The VISA Pay Wave doesn't have user challenge/response, it's simply a wireless magstripe. It's just a gimmick and really no faster than swiping the card. Skimming at a POS terminal - other than at a gas station or older ATM - is pretty rare (and/or ballsy) and I've personally never heard/read about it anywhere. I live in the US, so your mileage may vary elsewhere...

No, this is wrong. No permit is required. If you move to a different province, you cannot use social services, such as hospitals, subsidized housing, and public schools, but you can live and work there. Use of the social services is NOT tied to employment. Instead rural workers just get screwed and there is nothing they, or their employer, can do about it. They pay taxes to support services they cannot use. Furthermore, this status is hereditary, so even if someone is born in the city, they still are considered "rural" if their grandparents lived in the countryside in 1949.

Can you provide a citation? I certainly believe that an 8 hour shift is more productive per hour, but I have a very hard time believing that overall, more work is accomplished by working 8 hours than by working 12 hours.

AFTER unions got torn apart, in the US, perhaps.

but in my grandfather's day (turn of the 1900's), they fought for better working conditions and this is where the 5-day work week came from, time and a half (or more!) for overtime and I remember my GF telling me that 'every 4 hours, they are required to let us eat'. even today, at my 'cushy IT job' I don't get a food break every 4 hours. not that I need it, but its a thing that we once had and lost due to 'those evil unions' (sigh).

so, conditions were horrible in the US, we fought to make them more human-like and we won.

then, we lost them ALL. pretty much all of it.

cops and other groups have unions and no one says a word about it. but if IT guys or factory guys want to have a union, its 'hey, why do you hate america' and shit like that.

if my GF was still alive, he'd be furious for the things he and his peers fought for and yet we let drift away over the years.

No. There is one HUGE difference between these factories and a labor camp: In a labor camp, you can't say "I quit" and walk out.

These are embedded devices.

You install the patch or firmware update from your appliance vendor to address the insecure transport security vulnerability (Failure to utilize secure protocols such as SSH or HTTPS over Telnet/HTTP for administrative connections; transmission of usernames and passwords in cleartext withotu encryption).

What Yahoo needs is an idea (simple, to the point, effective, new, user worthy)
followed by an execution.

- Not 50 things. 1 to 3, done well. That's how all of the few mega-successful companies got to where they are now.

I called it cheating because they violated both one of the prime rules of AI: train on a data set that is more or less representative of the data set you will test with, and one of the prime rules of statistics

But they're not trying to do that. They're trying to debunk the claims of "near human" performance, which they do very nicely by showing that the algorithms make vast numbers of mistakes when the data in is not very, very close to the original data.

They also present a good way of finding amusing failure cases. I'd never thought of optimizing misclassifications to find how and where an algorithm fails.

Sounds like a plan.

Products are for suckers.

They should focus on social clouds for wearable augmented reality drones.

No it isn't. Did you see the part where I countered that I paid off my own student debt in 3 years as opposed to your hypothetical 30 year mortgage?

How about the fact that we need more and more knowledge workers in the tertiary sector? You know, as opposed to factory workers, menial labor, and uneducated workers.

Or the part where I threw out the idea that there is an infinite amount of work for scientists and engineers (and hence there are jobs there).

That's not an emotional appeal. Don't be a dick and wave away my input. If you're going to open up with that sort of disrespect, I don't think I'm emotionally invested enough to read the rest of that.

Let's see....

I also called out tech and trade schools, but I don't think the distinction is important here.

Pft. You crazy? Are you selectively looking at giant corporations that make widgets that have a 30 year shelf-life? There are startups that genesis, rise, fall, and get resurrected in the span of 5 years. No, "the business" can't predict it's needs and available revenue 5 years into the future. Knowing what their needs and revenue RIGHT NOW is difficult for most of them.
The bigger the company is, the more momentum they probably have, but also the more moving parts. The smaller, the more volatile they're going to be. And it's not like the little guys have an entire division to do market analysis.

That'd be lovely, but all too often we see them preferring to simply hire contractors who already have the skills. But hey, it DOES happen. I know a small firm that hired a smart english major and someone working towards their CS degree, and had the senior engineer train them up for years. Now, the english-major-now-experienced-programmer jumped ship for better pay and the college student can only put in 20hr/week due to classes, but it's a good idea in principle.

Yeah, I dunno dude. I'm not feeling like the rest of that rant is going to be worth the effort.

The last election had one candidate who was indifferent towards my job and one who was openly hostile towards it. I had to vote for the one who was indifferent in the hopes of preventing the hostile one from rising to power and putting me on the streets. It was that simple.

Indeed there was no candidate who cared about it or wanted to preserve it. But there was a candidate who plainly wanted to exterminate it.

The other way to interpret what happened is to notice that Microsoft went buddy-buddy with a company that was going to fight them in court. By doing that, Microsoft avoided having any actual ruling on their patents, and kept them in top shape for FUD.