HN user
Is there any reason not to just roll your own auth, with something like http://railscasts.com/episodes/250-authentication-from-scrat... and add omniauth if you want to use OAuth? It's not much more work than getting devise running, and it gives you the flexibility to do pretty much whatever you want in terms of fitting auth into your app.
(Also, it works fine with CanCan, which is brilliant and does a good job at staying out of your way.)
Seriously. I wish I could get 10mbps internet at home...I haven't been able to do so in almost 10 years of living in a very big city and the suburbs of another very major city...
The checkbox isn't the confirm your password...it's to make the actual characters show up so you can see that you've typed the right thing.
Not sure I love the idea, because there will be certain situations when a user can't use it, but it's worth considering...
Big newspapers keep obits pre-written for people they know they're going to have to write an obit for. It's not difficult, since when someone famous dies you can write about their accomplishments, legacy, and whatnot while they're still alive, and keep a blank spot in the lede about how they died. And it's nice, because you can write a much better article when you have a lot of time.
But it can lead to some interesting firedrills when someone dies unexpectedly:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postmortem/2009/06/michael_...
And sometimes the obituaries are pre-written many years in advance. Which leads to incidents like NYT's obit for Elizabeth Taylor, whose author died several years ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/movies/elizabeth-taylor-ob...