The screen readers for the blind emit nonsense words when fed typographically incorrect input. Be glad you're not blind, and don't have to deal with them.

And that character on your keyboard, above the equals sign? It's the right one to use, but the author didn't use it. Instead, he made 100 typos using the wrong symbol.

There is nothing simple about typography, and a script such as you describe would cause more damage than it would fix. Any editor has to fully understand English, to know which word is the right choice, to understand syntax and grammar, and to know when a writer is deliberately or playfully bending the rules.

If you want to see what the state of the art in automated editing looks like, try using Word's grammar checker. If all of its advice is followed, it can make any interesting story read as blandly as an 8th grader's essay paper on the history of frogs.

Well, you would be very wrong. Fraud costs both the retailers and the banks money. The real problem is that issuing new chip cards would cost the banks more than the fraud. Not only are the cards about a dollar more expensive each, and they still have to be re-issued about every three years, but the systems that inject encrypted keys into them, and store the keys on their databases, are very expensive. Banks are notoriously cheap when it comes to spending money that won't make them money.

The other reason EMV hasn't rolled out across the U.S. is that millions of retailers have about 12 million old credit card terminals spread across the country, and most are owned by cheap store owners who don't like being told they have to spend money to replace them. Most retailers have been dragging their feet, not wanting to make an expensive change. But the new members of the breach-of-the-month club are mad about the insecure systems they've been forced to use, and are now championing the rapid switch to EMV instead of fighting it. The smaller retailers are also impacted now, and are no longer resisting.

The irony is that EMV readers for the small retailers are far, far cheaper than the old terminals, and the rates for using new companies like Square, Intuit, and PayPal are much lower than the typical old bank rates for the old credit card readers.

That's how Chip and PIN works. Your account number is still fixed, but your authorization to spend from it (your PIN) is encrypted by the chip, and is valid only for a single transaction. There are still kinks with non-electronic transactions, but those can be solved.

Look for it to be all over the US by October of next year.

Supply, demand, taxes, and regulations all combine to control the prices. If people are willing to pay X, and you're selling all your product, why would you reduce prices? All it would do is lower their profits; if they're even making any.

My guess is there are a lot of hidden factors, like big insurance costs. Most insurance policies have an exemption so they don't pay out if you're doing something illegal. This means they may have to self-insure, or find a company willing to take on the risk of a federal bust - and that likely isn't cheap. Maybe the state has a tax rate designed to keep the costs high to minimize chronic abuse. Maybe the costs of physical security are high. Likely all of the above will continue to keep prices very high.

It's harder to carry a trunkful of "gambling" back across the border to sell to the people back home.

Pot is a noun. Gambling is a verb.

I'd love to be able to publish these statistics for our organization, (I'd estimate we have close to a quarter million drives in the field) but there is a big hurdle in the way: legal liability. If I was to say something negative about Western-Sea-Tachi drives, their lawyers might call our lawyers, and we could easily spend a million in court fees.

The thing I think would be interesting is that we have a completely arbitrary mix of drives, based on drive availability over the last 6 years or so. We also have a mix of different service companies who replace the drives in our workstations. Our contract is such that we don't control the brands, or even the sizes, as long as they meet or exceed our specs. As a service organization, they're responsible for picking the cheapest option for themselves. If our spec says "40 GB minimum", and they can't get anything smaller than 500GB, they'll buy those. If 1TB drives are cheaper than 500GB drives, they'll buy those. And if we're paying them $X/machine/year for service, they can do the reliability decisions on their own, so if they think some premium drives will last two years longer than stock drives, they might be able to avoid an extra service call on each machine if they spend $Y extra per drive. I expect these service organizations all have their preferred drives, but that's not data they're likely to share with their competitors on the service-contract circuit.

I don't take pictures for "posterity", or for people who outlive me. I take pictures for me, and my family, for now. While I only have thousands of total pictures, (not 10,000 per month) I can still find the pictures I want on my hard drives. So when I die, if some future grandchild wants to trawl through those terabytes in the vain hopes of finding a good picture of a great-great-grandparent they never met, why should I care? What difference would that make to me, today, in how I choose to save or discard photos?

It comes to understanding the methodologies. What makes each effective? What are their weaknesses? Do you have enough good people who can execute them?

Waterfall is often appropriate, especially when it comes to physical world engineering, or for software products that cannot and will not be changed. Agile is great when you are committed to fully automated testing, have a committed stakeholder who is an active participant, and can deploy on demand for low cost.

But many clients now expect instant updates like they experience with their iPhone apps, and it's very difficult to deliver like that with waterfall. Agile is the answer, but for legacy projects that lack adequate testing, it's a big challenge to migrate to agile, and requires the business be put on hold while the developers clean up their technical debt. Most businesses can't afford such a shift.

That way is also not a guarantee of success. If management is implementing their imagined-perfect new organization structure, they are often blind to the problems they are creating, believing the problem lies with the underlings who "aren't trying hard enough", or "don't believe in the vision."

Not a damn thing. As a matter of fact, the original HBR story referenced in the TFA is not about IT at all. And TFA could have been written by Captain Obvious, except it's not nearly as clear.

Your local makerspace would be a place to look for one to play with. If you just want to send a file to a neighbor and have him print it for you, http://www.3dhubs.com/ is a site where you can hook up with local printer owners who offer this service.

You probably do. Check on http://www.3dhubs.com/ for someone near you who is willing to print for you.

Cores and clock speed is hardly the only determinant of performance. It sets a hard upper bound, but that can be readily squandered by software.

In the case of Android phones, they pushed for extra cores early on to avoid UI stutter during garbage collection cycles. iOS has never provided garbage collection; you either have to setup your own retain/release calls to keep or relinquish objects, or you use ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) to do more or less the same thing.

In effect, it's a trade-off. Google decided to simplify memory management for developers, and keep the barrier to entry low by appealing to existing Java developers, with the trade-off being that they require more parallel processing power for garbage collection. Apple avoided the need for the additional processing power and battery capacity (and in turn device size) by not implementing garbage collection in iOS, and thus can squeeze more performance out of fewer cores, with the trade off being you can't just pull Java developers off the street and have them start writing iOS apps. ARC is so slick that IMO Apple has an overall edge with their design; others are of course free to disagree.

Yaz

Traffic calming measures have been common for quite a few years now. But I think that Sherman Oaks could take this one step further.

Traffic furniture rearranging.

Every day, get the road crews out there to move some barriers around randomly: dead ends in the middle of some block, random one way signs, maybe just drop a wrecked car in the intersection where the off-ramp exits the freeway. Reprogram traffic lights to introduce 10 minute delays. Make Waze's advice to be worse-than-worthless to the average driver, and just maybe they'll give up on your city.