Sometimes we forget how medieval the US banking system is. Then something like this comes around.
Every major bank in South Africa has offered cardless ATM services for so long I can't even say for sure when the last one came online. But the first seems to have been by 2008 at the latest.
I use it at least once a month to pay a casual worker who has no bank account. It has also saved my bacon when I forgot my wallet (but not cellphone with banking app) at home. And I've employed it twice when I suspected card skimmers had been attached to the ATM I wanted to use.
Never had any hassle with it. Never heard of any either.
But if you don't mind the extra space for the equipment, solar thermal is the way to go.
Apparently so. There's a reference here to KaXu Solar One, 1km square made up of 120 parabolic troughs "delivering up to 100MW". And it seems that storage after sunset is baked in, with the promise that rocks will do it cheaper than molten salt.
More detail at the (South African) Mail & Guardian, published a couple of days before that Guardian piece, which confirms the intelligence is built into each unit.
"The heliostats are effectively smart robots that 'know the angle between the sun and the tower, depending on the time of day, and know where the sun is with respect to the tower. They each know this independently'".
Sorry, spaceman, Aishwarya Rai isn't for sale, not even in return for FTL or access to the galactic data net. But if you're in the market for a slightly used Britney Spears mebbe we can talk...
I was a telecommunications journalist in South Africa during SBCs tenure, and I have to say things are a bit more nuanced than they may seem. SBC wasn't all bad.
In fact, it did South Africa a couple of favours. When it took up shareholding Telkom was a bureaucratic nightmare. Its technology was 18th century. I grew up with manual exchange telephones - the type where you wind a handle to reach an operator. And this up to the mid-90s.
Today we have a sophisticated ATM network with multiple national redundancy. Telkom has mature product offerings. The intelligent network initiated under SBC managers is a thing of beauty. Also, the company has a fantastic legal department;-)
Oh, there are many things wrong, and I have called for the heads of government ministers (and Jim Meyers, funnily enough) myself. The last mile is a mess, because Telkom wouldn't spend on it.
But SBC did some good. Did South Africa overpay for that? Absolutely. But it's not like we received nothing in return.
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Sometimes we forget how medieval the US banking system is. Then something like this comes around.
Every major bank in South Africa has offered cardless ATM services for so long I can't even say for sure when the last one came online. But the first seems to have been by 2008 at the latest.
I use it at least once a month to pay a casual worker who has no bank account. It has also saved my bacon when I forgot my wallet (but not cellphone with banking app) at home. And I've employed it twice when I suspected card skimmers had been attached to the ATM I wanted to use.
Never had any hassle with it. Never heard of any either.
Apparently so. There's a reference here to KaXu Solar One, 1km square made up of 120 parabolic troughs "delivering up to 100MW". And it seems that storage after sunset is baked in, with the promise that rocks will do it cheaper than molten salt.
More detail at the (South African) Mail & Guardian, published a couple of days before that Guardian piece, which confirms the intelligence is built into each unit.
"The heliostats are effectively smart robots that 'know the angle between the sun and the tower, depending on the time of day, and know where the sun is with respect to the tower. They each know this independently'".
Sorry, spaceman, Aishwarya Rai isn't for sale, not even in return for FTL or access to the galactic data net. But if you're in the market for a slightly used Britney Spears mebbe we can talk...
I was a telecommunications journalist in South Africa during SBCs tenure, and I have to say things are a bit more nuanced than they may seem. SBC wasn't all bad.
;-)
In fact, it did South Africa a couple of favours. When it took up shareholding Telkom was a bureaucratic nightmare. Its technology was 18th century. I grew up with manual exchange telephones - the type where you wind a handle to reach an operator. And this up to the mid-90s.
Today we have a sophisticated ATM network with multiple national redundancy. Telkom has mature product offerings. The intelligent network initiated under SBC managers is a thing of beauty. Also, the company has a fantastic legal department
Oh, there are many things wrong, and I have called for the heads of government ministers (and Jim Meyers, funnily enough) myself. The last mile is a mess, because Telkom wouldn't spend on it.
But SBC did some good. Did South Africa overpay for that? Absolutely. But it's not like we received nothing in return.