You were originally required to enter a PIN after a number of consecutive contactless transactions but I'm not sure if this is the case anymore.
On another (UK) forum where this was discussed, people's experiences varied greatly. Some found they had to enter a PIN every few purchases; others had never been asked to enter a PIN. It did vary with the bank, but there seemed to be other factors at work too.
Currently, anyone can make a contactless payment in the UK by tapping their card on the terminal to make a payment.
Nope, that should read:-
Currently, anyone can make a contactless payment in the UK by tapping anybody's card on the terminal to make a payment.
That the trouble : with existing cards, if I accidentally dropped one without noticing, someone might use it for weeks (keeping under £30 per purchase) before I noticed at the next statement, because I have many different cards for different purposes. UK police say that the typical use of a stolen contactless is about £100-£600 (in one bizare case it was about £30,000). Thieves act fast, and you are unlikely to get money back from the bank if you take more then a few days to report it lost.
Anyway, why not apply this fingerprinting for any purchase, not just >£30 ?
Many people have added Musk to their personal gallery of what they consider to be modern saints and geniuses : Musk is on that pedestal alongside Gates, Mandela, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Thatcher etc. You cannot say or do anything that will weaken their faith in these figures. Most people seem to need such figures for paternal or matriarchal reassurance.
Of course, in the USA "genius" is more or less equated with success at making money, even though that rules a lot out, Socrates for example.
Winning customers is not Musk's only aim. He has no personal need for more money. What he really wants is to try out some of the ideas he saw in his sci-fi comics as a teenager. At the same time he gets his rocks off by seeing himself in the media, so he tosses "outrageous" ideas to the public and the media knowing thay will publicise it; they lap it up and cry for more.
Sometimes however, his pigeons come home to roost.
Break an asteroid into 8 chunks, and now you have 8 impacts, each still having half the blast radius of the original
You are assuming that the 8 chunks all hit Earth. That is extremely unlikely unless you let the asteroid get very close first : within the moon's orbit say.
If you know that the asteroid is going to hit Earth, then breaking it up at eg the radius of Mars orbit will send the fragments into a cone of debris which, by the time it reaches us, will be spread over an area vastly more than the target area of Earth - even if that cone angle is quite small. Earth is a tiny target from the distance of Mars (just look at Mars from here, even allowing that Earth is twice its diameter). We would be unlucky to be hit even by one large piece, although there would be lots of smaller fireworks to see.
And if we are not sure if the asteroid would hit Earth, and the further away the more unsure we would be, it is nevertheless better to act sooner. The cone spread would be so wide by the time it reached us that we would be very unlucky to get a big hit.
Cant read TFA because of my ad-blocker - ads are more important than the future of the World. Sounds like BS though, what have colliding asteroids got to do with deflecting one? Are we going to try to knock their silly heads together?
the fractured core exerts a strong gravitational pull on the smaller pieces of debris and shrapnel broken during the impact
More BS. Unless the asteroid is getting on for the size of a planet, in which case abandon all hope, the gravitational force will be very weak.
If scientists are going to develop an asteroid deflection strategy that can actually work, they need to know how much force it really takes to destroy or deflect one
WRT deflecting, I was taught at school that the force on a object multiplied by application time resulted in an increase in that object's momentum in that direction, momentum being velocity multiplied by mass. I think Newton said it first. But perhaps the laws of physics have changed lately, and I'm only an engineer not a scientist.
Perhaps this idiot would share with us how he identifies who he "does business with" because these days you are doing business with internet companies unawares in that they are using your data as a commodity - companies like this 120 (and many many others) that few people have heard of. But this guy must not only have heard them but knows how to avoid them too : very clever, but how does he do it?
My password passed the spell check because it's "password", so who's laughing now? If only you people would stick to plain English passwords and spelled them correctly there wouldn't be a problem.
Millions of people... without anyone pointing a gun at their head, purchase devices that are not repairable.
Most would not know whether something they are buying is respairable or not. You need to be an expert to know. An independent repairer would know this, and I as an amateur, but fairly expert repairer of things, might be able to find out, but most people would only find out when they ask a repair shop if it can be repaired. Eg I once bought a Ryobi garden power tool (never again), and it was only when the ignition coil failed that I discovered that Ryobi spares are unobtainable. So it went to landfill for the sake of a $10* coil: and this is when we are being told to save the planet.
Anyway, there is little or no choice in the matter these days. Many or most things are deliberately made unrepairable, or the makers will not supply spares, just to boost their sales of new stuff.
They are supporting themselves and as it happens they are supporting tens (or even hundreds) of millions of other people. I don't care if that is a deliberate side effect or not - the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is big, unexpected, and very welcome news.
rail/subway public transport is a technology who's time has come and gone. It requires too large of a footprint
Do you even know what a subway is? It is under the ground - footprint zero. As for surface rail, it requires a far smaller footprint than equivalent road. Each London Underground track for example can carry the equivalent of a three lane motorway, comparing both at full capapcity.
Much of the testing/work is being done on 'loop', which is not evacuated. It's not nearly as fast, but it avoids all those problems.
Are you proposing the Loop underground, or overground? Overground runs into the same property issues as conventional rail. Underground - tunnelling is very expensive whatver BS Musk comes out with - otherwise High Speed lines would all be put underground where there was environmental opposition (sometime they are at great expense).
California have it in their grasp to be able to put in a TRUE high-speed with hyperloop. It would bring jobs....
Hyperloop would have exactly the same problems with legal and environmental battles about land usage, and that's what the main costs have been. (Don't BS us with claims that land-owners would be OK as long as it passes over on stilts). Hyperloop has not even been properly demonstrated yet.
these idiots are playing within tinker toys from other nations. What a bunch of maroons.
I think that Musk is the one who can't grow out of his toys. The USA could learn a lot from other nations about railways; the image of railways in the USA seems to be slow freight lines that are constantly de-railing. I have worked in the UK railway industry and I am shocked at what I see and hear about railways in the USA, so far behind they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't we know this already?
Because I turned off updates years ago.
So did I. I can cope with malware and hackers better than I can cope with Microsoft.
You were originally required to enter a PIN after a number of consecutive contactless transactions but I'm not sure if this is the case anymore.
On another (UK) forum where this was discussed, people's experiences varied greatly. Some found they had to enter a PIN every few purchases; others had never been asked to enter a PIN. It did vary with the bank, but there seemed to be other factors at work too.
FTFA :
Currently, anyone can make a contactless payment in the UK by tapping their card on the terminal to make a payment.
Nope, that should read :-
Currently, anyone can make a contactless payment in the UK by tapping anybody's card on the terminal to make a payment.
That the trouble : with existing cards, if I accidentally dropped one without noticing, someone might use it for weeks (keeping under £30 per purchase) before I noticed at the next statement, because I have many different cards for different purposes. UK police say that the typical use of a stolen contactless is about £100-£600 (in one bizare case it was about £30,000). Thieves act fast, and you are unlikely to get money back from the bank if you take more then a few days to report it lost.
Anyway, why not apply this fingerprinting for any purchase, not just >£30 ?
Pot and Kettle
Mod this up.
Many people have added Musk to their personal gallery of what they consider to be modern saints and geniuses : Musk is on that pedestal alongside Gates, Mandela, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Thatcher etc. You cannot say or do anything that will weaken their faith in these figures. Most people seem to need such figures for paternal or matriarchal reassurance.
Of course, in the USA "genius" is more or less equated with success at making money, even though that rules a lot out, Socrates for example.
Winning customers is not Musk's only aim. He has no personal need for more money. What he really wants is to try out some of the ideas he saw in his sci-fi comics as a teenager. At the same time he gets his rocks off by seeing himself in the media, so he tosses "outrageous" ideas to the public and the media knowing thay will publicise it; they lap it up and cry for more.
Sometimes however, his pigeons come home to roost.
Break an asteroid into 8 chunks, and now you have 8 impacts, each still having half the blast radius of the original
You are assuming that the 8 chunks all hit Earth. That is extremely unlikely unless you let the asteroid get very close first : within the moon's orbit say.
If you know that the asteroid is going to hit Earth, then breaking it up at eg the radius of Mars orbit will send the fragments into a cone of debris which, by the time it reaches us, will be spread over an area vastly more than the target area of Earth - even if that cone angle is quite small. Earth is a tiny target from the distance of Mars (just look at Mars from here, even allowing that Earth is twice its diameter). We would be unlucky to be hit even by one large piece, although there would be lots of smaller fireworks to see.
And if we are not sure if the asteroid would hit Earth, and the further away the more unsure we would be, it is nevertheless better to act sooner. The cone spread would be so wide by the time it reached us that we would be very unlucky to get a big hit.
Cant read TFA because of my ad-blocker - ads are more important than the future of the World.
Sounds like BS though, what have colliding asteroids got to do with deflecting one? Are we going to try to knock their silly heads together?
the fractured core exerts a strong gravitational pull on the smaller pieces of debris and shrapnel broken during the impact
More BS. Unless the asteroid is getting on for the size of a planet, in which case abandon all hope, the gravitational force will be very weak.
If scientists are going to develop an asteroid deflection strategy that can actually work, they need to know how much force it really takes to destroy or deflect one
WRT deflecting, I was taught at school that the force on a object multiplied by application time resulted in an increase in that object's momentum in that direction, momentum being velocity multiplied by mass. I think Newton said it first. But perhaps the laws of physics have changed lately, and I'm only an engineer not a scientist.
The kernel is only one part of the OS.
Found the RMS comment.
Perhaps this idiot would share with us how he identifies who he "does business with" because these days you are doing business with internet companies unawares in that they are using your data as a commodity - companies like this 120 (and many many others) that few people have heard of. But this guy must not only have heard them but knows how to avoid them too : very clever, but how does he do it?
I understood perfectly what both the videos were trying to say - bullshit in two slightly different flavours.
Makes me laugh to see a white man in a comfortable position complaining about white men in comfortable positions.
Salter proved himself to be a nutter back in the 1970's. By now he must be a geriatric nutter. Don't take any notice of him.
Dr Johnson had some words about tourist attractions : "Worth seeing, but not worth going to see."
Why all the black bars and rectangles on that sciencemag site? :-(
They were meant to demonstrate the effect, but the experiment went wrong.
My password passed the spell check because it's "password", so who's laughing now? If only you people would stick to plain English passwords and spelled them correctly there wouldn't be a problem.
you might be surprised at the denominator of quality discourse available from these regions
Yes I expect I will be surprised. I will not have realised that there were so many more wealthy widows of African princes.
That's all a business with thousands/millions of users in traffic has to pay for a domain, email and web hosting? Just $3?
He was referring to having a "voice" on the web. It doesn't mean that millions of people, or anyone, will listen to it.
Millions of people ... without anyone pointing a gun at their head, purchase devices that are not repairable.
Most would not know whether something they are buying is respairable or not. You need to be an expert to know. An independent repairer would know this, and I as an amateur, but fairly expert repairer of things, might be able to find out, but most people would only find out when they ask a repair shop if it can be repaired. Eg I once bought a Ryobi garden power tool (never again), and it was only when the ignition coil failed that I discovered that Ryobi spares are unobtainable. So it went to landfill for the sake of a $10* coil: and this is when we are being told to save the planet.
Anyway, there is little or no choice in the matter these days. Many or most things are deliberately made unrepairable, or the makers will not supply spares, just to boost their sales of new stuff.
* Cost to maker, and the planet.
News at 11
They are supporting themselves and as it happens they are supporting tens (or even hundreds) of millions of other people. I don't care if that is a deliberate side effect or not - the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is big, unexpected, and very welcome news.
would make it easier for independent repair professionals to get repair tools and parts for consumer electronics
(My bold)
That's not enough, although it's a start. These parts need to be available to consumers too.
rail/subway public transport is a technology who's time has come and gone. It requires too large of a footprint
Do you even know what a subway is? It is under the ground - footprint zero. As for surface rail, it requires a far smaller footprint than equivalent road. Each London Underground track for example can carry the equivalent of a three lane motorway, comparing both at full capapcity.
Much of the testing/work is being done on 'loop', which is not evacuated. It's not nearly as fast, but it avoids all those problems.
Are you proposing the Loop underground, or overground? Overground runs into the same property issues as conventional rail. Underground - tunnelling is very expensive whatver BS Musk comes out with - otherwise High Speed lines would all be put underground where there was environmental opposition (sometime they are at great expense).
California have it in their grasp to be able to put in a TRUE high-speed with hyperloop. It would bring jobs ....
Hyperloop would have exactly the same problems with legal and environmental battles about land usage, and that's what the main costs have been. (Don't BS us with claims that land-owners would be OK as long as it passes over on stilts). Hyperloop has not even been properly demonstrated yet.
these idiots are playing within tinker toys from other nations. What a bunch of maroons.
I think that Musk is the one who can't grow out of his toys. The USA could learn a lot from other nations about railways; the image of railways in the USA seems to be slow freight lines that are constantly de-railing. I have worked in the UK railway industry and I am shocked at what I see and hear about railways in the USA, so far behind they are.
Elon Musk proposed a far better and cheaper plan and they ignored it.
Get back to us when he has his idea actually working and with actual cost figures - ones which he has not pulled out of his backside.