My home, like many, has a low-voltage panel where the incoming cable signal from the outside world is routed to the rest of the house . All the coax cables from every room in the house are connected to a splitter here.

The trick, though, is that cables run signals in either direction. When I ditched Comcast, I put an antenna (Clearstream 2V) in an upstairs room facing towards the broadcast towers. I added an inexpensive signal booster, connected this to the coax wall jack, and then in the low-voltage panel this became my source - I disconnected the "outside world" line, moved the line from the antenna there, and now all the rooms in the house can get a signal from that antenna for free OTA HDTV. This is perfect for a cord-cutter.

Same exact thing happens to me. People think my email address is theirs, and they sign up for all sorts of things. I reset the password and close the account where I can, lecture the source on not trusting email addresses before verifying them if I'm feeling particularly annoyed, and otherwise add them to my spam filter.

Funny thing, though: the two sources I have the most trouble with are banks and phone companies. If one of their customers signed up with my email address, then I get sent all sorts of their personal information in my email - their phone number, bank account number, bank balance, SSN, postal address, &c. If I then try to contact the bank or phone company and say "yo, stop sending me your customer's PII," they often require me to provide an additional piece of information such as the customer's mother's maiden name before they'll listen to me. And of course I have no idea what that is.

And when I am able to finally convince them that they're sending their customer's information to the wrong person, often they tell me they're not allowed to edit the account and fix the problem without the customer's consent. "We need to contact the customer and ask him to update his information," they say.

And then a few minutes later, I receive an email in my inbox, asking the customer to please verify his email address...

I enjoy the calls from Windows Technical Support. I treat them like a game - how long can I keep these people on the phone (often while I'm doing something else)? I can usually tie them up for about a half hour, but I'm not going to give them remote access to my computer, and there's only so long I can pretend to have trouble letting them in until they give up. I've always wondered what they would do if they actually could get in...

Then I remembered: Microsoft makes free images of Windows installations available! They're intended for testing Internet Explorer and Edge, but they are full versions of Windows. The only limitation is that they're not activated, so they will stop working 90 days after first use, but that's not a problem. So here's what to do:

1. Download and install VirtualBox, which is free. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
2. Download one of the Microsoft VMs for VirtualBox. Pick whatever version of Windows you want. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/
3. In VirtualBox, create a virtual machine with the VM that you downloaded. Make sure it's not configured to share files from your primary operating system. Before you boot it, make a snapshot of the VM.
4. Boot it up and make sure it works. You'll want to change the wallpaper so it's less suspicious (the default wallpaper has instructions about how to use the VM), and you may also want to remove the evaluation watermark that shows up in the bottom-right corner of the desktop (there are sites with instructions on how to do this).

Now you're all set! The next time a Windows Technical Support scammer calls you and wants you to install something on your computer to give him access, go for it! He can wreck your honeypot all he wants - install viruses to it, even encrypt the files. VirtualBox even has a video capture feature that can create a movie file of everything he does. He shouldn't be able to get out of the honeypot (unless you have fileservers with weak passwords on your home network, but that's assuming he even looks).

After he's done, or if your VM reaches 90 days old, just revert back to your snapshot to reset everything. Now you've got a clean VM and your 90 day timer is reset.

Have fun!

A lot of the other responses here focus on what language to choose, but not what to do with it. So pick a language - Python is good, Ruby is good, PHP if you want to work with web sites, C# if you want to work with Microsoft stuff, Swift if you want to work with Apple stuff. And then:

- Sign up for a free Github account (https://github.com).

- Start working through the Advent of Code challenges. (http://adventofcode.com) They're a set of 25 two-part challenges posted in December 2015 and then another set in December 2016. I recommend starting with the 2015 set (because I think it was more straightforward). The reason I suggest these are that they are problems with specific solutions (you'll know when you get them right), they will make you learn how to solve problems in your language of choice, and there are a lot of posts on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/) with tips for each individual challenge. There are other programming puzzles out there, but Advent of Code is a good collection of challenges in one place.

- Post your solutions on your Github account. This will get you familiar with using Git. It's a good skill to have.

- Tweak your solutions if you'd like. Find a way to write more concise code? Want to practice documenting better? Interested in optimizing your solutions to run faster in less memory? There you go.

- If you ever want to use your new programming skills for a job, link to your Github repo from your resume. It will let people clearly see how you code.

Good luck!

Active 3D is a pain, with the need for expensive shutter glasses. But passive 3D is wonderful, with each scan line being polarized in opposite directions. Passive 3D glasses are cheap and the displays don't need high refresh rates.

I'd like to have a passive 3D computer monitor for gaming, but it looks like there aren't any on the market any more. So I figured I'd ask here - anyone know of any that are still being sold?

If a phone is too thin to have a headphone jack, then it's too thin. I'm annoyed by the trend of making phones so thin to the point where it compromises structural strength (remember BendGate?), isn't thick enough for the camera lens (iPhone 6/6S), and requires dropping standard ports. Allow another millimeter or two and use the extra space for a better battery!

What good would having the phone do, unless it's unlocked? Can they require you to use touch ID, enter your passcode, or tell them your passcode?

I was coming here to say the same thing, too.

I can't find any place that sells the Creative Labs F200 - not even http://us.creative.com/p/web-cameras itself.

"Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." I've got to say - I don't agree with that statement either. I know several human beings today, and all of them have been human from birth; none of them developed from earlier species of animals.

Now, if the statement were "The human species developed from earlier species of animals," I would agree with that.

It my seem like semantic nitpicking, but there's a common misunderstanding that evolution means individual bacteria turn into birds or individual dogs turn into monkeys. I prefer not to feed that misconception.

I had a lot of fun with this over the holiday season: http://adventofcode.com

It's twenty-five simple but interesting programming challenges. Day 1 is a simple "count the number of open and close parentheses in a string." Later days include "generate MD5 hashes until you find one that starts with five zeroes," "generate 50 iterations of Conway's Game of Life," "solve a Traveling Salesman problem for Santa," and even "simulate an RPG and find the best strategy for beating the boss." Each day has two parts; solve the first to unlock the second. Several of the challenges involved recursion, but in general they cover wide ground. Some people solved both parts within five minutes of each day's puzzle becoming available, but for those of us who didn't care about the leaderboard, an hour's work was usually plenty to get it done. (Students without experience would take a bit longer.) Also, the input for each day's challenge was different for each user - there were probably only a handful of possibilities, but it meant that you couldn't always just copy someone else's answers without doing the work yourself.

I think you'll find a lot of great material here. Pick a few of the days to explore with your students; teach them how a software engineer would attack the problem. Try solving it with different languages and compare how each language would do it. Demonstrate how you could optimize code to find the solution faster (especially in the "Game of Life" and "Look and Say" challenges).

Also, there was a great Reddit community that shared solutions in various languages, and lots of people put their code on GitHub. Some people played "code golf" and came up with amazingly terse solutions. I used the Advent of Code to teach myself Swift (my solutions are at https://github.com/bskendig/advent-of-code); my code was more verbose than it should have been but I usually solved each problem in fewer than 100 lines.

Interesting - what browsers do this? I tested and found that Firefox does when I restore a window or tab from the browser history, but Chrome doesn't seem to have a way to restore windows or tabs.

It's my belief and hope that Microsoft may put more care into the patches they release, now that they know the impact of a bad patch could be much more broad.

Also, given that the majority of Windows 10 users should now remain up-to-date on patches, maybe this means fewer configurations to have to test. (Or maybe not, since there may still be Pro and Enterprise users who keep deferring patches for years, but I don't think there will be as many of them.)

Well, I don't know about Windows, because I really only use Windows for games; but my Mac refuses to quit Safari if I've typed text into a field, and it refuses to reboot the OS if an app refuses to quit. I've always liked this behavior and it's saved my bacon on a few occasions. I'm surprised that Windows doesn't do this, but maybe because of the mandatory updates they'll fix Windows to stop clicking "Discard Changes"?

I've never seen a Windows system that was broken by an update. (I've heard there have been some bad updates, but I've never known anyone who's encountered problems because of them.) On the other hand, I've seen people keep clicking the button to postpone updates for months or even years; when something goes wrong with their computer, it can take hours of downloading/installing updates to bring it up-to-date to make sure that the problem isn't something that's been fixed already.

For the vast majority of Windows Home users who use their computers for web/email/Word, I think it's great to keep them up-to-date, mandatory. For anyone who's truly concerned about this, I suspect someone will find a registry edit that'll provide the deferred update behavior.

Also from TFA: "Update, June 21st 9:45AM: Microsoft has updated its blog post today and removed references to 'remain activated.' The stealthy edit isn't acknowledged, and we've reached out to the company for comment."