Indeed. I don't love Comcast - they are robbers who have tried to screw me so many gd times during a recent move across country, and if any other broadband in our area was any better we'd have dumped them. But, that said, this is an awfully nice perk of being their customer. Currently I'm working on Boston while my family lives in CA. We have xfinity at the house in CA (I bought my own modem for $60 and had a really good router. Renting a modem is just dumb), and I get Wifi in Boston off of my neighbors. It's a bit wonky in that for some reason my desktop can't log in, but if I USB-tether my phone or tablet to the desktop it works. (Any ideas on why that would be?). I can walk through any residential neighborhood in the city and I've got wifi.

You can get all worked up about vague security issues or extremely minor power usage, but really, this is a pretty nice and useful feature if you're their customer.

Have a look at the Corsair mechanical keyboards. They have a bank of programmable keys down the left side. Great for game or programming macros.

Lots of cases. And after using SwiftKey for a while, I'll never go back to typing on a phone if I can help it.

Flirting with people you have employment power over IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT. It's kind of the definition.

No it isn't.

More PUBLISHED experiments, though, please. Let's know what they're doing, and what the outcomes are.

I'm sure the DLC team are the same people as the port team. One of the biggest-selling games of all time surely couldn't work on two wildly different aspects of the game at a time.

Steam is works extremely well with an Xbox controller.

While I don't blog, anything that gets an academic writing and shaping their thoughts can be a good thing. And in the modern grant-writing process, it's absolutely better to get your ideas out there - it helps you to plant your flag, and it gets people thinking about your ideas. If your blog has followers, you get immediate feedback and critical analysis. And suddenly, you're recognized as the expert in that area.

Like it or not, at least in the US system, your grant application is not reviewed solely on its merits. The surest way to get a grant rejected is to have a really good idea that is completely unproven, and which a reviewer (who's probably reading 30 other applications that afternoon) will immediately be overly skeptical about. An application from a "recognized" expert will be far better received than someone who is just getting started. While most academics aren't going to know what a blog or twitter is, all it takes is for one reviewer in the room who does know to speak up and say "You know, this young guy with very few pubs has actually been deep into this for a while..."

But, yeah, there's a balance. If you should be in the lab, it's best to be in the lab, and you should absolutely not be live-blogging experimental results, no matter what.

Hasn't been that way in a long time. Until recently, my wife had an Arizona cell phone number, and we haven't lived there in a decade. I have three phone numbers, none of which has the same area code. 15 years ago I had a choice of the last four digits of my phone number from a short list (I chose 0666. The operator was like "Are you SURE?"), so that's not temporal either. Between vanity numbers, reuse of numbers, and internet VOIP numbers, etc, it's all muddy. Maybe this system worked for your parents or grandparents who haven't moved in 40 years, but not at all predictive for the majority of the population anymore.

Actually, the rich are effectively getting a LOT more of your tax money now than the poor are.

I don't know the history of this, and the linked article is vague on timelines, but it always did seem like UEFI came out of nowhere...

As someone who's been in the beta for two months now, Hearthstone is most definitely not pay-to-win, at least by CCG standards.

You get a core set of very good cards for playing though the tutorial and leveling up classes, easily done in Practice mode. You can earn more in game currency by playing - for winning, for reaching milestones, or as rewards in Arena, which is Hearthstone's version of draft. Rare, Epic and Legendary cards are NOT required to win. While the rares and epics are desirable, they're pretty easy to come by (you can disenchant unwanted cards to craft the cards you want). Legendaries are interesting, with extra animations and sounds, but are almost all VERY circumstantial, usually with distinct disadvantages. Top tier players very rarely use more than one or two in a deck. You can easily play with common cards and a few choice crafted rares and do very well.

Of course, a few expansions from now, and who knows. For now, playing for free works out fine.

And now, because there are so many aspiring faculty, I suspect more schools are refusing to give tenure to Assistant Professors, predicated on the basis that they aren't bringing in enough grants (in a grant funding climate that's never in living memory been worse). On top of establishing their research program by submitting dozens of grant applications as well as publishing any meager scraps of results they can drum up, they have to teach classes, mentor graduates, undergrads and postdocs, and often do significant "service" to the University (extensive time-sucking nonsense on various committees). When an Assistant Prof can't hack the minimally 80h work week, there are plenty more people ready to come in and try. Source: I recently left my position well before a tenure decision for a well-paying awesome industry job, and don't regret it a bit.