Yes, I spent my late 20's and early 30's doing a PhD and a longish poorly-paid post-doc at one of the top US institutions. But I enjoyed it. I did not have to do my professor's work. I develop a research agenda instead.
I'm tenure-track faculty at a very large, research-intensive state school now. My salary is where I'd start out at Google as an engineer with a PhD, because the university has recognized the need to compete with the private sector. I chose not to take the Google job at the time because I wanted to run my own lab, but the decision was close. I now have a few PhD students, some very limited grant money coming in. I do have to teach: some of it is fun, and I'm trying to give something back to my "customers" without spending valuable time on it (which I need to spend on research).
I do see some people that work crazy hours. They tend to either be very good at what they do, or they go for every grant opportunity they see (and still have a poor success rate). With the low chances of getting a proposal funded at certain important institutions (like NSF, NIH), I feel I need to economize and only send in core work.
Yes, a lot of teaching is offloaded on teaching faculty with year-to-year jobs. Science is not in their career goals, but they are much more dedicated educators. Given the poor preparation and an attitude among our undergrads to "pick up a degree" in lieu of "learning something profound", I think this is the right choice. We do not work with adjuncts all that much, but it's widely agreed that working as an adjunct for more than a year is labor of love, not a career.
I'm happy with my job for it offers plenty of intellectual and practical freedom. The downside is having to live in a college town rather than in NYC or SFO, or in a much more interesting European city. I'll live with this trade-off.
....find another client.
The real value here is it enables much more granular logging.
I object to this article, however, on grounds that this is not news. It's a press release, and crap like this is why I only visit slashdot every few months any more.
Wish this had made the real news. We know this sort of thing happens, but airline industries are highly effective at having this never reach public discussion.
So... "fun gimmick, or a serious commentary on an increasingly surveillance based society?"
Really?
How about both. Are having a sense of humor and making a serious comment mutually opposed? Slashdot deserves better.
Not 100% sure this is WebKit-free. On MacOSX there's still a reference to webkit in the UserAgent string as: "AppleWebKit" anyway.
If all else fails, lower your standards.