People that don't want to give any money to a cable company and want to give as little money as possible to the AT&T monopoly, and would rather have their money go to a friendly CLEC. I gave up my 50mbit Comcast cable internet connection for a 14mbit DSL connection because several times a week, packet loss would go through the roof and throughput would slow to a crawl on the Comcast connection, while the DSL provider has been rock solid.
is only a matter of infecting a computer inside the network.
Not even that. If dicking around with the port caused a hard reset of the router, who knows what would happen if you got someone to click on this link. (or set it as an img tag for automatic fun)
I think that's a bad link. Every time I click on it, I can't reach the internet for a few minutes.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to use the same device to verify purchases. If they did, then how would you prevent a fraudulent website from collecting the one-time-code generated and using it to authenticate a banking transaction? (Remembering that users aren't very good at following instructions.)
Interesting -- once again Europe is way ahead of the USA in credit card fraud protection.
Seems like it would be a natural extension to allow the user to enter the amount of the transaction for purhchase transactions and use that as a part of the PIN generation. So a token generated for a €25 purchase could only be used to authenticate a €25 purchase transaction and the merchant couldn't use it to authenticate an online banking session or change it into a €250 purchase.
My debit card is insured like my credit card. My bank has no ATM fees pays others ATM fees for me (up to a certain amount per month). There are always companies that will screw you, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Well, it's *almost* the same as a credit card. The difference is that if someone steals your debit card and makes $500 in fraudulent purchases, that $500 comes out of your checking account -- possibly the same $500 that you had left in the account to pay your rent. So your rent check bounces, the landlord charges you a $20 returned check fee, a $50 late fee, and requires you to pay via cashiers check for the next 3 months.
And read the fine print in your statement every month and keep an eye on the online terms to make sure they don't change the terms of your anti-fraud protection without you knowing about it.
Some debit cards offer a guarantee of loss prevention. Chase issues such cards. Since I got used to using a debit card I rarely handle any cash at all. Most months I have less than $5. in cash for the entire month. It is rare that I go anywhere that won't accept my Chase Visa debit card.
They may have a guarantee that says they will credit the money to your account after you report the fraud to them, but the guarantee probably doesn't cover the secondary effects that could result from someone stealing your debit card number. If you start bouncing checks because someone stole your card and drew your balance down to zero before you realized it, Chase is probably not going to reverse all of the returned check fees and possibly late fees from merchants you've sent bad checks to, and your landlord may even start requiring rent payment by cash or cashier's check after you've bounced a rent check.
Then don't use it at an ATM. I use my card for online purchases and POS. As I said, it's $3 for a new card, whether that's a replacement or second card or whatever. There is no monthly fee depending on how much you load onto the card each month.
Oh, and how anonymous are you using your credit card, which is as intimately and personally attached to you as any financial instrument can be? With a preloaded card you slap down cash to load the card, and that's it. Next time you just use a new card for the same price.
Debit cards are most certainly not for "suckers". It's like any other tool. Use it intelligently based on its strengths and weaknesses.
There is a decreasing likelyhood of anonymity with any face to face transaction -- with facial recognition cameras (ostensibly to "prevent fraud", but also a valuable marketing tool), merchants will be able to uniquely identify you when you walk in the store (not just when you make a purchase), and can identify you even if you use a different card number every time you shop. That information is very valuable to them, that's why Safeway will "give" you a 10 - 20% discount when you swipe your safeway card.
How about protection for online purchases (which doesn't involve a credit card terminal hooked up to my computer) since I don't want to deal with drivers or other setup to make it work.
Maybe something as simple as a time-based rotating 4 or 5 digit code (similar to an RSA token) that I type in when I make a transaction (whether online or at a merchant). Lock the card after the wrong code is entered 5 times in a row to prevent brute forcing.
Avoiding much of the baggage that comes with credit cards is the most effective way to ensure that you actually have the $1000 around to worry about.
I thought it was good financial sense that helped make sure you have $1000 in your bank account, not whether or not you use a credit card.
I have 3 credit cards, I haven't paid any interest charges in years. 2 are 'free', but I still carry an Amex card since I've found their international services to be helpful, though perhaps less useful today than it used to be. I still remember losing my card overseas and walking into a local Amex office and walking out with $1000 in travelers checks to tide me over while waiting for a replacement card to be delivered after the holiday weekend.
Nothing else needed, why are we even discussion this?
Not everyone wants to walk around with $1000+ in cash in their pocket so they can make a big purchase. And when you lose cash, it's really lost to you - if someone steals the cash from your pocket, there's little hope of recovery unless they happen to catch the thief, at least if they steal your credit card, you can report the fraud and get your money back.
Ever heard of checks?
Checks are even worse than credit cards - anyone with your account number (which is printed right there on the check, no "secret" CVV code or anything else needed) can use an electronic check (or print his own) to debit direct from your checking account.
Did they? I was part of an organization who had a CC breach due to our own utter stupidity, we called both the FBI, Visa, and Mastercard and asked them if they wanted the card numbers that were breached... they didn't give a flying fuck, didn't want to know anything about it. The FBI eventually cared enough to go to the guys house... after WE tracked him down for them.
It wasn't a real breach, the guy just stumbled across an utterly stupid web app storing a massive list of CC #s in a log file that he happen to stumble on by playing with the URL path and going up a few directories... turned out the guy really was just trying to get his damn purchase to go through.
So the FBI investigated, found the guy, who claimed that he didn't have fraudulent intent, and the banks decided not to spend thousands of dollars to replace cards that apparently didn't need to be replaced? It's possible that they treat a 40 million card breach differently since that opens them up to much more exposure from fraudulent purchases (in theory, Visa and Mastercard issuing banks don't pay for fraudulent purchases, they charge it back to the merchants, but it's still more work for their customer service reps and they may not be able to recover from all merchants)
Point to the story however is, Visa and MasterCard both told us to destroy the list of numbers and they wanted nothing to do with it. We of course moved the list off the server and saved it for the FBI, who of course DID want the evidence.
You're lucky you didn't get a PCI audit and a fine for non-compliance.
If you CC get stolen... you will have to FIGHT to get charges removed unless you live in peter pan land where the fairy can fix it for you.
I've had 2 credit card numbers stolen -- one was a Visa card and the bank called me about a suspicious $500 charge attempt thousands of miles away. I told them that I didn't attempt that purchase (which they had declined), and they canceled my card and fedex'ed me a new one.
The other was an Amex card - this one had a series of small $20 - $50 charges. I called Amex to report the fraud, they canceled and reissued my card, I marked the fradulent charges online and they credited the charges back to me, then they sent me a letter that I had to sign and return to certify that I did not make those charges.
Nothing else needed, why are we even discussion this?
Not everyone wants to walk around with $1000+ in cash in their pocket so they can make a big purchase. And when you lose cash, it's really lost to you - if someone steals the cash from your pocket, there's little hope of recovery unless they happen to catch the thief, at least if they steal your credit card, you can report the fraud and get your money back.
Here's what consumers can do. Simply use cards you preload money on. Walmart has them for $3 for Visa or Mastercard. Costs $3 each time you load funds onto the card (thus it's the same cost to reuse an existing card, or get a completely new one). Only load a couple hundred on the card each month, and if any issues come up, don't reload it and grab a new one next time. It's totally disconnected from your actual accounts in every way, and you mitigate any potential financial loss by only placing relatively small amounts of funds on the card.
Plus, it's not a "credit" card, so you don't have to worry about going into debt or interest rates.
Why use your cash to give the credit card company a free loan (and pay them for the privilege)?
Just use a regular credit card, by law your liability is only $50 for fraud (and I haven't heard of any bank enforcing the $50 limit for fraud reported in a timely manner). Unless you're willing to walk away from your $100 prepaid card without reporting the fraud and requesting a refund, you're not saving yourself any effort by using a prepaid card.
Never ever let your bank issue you a debit/ATM card that can be used as a credit card - request a PIN-only ATM card instead, and use it as little as possible, using the Bank's own ATM's where possible. Why risk letting a thief empty your bank account if they steal your card number? The bank may tell you that they will reimburse you upon reporting fraud, but if you started bouncing checks before you discovered the fraud, will they reimburse you for merchant returned check fees?
Coke is most likely planning promotion similar to the MagiCans promotion. For you kids out there random Coke cans would have pop-out cash or a coupon for free swag. I think the new version will to create a social network of bottle caps. Each cap has low cost WiFi chip similar to TI's SimpleLink module. You put it on a Skylanders-like pad and it powers the chip and acts a unique id. Arcades and stores will have these pads you earn points for each visit.
My next guess is an shipment tracking on scale that only Walmart has tried. They'll use WiFi chips instead RFID because of range and a little more security. A reason they may stay away from something like XBee maybe cost and a less common standard. That my two cents.
If the user has to put it on a special pad to read the code, I don't see why they'd use Wifi instead of RFID or even some contact type reader like an iButton. It seems like instant connection would be important, and the seconds it would take to wait for a Wifi chipset to power up and associate with the wifi network would be too long to make someone wait every time they enter a store -- especially when several people enter the store at once and they have to wait in line to scan their can.
I don't see why a Wifi network with a 100m range would be more secure than an RFID reader with a 2cm range, any Coke can module that's smart enough to use some sort of public key/certificate based authentication over Wifi could do the same with RFID, but do it faster, since it only has to do a quick key exchange and it's done, no need to figure out which frequency the Wifi network is on and then associate.
How much does it cost to reserve a block of MAC's? If they needed a thousand MAC addresses for some small project (maybe a new corporate standard Coke machine), and there's little to no incremental cost to get a block of 16 million, then there's no reason to think that they have some big plans to sell millions of devices.
Besides, 16 million is not many MAC addresses if they really did expect to release any public product.
New users never heard about bash. We live in the 21th century. By now no one should use things like grep, sed or awk anymore. The developers around systemd make sure that this functionality is soon hidden away from the audience.
Right, and that's the problem, new users don't understand how to use command line tools so everything gets loaded into a GUI like Excel or Access. We had a user insist that he had to have MS Access so he could process a big log file to extract a few records from it -- it was too big for Excel. He was a couple hours into figuring out how to get the file loaded into an Access table when someone asked me if I could help. 10 minutes after installing ActiveState Perl, I wrote a script to extract the records they needed, it ran for a couple hours to churn through over 100 gigabytes of data (limited by the speed of the fileserver), then after we had the data, I used a couple regular expressions to pull the data fields they needed out of a free form text field, and then 20 minutes later, used the data in the file to output the SQL commands that they needed to fix up the database (which is why they where looking through the file in the first place). They had originally planned on spending at least 3 days on this project. The Windows "find" command line took may have helped preprocess the file, but its lack of regular expression support would have meant running it dozens of times to get all of the data they needed.
Command line tools are still useful, even in the 21th century. If I didn't have Perl, then grep and/or awk would have been able to extract the data with a single pass through the file.
The drop in replacement halogens have the inner glass envelope enclosed by a standard sized glass bulb so a 72W halogen doesn't get hotter than the 100w bulb it replaces.
That and oven / fridge lights. LED and CFL (tube + electronic ballast) won't survive inside an oven. You don't want CFL need anywhere where food is prepared or stored as there is a chance that it could break.
Appliance lamps aren't banned.
Standard long fluorescent tubes also contain mercury and those tubes are in millions of residential and commercial kitchens.
On the flip side, there are some situations where rough service bulbs are probably the only good alternative to incandescent bulbs—for example, the fully enclosed fixtures that most folks use in their hallways and porches. CFL ballast electronics and LED step-down electronics are typically designed under the assumption that they can breathe, and have a tendency to fail much sooner when they can't. And I'd be afraid to use halogen bulbs in those fixtures because of the higher temperatures involved.
I wasn't talking about CFLs or LEDs, I was talking about energy efficient Halogens, which are the same size and shape as standard incandescent bulbs:
The only problem with your claim about the new bulbs saving money only applies if the electric utility does not have any rate increases in the works. I live in California and Edison International already has approved rate increases for the next 20 years that completely destroys any savings from more efficient light bulbs. Because of this, I'll stick with my god damn incadescent bulbs and use energy efficient ones only where it makes sense (long run times).
Posting AC due to mod points being used Fast Turtle
You are joking, right?
Rate increases mean that more efficient bulbs save even *more* money. Replace the 12 cents/KWh above with 20 cents/KWh and instead of saving $36 over 7 years, you save $60. If you're a high power user in PG&E territory, you're already paying 31 - 35 cents/KWh in the highest rate tier, so you'll save even more money with efficient bulbs.
And note that that savings I quoted were not for LED or CFL's, but energy efficient Halogens.
Yea um being a person recently effected by the blackout in the mid west. An Incandescent Bulb kept my generator from dieing cause the air was so cold the carburetor was freezing up. Had a drop light under the carburetor to keep it warm and running.
Right, because incandescents are the only source of heat known to man.
Use heat tape next time - a drop of water won't shatter the bulb and leave you without a generator.
My wife hates incandescents and LED are still too expensive.
I think you meant to say that your wife only likes incandescents, otherwise the incandescent ban won't affect you.
If she really wants to stick with incandescents, you could use energy efficient halogens that are still incandescents and are around 30% more efficient than traditional incandescents.
They aren't banned, as you can still buy the rough service bulbs. Newcandescent among others sells them for $2-3 a pop, and they have a 10000 hour life instead of the 1000 hour life that normal bulbs claim. They are cheaper and the light is easier on the eyes than any of the alternatives available at this time. Go rough service, I have a whole case on order and they should last me for decades.
One way they get the longer lifetime of the bulbs is to use a thicker filament, and they rate the lumens at 130V, while most homes are going to have 110 - 120V delivered to their homes, so you're getting less light out of the bulb.
You can get a quaility Halogen replacement bulb that will provide 100W equivalent performance while using only about 70 watts and will last 3500 hours for around $5.
I don't know if you think you're making a stand against government, but if you use the rough service bulbs instead of more efficient bulbs, you're costing yourself more money and getting less light than if you just bought an efficient halogen replacement.
How much more? At 4 hours/day the $2.50 10000 hour Rough Service bulb will last almost 7 years, while you'd need 3 of the 3500 hour $5 halogens to last that long, so you'll end up paying $12.50 more for the bulbs. However, saving 30 watts means 306KWh of energy savings for the Halogen, or around $36 at 12 cents/KWh.
So, you'll spend over $20 for the privilege of having less light, but you'll have proven why legislation was needed to get people to select bulbs that save them money.
Or are you going to claim that even halogen incandescents don't provide the same quality of light as conventional incandescents?
I've just specced out a Dell, and the Dell is $1016 more expensive. Add to that, the Mac Pro only consumes 450w versus the Dell's 1500w, which in turn will save $1040/year in power.
While the others will probably come down in price in a few weeks to months, at this moment Apple does have the edge on price.
Now, when you compare to build-it-yourself, you are absolutely correct that Apple is more expensive, but so is everyone else too.
I can believe the pricing (though I had a hard time finding a Dell with equivalent specs - can you post the configuration here?), but I'm having a hard time believing that a Dell with equivalent hardware specs to the Mac Pro uses 3 times more power, since the underlying hardware is, well, equivalent.
Saying that a desktop site works fine on modern smartphone / retina displays is a fatuous comment - your fatuous fingers aren't going to scale to retina resolution when you poke that link. To make a site work well at that size it needs designing for that size.
When I click a link that's so close to another link that I hit more than one, my browser shows me a zoomed in thumbnail of the links so I can choose the one I really wanted, so the physical size of the links on my screen doesn't really matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Who has that anymore?
People that don't want to give any money to a cable company and want to give as little money as possible to the AT&T monopoly, and would rather have their money go to a friendly CLEC. I gave up my 50mbit Comcast cable internet connection for a 14mbit DSL connection because several times a week, packet loss would go through the roof and throughput would slow to a crawl on the Comcast connection, while the DSL provider has been rock solid.
Get a refund. This shit must cost them or it will never stop.
On what grounds? They'll just say "It's a bug, we're working on a patch". Has anyone ever been able to get a refund because of a software bug?
Not even that. If dicking around with the port caused a hard reset of the router, who knows what would happen if you got someone to click on this link. (or set it as an img tag for automatic fun)
I think that's a bad link. Every time I click on it, I can't reach the internet for a few minutes.
In much of Europe online banking transactions can be authenticated with a battery powered reader like this: http://fstop57.com/freshstock/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/stock-photo-online-banking-6526.jpg . Most banks, as far as I know, only use them for online banking.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to use the same device to verify purchases. If they did, then how would you prevent a fraudulent website from collecting the one-time-code generated and using it to authenticate a banking transaction? (Remembering that users aren't very good at following instructions.)
Interesting -- once again Europe is way ahead of the USA in credit card fraud protection.
Seems like it would be a natural extension to allow the user to enter the amount of the transaction for purhchase transactions and use that as a part of the PIN generation. So a token generated for a €25 purchase could only be used to authenticate a €25 purchase transaction and the merchant couldn't use it to authenticate an online banking session or change it into a €250 purchase.
My debit card is insured like my credit card. My bank has no ATM fees pays others ATM fees for me (up to a certain amount per month). There are always companies that will screw you, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Well, it's *almost* the same as a credit card. The difference is that if someone steals your debit card and makes $500 in fraudulent purchases, that $500 comes out of your checking account -- possibly the same $500 that you had left in the account to pay your rent. So your rent check bounces, the landlord charges you a $20 returned check fee, a $50 late fee, and requires you to pay via cashiers check for the next 3 months.
And read the fine print in your statement every month and keep an eye on the online terms to make sure they don't change the terms of your anti-fraud protection without you knowing about it.
Some debit cards offer a guarantee of loss prevention. Chase issues such cards. Since I got used to using a debit card I rarely handle any cash at all. Most months I have less than $5. in cash for the entire month. It is rare that I go anywhere that won't accept my Chase Visa debit card.
They may have a guarantee that says they will credit the money to your account after you report the fraud to them, but the guarantee probably doesn't cover the secondary effects that could result from someone stealing your debit card number. If you start bouncing checks because someone stole your card and drew your balance down to zero before you realized it, Chase is probably not going to reverse all of the returned check fees and possibly late fees from merchants you've sent bad checks to, and your landlord may even start requiring rent payment by cash or cashier's check after you've bounced a rent check.
Then don't use it at an ATM. I use my card for online purchases and POS. As I said, it's $3 for a new card, whether that's a replacement or second card or whatever. There is no monthly fee depending on how much you load onto the card each month.
Oh, and how anonymous are you using your credit card, which is as intimately and personally attached to you as any financial instrument can be? With a preloaded card you slap down cash to load the card, and that's it. Next time you just use a new card for the same price.
Debit cards are most certainly not for "suckers". It's like any other tool. Use it intelligently based on its strengths and weaknesses.
There is a decreasing likelyhood of anonymity with any face to face transaction -- with facial recognition cameras (ostensibly to "prevent fraud", but also a valuable marketing tool), merchants will be able to uniquely identify you when you walk in the store (not just when you make a purchase), and can identify you even if you use a different card number every time you shop. That information is very valuable to them, that's why Safeway will "give" you a 10 - 20% discount when you swipe your safeway card.
How about protection for online purchases (which doesn't involve a credit card terminal hooked up to my computer) since I don't want to deal with drivers or other setup to make it work.
Maybe something as simple as a time-based rotating 4 or 5 digit code (similar to an RSA token) that I type in when I make a transaction (whether online or at a merchant). Lock the card after the wrong code is entered 5 times in a row to prevent brute forcing.
Avoiding much of the baggage that comes with credit cards is the most effective way to ensure that you actually have the $1000 around to worry about.
I thought it was good financial sense that helped make sure you have $1000 in your bank account, not whether or not you use a credit card.
I have 3 credit cards, I haven't paid any interest charges in years. 2 are 'free', but I still carry an Amex card since I've found their international services to be helpful, though perhaps less useful today than it used to be. I still remember losing my card overseas and walking into a local Amex office and walking out with $1000 in travelers checks to tide me over while waiting for a replacement card to be delivered after the holiday weekend.
Nothing else needed, why are we even discussion this?
Not everyone wants to walk around with $1000+ in cash in their pocket so they can make a big purchase. And when you lose cash, it's really lost to you - if someone steals the cash from your pocket, there's little hope of recovery unless they happen to catch the thief, at least if they steal your credit card, you can report the fraud and get your money back.
Ever heard of checks?
Checks are even worse than credit cards - anyone with your account number (which is printed right there on the check, no "secret" CVV code or anything else needed) can use an electronic check (or print his own) to debit direct from your checking account.
in this case Target did it for me
Did they? I was part of an organization who had a CC breach due to our own utter stupidity, we called both the FBI, Visa, and Mastercard and asked them if they wanted the card numbers that were breached ... they didn't give a flying fuck, didn't want to know anything about it. The FBI eventually cared enough to go to the guys house ... after WE tracked him down for them.
It wasn't a real breach, the guy just stumbled across an utterly stupid web app storing a massive list of CC #s in a log file that he happen to stumble on by playing with the URL path and going up a few directories ... turned out the guy really was just trying to get his damn purchase to go through.
So the FBI investigated, found the guy, who claimed that he didn't have fraudulent intent, and the banks decided not to spend thousands of dollars to replace cards that apparently didn't need to be replaced? It's possible that they treat a 40 million card breach differently since that opens them up to much more exposure from fraudulent purchases (in theory, Visa and Mastercard issuing banks don't pay for fraudulent purchases, they charge it back to the merchants, but it's still more work for their customer service reps and they may not be able to recover from all merchants)
Point to the story however is, Visa and MasterCard both told us to destroy the list of numbers and they wanted nothing to do with it. We of course moved the list off the server and saved it for the FBI, who of course DID want the evidence.
You're lucky you didn't get a PCI audit and a fine for non-compliance.
If you CC get stolen ... you will have to FIGHT to get charges removed unless you live in peter pan land where the fairy can fix it for you.
I've had 2 credit card numbers stolen -- one was a Visa card and the bank called me about a suspicious $500 charge attempt thousands of miles away. I told them that I didn't attempt that purchase (which they had declined), and they canceled my card and fedex'ed me a new one.
The other was an Amex card - this one had a series of small $20 - $50 charges. I called Amex to report the fraud, they canceled and reissued my card, I marked the fradulent charges online and they credited the charges back to me, then they sent me a letter that I had to sign and return to certify that I did not make those charges.
It could hardly have been any easier.
Nothing else needed, why are we even discussion this?
Not everyone wants to walk around with $1000+ in cash in their pocket so they can make a big purchase. And when you lose cash, it's really lost to you - if someone steals the cash from your pocket, there's little hope of recovery unless they happen to catch the thief, at least if they steal your credit card, you can report the fraud and get your money back.
Here's what consumers can do. Simply use cards you preload money on. Walmart has them for $3 for Visa or Mastercard. Costs $3 each time you load funds onto the card (thus it's the same cost to reuse an existing card, or get a completely new one). Only load a couple hundred on the card each month, and if any issues come up, don't reload it and grab a new one next time. It's totally disconnected from your actual accounts in every way, and you mitigate any potential financial loss by only placing relatively small amounts of funds on the card.
Plus, it's not a "credit" card, so you don't have to worry about going into debt or interest rates.
Why use your cash to give the credit card company a free loan (and pay them for the privilege)?
Just use a regular credit card, by law your liability is only $50 for fraud (and I haven't heard of any bank enforcing the $50 limit for fraud reported in a timely manner). Unless you're willing to walk away from your $100 prepaid card without reporting the fraud and requesting a refund, you're not saving yourself any effort by using a prepaid card.
Never ever let your bank issue you a debit/ATM card that can be used as a credit card - request a PIN-only ATM card instead, and use it as little as possible, using the Bank's own ATM's where possible. Why risk letting a thief empty your bank account if they steal your card number? The bank may tell you that they will reimburse you upon reporting fraud, but if you started bouncing checks before you discovered the fraud, will they reimburse you for merchant returned check fees?
Coke is most likely planning promotion similar to the MagiCans promotion. For you kids out there random Coke cans would have pop-out cash or a coupon for free swag. I think the new version will to create a social network of bottle caps. Each cap has low cost WiFi chip similar to TI's SimpleLink module. You put it on a Skylanders-like pad and it powers the chip and acts a unique id. Arcades and stores will have these pads you earn points for each visit.
My next guess is an shipment tracking on scale that only Walmart has tried. They'll use WiFi chips instead RFID because of range and a little more security. A reason they may stay away from something like XBee maybe cost and a less common standard. That my two cents.
If the user has to put it on a special pad to read the code, I don't see why they'd use Wifi instead of RFID or even some contact type reader like an iButton. It seems like instant connection would be important, and the seconds it would take to wait for a Wifi chipset to power up and associate with the wifi network would be too long to make someone wait every time they enter a store -- especially when several people enter the store at once and they have to wait in line to scan their can.
I don't see why a Wifi network with a 100m range would be more secure than an RFID reader with a 2cm range, any Coke can module that's smart enough to use some sort of public key/certificate based authentication over Wifi could do the same with RFID, but do it faster, since it only has to do a quick key exchange and it's done, no need to figure out which frequency the Wifi network is on and then associate.
How much does it cost to reserve a block of MAC's? If they needed a thousand MAC addresses for some small project (maybe a new corporate standard Coke machine), and there's little to no incremental cost to get a block of 16 million, then there's no reason to think that they have some big plans to sell millions of devices.
Besides, 16 million is not many MAC addresses if they really did expect to release any public product.
New users never heard about bash. We live in the 21th century. By now no one should use things like grep, sed or awk anymore. The developers around systemd make sure that this functionality is soon hidden away from the audience.
Right, and that's the problem, new users don't understand how to use command line tools so everything gets loaded into a GUI like Excel or Access. We had a user insist that he had to have MS Access so he could process a big log file to extract a few records from it -- it was too big for Excel. He was a couple hours into figuring out how to get the file loaded into an Access table when someone asked me if I could help. 10 minutes after installing ActiveState Perl, I wrote a script to extract the records they needed, it ran for a couple hours to churn through over 100 gigabytes of data (limited by the speed of the fileserver), then after we had the data, I used a couple regular expressions to pull the data fields they needed out of a free form text field, and then 20 minutes later, used the data in the file to output the SQL commands that they needed to fix up the database (which is why they where looking through the file in the first place). They had originally planned on spending at least 3 days on this project. The Windows "find" command line took may have helped preprocess the file, but its lack of regular expression support would have meant running it dozens of times to get all of the data they needed.
Command line tools are still useful, even in the 21th century. If I didn't have Perl, then grep and/or awk would have been able to extract the data with a single pass through the file.
Halogens may be more efficient, but they are significantly hotter than incandescents, in part because the bulbs have a smaller surface area.
The drop in replacement halogens have the inner glass envelope enclosed by a standard sized glass bulb so a 72W halogen doesn't get hotter than the 100w bulb it replaces.
That and oven / fridge lights. LED and CFL (tube + electronic ballast) won't survive inside an oven. You don't want CFL need anywhere where food is prepared or stored as there is a chance that it could break.
Appliance lamps aren't banned.
Standard long fluorescent tubes also contain mercury and those tubes are in millions of residential and commercial kitchens.
On the flip side, there are some situations where rough service bulbs are probably the only good alternative to incandescent bulbs—for example, the fully enclosed fixtures that most folks use in their hallways and porches. CFL ballast electronics and LED step-down electronics are typically designed under the assumption that they can breathe, and have a tendency to fail much sooner when they can't. And I'd be afraid to use halogen bulbs in those fixtures because of the higher temperatures involved.
I wasn't talking about CFLs or LEDs, I was talking about energy efficient Halogens, which are the same size and shape as standard incandescent bulbs:
http://www.amazon.com/Globe-Electric-00466-72-watt-Equivalent/dp/B00DR70TX6/ref=sr_1_2?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1388024249&sr=1-2&keywords=72w+halogen+clear+hours
The only problem with your claim about the new bulbs saving money only applies if the electric utility does not have any rate increases in the works. I live in California and Edison International already has approved rate increases for the next 20 years that completely destroys any savings from more efficient light bulbs. Because of this, I'll stick with my god damn incadescent bulbs and use energy efficient ones only where it makes sense (long run times).
Posting AC due to mod points being used
Fast Turtle
You are joking, right?
Rate increases mean that more efficient bulbs save even *more* money. Replace the 12 cents/KWh above with 20 cents/KWh and instead of saving $36 over 7 years, you save $60. If you're a high power user in PG&E territory, you're already paying 31 - 35 cents/KWh in the highest rate tier, so you'll save even more money with efficient bulbs.
And note that that savings I quoted were not for LED or CFL's, but energy efficient Halogens.
Yea um being a person recently effected by the blackout in the mid west. An Incandescent Bulb kept my generator from dieing cause the air was so cold the carburetor was freezing up. Had a drop light under the carburetor to keep it warm and running.
Right, because incandescents are the only source of heat known to man.
Use heat tape next time - a drop of water won't shatter the bulb and leave you without a generator.
My wife hates incandescents and LED are still too expensive.
I think you meant to say that your wife only likes incandescents, otherwise the incandescent ban won't affect you.
If she really wants to stick with incandescents, you could use energy efficient halogens that are still incandescents and are around 30% more efficient than traditional incandescents.
They aren't banned, as you can still buy the rough service bulbs. Newcandescent among others sells them for $2-3 a pop, and they have a 10000 hour life instead of the 1000 hour life that normal bulbs claim. They are cheaper and the light is easier on the eyes than any of the alternatives available at this time. Go rough service, I have a whole case on order and they should last me for decades.
One way they get the longer lifetime of the bulbs is to use a thicker filament, and they rate the lumens at 130V, while most homes are going to have 110 - 120V delivered to their homes, so you're getting less light out of the bulb.
You can get a quaility Halogen replacement bulb that will provide 100W equivalent performance while using only about 70 watts and will last 3500 hours for around $5.
I don't know if you think you're making a stand against government, but if you use the rough service bulbs instead of more efficient bulbs, you're costing yourself more money and getting less light than if you just bought an efficient halogen replacement.
How much more? At 4 hours/day the $2.50 10000 hour Rough Service bulb will last almost 7 years, while you'd need 3 of the 3500 hour $5 halogens to last that long, so you'll end up paying $12.50 more for the bulbs. However, saving 30 watts means 306KWh of energy savings for the Halogen, or around $36 at 12 cents/KWh.
So, you'll spend over $20 for the privilege of having less light, but you'll have proven why legislation was needed to get people to select bulbs that save them money.
Or are you going to claim that even halogen incandescents don't provide the same quality of light as conventional incandescents?
I've just specced out a Dell, and the Dell is $1016 more expensive. Add to that, the Mac Pro only consumes 450w versus the Dell's 1500w, which in turn will save $1040/year in power.
While the others will probably come down in price in a few weeks to months, at this moment Apple does have the edge on price.
Now, when you compare to build-it-yourself, you are absolutely correct that Apple is more expensive, but so is everyone else too.
I can believe the pricing (though I had a hard time finding a Dell with equivalent specs - can you post the configuration here?), but I'm having a hard time believing that a Dell with equivalent hardware specs to the Mac Pro uses 3 times more power, since the underlying hardware is, well, equivalent.
Saying that a desktop site works fine on modern smartphone / retina displays is a fatuous comment - your fatuous fingers aren't going to scale to retina resolution when you poke that link. To make a site work well at that size it needs designing for that size.
When I click a link that's so close to another link that I hit more than one, my browser shows me a zoomed in thumbnail of the links so I can choose the one I really wanted, so the physical size of the links on my screen doesn't really matter.