If your employer reimburses you for safety glasses or steel toed shoes, they don't get access to everything you do while wearing them, do they ? Of course not.

Take it as a reimbursement, and do NOT let them even THINK that they 'own' the hardware. Note that they will need to include the $$ as part of your compensation (and you're probably gonna pay tax on it).

As far as the intellectual property issue if you 'invent something' while using the equipment, it's always a hard job proving that in a court of law. Even people who sign those 'all your brain are belong to us' agreements (sign or yer fired !) get out of them all the time. They keys usually are that the wonderful concept you developed has nothing to do with the core business of your employer.

I'd feel safe doing it this way. BUT! I'm neither a lawyer nor a tax consultant, nor do I play either role on TV. So YMMV.

Seriously. Growing up in the US suburbs, the concept of 'bartering' is foreign, and considered impolite at best, and offensive at worst, to the point where you will be banned from a shop for it. Fast forward a decade after my D&D experience and I found myself alone for half a year in a middle eastern country. And shopping in the bazaar for supplies. Almost immediately the bartering skillset I had learned playing D&D for the better part of five years raced to the forefront. While spells and armor were not available (but automatic weapons were) , I still made out just fine, and never had to roll the D20 I kept in my pocket. Yes, I still have that talisman some 30 years later, it's a useful decision making tool.

My thoughts exactly. The concept of a 'frankenfish' which deliberately accelerates evolution for shortsighted purposes is a baaaad idea with a bad end for all of us.

Not a chance. I've got the same thing going, and "There Can Be Only One". I must now hunt you down, and unlike you, I actually KNOW how to use a sword !

Back in the day, I worked on a project that gave me 2 weeks to get about 2 months of work done. The people who were supposed to give me data dithered and delayed. Once I had it, I had from Thursday morning until the next Monday morning to get the job done. This was the first and last time I ever did No-Doz. Stayed and calculated, typed, drew drawings, etc. from Thursday at 7Am until Monday at 7AM. No sleep, no cat naps beyond the occasional descent into sleep deprived / caffeine overdose hallucination. When words like 'beer' and 'refrigerator' started creeping into the technical description of a portable radar system, I knew I was toasted. I wrapped it up, printed and dropped it on my boss's desk, and went home. I have no idea how I got home. My wife put me to bed.

For this incredible feat, I was rewarded with having to find another job. Sucks to be the Junior Engineer. Got a good job across the country. And then the company hired a new president. The same moron that sat on the earlier project for 1 1/2 months and caused me to end up there. Needless to say that company tanked too.

NOT an urban legend. Happened to me with a 550 card program at Mizzou in 1975. I was running through the halls to go get it punched on the auto-collator (I think that's what it was called- a machine that punched the extra columns on the right (73 through 80) in sequence so you could resort the cards. And I tripped, and the cards went flying.

Fortunately I had a printout because I'd just run the program, so I just went back and keypunched the whole damn thing. And left the cards in the hall. I was a faster typist than a sorter.

Bingo. While the technorati here at /. may look down their noses at it, there are a gazillion of us corporate types using Citrix (or, as we like to call it, Sh*trix), which is empirically a terminal application. So think of a terminal on the iPhone that lets you get into your entire corporate application empire.

MAJOR Business killer application. Instantly, the iPhone can become the defacto business palmtop environment. Sure, businesses will need to scale applications dependent on 1024x768 or higher screen sizes, or get used to virtual screens (imagine a virtual screen using the tilt sensors for screen panning ? Cool !).

Apple is gonna kill the Crackberry if this works.

Time to stop using you xBox to run your financial empire, kids. Get the grizzled old traders back and fire the children.