Funny, I thought Tyson and Watterson had been very famous for a long time. But then I realized that no one else in my household knew their names until the last couple of years.

I don't actually buy much, but there are a few worth spending time with. They might be available online, but mostly just in the same format as the printed version. Not every issue for any of these, but sometimes Scientific American, American Scientist, Trains, National Geographic, Home Power, Smithsonian, Road & Track... that's about all I can think of without getting into obscure tightly-focused monthlies or geographically specific magazines. I think The Economist has stayed solvent by broadening their appeal. Which means the excellent columns with economics-based analyses of years ago are much rarer. I find The Economist not much different from some of the US-based news weeklies these days, aside from having much better international coverage.

Yep. Tilt the back and the seat backwards, shift much of that weight resting on thighs to back. Straighten legs out and rest feet on something tilted towards you.

I don't know about you. I can walk at any speed all day long, and it feels great, but standing still gets uncomfortable quickly, and my back starts giving me problems after just a few days of that. I still have minor foot issues left over from working in a retail department store for just a couple of years, 30 years ago. So no. No standing desks for me under any circumstances. You're welcome to one. I'm going to be up walking around every 30 minutes and frequently pacing around the cube farm to think, but I'm going to sit while I'm not walking. And I expect a decent chair to go along with a decent monitor. What we all really need is a half hour of walking every 2 hours. The productivity of the sitting time would increase at least enough to offset the time walking.

...is what I've been using for years. I'm glad that the first year I went electronic I chose TaxCut (H&R Block's software original name) the first time, because I can't see any real difference between it and TurboTax except that TurboTax is significantly more expensive for any particular level of functionality. Using the second most popular in this case is quite advantageous. Sort of like buying an MP3 player other than an iPod. Except for less third-party support, you can get the same functionality for a lot less cash.

Yes. Common Carriers. That's what they are, and how they should be treated. What they're doing, discriminating traffic, is going to get Safe Harbor provisions removed, and they'll have to filter everything. They won't mind that, except they'll be sued for not catching things. Do they care about the long term? Nope, just next quarter's profits.

Building nuclear plants would be faster than building a lot more renewable sources? No way. Nukes might be necessary, but it takes a long time to get from planning to power production. Building more factories to build more wind machines and then installing those is going to be quicker, even where it requires more transmission lines. The other route to meeting energy needs is conservation. Many of us are very tired of hearing about it, but it only takes a glance around to see how much is wasted. People driving empty pickups and SUVs, parking lots lit up brighter than cloudy days (with fixtures that send light somewhere besides downwards), houses and especially business structures with little insulation, heat pumps using ambient air rather than earth or bodies of water for sinks/sources, water heaters maintaining temperatures 24/7, traffic signals insensitive to traffic conditions, buses and delivery trucks that stop & start every minute without capturing any of the energy during deceleration, PCs that stay on 24/7 without sleeping, roofs with heat-absorptive coverings, PATIO HEATERS, houses without integrated HVAC/water heating/refrigeration systems (that would be almost all), processes that use millions of gallons of drinking water when less energy-intensive water sources would do, excessively energy-intensive farming, transportation of low-value goods around the world due to ridiculous trade rules, shipping that refuses to supplement their fossil-fuel thrust with wind, dump trucks hauling dirt around because architecture isn't designed for the site but vice versa... blah blah blah.

We could cut energy use in the US by 50% without even much inconvenience. I'll not resist nukes when a bit more effort is spent avoiding waste.

It's difficult to focus on the concepts presented when the author employs such over-used, abused, and ultimately meaningless phrases as "marketplace of ideas" and "intellectual property".

90%, 95%, 98%, 99%... what's next, 99.9%? Deniers like to argue that it's not caused by human activities. Pure bullshit, but it isn't even relevant. There are some who think that whatever happens is good as long as man didn't cause it. Those are the ones that might be OK with climate change as long as we didn't cause it. Where does this end? Is it OK for most of Earth's multi-celled life to be destroyed by a celestial collision just because we didn't cause it? Regardless of the reason for it, reducing greenhouse gases will slow it, so that needs to be done immediately.

At first Symantec's actions sounded dismaying, but in the long run using every opportunity to publicize the folly of using that API is probably beneficial. I've spent years trying to dissuade people from using (old) Excel's password "protection" due to the false sense of security. That Win API has the same effect—convinces the masses they're employing secure means when in fact they're not.

Plots... the funniest of which was the powder-in-the-shoes-to-make-the-beard-fall-out. Exploding conch shells were in the works, too, I suppose for if the poison diving suit didn't work.

As far as the pleasures, don't forget cruising around in the convertible '59 Cadillac.

Finally somebody's getting at what's behind all the meddling in Cuba. Virulent anti-Castro Cuban ex-pats hold a lot of political sway, and giving them what they want doesn't annoy many other US citizens. So they get what they want because the cost to politicians is near zero. Never mind that Cuba isn't the falling domino threatening to take the rest of Latin America to communism that it was thought to be 50 years ago and really has little effect on anyone outside its borders. Sure, there are a few dinosaurs and misadventurers in the US government or three-letter-agencies, but they wouldn't get funding if it weren't for the ex-pats' influence. Shouldn't funds go instead to countering real threats like Bermuda, the Canaries, and Palmyra?

Having written BATch files since 1985, the first time I tried JScript I decided not to use BATs again except for very simple things. Windows Scripting Host was a good idea that apparently 1) appeared too late, and 2) wasn't supported on all Windows versions for a long time. Too bad.

Familiarity, in this case, bred contempt. I've written far more code in all sorts of dialects of BASIC than anything else, and I avoid it now if at all possible. For 1964 or the limited hardware in the 70s (6502s, Z80s, etc.) I suppose it was OK. But this isn't 1964 or 1978. VB isn't Dartmouth BASIC, but it looks and feels like V'GER—all sorts of stuff agglomerated onto a simple-minded core to add capabilities. So I'll celebrate not having to use it. MS made gigabucks in spite of BASIC, not because of it. Too bad K&R didn't get to work a few years sooner so we would never have heard of it. Some older cities still have lead pipes. Doesn't mean it was ever a good idea, and they'd be better off had they never used lead in the first place.

Or here's another suggestion: phones in motion automatically limit the length of the call. Even if this doesn't limit the nature of the distraction, it limits the amount of time it applies, which would have a huge impact on the overall risk.