It's more brilliant than you think—now the Microsoft employees who came up with this idea can get MacBooks without getting their boss's signature! In theory, anyway.

There's a chapter in Freakonomics that covers this iirc. The summary goes something like; spending money won't make people like you, and if people dislike you they won't vote for you. If they don't dislike you, then money spent is positively correlated with supporting votes.

Well... there's the beachfront property market.

Agreed! Firstly, as the P pointed out, a significant amount of time goes into getting grants to fund the experiments. This isn't going to go away, funding is still required, but it will mean that YOUR lab now has a chance of getting the grant, as opposed to the lab that already has the machine available for use because it was funded by the last grant. This means a wider variety of labs doing the science, which is a good thing. Also, having worked for a commercial science institute that really pushed the idea of 'brand name equipment saves you time and money', I can assure you, it's not the case. Our brand name equipment was ALWAYS down, waiting on a repair guy to be flown in from another continent, because the local guy didn't know how to fix it, or didn't have the parts. On top of that, we often had to run experiments multiple times because the results were suspect. The machine operator ended up with more repair skills than the first-level call out guy after about a year... that saved us time! So I'd say having in-house skills for maintaining your CORE equipment is a good thing. Open source design and hopefully some interchangeability in parts, a bonus!

Does anyone remember that old game: "Bureaucracy"? The aim was too keep your blood pressure low enough not to have a stroke and die while dealing with everyday issues. Maybe a remake with this sort of controller is in order, then it could measure your real blood pressure.

Then, maybe, someone can use the measurements as evidence in a suit against... well basically every cable, internet, or phone company, building contractors, and government institution.

See also: Slashdot and unicode support.

I would have gone with Orafisco myself

Except when the government steps in with your taxes to bail out the bank that goes bankrupt because everyone stopped using it; and that is assuming Joe Consumer actually has a big enough effect in the first place, because banks don't get deposits only from the man on the street. The money is in the loans. And you can't just stop using a bank if you have a loan. Can't buy a house without a loan either generally, and buying often makes more sense than paying off your landlord's mortgage.

Hey, definitely. I'm all for this sort of interest piece; I've done some truly worthless statistical analyses purely for the geek value. But it shouldn't be mislabeled, much less sitting on Arxiv. I guess maybe this happened because the lead author is a physicist? Assume a spherical cow, etc.

Exactly. The results of this study could not be more bullshit. It's the kind of "why would you even bother doing that" study that should make people double over laughing.

We'd deal with them the same way we dealt with Denmark. Simple.

As another commenter said already, Canada went through nuclear disarmament in 1984. (The US wasn't pleased.) "Develop" is definitely the wrong word.

Good points, both the P and the GP. I should rephrase and re-summarize as: There can be no legal whistle blowing of legal but unlawful activities. I would consider Snowden's revelations lawful, but only some of them legal. Some of the stuff the re released describes clearly illegal activities. Whistle blowing of illegal activities is essentially reporting a crime, and there's a long tradition of reporting crimes (especially corporate ones) to the press instead of the cops.

It's not about disclosing illegal activities. It's about disclosing activities that shouldn't be legal, or activities the public should be made aware of because their government is doing it behind their backs, even if legally. Yes, the ballot box is supposed to be the place to sort it out, but the ballot box presumes an informed citizenry. An informed citizenry presumes a system where whistle blowers are protected if they're actions are indeed in the public interest.

There can be no lawful disclosure if revealing legally classified documents is unlawful, even if the legal system facilitating the classification of those documents doesn't enjoy the broad support of the people. The correct term, that doesn't allow legal weaselling is "the public interest".

Alas, they also noted differences in brain activation when the subjects were shorn pornographic imagery, so that joke doesn't quite work, unless they were secretly controlling their muscles for the elbow and wrist in the MRI tube. But we can pretend it does!