Sticking with the subject of attaching a credit card reader to an Apple device, there's a business in my city that uses an iPad with a credit card reader on it to do their transactions. Pretty slick considering point of sale (POS) systems used to run for $1.5k-$2k each.

But then on one busy day I saw the cashier constantly swapping the charger and credit card reader in and out because there's only one slot on an iPad. So clearly there's a drawback with that system.

Seems like the natural upgrade is to just have a tablet that can be on a charger AND support a credit/debit card reader at the same time. Bingo, cheap touch screen POS system. Is there one out there that already does this?

If the data you are cramming into a file doesn't naturally fit into a tabular format that you would want to selectively recall at random times, then I would question why you would ever "realize" you need a database.

My wife got her account by going through this thing where you e-mail them from another e-mail and you have to answer questions like subject lines, contacts, recent e-mails, etc. We had the right answers and the foreign retards on the other end kept denying us. Eventually I realized that they don't understand what I'm saying when I put "clearly I'm not a robot" in my e-mail, so you have to answer every question they give and leave out anything extra.

This is also why I no longer associate phone numbers with any account anymore.

I think hotmail has a security bug where old login/challenge hashes become reusable after some time. My wife had a strong password and after months of inactivity her account got hacked and was spamming emails just like this guy described. The worse part is she had an old phone number on her account and ms required that she send a text from it to unlock her account.

You can still access hotmail via pop3. If you want to dump your emails this is the only way

Once kickstarter becomes overloaded with projects it won't be much of a service anymore. I think now is a good time to jump in, though.

If you look at the donations compared to the money donated, almost all successful projects require someone or multiple people to shell out way more than a copy of the product would cost.

I'm wondering how kickstarter is going to be long term. It seems like a lot of crappy games manage to get funding which amazes me. Kickstarter is for most projects a means of preselling the end result of the project and from what I can tell, the money put into it usually dwarfs what you would be paying if you were buying it retail. I have a cool game idea that I've been working with and its feasible, unique, and doable, but I don't have the free time. With kickstarter I could secure money that I would lose by reducing the hours I put into my job (or quitting if enough people donate) and dedicate my time to the project, then turn and make a good profit if it sells. Worst case, I at least get paid if I set my target threshold high enough, and based on what I'm seeing, I'll get paid more than I'm being paid right now.

My only issue is that I hate top skimmers and there are two on these project donations. Kickstarter takes 3% and the credit card companies take another 3%. The economics of it always make it a win since there is no risk in putting your project up, but still, is there a kickstarter like website that takes a smaller cut?

If you haven't understood why republicans believe the government is inherently frivolous in its spending, then here's a textbook example of why they think that. Zuckerberg didn't earn his billions. Period. He earned something, but not that much money. That is investor's money. He just dumped someone else's money down the toilet. Actually, more precisely he just paid off someone else (the CEO of instagram) with someone else's money.

I'm guessing instagram's biggest users are under 18 girls. I don't doubt that's a prime audience since they are probably loose with their parent's money. Nevertheless, I'm skeptical the company with ~15 employees is worth 67 million dollars an employee. Mind you, the Los Angeles Dodgers were sold for $2 billion dollars.

mod up, about time someone who actually saw it gave an opinion on what it was and not speculation on what they think its going to be.

One thought is, would you consider it flat, or was the depth realistic?

Drop the sales tax entirely and raise income taxes. Problem solved

last time I had a personal website up, 60% of it was buffer overflow bots, 20% were old IIS exploit bots and 10% were slashdot scans whenever I made a post.

Really though, firewalls in the US should come with the entire Chinese, Russian, and Indian IP range blocked for incoming connections by default.

I really hope your trolling because win7 search is worthless. Won't search the contents of any non-MS file extension that isn't named ".txt"

Then it lies to you and tells you no such file exists. In fact, it even takes a while to search files it has no idea how to search, like ASCII FORMATTED files!

Then it has keywords you have to memorize and automatic wildcards you can't disable.

And MS DESIGNED IT THIS WAY. THIS IS WORKING AS THEY WANT IT.

And they won't change it! This is the first step for any company that is doomed to fail, is that they ignore their customers and don't fix problems. This issue was brought up years ago.

Windows 7 search has cost me hours of productivity, most of it wasted trying to figure out why its content search wasn't working only to eventually find it out was by design.

Who's "we" and why would you be past that? Usually by the time I realize what broke and how it broke, I'm too far in the code to recover anything. Example: I got an exception on line 11 due to a bug on line 8.

Now what would be kind of cool is to save the program state prior to entering a function and then restarting from that function entry point. Of course that wouldn't work if your function modified an external file or something... Maybe Visual Studio already does this in a version newer than I use? Actually I'd appreciate if someone could fill me on this, I'm always looking for ways to be more efficient.

see, why weren't you stooping over the patent examiner's shoulder when he was reading it?

They should require that patents be written in minimal english rather than obfuscated english.

In apple's defense though, they probably had to re-develop their software over and over again when they found design holes. In contrast, a copy-cat only needs to design it once.

I suppose the alternative to this is that your phone must provide unbridled access to you wallet app if you manage to unlock it. Or an perhaps having user acccounts for your phone to restrict which apps are accessible (one for your kids).

Personally, I'd like to have an "at-ease" app which restricts the interface on phones such that a toddler can touch anything and you don't have to worry about them leaving the app then calling someone.

in fact, think of this - their simulator probably took way more man hours than their developed solution to this problem