A business owner doesn't look at a person who does five tasks and say "I will replace your entire 40-hour-per-week job with one robot that does all five of your tasks." They look at the tasks they need done, the labor expense spent on each of those tasks, and say "I will automate the tasks that I can, and cut payroll hours accordingly."
If you needed four full-time employees to work your greenhouse yesterday, and it took a total of 20 hours per week to move pots, you now only need three full-time employees, one part-timer for 20 hours, plus a robot.
Later, once fertilizer robots are available, you take another look at your time spent fertilizing. If it takes you another 20 hours, and you can buy a fertilizer robot to do it, you reduce the head count to three employees plus two robots. Alternately, you can keep everyone on staff, but cut all their hours to 30 hours per week, (and drop all their benefits because they're now part-time.)
Of course, the laborers who have had their hours cut and their benefits dropped will have little incentive to make tasks easy for the robots. "Oh, sorry, the hose leaks and sometimes it makes those big mud puddles, and I guess the robot just got stuck." "You know, those sensors always seem to get plugged up with grass clippings." And finally, "We stopped using the robots because they weren't very reliable, what with all the traction problems and sensor failures."
Please tell that to the many millions of people that bought apps for the Nokia Feature Phones, who used the Ovi store, etc. Nokia did very well in making money using Feature Phones for quite a while.
Of course they did, and I never claimed otherwise. Nokia made money by the truck-full off of feature phones back in the 1990s and early 2000s. But those massive profits completely dried up five years ago. Nokia kept on making feature phones even after the cheap clone phones came out, and suddenly found they had to compete on price alone against a product that was perhaps $20.00 cheaper than their product. If your profit margin drops from $20.00 dollars per phone to $0.50 per phone, you have to run your very expensive factories for 40 times longer just to make the same amount of money you used to. You then have to try to sell 40 times as many phones to customers - but most of them would really rather have iPhones or Androids.
Stockholders see that as "devaluation" and sell their shares. That means you have even less money to keep those expensive factories and salesmen working.
The world changed, but Nokia didn't keep up. They made a deal with Microsoft and produced some really nice phones, but the marketplace has mostly ignored them as a Johnny-come-lately to the smartphone party.
Feature phones make alot of money and are stepping stone to smartphones.
Wrong. Feature phones make no money. About five years ago, a Chinese foundry released a cheap phone chipset enabling anyone to make feature phones for very low cost. Chinese factories can emit simple phones by the tens of thousands per shift for a few dollars each, and they became a commodity. Competition can't raise the price, so the only way to make money is through volume. And that benefits only factories.
Yeah, I'm not trying to argue the complete AGW case here. I'm simply stating that the scientist who linked them (and who was later smeared for it) is backed by a large body of valid, peer-reviewed research. The anti-vaccine crowd, on the other hand, started with a set of scary stories ignited by non-coincidental timing of unrelated events, fueled by ignorance, and the flames were fanned by a stupid actress. They grew more "believers" because the various right-wing political aspirants, television talking heads, and religious figures, were all looking to galvanize attention and support by capitalizing on the unfounded fears of their predictably gullible base, and the entire group rallied around a single completely fraudulent study by a "researcher" attempting to profiteer from their ignorance.
For the GP to claim that the climate scientist and the anti-vaccine "researcher" are even remotely similar is far beyond a simple mistake. It can only be a deliberate lie.
Let's start debunking the vaccine myths with a few important facts. The recommended age of the first round of MMR vaccinations is between 12-15 months of age. It's also true that some children will react to the MMR vaccine by showing a mild fever, with a lower percentage developing a rash, swollen glands, etc. Some unlucky few will go on to develop a serious illness. But the simple truth is that side effects occur in 1 out of 5 children who are vaccinated.
Next, it's important to know there's no serum or blood test that can identify autism. Diagnosis starts when a parent suspects a child's behavior isn't "normal." There's a checklist of autistic behaviors in toddlers that a professional observes and evaluates. But the important prerequisite is the child has to be old enough to express those behaviors. Depending on the child, they become mature enough to evaluate somewhere between 18-24 months of age.
Because of this coincidental timing, it stands to reason that most children who are diagnosed with autism are diagnosed within a few months after their MMR vaccination. And 20% of those children will have experienced some side effects from the vaccine. To a worried parent, the two might be seen as related. To a very worried parent who hears a congresswoman, a random movie star, and their pastor all shouting "Vaccines cause Autism!", it becomes a terrifying reality.
Autism is a tragedy for the family, no doubt. But some parents want to blame an accident for injuring their child so they can have someone to sue. And frankly no amount of scientific evidence would convince the soon-to-be-rich parents of those children that their autism wasn't caused by the vaccinations.
So now that we've established that certain people are susceptible to believing this coincidence, and some have strong financial motives for purporting to believe it, it's not hard to get people claiming that vaccines are a part of a "pharmaceutical company conspiracy and government coverup". What went from a common coincidence involving a tragic illness was retold as a gripping story that strikes fear in the hearts of parents. Scary stories are very powerful, and they tend to stick with us. This fear was exploited by an unethical researcher wanting to cash in on the craze. He was later exposed and denounced, and he was the only scientist claiming that such a connection existed. There simply aren't any valid studies showing a connection; just anecdotes from sad parents and unqualified public figures. But the stories continues to be retold because of their scary nature.
The facts of global climate change, however, are backed by many independent studies, including global average temperatures, changes in weather patterns, and the rapidly shrinking polar ice caps. The global measurements of steadily rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are beyond dispute. The stolen emails of a research organization who linked the two were used in a smear campaign, yet even after the attack their studies were not repudiated. There is simply no comparison between them and a fraud trying to cash in on tragedy, suffering, and stupidity.
Why would anyone go to a church for medical advice anyway?
A couple thousand years ago when their book was written, it was a useful document to run a society. It was used to bind followers under a common religion, sure, but it included diverse topics ranging from a code of laws regarding behavior through history, economics, and plausible-enough explanations of natural phenomena.
It also contains a few sentences of health information. These include lists of what to eat and what not to eat, and how to keep a kosher kitchen, which was a somewhat practical way of avoiding contamination and sickness. Other medical advice included the idea of quarantining a leper and burning his clothes and possessions, and to wash in running water after coming in contact with a dead body. Hyssop was a biblical era cleansing agent, which is not a bad choice for a plant recognized today for its antiseptic properties.
So because it offers a few words on the topic, that provides enough "authority" for the preacher to talk about it. And what a preacher says on the subject will be taken seriously by ardent followers.
No one is ever perfect. No one ever has clean hands. Yet if we use that as an excuse to never change anything, nothing will ever be improved.
The people who like to hang on to 600 year old religious, racial, or tribal arguments as an excuse to continue war are the people who fuel the conflicts. They never solve them. They're toxic.
Discovery credit often goes to the first person to successfully exploit the thing discovered. People make similar claims about the first airplane to fly, yet it was the Wrights who both flew early AND created the Wright Company to capitalize on their new invention -- therefore they get the lion's share of the credit. There are strong arguments to be made for Mozhaysky, Ader, Maxim, and others to have beaten the Wrights to be the first to fly a heavier-than-air craft, yet they didn't "get off the ground", so to speak.
So did the Vikings or Portugese establish trade with the Americas? Did they bring back bars of silver or gold, or native American artifacts? Make maps or ostrich-egg globes? Were they celebrated with parades upon their return, something that others emulated and wrote about? Even if they were the first to arrive on the shores, nothing happened as a result.
In other words, "history is written by the winners."
No, spying has been an illegal but ongoing act of governments everywhere, and has been true across history. It's unethical, highly offensive, unjustifiably immoral, and dangerous to the agent if you act on the knowledge gained, but it's not an act of war.
The primary differences between the NSA and all other spying is that they have essentially unlimited resources, technology, and personnel to throw at it, and they are very, very good at it.
Where the NSA is lacking, though, is with actual infiltration. They have no agents hiding inside every possible organization. They are instead performing their spying on the communications that the other people are using. It's cheaper, easier, more reliable, and more "politically acceptable" to tap conversations. It's expensive, difficult, and unreliable to have a source reporting from within the organization, and it's politically unpalatable when an agent is discovered and killed or tortured for their treason.
Typically, infiltration has been the job of the CIA and similar spy agencies in other countries, but their historic mission has been to infiltrate an entire nation-state. Nations are easier to spy on because the attack surface is large, and they can get useful benefits from spies anywhere in the government, military, or police. It's much harder to infiltrate a religious or tribal clan, where it's a smaller group where everyone is personally known to the others.
Where it gets dodgy, though, is not in the passive (or even aggressive) monitoring. It's when the monitors begin injecting their own information in order to influence the behavior of others. It's obviously one thing to overhear a voice on the radio saying "we'll meet at the ABC building on Thursday," but a completely different thing to alter the voice on the radio to say "let's meet at the 123 building on Thursday" to lead them into an ambush. Deploying an agent provocateur can indeed be an act of war, even via the proxy of communications.
A better analogy would be a case of an actual bank burglar. There was a guy (many decades ago) who found a way to set off a specific burglar alarm sensor at a local bank. Every night at 2:00 AM or so he would do whatever it was to trip the alarm, then quickly sneak away. He'd watch the cops arrive, shine their flashlights around, find nothing, then leave. After repeating this pattern for a couple of weeks, the cops stopped showing up after the alarm was tripped. He then broke into the bank.
Look at it another way: Maybe these are banks that haven't wasted a lot of investor funds on computer security, and instead saved that money and loaned out those funds to turn a bigger profit. Maybe they made more money over the years through loans than they lost in the theft?
Let's say that $45 million would be the profit on about a billion dollars in loans (a very rough approximation, but good enough for this analysis.) Suppose that billion was spread out over a decade. They had to have saved more than $100 million dollars every year on computer security, which is highly unlikely. I guess these banks simply failed at security.
I'm looking at it from the other side. I think of these visual languages as nothing but abstractions, done at a layer so high that they can make it hard to define your problem with enough precision to do the job well. Additionally, because they are so many layers removed from the hardware (often hiding behind a network interface as well as thick layers of XAML, DOM parsers, WPF, IL, bytecode, frameworks, OS APIs, libraries, and HALs), performance either suffers or you're forcing your users to spend extra dollars on a CPU, RAM, and power to make up for your reliance on abstractions.
Why was it a "horrible" experience? Did filemaker pro somehow fill your crankcase with 90 weight grease and wreck your engine? Did the DOS program spray poop-scented air freshener beneath your seat?
Or did you just see someone using an old DOS program that's doing exactly what the business owner needs without costing him a ton of money? Doesn't sound too horrible to me.
The point was crystal clear: the friend of my enemy will get no end of crap thrown at them. The Grauniad can expect more such visits in the future, as well as any other news organization who dares publish That Which Must Not Be Published.
FYI, "official" inkjet ink from the manufacturer is crazy expensive regardless of the volume. A 700ml cartridge for a large format Canon printer is $300.00 A 15ml cartridge for a home printer is $25. Other negatives of inkjet in this application would include the high humidity. Inkjet ink is water soluble, and won't fare well in a damp environment. While some of their offices might have a climate controlled environment, most of their clients wont be living in such conditions. If they have to carry the paperwork around with them, it's going to get spoiled quickly.
I agree that direct thermal printing would be a poor choice, especially if the paper can be exposed to sunlight, but thermal transfer printing is very stable. Many of the Zebra models and all of the Dymo label printers use thermal transfer, so they'd be a possibility for specimen labeling. Unfortunately, none of those are page printers.
One possibility that my clinic used for a long time was to have a stack of blank pre-printed forms, then they printed a dozen labels on a Zebra printer during admission. They stuck a label on each copy of the form they handed out, and the excess stickers traveled with the paperwork as the clients moved through the clinic. That way the doctor could stick one on his order to X-ray, the X-ray technician could stick one on the X-ray film, the lab could stick one on the samples, etc. They only used the small label printer and took care of the rest with a pencil. That might work for this need.
Dot matrix is so slow that carbon copies may be cheaper or faster than printing a second copy. It may also be important if you need the carbon copy for hand-written notes or signatures.
If the card data was captured from a skimmer (and is not simply an account number and expiration date), then the data the criminal encodes on the track is identical to the real mag stripe, including the card's CVV1 found in the discretionary data field of the mag stripe. Having the cashier re-enter the last four digits is one way that some stores use to catch people attempting this fraud. But it all depends on the Point of Sale software in use, and how the store authorizes their credit transactions. There isn't one fixed way to accept credit that every retailer follows identically.
You can erase and re-encode a different account number on an old mag stripe card. You may have noticed some stores have the cashier manually enter the last four digits of the credit card to prevent against this kind of fraud.
For a swipe-it-yourself terminal where the cashier doesn't see or handle the card, the bad guys can use any old card with a mag stripe. Some thieves have been known to reuse old gift cards. At least one scammer glued old VCR tape to cardboard squares and hand-wrote the PIN on the face of the cardboard as he encoded them. He then stood in front of an ATM with a stack of disposable cards, feeding them in one after another to rapidly tap as many accounts as he could.
Oh, and the entire article is wrong by three orders of magnitude. ONE credit card account number can go for between $2.00 - $40.00, based on the type of account and quality of numbers (the percent that will work.) ONE THOUSAND Instagram followers goes for $15.00. That's $0.015 for each fake follower. That's comparable to the going rate for bogus Twitter accounts ($0.02 - $0.10 each), Yahoo email accounts ($0.01 each), or Hotmail accounts ($0.012 each.) Gmail accounts are harder to dynamically create, perceived as spam-resistant, and therefore more valuable to bad guys, and go for $0.20 each.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is drinking more than four cups of coffee per day.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD coffee consumption has risen yet again, now over more than 4 cups a day. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has drunk more coffee, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is drinking pots of coffee every day.
You don't need to be a Juan Valdez to predict *BSD's future. The kettle is on the stove: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is drinking too much coffee. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to drink coffee. Coffee flows like a river of coffee.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having drunk more than a pot a day for years. The unwashed cups on the desks of long time FreeBSD developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is drinking coffee.
Slashdot Mirror
A business owner doesn't look at a person who does five tasks and say "I will replace your entire 40-hour-per-week job with one robot that does all five of your tasks." They look at the tasks they need done, the labor expense spent on each of those tasks, and say "I will automate the tasks that I can, and cut payroll hours accordingly."
If you needed four full-time employees to work your greenhouse yesterday, and it took a total of 20 hours per week to move pots, you now only need three full-time employees, one part-timer for 20 hours, plus a robot.
Later, once fertilizer robots are available, you take another look at your time spent fertilizing. If it takes you another 20 hours, and you can buy a fertilizer robot to do it, you reduce the head count to three employees plus two robots. Alternately, you can keep everyone on staff, but cut all their hours to 30 hours per week, (and drop all their benefits because they're now part-time.)
Of course, the laborers who have had their hours cut and their benefits dropped will have little incentive to make tasks easy for the robots. "Oh, sorry, the hose leaks and sometimes it makes those big mud puddles, and I guess the robot just got stuck." "You know, those sensors always seem to get plugged up with grass clippings." And finally, "We stopped using the robots because they weren't very reliable, what with all the traction problems and sensor failures."
When I saw the video of them scurrying about with their front facing pot pincers, all I could think of was a Pixar-like voice saying "Bare-E".
If the world wasn't this hospitable, life would never have evolved.
That's a load of crap, what about life forms on earth that thrive in 500+ degree underwater volcanic vents?
I'd say "they're not up here posting on Slashdot", but with some of the commenters I'm not sure that's completely true.
Please tell that to the many millions of people that bought apps for the Nokia Feature Phones, who used the Ovi store, etc.
Nokia did very well in making money using Feature Phones for quite a while.
Of course they did, and I never claimed otherwise. Nokia made money by the truck-full off of feature phones back in the 1990s and early 2000s. But those massive profits completely dried up five years ago. Nokia kept on making feature phones even after the cheap clone phones came out, and suddenly found they had to compete on price alone against a product that was perhaps $20.00 cheaper than their product. If your profit margin drops from $20.00 dollars per phone to $0.50 per phone, you have to run your very expensive factories for 40 times longer just to make the same amount of money you used to. You then have to try to sell 40 times as many phones to customers - but most of them would really rather have iPhones or Androids.
Stockholders see that as "devaluation" and sell their shares. That means you have even less money to keep those expensive factories and salesmen working.
The world changed, but Nokia didn't keep up. They made a deal with Microsoft and produced some really nice phones, but the marketplace has mostly ignored them as a Johnny-come-lately to the smartphone party.
Feature phones make alot of money and are stepping stone to smartphones.
Wrong. Feature phones make no money. About five years ago, a Chinese foundry released a cheap phone chipset enabling anyone to make feature phones for very low cost. Chinese factories can emit simple phones by the tens of thousands per shift for a few dollars each, and they became a commodity. Competition can't raise the price, so the only way to make money is through volume. And that benefits only factories.
Inconvenience, perhaps. Inability to fill the retina display with enough pixels, maybe. But "harm"? I think some perspective is askew here.
Yeah, I'm not trying to argue the complete AGW case here. I'm simply stating that the scientist who linked them (and who was later smeared for it) is backed by a large body of valid, peer-reviewed research. The anti-vaccine crowd, on the other hand, started with a set of scary stories ignited by non-coincidental timing of unrelated events, fueled by ignorance, and the flames were fanned by a stupid actress. They grew more "believers" because the various right-wing political aspirants, television talking heads, and religious figures, were all looking to galvanize attention and support by capitalizing on the unfounded fears of their predictably gullible base, and the entire group rallied around a single completely fraudulent study by a "researcher" attempting to profiteer from their ignorance.
For the GP to claim that the climate scientist and the anti-vaccine "researcher" are even remotely similar is far beyond a simple mistake. It can only be a deliberate lie.
It's actually not that hard to understand.
Let's start debunking the vaccine myths with a few important facts. The recommended age of the first round of MMR vaccinations is between 12-15 months of age. It's also true that some children will react to the MMR vaccine by showing a mild fever, with a lower percentage developing a rash, swollen glands, etc. Some unlucky few will go on to develop a serious illness. But the simple truth is that side effects occur in 1 out of 5 children who are vaccinated.
Next, it's important to know there's no serum or blood test that can identify autism. Diagnosis starts when a parent suspects a child's behavior isn't "normal." There's a checklist of autistic behaviors in toddlers that a professional observes and evaluates. But the important prerequisite is the child has to be old enough to express those behaviors. Depending on the child, they become mature enough to evaluate somewhere between 18-24 months of age.
Because of this coincidental timing, it stands to reason that most children who are diagnosed with autism are diagnosed within a few months after their MMR vaccination. And 20% of those children will have experienced some side effects from the vaccine. To a worried parent, the two might be seen as related. To a very worried parent who hears a congresswoman, a random movie star, and their pastor all shouting "Vaccines cause Autism!", it becomes a terrifying reality.
Autism is a tragedy for the family, no doubt. But some parents want to blame an accident for injuring their child so they can have someone to sue. And frankly no amount of scientific evidence would convince the soon-to-be-rich parents of those children that their autism wasn't caused by the vaccinations.
So now that we've established that certain people are susceptible to believing this coincidence, and some have strong financial motives for purporting to believe it, it's not hard to get people claiming that vaccines are a part of a "pharmaceutical company conspiracy and government coverup". What went from a common coincidence involving a tragic illness was retold as a gripping story that strikes fear in the hearts of parents. Scary stories are very powerful, and they tend to stick with us. This fear was exploited by an unethical researcher wanting to cash in on the craze. He was later exposed and denounced, and he was the only scientist claiming that such a connection existed. There simply aren't any valid studies showing a connection; just anecdotes from sad parents and unqualified public figures. But the stories continues to be retold because of their scary nature.
The facts of global climate change, however, are backed by many independent studies, including global average temperatures, changes in weather patterns, and the rapidly shrinking polar ice caps. The global measurements of steadily rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are beyond dispute. The stolen emails of a research organization who linked the two were used in a smear campaign, yet even after the attack their studies were not repudiated. There is simply no comparison between them and a fraud trying to cash in on tragedy, suffering, and stupidity.
and puts others in jeopardy.
[BZZZZT]. "Alex, I'll take Communicable Diseases for $500."
"The answer is: The Eagle Mountain International Church."
Why would anyone go to a church for medical advice anyway?
A couple thousand years ago when their book was written, it was a useful document to run a society. It was used to bind followers under a common religion, sure, but it included diverse topics ranging from a code of laws regarding behavior through history, economics, and plausible-enough explanations of natural phenomena.
It also contains a few sentences of health information. These include lists of what to eat and what not to eat, and how to keep a kosher kitchen, which was a somewhat practical way of avoiding contamination and sickness. Other medical advice included the idea of quarantining a leper and burning his clothes and possessions, and to wash in running water after coming in contact with a dead body. Hyssop was a biblical era cleansing agent, which is not a bad choice for a plant recognized today for its antiseptic properties.
So because it offers a few words on the topic, that provides enough "authority" for the preacher to talk about it. And what a preacher says on the subject will be taken seriously by ardent followers.
"Never gonna roll your windows up,
Never gonna put your top down,
Never gonna run your battery down, or desert you."
I said excuse, not cause. And I listed two other common excuses, and never claimed any to be a sole cause.
You are a troll, neither cute nor naive.
No one is ever perfect. No one ever has clean hands. Yet if we use that as an excuse to never change anything, nothing will ever be improved.
The people who like to hang on to 600 year old religious, racial, or tribal arguments as an excuse to continue war are the people who fuel the conflicts. They never solve them. They're toxic.
Discovery credit often goes to the first person to successfully exploit the thing discovered. People make similar claims about the first airplane to fly, yet it was the Wrights who both flew early AND created the Wright Company to capitalize on their new invention -- therefore they get the lion's share of the credit. There are strong arguments to be made for Mozhaysky, Ader, Maxim, and others to have beaten the Wrights to be the first to fly a heavier-than-air craft, yet they didn't "get off the ground", so to speak.
So did the Vikings or Portugese establish trade with the Americas? Did they bring back bars of silver or gold, or native American artifacts? Make maps or ostrich-egg globes? Were they celebrated with parades upon their return, something that others emulated and wrote about? Even if they were the first to arrive on the shores, nothing happened as a result.
In other words, "history is written by the winners."
Spying is an act of WAR.
No, spying has been an illegal but ongoing act of governments everywhere, and has been true across history. It's unethical, highly offensive, unjustifiably immoral, and dangerous to the agent if you act on the knowledge gained, but it's not an act of war.
The primary differences between the NSA and all other spying is that they have essentially unlimited resources, technology, and personnel to throw at it, and they are very, very good at it.
Where the NSA is lacking, though, is with actual infiltration. They have no agents hiding inside every possible organization. They are instead performing their spying on the communications that the other people are using. It's cheaper, easier, more reliable, and more "politically acceptable" to tap conversations. It's expensive, difficult, and unreliable to have a source reporting from within the organization, and it's politically unpalatable when an agent is discovered and killed or tortured for their treason.
Typically, infiltration has been the job of the CIA and similar spy agencies in other countries, but their historic mission has been to infiltrate an entire nation-state. Nations are easier to spy on because the attack surface is large, and they can get useful benefits from spies anywhere in the government, military, or police. It's much harder to infiltrate a religious or tribal clan, where it's a smaller group where everyone is personally known to the others.
Where it gets dodgy, though, is not in the passive (or even aggressive) monitoring. It's when the monitors begin injecting their own information in order to influence the behavior of others. It's obviously one thing to overhear a voice on the radio saying "we'll meet at the ABC building on Thursday," but a completely different thing to alter the voice on the radio to say "let's meet at the 123 building on Thursday" to lead them into an ambush. Deploying an agent provocateur can indeed be an act of war, even via the proxy of communications.
A better analogy would be a case of an actual bank burglar. There was a guy (many decades ago) who found a way to set off a specific burglar alarm sensor at a local bank. Every night at 2:00 AM or so he would do whatever it was to trip the alarm, then quickly sneak away. He'd watch the cops arrive, shine their flashlights around, find nothing, then leave. After repeating this pattern for a couple of weeks, the cops stopped showing up after the alarm was tripped. He then broke into the bank.
Look at it another way: Maybe these are banks that haven't wasted a lot of investor funds on computer security, and instead saved that money and loaned out those funds to turn a bigger profit. Maybe they made more money over the years through loans than they lost in the theft?
Let's say that $45 million would be the profit on about a billion dollars in loans (a very rough approximation, but good enough for this analysis.) Suppose that billion was spread out over a decade. They had to have saved more than $100 million dollars every year on computer security, which is highly unlikely. I guess these banks simply failed at security.
I'm looking at it from the other side. I think of these visual languages as nothing but abstractions, done at a layer so high that they can make it hard to define your problem with enough precision to do the job well. Additionally, because they are so many layers removed from the hardware (often hiding behind a network interface as well as thick layers of XAML, DOM parsers, WPF, IL, bytecode, frameworks, OS APIs, libraries, and HALs), performance either suffers or you're forcing your users to spend extra dollars on a CPU, RAM, and power to make up for your reliance on abstractions.
Why was it a "horrible" experience? Did filemaker pro somehow fill your crankcase with 90 weight grease and wreck your engine? Did the DOS program spray poop-scented air freshener beneath your seat?
Or did you just see someone using an old DOS program that's doing exactly what the business owner needs without costing him a ton of money? Doesn't sound too horrible to me.
The point was crystal clear: the friend of my enemy will get no end of crap thrown at them. The Grauniad can expect more such visits in the future, as well as any other news organization who dares publish That Which Must Not Be Published.
FYI, "official" inkjet ink from the manufacturer is crazy expensive regardless of the volume. A 700ml cartridge for a large format Canon printer is $300.00 A 15ml cartridge for a home printer is $25. Other negatives of inkjet in this application would include the high humidity. Inkjet ink is water soluble, and won't fare well in a damp environment. While some of their offices might have a climate controlled environment, most of their clients wont be living in such conditions. If they have to carry the paperwork around with them, it's going to get spoiled quickly.
I agree that direct thermal printing would be a poor choice, especially if the paper can be exposed to sunlight, but thermal transfer printing is very stable. Many of the Zebra models and all of the Dymo label printers use thermal transfer, so they'd be a possibility for specimen labeling. Unfortunately, none of those are page printers.
One possibility that my clinic used for a long time was to have a stack of blank pre-printed forms, then they printed a dozen labels on a Zebra printer during admission. They stuck a label on each copy of the form they handed out, and the excess stickers traveled with the paperwork as the clients moved through the clinic. That way the doctor could stick one on his order to X-ray, the X-ray technician could stick one on the X-ray film, the lab could stick one on the samples, etc. They only used the small label printer and took care of the rest with a pencil. That might work for this need.
Dot matrix is so slow that carbon copies may be cheaper or faster than printing a second copy. It may also be important if you need the carbon copy for hand-written notes or signatures.
If the card data was captured from a skimmer (and is not simply an account number and expiration date), then the data the criminal encodes on the track is identical to the real mag stripe, including the card's CVV1 found in the discretionary data field of the mag stripe. Having the cashier re-enter the last four digits is one way that some stores use to catch people attempting this fraud. But it all depends on the Point of Sale software in use, and how the store authorizes their credit transactions. There isn't one fixed way to accept credit that every retailer follows identically.
You can erase and re-encode a different account number on an old mag stripe card. You may have noticed some stores have the cashier manually enter the last four digits of the credit card to prevent against this kind of fraud.
For a swipe-it-yourself terminal where the cashier doesn't see or handle the card, the bad guys can use any old card with a mag stripe. Some thieves have been known to reuse old gift cards. At least one scammer glued old VCR tape to cardboard squares and hand-wrote the PIN on the face of the cardboard as he encoded them. He then stood in front of an ATM with a stack of disposable cards, feeding them in one after another to rapidly tap as many accounts as he could.
Oh, and the entire article is wrong by three orders of magnitude. ONE credit card account number can go for between $2.00 - $40.00, based on the type of account and quality of numbers (the percent that will work.) ONE THOUSAND Instagram followers goes for $15.00. That's $0.015 for each fake follower. That's comparable to the going rate for bogus Twitter accounts ($0.02 - $0.10 each), Yahoo email accounts ($0.01 each), or Hotmail accounts ($0.012 each.) Gmail accounts are harder to dynamically create, perceived as spam-resistant, and therefore more valuable to bad guys, and go for $0.20 each.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is drinking more than four cups of coffee per day.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD coffee consumption has risen yet again, now over more than 4 cups a day. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has drunk more coffee, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is drinking pots of coffee every day.
You don't need to be a Juan Valdez to predict *BSD's future. The kettle is on the stove: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is drinking too much coffee. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to drink coffee. Coffee flows like a river of coffee.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having drunk more than a pot a day for years. The unwashed cups on the desks of long time FreeBSD developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is drinking coffee.
Fact: *BSD drinks excessive amounts of coffee.