"In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover. It's the central conceit of Obamacare that Big Fed knows best and is going to make sure you get it, pounded down your gullet if necessary."

The ACA mandates minimum standards. Yes, in the old days you could 'pick' a health insurance policy that you paid $90 a month for which only paid $50 of any procedure you needed. Now "Big Fed" is insisting you actually get some basic coverage. There's still absolutely nothing stopping you 'picking and choosing' what procedures and medications your insurance will cover once the (rather rudimentary) minimums have been covered.

I have a HIV-prevention research project running in Mexico at the moment (NIH/NIDA 5K01DA032443). Making sure I had appropriate ethics approvals and other paperwork arranged before beginning work took slightly longer than getting the equivalent approvals in the US (but we're talking maybe three weeks longer in the context of a four year project), but never involved bribes or any suggestion of bribes, and every communication I had with Mexican authorities was as straightforward and professional as it usually is with their US equivalents. I'm not claiming there's no corruption at all in Mexico - get pulled over by local cops and depending on what part of the country you're in that can still happen (although a lot has changed in the last couple of years). But I can say unequivocally that in my experience those parts of government which deal with the day-to-day regulation of science aren't corrupt.

On the other hand, conversations between the relatives at Christmas have massive amounts of context - we *know* Uncle Joe who has been sending money to the Zionist Freedom Front ever since his older sister was liberated from Auswich couldn't possibly have said "I'm not a fan of the Jews", whereas we don't have the personal-level context needed to decide whether some idiot celebrity or politician might or might not have said "I'm not a fan of the Jews". So for the purpose of the original poster, an 80% accurate ASR system might be good enough.

TFA is not so much about "legal issues" as it is about the struggle to get permission to collect biological specimens in another country. Another country where there's unfortunately been a long history of scientists and pseudo-scientists from more wealthy countries showing up and taking whatever they wanted, sometimes to the severe detriment of the locals. Ok, we're talking about Mexico and the US if you're too lazy to read TFA. The "legal issues" are the system of review the Mexican government has put in place in response to prior abuses, designed to ensure new research projects don't exploit, destroy, or otherwise cause the kinds of problems both amateur and professional scientists have caused in the past. I'm glad the author of the TFA is attempting to work out how to make it work, rather than just declare that his 'right' to do research in another country trumps local law, and I'm also glad to hear the Mexican government people he emailed appear to be responding throughtfully.

TL,DR - this isn't about citizen science being stifled by The Man, it's about a particular project hitting a hiccup caused by a long history of 'amateur scientists' exploiting and destroying another country's cultural and biological heritage.

"These same cables could be used to pull back parts of the robot, so that science instruments at the center could be exposed and used."

Ok, for the first time ever a goat.sx reference would actually be appropriate.

Oh that wasn't a complaint. I'm enormously lucky to be being paid that much to do something I like, and I'm well aware of it. Just responding to the parent post's mention of "$200 to $800 an hour" as a measure of when the cost of a laptop becomes more or less irrelevant.

Public health, on the behavioral side. So some stats (mostly handled in R) and a lot of qualitative data (mostly handled in custom written software) and a lot of GIS data (postgis with qgis, grass, udig frontends).

You don't even have to make $200+ an hour. I'm a researcher. Divide my annual salary up by hour and I barely make $50 an hour. But the actual research I do gets funded by grants, which run at about $250k per project year. In those grant applications, I allocate money for computers, and those computers are chosen 100% on their fit for the job, and $10k for a single laptop in the context of a three year $1.5 million grant isn't even an individual line item. 'Fit for the job' is basically 'does it run the software I need/write' followed by 'lowest downtime' followed by 'make my staff the happiest'. Which five years ago meant macs for data collection in the field, and linux on whatever hardware was most appropriate for everything else. Now it means android tablets for the field, and linux on whatever hardware is most appropriate for everything else. If the software I needed only ran on windows I'd buy that too, but the handful of times I've used windows-only software in the last decade the tech support issues have tripled so I avoid it where possible because you lose so much time, and in my field it's become extremely rare to find the only software that does the job you need only runs on windows.

It took me a minute to realize the author thinks gui interfaces are Gay Paree and the command line is back on the farm. In my experience it's the other way around - once the kids have discovered the flexibility and utility of the command line it's a bit hard to keep them in the walled garden of gui interfaces.

Any gui is absolutely great as long as a) the task you're trying to do with it is one the programmer/designer has anticipated; and b) the programmer has done a decent job. As soon as you're trying to do something that a gui designer hasn't though of, it suddenly becomes difficult or impossible to get anything done, whereas you can usually work out a way to do it using the multiple small pipeable tools available in your average shell.

You do realize the 'idiots in Sacramento' spend most of their time living and working in their home districts and only go to Sac to represent their district's interests while the legislature is in session?

The reason Stross' opinion might be worth paying attention to is his writing often revolves around economics, and people like Economics Nobellist Paul Krugman think he's solid on it: http://boingboing.net/2009/08/11/charlie-stross-and-p.html

I just set it up on a spare server and had a quick play with an odt version of a NIH grant (US National Institutes of Health) I'm collaborating on at the moment. Not too shabby - unlike google docs it doesn't completely bork the page formatting and the collection of styles we use to keep it in line with the (typographically absurd) requirements of the NIH (oh, SF424, how I hate thee). Which is a big deal, because most of the sections required in an NIH grant have strict page limits (and required fonts, font sizes, line spacing, and margin limits), and getting right to those page limits without going over is important. So when you've finished collaborating and are ready to download the final document, with google docs a) you have to reimpose those margins, fonts, etc which is a pita; and more importantly b) you run the real risk that on reimposing those margins, fonts etc the page count will change, requiring another whole round of editing to get it under the required page count. Whereas this appears to keep the document in odt the entire time and hence there'd be no nasty surprises at the end.

Having said all that, there's no way to add citations. Google docs has a close to useless implementation of citations (imagine 5 scientists collaborating on a document, each of whom have their own citation databases with thousands or tens of thousands of entries, and then go and have a play with citations in google docs. Try not to giggle too much when you realize how well that'd go..). But given open/libreoffice has really good integration with zotero, and zotero is also open source and browser based, it seems like these two could be made to talk to one another, which for academic collaborators would be a HUGE feature, jumping it way ahead of any other collaborative tool I've ever seen. And believe me, collaborative writing is so central to my work that I play with *anything* that looks like it might be an improvement on google docs or the nightmare of emailing around multiple copies of a document with 'track changes' in heavy use.

You forgot the third option - the hazard avoidance system saw the rocks and avoided them. The fact the lander didn't hit them suggests this is at least a plausable option..

"Post 1913 we can clearly see what happens in a democracy with the effective restraint on spending removed."

You become the richest most powerful country in the history of the world? Seriously, I can't imagine the US economy being even remotely as diverse and large as it is without 100 years of massive government spending on everything from a national road network to the development of computers.

I hear morale in the Stasi was pretty low immediately after the wall came down and revelations about exactly how pervasive their surveillance had been began leaking out too..