In Australia with the Commonwealth Bank the purchases are (afaik) limited to $100 before requiring a pin and are covered by the bank in the event of fraud. As long as the cards come with the guarantee that unauthorised payments charged if it is stolen are not your responsibility, what's the problem? It makes paying for things easier, which probably increases the amount you spend and thus works out well for those companies.

You're making the wild assumption that Bill and Melinda didn't consult widely and look for evidence before deciding they'd sink a significant amount of time and resources into this venture. You seem to dislike the man, but I see no reason to take that dislike and assume he's wildly negligent in his philanthropic endeavours. It's a foundation–there's more than two people in the decision making hierarchy. It's reasonable to assume that a number of them have actually spent time with the people they wish to educate and have carried out enough research to determine that a mobile phone-based software solution has the potential to do what they're aiming for.

They're predicting that software will get there in 15 years (or whatever); we're not there yet. If you look at how far we've come in the last 15 years, then predicting that putting significant resources into creating digital education will result in better experiences for the most needy isn't that far fetched.

It can make it a bit easier to read. 3493343873.36 vs 3 493 343 873.36 vs 3,493,343,873.36 for example, the comma seems to give you an easier starting point for reading the following number compared to the blank space. Counting the three commas is easier than counting the three spaces to determine it's a number in the billions.

You shouldn't use them in circumstances where you're writing an array, but you probably also shouldn't use spaces in that circumstance either. You don't need to store the numbers with commas.

The steam overlay is included in every game launched through steam. After closing the game, or preferably after launching it when you've played more than a few hours, it could prompt you to click thumbs up or thumbs down. Might be a little annoying I guess, but it'd probably even out the negative versus positive bias and only requires clicking a button.

It's getting harder to find yoghurt not labelled low-fat in supermarkets (in Australia at least); the vast majority choose to reduce total fat content to minimal levels and fill in the flavour void with sugar. A generic supermarket yoghurt is 5g fat 29g sugar 30g carb, marking itself as 2% fat. You seem to have to aim for full-fat Greek yoghurt for anything approaching a 10g fat to 6-7g carb ratio. So the chances that he was eating a low-carb yoghurt are pretty low.

Were these rather generous photographs or partially obscured faces wearing hats in a crowd? Was the database of potential people in the billions? Identifying the subject of a selfie at your university might not be the most difficult task, but identifying everyone in an arbitrary crowd is going to be a lot more involved. The process could probably benefit from being able to map relationships to narrow partial matches down, hence Facebook.

Few people would be convicted in a court of law based upon testimony alone — it's the weakest form of 'evidence' possible. "They said so therefore true!" is not an acceptable form of evidence when you're describing a concept that governs everything in the universe (and apparently outside it, whatever that entails). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Why do you feel like "Gamergate" is worthy of additional mainstream news coverage? Mainstream news is an entertainment product more than anything else, and few people who watch / read it religiously are likely to be both heavily involved in gaming and passionate about the range of issues Gamergate purports to cover. It makes sense that it's more of a footnote or focuses more on the side that's likely to be of interest to a wider audience.

Discussions of the Gamergate issue haven't proven productive in any venue thus far, as they're often dominated by mistruths, irrelevant information, lies, and harassment. I usually avoid voluntarily exposing myself to it because I have no way of determining who is being truthful without significant investigation, and I frankly don't care enough to spend the time looking into the various claims; I suspect that's true of many people.

Let's be a bit more frank here, the movement has something in common with religion: its goals are so vague that the people who are trying to do 'good' and improve things are sheltering those who want to cause destruction. There is a significant vocal minority who are using the shield of the many moderates to justify their extremist tactics, which seem to revolve around harassment campaigns. When this happens to your movement you can either try to correct it or disassociate yourself from it and re-form in a more focused group. I suggest the latter is more likely to work at this point, it seems like it would be quite hard to drown out the vitriol I've seen without even trying to look for it.

You should really look into dropping Gamergate entirely, to divest yourself of its now relatively toxic branding, and creating several focused movements to replace it.

So reduce the number of regulations and taxes that taxis are subject to and suddenly they'll be able to deliver the same service as Uber but even more reliable. The taxi drivers seem to be complaining about the unfair advantage that the Uber drivers have, so you either subject the Uber drivers, who certainly fall into the definition of "taxi", to regulation or you deregulate taxis.

I assume there's some good reasons behind most, but probably not all, of the regulations affecting taxis, so why would we want to allow some subset of drivers to bypass those but not others?

I'd personally prefer the route of all of them being subject to the taxi regulations, but those regulations being eased in areas where they might have grown absurd.

The rendering at higher resolution then down-scaling without the game being aware of it is a pretty dreadful idea, you're just going to get tiny interfaces in most games or, as apparently pictured, a massive field of view which makes it harder to see smaller details. Microsoft's DirectX12 (or was it 11?) for mobile devices allows you to render the game world at higher or lower resolution and the interface at native, then merges them when displaying it; requires hardware support, apparently, but that seems like the best approach to scaling.

I'll this seems like the introduction of Eyefinity/Surround/Stereoscopic 3D/hardware PhysX. They'd be cool if games supported them properly, but since each implementation is different (and they have to wrestle with the Windows display system) it becomes easier to just ignore them. You're only likely to find Eyefinity/Surround in racing games, and physx where nVidia has paid to add it. The chances of many games going to the effort of supporting an upscaling hack seem pretty low.

I'm curious, when is the definition of a content-free if-then-else statement more than a couple of lines? A random line from a .ddd template (end of file) in their source code seems to indicate they're using an if( <condition> ) then block with no attached end statement, with whitespace presumably being meaningful (though in the sample I linked the indenting doesn't seem to be very consistent at the end). This seems like an odd thing to boast.

I think you're incorrectly assuming they're supposed to be primarily a watch. These devices track your approximated movement, location, and, most importantly, heart rate (resting HR is one of the best measures of your fitness). That allows you to get a pretty decent overview of your health and which direction it's trending in over time. Alone, not necessarily very useful after the honeymoon period is over. But when folk figure out ways to use that to effectively motivate people to get better it'll be pretty revolutionary.

They have displays so they can show more detailed information about what they're tracking, but I suspect it'd be a mistake to assume people would be buying them primarily for the watch functionality. They're all a crap watches, but they're awesome fitness trackers.

This may be a stupid question, but why not? I've found pressing win+q and typing "proxy" then enter opening the proxy settings to be significantly faster than attempting to navigate to them manually. Win+Q and "event" is a fairly speedy way to get to the event viewer, though Win+X then V is probably faster. Searching for settings seems significantly easier than attempting to determine which sub-menu item/icon they placed a command under.

I'd argue that searching for everything is a good thing, but not all implementations are up to scratch. They can improve that, though, and have over a year before release, so there's still time to report the search terms that don't do what you expect (if you're ever bored enough to bother doing free testing for them – which is the problem).