Speaking as an ex-state-employee who went private in the same town and got a >50% bump in salary (and has since received -gasp- raises over the cost of living, unlike the median 0% raise I got while with the state over 7 years), I wouldn't be inclined to question Kahn's claim. I have a number of friends in the same boat where leaving the state was a huge pay bump.

Just sayin'. Your average worker bee is paid very little by the state. It was part and parcel of the deal -- lower compensation, but great benefits.

Detection is the arms race. Tell me, who has really won the other arms race, the virus writers or the AV vendors?

I'd vote for civ, but I have to finish one more turn first.

See also: XCom.

Taint Wars 2. Better hope it keeps being popular in Asia, lest NCSoft get all Auto Assault/City of Heroes/Tabula Rasa on your game.

I don't know that either Chicago or Kansas City is really far enough from the new madrid fault to be considered safe. Things aren't built to CA earthquake standards around here, even something small(ish) by the time it reaches Chicago is going to do serious amounts of damage. Not to mention there are faults a lot closer that they know next to nothing about (see the higher risk zone west of Aurora at: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/illinois/hazards.php) so the margin of error on them could be ... large.

As earthquakes go, a 5.1 in Aurora isn't big, but it was felt all over: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1909_05_26.php You make that a 6 or 7 because nobody really studies the fault system there and much of Chicago is going to be rubble.

Its potentially even more tragic if shutting it down ends up with the cell companies pushing through an elimination of the radio-quiet zone. The existence of said zone is probably a resource we won't be able to recover if it is lost.

100k deaths of coal miners by accident only in the US alone, 1900-2000 if you believe wikipedia. Excludes various exposure diseases (black lung), other environmental effects, and everything bad about burning it (radiation, ash/particulate matter, the whole CO2 problem).

Those nuke plants been slakin'. We need some bodies now. I think our only hope is that Fuka wakes Godzilla up and we count those under the death-by-nuke-plant statistic. I suppose you could toss in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that'd help some...

If you want to cook them from the inside out, why not just use a microwave?

Hint: if you haven't ever used a degausser, they can only operate for a limited time (due to internal resistance -> heating) and you wear the huge heavy gloves to hold the disk which will get what can be best described as "quite hot."

You don't need ikea level precision. A hand crafted, slightly imperfect, but stained and varnished bookshelf is far more pleasing to the eye than a wall of ikea crap. And it doesn't cost more if you consider that the bookshelf you build of real wood will probably still be usable 30, 60, or even 90 years and a few moves, while the ikea stuff will probably not survive the second move -- or maybe not even till the first. (or it could be my house has more books than the average... but our cookbook shelves in particular suffer greatly, but I haven't replaced them yet.)

There's a reason when I got a geekdesk it was frame only. 3/4 inch oak ply on top, stained a dark brown, coated with a nice thick protective layer of poly. Why pay >$100 for pressboard/laminate when I can make something far more beautiful (and sturdy -- the desk frame is going to give way long before you overload 3/4 inch ply without specifically trying to break the plywood) myself.

Friends considering lift desks have been asking how hard it is to make a surface like mine... (answer: not very, if you have a modicum of patience!)

AT&T was, in theory, building uverse out in my community (midwestern university town, >100k pop). That was two years ago. Not a peep since then. Supposedly a couple places have it, but I can't get it where I am. I'm stuck with comcast and their terrible network maintenance. They have a leak (classic sense: water infiltration) somewhere. Good soaking rain means 25%+ packet loss, multi-second ping times for a few days.

Of course by the time I'm through their "service" org far enough the central line techs would come out and look at it, things have dried up and they see no problem, so close the ticket and fix nothing.

Luckily we have a university/city sponsored FTTP service in the works -- probably WHY AT&T quit their uverse build out -- but at least I'll be able to get service that isn't comcast before I die/move out.

No power strip should be the size that thing is unless its also an integrated UPS. The oversized nature of it should be a huge tipoff. Figuring out that it was up to no good is easy too if you suspected it: plug it in to a kill-a-watt. Draws power when "off"? Time to get a hammer...

I too fear our socialist asphault (or concrete) underlords. Don't let the roads get you too boy.

"The client is in the hands of the enemy." - Koster

It applies just as much to hardware you sell me as to the bits residing on it. If you were right about the secure device thing, there wouldn't be all the cracks on the console/handled systems.

I missed one important thing: which frame I had. I got the max large frame (as opposed to the max small frame -- capacity vs surface size is why they are named oddly).

TBH, I think mine looks better. No pics, sorry. Imagine a nice dark stain on oak, with the characteristic light/dark/light of plywood on the edge.

I have a geek desk. I love it. Actually I have half a geek desk -- the frame only. I put my own surface on it. All theirs are laminated formaldehyde-laced pasteboard. Bleh. I can buy that crap from Ikea.

So I got a sheet of the soy-glued plywood, stained, sealed it in many (many) layers of poly, let it get good and dry in the garage, ordered frame only, fit two together with provided 3/4" wood screws and life is good.

Baby can't reach a 47" high desk surface. This is convenient. I've also found its really convenient to use to just stop by, check something, and go on my way. There's no butt-in-chair intertia to get over.

I've been looking for a cheap treadmill to try the walking thing. I haven't managed to nab one yet. That is probably a no-go other than as an experiment until the kid is a bit older though, since I think there'd be fingers pinched all the time otherwise.