I wish I had mod points, as that was a very nice summary of the US system. The only slight edit may be to also point out that even when you get to the Associate Professor level, you're so used to working full bore that it's hard to step back and enjoy/appreciate the sudden release of pressure due to job security (that you've fought so hard for for so many years). That is, what you said about that at the Full Prof level also can apply at Assoc Prof level.

Also, as someone who grew up programming an Apple ][+, I love your username. I entered that command so many times, I guess I'll never forget it.

Private telecomm company GWI has already announced plans with the University of Maine (also part of Gig.U) to do this in the nearby Orono and Old Town communities.

I'm curious to see the outcome a few years down the road, how it really affects anything.

When that happens, you revise the paper to make it more clear how the material differs from the earlier, smaller paper, and submit to another journal (if that journal won't consider a re-submission), and also in the cover letter to the editor/reviewers emphasize why this new paper is worthy of being published even with the existence of the prior one.

At least with journal articles you have the opportunity to provide these extra out-of-band communications, and there is room for back-and-forth exchanges between the authors and the reviewers/editors. With grant proposals, if you get rejected, that's it, there's no chance to respond to the reviewers and resubmit for them to re-evaluate. You wait another year (depending on the agency/program; the program I use at NSF accepts proposals once per year) and submit a revised proposal, and get a completely different review panel, which wants to see completely different things (and may even criticize things which were added to the proposal to address comments from the previous year's reviewers).

I have reviewed more than 50 journal articles over the past ten years, and have not been paid a penny for it. No money was paid to my institution/department, either. It's voluntary service to the profession.

Pretty much the same story here -- I have a TracFone Motorola V170 -- I think it's about 5 years old, and I paid about $30 for the phone back then. I buy a $100 card once a year, which has more minutes than I need (I still need to buy the card to extend the service for another year). My battery was dying on me a couple years ago, but a friend had the same phone and switched to T-Mobile, so I cannibalized his battery. I'd actually love to have a smartphone, but don't want to pay $80/month for one.

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ is what you are describing, for Yahoo/Bing/Google.

Pleco Software ( http://www.pleco.com/ ) has a version of this for their excellent Chinese dictionary software. There's a video of the prototype at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc

I'm not sure if the above works on the latest (4th-gen) iPod Touch with camera, or only iPhone.

I'm not affiliated with Pleco, other than as a very happy customer of theirs for about 8 years. I first got their electronic Chinese dictionary software for a Palm Pilot back then, and then more recently migrated (for free) to their iOS version for my iPod Touch. The dictionaries they license aren't cheap, but they're very good, and their software and support is great; I highly recommend them.

I used to think R was very specific for stats as well, but eventually a colleague told me he was pretty sure it could do most of what I used Matlab for (spatial stochastic models, basically continuous-time stochastic cellular automata). See my comment and link to Matlab/R reference over at:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1084091&cid=26371723

I used to use Matlab quite a lot (mostly for prototyping simulations and for visualization; I use C for my "real" simulations which take a lot of CPU time, since they run so much faster in C). I learned R about 2 years ago, and found that it can do pretty much everything Matlab can that I need for my own research.

Anyway, I wrote up a "Matlab / R Reference" that translates the basics between the two packages. It doesn't have highly specialized stuff, but many people have found it handy. I use my own reference quite a bit myself, since these days I mix up commands between the two packages quite a bit. It's available at:
http://www.math.umaine.edu/faculty/hiebeler/comp/matlabR.html

If you want to get the rows of an array (x) with 0 on column 1, you do x[x[,1]==0]. basically, x[,1] gives you a one column table with the appropriate column, x[,1]==0 gives you a vector of true,false values, which you can use to index into the array again.

While that does pull out the rows which have 0 in column 1, it packs those return values into a vector (the first element of each of the selected rows, followed by the second element of the selected rows, etc.). If you want to extract those rows of the matrix, and keep them in matrix form, then this will do it (note the extra comma):
x[x[,1]==0,]

Yes, R is pretty nice in that sense. Matlab can do many of the same tricks, e.g. the Matlab equivalent of my command above is
x(x(:,1)==0,:)
Matlab doesn't have a simple way to do your version that I know of, since Matlab doesn't automatically recycle a vector index to a matrix. You'd have to do something like x(repmat(x(:,1)==0,n,1)) where n is the number of columns in x -- or to avoid hardcoding the n, you could do x(repmat(x(:,1)==0,size(x,2),1)) which is starting to get ugly isn't it?