For some of us, caffeine causes horrible gastro-intestinal distress. A naturally decaf bean that tastes more like the regular thing? Sign me up.

In terms of hiring, I have yet to see a college or trade school that does an adequate job. Fundamentally, I'm hiring people to develop web apps on the MS MVC stack. That requires a bit of theory, architecture, security, and hands on coding skills. If you can't actually code, you're worthless. I give all applicants a CS101 level coding test. Anyone worth hiring will be done in under 5 minutes. From there, it turns in to an interview about your theoretical knowledge and patterns. Anyone without a basic grasp of security and best practices is a liability. And most recent grads, even if they have all that covered, take 6-12 months to really become useful. At which time, they expect to get paid a boatload of money, except I've got to somehow account for the expense of training them to be useful. It's all kind of frustrating, really,.

His columns aren't always terrible, but this one was particularly dumb. Oh no, I'm so god damn special that I can't wait 2 days to get my phone replaced. If it's that big of a deal, either get better insurance or buy your own spare phone.

Is it too much to ask that whatever their course of study they take at least one class on the principles of web application security? When I can hack your web app six ways before lunch time, there's a major gap in your education.

Fraud is fraud. They aren't going after the banks, just arresting the actual criminal.

This scam is nothing new. I fell for it once 20 years ago when I was 18. The customer told me I needed to use the number printed on the card to get an authorization code. Being 18 and not knowing any better, that's what I did. Everything seemed legit during the phone call, I punched it in to the card system, and the scammer walked away with a very nice laptop.

Now that I know how the scam works, I could easily spot it and have the guy arrested. Asking the typical register jockey to do so? Not likely. I'm actually a little surprised that override codes are still a thing. The last time I worked a register (about 13 years ago), a declined card was a declined card, no exceptions.

Alternately, you could claim that they cut Saturday processing instead of raising prices. I'm hardly outraged about this.

By law, all the blood donations in the US have to come from volunteers -- donors are not allowed to sell blood

Then fix the law. I'll give my blood away for free when everyone working at the blood bank and the hospital start working for free as well. Until then, my O-Neg blood is staying where it is. Frankly, it takes balls to ask me to donate when everyone else in the system is in there for the money. Pay people for blood and the shortages will disappear. At least in the US. 3rd world countries may have other institutional problems getting in the way.

With the long term capital gains tax rate at 15%, I'd just pay the tax. Odds are that rate is going back up at some point in the not too distant future.

Oh, I've bought a few phones that were, in hindsight, mistakes. I knew what I was buying, I just didn't know it was crap. Android prior to Gingerbread was crap, and even Gingerbread was kind of iffy. Fortunately, smartphones have reached a point where even the cheap phones are pretty nice. My S3 is approaching 2 years old and I may continue to use it for another 2 years.

I always fill out the conscientious objector form, even though my kid is vaccinated. It's none of the government's business. Yep, I'm one of those people.

He's a columnist. He's probably more qualified than the idiots who write for my local newspaper. But his job is to write something even if he doesn't really have anything to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennett_Haselton

And in this case, there's not much to say. Movie streaming, DVD sales, rentals, etc., are tied up in a web of contracts and distribution agreements, and it's entirely possible that a studio couldn't sell streaming on some things even if they wanted to. Also, a lot of movies are available on Amazon Instant Video as 24 hours rentals. Ta Da. The challenge for Amazon, Netflix, and the studios is how do they milk the most money out of consumers while at the same time satisfying all of their existing contractual obligations. They're all smart companies, it's just more complicated than poor Bennett understands.

They're a fantastic business machine. They really are.

But at the same time, Microsoft is losing a whole generation of users who are learning that they don't need Microsoft. I would argue that a lot of Apple's success today stems from the fact that they were the dominant machine in schools 30 years ago.

Kids today are running around with 7" tablets. Sure, they're infotainment, but they do everything on those tablets. Web, Skype, Netflix, they type up homework, and of course, play games. It is a major strategic mistake to ignore the 7" tablet market.

I use a DNS (hosts file) based ad blocker. Works great. Although I'm less concerned about being tracked than I am about someone using ad networks as a vector for malware.

I'm not opposed to advertising, but until ad networks can be trusted, I'm going to leave the blocks in place.

It's called equipment monitoring. I make a monitoring system for stand-by generators. It turns out that there are laws about how often you can run your generator in a non-emergency fashion in some states. My monitoring service costs a tiny fraction of the fine for an incomplete log book. As an added benefit, it can automatically notify your maintenance company that the generator needs repair or fuel.

No one cares about connecting your toaster to the internet. However, there are a lot of monitoring applications that can really benefit from a low cost low bandwidth service.

Taxing EVs makes perfect sense. They still need roads to be built and maintained.

Adding an enforcement fee for a car that doesn't need enforcement is just absurd. If the number of tickets being written drops because there are no more speeding cars and reckless drivers, then just reduce the size of the police force. You don't need patrol cops any more and that's a good thing. Instead of employing people as patrol cops, they can instead work as artists or scientists or something that makes the world better instead of being a necessary evil.