Nonsense. You can easily hire top people, you just have to be willing to pay them enough. Whatever you're offering, keep doubling it and see if you're still not getting great candidates walking in the door. This is what Netflix do: They routinely offer salaries at significantly above market rate, and they have far less trouble hiring software engineers than the other Silicon Valley firms who complain about a lack of talent.

Now, you may say, "but we can't afford to offer salaries that high!" and maybe that's true, but it means that the candidates you want are out of your price range, not that they're not out there. For companies that can't pay, the solution is obvious: Encourage as many people as possible to enter STEM fields, thus increasing the pool of candidates, which in turn increases the smaller pool of elite candidates. Greater supply and equal demand causes a drop in price, and companies an now hire better talent for mediocre wages.

This equation is the only reason by tech companies have been attaching themselves to these ludicrous campaigns to teach everybody to code. Not because they really believe their some social benefit to every school kid being able to make their own smartphone app, but because they want to increase their profits by lowering their wage bill. This is hardly wild speculation, given we know for a fact that tech CEOs spent most of the 2000s illegally conspiring to lower wages via mutal non-recruitment agreements: http://pando.com/2014/01/23/th...

I want my network neutrality back. This is the sort of thing that is going to squeeze out the smaller players, or anyone who the backbone operators and ISPs don't want to succeed. It will result in less innovation as startups who can't afford to pony up to the established powers who control the infrastructure won't be able to do business. Prepare for decades of stagnation and no progress as the big players concentrate on consolidating control and only improve things where they absolutely have to, incrementally, with no imagination.

Border Patrol is just a small part of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. CBP mainly inspects people and goods that come into the U.S. through any port, whether it's by land, sea or air. So they have officers all over, and intercepting counterfeit imports is part of their mission. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the other agency within DHS that has boots on the ground to find violators after they get past customs. They should be part of a task force to find illegal imports as well.

Border Patrol is probably what you're thinking of, they are the ones actually patrolling the border. Or are you thinking of the TSA, which is yet another part of DHS?

2007: The T61p. I *still* use mine. I'm typing this post from it. It has the best layout and the best feeling keys I've ever used on a laptop. I especially like the placement of the arrow keys and "back page/fwd page" keys in a 3x2 grid, and the Insert|Delete|Home|End|PgUp|PgDn block. ONLY ONE improvement possible: swap the Fn and Ctrl key on the left side of the keyboard. There are firmware hacks that do this. I'm hoping Lenovo puts out a new model with this keyboard before my T61 dies, or at least before *I* die... but I don't expect that it'll happen. But I keep wishing.

They'll get to it. Right after they switch to metric

I saw this demo'ed first hand, and it is awesome. I don't know that I'd call it "military grade" (not sure what that means) but they originally developed the technology for controlling industrial robots better, according to the guy in the booth who I talked to. So I'd say it's at least "industrial grade" tech. I really want to see the kickstarter succeed. This VR suit pairs brilliantly with oculus rift, and makes the wiimote seem rather primitive.

I was under the impression that the Taipei geeks were fiddling with the touchpad and display screen markets, out of their niche in ATM touchscreen displays (which wealthy nations ignored), and that when they were contracted by Apple to make Ipads they said "hey, check this out, we put a screen on it. And you can attach at telephone". And Apple said "heck yah make that" but nothing kept Samsung from doing the same. But that's a general recollection, I don't want to be cited as a source.

I don't remember it happening in that way.

Apple acquired a company called FingerWorks that didn't do touchscreens, but DID do multitouch gesture systems.

Steve Job's vision for the iPhone was a phone that is a piece of glass. I believe capacitive sensors had been done before, but Apple's hardware+software expertise, combined with FingerWorks patents, created the gesture-based interface that now seems routine on smartphones.

To be able to manipulate items on the screen by touch -- incredibly responsive, intuitive gestures, it was a big breakthrough. Even tiny things like the little slider thing to unlock an iPhone was magic, it appeared like a physical latch because it followed your touch.

Swipe to scroll, pinch to zoom, etc etc, those gestures were from FingerWorks, AFAIK.

After all the lies the government has been shown to have perpetrated, even if they did offer clemency, a pardon, or whatever, if you were Snowden, would you believe it?

Someone please explain how Bitcoins are deflationary if they are (as I understand it to be so, please correct me if I'm wrong) infinitely divisible?