Actually mass transit sucks. Trains are good for hauling coal and cattle. What is needed is a transport system that meets individual travelling requirements ie carries one person efficiently and scales from there. Any model that relies on people giving up the ability to travel where and when they want is dumb simply because it requires compromise on where is when. For actual fuel efficiency per mile look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation. Motorcycles beat all forms of rail, changing them to diesel or more fuel efficient engines would allow them to beat "Efficient Hybrids" however you rarely see the nutters that promote rail considering more motorcycle. The majority of motorcycles can travel at over 200km/h which is significantly faster than most trains, what we need is for someone to make motorcycles or something like motorcycles safe. Rail it being promoted by people who like trains, it is simply coincidence that they happen to be more efficient than cars.
In short for better individual transport.
where at any time
when at any time
faster than current systems
fuel efficient
Opting out is still possible however the person opting out now bears the cost. This is a pure enconomic play, current models don't work because the cost of non-compliance is bourne by others. 1 Others who are exposed to disease 2 Children who are not capable of making rational decisions (especially when bred from stupid parents)
Only the basic medical framework is government funded in Australia, to get elective surgery or what you might consider a reasonable waiting period you buy private heath insurance. Its significantly cheaper than the US model and delivers a better service.
You talk about VM, distribured data..... but what do you actually want? Have you heard of the CAP theorem? does it apply to what your doing? How dynamic is your data? How granular are updates? Is it of a transactional nature? Is it your DVD/Bluray collection? From what I'm hearing well managed software raid would suit, ATAoE 10Gps+ no need for more complexity, of course you could use a rack are file system but first you'd need to provide a problem that it actually solves.
This is not stupid or weak, it is the response of a well informed CIO that understands the capabilities of the market. For example does google, facebook or twitter buy support by the OS install? No...
How about you buy a couple of Red hat licences, that way you can have a process which if there is a bug you can replicate it on your production system by moving the app off Centos onto Redhat. The hypothetical risk that you mention is mitigated. Or you could ring the vendor and ask them if they will support Centos, some do BTW. With the other options you're pissing into the wind, I 'need' to use CC products in certain situations and that mean in a manner confirming the the security target. If you want FIPS compile openSSL with the FIPS option.
The bottom line is that your manager doesn't think that Redhat is offering a value proposition and I don't think that they do either. I really can't justify the service offering of Redhat over Centos. Redhat needs to actually offer value in this space.
Never like or never used. Forgive the misspelling I'm writing this from a laptop near a pool and the text is nearly invisible, especially with polarised sunglasses. E-ink on the other hand is near perfect in the sun its just slow. I recently lend an e-ink device to someone who was an avid ipod lover to take on a holidays and needed to go a week without charging his device. He's now bought one and finally understands that they are currently separate markets. I do a lot of reading and rarely play the puerile games that are so that may be a diferentiating factor.
Any E-book reader needs e-ink. I've been given an Ipad for work and while its a nice toy... its a toy. It not small enough to fit in my pocket, it sucks for reading work related documents, however its great for games and ok for magazine type content. Really WTF are organisations blowing their cash on these things? Here's a tip companies and government organisations that buy these devices should be slashing their IT budgets and giving the money back to shareholders. If I wanted an ipad-kindle hybrid it need both the lcd screen and the e-ink screen and would magically sense which way is up and present content based upon its orientation. The reason that this hasn't been occurring is that the screens are the most expensive component.
ps I actually want a full size e-ink screen for reading documents so that printing is not needed at work if anyone with any actual decision making authority reads/.
The copyright model is broken and has been massaged by large corporations into a licence to print money. Copyright should only apply to individuals and for limited periods of time. Nothing created while my father has lived has ever gone into the public domain which was one of the key reasons why copyright was granted. How does 25 years for individuals and 5 years for companies sound? That way the price that they pay for copyright protection is and end date to protection, if the corporations don't like it they can use proprietary mechanisms and once they're broken they can't claim copyright. It would also force companies to licence copyright management from individuals rather than buying them outright.
Australian Law make this form of interception illegal. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/taaa1979410/ There are two types of conversations which occur which are specifically mentioned in the act. The first is between your phone and the carriers infrastructure to enable the phone to maintain contact with the carriers infrastructure.The contract that you have with the carrier provides for this to occur. The second occurs when you call someone.
It would appear that the purveyors of this product either can't afford a lawyer or have a really good one.
Both types of conversations are protected by the telecommunications Interceptions Act (from memory this is the specific act). Even a layman can understand the extract from the act below.
CHAPTER 2--Interception of telecommunications
PART 2-1--PROHIBITION ON INTERCEPTION OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
7. Telecommunications not to be intercepted
PART 2-2--WARRANTS AUTHORISING THE ORGANISATION TO INTERCEPT TELECOMMUNICATIONS
In short intercept and not have a warren t then go to gaol for two years:)
The pro greenhouse factions have been pointing to isolated areas where there has been ice reduction. The pro fossil fuel group point to areas where ice is increasing.
There areas of reduction are larger and more prominent than the areas of ice increase. If I were a betting person I would want long odds before supporting the ice increase camp and what would I spend the money on if I lost.
Now climate change doesn't need to be a bad thing, it depends upon your perspective and context however I'm more worried about the impact of lots of CO2 on the oceans pH. This will change life as we know it and I suspect that the oceans will become a not very nice place to be close to.
If I had the power I'd be making society go nuclear big time and taxing the begessus out of any C02 emmiter to fund the change. It not that I like nuclear its the only real option that is palatable to me. I like using lots of energy, I don't want to be frugal with my energy budget which the green loonies think is the best option. The situation in Japan is simply poor planning, Anyone who thought that putting fundamentally unstable nuclear plant designs on the coast which are plagued by extreme earthquakes and tsunamis needs their head read. By the way the Japanese aren't the only numbnuts. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/google-earth-maps-out-at-risk-populations-around-nuclear-power-plants.php http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/nuclear-reactors-in-earthquake-zones-in-the-us-map.php
The answer is better reactor design and better plant placement.
Oracle has really missed the boat in relation to user sentiment and understanding of the market. There is a perception amongst management that it any MS or other vendor solution is going to be cheaper than an oracle one, this is largely true and I'll give you a couple of examples. The Oracle licensing model is bound to cores not CPUs, thus any other vendor can demonstrate that as infrastructure scales to more cores rather than CPUs Oracle licensing is going to bite you in the arse. Oracles take on virtual computing is also meant to drive you towards Oracles virtualisation products however in reality it is pushing in the opposite direction. You must licence the product for all the cores in the cluster and so as agencies adopt virtualisation Oracle goes from being merely expensive to being uncompetitive. I'm speaking from experience in this regard, in a recent project we slashed 25% off a 15m project by replacing some of the oracle software stack and using a combination of Redhat and MS, we changed the sys integrators design and the vendor is happy to support it. This was in a government environment where change is 10x harder than in the commercial arena. It should be noted that this saving was against a "discounted" oracle price. Oracle's price = pissing off management in hard times Oracle's open source strategy = pissing off the open source community which tended to oppose MS Oracle Google/Android strategy = pissing off mobile users
Oracle has hard times ahead and they're current pissing on those who were standing with them.
Oracle which now owns MySQL is a database vendor. MySQL has been a game changer in the database market offering for little or no cost a product which directly competes with Oracle offerings in some market segments. Improving MySQL scalability makes it compete in more market segments that before. This doesn't make sense Improving MySQL authentication options makes it compete directly with the Enterprise Edition of the Oracle DB Where is the benefit to Oracle in maintaining 2 competing database products? There is none. Unless you are willing to play the long game. Step one Gut hook the client, Oracle purchased MySQL for the customers, adopting an embrace and extend model binds customers to the product increasing cost associated with jumping ship. (Go on Oracle give those cigarettes out for free) Step 2 Develop an migration path between MySQL and Oracle, hey guys there's no pressure (Maybe a MySQL front end on Oracle?) Step 3 Migrate more components to a closed source model, ones that you really need Step 4 Force users onto the Oracle back end Step 5 Roll in cash and laugh
Buffer overflows, formal techniques, specialist languages were all created decades ago, Bill gates wrote the trustworthy computing memo because of the bad press that MS was getting, it was pure marketing. Systems from other vendors have evolved to provide smaller attack targets upon install that they did a decade ago. This is system design not software techniques. This guy is a knob blowing his own trumpet.
History is littered with comments of this ilk, but made by people whose opinion should be considered. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." This commentary is made by a journo who's only job is to make lots of people go to this web site. Game/Set/Match to journo,./ readers you should hang your head in shame.
ps a decade ago I had access to a network with multi-gig connectivity to the Internet as I had a job with a research organisation. It's the only network that I've work on where I actively tuned the TCP stack and optimised disks to cope with the download speeds, it was fantastic. All I can say is bring it on.
It's a bug, the vendor is behaving badly and attempting to control the media. What should be happening is It's a bug, the vendor should be apologising and assisting users. In short apple users you should be taking your money elsewhere where the vendor treats you with respect but... apple is like religion....
Apple is like religion, if you criticise you're a heretic, where reality and marketing differ you must accept marketing and worst of all is the viewpoint that the rest of the world are deluded and need saving. Worst of all is that you can't bring yourself to objectively look at the problem, instead you justify the relationship using some past event.
Governments do IT very inefficiently, they are also clueless when outsourcing but they think that they're good at it. Vendors have teams who manage deals all the time and a government agency thinks that it can draw a team together every few years and not get skinned by the vendors. It a bit like the hometown team going up against a bunch of pros. Internal government IT departments make these vendors attractive because they're monopolies, if the business want to wind down costs that means cutting services, there are no creative cost effective solutions. For example every innovative IT company over the past decade is using local storage not SANs as they figured out that doing storage the classic tier 1.. teir n way that vendors said to do it was not economically feasible. But Government and the dinosaurs of the business world are still investing in these technologies. Government buy software solution that only have a single supplier such are Microsoft, Oracle etc. You will never get a decent price or decent service when there is only one supplier, this is a market principle which governments choose to ignore. Hardware has become cheap because there's multiple supplier but the price of software has increased. The bottom line is seek commoditisation, make markets work for you rather than against you and finally run software development like a lottery. Small teams of developers can actually out-compete most large organisations if the solution is chunked in the right way.
This debate is older than the hills and those in favour of suppressing information should have been defeated many times however they just keep coming because it appeals to the same simplistic mindsets that find communism attractive. While it suppressing information appears to be a good idea the free flow of information makes democratic societies work. Military organisations are very inefficient because they limit the flow of information, communism had famines because they limited the flow of information. Surprisingly there has never been a major famine in a country with a free press in the last 100 years. If your airport security is broken fix it, don't attempt to gag the messenger who's telling you that your pants are round your ankles. If your leaders are leading you into a nuclear dustup they should be able to explain why they need a bunker and you don't get one. If there were enough bunkers for all a special congress bunker wouldn't be needed now would it. The same argument for repressing information was unsuccessfully used to stop research into lock design a few hundred years ago and as a result we've got good quality locks at bargain prices. Stop trying to daemonize people and let society to come up with effective ways to stop idiots, for example by giving planes strong cabin doors
The fact that a most credit card transactions are based upon a couple magic numbers and a date makes them easy to defraud. Fixing this problem isn't rocket science. With smartcards, crypto and near field readers this problems shouldn't be hard to make this go away. A vender generates a transaction, you digitally sign it and the vendor gets the signed result. You could even put the credit institution in the loop if you wished. Its funny but Google appears to be pushing the technology that would facilitate this. That would make google stops a buy and visa a sell for the longer term wouldn't it?
It is sad, if you want to teach creation tales it should be done either creative fiction or religion classes not as part of the science curriculum. Science is a movable feast, tomorrow there may be consensus that another theory is better however the prevailing viewpoint supports Darwinism. Why with the imperial measurement system, mounting debt and religious blowhards blurring fact with fiction the future is looking very third worldish for the good old US.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can make the imperial system work doesn't mean it should be the one that you use. Just because your dick can reach your arse doesn't mean you don't need a girlfriend.
You're an idiot, the metric system is better because it is orders of magnitude simpler. 1L of water is a cube of side 10cm, it weighs 1 kg. The whole metric system is like this you push a force of one newton for 1 m you require a joule of energy. You want electric brakes to disipate this energy then pass 1 ampere through a resistor of 1 ohm. You could prove me wrong by telling me how many btu are generated by pushing a force of 1 pound for a distance of 1 chain. Meanwhile go home via africa because just because its longer doesn't make it wrong.:)
Under Australian Telecommunications law your phone has two sets of conversations. One set is the obvious one relating to the people that you call, the other occurs between you and the carrier. Each time that your phone connects, polls or hands over to another tower you are "having a conversation" with the carrier which you have expressly permitted, if the phone hands over GPS location data at the same time so much the better. The carriers are running wild with the possibilities and have been buying petabytes of storage to capture the flood. Currently a phone only polls the local tower every two hours if you're not moving, however they're getting the federal government to pay for a system upgrade which will enable this information to be captured every 5min. The stated reason for this upgrade is the ability to send emergency sms messages but the carriers are loving the extra data.
Our company offers users a choice, internet connectivity with linux or a MS desktop without internet connectivity. What do you think that the result has been?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually mass transit sucks. Trains are good for hauling coal and cattle.
What is needed is a transport system that meets individual travelling requirements ie carries one person efficiently and scales from there. Any model that relies on people giving up the ability to travel where and when they want is dumb simply because it requires compromise on where is when.
For actual fuel efficiency per mile look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation.
Motorcycles beat all forms of rail, changing them to diesel or more fuel efficient engines would allow them to beat "Efficient Hybrids" however you rarely see the nutters that promote rail considering more motorcycle. The majority of motorcycles can travel at over 200km/h which is significantly faster than most trains, what we need is for someone to make motorcycles or something like motorcycles safe.
Rail it being promoted by people who like trains, it is simply coincidence that they happen to be more efficient than cars.
In short for better individual transport.
where at any time
when at any time
faster than current systems
fuel efficient
Things aren't looking good for you sir... their != there
Their is not greater than there.....
Opting out is still possible however the person opting out now bears the cost. This is a pure enconomic play, current models don't work because the cost of non-compliance is bourne by others.
1 Others who are exposed to disease
2 Children who are not capable of making rational decisions (especially when bred from stupid parents)
Only the basic medical framework is government funded in Australia, to get elective surgery or what you might consider a reasonable waiting period you buy private heath insurance. Its significantly cheaper than the US model and delivers a better service.
You talk about VM, distribured data..... but what do you actually want?
Have you heard of the CAP theorem? does it apply to what your doing?
How dynamic is your data?
How granular are updates?
Is it of a transactional nature?
Is it your DVD/Bluray collection?
From what I'm hearing well managed software raid would suit, ATAoE 10Gps+ no need for more complexity, of course you could use a rack are file system but first you'd need to provide a problem that it actually solves.
This is not stupid or weak, it is the response of a well informed CIO that understands the capabilities of the market.
For example does google, facebook or twitter buy support by the OS install? No...
How about you buy a couple of Red hat licences, that way you can have a process which if there is a bug you can replicate it on your production system by moving the app off Centos onto Redhat. The hypothetical risk that you mention is mitigated. Or you could ring the vendor and ask them if they will support Centos, some do BTW.
With the other options you're pissing into the wind, I 'need' to use CC products in certain situations and that mean in a manner confirming the the security target. If you want FIPS compile openSSL with the FIPS option.
The bottom line is that your manager doesn't think that Redhat is offering a value proposition and I don't think that they do either. I really can't justify the service offering of Redhat over Centos. Redhat needs to actually offer value in this space.
Never like or never used. Forgive the misspelling I'm writing this from a laptop near a pool and the text is nearly invisible, especially with polarised sunglasses. E-ink on the other hand is near perfect in the sun its just slow.
I recently lend an e-ink device to someone who was an avid ipod lover to take on a holidays and needed to go a week without charging his device. He's now bought one and finally understands that they are currently separate markets.
I do a lot of reading and rarely play the puerile games that are so that may be a diferentiating factor.
Any E-book reader needs e-ink. I've been given an Ipad for work and while its a nice toy... its a toy. It not small enough to fit in my pocket, it sucks for reading work related documents, however its great for games and ok for magazine type content. Really WTF are organisations blowing their cash on these things? Here's a tip companies and government organisations that buy these devices should be slashing their IT budgets and giving the money back to shareholders.
If I wanted an ipad-kindle hybrid it need both the lcd screen and the e-ink screen and would magically sense which way is up and present content based upon its orientation. The reason that this hasn't been occurring is that the screens are the most expensive component.
ps I actually want a full size e-ink screen for reading documents so that printing is not needed at work if anyone with any actual decision making authority reads /.
The copyright model is broken and has been massaged by large corporations into a licence to print money. Copyright should only apply to individuals and for limited periods of time. Nothing created while my father has lived has ever gone into the public domain which was one of the key reasons why copyright was granted. How does 25 years for individuals and 5 years for companies sound? That way the price that they pay for copyright protection is and end date to protection, if the corporations don't like it they can use proprietary mechanisms and once they're broken they can't claim copyright. It would also force companies to licence copyright management from individuals rather than buying them outright.
Australian Law make this form of interception illegal.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/taaa1979410/
There are two types of conversations which occur which are specifically mentioned in the act.
The first is between your phone and the carriers infrastructure to enable the phone to maintain contact with the carriers infrastructure.The contract that you have with the carrier provides for this to occur.
The second occurs when you call someone.
It would appear that the purveyors of this product either can't afford a lawyer or have a really good one.
Both types of conversations are protected by the telecommunications Interceptions Act (from memory this is the specific act). Even a layman can understand the extract from the act below.
CHAPTER 2--Interception of telecommunications
PART 2-1--PROHIBITION ON INTERCEPTION OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
7. Telecommunications not to be intercepted
PART 2-2--WARRANTS AUTHORISING THE ORGANISATION TO INTERCEPT TELECOMMUNICATIONS
In short intercept and not have a warren t then go to gaol for two years :)
The pro greenhouse factions have been pointing to isolated areas where there has been ice reduction.
The pro fossil fuel group point to areas where ice is increasing.
There areas of reduction are larger and more prominent than the areas of ice increase. If I were a betting person I would want long odds before supporting the ice increase camp and what would I spend the money on if I lost.
Now climate change doesn't need to be a bad thing, it depends upon your perspective and context however I'm more worried about the impact of lots of CO2 on the oceans pH. This will change life as we know it and I suspect that the oceans will become a not very nice place to be close to.
If I had the power I'd be making society go nuclear big time and taxing the begessus out of any C02 emmiter to fund the change. It not that I like nuclear its the only real option that is palatable to me. I like using lots of energy, I don't want to be frugal with my energy budget which the green loonies think is the best option. The situation in Japan is simply poor planning, Anyone who thought that putting fundamentally unstable nuclear plant designs on the coast which are plagued by extreme earthquakes and tsunamis needs their head read. By the way the Japanese aren't the only numbnuts.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/04/google-earth-maps-out-at-risk-populations-around-nuclear-power-plants.php
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/nuclear-reactors-in-earthquake-zones-in-the-us-map.php
The answer is better reactor design and better plant placement.
Oracle has really missed the boat in relation to user sentiment and understanding of the market. There is a perception amongst management that it any MS or other vendor solution is going to be cheaper than an oracle one, this is largely true and I'll give you a couple of examples.
The Oracle licensing model is bound to cores not CPUs, thus any other vendor can demonstrate that as infrastructure scales to more cores rather than CPUs Oracle licensing is going to bite you in the arse.
Oracles take on virtual computing is also meant to drive you towards Oracles virtualisation products however in reality it is pushing in the opposite direction. You must licence the product for all the cores in the cluster and so as agencies adopt virtualisation Oracle goes from being merely expensive to being uncompetitive.
I'm speaking from experience in this regard, in a recent project we slashed 25% off a 15m project by replacing some of the oracle software stack and using a combination of Redhat and MS, we changed the sys integrators design and the vendor is happy to support it. This was in a government environment where change is 10x harder than in the commercial arena. It should be noted that this saving was against a "discounted" oracle price.
Oracle's price = pissing off management in hard times
Oracle's open source strategy = pissing off the open source community which tended to oppose MS
Oracle Google/Android strategy = pissing off mobile users
Oracle has hard times ahead and they're current pissing on those who were standing with them.
Oracle which now owns MySQL is a database vendor.
MySQL has been a game changer in the database market offering for little or no cost a product which directly competes with Oracle offerings in some market segments.
Improving MySQL scalability makes it compete in more market segments that before. This doesn't make sense
Improving MySQL authentication options makes it compete directly with the Enterprise Edition of the Oracle DB
Where is the benefit to Oracle in maintaining 2 competing database products? There is none.
Unless you are willing to play the long game.
Step one Gut hook the client, Oracle purchased MySQL for the customers, adopting an embrace and extend model binds customers to the product increasing cost associated with jumping ship. (Go on Oracle give those cigarettes out for free)
Step 2 Develop an migration path between MySQL and Oracle, hey guys there's no pressure (Maybe a MySQL front end on Oracle?)
Step 3 Migrate more components to a closed source model, ones that you really need
Step 4 Force users onto the Oracle back end
Step 5 Roll in cash and laugh
Buffer overflows, formal techniques, specialist languages were all created decades ago, Bill gates wrote the trustworthy computing memo because of the bad press that MS was getting, it was pure marketing. Systems from other vendors have evolved to provide smaller attack targets upon install that they did a decade ago. This is system design not software techniques.
This guy is a knob blowing his own trumpet.
History is littered with comments of this ilk, but made by people whose opinion should be considered. ./ readers you should hang your head in shame.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
This commentary is made by a journo who's only job is to make lots of people go to this web site.
Game/Set/Match to journo,
ps a decade ago I had access to a network with multi-gig connectivity to the Internet as I had a job with a research organisation. It's the only network that I've work on where I actively tuned the TCP stack and optimised disks to cope with the download speeds, it was fantastic. All I can say is bring it on.
It's a bug, the vendor is behaving badly and attempting to control the media. What should be happening is ... apple is like religion....
It's a bug, the vendor should be apologising and assisting users.
In short apple users you should be taking your money elsewhere where the vendor treats you with respect but
Apple is like religion, if you criticise you're a heretic, where reality and marketing differ you must accept marketing and worst of all is the viewpoint that the rest of the world are deluded and need saving. Worst of all is that you can't bring yourself to objectively look at the problem, instead you justify the relationship using some past event.
Governments do IT very inefficiently, they are also clueless when outsourcing but they think that they're good at it. Vendors have teams who manage deals all the time and a government agency thinks that it can draw a team together every few years and not get skinned by the vendors. It a bit like the hometown team going up against a bunch of pros. .. teir n way that vendors said to do it was not economically feasible. But Government and the dinosaurs of the business world are still investing in these technologies.
Internal government IT departments make these vendors attractive because they're monopolies, if the business want to wind down costs that means cutting services, there are no creative cost effective solutions. For example every innovative IT company over the past decade is using local storage not SANs as they figured out that doing storage the classic tier 1
Government buy software solution that only have a single supplier such are Microsoft, Oracle etc. You will never get a decent price or decent service when there is only one supplier, this is a market principle which governments choose to ignore. Hardware has become cheap because there's multiple supplier but the price of software has increased.
The bottom line is seek commoditisation, make markets work for you rather than against you and finally run software development like a lottery. Small teams of developers can actually out-compete most large organisations if the solution is chunked in the right way.
This debate is older than the hills and those in favour of suppressing information should have been defeated many times however they just keep coming because it appeals to the same simplistic mindsets that find communism attractive.
While it suppressing information appears to be a good idea the free flow of information makes democratic societies work. Military organisations are very inefficient because they limit the flow of information, communism had famines because they limited the flow of information. Surprisingly there has never been a major famine in a country with a free press in the last 100 years. If your airport security is broken fix it, don't attempt to gag the messenger who's telling you that your pants are round your ankles. If your leaders are leading you into a nuclear dustup they should be able to explain why they need a bunker and you don't get one. If there were enough bunkers for all a special congress bunker wouldn't be needed now would it.
The same argument for repressing information was unsuccessfully used to stop research into lock design a few hundred years ago and as a result we've got good quality locks at bargain prices. Stop trying to daemonize people and let society to come up with effective ways to stop idiots, for example by giving planes strong cabin doors
The fact that a most credit card transactions are based upon a couple magic numbers and a date makes them easy to defraud. Fixing this problem isn't rocket science. With smartcards, crypto and near field readers this problems shouldn't be hard to make this go away. A vender generates a transaction, you digitally sign it and the vendor gets the signed result. You could even put the credit institution in the loop if you wished. Its funny but Google appears to be pushing the technology that would facilitate this. That would make google stops a buy and visa a sell for the longer term wouldn't it?
It is sad, if you want to teach creation tales it should be done either creative fiction or religion classes not as part of the science curriculum. Science is a movable feast, tomorrow there may be consensus that another theory is better however the prevailing viewpoint supports Darwinism. Why with the imperial measurement system, mounting debt and religious blowhards blurring fact with fiction the future is looking very third worldish for the good old US.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can make the imperial system work doesn't mean it should be the one that you use. Just because your dick can reach your arse doesn't mean you don't need a girlfriend.
You're an idiot, the metric system is better because it is orders of magnitude simpler. 1L of water is a cube of side 10cm, it weighs 1 kg. The whole metric system is like this you push a force of one newton for 1 m you require a joule of energy. You want electric brakes to disipate this energy then pass 1 ampere through a resistor of 1 ohm. You could prove me wrong by telling me how many btu are generated by pushing a force of 1 pound for a distance of 1 chain. Meanwhile go home via africa because just because its longer doesn't make it wrong. :)
Under Australian Telecommunications law your phone has two sets of conversations. One set is the obvious one relating to the people that you call, the other occurs between you and the carrier. Each time that your phone connects, polls or hands over to another tower you are "having a conversation" with the carrier which you have expressly permitted, if the phone hands over GPS location data at the same time so much the better. The carriers are running wild with the possibilities and have been buying petabytes of storage to capture the flood. Currently a phone only polls the local tower every two hours if you're not moving, however they're getting the federal government to pay for a system upgrade which will enable this information to be captured every 5min. The stated reason for this upgrade is the ability to send emergency sms messages but the carriers are loving the extra data.
Don't buy from Vendors which do this, and yes Google does have a choice though they may have to tumble into the mobile phone business.
Our company offers users a choice, internet connectivity with linux or a MS desktop without internet connectivity. What do you think that the result has been?