So you don't need to make or sell products.

But you slow down to a crawl if you are iding every customer, they might be using false ids or they've moved since the last time they got a license etc. Plus if you've ever saw a cops episode it seems everyone walks/drives around without any id (maybe that is just criminals some how thinking that if the cops can't figure out who they are they'll just let them go :)). The US is the only rich country I know of that still takes imprints (been to France, Germany, Czech, UK, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, and live in Canada). I've actually never had a imprint of my card because we've always had electronic readers and for the last 5 years or so chips in the card. I don't even know how many stores still have the ability I think it has been over a year since I even saw a imprint device.

I think it will end up being like when traveling to another country with a developed banking system for a long while: you'll pay for almost everything with credit cards or a head of time but you'll still have a couple hundred (equivalent) around just in case someone won't take it for whatever reason.

Ex. power blackouts like NY had last year, or ~15 years ago when New England and Ontario had a power outage for a couple days. Most things will shutdown anyways in those scenarios but still are businesses really not going to want to be able to sell things because their card reader isn't working? Or how about your wallet gets stolen, credit card gets hacked etc? With cash you might/likely have some around the house. How many people have a spare copy of their bank card and credit card and will it work once you report the other one as missing? What you are just going to not buy anything for 3-5 days while you wait for another one?

I've seen numerous talks/podcasts with MS employees and it seemed pretty flat. Many say things like my bosses boss (head of enterprise software) says we should XYZ for our customers. Maybe by the time you get invited to podcasts you are already pretty senior but a lot of them sounded like they were just a member of a team, ASP or C# say. If that is any indication of the hierachy though it probably is only 5-6 levels to the CEO which isn't bad when you have 130k employees basically breaking the company up with each junior manager managing 20 people, their manager managing 20 managers etc all the way up would do that.

But this team lives close to me therefore it is the most important thing in my life to see them win.

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

It looks like every world cup but perhaps a couple has had a different stitch pattern on the ball. Is there really that much need for innovation? I think it might be cool to have a "better ball" but doesn't the sport at some point lose something from the equipment changing so frequently? Comparing stats when the balls have different characteristics like how smoothly they'll roll, air resistance etc must be the explanation for soccer riots.

I'm not sure if 4.5"x4.5" would feel right but I could see a square phone that you hold at a point (ie speaker/receiver on the diagonal): since the majority of the time phones are used for something other than as a phone having symmetry and not even having to think which way you grab the device would be nice.

Yeah. I also love when you as someone how they are going to spend their holiday's and they say "eat, get really drunk and light off some fireworks for the kids". Okay so drunk out of your gourd while playing with explosives and tending to your kids ... and the parent of the year award goes to ... Somehow saying it is a holiday makes being a jackass a good idea.

... and for the places where people actually live much longer. Though Vermont might (and probably was) a larger portion of the population at the time. The UK was either early or late to the party depending on how you count the Magna Carta. But after their abolishment in 1833 they did more over the next few decades, by far, to irradiate slavery by making it an issue of Treaty with pretty much every country they dealt with, creating a large part of the navy specifically for anti-slavery operations etc. As much as they were dicks to the colonies they at least were very active in freeing/preventing slavery once they set their mind to it.

In my mind that is the problem with a federalist system: it takes an act of God to get a consistent law across the country. I don't think fundamental human rights (quality and standards of healthcare and education included) or what is a criminal act should depend on which state of a country you happen to belong to.

Yeah that is the worse bit. I like fireworks I go more times than not to see them (on a different day than the yanks though). What sucks is the drunken idiots with $5 of fireworks to set off every night for a week on either side. They always seem to wait until 12-2am and set off one or two. Could call the cops but who knows where they are coming from? It isn't like they are doing a whole show or anything: just enough to wake you up and scare your dog.

It was a long time later before the idea of getting rid of slavery came up. The funny thing with the 4th of July: declaration of independence: yeah and how long did it actually take to get it? I can declare myself boss at my work it might take a while before others agree though.

You got to do something so you can damn the people that don't believe even after all the evidence. You got to do very little so those that believe you did it look crazy and you give people a reason not to believe in you.

Assuming they fit in the fixture I really like putting 100W equivalent CFLs into fixtures too. I had a bunch of ceiling lights rated at 40W. The room was quite dimly lit with incadenant (more of a mood light than a reading light). Replace those with 25W CFLs and the room is nice and bright, I save power and I'm well within the quoted rating for the fixture (how much of a safety factor that is I don't know but it also helps the fixtures not be so hot to the touch).

Yeah but we had dreamweaver and the like back in the day. It still took a designer and a lot of luck to have anything that looked decent on the couple of browsers we had. Now you have 3-4 major browsers each with several versions in use on everything from a crappy 320X480 low end phone to a multi-mon 4k setup. I haven't seen very many html conversions that were better than "readable" including written by otherwise technical physicists/computer scientists in LaTex (already a pseudo programming language) that look fantastic in pdf.

I like the ribbon but I agree fat toolbar plus crappy wide screen 9/16 didn't help. Not sure if having the toolbar on the side would have helped. Perhaps failure of focus groups but I heard talks about this choice. Essentially all that MS usage collection told them people were asking them to add features that have existed for a decade. They added the ribbon to force people to see the features that they might not have bothered seeing if it was a couple levels down a nested menu.