5 postdocs per research position is great, compared to the number of potential candidates per tenure-track professor position. Getting rid of people at the postdoc stage means they're not stringing them along pretending there's an upward career track in academia, and means they'll be less tempted to take an adjunct job while waiting for the real thing. (And yes, it sucks.)

You can do a lot of basic testing with cheap X10 stuff, then if you decide it's not a waste of time, go find something better. I played with X10 stuff a decade or so ago, and while it was pretty easy, I found that my home didn't have much that benefited from automation. (A previous place I lived had a hot tub that took an hour to heat up, and it would have been useful to be able to fire that up remotely. But that was gas-powered, and the landlord owned it, plus that was back in the days that it would have been a telephone relay.)

Or maybe the Internet doesn't browse at all.

Ok, I do live a couple of miles from the Googleplex; YMMV. But the things drive by my block all the time :-)

I doubt I'll ever buy one, but I'll be very interested to see when Google thinks it's time for their robocars to compete with Uber, or in general, for Transportation As A Service to supplant individually owned cars for day-to-day transportation needs.

If it bought meth or Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra and let you use it, then yes. (Bad robot!)

If it bought cannabis or some other safe but politically incorrect substance, then it might have violated the Second Law, depending on whether Swiss law commands robots and other non-humans not to buy them, or only humans. (Also, if it bought cannabis and let you drive under the influence, that'd be a First Law problem, but any robot smart enough to buy dope online is smart enough to emulate an Uber app and call for a ride.)

Under US law, property that commits crimes or torts (such as a car used to buy drugs or a dog that bites people) is subject to civil or criminal forfeiture, so your dope-buying robot might be subject to arrest, and might end up as a slave of the US government, buying dope for them instead of you, but I assume Swiss law isn't quite that silly.

There's not much 2G infrastructure left in the US, and the carriers are migrating people off it as fast as they can, so they can recycle the spectrum for 4G, which is a lot more spectrum-efficient as well as offering higher speeds. Otherwise, I'd be really happy to get one of these to be the spare phone that sits in my wife's car for emergencies. (The battery life is a big part of the appeal here.)

QNX and RTLinux and such are great if you need sub-millisecond response for your home automation systems. You don't. If you do, you're doing it wrong.

If your Internet-O-Things devices have spinning motors driving sharp-edged blades, you should be using hardware or at most electrical methods to do automatic stopping. If your electrical things use high voltage that might be exposed to people, you should be using ground fault interrupters on them. If you've got voice-operated instructions, they may need to process sound quickly, but you should buffer it if there's anything really critical. If your vacuum-cleaner robot scares the cat, responding in 100ms should be good enough (it'll probably have more mechanical inertia than that.) If your hot tub thermostat is sampling temperatures every millisecond, it'll be ok if the controller misses a few seconds worth of samples, as long as you don't do something stupid like treat missed samples as "0".

So the neutrino (i.e. something other than vacuum) hit another particle (also something other than vacuum), which grabbed some nearby nothingness to create a third particle? Sorry, but to me, the first two parts of it mean you're not creating stuff out of vacuum.

English is at its core a Germanic language. The grammar's descended from German versions of Indo-European, not Romance or Celtic versions, and if you take the basic vocabulary it's Anglo-Saxon. (For instance, the 1000-2000-word Basic English subsets are almost all Germanic.) There's a lot of French layered on top of it, from the Norman conquest, but it's mostly vocabulary and fancier words, not the core language. (And technical jargon being derived from Latin and Greek doesn't count; that's an artifact of Latin being the lingua franca of educated people for centuries.)

It's not just that the French have an Academie that defines the language rules. It's also that the French Kings and later Parisian governments spent centuries imposing their language on the rest of France, banning the use of Provencal and Breton and Basque and all the other regional languages, whether Romance or Celtic or other.

Most of the US authors and artists I know who self-publish have recently been ranting about VAT MOSS compliance costs, and how it's basically too difficult and expensive to make it worth selling to Europeans since the new law kicked in, so their web sites now won't sell to you if you ask to ship to Europe.

The ones who aren't ranting about it either don't know about the issue, or are just planning to ignore the taxes.

I've never been nearsighted, but I've now needed reading glasses for a decade due to age. Some astigmatism, plus slightly different magnifications for one eye than the other. What works well for me is to have my optometrist prescribe one set of glasses for computer use (with the focus distance set for computer distance, which is longer than the book-reading distance that standard reading glasses focus on), and a combination of drugstore glasses and older computer glasses scattered around the house and car, and a couple of special pairs (like the reading-lens safety glasses and the extra-strength readers for close work.)

So there are computer glasses at home and work that (almost) never leave their desks, and general-purpose reading glasses elsewhere. Most of them come from Zenni Optical, who make decent glasses really cheap ($10-20 for boring frames, unless you need progressives.) The catch with them is that you do need to know the pupillary distance, which your optometrist won't always write down unless you specifically ask, and that measurement depends on the focus distance (so computer glasses will be different than book-reading glasses or distance glasses.)

I also have a few of those skinny drug-store glasses that come in tubes, so you can leave one in the laptop bag or jacket pocket and it won't get squashed. Not perfect, but good enough for short periods of reading, or for restaurant menus.

The point of Stingrays is that they're controlled by the cops, not the phone company, and they can hijack cellphones whenever an "authorized" user wants, without the inconvenience of actually having to present documentation to somebody at the phone company claiming to have a warrant or equivalently warrant-like document.

By contrast, the point of COWs is to be mobile so you can deploy large additional cell capacity at locations that don't normally need it, and the point of femtocells is to be able to get phone service where there's not enough signal and to provide data service to your phone using your own (free) internet connections instead of paying the phone company for expensive mobile data (though the latter application is largely handled by Wifi these days.)

What I'd really like for an application like this is something that can run on a $50 burner phone, most of which run Android 2.3 because they don't have the CPU horsepower for 4.x (or more realistically, something I can run on my old Android 2.1 phone :-) There are starting to be
This is mainly because I'm not interested in rooting my main phone, but would like to try it anyway, but also, if I were doing the kinds of protests where cops are hauling around IMSI catchers to track people, I'd want to be using a burner phone.

(Yes, I realize that here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a "Burner Phone" can just as well mean a propane-powered phone with a steam whistle and an MDMA dispenser in the back that only runs on the Playa.)