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Slashdot previously had an article discussing pointless research (which was an interesting and surprisingly two side story). But...this "study" would be an example of said (truly) pointless research.

As soon as they had the hypothesis that people would pick up these sticks and put them in their computer the problem was exposed. Any real leadership would just have moved to solve this problem, rather than prove that it is indeed a problem. I would hope that the "security experts" at the DoHS would ponder than an outcome of 1% and an outcome of 99% would basically be the same problem and studying the particular location on this spectrum should bear little relationship to the need to address the problem.

would you let a device that you couldn't administer onto a network you were responsible for?

Probably not. Its a reasonable request. Maybe you can trade with said IT guy and see if he's designed any surgical devices he'd like to see get some action :)

if the world weren't about to end.

If I were google, I'd be pretty psyched to be the only ad provider who can triangulate from search to ad delivery. Thats a real coup in terms of unique analytics for them. Between every page that has their ads on it, every site that uses their site analytics and every request that has google.com as the launch point (and access to http-referer information across all of these....it'd be hard to imagine an analytics company coming close to competing.

There are many more desserts than just cookies.