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I worked a summer as an engineering intern at the largest US manufacturer of breath-alcohol systems. There were dozens of models made to accommodate the wildly varying requirements among states and nations regarding what false positive signals to "rule out". Basically, the systems were very simple infrared spectrometers, made to look for telltale absorption bands of the ethanol molecule in just a few (like 3-4) broad infrared wavelength bands (see e.g. here). The problem is, a large range of simple organic molecules absorb at similar wavelengths. So, for example, to rule out acetone (rotten fruit? nail polish remover?), you'd need to add one or more bands where the two molecules differed in absorption properties. And so on for other molecules with similar optical behavior. I believe the UK had the strongest requirements for ruling out false positives; something like a dozen channels were required (which increased cost, difficulty of calibration, and weight).

They don't really use aggregate in deep see drilling.

So the summary is correct when it says cement. I am assuming that it what you are talking about, because I didn't really see any comments talking about concrete. Ref:

http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Display.cfm?Term=cement

That article misrepresents just who/what Schlumberger is. Take a look here. They are into almost everything oil that's more complicated than banging rocks together. If you hire them, you do what they fucking tell you.

This is what happens when you don't. They know what they are doing.

IAA(non-certified)PE, although I don't work for any of the companies in question.

Although drilling is a cowboy science, there are a few concepts to it that are not immediately obvious and help explain what they're doing. I'd like to define the problem a little bit better, which may actually lead to someone finding a better answer.

The problem that they're facing is that there is a pipe placed in a hole down many thousand feet into an oil reservoir, most likely at the edge of a salt dome. The reservoir is at very high pressure (which is common in the GoM and one of the benifits of drilling here), and effectively we have an uncapped fire hydrant spewing high pressure fluid into the ocean, which floats up and producing the lovely oil sheen. As you'll notice, all attacks follow this vein... capping the end of a wildly spewing fire hydrant. My personal opinion isn't really relevant, but hey, they've got to show they're trying all options.

During drilling we control well pressures during drilling with heavy mud fluids, which provide counter-pressure and keep this problem in check. From a discussion on a plane yesterday with someone in well completions, they had set a plug in the drilling fluid (probably a brine at this point, replacing the mud) but may not have tested it well enough, and enough gas escaped from below the plug to displace the drilling fluid with a large bubble of gas. The low density of the gas created an unstable pressure system, and allowed the pressure below to burst through the plug and cause a kick, sinking the rig. Note that rigs tend to drill many wells at the same location now, spreading them out using directional drilling but not actually moving the rig. When we drill a well and a production platform is not yet in place, we temporarily cap the well... using the same process that didn't go so great this time. So when the drilling platform sank, any already drilled and capped wells were likely damaged as well. These are likely easier to shut off due to properly operating subsurface safety valves being in place (required in the GoM), and possibly BoP stacks being in place still as well (not likely but maybe? usually these are removed after drilling).

So here we are, with the BoPs not working on this one well, and it's gushing oil. In most situations we drill a relief well, because when we intersect the gushing well, our wellbore is full of drilling mud, and we can kill the flow by using extra-heavy mud weighs to stifle flow right at the source. This is, in my opinion, the best and most complete option. The problem to this method is that it takes days/weeks, not hours/days, and we want an "hours/days" solution. Hence the multi-million-dollar "cork" they are trying to place on top of this fire hydrant. I see estimates of 3 months in the news for the relief well being effective, and I think that's a bit high but reasonable. "Off the cuff" (do not use this as a real estimate) I like to guess about 500 feet of drilling a day, and this well is 13,000 feet, but that's certainly much too optimistic in this case.

Here is a link to an event similar to this one near Australia

Dropping tools down the hole is something I have never seen in my 5 years career.

The reason why you need to fish them out is not because of the price of the tool but because of the price of the well ! ;-))

Most tools are made of hardened steel which isn't found in nature so no drilling rig machinery can drill through them. I heard stories of holes that were abandoned, hence all the invested money on them was lost because they couldn't manage to fish some dropped tools out of it so they couldn't resume drilling. There was even stories about drill strings that could not get pulled out of the hole because it was stuck due to a dropped tool. Same result; abandoned well plus abandoned drill string. (Remember that the drill bit is always bigger than the drill string, hence it can easily get stuck)

Even if you finally manage to fish the tool out, it takes special equipment and the drilling can be postponed for 2 to 3 days before that equipment gets there and sometimes up to 2 weeks before they manage to get it out, which drilling contractors and oil companies do not like ;-)

Back to "my tool", it was attached to a wire and dropped into the drill pipes. So even if the wire broke or if got stuck in the pipes, we would not have to fish it out because it wasn't dropped directly into the hole. The tool couldn't go through the drill bit so it was always kept inside the drill string. Pull the drill string out in the worst case scenario ;-)

Anyway, dropping tools down the hole could easily get you fired back then ;-)

Oh, and other horror stories included dropped drill bits, dropped drill strings, hitting underground rivers and losing your drilling mud and also tight holes where the Earth squeezes your drill string.

I remember working on a tight hole and getting stuck for a few days until Schlumberger got to the well and injected special liquid into it. A guy gave me a Schlumberger hard hat and I kept wearing it afterward while working ;-)
http://www.slb.com/

That is contrary to my understanding of the data. Can you show data for that? This is the data I'm familiar with: data

The problem is you seem to be avoiding the simple point that global temperatures HAVE been rising. I'm sorry, but it's a recorded fact. The problem is you're setting up the classic straw man this argument alaways suffers from, namely, confusing the fact of a global rise in temperature with the theory of what is causing it or whether it is outside the realm of natural cycle.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

That quote leaves out the fact that they're also necessary. The models may be bad, but until we get better ones we have to work with the ones we have now.

it indicates that the connection between CO2 and Global average temperature may be correlational and not causational. Effect does not, under normal circumstances, preceed cause.

Actually, the currently scientific thinking is more complex than either side really wants to talk about. Historically, there is very strong evidence to suggest that large changes in Earth's temperature are actually caused by slight changes in its orbit. But, that being said, those changes can't account for the increase in CO2 by themselves. Generally, the thinking goes that the changes in orbit trigger a small initial change, which triggers CO2 buildup and temperature change in a feedback loop. In other words, current understanding of the evidence doesn't provide strong support for either side of this debate. (search around if you want to find evidence supporting this explanation--it's easy to find)

So, I would say you got right, one sorta right, and one dangerously wrong.

Is global climate change a concern? YES!
Has it been shown that it is definitely happening? Indisputably. If you don't like the temperature fact, try the size of the ice cover over the north pole.
Is it the fault of humanity? Conclusively, we can't really say until it's all over of course. Currently accepted science, however, suggests it is.

And a fourth that nobody ever seems to ask:

If it's not the fault of humanity, is it a historically precedented change, or is there some other causal factor we aren't aware of?

An article has appeared in a recent issue of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics with a curious title "Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years." Wow, that's a mouthful! Imagine publishing a paper in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal in which you predict global cooling over the next few decades? Apparently, the authors were not moved by the 46.6 million websites found when doing a quick search of the internet for "global warming."

The article was produced by Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian of the Nanjing Normal University in China (obviously, English is not their first language, if you couldn't tell from the title, and some of the following quotes from their article are a bit awkward). The work was funded by the Chinese National Science Foundation, and not by coal interests in China. We have no reason to suspect that Zhen-Shan and Xian are puppets of any group with any interest in denying global warming in the coming decades.

> this is the freshman philosophy class teaching the phrase "correlation does not imply causation."

Baby steps, stonecypher, baby steps. Your original comment stated:

> That's funny, none of the scientists see said spike. Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me what year(s) this spike is over [...]

Now you say:

> All you have discovered is that CO2 is going up. That it happened while we were in the industrial growth phase does not mean that we created it.

We're making progress, you've recognized that CO2 levels are in fact rising past pre-industrial levels. Great. I'd also say that a >20% increase in 200 years, past the highest *peak*, not average, in the past few hundred thousand years (NOAA data, see http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_ch ange/images/carbon_dioxide.jpg , from http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_ch ange/greenhouse.htm) could reasonably be called a "spike".

Now, moving on to causality. You're right, of course, that correlation is insufficient to prove causation. It would be great to have a complete and accurate model Earth that we could run through its entire history, preventing the industrial revolution, and compare the resulting CO2 levels with real life ones. Failing that, we have to rely on a little reasoning.

We have, during the same time period:
a) A rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration
b) Industrialization, and its concomitant increase in CO2 emissions
In the absence of alternative explanations, it's reasonable to suppose that b) caused a). Of course it's not proof in a mathematical sense, but it's still the best explanation on offer. So, again: *do* you have a better explanation? Or even a reasonable one? Volcanoes? Then you need to show that there has been a sudden increase in volcanic activity, with respect to the past few hundred thousand years, over the same period as the CO2 concentration increase. Can you?

Are you with me so far? I haven't started on temperature or climate at all yet, I'm trying to do this one step at a time.

> As a side note, I think this is my favorite example of Correlation Does Not Imply Causation.

Um, that's supposed to be a joke. Did you notice the x axis scale on that? It's completely random; even if it were based on actual data that chart wouldn't show correlation, and therefore says nothing about the lack of relationship between correlation and causation (which I don't dispute, but anwyays. Getting a little pedantic here.)

> this is the freshman philosophy class teaching the phrase "correlation does not imply causation."

Baby steps, stonecypher, baby steps. Your original comment stated:

> That's funny, none of the scientists see said spike. Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell me what year(s) this spike is over [...]

Now you say:

> All you have discovered is that CO2 is going up. That it happened while we were in the industrial growth phase does not mean that we created it.

We're making progress, you've recognized that CO2 levels are in fact rising past pre-industrial levels. Great. I'd also say that a >20% increase in 200 years, past the highest *peak*, not average, in the past few hundred thousand years (NOAA data, see http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_ch ange/images/carbon_dioxide.jpg , from http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_ch ange/greenhouse.htm) could reasonably be called a "spike".

Now, moving on to causality. You're right, of course, that correlation is insufficient to prove causation. It would be great to have a complete and accurate model Earth that we could run through its entire history, preventing the industrial revolution, and compare the resulting CO2 levels with real life ones. Failing that, we have to rely on a little reasoning.

We have, during the same time period:
a) A rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration
b) Industrialization, and its concomitant increase in CO2 emissions
In the absence of alternative explanations, it's reasonable to suppose that b) caused a). Of course it's not proof in a mathematical sense, but it's still the best explanation on offer. So, again: *do* you have a better explanation? Or even a reasonable one? Volcanoes? Then you need to show that there has been a sudden increase in volcanic activity, with respect to the past few hundred thousand years, over the same period as the CO2 concentration increase. Can you?

Are you with me so far? I haven't started on temperature or climate at all yet, I'm trying to do this one step at a time.

> As a side note, I think this is my favorite example of Correlation Does Not Imply Causation.

Um, that's supposed to be a joke. Did you notice the x axis scale on that? It's completely random; even if it were based on actual data that chart wouldn't show correlation, and therefore says nothing about the lack of relationship between correlation and causation (which I don't dispute, but anwyays. Getting a little pedantic here.)

You can't just assume that the transition is going to be an abrupt occurance. There is data to suggest that the earth is constantly changing - see below excerpt from article. The earth is more stable and self-adjusting than people think - its been doing it long before we (people) were here and will continue to do so.

http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_ch ange/causes_other.htm

Milankovitch theorized that the inclination of the Earth's axis is not always 23.5. There is a bit of wobble over time. He calculated that the tilt changes between 22.1 and 24.5 within a cycle of about 41,000 years. When the tilt is less summers are cooler and winters milder. When the tilt is greater the seasons are more extreme

The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon.

Okay. No problem. Let's work that out then.

We need to plant X number of trees to counteract Y tonnes of CO2 being produced. As CO2 production goes up, we need to increase the number of trees we plant.

Oops. It seems that those numbers aren't exactly favourable to your solution right now. Could it be that currently, the amount of trees is going *down* while the amount of CO2 being produced is going *up*? Oops. Well, okay, let's reverse that trend.

Let's start in America, where most of the world's human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is produced (see earlier citation)? Well, to soak that up, you'd need to have about 146 25 year old pine trees for every (metric) tonne of CO2 produced. Not plant, but *have*. They have to be at least 25 years old before that sort of CO2 absorbtion is being done. And then you'd have to add 146 more 25 year old pine trees per year per ton of CO2 that that amount goes up.

So how many tonnes of CO2 does the US produce? About 5.4 billion, way back in 1997. You would need to *have* 788 billion 25 year old pine trees in 1997, and increase that number by 1.5% every year (11.82 billion) to keep up with growth.

Let's assume each tree needs 4 square meters of land to grow on. That's a wildly optimistic number, by the way, but it makes the math nice and easy. That's 3.154 billion square meters, which means 315 million hectares. Great. According to The World Factbook, that's 34.4% of the total land mass of the US.

Looks like it's time to get out there and start planting. :)

If you've ever seen a complex piperack there are probably similarities.

Of course, with electronics there is only one medium flowing, and if it gets out all you have is magic blue smoke. Well, OK, maybe also a fire and destruction of data.

This is largely due from the incredibly rapid decline of the North Sea oil and gas fields.

Britain developed the North Sea oil and gas in the 70s, this largely saved its economy by providing three decades of cheap oil and natural gas. However, the good times are now about to abruptly end. Oil production is down dramatically- nearly 50% since 1999.

In fact it fell 13% in just the last year! http://realtimenews.slb.com/news/story.cfm?storyid =630622

In fact the North Sea is now well down on its peak production, and the UK will now be reliant on Russia and the various OPEC countries, many of whom are in decline themselves. The global competition for oil and gas is immense.

Unless the UK can commit to a new generation of nukes, the future here will be very dark indeed.

Not to be critical or trolling or anything, but scientists simply just caught a glimpse of something cool that lasts for miliseconds at best. I'm all for science that has the very shred of potential to be something beneficial to society, but this is stretching it. Cool yes, but front page worthy? I disagree

Cooler things are obtained with water and corn starch mixed, and that you can truely replicate at home. http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/lab/cornstarch/

No, it wouldn't. A Faraday cage only works if the metal you are using is a perfect conductor. Aluminum is far from perfect.

Skin depth, the distance that an electromagnetic wave penetrates into a material before being attenuated to 1/e, is inversely proprotional to the square root of the conductivity of the material the wave is incident on.

see http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Display.cfm?T erm=skin%20depth

if you do the math, you'll find that you would need around 4 sheets of standard .001" aluminum just to attentuate a signal in the middle of the radio band to 1/e. Experimental physicists learn this fact very quickly.

There have been a number of other projects to drill deep into the Earth's crust, though none has succeeded in reaching the mantle, as this Japanese team is trying to do. Some of the more well-known ones:

Another poster already provided the wikipedia page for Project Mohole. That was a US team back in 1961 that managed to drill to 183 m below the sea floor, in 3500 m of water off the Mexican coast. From a ship, floating on the ocean surface -- I just find that incredible.

As far as land-based projects go, there have been 2 big ones that I know of. The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a Russian project, started in 1970, that drilled at a site on the Kola Peninsula near Finland. Their deepest hole reached 12.262 km in depth, which is the current record. This page has a section (scroll down a few screens) with some very interesting findings from the project. Apparently, geologic theory doesn't quite correspond with what we find when we actually go down there to see for ourselves.

There's also the KTB (long German acronym) Borehole, started in 1978 in Bavaria. They reached a depth of 9.101 km. Information on this one is hard to find, at least in English, though there is a great Oilfield Review article (big pdf) available.

This Japanese project is going to drill through the sea floor in the Pacific, in a spot where the crust is thin, which will hopefully allow them to reach the mantle in only 7 km, under 2.5 km of water. For comparison: the previous record seafloor drill was only 2.1 km. So they've definitely got their work cut out for them.

They use:

car driving monitoring.

Smart Cards for network access and logging.

Telephone call logging.

And cell phone triangulation tracking

A real paradise for the cubicle dweller.

I was under the impression there already was a trademarked piece of software called Eclipse

According to this article, the iraqi state oil marketing agency imports their gas from Turkey for 98 cents a gallon.

Someone earlier commented on the cost of bringing coals to Newcastle.

Of course, you know that Schlumberger is the major global competitor to Halliburton. Why didn't they get to bid on the delivery? Maybe it has something to do with their Paris headquarters...

I read the actual paper, (available, with registration required, here), and granted, these guys did a good job on the analysis and experimental verfication, and also should be commended for bringing attention to this phonemena, but the basis for their work has been know for quite some time. In the field of geophysics, it has long been known that "spontaneous potential" exists due to the flow of water through sermipermable layers of rock and clay. A bibliography on spontaneous potential in boreholes has been compiled by the USGS with some papers dating back to the 1940's.

The real questions are how practical and economically viable this approach will be for medium to large-scale power generation. For natural sites (e.g. permeable rock layers), what type of electrodes can be used, how well will they resist corrosion, and how large must they be? The bottom line: how much will the power cost over the entire life cycle in terms of $ per KWH?

For manufactured microchannel membranes or devices, added questions are the cost of manufacture and the lifespan of the device. How easily will the pores become clogged, what steps must be taken to prevent this, how long will it take for the pores to erode over time, and what is the expected lifetime of the microchannel device?

One big difference between pure science and engineering is that engineers need to factor in economics.

I own a smartcard reader/programmer (most devices are both readers and programmers, it's just a serial interface to a "chip card" aka smartcard.) made by Schlumberger, and the SmartCard Developer's Kit from Amazon, which I bought to play with Smartcard support for Linux.

So am I going to get a letter from DirectTV?

Yes, we we have over 25,000 CPUs of Linux clusters performing seismic analysis (not beowolf, strictly).

Just a thought. If you really need 2-factor authentication, setup the reverse proxy (unless you can get TiVo to require SSL client-side authentication). Pick up a smart card and reader from http://www.cardstore.slb.com/. I recommend the CyberFlex E-gate for this as it will reduce you overall costs and give you MAXIMUM convenience. Once you get this all set up (you may want to visit the M.U.S.C.L.E. site if you're using Linux or Mac OS X or other un*x variants), go to your favorite free-cert provider like Thawte/Verisign. When you generate your keys, be certain to instruct your smart card to do the work. Next, configure your web-server (TiVO or Apache) to require client-side SSL authentication and specifically, your certificate. Viola! Two-factor authentication. In this case, your private key makes your smart card very unique (what you HAVE) and you should set a PIN on your smart card to protect it (what you KNOW). If you're really up for a project, add some biometric (what you ARE) card-authentication for 3-factor authentication.

Shlumberger, the company that made this survey, will be one of the companies to profit when the Gulf War ][ hits off.

They have a huge business in Oil extraction services and technologies.

These people are evil folks; but then, a company that employs agressive lobbying and spin tactics in order to turn a population into fleecable sheep (each ID card will cost over $25 per person in the UK, now thats what I call "Wool") can only be bad.

Dont worry, real scientists and programmers will be working on this, not pathetic amateurs or raving fanatics, so I suspect it will be able to handle it.

Although until it supports shitty console based text editors Im sure you wont be happy.

"3. I don't know about anyone else, but I *hate* Visual Studio, and I would more than rather use emacs and gcc to do my developing...."

I program for a living and for fun and any help that an ide can provide in making my job just a little easier is welcome. I would rather spend an hour reading a book, going for a walk or being with my girlfriend than breaking my wrist typing some obscure commands into emacs and feeling oh so 'leet'.

The whole 'I use vi and gcc in xterms' mentatility is why there are no good development environments on Linux or ever will be. Oh Im sure its nice to be stuck in the 70's, but to be honest I've got better things to be doing.

Get in touch with the Athens Olympic Committee or the company doing the IT for the next few games, SchlumbergerSema. The pay may not be great and you'll probably work your ass off while you're there, but you'll meet more people from all over the world than you could ever imagine. If you do it right, it's easy to set yourself up to work for future Olympics as well. After Athens, the next games are in Turin, Italy (2006) and Beijing, China (2008). I worked in IT for the Salt Lake games and I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. In fact, had I not decided to stay in the states to finish my CS degree, I would have moved on myself.

Reminds me of a cornstarch and water experiment we used to do. Mix it together and you get a weird substance that exhibits properties of solids and liquids. Try it if you're bored...

In college, inspired by one of the coolest professors ever, I wrote a java applet that simulated the mechanics of the Rayleigh Wave... wave propegation thru a solid material. Its basically a (WAY oversimplified) earthquake simulator. Here you go: http://filebox.vt.edu/users/brreed/Page1.htm most the source is here: http://filebox.vt.edu/users/brreed/src/ this project was my first java applet, first exposure to java 2d, and definately a big reason i left engineering for cs...

Schlumberger has a lot of stuff for Irix and Solaris and I think Linux.

Landmark sells an all-in-one product called "Openworks".

Do a bit of googling and you'll find lots of other companies offering GIS software for Unix. Most of my GIS experience is with Landmark's Openworks and Schlumberger's GeoQuest, which is why I mention them. I've dealt with about five other packages. This stuff tends to be rather pricey, but you can expect top-notch support from people who really grok the stuff. Lots of these companies will even send you an admin to work at your site full-time on keeping whatever package running smoothly.

It makes (at least) 6 months since SIM cards with java have been shipped to customer (in Europe).

So, it is already there in many phones and peoples already made some applets for them

• sun doc
• SIMagine contest

Intel uses testers from schlumberger (their reps are quick to point that out). Typically, a tester cost anywhere from 1-10 million dollars + plus they require a lot of maintenance, calibration, etc. Basically, the faster and more pins you need, the more it cost.

I've worked with some schlumbeger 'KX' testers, they're a big pain in the ass, unreliable, and are badly designed: just shutting the thing off can break it!! (especially if you use the emergency off button).

There is another choice, however, you can use 'bist'(built-in self test) and have the chip basically test itself :-). This allows companies to get away with using cheaper, more reliable testers.

The capabilities range from simple memory storage cards (3KB to 16KB), which are a high tech equalivant of the magnetic stripe on "swipe cards" to high end crypto processors which are tamper resistant and/or tamper evident. These crypto cards can generate a private key that never leaves the card, and can securely performing digitial signind decryption using the private key. Such cards typically support DES, Triple DES, RSA 512-1024 bit and SHA-1. E.g. CryptoFlex from Schlumberger, Gemplus Public Key

Smart cards are already far more common in Europe, are used in satellite TV, Mondex (an electronic wallet scheme that never seems to get off the ground), and in a different form factor, the SIM cards of GSM mobile phones are smart cards. Because of Sat-TV, Pay-TV, and GSM phones there are hundreds of millions of smart cards in use today.

There is also Linux support via MUSCLE which supports the PC/SC API made popular under Windows, and most vendors support.

I work for a smart-card solutions company in India and was the technical lead for a team that wrote software for India's largest installation of smart-cards which in India is larger than most credit cards. I have also been asked to present my views in front of RBI (India's fedral bank) sponsered committee to create standards for smart-card use in the country. Coming to technical details, a smart card basically acts like a secure computer with a secure filesystem and operating system of its own. It exposes a limited set of "system calls" that you can call from inside your program which are supposed to be secure (at least in theory). For example, the system calls may allow you to "write" a private key to a "file" in smart card froma program but having once written the private key you are not allowed to modify or read it back. There will be a seprate set of "system calls" that will allow you to decrypt or sign messages using this key however (after giving one or more PIN(s)). As a card is small and can be easily hidden or transported under rugged enviroments this allows a very secure and convenient place to keep critical private keys. Such cards are commercially available and are programmable from Windows and Java (A free linux version in C is being done by MUSCLE guys). There is nothing more or nothing less to smartcard technology. As you can imagine one can leverage this simple use and storage of assymetric (and also symetric) keys to design wonderful credit-card (or other financial) solutions that can provide almost complete privacy and fraud-control. However,it is not technology but the corporates and government which are limiting the use of smart cards. For example, in India a large number of people (especially with money from dubious sources) used to spend by buying stored value smart cards which were available off the counter for cash. Till income-tax department decided to make it compulsory to record identification details for each such transaction. One can argue that it was a blow to privacy but does the govt has an option in front of brazen money laundry? This is not bound to change any time in near future. As soon as you make financial transactions anonymous, guys who got "bad money" get in and start using the system for their own laundry. However, fraud-control is on everybody's list and one should expect VISA and MasterCard to move in this direction. As somebody else pointed out, there is a lot of investment done by merchants and banks in current terminals and rest of the credit-card infrastructure so one should not expect new technology to come out overnight. however, over next 5-10 years I would expect a lot more credit cards to be chip-based with at least PIN protection on them

TWINKLE - The Weizmann INstitute's Key Locating Engine

You people need to learn about smartcards. Start at Schlumberger and Litronic (they have a good intro to smartcards.) and go from there. The people at ZeitControl have this cool programmable card that you should look into.

Disclaimer: Although I work for one of the biggest smart card makers in the world and the inventor of Java Card (Java on smart card), as far as I know AmEx is not using our cards.

As for Blue, Frost and Sullivan's analysis is a good place to start. Personally, I think it is a good thing: get consumers used to idea of smart cards and making everything free at first really helps. And if they use Java Card based smart card, they'll be able to roll out new features in the future. Besides, free card, free reader and 0% APR are hard to beat (unless they start cutting checks, I guess). At least I've applied for the Blue card.

Linux support probably can be found at: http://www.linuxnet.com/ (I say probably because AmEX is highly likely to use one of the well known readers, much of them supported by MUSCLE project)

As for security: much of the first 40 posting I've read are either wrong or misinformed. I'd recommed that you read some smart card introduction before posting here:

Smart card industry association: http://www.scia.org/

Smart card forum: http://www.smartcrd.com/

Java Card (but lots of general smart card info) http://members.xoom.com/javacard/

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More misc.: AmEx are working on a web page: www.blueamex.com (www.blueamex.net, too)

Danny (shameless ad: Java Card was invented here: www.cyberflex.slb.com)

Disclaimer: Although I work for one of the biggest smart card makers in the world and the inventor of Java Card (Java on smart card), as far as I know AmEx is not using our cards.

As for Blue, Frost and Sullivan's analysis is a good place to start. Personally, I think it is a good thing: get consumers used to idea of smart cards and making everything free at first really helps. And if they use Java Card based smart card, they'll be able to roll out new features in the future. Besides, free card, free reader and 0% APR are hard to beat (unless they start cutting checks, I guess). At least I've applied for the Blue card.

Linux support probably can be found at: http://www.linuxnet.com/ (I say probably because AmEX is highly likely to use one of the well known readers, much of them supported by MUSCLE project)

As for security: much of the first 40 posting I've read are either wrong or misinformed. I'd recommed that you read some smart card introduction before posting here:

Smart card industry association: http://www.scia.org/

Smart card forum: http://www.smartcrd.com/

Java Card (but lots of general smart card info) http://members.xoom.com/javacard/

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More misc.: AmEx are working on a web page: www.blueamex.com (www.blueamex.net, too)

Danny (shameless ad: Java Card was invented here: www.cyberflex.slb.com)

Even better than PIN codes, how about biometric info. Take a look Cryptoflex from Schlumberger for some funky examples...

Even better than PIN codes, how about biometric info. Take a look Cryptoflex from Schlumberger for some funky examples...