This invention might seem shallow, but there is a noble plot afoot... These pumps will actually save the food they remove in order to be exported to poorer communities and nations around the world. Dean Kamen will solve world hunger by recycling pre-masticated food! Can you imagine... U.S. #1 export for 2013: pre-masticated food. We are certainly good at masticating!

Unfortunately, there's a lot more to that first milestone than sitting down to hash out some code. In just about any size business, a project will require the programmer to work with a multitude of other professionals around the company. Imagine you're one of those people and for every project you have to deal with two or more people not only for the initial briefings, but for ongoing support where they're likely to ask similar follow-up questions and require at least some maintenance. It's not so simple that you brief and follow-up with the programmers simultaneously either; doing so would misrepresent their skill sets and unfairly level the playing field, thus mitigating the initial intent to discover the best and brightest at that particular project. I imagine the cost in this paradigm actually exceeds the simple salary of the extra programmers, but also includes the time, energy and frustration of the other employees who must deal with the redundancy.

I believe Google has had an initiative where they basically save web pages at points in time, building up a history of the evolution of websites. While it is Google and not the government, this is still a prominent initiative to archive and maintain our internet heritage. Maybe someone can elaborate further on the details of this work?