Of all places on the Internet it was really odd to see Standford's site requiring Silverlight to watch its content. WTH, how could something like this happen?
Silverlight is reasonable and has market share. Since their goal is to get distribution....
Or perhaps they were suspended over a tank of piranha by an evil laughing Bill Gates somewhere in the basement of http://cs.stanford.edu/info/gates
Or perhaps they just out sourced the web design to the cheapest company who happened to use Silverlight.