"An infant born in America will grow up in an American cultural environment, and will have American probabilities for growing up to be a decent person. An adult immigrant from another country is a much larger risk, and many would show up just because they couldn't succeed in any other country either. You do not want to let those people in. It's ok to be selfish."

Yeah right you are not an American. And I am the queen of Sada. LOL.

Wow, if I wanted to read so many GOP/libertarian talking points with no sources or references, I would have signed on to Free Republic.

What the heck is going on Slashdot today?

It is funny to see republicans trying to pretend to be "financially responsible" after generating more debt in just 8 years, than the whole accumulated debt accrued by this nation in all its history.

Not that the Dems are that much better. But seriously, it must take some sort of reinforced steel balls... for a republican to try to assume some sort of fiscal moral higher ground.

Care to provide sources?

Pray do tell, which public university has a $2 billion dollar endowment for just their engineering department?

It seems all some libertarian/republican posters can do to justify their view is spread innuendo or make up facts. It is intellectually disingenuous at best.

As a person who is working at a top university, let me tell you that you have no clue what you are talking about.

I would like to see where those mythical piles of money on which universities are sitting are, because we could sure use it right about now.

So please, oh wise one, point us to where all that cash may be.

Actually, if you knew anything about how federal funding works (NSF, and DARPA for example... I am sure NIH et al do the same) there is plenty of oversight. Most funding grants requires to provide report and justification on how, what, and by whom each penny in the grant was spent.

As a researcher myself, I think the original poster has no idea on the amount of overhead that goes into managing a grant. $12K in the big scheme of things is not that much. A normal paper may cost triple that just on student salaries.

In fact, for each $1K of funding I get, the amount of time I have to invest in obtaining it, working with it, and then justifying it via multiple reports would make any sane person think twice about getting a PhD. Also, for each dollar in external funding, the uni most likely "taxes" you half of it. So that they can subsidize the education of little pricks like the original poster. What an honor!

Only now??????? Where have you been in the past decade.

The last outfit I worked that was using CATIA, the windows machines outnumbered AIX dekstop boxes like 10 to 1. And even the high end AIX gfx were starting to seriously under perform compared to the Quadros in the PeeCees.

Same thing for NASTRAN. I am no fan of windows, but Dassault, PTC et al have focused on the Windows versions for a while now. And that is because the price/performance of AIX workstations hasn't been there in a loooooong while.