I'd probably take the first one, telling myself "Hey, I'm getting paid for it. I might as well 'earn' it."

It'll be followed by the second one, "Damn, that HURT. I'll transfer to upper management and shock him instead."

Love never should have entered;
It was never in the plan.
We were finally going to have her
And let Joe be damned...
-Monsters, Blue Oyster Cult

It's a bit like the endgame for the game Uplink-- if you go blackhat, you end up in a race to destroy the internet. If you succeed, the only thing that happens is that you get a 'connection terminated' notice.

Several of the recent Harvest Moon games, which do appear on Nintendo platforms, allow for same-sex marriages. You can even get children in them too, via adoption or babies showing up on your doorstep (I think).

You must be the guy who read off my hotel confirmation to me...

As did I. And I think that would actually be far more interesting.

Unless you hate the beans yourself and picked them out of the toilet before roasting them...

Well. You might also have to be a civet.

It's a bit of a fluff article, but there are certainly enough relevant examples of cell phone usage being an active element in improving the lives of 'rural farmers in 3rd world countries': http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/13/...

(Also, came across this article, which is a bit more recent and covers specific products: http://www.ventures-africa.com...)

I think it would be all the money you spent on coffee.

One may wish to consider the short story 'Ms Fnd in a Lbry', by Hal Draper. (http://folk.uio.no/knuthe/msfndinalbry.html)

Summed up, it's a report of an archaeological document discussing the collapse of a previous civilization due to information overload and how index upon index made it impossible to verify information and linkages if anything was ever misfiled... with the added addendum that the document in question appears to have a bad reference...

"The reward for solving a block is automatically adjusted so that roughly every four years of operation of the Bitcoin network, half the amount of bitcoins created in the prior 4 years are created. 10,500,000 bitcoins were created in the first 4 (approx.) years from January 2009 to November 2012. Every four years thereafter this amount halves, so it will be 5,250,000 over years 4-8, 2,625,000 over years 8-12, and so on. Thus the total number of bitcoins in existence will never exceed 21,000,000. Blocks are mined every 10 minutes, on average, and for the first four years (210,000 blocks) each block included 50 new bitcoins. As the amount of processing power directed at mining changes, the difficulty of creating new bitcoins changes. This difficulty factor is calculated every 2016 blocks and is based upon the time taken to generate the previous 2016 blocks"

Interestingly enough, a lot of the small/medium businesses I work with that do business internationally have the exact same concerns with international currencies. (Dollar, Yen, Euro, Pound are accepted as safe... but even a currency as significant as Renminbi makes some people skittish.)

Same here-- I tried shopping with a list once. Failed horribly: Unless there's a special event, I know what I can make, and I decide what to buy based on current prices, quality, and how long to my next expected grocery trip.

Very likely. If they did a good job testing things, then they had to actually design and produce, in limited quantities, all the actual controllers to be given to be people, or at least have them with interchangeable parts when possible.

I participate in surveys and focus groups when I can and they can be quite interesting, and expensive on the part of the tester. A few months back, I had the opportunity to try various formulations of a hard cider produced by a major beer company. (I want to say it was Coors, based on the demo packaging, but that's probably wrong.) One at a time, they gave me sealed cans of slightly-different ciders in nondescript packaging with instructions to pour it into a (new) cup, munch on various snack foods, fill out the survey, call the guy in for the next can, repeat, for a total of 8 different versions. For my trouble, I got to keep the half-eaten bag of crackers, drink all the cider I wanted until I decided to leave (or got drunk, I suppose), and 50$ cash.

Another time, I got a steak dinner, with dessert, and a voucher to some mail order company where I got a free set of pots and pans. What were they actually testing? Steak sauce.

There's a lot of random stuff in R&D... and paying the subjects are an area that can add up to be intriguingly costly.

Left-handed writer, right-hand mouse, right-hand scissors, left-hand golfer and... left-handed Wiimote user. It didn't really occur to me that anything was particularly unusual until I was playing one of those dance games that uses the Remote+Nunchuck and I kept failing everything because I was holding them in the "opposite" hand. (Thankfully, a lot of games will either auto-calibrate for that, or have control settings to pick. This one... didn't.)