The problem with dystopian theories like this is bullets are cheap. If you've subjugated the public to the point that you can force expensive brain surgery on them, why bother? Just shoot the people you don't like.

Besides, there's a huge market for non-lethal weapons; if this works on everyone and incapacitates rapidly, government labs and defense contractors will be tripping over themselves to reproduce this effect through external stimulus. No surgery necessary. Woo...

...and, of course, the end result is police and militaries doing whatever the hell they please with the excuse that their phasers were set to stun.

Fortunately for you Slashdot isn't a book, play, or film. (Although I'm probably skirting the edges with Google's Operafier plugin.)

What's amusing is that because they have the word "coin" in their name, people automatically consider coins money. But they're not money. They're just tradeable metal discs. If they had called them Nickelplates or Copperounds, no one would think of them as money, and they would have gone nowhere.

*dons white beret*

Guess what! Everything is arbitrary! And it's wonderful! You can buy a house with colored pieces of paper or wear a beaver tail or race steam-powered airships or conduct a symphony underwater. The world we know is nothing but the sum of a billion crazy ideas, and the greatest people in history are the ones who made it a slightly weirder place...Or not! Who knows?

If only someone had invented a tele-seeing apparatus— then people from all over the world could witness and converse about their protest.

Alas, such a thing does not exist, so no one even knows it happened.

Pity.

It would just become a political mess; Biofur would get mired in a war between the sweatshop garment workers' union and the hoover lobby.

And this is why QA hates devs.

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

Whew! For a second there I thought you were going to say "M".

And SCOTUS 2: Justices In Time was a pretty good movie.

Or, as the late Tom Clancy proposed, Boxes From God.

Perhaps, but we can't incentivize the use of 'incentivizing'.

Well, the rich have always benefited the most from business, and will most certainly continue to do so.

But corporate serfdom is a result of a lack of labor opportunities, from the mining towns and workhouses of the 1800s to sweatshops and factories in third world countries today. So I'll turn your idea on it's head: A world where labor pools can court business from all over the world is far better than one where workers are beholden to the local oligarchs.

More like "dropped on average a few percent in real purchasing power from its peak a couple decades ago".

Considering how many of the world's problems are caused, enabled, or exacerbated by abject poverty, it seems a small price for bringing a couple billion people in the BRICS nations out of it.

Unless you're one of those who think you were born deserving more than everyone else in the world.

Yes, and in the 'real' world anyone can break into your home, take your stuff, rape you, kill you, and eat your liver with fava beans and a nice chianti.

So forgive me for staying in the fictional 'legal' world; I'm not quite ready to throw away all of civilization whenever it happens to inconvenience me.

Who said anything about a buck?

1. Create script to register Amazon Turk account and spin up EC2 instance for an hour
2. while (true) { run_script(); }
3. Profit!