Not really advocating either way, but the alternative Republican-favored approach is to give tax rebates for the economic behavior you want (e.g. health cost savings accounts, buying energy efficient cars, etc.). Both are forms of government influence over economic behavior.

Back in the not-too-distant past when I worked on tape R&D at IBM, we were entertained by these non-stories. At the time, IBM made more money off of tape than the whole disk industry made all together.

As to the geek-factor, it's worth noting that the slower product cycle for tape development (driven largely by interoperability being maintained for a long time) means that a tape developer can have a lot more fun than a disk developer. When we were inventing the LTO technologies, there was huge freedom to create something new and interesting compared with the difficulty of making even modest changes to the disk product line.

Totally agree. For me (I eventually became a research physicist), the connection point was a simple experiment in a high-school physics class where we were able to predict the equilibrium temperature of the combination of a heated brass weight and a styrofoam cup of water. It was the connection between the math and the reality that was amazing to me -- that you could know pretty much exactly what the result would be ahead of time...and the you could design a particular outcome and make it happen. I guess it is the mark of nerddom, but I was hooked.

My officemate produced a beautiful doctoral dissertation with LaTex. Unfortunately, he has now been manually re-working it over the course of several weeks to coerce LaTeX to format it more like MSWord so that it will be approved by the publisher who is printing his book. "Everyone else" produces "camera ready" copy for this book series using MSWord with provided templates. When my friend argues with the editor that his LaTeX output is better, he is told that those styles are no longer considered better -- I assume this means that Uncle Bill has managed to win the formatting game as he has managed to control what is "proper" grammar through his green squiggles.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is his sad story. And this is a top-rung German academic book publisher. (They turned down my book [another story] but fortunately, my publisher does all of the typesetting for me!).