This was an interesting question and I feel like I can give an interesting answer. I'm self-employed, in that I'm the owner of the company. So for me there is no separation. My "work" laptop is also my beefiest and hence my primary laptop. I can dictate how our lab environment is built out.

To address what you talk about with my employees, generally speaking I'm pretty lenient with what they want to use and do (no porn no pirated software, that's pretty much it). I give pretty much free reign in the lab. I do this by having a development VM server and allowing a dev to spin up pretty much any VM he wants. I got an MSDN subscription to cover all the various MS OS flavors, but I see lots of ubuntu and OpenSolaris VMs too.

The bigger issue for me is not computing resources, its time. You have to show me that your research efforts are worth our time. If we're building a J2EE project on top of Ubuntu with mysql, I will question why you are doing a python tutorial on the company time, for example.

For me personally, since we're a small company and cashflow is tight I personally follow a "10% IPA rule". No more than 10% of my time can be spent on non-Income-Producing-Activity. I try to make sure 90% of my time is directly billable to revenue and not spend more than 10% of my time beyond that. Maybe larger companies with bigger profit margins can handle more, but we just can't right now.

I certainly encourage people to learn new things and I can see the value of doing this out of left field. (For example, last year I decided to finally really learn functional programming, and it gave me a huge positive impact on my vanilla Java/Perl/JS/etc coding). And since most engineering talent is the geeky sort who love to learn for learning's sake then its a positive morale influence to let people dabble. But when I can see the cash flow report every month then I can see where the PHB/clueless MBAs get nervous when you spend too much time doing research and learning.

Now, when you mention security being an issue.....well, can't help you there. Most large companies have fairly brain-dead security policies so there's not much you can do about it.

This really intrigued me. I've never thought of atheism as a "religion" per se. It seemed silly to me, like calling someone who chooses to not watch sports a fan (see? silly!). But let's see what the dictionary thinks.

The third definition is certainly interesting. If Dawkins and these other scientists feel strongly enough about their atheism to write books and make movies and go on lecture tours then I would posit that this interest/activity is very important to them.

So yeah, maybe hardcore atheism IS a religion.

How do you do #2 without a lot of work? I like the idea of microloans where someone else does the legwork and paperwork but I don't have the know-how to find a farmer, convince him to borrow from me instead of a bank, and then do the paperwork right.

I read the articles and am kind of a novice chess player but I can't figure out what this "huge blunder" that Vishy made? He was playing white and didn't respond properly to an attack from black? This would be huge, right? Isn't it typically when playing white you play to win and black you play to draw (that one-move advantage is huge)? So the fact that Carlsen got a win as Black was huge, right?

Can someone explain the details of the mistake to me? The commentators and commenters all make it seem obvious but I can't tell what's going on.

I've always wanted to be good at chess (I equate it to being "smart") but I've never been able to be very good at it.

If it makes you feel better (and I mean this with all sincerity) I don't think you and your wife are idiots. My wife and I experience the same thing. Whenever we try to do something "good" that pushes outside the typical societal norm, everyone thinks we are idiots. It can be very frustrating. We jokingly call it "us against the world". So actually I'm glad to know we're not alone.

I know I'm late to the game replying to your post, but is this true? This seems like the exact opposite of what I hear and read a lot. The concept of doing strength training for example, because "muscle burns more calories than fat". In other words, by building muscle you are increasing your RMR. Which is basically completely different than what you said.

Or am I missing something? This is an honest question...I, like many USians, am trying to lose weight.

Totally with you up until here. IIRC, Carmen does a backtrace and the source IS the bug quarantine zone.

I thought the guys at Top Gear figured out the best survivor-type pickup was the Toyota Hilux?

http://topgear.wikia.com/wiki/Toyota_Hilux/

This one was pretty awesome. I would want a truck that won't break down no matter what I do to it.

If you like the live action visual mediums (TV, movies) I would strongly urge you to watch the Firefly series. Its on Netflix streaming. My wife, who is not a scifi fan at all, still highly enjoyed the series. Its only 13 episodes so its not like you're committing to an entire season of Glee or something.

I haven't read the commonwealth saga. Most modern scifi writing hasn't caught my attention. I tried reading Hyperion, Scalzi, Virge, Snow Crash, didn't really enjoy any of them....I guess I prefer the classical "no-frills" style of writing. I can really dig into Heinlein, Card, and Asimov.

........Did I just feed a troll?

Nope. Source code is right her:

http://download.tuxfamily.org/notepadplus/6.4.5/npp.6.4.5.src.7z

I don't know which license they use.

OK, fine, I won't be lazy....its GPL according to the website.

Heh, mentioning Carly gave me a depressing yet fascinating train of thought.

The cynic in me says....put her in. Watch MS stock decline. Buy. Force her out. Stock jumps 20%. Sell. You just made eleventy billion dollars

If you're a wall street power exec with influence of the MS board....its brilliant

like to eat pizza while watching 4 episodes of TNG on Netflix

That plan sounds pretty awesome, actually.

You seriously think that skipping one meal a day for 4 days will make you faint and put you in the hospital?

I can't decide if he's a, b, or c either. But I recall being surprised at finding out how many undigested calories really are in poop. And how and why fiber plays a role in that.

Not sure how reliable these citations are but I found these which contradict your assertion. Sounds like most pilots are paid for "flight time", and in fact are NOT compensated for when they are sitting at the gate.

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/278808/

http://thetruthabouttheprofession.weebly.com/professional-pilot-salaries.html

http://www.pilotcareer.info/Airline_Pay___Life.html