Good advices!

1. I'd say it's possible to get ahead using a credit card, but you need to be very disciplined. The agreements are very much structured as a deal with the devil, as soon as you get behind one payment they start charging you as many fees and interest charges as they can. That said, you can win by:

Getting a card with 0% APR, and paying off the balance in full each month.

ALWAYS paying your balance off in full every month before the due date. Do not carry a balance, since this means they start charging you fees.

If you miss a payment, you LOSE. Minimize damage by paying off your entire balance completely (including stuff that hasn't hit your statement yet) and stop using the card until they stop charging you fees and you return in good standing. This may take 2-3 billing cycles. They will continue to charge you fees for several months, along with interest based on your "average daily balance" (i.e. not the balance of $0 if you pay it off before your statement date comes around). If it's your first time paying late, MAYBE you can give them a phone call and have all the fees waived once.

Set up automatic payments from your savings/checking account, so you never miss a payment

Make sure you always maintain enough money in your savings/checking account so you can completely pay off all the balances on all your credit cards and still have enough to live for 3-6 months. This probably takes the most discipline, since it means you probably want to live on a strict budget until you hit that number.

Profit! Pay your credit card statements as late as possible, but no later (I usually schedule them about a week before the due date). If done right, you essentially end up floating the money you spend with your credit cards for 1-2 months... meaning the money you spend will stay in your bank account (earning interest, however meager it is these days). And if you have good credit score, you can probably get some percentage rewards on your credit card purchases (1% - 5% is common).

Share the wealth - of course, cashback from the credit card essentially means the merchants you frequent are paying you a percentage whenever they run your credit card (or, er, the credit card company is giving you a small cut of what they charge the merchant for transactions). So if there's a merchant or restaurant you like, consider paying cash, especially when tipping waitstaff (who might then be able to go on and, er, underreport their tips to reduce their tax burden, which is illegal but I'm sure it happens and doesn't really have anything to do with you other than they will love you for it).

2. Yes! Don't be afraid to be your own accountant, tax forms are all written towards an 8th grade comprehension level (ha ha). But really, tax incentives are there to help shape your behavior and a lot of it is actually very level-headed for something that comes out of government - there are little rewards you can score at the end of the year for improving your energy efficiency, supporting good charities (more money donated to stuff you actually want to support means slightly less tax dollars for congress to throw at things you don't like). But by all means use an online service like taxact or turbotax to take the liability off of you if there's an honest mistake that slips through.

3. Yeah, life insurance doesn't work the same way it does in the Game of Life for some reason. Usually if you can snag some from your employer for little to no contribution, that's worthwhile to make sure your family has enough money to bury you if you die, and keep the house and family car running until they can cozy up with another breadwinnar.

4. Compound interest might be the only useful financial advice you can get out of a high school education these days. But they still don't really give you a lot of rules of thumb that fall out of that, such as:

Inflation means everyone's money depreciates about 3% each year. If your bank account's interest rate is less than that, you're not going to be living off of interest income :P

A typical 30-year mortgage means you'll probably pay the bank back twice the amount of the original loan.

Don't buy a house that costs more than 3x your annual income.

5. Rings true, just pick the index fund with the lowest admin fees. You're in it for the long run, and lots of smart investors have repeatably demonstrated that index funds, even fairly random ones, tend to outperform "managed" mutual funds over the long term.

6. Yes, don't turn down free money! In the same vein, you can help teach your kids to save money by setting up an e.g. a 50% parent-matching contribution for whatever pocket or present money they put in their bank account instead of blowing on candy and toys.

Oh, just make it more like Windows and use
* ALL=ALL:NOPASSWD
already! :-D

Then you can set up passwordless ssh with no passphrase to all your systems do stuff like
for H in `cat myhosts.txt` ; do ssh -qt $H "sudo rm -rf /" > $H.txt & done

Yeah, the NPR reporting on this last week pretty much indicated that WhatsApp is extremely popular in the developing countries (BRIC, etc.). Facebook bought their user base, and are probably not all that interested in their app, so none of us should really be interested in it either.

US has always been weird with respect to SMS, what with them charging extra for low-priority data packets that essentially piggyback on the cell tower control packets "for free". But chalk that up to the "ingenuity" of Amurrican marketing and productization.

For my part, I just use the Google Voice app to do SMS on my existing data plan. But I never got into doing SMS via Twitter, which is probably closer to whatever it is that WhatsApp does.

Another thing the NPR coverage touched on was the $1 / year paid subscription model that WhatsApp uses, and that the Russian (Ukrainian?) developer is pretty against any kind of embedded advertising, so it'll be interesting to see what Facebook does with this. I'm frankly kinda surprised I haven't read much coverage about this on any of the tech news sites, it's really weird getting deeper coverage about $random_software on mainstream broadcast radio, compared to what would have made the news just a decade or so ago.

So I don't really understand why utility quality doesn't seem to affect realty prices. Maybe if Zillow and Craigslist started including broadband rankings from broadbandreports.com for homes and rentals alongside listings, we'd get somewhere. Thus far, it doesn't seem to appear on the radar, somewhere far beyond "school rankings in standardized testing" and even "price of garbage collection".

Of course, then the internet availability score might start to have some impact on assessments used to determine property taxes, which could start having unintended consequences. But I'm pretty surprised thus far that more people don't really shop for residences by FTTP availability.

Oh, over on Eastside I have Frontier FiOS (formerly Verizon). It's pretty great.

We could also, you know, confirm by looking at packet loss stats from Cogent to your ISP's carrier
http://internethealthreport.co...

Amen to that. If you look at the Google Fiber Cities plan at https://fiber.google.com/newci... , you can more or less see that Google Fiber is trying to avoid population centers where the internet is already well developed (DC-NYC-BOS corridor, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Houston) and primarily concentrating in "up-n-coming" low-cost southern tech centers, which already typically get lower marks for education.

So if anything, Google Fiber appears to be trying to bring the poors up rather than help the richers widen the gap.

So I don't really game console, but I hear Child of Eden was maybe the only game that used Kinect right, and it's pretty much an abstract musical game that lets you shoot lasers from your hands.

I did get a PS2 and a nice wheel to play GT4... and now that the PS4 is out I might shell out for a used PS3 so I can play GT6. But yeah... Playstation tends to have a few really good exclusive titles, while XBox tends to just be a cheaper and easier to use (well, OK, "dumbed-down") gaming PC. But I already have a gaming PC, so.

Which is a shame, since I used to work next to the Forza devs, and have to admit the 3-screen setup with a good wheel / shifter / pedals they have in their lobby feels awesome. But XBox never supported the somewhat-affordable Logitech G25 / G27 wheel, and I'm not going to shell out 2 - 3x as much for the slightly nicer German racing wheel / shifter that does work with an XBox or three that I don't have.

Yep, I'm heavily addicted to World of Tanks at the moment.
It's playable under Linux and is straightforward to install using http://www.playonlinux.com/ (though lately I've had to turn torrents off in the WoT updater, or find and download their torrent files separately before relaunching their updater). My frame rate appears limited, but supposedly it helps to configure PlayOnLinux to use a newer version of Wine with the CSMT patch (to offload rendering to another CPU core). Audio still sounds pretty crappy under Linux, which is a lot of the fun with a good subwoofer, so mrrr.

On to gameplay, it's pretty well balanced, and you can have just as much fun at lower tiers than some of the higher ones. The game mechanic and learning curve is quite a bit higher than your average shooter... before you get frustrated, you'll want to read up on how the camouflage system works, since a lot of the game mechanic is more hide-n-seek than twitch-n-shoot (though really there are tanks that you can play either way). Above all, I love how player skill and teamwork is still more important than, say, crew stats (which certainly help load the dice in your favor when you land shots, but aren't the end-all-be-all like in most MMORPGs / RTSs).

GTA4 was pretty terrible, but GTA3:SA is pretty brilliant. Sounds like GTA5 falls somewhere in between... though part of the appeal of the GTA series was as something of a time capsule, which doesn't really work now that they're basically modeling recent times.

man, it's like you'd have to be some sort of ninja to make those double-jumps... oh, wait...

Same thing could be said of the (in)famous Clippy tool. As derided as it was in tech circle (jerks), apparently he was pretty popular with the ladies according to one of my friends in tech support, who had to deal with lots of sticky keyboards. But I suppose just another way Clippy was spreading the joy, of, er, digital manipulation to the masses.

Rings true... when I went to get my MSSE degree (funded by my employer), the most fun classes were actually the electives. One of the first classes I took as an ASS ("advanced special student" prior to getting on a degree track) was a signals analysis class where we learned about z-transforms and fourier transforms... stuff that I had already been familiar with after years of staring at Winamp / XMMS / Milkdrop spectrum analyzers and had assumed would be covered in my undergraduate engineering maths program at some point... but never was.

The mainline degree courses actually tended to be the most inane and least relevant to anything I wanted to do professionally. Though unexpectedly one of the best ones happened to be the Engineering Finance course which explained all about double bookkeeping and debt asset ratios and all that stuff that I always turned a blind eye to. It was right after the Arthur Anderson scandal, and the educator was a really stellar and engaging accountant who was let go after that fiasco. But maybe that just speaks to how mundane the rest of systems engineering seems in comparison.

When I worked at Boeing about a decade ago, they actually had two tracks... Levels 1 - 6. Above level 5, you had to pick between the management or technical track, which would target what kind of training you'd get. And above that they had executive leadership tiers along both tracks.

The technical path also had a "technical fellowship" that would meet for conference presentations each year. I went to one once and it was pretty awesome, kinda like a live edition of a Popular Science magazine.

Haven't really experienced anything else quite like it at other engineering companies I've worked for since, though :/ Then again, most of Boeing was heavy into "technical management" and PPT engineering at the time too, so it's not like they were really the ones doing the detailed engineering work.

Eh, I'm enjoying it. The Photo album thing is the best I've seen yet, finally better than running album or gallery on my own box, and much nicer than my forays into flickr or twitpic or whatever. Public images and albums are straightforward to share with a URL, and it doesn't bug those people to log in. The fullscreen slideshow and overview features work great, though sometimes I get lost in the navigation and I'm occasionally frustrated when they dump you into the album "highights" view (a random sampling of your full album). Not even mentioning the autoawesome filters are neat and only slightly tacky, but entirely optional at your discretion.

Sure, I don't have many people in my circles, but Wil Wheaton is enough to keep the feed entertaining. Besides, people suck.