Mod parent up. Seriously. Loudly: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL.
Say it again: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL.

"Version" implies, well, a version of a document, a stopping point, a revision of the whole. Tracking a version of a document is a point construct; not at all the same thing as tracking the flow of changes over the course of a period of work. One is a node, the other's an edge. One's a pixel, the other's a vector. Not the same thing.

Both are really useful, but they're different tools for different purposes. As the parent posted, if anyone in a workgroup hits "accept all changes" the tracking is gone. Anyone using track-changes as version control -- expecting never to accept changes, and worse, puttering along with the idea that rolling back through tens of thousands of incremental changes is a remotely practicable rollback function -- is a moron.

On the other hand, true version control is analgous to an audit function. Writers in a workgroup should not be able to defeat version control adopted by that workgroup. Seriously, it should not be easy to lose track of versions or toast the ability to roll back to an earlier version, which in the current state of word processing software (local or in the cloud) means version control has to be external to the document itself. Google Docs' record of explicit saves is pretty close. Wikipedia's history of change commits is dead on. Track-changes is something else entirely.

When I see this news, all I can think is "Great, now there's an easier way to transmit and receive fraudulent vote tallies." What the USA really needs is a short & sweet federal law that says something like:
"It shall be illegal to certify any public election tallied by methods or mechanisms not available in their entirety for public inspection."

No more of this secret-sauce craziness. If you can't show how you count, you're surely up to no good -- and it's high time for that reality to be codified in law.

I caught a few of the threads where the apparent perp was outed, and I was very encouraged at the volume of comments that basically said 'that's enough data, now let's turn it over to the authorities.' Crowdsourcing of evidence-gathering is terribly powerful, and it's nice to see that even in a large pool of people (in a vigilante mood) the majority still have a sense that there's a line between prosecutor and jury. Sure, there are issues with naming potentially innocent people, but when the crowd refrains from attack and turns to a judicial system, it's the best we can do.

> it's swipe, sign, optionally-type, done.
> I've done hundreds of Square transactions, and it takes seconds. You don't know what you're talking about.

You are clearly an unusually adept expert. Oh wait.... no.

The standard *actual* usage scenario is... hand my card over, wait for the person to dig out his/her phone from their pocket, wait for them to dig out the Square dongle from some other pocket or purse, wait for them to plug it in and swipe, swipe, swipe to find the app, start it, fiddle with the dongle because it's not reognized, pull it out, plug it in again, swipe the card, set it down, check the amount, type it in, no wait... clear, and type it in again, hand it to me to "sign", take it back to submit, I ask for a receipt, they say they don't know how to do that, I say click the 'receipt' option, they ask their partner/manager/boyfriend whether that's ok, there's a minute of mumbline and quibbling, they push a button and hand it back to me... I type out a number, then they click submit... and wait... and wait... and if we're lucky, THEN the transaction "takes seconds." If we're not, the transaction fails for any number of reasons (mostly crappy signal/data service drops off), and I'm standing there even longer watching some slackjawed yokel tapping at his ifruit, wasting my time.

You're either an atypical client in a stable location (in which case you could get a much better rate elsewhere), or you're a salesperson for Square.

Online retailers don't process cards the same way as a "card-present" (Visa/MC/PCIco's term) transaction, don't get full track data, have different terms, easier chargebacks, etc etc. OTOH Square reads full-track data, and processes it thru an uncontrolled consumer device with encryption that terminates at the next proxy... Yeah. So I have the highest-disclosure type of activities happening thru the highest-risk type of merchant processing. 's no good.

Square? You mean the purveyors of the butter-slice sized "I-can't-believe-it's-PCI-compliant!" (tm) mobile payment system? The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt. I know, I know, most people swipe their cards and wave off the receipt, taking it on faith that the merchant will charge only the amount shown on the till and not a little more... or the maximum I just authorized with the card-present swipe. If the charge is off, you have no proof, no way of coming back, nothing at all.

Oh sure, I can stand there for another 2-3min while I ask said hipster to email or text me a "receipt" (at least it has a transaction number) usually accompanied with a lot of huffing and puffing about how giving me a receipt is a hassle and why do I want one anyway....? Because I just did the electronic equivalent of laying my wallet on the counter and saying "Take what you need." I'd like some acknowledgement of what was taken. Is that such a burden? I still write a few checks for bills and such so there are multiple transaction types debited against a single account, and I like to reconcile payments and balance my account periodically like a grownup.

I might slide more easily into the paperless future if the rate of "error" (not really) wasn't going up. Even in my run-o-the-mill consumer usage, I've had a few instances in the past year where a person (a local drive-up barista, a dude selling t-shirts at Comicon, etc) where there was a discrepancy between what I was told and what was punched in. It's never in my favor, and if I didn't catch it in tiny print on a smudgy screen before faux-signing with my finger... And when I ask for a receipt -- even a text pseudo-receipt -- they got all flustered, and one even refused (that was the one who'd added an even two dollars). Persoanlly, if you're that hard up to steal a buck from me, you can have it. But that doesn't mean it's right.

All of a sudden this older type of "skimming" is coming back into vogue, something that I haven't seen since... well, ever in my lifetime. My parents used to talk about deli guys with a finger on the scale, and cashiers with pennies on the counter to count how many dollars in the till they'd lifted from customers (so they could balance the till by pocketing the right amt of cash at the end of the day), but I thought they were funny old-people stories. Any now Square comes along with a magical box that re-enables a petty crime by depricating auth logs... and few people seem to give a crap.

Everything old is new again.

Bigger is better. Here's my reasoning:

No touchscreen is so 90's. Gotta be able to use apps with simple gestures. On the other hand, no physical keyboard means the screen is covered with smudgy dots (ew), and typing on a touchscreen requires direct attention (NTSB stats show that even dialling on an ifruit while driving is profoundly poor judgement). Gotta have both.... So since I have to have both keyboard and touchscreen, I run things I'd characterize as "applications" on the device. Browsing slashdot? Editing a long email? Yeah. Much more screen real estate than a weather widget or disgruntled birds "app".... So now I'm looking at 800x480 or even 1280x600 screen in my hand, and the browser renders pixels 1:1, so the damn thing had better be at least 4.5-5in across. (Think of it this way: the "retina" display is marketing nonsense, but it's a good marker of the point beyond which increased DPI has no purpose, because humans can't discern the difference.)

Oh, and when I put my phone in my jeans pocket, it falls over sideways and wedges over my thigh when I sit or kneel. A slightly bigger screen will stay vertical in my pocket -- the 5in tablet style phones are just about right.

That or narrower pockets in my Levis...

0.o

Far be it for me to defend DSM IV; personally I think it's a relativist p.o.s and contains opinion-based nonsense such as "oppositional defiant disorder" which doesn't pass the giggle test. I'm just pointing out that by the current even-if-crappy standard, mental health doctors have label for a category of behavior; the category has qualifying criteria; and "asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle..." of the criteria for HF Asperger's, a "pervasive" mental disorder.

Actually, yes. That's how measurement works. If you accept that IQ is a reasonable measure of Bob's intelligence, then you have to accept that it's a reasonable measure for Alice too. The APA asserts that DSM criteria apply to all people. If you don't like the system, its metrics or the resulting label, criticize that, but don't assert random exceptions.

(shakes head) 'Deviates from the norm' to a sufficient degree that it has been clearly labeled as a disorder. Ponder the word "deviant." Are you a happy deviant? Isn't that ok?

Have a look at DSM-IV 299.00 Autistic Disorder. Specifically, Asperger syndrome is primarily characterized by a person's one-sided social relationships and imbalanced interactions. Research shows (generally) that HF Asperger's sufferers have an inability to recognize or process social cues, communication, and other information when interacting with other people. Mistaking pets, machines, or entirely inanimate objects for persons with which one has full human relationships is one of the red flags for this diagnosis.

This spectrum is classified under "Pervasive Developmental Disorder" ...so "Insane" is maybe not the right word. However, as much as PETA likes to use the phrase "pet parents," asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle of "mental disorder."

Pets are meat. Children are minions. There's a difference.

Mod parent up. This is brilliant, probably the best thing I've seen on /. in years. Following Bradbury's theme, how about.....

HTTP 451: An error in your society has prevented your client from receiving the specified content.

(And I love the fact that HTTP 450 paves the way for this.)

You just described the Apple Store

aka the most profitable (per square foot) retail business in the US

As of the beginning of 2012: "Despite a modest launch and a limited distribution in terms of markets, Nokia's N9 model [Meego] has reached sales estimated between 1.5 and 2 million devices. According to Nokia's own quarterly report and analyst company Canalys analyses, the combined deliveries of the comparable Lumia (WP7) devices summed to approximately 1.2-1.5 million in the last quarter."

http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/smart-phones-overtake-client-pcs-2011
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248778/nokia_reports_loss_but_sells_more_than_1m_lumia_phones.html

It's also curious to see that Nokia N9/Meego phones are close to the 2-million sales mark with virtually nonexistent marketing, and Nokia did not sell that phone in the North American market at all -- stateside N9's were all grey market. For historical comparison, internal Nokia sales reports say the predecessor N900 sold 100,000 in its first month and well over 1 million by 2010 (which means the N9 sales are better than the N900), and yet they refused to sell the N950 at all when it was completed in 2011 (despite nil market overlap with WP7 phones). Apparently there are a lot of nerds out there, but Nokia doesn't want their money.

You had me there for a second... thought they were giving away N900 phones, and I'd have to jump on it. It's the first phone that I will probably replace with another of the same model.

Instead, they're giving away the skeleton of the N9, running a mashup of Harmattan, Gnome, and Ubuntu's Unity interface, with gestures lifted (and flipped) straight from WebOS. Don't take that the wrong way -- I think WinPhone7 mostly took the *good* bits from those other OS's; I just think msft ought to acknowledge that WP7 (and now Windows 8's Metro i/f) is highly derivative of open-source software.

And I still want an *actual* keyboard, not the smudgy hot mess in the hands of most iPhone (and Lumia 900) users.

Feh.