All the tiny contractors I delt with since I bought my place have been able to take cards. Now that you can get cheap hardware hooked up to a cheap android phone and a small merchant account to start swiping cards, even the plumber and the 3 table restaurant in chinatown take cards now...

http://www.amazon.com/First-Al...

356 pounds. Free shipping with amazon prime. Shipping is rarely an issue aside for niche stuff, even outside of Amazon. Kids can use prepaid cards. Sure, these may not be convenient enough in certain situations today...but tomorrow it may be another story.

In the world of the internet, no matter how many rules or laws you pass, only one player will ever be able to compete on price. Even if you banned online sales altogether, someone could find the cheapest physical store (the only difference is that then it would be limited by location/distance, allowing a few more players...but thats as far as you can go).

If I want a specific product, I know what I want precisely, then of course the only thing that matters is how cheap and how fast i can get it, and there's always one objective number here. There's a small variation if you include customer service of course...but in this case as you mentionned, amazon has almost flawless customer service.

Anyone who wants to compete has to do so with value. Anyone who goes in a brick and mortar store either wants instant gratification (but that will go away as "same day shipping" becomes more common), or _doesn't know what they want._

The later is where brick and mortar stores have to compete to provide value. If the staff doesn't know what they're talking about and can't assist, you automatically are worse off than the cheapest retailer that can be found online and will die (Bestbuy!!!).

I used to work for an online retailer/manufacturer of marketing products that is top dog as far as price/quality goes. No one could compete in the US on price and delivery. But in certain markets, we couldn't get any kind of traction... why? The brick and mortar stores had very very knowledgeable/well trained people, and provided fantastic value to customers, so they never went online, as the savings weren't worth it.

Where it gets crazy, is when you get amazon prime on a full sized safe. Free shipping on something that weights 1-2 TONS.

Yeah...

Web workers, local storage, JIT is more than good enough, and there are typed arrays for anything that matters.

Its good enough to make 3d game engines, its good enough for a mail client.

I agree with you on unlearning java before doing an anything meaningful in javascript...

However, there's only one thing worse than C#/Java dev trying to apply what they know to Javascript, and its a C++ dev trying to do the same. I've had to deal with a few, and its completely deplorable. Overengineering and premature optimization (that actually slow things down in one place), underengineering and total lack of optimization where its easy and count.... try to do classes the same way without trying to understand the various inheritance patterns javascript can use... trying to reinvent the wheel everywhere...

Its just painful.

You don't need the IDE though. Sure, its nicer if you do, but when doing javascript its not rare to use Sublime or some other similar ones, if you're not using the holy war editors.

Sublime has packages for Dart, so well...

In Python its annoying, but it could be worse.

Doing it in a markup/templating language is where the capital sin starts. Jade, I'm looking at you...

From what I gather, this thing is only as wireless as a QI charger is wireless. You basically need to touch it with the "remote" for it to work. If you're point blank range and know exactly where the chip is, you could have done a lot more than just hack the chip...

Yeah, it must be nice. Having lived in both Canada and the USA, I've unfortunately never experienced a functioning health care system :(

This is the only reason I use Uber (though I push it a notch and use Uber Black, even though its pretty expensive).

When I need to take a cab at 4 AM to go to the middle of nowhere (I don't have a car, as I only need this like twice a year or something, not worth it), hailing a shady dirty taxi who'll bitch and moan about me asking to go somewhere unprofitable isn't exactly my preference.

Uber (Black) has been doing quite nicely. Up the standard of normal taxis, even if you have to double the price, and I'll happily use them again.

The Samsung one already does that. I dunno if it has has many features, but it has the heart rate monitor and movement meter at least.

Future ones will most likely have all the bells and whistles. These are just early adopter models. They're mainly sold on the play store...hardly mass market.

When I was walking around with my Palm PDA, and later on, my Windows Mobile one, people were telling me the same thing.

Then Apple came in, made very very incremental improvement (remember, at the time the iPhone wasn't that special, no app store and all... it had a better touch screen tech that everyone was starting to use around the same time, a better scrolling paradigm, a decent browser and the biggest thing, came with unlimited data plan, which has nothing to do with the device itself). The market was taken by storm.

Maybe these watches are not cutting it. These particular ones definitely won't, they're prototypes more than anything (the Moto 360 and future models, as well as the iWatch, probably will be much better), but its just a matter of time before someone gets it right.

The line between everyday accessories and high tech gadgets is blurring. Soon there won't be a line at all.

Well, the thing is, they were sending it internally, which would have had the encryption and all the security around it. They sent it to a non-encrypted medium by accident.

The only issue is that the client tool to send via secure channels is the same as the one to send via unsecured ones.

When I worked for one of the big financials a few years ago, we had a mail client add-in on all machines that would check if you sent anything to anyone outside of the company. If you did, it first would warn you and ask you to confirm, and if you had attachments or if the content of your mail contained some data beyond a few sentences, it would make you convert it to a link, just as you described.

The thing is, it wasn't fool-proof and there were ways around it. Its probably what happened here.

Not saying I agree with separating the sex, but I can see why you would want to.

When talking about competition like this, you're talking about the very tip top of players, at which point, differences that would be minute to insignificant day to day (practice and training trump any biological difference, even when playing football. A girl who plays football 50x more than a guy will kick his ass at it pretty much no matter what) start showing up.

At the 0.1%, maybe men can click faster, maybe women can keep track of more things at once. Who knows, but I'd be very very surprised if, all other things being equal, members of one sex or the other didn't come up drastically on top. Which one it will be? Who knows, right now women just don't have the numbers in these type of e-competition to be statistically significant, but one day, they probably will be. And then maybe we'll be like "Whoops, there was a difference after all"