A couple of clarifications are in order.

First TMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation) is not akin to putting a magnet on your skull....so don't embarrass yourself by having your spouse wear a special hat while you ask them about their infidelity.

Second, the researches never said that the technique makes it impossible to lie or tell the truth. They said that subjects were more likely to lie or tell the truth depending on the location stimulated.

Third, it really isn't much of a surprise that cranking up, or turning off areas of the brain have an effect on behavior.

This is the digital age, surely there is no reason to communicate in this manner anymore. My guess is that it's a Soviet Plot to distract the capitalist imperialist to spend billions of rubles to figure out what its significance is (I've never used that phrase "Soviet Plot" before in my life). You can imagine that the change in message is spurring Dick Cheney (or more likely Rush Limbaugh) to make a run at the White House just to figure it out.

Think about it, the amount of data being transmitted is trivial. We live in the internet age. This is at best a distraction made for those who visualize the modern era as a series of tubes.

Probably none of you youngsters remember this, but Yahoo! initially didn't do search as much as handmade lists of interesting sites. To make it into their search results your page would be evaluated by a member of their staff. Talk about quality control! In a sense it was an early, massive, blog. I'm not saying that it's a good business model but it was good for the end users. They went away from that model and to spidering the web like all their competitors. Ten years later they're on life support. Coincidence?

Now Get off my lawn!

The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have ...its big shots and its slow, fetishized ... stuff of macho fantasy. [It] is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact.

I remember uploading Doom to my local BBS. I don't remember it being quite the right-of-passage depicted here.

Actually, I am thinking of creating a URL shortener inside my intranet. Here's a purpose that no one's thought of, or at least mentioned: it gives a layer of abstraction. Inside the company they can send emails, or put links on web pages that point to my URL shortener, let's say, "Company Policies". That link will always work no matter if the target web page stays on our legacy ASP system or gets moved to our shiny new Sharepoint. All they have to do to fix thousands of links is update the target in the shortener.

Does anyone know what language this one is in?

I know that this thread is too old for anyone but the author of the parent to read my comment....so this is for you. Having just come off a 2 year project I can say that your comments are the most insightful that I've read in years. Technically the project is only 85% done, but the PM has closed the project so that the deadline is met...all the remaining work is 'phase two'. Of the classic project triangle (Cost, Time, Quality) everything was deemed flexible except Time and Cost.

In defense of our BAs they did a pretty good job asking the users what exactly they would like the soltuion to do. The problem is that the answer the users gave was something like, "I'd like unicorns to dance around my office and sing Ode to Joy. Oh, and if they could fart rainbows that'd be fabulous!"

-Your friendly systems architect

Ok...did it fly to Morocco (impressive), or South Africa (really, really impressive)? Africa isn't a country Ms Palin.