We have paternity/parental leave in Canada. and I don't think it helps much. I know very few men who have taken more than 2 weeks when their kid was born. I think I know exactly one guy who took the full leave (35 weeks here), but his wife was a doctor, so it made much more financial sense for him to take the reduced pay for. The mom took a few months off when the kid was born, and then he took time off after she had recovered. In the name of equal opportunity, parents should be able to split the allotted time off and benefits, but it's not going to change things that drastically.

While I agree that this type of discrimination exists, you have to admit, it many STEM jobs, having somebody leave for a few months would be a pretty big concern. For many other jobs, it's not a huge problem to replace somebody when they need to take time off. For science and engineering, you are paying somebody for their knowledge. And in particular, you want to keep people around because they have gained a lot of specific knowledge about what goes on at your company. You can't just bring somebody in and transfer over that knowledge quickly. By the time the replacement catches up, a few months will have passed. And once the person gets back to work, it will probably take them a couple months to catch up on what's been going on.

This thing has way more power and way better connectivity than an ARM SBC. Try finding an ARM SBC with USB 3, DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, and M.2 SSD support. This thing is small enough that you could substitute it for a laptop if you just wanted a machine to bring between work and home. I know a lot of people who have work laptops who never use them except at a fixed desk anyway. Just plug in the peripherals at home or work. Not than I'm a big fan of working from home, but for some people this might actually work quite well for the task.

For brick and mortar stores, you are absolutely right. I think chip and PIN is a pretty decent authentication method. But for it to really work, we need to get to the point that there's no mag stripe, and no number on the card. We should completely get rid of the legacy payment by mag stripe, or simply knowing the card number and expiration date. There shouldn't be an insecure alternative. Payments should either be authenticated through the chip, or through the card issuer's website. There should be ability for the retailer, online or otherwise, to obtain information that would allow fraudulent transactions to be made.

This is what's wrong with online payments. To make a credit card payment, the website should just direct me to the website of visa/mc/amex and have me verify myself, and transfer money to the merchant, very similar to how PayPal works. With phones being so ubiquitous, a similar thing could be done for brick and mortar stores. Pop up a QR code at the register, scan it with a visa app, enter your credentials, and the payment is done. We need to fix the system and get rid of these antiquated payment methods.

Zealotry is probably the main issue. By and large, sports fans aren't that bad of people. But it doesn't take much searching to find evidence of riots and destruction from hard core sports fans, or people using sports as excuse to be terrible people.

I think that most religions are good and that very few of them condone these acts. It's just that you won't see it on the evening news. Because it's not exciting. I go to a baptist church, and I cringe that the Westboro Baptist Church uses the name "Baptist". It's basically the complete opposite of what they teach at my church. Everybody I have met there is very accepting of and they don't judge people. It's a nice change from the Catholic church I grew up in. They make a huge effort to apply the teachings in the bible to how to live your life as a better person. While I don't think that religion is required to be a good person, I think there are plenty of churches out there helping people to be better people in all aspects of life.

If I was using this password system, wouldn't having the file give the person who obtained the file a list websites/systems that I have access to, along with my user name? I'm not sure if that's such a great trade-off. Currently I have a password safe (keepass) that keeps the entire password database encrypted until you enter the correct password. The password I have is quite long, and would probably take a huge amount of computing resources to brute force.

As a cyclist, this kind off stuff often comes up. The saying goes, "it doesn't matter if you're right, when you're dead". A driver should take the proper precautions to avoid accidents. That means checking for cross traffic when going through a green light or when the cross traffic has a stop sign and you don't.

I agree. I get much better results from my handheld GPS than I do from trying to use my phone for the purpose of a GPS. I don't wear a watch. But if I did, I'd probably want it to just be a watch. A Microsoft Band or FitBit, is a lot more appealing than an iWatch if I actually waned to track that kind of stuff. With the iWatch you have to plug it in every night, so it loses the ability to track your sleep. With the other options, you only have to plug it in once every few days, so you could presumably charge it when you are just sitting at your desk or watching TV when you are sedentary and there is nothing to track anyway.

Unless we get to the point where I can carry a cell phone sized device that can fulfill all my computing needs, and all my other devices are just dumb screens that interface with that computer, then I think I would rather just have dedicated devices. True convergence only happens when 1 device really can fulfill all your needs, rather than pretending that an underpowered device can do all those tasks, and yet fails at most things.

Not sure how things work in Australia, but in Canada, you don't have to charge GST (same name, who would have guessed) if you make less than $30,000 in revenue. It's possible they could get around it by making the drivers individual businesses.

Although, I think that Uber rides really should be charging tax. They are already semi-illegal in many places. Trying to dodge the tax man is sure to give the authorities even more reason to shut them down.

Well technically they do receive the signal, they just don't do anything with it. My mouse, wallet, keys, coffee cup, everything is receiving the signal.

I was counting only stuff that was actually mine. We have 5 cell phones in our house, but only 1 is mine. I'm also only counting devices which I actively use, not stuff that's sitting in a drawer and hasn't been turned on in 2 years. So I have my current cell phone, and my handheld GPS that I mostly use for tracking bike rides (with handlebar mount - not hand-held). If you've "forgotten" about a device, surely it shouldn't count. I'm actually surprised you don't see them built into more devices, Most laptops and tablets don't have GPS built it. It's not extremely necessary, but they are so cheap that I can't see why they wouldn't put it in there. Somebody else mentioned that they are a developer so they have a bunch of handsets that they test on. Those really do belong to the company, even if you are the owner of the company. Otherwise, we can get crazy and some guy who owns a warehouse can say he has 1000 GPS units in his possession.

Basically, it looks like they didn't do any research on how much shipping would cost to other countries, and just wanted to make sure they didn't end up in the red. The problem with this is that there's places like Canada and Europe where you can most likely ship for way less that $20. I'm in Canada, and I've ordered bicycle parts from the US that weigh quite a bit more than this tiny computer, and the box would be much bigger, and still the shipping cost was $10 or less. Spending an afternoon at the post office, or talking to somebody on the phone could probably give you a pretty reasonable idea of what the shipping costs would be to most popular countries where people would order this thing.

If you need your employees to know their brains out for a project, you are doing it wrong.

You might make a few gains and get the product out the door, but quality will suffer, and people won't stick around for very long if you make them work long hours all the time. Which means nobody will really have that much experience with your code base, and it will take even longer to complete stuff.