Only for cheques. Interac eTransfers and payments are instantaneous.

I've been reading about biometric scanners for over a decade now, starting with the fingerprint reader bar that was on old IBM Thinkpads.

Every single attempt at cheap biometric security has been demonstrated to be insecure or unreliable. When I got my Lenovo laptop, the first thing I uninstalled was their camera-using face scanner software, because I'd read about how easy it was to hack with a photo of the person to be identified.

Sure, there are real biometric devices out there such as government iris scanners and such, but those are not cheap enough for mass deployment. Until such high reliability security devices are available to the consumer at a sane price, I'm going to stick with good old fashioned passwords.

Besides, getting into the machine is only the first step. All that would gain you access to is some personal photographs and documents. Everything else would require access to the keystore and the key passwords for accessing remote servers, so I'm still relatively comfortable that someone hacking my password isn't that great a risk.

I'm also perfectly comfortable with "da goobernmint" scanning my system (with a warrant), because all my "secure" data resides elsewhere, and they won't find so much as a PDF of a bank account statement on the box itself.

I get my DSL (5Mbit) and IPTV (SaskTel MaxTV) for $62 a month. Spending $30-40 just for video streaming seems a rather high price to me -- especially as they've already said they're unlikely to be able to carry all the major US networks. (Of course my package is focused on the Canadian networks, but it also gets "the big 4" from the US.)

At $40/month, that would leave only $20/month to pay for a 10Mbit or better internet connection for streaming the video (my 5Mbit link is data only -- the *actual* link is 25Mbit, but 20Mbit is reserved for video.)

I can't believe the price gouging that goes on throughout most of North America.

That's pretty messed up when the government itself is concerned about government spying...

There was a time when non-mechanical keyboards were durable, but having had Microsoft, Logitech, and no-name brands die on me in 6-9 months of purchase for the past five years, I finally ponied up for a cheap mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Black switches a little over a year ago. There is no way I will ever go back to a non-mechanical keyboard. As it has survived the lifespan of the previous two keyboards already, I figure I've already saved $30 on it's $90 purchase price compared to the $60 each for the other two keyboards it replaced.

Yes, they are noisier than some other keyboards. But the durability and the feel of the keyboard are well worth that "price".

I'm uncomfortable with Siri, Cortana, the "smart" TV voice commands, and the whole lot of it unless and until all the processing can be done locally. Under no circumstances do I want my conversational data uploaded to the cloud for processing. Damned if I'm going to watch what I say in my own home because of eavesdropping equipment!

1. It's called a "typo." Can you say "typo?" I knew you could. Go treat yourself to a cookie.

2. "Shoddy" is not a grammatical structure.

3. Your point being exactly what?

Your whole "argument" is just to claim some superiority, when I never claimed to use "perfect" English in the first place. In fact, your bitching is about what most people would call "style", which is how one makes the language expressive instead of dryly pedantic.

But I guess all you ever read is factual textbooks, not recreational prose.

Some people think "natural gas" is some be-all, end-all solution that magically reduces the carbon footprint or that is available in unimaginable quantities. It's not. There are limited reserves of natural gas available, and if it were to be used up to produce synthetic gasoline, the vast majority of North America would have a serious problem with home heating systems and the prices of the fuel for them.

You think it costs a lot to heat your home with gas now? Just wait until some bozo wants to buy up half the supply to make synthetic gasoline.

The money being used to fund "clean coal" should be directed to something that is actually clean, like development of fusion technology.

No one guaranteed the fossil fuels industries a right to earn profit in perpetuity. Fuck 'em.

The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.

We don't need "cleaner coal technologies." We need coal to be GONE. The same goes for pretty much *all* carbon-intensive fossil-fuel industries.

When someone checks IDE configuration files or broken code into the repository, make sure you publicly and thoroughly humiliate them for the whole team to see. Seriously. I can't tell you how many hours have been lost on projects both corporate/internal and distributed because of crap like that.

If someone is too lazy to even make sure their code builds before checking it in, they deserve to be humiliated as the unprofessional hacks that they are.

People's expectations for low prices are completely unreasonable nowadays. It hasn't been all that long since $2000 was the "normal" price for a decent machine, never mind a portable device. I realize prices have come down a lot, but realistically Blackberry is only a bit more than doubling the price for this custom-configured device compared to the base hardware. That's far from unreasonable in the "preconfigured stack" systems market.

Don't forget, the point of such devices and systems is to have a single supplier you can pin for resolving any issues or problems. You're buying the vendor's services and reputation, not a collection of unconfigured components.

Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, even scientists. Perhaps more so than others, because their pay scales and tenure often depend on being published and cited as often as possible.

The sad thing is that even a plethora of citations does not demonstrate the quality of a given paper. It just means it had one or a few quotable paragraphs; not that it's methodology or conclusions were necessarily stellar.

When I worked on some research back in the university days, the prof in charge of publishing the paper insisted on citing a whole bunch of papers that neither I nor my cohort had ever read. Although the professor was only supposed to be the guide for the research, he'd read those papers so he insisted they had to be cited.

I've always thought that was just "citation bloat" to try to make our own paper look more "researched" than it was.

I've never had a "good" programming job that didn't require a background check. The odds of a convicted criminal getting a job at any of those companies is ZERO.