Not necessarily in that order. Also, I have married friends that have replaced sleep with offspring, and fucking with more fighting. Apparently there is wiggle room.

Mostly it's due to convenience. I have a nice little satchel where my tablet lives. My work provided laptops are powerhouses, but weigh several kilograms. My 8 inch tablet weighs a little over 300 grams and its heft is barely noticeable. But again, for most of my work I simply need an SSH client and at worst, a Python interpreter.

You can call tablets 'toys' all that you want. The undeniable truth is that for some of us they are essential business tools. When I'm on vacation or out-of-the-office, I am still contractually obligated to maintain SLAs. Having a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is far more reasonable when I'm overseas than lugging a laptop around. I'm not writing novels, I'm not writing much code, but I am doing a ton of server maintenance.

Our programmers have recently been porting our business apps for 8" Android tablets for our engineers to use in the field. They're far cheaper to replace than a laptop, they can be locked down by IT, and they give us a nice target to hit development-wise. I've always bristled when people claim that tablets are just toys, they can be quite useful for those with a little imagination.

The vast majority of excellent programmers were born before electricity was harnessed. What a waste!

Also, you'd be surprised at how much police work is shooting unarmed black people and finding out what they did later.

I'll second the Pebble. The latest update gives it most of the same abilities as Android Wear devices. It's nice being able to archive or spamify emails the second that I get them. You can setup tasker for automation. I also use Pushover and Pushbullet a ton. If one of my servers goes down, a backup fails, or I get a hack attempt noticed by fail2ban, I get notified at an instant. I live in a pretty cold climate and it's nice to be able to dismiss messages without digging my phone out through multiple layers and taking my gloves off to get to the notifications bar.

NewEgg and half.com both accept BTC. Pretty much everything in my data closet at home is from NewEgg.

Well thank goodness we don't have an overreaching government that drops the "national security" card at the drop of a hat. Otherwise we could end up seeing some really silly shit going down to fight a (mostly) fictional enemy.

It's been my experience that most self-professed Christians worship money and power far more than they worship any deity.

And this (extremely insightful) explanation is why so many United Statsians are so terrified of our own country. We are seemingly just a few votes away from a tyranny of the vocal religious minority. Give a fundamentalist a few thousand nuclear missiles and the most expensive army the world has ever known, and brown people around the world start to get nervous. But we have to do it, because terrorists, or freedom, or something!

So his next career will be on Wall Street?

This may actually be the stupidest thing I've ever seen on ./. So kudos, to you.

Same way Google does it I suppose. A list of single-use codes that you keep offline, and you can verify from the same device that you initiate the purchase from...in theory. It seems like the U.S., as a society, wants to completely eliminate every sort of risk in the world. What we should really be concentrating on is mitigating them to an acceptable level.

How about just basic 2-factor authentication?

• I initiate a purchase online, Amex gives a probationary okay and sends a 5 digit code to my mobile device
• The vendor prompts me for that code
• Once I confirm that I am in possession of the device, the transaction can be completed

It may not be perfect but it seems a bit better than the honor system that we're on now.

In a few years once somebody figures out how to implement a 5 digit value on the back of a card, our worries will be over!