These 3D whizmos, like for example LEAP motion (incredibly cool), all work great.... for about 20 minutes. Then you put them in the drawer because they require too much muscle coordination and energy to operate. in contrast when you REST your finger on a scroll wheel or REST your hand on a mouse it is not merely not moving, it is at rest in 3 dimensions. it only takes a small effort to move it, but you are not having to run a whole lot of muscles in coordination to keep the hand or finger in a constant position. it's hard to poise your hand in empty space. In the old days, good typists could do this with hands poised over the KB and fingers hovering above the keys. Most people now days use palm rests or put pressure on the keys. those old time secretarial pool typists had to sit up straight and brace their feet on the floor to pull that off. Girdles probably helped!

the first successful mouse replacement will have that feature. Perhaps something with haptic feedback to support your finger a little till you really want to move it.

personally I suspect the some sort of eye motion or maybe a joystick like thing will be the first 3D controller that people can use for long periods.

- government doesn't have anything "to provide", it can only take away from somebody in order to subsidise somebody else, it doesn't produce anything and has nothing to give to anybody for free. If you are talking about government stealing even more resources from those, who are already being stolen from in order to provide bread and circuses to those, who are already on welfare anyway, then all you will achieve will be more corruption, even less production, as those producing, will be moving their productive capacity out of the country even faster.

why not just reduce the window area to half it's current size. If the savings is really significant then that would be significant too. Then compensate with the video system. the remaining window would be the failsafe.

...the other red herring argument was age discrimination...

The reality is that USA (and many others, like the Canadian or European) workers are much more expensive than workers from countries that do not have the insane socialist labour laws that raise the cost of doing business just enough for companies not to hire in those places any longer. This is not about an hourly wage, even if the hourly wage was exactly the same in USA and in India it still would not make sense to hire Americans. This is about the insane labour laws, the insane government agenda of running welfare / socialist / fascist states, where the individual is subservient to the government. It is too expensive to deal with big government where you cannot even pay a simple cash bribe for the government to go away and not come back.

I think it depends a lot on your management. If you can get them to recognize your value to the company (assuming you're providing that value) and make yourself especially difficult to replace (due to skillset and work ethic, not sabotage and self-niching), you have some more leverage where you are. I've found it fairly effective to engage on the subject in a more cooperative - rather than adversarial - manner. For instance, making it about what your fair market value is versus what your pay is, rather than an issue about raises not being high enough, or that your lifestyle is exceeding your means. When you can show that your paycheck isn't reflecting your fair market value, it removes a lot of the emotion from the conversation. At that point, you have a couple of ways to deal with it: adversarial (which largely consists of holding your management hostage by threatening to leave or by getting and showing written offers for more money) and cooperative (convincing your management to find a way to get you what you're worth as quickly as possible without an overt or heavily implied threat of leaving).

Ultimately, it doesn't have to get personal and it won't if both parties can avoid making it personal. You're an asset that's worth $x in the market. If the company is paying you .75x and the company doesn't feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, you should work elsewhere. If the company does feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, they can choose to find a way to make that happen. If they don't, there's no reason to be personally offended when the asset finds and accepts a better offer.

Needless to say, it won't always work this way. Some people (on both sides of the table) are just children and will make it all very personal. If you find yourself working for children who can't have adult conversations in an adult manner, you should be seeking additional compensation to account for that and you should leave if it doesn't come. You're only a supplicant if you allow yourself to be one. That doesn't mean be a controlling jerk; it means ensuring you're a valuable asset and only working at places which recognize you as such.

For 9 years I was a contractor, doing what needed to be done for many different clients. 1 year? My longest contract (with all the extensions) lasted for 5 years, and I left that one to start my own business. My shortest contract was about 2 weeks, I came to do what the client needed, did it and went on.

You can fill your car in 5 minutes and go another 600KM. You can battery swap a Model S in 90 seconds and go another 500KM. Or you can wait 20 minutes and get a supercharge that will get you 250KM for zero cost.

Seems like the electric car not only meets your expectations, but rather exceeds them.

Waltons and Kochs do much more for the current society than Musk is, they are bringing cheapest goods possible to the most people that the possibly can. Musk's creativity is actually very narrow in its target market, but he can become Ford of today if he manages to find efficiencies and actually mass produce cheaper and cheaper vehicles even in the modern age of enormous government created inflation.

R has more single function high level commands devoted to stats, these are done right internally and are self consistent with other functions for further processing. But its not as general a programming language as python. if you want something different than the canned functions in R then you will need to write them yourself at which point you might as well be using python. however if you like SAS then chances are R will seem more like what you are hoping for.

- yes, putting the religion of socialism before the Constitution is what has destroyed America.

Constitutionally US Congress has no authority to dictate anything to business or individuals unless it is expressly stated in Article 1 Section 8. The actual problem is that SCOTUS has not struck down almost all laws that ever came out of Congress as it should have as unconstitutional, but instead it allowed wider and wider oppression via usurpation of powers by the government and destruction of the individual freedoms.

The reality is that the religious argument shouldn't matter, because the only true argument here is the argument of freedom. Individuals must not be coerced by governments, they must not be forced by governments to accept compensation for their work from their employer in a way that government sees fit (any form of insurance or maternity leave or paid vacation for example) in lieu of what the individual and the business agree to on their own accord. Individual may want to be paid in gold for example and nothing else and may sign a contract with the employer to that effect and government doesn't (Constitutionally) have the authority to overwrite this contract.

- hello, Dr. Lecter.

What it can do is provide an interface between NGOs and common people. NGOs typically receive much of their funding from governments and rich or wealthy benefactors. Fundraising means getting those folks into a room and convincing them to cough up some cash. Crowdfunding allows a wider audience (literally everyone on the Internet) to see the intended actions of the NGO and then choose to contribute. Rather than getting $45,000 from 100 rich people, they can get $45 from 100,000 without the immense overhead of doing so without using the Internet. That's the real difference. It isn't easier so much as it's a different way of fundraising from a different audience.

The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign isn't going to send men with automatic weapons to break down my door and haul me to prison if I decline to provide it funding. The entity you describe will.

There's a moral difference between CAUSING an abortion and ALLOWING one to happen naturally in the eyes of the religious.

To me, the line is more blurry. Is someone who could prevent something but allows it *completely* innocent, really? I mean, we as a society try to prevent deaths by cancer, why not deaths by natural abortion?

Also, some of the religious may argue that to cause an abortion that wouldn't have happened is to thwart God's Plan, but how do these yahoos know that the abortion wasn't God's plan?

And let's go back to the cancer deaths again. Are we not thwarting God's Plan by saving someone with cancer?

In the end, I think there is a fundamental point, the religious pick an arbitrary line between what they like and what they don't, and it doesn't always make rational sense.

I think the rational argument is that no one should be forced to risk their lives to provide life support to another person. My kidneys are MINE thank you very much, don't hook me up to another person as a dialysis machine against my will, even if it saves that person's life. It puts ME at risk and is a great imposition on me. And even if I agree to it at some point, I can change my mind about continuing to risk my life by providing dialysis.

Pregnancy is very much analogous.

--PM

- so you are not a potential Uber customer, where is the problem? Don't like the service, don't participate in it, but instead you want to steal this choice from people who do like the service and are willing to exchange their own money for the services provided.