It's not just "easy". Fax is as secure as the phone network we pretend is secure, so if you act on a fax which appears to come from a specific phone number then you have some level of legal protection from liability. If you use a website or email then you are only as protected from liability as your identity verification system.

If I need to deposit a check, I take a photo of it with my cellphone using the bank's app and it gets processed just fine. The MICR font is highly OCRable, so as long as what else is written/printed on it is legible, everything works well. Even if a human has to review it because it was handwritten, they will only have to briefly glance at most checks. The only thing I actually write checks for any more is my rent. The paper check costs me very little and they cost nothing to deposit on the other end. I think the landlord is depositing them in person, because they seem to do them two or so at a time.

You appear to have not read anything above your comment. I can't do a QR code by hand. I need a printer to produce one. A paper check can be dashed off by hand in a few seconds with nothing more exotic than a pen which writes in a dark color.

We haven't even eliminated magstrips. We still have them around for backup. An attacker can disable a chip reader by making a special card that applies epoxy to the contacts when it's inserted, which you can do with e.g. a dremel, forcing subsequent users to fall back to the strip.

That's the US for you. Electoral college, scotus with no term limits, yada yada.

These days we have thick gloves which can activate a capacitive touch screen.

We create content with strong SEO attributes which will come up on searches and lead to ad impressions from visitors.

You don't even need a diagnosis. If you just go to disabled student services you can tell them you're unable to concentrate blah blah blah

Have you ever actually tried using Numpy in C?

You can tell how serious someone is about performance based on whether or not they bring out a profiler. If they don't use a profiler, they aren't serious about performance (or maybe they're just clueless).

What do you want to program?

Modern C++ didn't get rid of the gotchas, it just added more of them. It's fine if you're working by yourself, but you can't prescribe what features other people will use (including the writers of libraries you want to use). But old C++ was fine when working by yourself too.

You can add types to your variables in Python. You can use typescript with Javascript.

You can also introspect your types in Ruby, so his point is moot.

There is also the question of why you would add type checking to a dynamic language: if you don't want a dynamic language, why did you choose one? But the reality is most of us don't choose languages anymore, we choose libraries and have to accept whatever language they are attached to.

The author is claiming that Python is readable.

A lot of lawyers prefer checks because a signed check is proof of intention. Not only is it signed, it often has a "reason" memo written.

This can also work in behalf of the person writing the check (in court). For example, if you pay your rent by check, the landlord shows the intent to accept it when they deposit the check. Whereas if you pay with direct deposit, the landlord can claim they had no intention to accept the money.

A lot of times you can have the bank write the check and mail it for you free. Usually it's in the "bill pay" section of the UI.

It comes with nice, official (intimidating) printing. That's what I do on the rare times I need to write a check.

Three wheeled vehicles are bad. Even if they make good the vehicle will be crap. It will also be a deathtrap on US roads with a bunch of completely incompetent idiots driving three ton trucks and SUVs.

It's long past time we had a real debate about the law, too. Just because something has been the law for a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean it should remain the law as times change. Clearly there is a difference between the implications of casually observing someone as you pass them in a public street, when you probably forget them again a moment later, and the implications of recording someone with a device that will upload the footage to a system run by a global corporation where it can be permanently stored, shared with other parties, analysed including through image and voice recognition that can potentially identify anyone in the footage, where they were, what they were doing, who they were doing it with, and maybe what they were saying and what they had with them, and then combined with other data sources using any or all of those criteria as search keys in order to build a database at the scale of the entire global population over their entire lifetimes to be used by parties unknown for purposes unknown, all without the consent or maybe even the knowledge of the observed people who might be affected as a result.

I don't claim to know a good answer to the question of what we should allow. Privacy is a serious and deep moral issue with far-reaching implications and it needs more than some random guy on Slashdot posting a comment to explore it properly. But I don't think the answer is to say anything goes anywhere in public either just because it's what the law currently says (laws should evolve to follow moral standards, not the other way around) or because someone likes being able to do that to other people and claims their freedoms would be infringed if they couldn't record whatever they wanted and then do whatever they wanted with the footage. With freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to respect the rights and freedoms of others, which some might feel should include more of a right to privacy than the law in some places currently protects.

That all said, people who think it's cool to film other human beings in clear distress or possibly even at the end of their lives just for kicks deserve to spend a long time in a special circle of hell. Losing a friend or family member who was, for example, killed in a car crash is bad enough. Having to relive their final moments over and over because people keep "helpfully" posting the footage they recorded as they drove past is worse. If you're not going to help, just be on your way and let those who are trying to protect a victim or treat a patient get on with it.