Of the several credit/debit cards my wife and I have, tap-to-pay works on only one of them, and then, only about 10-20% of the time. (Yes, they are all *supposed* to have NFC tap-to-pay capability - it just doesn't work!) I tried tapping again today for lunch and it failed repeatedly in more than a half dozen tries.

It's so bad, that I usually never even bother to tap anymore and just live with the glacially slow chip reader. Mag stripe reading was at least fast, and *all* of these alternative methods are a *huge* step backwards in usability and speed from the customer's POV. And by the way, I live in Austin, so it's not like I'm in some benighted backwater that modern tech hasn't reached yet!

Without MAJOR improvements in the terminal equipment, for the first time ever I will have substantial reason to prefer VISA over MasterCard in two years...

Firefox tab management has been wretched since the move to Quantum destroyed the ability to run Tab Mix Plus, which is the *ONLY* tab manager I've ever seen that gracefully handles over a thousand tabs. (Yes, I have that many - around 1300 in three windows right now, in fact, with about 1250 in the main window...)

Windows users get this for free with Mouse Without Borders, a free tool from Microsoft Garage - think Windows-only Synergy. Before switching to the Surface (I'm a pen/touch addict), I used this for years to kinda virtually dock my laptop to the nice keyboard and mouse on the big touchscreen desktop. Generally speaking, it was rock solid and just works. The ability to copy/paste intelligently between PCs and as much drag-and-drop functionality as is reasonable makes it work pretty much like you want it to.

Architect is only a verb to the illiterate. Architects do NOT "architect" buildings (or systems, or what have you), they *design* them.

Well, for one thing (and this will not be popular), the problem with hiring from India is that then you have to deal with Indians. While generalities are always dangerous, it is nevertheless very true that there is a distinctly "Indian way" of doing software development. Since this is the *only* way taught in Indian schools, most Indian developers are literally completely lost when they need to deviate from it. That way is capable of doing some ordinary things acceptably well, but as someone who's spent his career in a series of positions on the bleeding edge of technology, I can tell you that such rigidly-thinking developers are worse than useless (actually a serious detriment) when trying to do something new and innovative.

As a for-instance, a few years ago, I was hired as a contract CEO to launch a company and build out the first version of a fairly large and scalable SaaS enterprise app. (We went from zero to $15M/month in under three months.) Its data tables were quite appropriately structured by the needs of the application (which in turn, were almost entirely driven by the human users' workflow needs). As part of the handoff, the owner of the company brought in a dozen-strong (plus managers, of course) Indian outsourcing team to take over development from our (admittedly very talented) team of only two here in the US.

They immediately insisted on "re-architecting" ("architect" is not a verb) the DB to rearrange all the tables to their liking. (Yes, there were places where the tables were not in third normal form - it's not a law, you know...) Performance fell by nearly 99%, and their other "refactoring" of the code to match "Indian way" software dev practices did even more damage to the app's price/performance. (Like most Indian programmers (they're not good enough to be called developers) I've encountered, they could only think in bad Java even though this was a pure Python/JS environment.)

I didn't stay through the destruction of the great product we had built, but the way they were going, I imagine the final product cost 1000x more to run and operate than the one we did using much more capable US talent. (And yes, what we built was perfectly, actually much more readily, maintainable. It was a marvel of clear, direct code, but did not conform to trendy Indian CS norms, hence their need to re-do everything the only way they understood...)

I've never found Indian outsourcing to save money, effort, or time (although Eastern Europe and Costa Rica have been winners), and getting quality product from India is nearly as difficult as getting quality products out of China...

The problem is much bigger than just the impact of pushing wages down for American workers. Indian workers probably exercise chain migration even more extensively than those coming across the southern border do: it's not unusual in my neighborhood here in Austin, for instance, to find that an Indian worker who came here originally on an H1B has now moved their entire family here from India. This common practice is not without costs and permanent impacts on American taxpayers that go well beyond just depression of tech wages...

I led the team that built the best and most detailed models and real-world data analysis software for the management and monitoring of DC Solar PV in utility-scale settings. The data we collected and processed on DC (where the action is) PV performance were of a scale and quality unequalled by anyone else anywhere. (*Every* panel was instrumented with lab-accurate measuring equipment, with a data interval of six seconds for real-time analysis (clouds passing array, etc.)) I stand by my statements, because I've collected and seen the data myself.

The real world data clearly shows it takes 20-22 years to make back your investment sans-subsidy, if you properly take into account balance-of-system, maintenance (you need LOTS more than you think), cleaning ($0.50/panel!), site, and other costs. All of these things pretty much MUST be done to recover your costs and reach breakeven at all.

And yes, there's significant cadmium in many non CdTe panels - it's frequently part of the alloy for the foils connecting the cells within the panels, especially the now-ubiquitous cheap Chinese panels.

All Islamic terrorists should be encouraged to try synthesizing large quantities of dioxygen diflouride (the infamous FOOF) or maybe even trioxygen diflouride (ozone flouride). I'm told the sulfur chemistry of these compounds is an area in which very little research has been done - here's your chance to make your mark, Mohammed!

Star Trek, unmoored from the influence of either Gene or Majel (Barrett) Rodenberry, is falling hard for "Get Woke, Go Broke".

I've been a Trek fan (trekkie, trekker, whatever - I'm not going to get into a debate) since *way* before that was cool, but I gave up on the StarTrek franchise first with the new movies, which somehow managed to be even worse than the bad old movies, and finally, with Discovery, which was basically nothing but SJW writers beating the audience over the head with their lack of wokeness and failure to acknowledge and atone for their inherent racism/sexism/whateverism. Trek is just not fun, interesting, or even mildly uplifting anymore.

Itâ(TM)s not just lead. Itâ(TM)s also other much nastier heavy metals, including cadmium, which is part of every known oncogenic pathway. Chinaâ(TM)s predatory pricing has let them grab most of the worldâ(TM)s PV panel market and drive the quality producers (Schott in Germany, etc.) out of business, even though even the Chinese âoeTier 1â vendorsâ(TM) panel lifespans are much shorter than the Western manufacturers.
Cheap Tier 2/3 panels often literally fall apart (delaminate) and start leaching toxic metals within a decade. (This leaching *will* happen as soon as water breaches the panel.) BTW, it takes around 20 years of power production to break even on PV solar, so all of the cheap Chinese sh*t panels (most of whatâ(TM)s being produced today) can never even pay for themselves...

I had a conversation with a young developer today who was absolutely floored that as recently as 20 years ago, 64 MB was considered to be a LOT of RAM, and Win98 only required 24MB, though you really needed 32MB. My Raspberry Pi 4/1GB has more compute power, more CPU, more ram, and more storage than any of Chevron's Crays had when I worked there in the early 90s. OSes have just gotten completely obese. It's no wonder they can't be secured...