But Christ-on-a-fucking-wheel, why did it take until 2009 to be able to move money instantly from one account to another? And it's still only certain banks that do the same-day transfers. These guys are absolutely retarded. With the billions they make every second, you'd think they'd be able to install a few broadband lines between their offices and make it so money can get transferred quickly. Three days - seriously?!
My bank takes two days to do an internal transfer and three for external. What's happening is that the bank is still using my money to make more money during those three days, but not paying anyone interest on the deposit. It's only pennies to we poor peons, but it adds up pretty quickly for the bank.
It's not that the bank couldn't make the transfer immediately, they just didn't/don't want to lose that little cash cow.
It seems to me that they only need to present you with a single convincing page to get you to give them a one-time pad that can be used to drain your account (at least up to your withdrawal limit, if you have one).
One-time pad was perhaps the wrong wording. It's a list of 200 or so numbered 6-digit numbers that are used a single time to authenticate a single transaction.
Though I realize people are dumber than I expect, who would enter 200 6-digit numbers into a form from the bank? The bank sent you the numbers in the first place.
The point is that you're only ever asked for a specific number once, and if you mess up three times they lock your account. The attacker would need a good part of the unused list to have a chance at having the right number at the right time.
This is why German banks use a one-time pad system at the actual transaction itself. I can log in with a single password. To process an actual transaction though, I need to enter a randomly selected code from a piece of paper they sent me or the code they send me in an SMS. Since it's only good for the transaction at hand and only ever used once, there's no way for it to be used by someone who's intercepted it.
Though, I suppose the attacker could try and get me to go through the entire TAN list, faking failures every time. I don't know how many people would go through 200 failures before calling the bank though.
I'm using a Notebook Mouse 5000 right now with OS X. I also use it with Ubuntu on another partition. Works perfectly, and you can even set the thumb button (button 4) up just like any other mouse.
I Windows Vista and 7 I have to delete the mouse and re-add it every time I restart the computer. For some reason it won't stay paired. Odd that an MS mouse doesn't work with Windows, but does with everything else.
Remember people they are not a bank. Actually, in Europe they are a bank. From the German PayPal site:
PayPal wird EU-weit von der PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (PayPal Luxemburg) als Bank geführt und von der Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) reguliert. which translates to something like "PayPal is run EU-wide as a bank, and is regulated by the CSSF."
It's been a while since I worked with JTAG, but IIRC you can set a flag on most implementations that disables reading the firmware out. All you can do is install new firmware or delete what's in there at that moment. If you could just get the firmware out of most chips, the Linux driver problem wouldn't exist the way it does.
You may be German, but I'm guessing you're also 12, seeing as you've never moved or worked.
It's not the police, but you still have to register with the municipality (Standesamt). Also, as long as you belong to either the Catholic or Protestant church you have to pay the church tax (Kirchensteuer). To not pay the tax, you have to officially leave the church. There are a lot of jobs, especially in the social services, where if you've left the church you can't work. Add some of the most restrictive computer usage laws out there (DVD copy ban, network intrusion tool ban, draconian data retention laws...) and even a Weißwurstfrühstück can't make everything better.
I like Germany for the most part, but a bastion of freedom it is not.
The difference is that it's a whole lot harder to lie about what you can do when applying for a 'normal' job. If you say you're a wizard at something but actually have no clue, you'll find yourself back out on the street rather quickly, assuming you manage to bluff your way through the technical parts of the interviews. Politicians, on the other hand, say a whole lot of things, don't/can't do any of them, but still get to keep their job for four years or so. Add the fact that the general public seems to be made up of people who are completely ignorant of the actual state of the country and you've got yourself a pretty cosy position.
As far as working for or being accountable to the people, it's been a long time since politicians were working for the electorate and not the people funding their campaigns. I'm personally in favour of banning corporate campaign contributions, strictly limiting private ones, and making politicians account for every cent and every asset from the point they put their name into a race until 30 years after they've quit politics. I'm sure most countries would be a lot different today if voters actually had to go hear someone speak and couldn't rely on multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to tell them what to think.
They also lock out users outside of the US. According to Amazon, the labels in the US don't want to sell mp3s to people in Europe. iTunes sells music in 22 different countries, and although the DRM sucks, it's still cheaper by about 8 Euro than buying the actual CD. eMusic is OK, but like someone else said, I don't like the subscription method. I don't buy that many CDs, and when I do it's more often at a show - also aften 5 or 6 Euro cheaper than in the stores.
Maybe Amazon will get smart quickly and expand their program to other countries.
This tool's been around for well over a year. I remember getting pissed off that it had taken over as the number one result on Google. All that work for an original name, and someone comes along and uses it for this.
I'm currently based overseas, without access to decent television. Since they don't allow you to watch them online unless you're in the US, iTunes was my only option for watching the shows while still giving back to the people making them. Americans complain and complain about people overseas pirating stuff, but continue to refuse to sell it overseas. I figure, if you don't give someone a way to pay for the stuff you're selling, what right do you have to complain when they don't.
I make things for a living that people might want to pirate, and would feel bad about it if someone was pirating, I shouldn't pirate either. I rent movies I want to see, buy software I want to use, and try to let others know that not paying for these things is stealing. I also don't tell people from other countries that they can't buy my products though.
EVDO (a.k.a. CDMA2000) is only available across the U.S. EVDO is based on IS-95, which is only used in North America. UMTS (what everyone here is calling 3G) is based on GSM, which can be found everywhere. The reason Apple went with GSM is so that the phone can be sold world-wide. Not being a pure mobile phone vendor, I doubt they wanted to get into supporting phones using completely different network standards. There might not be a UMTS chipset ready for the iPhone, or the U.S. might not have decent enough UMTS coverage, but I'm pretty sure it won't take long for both to get to the point that Apple is upgrading the phone.
I also carry flip-flops 'cause I have a thing about the floors of public showers. Everyone should have a thing about public showers. There is nothing worse than being three days into your trip to suddenly find out what it's like to walk around with athlete's foot or a planters wart. Worse are the people who don't realize they have something and wander around spreading it to others. You should always wear some type of footwear in public places, even in the hostel room. It's really the one thing I haven't figured out about hostels. You aren't allowed to use your own sheets, but you're allowed to walk around barefoot.
In Israel, likely the most US friendly country in the area, there are bootleg copies of petty much everything you might want in the streets and stores. The Arab countries have less, but I think that's more of a taste in media thing than a response to the law.
Last night here in Tel Aviv, I had a police officer flip me the bird as I tried to cross at a cross walk. This is the only place I've lived, so far, where the people will actually honk and speed up as you try to cross the street.
In response to finding CFL chandelier bulbs, we bought some generic Ikea ones and were pleasantly surprised. The warmup time is about 20 seconds, but it's something we can live with and they were cheap enough not to expect more. They look nice enough, provide a decent, warm light and four light up our 20m^2 dining room without any problems.
I think a lot of comments are missing out on the prime feature of a contextual system - It must be rules-based. The problem with things like MS Office menus is that you can't decide how it is going to work. The other thing is they must have a good idea as to where you really are and who is with you. Imagine the following scenarios:
- You're in a meeting with project team-mates and the project leader calls - ring through.
- You're in a meeting with project team-mates and a non-project related co-worker calls - to voicemail
- In your office all calls are forwarded to the land-line. Out of office all calls are forwarded to the cell.
- Cell never rings when you're in the washroom.
This can be applied outside the workplace as well:
- Baby is in its room and you're not - only the phone closest to you rings.
- Alarm on your cell phone goes off one or two stations before you have to get off the train.
- Phone automatically goes silent in the theatre, and then only vibrates if the server room is calling.
All these scenarios are specific to a person, and depend on that person sorting contacts into groups and setting up the system for their particular requirements. Default rules can be provided (i.e. no phone in the washroom), but it is obvious that people need to inform a contextual system of their relationships to others in the system and create rules that suit their requirements.
Though the Autobahn are definitely nicer places to drive than anywhere in the U.S., you've obviously never listened to German traffic reports. On average they consist of things like "5 km jam between Lindenhof and Heinersdorf", or 12 km jam on the A8 between Pfaffing and Hotzolling". Congestion is a way of life, and the amount maintenance required by the nice roads means that they're always under construction. It once took me 13 hours to drive the 600 km from Munich to Berlin. It has never taken that longer than 7 to get from Toronto to Montreal, and I don't imagine the Canadian roads are so much better than the American.
The reason the Autobahn have no speed limits was stated somewhere above - driver education. You don't get the people sitting in the left lanes doing 80, scared of passing an LKV. People also realize that letting someone pass you isn't a sign of weakness. This is also the reason that most Germans follow the posted limits, unlike in North America where driving 20 over is the norm. The crazy fines associated with speeding might have something to do with it as well though.
You mean this study? It seems to say tobacco smoke is a Class A carcinogen. Apparently, only 160,440 people in the USA died of lung cancer last year though. That means that 1.8% of all deaths from lung cancer are directly caused by second hand smoke. Then there are the 35,000 to 40,000 deaths per year from heart disease due to second-hand smoke. Of course, if you're willing to murder 3000 people per year for a habit, what's another few thousand?
I think we can all agree that smoking is dangerous, so please explain how regular exposure to an environment filled with cigarette smoke isn't. I'm sure there are lots of people who would be glad to hear it. Heather Crowe for instance. No wait, she just died of lung cancer. That's the point that immediately struck me as absurd, but the rest are too. The only insightful part of the comment is the last line.
The problem isn't that people don't like certain things, the problem is that most people don't bother to take the time to think about the root cause of a problem. Mothers worry about their kids playing outside because of smog, so they pack them into the SUV and drive to the McDonald's playland. If more people actually bothered to ask why and not just say "it's too late now", we wouldn't have to ban peanuts from schools, use air-filters in our homes, block the stars from the sky with street lights, spend billions on healthcare for people purposely killing themselves and others, or worry about protecting ourselves from men breaking into our houses with guns.
1) It's easier to bring along one laptop instead of several binders full of dog-eared papers to take notes.
I always used a single binder with the notes from the last week of classes. the rest of the notes were filed away at home in class-specific binders.
2) I use Perforce to keep what's on my laptop in sync with what's on my desktop, so there isn't much of a fear of suddenly losing my notes.
Unless the house burned down, I never had to worry about losing anything. Moving the notes to the correct binder also gave me the chance to glance over them again.
3) There's no shuffling around binders and pages of notes to find the note you're looking for with a laptop, everything is organized directories and I can search through them.
If the notes are kept organized in the first place, this isn't normally a problem. Shuffling seems to normally come from those people who put everything into their book bag and start every class searching through the ream for the last lecture's notes.
4) I can easily refer to supporting material during the lecture. Profs often have the class slides posted online, and sometimes we're stuck with a horrible projector that won't focus, I can simply download the notes and follow along on my own screen without having to sit at the front of the class.
This is where preparation comes in handy. Too many people underestimate the importance of glancing through the material for the next lecture. If diagrams and course notes are online, you can print them off and bring them along. As posted before, this way you can annotate and comment on the course material, and you're actually prepared for the class.
I don't think I ever met anyone who could actually write up equations and sketch diagrams on a computer fast enough to keep up with the lecture. It was always the guy in the front with the laptop asking the prof about how you exit a while(1) loop just after the prof had explained how to use break and continue. This, added to the distraction of the guy watching Office Space at the the front, is why professors ask people not to take notes on their computers.
We have plaster and wire mesh walls, and steel beams holding up the ceiling and floors. Not only can I not see my AP from outside, I also can't use the cordless phone in the garden. I don't get calls on the mobile when at home though, so there are positives.
So, solution to the parents being tech clueless is to just have them redecorate in a more rustic style.
It's unfortunate that Pages is only for the Mac. I'll admit it's not quite 100% yet, but the formatting paradigm is exactly what you're talking about. Templates are easy to see, change, and create, and changes to templates are stored with the file, not globally. It really encourages the use of actual styles, as opposed to just knowing that Arial 14pt. bold is a 2nd-level header. Both MS and the OOo team could take something from the way styles are implemented in Pages.
Slashdot Mirror
But Christ-on-a-fucking-wheel, why did it take until 2009 to be able to move money instantly from one account to another? And it's still only certain banks that do the same-day transfers. These guys are absolutely retarded. With the billions they make every second, you'd think they'd be able to install a few broadband lines between their offices and make it so money can get transferred quickly. Three days - seriously?!
My bank takes two days to do an internal transfer and three for external. What's happening is that the bank is still using my money to make more money during those three days, but not paying anyone interest on the deposit. It's only pennies to we poor peons, but it adds up pretty quickly for the bank.
It's not that the bank couldn't make the transfer immediately, they just didn't/don't want to lose that little cash cow.
It seems to me that they only need to present you with a single convincing page to get you to give them a one-time pad that can be used to drain your account (at least up to your withdrawal limit, if you have one).
One-time pad was perhaps the wrong wording. It's a list of 200 or so numbered 6-digit numbers that are used a single time to authenticate a single transaction.
Though I realize people are dumber than I expect, who would enter 200 6-digit numbers into a form from the bank? The bank sent you the numbers in the first place.
The point is that you're only ever asked for a specific number once, and if you mess up three times they lock your account. The attacker would need a good part of the unused list to have a chance at having the right number at the right time.
This is why German banks use a one-time pad system at the actual transaction itself. I can log in with a single password. To process an actual transaction though, I need to enter a randomly selected code from a piece of paper they sent me or the code they send me in an SMS. Since it's only good for the transaction at hand and only ever used once, there's no way for it to be used by someone who's intercepted it.
Though, I suppose the attacker could try and get me to go through the entire TAN list, faking failures every time. I don't know how many people would go through 200 failures before calling the bank though.
I'm using a Notebook Mouse 5000 right now with OS X. I also use it with Ubuntu on another partition. Works perfectly, and you can even set the thumb button (button 4) up just like any other mouse.
I Windows Vista and 7 I have to delete the mouse and re-add it every time I restart the computer. For some reason it won't stay paired. Odd that an MS mouse doesn't work with Windows, but does with everything else.
It's been a while since I worked with JTAG, but IIRC you can set a flag on most implementations that disables reading the firmware out. All you can do is install new firmware or delete what's in there at that moment. If you could just get the firmware out of most chips, the Linux driver problem wouldn't exist the way it does.
You may be German, but I'm guessing you're also 12, seeing as you've never moved or worked.
It's not the police, but you still have to register with the municipality (Standesamt). Also, as long as you belong to either the Catholic or Protestant church you have to pay the church tax (Kirchensteuer). To not pay the tax, you have to officially leave the church. There are a lot of jobs, especially in the social services, where if you've left the church you can't work. Add some of the most restrictive computer usage laws out there (DVD copy ban, network intrusion tool ban, draconian data retention laws...) and even a Weißwurstfrühstück can't make everything better.
I like Germany for the most part, but a bastion of freedom it is not.
The difference is that it's a whole lot harder to lie about what you can do when applying for a 'normal' job. If you say you're a wizard at something but actually have no clue, you'll find yourself back out on the street rather quickly, assuming you manage to bluff your way through the technical parts of the interviews. Politicians, on the other hand, say a whole lot of things, don't/can't do any of them, but still get to keep their job for four years or so. Add the fact that the general public seems to be made up of people who are completely ignorant of the actual state of the country and you've got yourself a pretty cosy position.
As far as working for or being accountable to the people, it's been a long time since politicians were working for the electorate and not the people funding their campaigns. I'm personally in favour of banning corporate campaign contributions, strictly limiting private ones, and making politicians account for every cent and every asset from the point they put their name into a race until 30 years after they've quit politics. I'm sure most countries would be a lot different today if voters actually had to go hear someone speak and couldn't rely on multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to tell them what to think.
Quirks and Quarks covered this a couple of weeks ago in a pretty good interview. You can find the show here (in mp3 and ogg =).
They also lock out users outside of the US. According to Amazon, the labels in the US don't want to sell mp3s to people in Europe. iTunes sells music in 22 different countries, and although the DRM sucks, it's still cheaper by about 8 Euro than buying the actual CD. eMusic is OK, but like someone else said, I don't like the subscription method. I don't buy that many CDs, and when I do it's more often at a show - also aften 5 or 6 Euro cheaper than in the stores.
Maybe Amazon will get smart quickly and expand their program to other countries.
This tool's been around for well over a year. I remember getting pissed off that it had taken over as the number one result on Google. All that work for an original name, and someone comes along and uses it for this.
I'm currently based overseas, without access to decent television. Since they don't allow you to watch them online unless you're in the US, iTunes was my only option for watching the shows while still giving back to the people making them. Americans complain and complain about people overseas pirating stuff, but continue to refuse to sell it overseas. I figure, if you don't give someone a way to pay for the stuff you're selling, what right do you have to complain when they don't.
I make things for a living that people might want to pirate, and would feel bad about it if someone was pirating, I shouldn't pirate either. I rent movies I want to see, buy software I want to use, and try to let others know that not paying for these things is stealing. I also don't tell people from other countries that they can't buy my products though.
EVDO (a.k.a. CDMA2000) is only available across the U.S. EVDO is based on IS-95, which is only used in North America. UMTS (what everyone here is calling 3G) is based on GSM, which can be found everywhere. The reason Apple went with GSM is so that the phone can be sold world-wide. Not being a pure mobile phone vendor, I doubt they wanted to get into supporting phones using completely different network standards. There might not be a UMTS chipset ready for the iPhone, or the U.S. might not have decent enough UMTS coverage, but I'm pretty sure it won't take long for both to get to the point that Apple is upgrading the phone.
In Israel, likely the most US friendly country in the area, there are bootleg copies of petty much everything you might want in the streets and stores. The Arab countries have less, but I think that's more of a taste in media thing than a response to the law.
Last night here in Tel Aviv, I had a police officer flip me the bird as I tried to cross at a cross walk. This is the only place I've lived, so far, where the people will actually honk and speed up as you try to cross the street.
In response to finding CFL chandelier bulbs, we bought some generic Ikea ones and were pleasantly surprised. The warmup time is about 20 seconds, but it's something we can live with and they were cheap enough not to expect more. They look nice enough, provide a decent, warm light and four light up our 20m^2 dining room without any problems.
You can do this in KDE, it just doesn't look as pretty.
s ktopbehavior/index.html
http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase/kcontrol/de
Look for "Menu Bar at Top of Screen"
I think a lot of comments are missing out on the prime feature of a contextual system - It must be rules-based. The problem with things like MS Office menus is that you can't decide how it is going to work. The other thing is they must have a good idea as to where you really are and who is with you. Imagine the following scenarios:
- You're in a meeting with project team-mates and the project leader calls - ring through.
- You're in a meeting with project team-mates and a non-project related co-worker calls - to voicemail
- In your office all calls are forwarded to the land-line. Out of office all calls are forwarded to the cell.
- Cell never rings when you're in the washroom.
This can be applied outside the workplace as well:
- Baby is in its room and you're not - only the phone closest to you rings.
- Alarm on your cell phone goes off one or two stations before you have to get off the train.
- Phone automatically goes silent in the theatre, and then only vibrates if the server room is calling.
All these scenarios are specific to a person, and depend on that person sorting contacts into groups and setting up the system for their particular requirements. Default rules can be provided (i.e. no phone in the washroom), but it is obvious that people need to inform a contextual system of their relationships to others in the system and create rules that suit their requirements.
Though the Autobahn are definitely nicer places to drive than anywhere in the U.S., you've obviously never listened to German traffic reports. On average they consist of things like "5 km jam between Lindenhof and Heinersdorf", or 12 km jam on the A8 between Pfaffing and Hotzolling". Congestion is a way of life, and the amount maintenance required by the nice roads means that they're always under construction. It once took me 13 hours to drive the 600 km from Munich to Berlin. It has never taken that longer than 7 to get from Toronto to Montreal, and I don't imagine the Canadian roads are so much better than the American.
The reason the Autobahn have no speed limits was stated somewhere above - driver education. You don't get the people sitting in the left lanes doing 80, scared of passing an LKV. People also realize that letting someone pass you isn't a sign of weakness. This is also the reason that most Germans follow the posted limits, unlike in North America where driving 20 over is the norm. The crazy fines associated with speeding might have something to do with it as well though.
You mean this study? It seems to say tobacco smoke is a Class A carcinogen. Apparently, only 160,440 people in the USA died of lung cancer last year though. That means that 1.8% of all deaths from lung cancer are directly caused by second hand smoke. Then there are the 35,000 to 40,000 deaths per year from heart disease due to second-hand smoke. Of course, if you're willing to murder 3000 people per year for a habit, what's another few thousand?
"second hand smoke is dangerous"
I think we can all agree that smoking is dangerous, so please explain how regular exposure to an environment filled with cigarette smoke isn't. I'm sure there are lots of people who would be glad to hear it. Heather Crowe for instance. No wait, she just died of lung cancer. That's the point that immediately struck me as absurd, but the rest are too. The only insightful part of the comment is the last line.
The problem isn't that people don't like certain things, the problem is that most people don't bother to take the time to think about the root cause of a problem. Mothers worry about their kids playing outside because of smog, so they pack them into the SUV and drive to the McDonald's playland. If more people actually bothered to ask why and not just say "it's too late now", we wouldn't have to ban peanuts from schools, use air-filters in our homes, block the stars from the sky with street lights, spend billions on healthcare for people purposely killing themselves and others, or worry about protecting ourselves from men breaking into our houses with guns.
1) It's easier to bring along one laptop instead of several binders full of dog-eared papers to take notes.
I always used a single binder with the notes from the last week of classes. the rest of the notes were filed away at home in class-specific binders.
2) I use Perforce to keep what's on my laptop in sync with what's on my desktop, so there isn't much of a fear of suddenly losing my notes.
Unless the house burned down, I never had to worry about losing anything. Moving the notes to the correct binder also gave me the chance to glance over them again.
3) There's no shuffling around binders and pages of notes to find the note you're looking for with a laptop, everything is organized directories and I can search through them.
If the notes are kept organized in the first place, this isn't normally a problem. Shuffling seems to normally come from those people who put everything into their book bag and start every class searching through the ream for the last lecture's notes.
4) I can easily refer to supporting material during the lecture. Profs often have the class slides posted online, and sometimes we're stuck with a horrible projector that won't focus, I can simply download the notes and follow along on my own screen without having to sit at the front of the class.
This is where preparation comes in handy. Too many people underestimate the importance of glancing through the material for the next lecture. If diagrams and course notes are online, you can print them off and bring them along. As posted before, this way you can annotate and comment on the course material, and you're actually prepared for the class.
I don't think I ever met anyone who could actually write up equations and sketch diagrams on a computer fast enough to keep up with the lecture. It was always the guy in the front with the laptop asking the prof about how you exit a while(1) loop just after the prof had explained how to use break and continue. This, added to the distraction of the guy watching Office Space at the the front, is why professors ask people not to take notes on their computers.
We have plaster and wire mesh walls, and steel beams holding up the ceiling and floors. Not only can I not see my AP from outside, I also can't use the cordless phone in the garden. I don't get calls on the mobile when at home though, so there are positives.
So, solution to the parents being tech clueless is to just have them redecorate in a more rustic style.
It's unfortunate that Pages is only for the Mac. I'll admit it's not quite 100% yet, but the formatting paradigm is exactly what you're talking about. Templates are easy to see, change, and create, and changes to templates are stored with the file, not globally. It really encourages the use of actual styles, as opposed to just knowing that Arial 14pt. bold is a 2nd-level header. Both MS and the OOo team could take something from the way styles are implemented in Pages.