early 2012: packaging of user data into securities
mid 2012: derivatives on these securities
late 2012: crash
early 2013: SEC orders Americans to stop using their names until bankruptcy courts sort out ownership issues

of the emergency call center operators job getting worse. Now *everyone* has an incentive to freak out even if they're not missing a limb or watching a loved-one choking on a hot dog.

What exactly is nuanced about this? A corrupt public servant and a private company collude to charge taxpayers $200 to view something that very clearly should be freely available. This is corrupt in a very un-nuanced way.

There is a private company called Pacific Biosciences that is doing something very similar, single DNA molecule sequencing. They managed to get reads from a single DNA molecule, and this was sort of the hot topic at a few computational biolgoy conferences I went to last year. It's not clear who is going to win this race, but I think a lot of people think this is the future of DNA sequencing.

Posting this on Slashdot is like sending Pizza Hut circulars to Ethiopia

...before they kill the entire action film genre

How did we not think of that! Throw more money at the problem, that always works

I agree that reflexively throwing more money at a problem is not good policy, but investing more money in science (in such forms as higher NIH/NSF budgets, higher graduate student stipends) is definitely part of the solution. Want proof that this strategy works? Look at Singapore. They are luring away American scientists in droves simply by giving them higher salaries and easier access to research funds. Scientists like me respond to financial incentives just like any other person who has bills to pay and food to buy (in fact, I am currently considering taking a research job in Singapore). The same applies to grad students - if you make it easier for them to study by giving them slightly higher stipends and easier access to research funding, they will be more likely to start graduate school and less likely to quit.

I'm not saying we can just increase science funding and this problem will go away, but more money would definitely help.