Techies have always been strange - for example, consider the average /. reader. Or Richard Stallman.

Another great example of an outlier is the so-called "Spam King", Dale Begg-Smith, who, when not making millions off spam and malware, won two Olympic medals and three World Cup championships in mogul skiing, starting in 2006. If that isn't a bizarre combination of pursuits, I don't know what is.

Because you could upgrade your phone without interrupting the current call?

Not to defend this bozo, but the $10 million "raise" was undoubtedly due to appreciation in his stock options, since AOL stock increased from $5 to $45 in 2013.

Because they hate the EPA and are using this as a pretense to neuter it. There's no way they can provide "reproducible" results to back up many of their rulings - what are they going to do, run a study with one polluted river and one clean one? This is clearly just a smokescreen by the know-nothings on the right, since they have no regard for science otherwise. Fortunately the House can't unilaterally pass legislation - sorry, guys, maybe next week you can repeal the ACA for the fiftieth time instead.

Back around 1980, there were a zillion magazine and newspaper articles around about the shortage of programmers, and about how computer science was the highest-paying thing to go into. The result was a boom in CS enrollment, followed by a glut of incompetent entry-level programmers who really wanted to be rafting guides or something. Once the dust settled there was still somewhat of a shortage, and salaries remained high despite all the telephone-sanitizers who tried to become programmers.

This all has a familiar feel to it.... What the big companies really want right now is cheap programmers, not more programmers. They're clearly hoping that increasing supply will lower their labor costs, whether it's by pushing the "year of code" or by increasing HB-1 visas.

I have an inactive Verizon flip-phone in my hiking gear, just to call 911 in an emergency. My regular cell phone is Sprint, which has much worse coverage away from the cities.

I suspect the passion/dream/obsession/whatever stuff is just another subtle way of accomplishing age discrimination. After all, most people calm down sometime in their 20's or 30's - you know, about the time they start getting expensive to employ.

Well, Clovis, don't keep us hanging - what did happen 11,000 years ago?

No, you didn't - Carlsen didn't just play e5 Nf6 Ng4 Qh4 and Qxh2 (the basic Scholar's Mate from the black side). This game was nine move pairs, and included Gates playing Bd3 with his queen pawn still on d2 (a seriously weak move). I suspect that when Carlsen saw that move he knew he could just march his knight and queen over and checkmate Gates with no particular effort required. I think Carlsen only used about 10 seconds on his clock (of the 30 seconds he got - Gates got two minutes).

What's that in Mean Deviations?

VISA just sent us new cards and cancelled our old ones. They didn't specify exactly why, but I shop at Target.

That email "from Target" might be a phish. Careful...

What the CEO really said was

Which is completely different than "POS malware" - note he said the access point. I'm still betting this is an inside job, and one of their central billing computers had a little extra code in it that was sending the info across the net to some holding site.

Also the length and area of a football field.

You misspelled "wont".

Except the victims will also sue the manufacturer of the car, and everybody involved in its creation.