Vodafone is international, Europe-based (I think). They are one of the few providers we have down here in New Zealand. Verizon does do business in NZ, but mostly dealing with heavy IT networks. They give Cisco a fairly good run for the money. As far as the trips, it's cheaper here to call cellphone-to-cellphone than cellphone-to-landline. Most of my calls are to the City Council raising an issue regarding maintenance in the city parks. It's always to a landline, and I make sure they never put me on hold.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

I still have you beat. I have $32 remaining on my $20/year Motormouth pay-as-you-go plan from Vodafone. At my current rate of usage, my next top up will leave me with a $38 balance. Latest offerings from all local providers keep pushing carryover data which I don't need at a cheap $19/MONTH. My Samsung came with a calculator app onboard plus a Sudoku app to use while waiting for others to get off their phones. One of my few complaints is the smallish screen size, but I can live with that.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

I still use one of those Samsung flip phones. The screen and buttons are protected, unlike the smart phones that can place calls without your knowledge or crack under the weight of my fat ass. My provider keeps trying to convince me that I would be better off with a new phone on a plan that costs 1200%-1800% over the cost of my existing plan. For that amount, I could fly to Japan and buy a new flip phone off the shelf.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

With all the difficulties I've been having trying to recover my Itunes music library, I discovered a great number of similarities between the Itunes program and Microsoft Edge. Did Microsoft hire former staff from Apple?

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

My daughter can attest to that. She has a doctorate in astronomy. Her thesis involved writing software for adaptive optics.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

I subscribe to a production newsletter where 70%-80% of the content is IT related. So, what are you complaining about?

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Having worked for a company that used the fingerprint technology in its security system, I managed a look under the hood, so to speak. For the technology to work, a live finger with a blood flow is required. The readers measure the blood flow pattern just under the surface of the skin as masked by the spirals and whorls in your print. A 3D copy of your finger just isn't up to the job. Besides, if you are concerned about using a cell phone with fingerprint security, get something else.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Hmm. Incentive based pay based on the value added by your productive effort could result in your owing the company money. The crappy scheme pays your salary.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Workplace? I'd settle for an income.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Very simply, it's a matter of cost to the company. The 'free' coffee costs about 13 cents per cup, your Snickers bar would cost minimally about 52 cents. That being said, the majority of NZ companies offer a selection of sweet biscuits (what Americans call cookies) alongside tea and coffee. Since the majority of Kiwis drink tea, the cost for the feebie is approximately 25 cents per serving.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Ah, yes, the infamous P34 green phosphor. Be glad it wasn't one with orange phosphor. After a few hours, what was supposed to be white would take on a purple hue.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Is the MDB saving the images as blobs, or as references to the image files themselves? IMHO, storage of blobs is tantamount to disaster as they can be spread across data blocks and deletion of a record may stuff the indexing as part of a block still contains active data.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

MS Access is for the quick and dirty applications involving less than 100k records. I find it useful keeping track of my CD collection. (Now, which cabinet has that Sonny and Cher album?)

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

The impact seems to vary depending on which version of windows you upgrade from. I upgraded from 64bit 8.1 and discovered that the upgrade cost me 3.4Gb against my data cap. Upgrading from 32bit would be substantially more costly as the upgrade downloads both the 64bit and 32bit versions. (I discovered this in one of the later updates where the test for 64bit was not performed before downloading the update. Bad, bad, Microsoft!)

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

I found that Edge tries to do everything within the Edge package -- a great majority are in direct conflict with software provided by the copyright holders of the technology they are trying to emulate. I will admit that the PDF viewer is quick, but terrible if you want to extract text from a page for quotations in a thesis paper. The other holdup is SSL security checks where a minor conflict occurs. The pop-up window sometimes comes in BEHIND the Edge window and Edge stops, waiting for your reply to a question you can't see. There are a few other anomalies that I find irksome. Prime example is that you have to left-click select on a right-click display of redirect options. (I'm one of those individuals who performs a search and right-clicks the links to display the results in new-tabs for detail comparisons.)

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

This brings up the recent flaming of a casual comment in a brain_fart_moment by a legal professional when he tried to compliment a colleague on her appearance.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

One the biggest gripes I have with 'meaningful' names is their utility. What is the justification for having a 122 character variable name describing a boolean? Microsoft used to have such describing whether the screensaver was in blackout mode. There used to be a condition where the software would concatenate program.procedure.variable names and attempt to display the result in a 256 character namespace. If the concatenation exceeded the namespace limit, 'namespace_exceeded' would be displayed in place of the concatenation and debugging would be terminated. (Those were the days.)

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

I was around when the first internet virus was deployed on DARPA. Imagine the fun of single stepping a DEC 8/12 to trap it.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

Not bragging, but one does tend to accumulate a volume of languages over the decades. I'm not entirely certain, but the count was somewhere in the vicinity of 1217, counting all variants and experimental versions. I still have some of the reference manuals from my first projects -- pre-internet. When I started in the industry, one was required to only know six languages (Basic, COBOL, Fortran, RPG, Assembler and ALGOL/Pascal). All the rest are derivatives of at least one of those six. If you don't believe me, please explain why a large number of language reference manuals contain a syntactic reference section written in Backus-Naur (ALGOL) form.

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.

I agree with you regarding anonymous voting. Besides, if it were non-anonymous, who can be sure that false identities are not being used?

The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.