[TeMPOraL]

In case of this "invisible electrostatic wall", there were likely significant amount of people in that company who were at least somewhat into Star Trek[0], so I'd expect more than mere "meh, this happens" from people who had just seem to have accidentally invented a force field. It's not merely a weird emergent behavior, it's a behavior closely resembling a sci-fi technology, and therefore likely to have similar applications - so quite obviously a potential money and fame printer.

-- [0] - Which was well-known around the time of that event, and at its peak of popularity when the report in the article was filed!

[dekhn]

When you work in production and have quotas to meet, you often ignore interesting side-effects. When I worked at google I worked at global cluster scale and frequently saw any number of events that in themselves would have been graduate-student-for-two-years projects that I had to force myself to ignore so I could get my main work (large scale protein design using 1-3 million cores in prod) to finish.

As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.