Sure. But I also wouldn't want to go to the hospital and wait for an MD when I need my nails clipped.

An awful lot of development is the equivalent of nail-clipping, not surgery. Or at least it should be.

Exactly half of the places I've worked had a dress code that forbade shorts. I prefer no dress code, but looking back, I don't see a strong correlation between dress code (or lack thereof) and workplace quality of life. Some "business casual" places were great enough that I didn't mind the dress code, some "anything goes" places were terrible enough that everyone was miserable no matter how they dressed.

So if you were forced to wear shorts, perhaps due to some small-minded one-dress-code-fits-all corporate policy, you'd find it objectionable? Perhaps it might even interfere with your work, if it's uncomfortable or annoying enough? Isn't it great when an employer doesn't do that?

Not to ride on the coattails of your eventual Nobel or anything, but this is the best idea I've heard in a long time, and I spent five years at a crop-science company. Put together a robust trait stack to express three or four distinct narrowband fluorescent emissions, and good luck horizontal-transferring that entire stack into a neighboring weed by accident. If the robots see something that only fluoresces in one or two of the bands, it'll be as easy to pick out as a purple or cyan blot in a field of white.

"A year's salary" is not pocket change.

A month's salary is not pocket change.

I think long and hard before spending a week's salary on a single purchase. Getting that kind of cash from ATMs would take several days, given daily withdrawal limits around here.

I know, right? That would be like taking away Flash.

No, classic Apple would've gotten it right. Tog would've laughed this design out of the building, with a highlight reel showing people bonking into the glass walls, and how sensible visible elements on the glass fixed the problem.

I miss classic Apple.

I'm having trouble understanding the significance of 25-pm distortions (0.025nm) in an optical telescope, where the light you're bouncing around has wavelengths on the order of 20000 times more than that (400nm-650nm, longer for IR). Does interferometry really let us detect phase differences that small?

He certainly doesn't crank things out quickly, but most of it is eminently worth waiting for. His last novel was a bit of a misfire, but he's talked about a couple of other things in the queue from the Zones of Thought universe, and I'd love to see something entirely new from him as well.

What if they install something that keeps mining after you leave the page?

What if they install something that keeps mining as a system service that starts up automatically whenever you boot your machine, and maybe sets up a proxy for them to communicate with other systems inside your LAN?

After all, if you've viewed their content, they're entitled to compensation, right?

I think we fundamentally agree that informed consent is the important thing, but I'm not willing to venture very far down the slippery slope of "compensate content producers by letting them run whatever they want on your machine".

If we really want to use this role-reversed metaphor, they're paying me (with their content) for my attention (to their ads). Ideally, my favorable and engaged attention, not my swearing-at-the-site-as-I-try-to-close-my-hung-browser attention.

In point of fact, I've decided that many sites offer inadequate "pay" for the resource hit they impose, whether from ads or just bad coding. Sometimes I switch to viewing them in a different browser that mitigates these resource attacks. Most often, I just stop visiting.

How do you figure the cost of losing half your battery time? From what I've directly observed, having a few badly-behaved Web pages open can take me from six hours of battery life to two or three.

I've been known to pay for ad-free access to content, and I've been willing to accept ads as a way to compensate content providers. Ads are simply getting too expensive to accept now -- the electricity cost is small, but the costs in battery life, stability, and safety are just too high.

(And that's omitting the attention costs. Static ads? Fine. Static ads for things I'm actually interested in? Heck, I'll click through them! But autoplay video, distracting animations, malware? Nope. Bad for my perceptual and cognitive health.)

"Unoccupied CPUs" were a waste back when a CPU used the same amount of power idling as working.

Today, giving my "unoccupied CPU" a task for your benefit is theft of my battery life (time until I need to recharge), battery lifetime (total number of cycles), electricity (both direct device usage and indirect cooling needs), and device lifetime (hotter devices fail sooner).

Now, if you'd like to offer me payment for these things you wish to consume, we can talk.