pdf
(2010) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=453648&filekey=9577388E-424A-41E2-BE32-B7BF46C2BBA1&filename=2010AR.pdf
(2009) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=361273&filekey=005B0CA2-05C3-48E9-8BE0-268B84CEB2BD&filename=SunPower_BMK.pdf
(2007) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=182669&filekey=D290981E-816A-4179-AAFF-FDE71CC3A8AD&filename=2007AnnualReport.pdf
(2006) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=90636&filekey=7E859B79-FC73-4823-8071-C114A759E1F4&filename=14790-001.pdf
(2005) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fileid=35108&filekey=0CD02714-FF13-406A-BFC6-1E9700F0DA05&filename=2005AnnualReport.pdf

and their US SEC reports for 2012:

(October 16, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=867773-12-51&cik=867773
(August 31, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=867773-12-46&cik=867773
(August 8, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=1193125-12-344048&cik=867773
(May 3, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=1193125-12-208521&cik=867773
(February 16, 2012) http://investors.sunpowercorp.com/common/download/sec.cfm?companyid=SPWR&fid=1193125-12-65347&cik=867773

Similar claims can be made about some of the other companies, e.g., Johnson Controls, according to their financial information on the SEC's website (http://www.sec.gov/).

Also, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a US Government research lab, not a private or public company, that is funded by the US Department of Energy.

Some individuals may not understand the intermediate steps if they aren't intimately familiar with the field, e.g., someone new to probabilistic models may not know why you can rewrite Sethuraman's sum-based, stick-breaking construction of the two-parameter Poisson-Dirichlet/Pitman-Yor process or the one-parameter Dirichlet processes in a multinomial-based, stick-breaking form. Nevertheless, that does not necessarily mean that the context or contributions of your work won't be unknown to others.

To elaborate, I recently wrote a paper wherein I used copious amounts of differential geometry to recast a high-level machine-vision methodology in a more general, conducive fashion, then proceeded to extend and use the tools of the field to massage that scheme so that its algorithmic implementation would have a much lower computational complexity. Although the paper was sent to the top-tier computer vision/pattern analysis journal, which has been host to a few articles that make use of differential geometry, I doubt that most of the readers will care about the pages of theorems and derivations, as most are not mathematicians, and, instead, just home in on the two important, end-product equations I list, either code them up or download my code, and find that they produce the same outputs but with the new version requiring fewer calculations; further, In this case, while they may not fully grasp how I moved from one representation to the other, they can at least see that the end result is bonafide and incorporate my scheme in their work.

You're correct that it would be quite expensive, considering that just a 28nm mask alone runs around $2.8M to $3M (USD) these days. However, with around $6M (USD) in hand, I'd be able to get some investors on board to match or even triple that amount, which would give me a better amount of wiggle room.

MIMT (multiple instructions, multiple threads) is a term that I coined in one of my recent journal papers, which I just sent out for review, for a ray tracing architecture. While there were, arguably, better terms that I could have employed, e.g., coherent multi-threading, I preferred MIMT, since it immediately lets readers know that the work is different from the current SIMT (single instruction, multiple threads) paradigm in commodity graphics hardware.

If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.

It's pretty easy to refute your "facts", considering that you didn't bother checking most of your links. Going only partway through your list, I found a good chunk of the schools you listed didn't run Windows:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.pace.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 198.105.44.27 Pace University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.ucsc.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 128.114.109.5 University of California, Santa Cruz

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.mbc.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 72.32.6.118 Rackspace Hosting

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.lynchburg.edu
Linux nginx/1.0.15 28-Sep-2012 50.56.4.21 Cloud Loadbalancing as a Service-LBaaS (DFW)

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.uncc.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 152.15.219.131 University of North Carolina at Charlotte

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.umt.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 150.131.194.46 University of Montana

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=spalding.edu
Linux Apache 13-Sep-2012 216.135.72.163 BLUEGRASS.NET

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.biola.edu
Linux nginx 28-Sep-2012 199.19.144.31 Biola University, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.immaculata.edu
Linux Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 98.129.134.83 Immaculata University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.tiu.edu
Linux Apache-Coyote/1.1 28-Sep-2012 38.126.15.210 PSINet, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.trevecca.edu
Linux Apache 28-Sep-2012 174.129.33.200 Amazon.com, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.trident.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) 14-Jan-2012 216.23.173.234 Jazel, LLC

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.canisius.edu
Linux Apache-Coyote/1.1 28-Sep-2012 138.92.8.121 Canisius College

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.bentley.edu
Linux nginx 28-Sep-2012 184.73.245.212 Amazon.com, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.scranton.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 134.198.4.83 University of Scranton

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.emerson.edu
unknown Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny8 with Suhosin-Patch 28-Sep-2012 199.94.80.103 Level 3 Communications, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.newpaltz.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache 28-Sep-2012 137.140.1.48 SUNY College at New Paltz

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.ndm.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 28-Sep-2012 207.97.254.202 Internet Services, LLC

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.mville.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.22 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 28-Sep-2012 50.116.112.214 WEBSITEWELCOME.COM

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.rwu.edu
Linux nginx 28-Sep-2012 107.20.247.107 Amazon.com, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.mercyhurst.edu
Linux nginx 5-Sep-2012 174.143.146.154 Slicehost

As an aside, most of these places I hadn't even heard of and can't be considered as top ranked. Unsurprisingly, however, all of the highly regarded schools in the world run Linux:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.mit.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8j 24-Sep-2012 18.9.22.169 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.stanford.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache 22-Sep-2012 171.67.215.200 Stanford University Network

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.ox.ac.uk
Linux Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) 31-Aug-2012 163.1.60.42 Oxford University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.cam.ac.uk
Solaris 9/10 Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_ucam_webauth/1.4.2 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8j-fips mod_perl/1.30 12-Sep-2012 131.111.8.46 University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.caltech.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.16 (Amazon) 18-Sep-2012 50.18.187.91 Amazon.com, Inc.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.berkeley.edu
Solaris 9/10 Apache 26-Sep-2012 169.229.216.200 University of California at Berkeley

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.gatech.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache 28-Sep-2012 130.207.244.120 Georgia Institute of Technology

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.harvard.edu
unknown nginx/1.2.0 17-Sep-2012 69.172.200.24 DosArrest

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.cornell.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.21 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.21 OpenSSL/0.9.8r JRun/4.0 3-Sep-2012 132.236.204.10 Cornell University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.princeton.edu
Linux Roxen/5.1.185-release1 25-Sep-2012 128.112.132.86 Princeton University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.yale.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache 12-Sep-2012 130.132.35.53 Yale University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.upenn.edu
Linux Apache/2.2.22 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 11-Sep-2012 88.221.94.232 Akamai

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.columbia.edu
unknown Apache/2.2.21 18-Sep-2012 128.59.48.24 Columbia University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.brown.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) PHP/5.2.1 mod_perl/1.29 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.8d 28-Sep-2012 128.148.252.129 Brown University

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.dartmouth.edu
F5 BIG-IP Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) DAV/2 PHP/5.2.11 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.8.8 27-Sep-2012 129.170.16.202 Dartmouth College

Did it never cross your mind that maybe this particular individual just enjoys his work?

As an aside, I've known plenty of people, myself included, who have pursued careers, e.g., as researchers, engineers, or physicians, despite having complete financial security from birth, simply because they relish working and have the talent for their particular job, wanted to make a difference, wanted to better themselves, etc.

In the (incomplete) hypothetical situation you proposed, there would be a myriad number of paths that I'd take depending on various circumstances.

To elaborate on just one, if I was reviewing candidates for tenure-track junior faculty and research positions in an area that I was familiar with, I'd sit down and read through all of their publications. (Since I am a prolific reader, I can easily go through 300 full-length journal papers, in my spare time, every 2-3 weeks; considering prospective faculty reviews take months, I'd have plenty of time.) Once I had a handle on what each person had done, along with asking about their contribution to each paper, assuming multiple co-authors, I'd then start to weed through applicants based upon factors like venue prestige, publication count, publication rate, topic relevancy (some universities currently have general hiring freezes, due to budget cuts, but will open up positions for those focused on a particular subject area), etc. (To me, the prestige of a journal, or, in some disciplines, a conference, is important, as it shows that a person is willing to put in more effort to succeed. At the same time, however, I would not be hesitant to favor someone who was an industrious scholar and produced a great deal of papers in a mixture of mid- and high-tier venues.)

It should be noted that the usefulness of h-indices varies from field to field. For example, in various branches of pure mathematics, a heavily-referenced paper is one that, maybe, garners 25 to 100 citations. In applied mathematics and certain subsets of statistics, the threshold would be a factor of magnitude larger.

Also, as a preference, I tend to ignore metrics like h-indices when evaluating a researcher, as they provide very little evidence for his her her capabilities, let alone the quality of the work.

To elaborate, at least from my own experiences, in certain portions of applied mathematics that bleed over into computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition, I've seen papers that are relatively mathematically prosaic, but possibly easy to understand or where the code is made available, be heralded and heavily cited for a period. In contrast, I've come across papers that provide a much more sound, but complicated, framework along with better results, possibly after the topic is no longer in vogue, and go unnoticed or scarcely acknowledged.

In a different vein, there are times when a problem is so niche, but nevertheless important to someone or some funding agency, that there would be little reason for anyone else to cite it.

Touching on an almost completely opposite factor, there are times when the generality of the papers, coupled with the subject area, artificially inflates certain scores. For instance, if a researcher spends his or her career developing general tools, e.g., in the context of computer vision, things like optical flow estimators, object recognition schemes, etc., those papers will likely end up more heavily cited, as they can be applied in many ways, than those dealing with a specific, non-niche problem, e.g., car detection in traffic videos. Furthermore, the propensity for certain disciplines to favor almost-complete bibliographies can skew things too.

Finally, albeit rare, are those papers that introduce and find the "best" way to solve a problem that no other discussion is warranted.

Actually, most countries, including the United States, require that counseling psychologists obtain a license, let alone pass tests, to offer their craft to the public. If someone is found, just like in medicine or in clinical psychiatry, practicing without such a license, they will be slapped with some steep fines and jail time. (Granted, there is some wiggle room with regards to this, as ordained pastors and rabbis are allowed to provide counseling within the context of religious duties; moreover, if these religious ministers have suitable advanced training or degrees, they can ethically provide psychotherapy.)

Also, as an aside, the submitter might not have the proper background to engage in psychological counseling. For example, there are many that focus exclusively on research and look at phenomena, which are distant from those behaviors useful in a psychotherapy setting, such as how humans parse space, how we learn new concepts, how we analyze various items, etc.