> it's swipe, sign, optionally-type, done. > I've done hundreds of Square transactions, and it takes seconds. You don't know what you're talking about.
You are clearly an unusually adept expert. Oh wait.... no.
The standard *actual* usage scenario is... hand my card over, wait for the person to dig out his/her phone from their pocket, wait for them to dig out the Square dongle from some other pocket or purse, wait for them to plug it in and swipe, swipe, swipe to find the app, start it, fiddle with the dongle because it's not reognized, pull it out, plug it in again, swipe the card, set it down, check the amount, type it in, no wait... clear, and type it in again, hand it to me to "sign", take it back to submit, I ask for a receipt, they say they don't know how to do that, I say click the 'receipt' option, they ask their partner/manager/boyfriend whether that's ok, there's a minute of mumbline and quibbling, they push a button and hand it back to me... I type out a number, then they click submit... and wait... and wait... and if we're lucky, THEN the transaction "takes seconds." If we're not, the transaction fails for any number of reasons (mostly crappy signal/data service drops off), and I'm standing there even longer watching some slackjawed yokel tapping at his ifruit, wasting my time.
You're either an atypical client in a stable location (in which case you could get a much better rate elsewhere), or you're a salesperson for Square.
Online retailers don't process cards the same way as a "card-present" (Visa/MC/PCIco's term) transaction, don't get full track data, have different terms, easier chargebacks, etc etc. OTOH Square reads full-track data, and processes it thru an uncontrolled consumer device with encryption that terminates at the next proxy... Yeah. So I have the highest-disclosure type of activities happening thru the highest-risk type of merchant processing. 's no good.
Square? You mean the purveyors of the butter-slice sized "I-can't-believe-it's-PCI-compliant!" (tm) mobile payment system? The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt. I know, I know, most people swipe their cards and wave off the receipt, taking it on faith that the merchant will charge only the amount shown on the till and not a little more... or the maximum I just authorized with the card-present swipe. If the charge is off, you have no proof, no way of coming back, nothing at all.
Oh sure, I can stand there for another 2-3min while I ask said hipster to email or text me a "receipt" (at least it has a transaction number) usually accompanied with a lot of huffing and puffing about how giving me a receipt is a hassle and why do I want one anyway....? Because I just did the electronic equivalent of laying my wallet on the counter and saying "Take what you need." I'd like some acknowledgement of what was taken. Is that such a burden? I still write a few checks for bills and such so there are multiple transaction types debited against a single account, and I like to reconcile payments and balance my account periodically like a grownup.
I might slide more easily into the paperless future if the rate of "error" (not really) wasn't going up. Even in my run-o-the-mill consumer usage, I've had a few instances in the past year where a person (a local drive-up barista, a dude selling t-shirts at Comicon, etc) where there was a discrepancy between what I was told and what was punched in. It's never in my favor, and if I didn't catch it in tiny print on a smudgy screen before faux-signing with my finger... And when I ask for a receipt -- even a text pseudo-receipt -- they got all flustered, and one even refused (that was the one who'd added an even two dollars). Persoanlly, if you're that hard up to steal a buck from me, you can have it. But that doesn't mean it's right.
All of a sudden this older type of "skimming" is coming back into vogue, something that I haven't seen since... well, ever in my lifetime. My parents used to talk about deli guys with a finger on the scale, and cashiers with pennies on the counter to count how many dollars in the till they'd lifted from customers (so they could balance the till by pocketing the right amt of cash at the end of the day), but I thought they were funny old-people stories. Any now Square comes along with a magical box that re-enables a petty crime by depricating auth logs... and few people seem to give a crap.
No touchscreen is so 90's. Gotta be able to use apps with simple gestures. On the other hand, no physical keyboard means the screen is covered with smudgy dots (ew), and typing on a touchscreen requires direct attention (NTSB stats show that even dialling on an ifruit while driving is profoundly poor judgement). Gotta have both.... So since I have to have both keyboard and touchscreen, I run things I'd characterize as "applications" on the device. Browsing slashdot? Editing a long email? Yeah. Much more screen real estate than a weather widget or disgruntled birds "app".... So now I'm looking at 800x480 or even 1280x600 screen in my hand, and the browser renders pixels 1:1, so the damn thing had better be at least 4.5-5in across. (Think of it this way: the "retina" display is marketing nonsense, but it's a good marker of the point beyond which increased DPI has no purpose, because humans can't discern the difference.)
Oh, and when I put my phone in my jeans pocket, it falls over sideways and wedges over my thigh when I sit or kneel. A slightly bigger screen will stay vertical in my pocket -- the 5in tablet style phones are just about right.
Far be it for me to defend DSM IV; personally I think it's a relativist p.o.s and contains opinion-based nonsense such as "oppositional defiant disorder" which doesn't pass the giggle test. I'm just pointing out that by the current even-if-crappy standard, mental health doctors have label for a category of behavior; the category has qualifying criteria; and "asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle..." of the criteria for HF Asperger's, a "pervasive" mental disorder.
Even if what you said is true, that doesn't mean all such people have autism or Aspergers syndrome.
Actually, yes. That's how measurement works. If you accept that IQ is a reasonable measure of Bob's intelligence, then you have to accept that it's a reasonable measure for Alice too. The APA asserts that DSM criteria apply to all people. If you don't like the system, its metrics or the resulting label, criticize that, but don't assert random exceptions.
I can't see it as anything more than liking something more than other people. The need to characterize them as "insane" or attempt to diagnose them with random disorders seems short-sighted to me.......Only because it deviates from the norm, I suspect. I believe parents driven by instinct can't imagine another "healthy" person having different feelings than themselves.
(shakes head) 'Deviates from the norm' to a sufficient degree that it has been clearly labeled as a disorder. Ponder the word "deviant." Are you a happy deviant? Isn't that ok?
Have a look at DSM-IV 299.00 Autistic Disorder. Specifically, Asperger syndrome is primarily characterized by a person's one-sided social relationships and imbalanced interactions. Research shows (generally) that HF Asperger's sufferers have an inability to recognize or process social cues, communication, and other information when interacting with other people. Mistaking pets, machines, or entirely inanimate objects for persons with which one has full human relationships is one of the red flags for this diagnosis.
This spectrum is classified under "Pervasive Developmental Disorder"...so "Insane" is maybe not the right word. However, as much as PETA likes to use the phrase "pet parents," asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle of "mental disorder."
Pets are meat. Children are minions. There's a difference.
As of the beginning of 2012: "Despite a modest launch and a limited distribution in terms of markets, Nokia's N9 model [Meego] has reached sales estimated between 1.5 and 2 million devices. According to Nokia's own quarterly report and analyst company Canalys analyses, the combined deliveries of the comparable Lumia (WP7) devices summed to approximately 1.2-1.5 million in the last quarter."
It's also curious to see that Nokia N9/Meego phones are close to the 2-million sales mark with virtually nonexistent marketing, and Nokia did not sell that phone in the North American market at all -- stateside N9's were all grey market. For historical comparison, internal Nokia sales reports say the predecessor N900 sold 100,000 in its first month and well over 1 million by 2010 (which means the N9 sales are better than the N900), and yet they refused to sell the N950 at all when it was completed in 2011 (despite nil market overlap with WP7 phones). Apparently there are a lot of nerds out there, but Nokia doesn't want their money.
You had me there for a second... thought they were giving away N900 phones, and I'd have to jump on it. It's the first phone that I will probably replace with another of the same model.
Instead, they're giving away the skeleton of the N9, running a mashup of Harmattan, Gnome, and Ubuntu's Unity interface, with gestures lifted (and flipped) straight from WebOS. Don't take that the wrong way -- I think WinPhone7 mostly took the *good* bits from those other OS's; I just think msft ought to acknowledge that WP7 (and now Windows 8's Metro i/f) is highly derivative of open-source software.
And I still want an *actual* keyboard, not the smudgy hot mess in the hands of most iPhone (and Lumia 900) users.
From http://law.justia.com/cfr/title22/22-1.0.1.6.33.html#22:1.0.1.6.33.1.3.1
22 C.F.R. PART 51—PASSPORTS Title 22 - Foreign Relations PART 51—PASSPORTS
51.6 Damaged, mutilated or altered passport. Any passport which has been materially changed in physical appearance or composition, or contains a damaged, defective or otherwise nonfunctioning electronic chip, or which includes unauthorized changes, obliterations, entries or photographs, or has observable wear and tear that renders it unfit for further use as a travel document may be invalidated. [ Note that this says MAY, and more to the point does not say IS... so a revocation judgement has to be made by.... ]
51.4 Validity of passports. (h) Invalidity. A United States passport is invalid whenever: (1) The passport has been formally revoked by the Department; or [... ONLY IF, in the judgement of the State Dept, the mutilation warrants revocation ] (2) The Department has registered a passport reported either in writing or by telephone to the Department of State, or in writing to a U.S. passport agency or to a diplomatic or consular post abroad as lost or stolen. (3) The Department has sent a written notice to the bearer at the bearer's last known address that the passport has been invalidated because the Department has not received the applicable fees.
Improper visas or clearly wrong authorizations is one thing, but the intrinsic validity of a properly issued passport to its proper owner is clearly not a decision delegated to airline staff. That judgement is for immigrations or passport officials to make, not some Jetway jockeys who've mistaken themselves for State Department employees. Seems to me that a lawsuit for injunctive relief is perfectly appropriate -- specifically to prevent AA or other airline staff from making legal declarations about the invalidity of a passport. And it's not like this would be burdensome, either: If Jetway Jane sees that you don't posses a passport or a visa for a destination that requires one, you've violated the terms on your ticket, and will be denied boarding because it's a ticketing issue. But If Jetway Joe thinks your passport might be invalid, he should call the resident officials at the airport to make a determination -- not try to impersonate them.
Why is it that decent, smart people get it in their heads that they can only do one thing? Years ago I had some bungee-manager give me a lecture on how I was spreading myself too thin, and successful people chose one thing and did it well. Nonsense. Successful savants maybe, but creative/skilled people who've been doing something well for a decade or two..? (I'd steadfastly refused to choose between the management and tech tracks at my company, and my good performance in solving/building/managing/selling didn't fit their vision of a career.)
Instead of trying to find a place for yourself as a good systems engineer who will be applied to good peoplems, go look for an enterprise or business sector that could use someone like you. One of the coolest things I did in recent years was to stop thinking as an IT security geek (please, not another PCI assessment or pentest clown show), and got a yearlong gig with the UN as a governance reform manager who happened to specialize in IT. Same crap, but new challenges and way more satisfying work.
Look at the org's business, not the tech. Some examples: I have a engineering/physics/software geek friend who signed on last year with a biotech firm that does fish tagging. Instead of looking up up up the tech hierarchy, he now runs a small operation with just a couple of guys, doing world-class work. Another friend topped out in engineering management at a certain large redmond org, and decided that where she was working was more important that the specific engineering challenges, so she's now working for a school system in Hawaii. Both are incidentally now working on improving their health and have time for music that they'd been puting off for years. Second life in the real world. Nice.
iPad = a rock? Well, if you put it that way, I have to agree!
Ya doofy n00b, there's nothing Android about the Touchpads. Did you miss the... and the part about the...? And the big firesale... and then the open...? (*sigh*)... Yeah, I guess you did. Do ya live under that rock^h^h^h^hiPad?
The intersection is "fun to drive." The Tesla is a miniscule 2-seater that's not easily driven with the roof on except by hobbits. The Ural is an open 3-seater that drives like a lightweight car. Smart's a 2-seater made by cutting a C-class in half and stuffing in a motorcycle-spec 1000cc turbo. All more or less cargo-less with high smiles-per-mile. You get the point: quite comparable in actual use.
Everything else is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the Tesla roadster with its top off looks sporty (Don't be so smug -- I'd hardly call it beautiful), but with the standard roof on, it looks like a funny-lookin' guy with a bad toupee; the automotive equiv of old Gov. Blagojevich. And no matter what's under the hood, Accord says "soccer mom" and Altima says "first decent job and apartment, but I'll sell it when she gets pregnant." Ask a woman between the ages of 25-35, and apparently you'll be told the Fiat 500 is adorable**. The Prius looks like a wheel chock to me, but Portland hippies think it's sexy. Ask a guy from 2hrs east of here, and he'll say you & me we're all f@99ots because we don't have a diesel pickup with duallys and mudders. Ask the next guy down the line, and you'll get a completely different mix. YMMV.
Anyway, trying to mimic Apple's marketing success of the iPhone with anything outside of a 2-pay-period-disposable-income item is harder than you would think. Can't easily think of a successful example, but I could pave a highway coast to coast with the bodies of those who've failed. Currently Fiat is doing reasonably well on that path** with the 500, but Tesla would do well to avoid counting on that working for them.
I can't help but think that the folks over at Ural motorcycles/IMZ America have a better sense of the market right now. They've just introduced a new "Model T" at the low end of their range, bringing the basic Ural 2-wheel drive sidecar motorcycle to the US for under $10k. Irbit Motorworks (IMZ) is Russian, the design is sourced from midcentury BMW, and the last decade+ of updates (e.g. new cylinders/heads with modern compression, better mpg/reliability, etc) have been pushed by enthusiasts in the US and EU. It intersect with the Tesla in the "sheer fun to drive" category, and my guess is that with an economy just holding on, there's gonna be a lot more of these on the road.
In another post I muttered about T-Mo staying on as the value carrier in the US: "T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on."
Same goes for Ural/IMZ versus Tesla. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Tesla business model is too "lean on the rich to get thru hard times" which all too often degenerates to "ran outta high-end customers, so try to screw the next class for as much as we need to stay afloat..." You wanna impress me Tesla? Go buy the tooling for the Corbin Merlin or Sparrow and start turning out fun electric 1-seaters for $15k -- price-competitive with the Fiat 500, Smartcar, and Scion iQ.
I was just in another window, messaging a colleague about how there's still value in doing really lame or stupid things as long as you do those things consistently, and establish a common scope and language... so that you can then start to do real work. IOW: "You don't know how f---ed up things really are until you try."
This doc is basically the product of a terribly depressing concall on which CA after CA lamented the lack standards... and 5min from the end, one of the participants stepped up and said something like "Hey, we drafted this amateur-hour recommendation doc by ourselves -- how would the group like to adopt it?" This document is a very sad, sad, incomplete, short-sighted, sad (did I say sad?) first step -- basically munging together RFC 3647 with some ideas from PCI, but still sets no real standards for actual operational security of a CA.
However, if this gets adopted & reissued by a real standards-issuing body,/then/ people can say "Hey, ISO/IEC 2XXXX security standard for CAs really sucks; why don't we make it not suck..." THEN this doc will have had real value in ensuring there's a place for the non-suck document when it's done. (BS7799=suck, but it became 27002 and in the process set the stage for other standards that are, frankly, quite good.) The first step out of a swamp is still a step in the swamp.
I used to work for a UN agency and spent a year specifically working on governance reform for IT. The idea that "the" UN has email systems is kind of funny. While some agencies have well-designed, well-run, consolidated communications & IT systems, those are more the exception than the rule. By and large, each agency has multiple divisions or programmes that run their own IT systems with little to no effective oversight. Disparate systems and dependence on abandonware are prevalent. Governance & policies are (*ahem*) lacking in most cases, and enforcement is by and large nonexistent. Tell a Deputy Director that he has to have a password of more than four characters or change it more than once a year? Good luck with that. There is simply no framework or middle ground for getting an agency or multiple agencies to adopt best practices when their reality vacillates wildly between disasters/getting shot at/real work one day, and political fights/internal corruption/not having enough money to run simple services on the next. While seeing this on pastebin is disappointing, it's not the least bit surprising. It falls more in the category of "someone noticed the door was hanging open and put some mild effort into it" rather than "1337 h@xx0r broke into a fortress." The sad part is that the likely outcome of this event is a long series of dreary Euro-proper weekly meetings at UNDP and other agencies, eventually resulting in a task force of a dozen people at the Secretariat charged with defining what "fix" means, followed by a slew of small teams at each affected agency to work on the perceived ICT policy, operation, and configuration problems. But no authority will be given to those teams to mandate changes to their respective ICT Chiefs. In 6-9 months a series of changes to security controls will be recommended, but they'll be overridden, redirected, and mangled by their respective IT orgs; in all probability the money & effort will be unrecognizable and the effects negligible. It's like The Office without the slightest hint of humor.
I've been with T-Mo for almost 15 years, and this is good news. Not great news -- I'm sure there will be more trouble for T-mo in some form or another -- but at least not this year, and probably not next. But you know what this does mean? I'm re-upping my contract with T-Mo. When T-Mo came calling last year (one of several "PLEEZ don't jump ship" themed customer retention campaigns) I told them desire to have a GSM phone was only trumped by a desire never to be an AT&T customer again. As long as the death star doesn't gobble them up, T-Mo can keep having my money.
Oh, and btw -- T-Mo coverage is more than adequate across the US & Canada, (Iirc I still don't have coverage in rural Neb and WY, but no trouble anywhere else), data services are cheap, and they actually have decent humans in the corp stores. T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on.
Nonsense. $120 avg per shot is not cheap, but it's by no means gouging or a "money grab." That fee has to cover back R&D costs of development -- averaging $250 million -- and Guardisil is a first-to-succeed research effort that took about twice as long as average (about 20 yrs) to develop. That means Merck started out in the hole for somewhere south of 1/2 Billion dollars. They don't even recoup dev costs (plus two decades of investors' interest losses) until they sell ~3.5 million doses, and that doesn't even address the "last mile" costs of refrigerated transport and storage, compliance with legal regs, medical recordkeeping, and a few bucks for the overscheduled intern to swab you with an alcohol wipe and stick the needle in you. Three times. Each time for less than the cost of a good tire on your car.
How exactly did you arrive at the firm belief that this is a gouging "money grab"? Show me the math.
I had my two preteen boys vaccinated last year. Why? Because somewhere out there are probably at least two girls who will will be safer for it in future years.
Sure, there are lots of other reasons for them, but HPV vaccinations for boys are more about doing the greater good. The anti-vaccine protesters are kooks who can't count. And the anti-promiscuity hand-wavers... are also kooks who can't count (and have no grasp of history). Even the most basic grasp of statistics makes vaccination a clear and positive decision.
Just to be clear, I'm a serious fan of Cyanogen's work from the Zaurus era (went thru several generations of SL & C using his and others' work), and appreciate the effort that has gone into this. But as others have pointed out, the HP is going to some effort to ensure the hardware is a dead end, while WebOS remains a high-end viable platform and the dev base is very much alive. Seems if you're going to work on a niche market ubergeek-OS-mod, you ought to have higher goals.
Dammit. That's the wrong way!!! I have an HP Touchpad, and the hardware is mediocre, but WebOS is a work of art. Otoh, I also have multiple android 2.2 & honeycomb devices, and by and large they're fast and flexible, but the OS and app markets are buggy and malware-infested. Why port the middling-common-denominator OS to HP's crummy hardware? "Upgrading" the HP tablets by loading Android is like upgrading a Ford Fiesta with an Isuzu diesel. Sure it'll keep you on the road, but it ain't pretty and it ain't gonna be fun.
What's *really* worth someone's time and effort is a port of WebOS to better hardware. Ginmme an illicit port of WebOS to some of the nicer Samsung 5-10in tablets, the Lenovo K tablet, etc etc (anything with more ports and a faster proc) and I'd be all over it.
Mod parent up. Very insightful, and cuts to the core of the "HP gave up too fast" argument. Apotheker is just the latest in a string of lousy managers, but it's worth noting that the core of HP's current train wreck was NOT Leo's panic over low Touchpad sales and high-risk alternative proposals. It's that HP's board is so adrift that Apotheker was allowed to turn his panic and high-risk ideas into instant ill-planned actions . It's the speed that is indefensible. I suppose the title of CEO conveys a certain direction-setting authority, but even the captain of a supertanker is not allowed by the engineers to demand turning at such a speed that the ship will flip over.
One has to wonder what the metrics and thresholds were for success. Honestly, given the uptake in the past few weeks, WebOS's position has been as positive as could be reasonably expected. Reviews that say WebOS is #2 in function to Android? That's fabulous. So why quit 10 steps out of the gate? If HP was in this for the long haul, they've terribly screwed up tactically. If they were looking for short-term results, they've terribly screwed up in their strategy. Any way you slide this, it's a failure of leadership, not market or technology.
Look, I work for a certain large software company, and the volunteer group I work with still chose to install Ubuntu on computers we give to people as part of a county-sponsored social program. Even if cost were no problem (which it very much is), Win7 is a non-starter because of mem/cpu requirements vs donated hardware. After ~three years of experience, we've probably given out 200-250 Ubuntu systems, and the support requirements for Ubuntu are *excellent* compared to XP or any other Windows variant.
Initially we were afraid that the support would kill us, but these systems seem to actually be fairly long-lived without massive support calls. To be honest, the worst cases tend to be when a recipient comes back and says "My boyfriend/abuser/pimp/dealer couldn't figure out Linux so he 'upgraded' it to [XP/Vista] and now it won't work." After being burned a few times, we became pretty strict about no supported OS = no support; we offer to backup their docs/pics to a cd, then re-image the drive back to Ubuntu.
You'll need to have reasonable standards for the hardware you accept for donation (ex: min P4/512/40gb/dvd-cdr), solicit 15-17in LCDs or be choosy re CRTs (here, dead crts cost $ to dispose of), choose an Ubuntu LTS release as a base (10.04LTS is working great for us), make sure you have a maintainable customization script/jumpstart/imaging solution (script *everything* -- there are tons of scripts out there you can adapt to your needs), write a quickstart sheet for all manual/user-specific configs (show users how to create non-priv accounts for kids and guests), and configure auto-updates to match the connectivity of the users (don't turn on auto-download for dialup users...).
As long as you design your customizations to rely on existing sources (unless you run your own repository), your users should be more or less self-supporting. Now this doesn't mean we're totally carefree. The new Unity interface in Ubuntu 11.x is really too confusing for our users, which means we may have major customizations to do next year when 12.04LTS is released. (Or we may switch to Linux Mint or another Debian/Ubuntu variant). But for now, we're quite happy with the results.
Talk about the walking dead... wow. Nokia dumping Symbian in an age when lo-end CN knockoffs come with Android 2.x, and HP is putting WebOS on printers... actually makes a little sense. Nokia dumping Harmattan/Maemo6, an in-house controlled solid full-scale OS with a UI that's 4 years too late.. seems lazy or poor judgement. Nokia jumping on WinPhone7, with zero control of a third-party franchised OS that has a great UI but functionality 4 years behind the curve... seems genuinely self-destructive.
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> it's swipe, sign, optionally-type, done.
> I've done hundreds of Square transactions, and it takes seconds. You don't know what you're talking about.
You are clearly an unusually adept expert. Oh wait.... no.
The standard *actual* usage scenario is... hand my card over, wait for the person to dig out his/her phone from their pocket, wait for them to dig out the Square dongle from some other pocket or purse, wait for them to plug it in and swipe, swipe, swipe to find the app, start it, fiddle with the dongle because it's not reognized, pull it out, plug it in again, swipe the card, set it down, check the amount, type it in, no wait... clear, and type it in again, hand it to me to "sign", take it back to submit, I ask for a receipt, they say they don't know how to do that, I say click the 'receipt' option, they ask their partner/manager/boyfriend whether that's ok, there's a minute of mumbline and quibbling, they push a button and hand it back to me... I type out a number, then they click submit... and wait... and wait... and if we're lucky, THEN the transaction "takes seconds." If we're not, the transaction fails for any number of reasons (mostly crappy signal/data service drops off), and I'm standing there even longer watching some slackjawed yokel tapping at his ifruit, wasting my time.
You're either an atypical client in a stable location (in which case you could get a much better rate elsewhere), or you're a salesperson for Square.
Online retailers don't process cards the same way as a "card-present" (Visa/MC/PCIco's term) transaction, don't get full track data, have different terms, easier chargebacks, etc etc. OTOH Square reads full-track data, and processes it thru an uncontrolled consumer device with encryption that terminates at the next proxy... Yeah. So I have the highest-disclosure type of activities happening thru the highest-risk type of merchant processing. 's no good.
Square? You mean the purveyors of the butter-slice sized "I-can't-believe-it's-PCI-compliant!" (tm) mobile payment system? The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt. I know, I know, most people swipe their cards and wave off the receipt, taking it on faith that the merchant will charge only the amount shown on the till and not a little more... or the maximum I just authorized with the card-present swipe. If the charge is off, you have no proof, no way of coming back, nothing at all.
Oh sure, I can stand there for another 2-3min while I ask said hipster to email or text me a "receipt" (at least it has a transaction number) usually accompanied with a lot of huffing and puffing about how giving me a receipt is a hassle and why do I want one anyway....? Because I just did the electronic equivalent of laying my wallet on the counter and saying "Take what you need." I'd like some acknowledgement of what was taken. Is that such a burden? I still write a few checks for bills and such so there are multiple transaction types debited against a single account, and I like to reconcile payments and balance my account periodically like a grownup.
I might slide more easily into the paperless future if the rate of "error" (not really) wasn't going up. Even in my run-o-the-mill consumer usage, I've had a few instances in the past year where a person (a local drive-up barista, a dude selling t-shirts at Comicon, etc) where there was a discrepancy between what I was told and what was punched in. It's never in my favor, and if I didn't catch it in tiny print on a smudgy screen before faux-signing with my finger... And when I ask for a receipt -- even a text pseudo-receipt -- they got all flustered, and one even refused (that was the one who'd added an even two dollars). Persoanlly, if you're that hard up to steal a buck from me, you can have it. But that doesn't mean it's right.
All of a sudden this older type of "skimming" is coming back into vogue, something that I haven't seen since... well, ever in my lifetime. My parents used to talk about deli guys with a finger on the scale, and cashiers with pennies on the counter to count how many dollars in the till they'd lifted from customers (so they could balance the till by pocketing the right amt of cash at the end of the day), but I thought they were funny old-people stories. Any now Square comes along with a magical box that re-enables a petty crime by depricating auth logs... and few people seem to give a crap.
Everything old is new again.
Bigger is better. Here's my reasoning:
No touchscreen is so 90's. Gotta be able to use apps with simple gestures. On the other hand, no physical keyboard means the screen is covered with smudgy dots (ew), and typing on a touchscreen requires direct attention (NTSB stats show that even dialling on an ifruit while driving is profoundly poor judgement). Gotta have both.... So since I have to have both keyboard and touchscreen, I run things I'd characterize as "applications" on the device. Browsing slashdot? Editing a long email? Yeah. Much more screen real estate than a weather widget or disgruntled birds "app".... So now I'm looking at 800x480 or even 1280x600 screen in my hand, and the browser renders pixels 1:1, so the damn thing had better be at least 4.5-5in across. (Think of it this way: the "retina" display is marketing nonsense, but it's a good marker of the point beyond which increased DPI has no purpose, because humans can't discern the difference.)
Oh, and when I put my phone in my jeans pocket, it falls over sideways and wedges over my thigh when I sit or kneel. A slightly bigger screen will stay vertical in my pocket -- the 5in tablet style phones are just about right.
That or narrower pockets in my Levis...
0.o
Far be it for me to defend DSM IV; personally I think it's a relativist p.o.s and contains opinion-based nonsense such as "oppositional defiant disorder" which doesn't pass the giggle test. I'm just pointing out that by the current even-if-crappy standard, mental health doctors have label for a category of behavior; the category has qualifying criteria; and "asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle..." of the criteria for HF Asperger's, a "pervasive" mental disorder.
Even if what you said is true, that doesn't mean all such people have autism or Aspergers syndrome.
Actually, yes. That's how measurement works. If you accept that IQ is a reasonable measure of Bob's intelligence, then you have to accept that it's a reasonable measure for Alice too. The APA asserts that DSM criteria apply to all people. If you don't like the system, its metrics or the resulting label, criticize that, but don't assert random exceptions.
I can't see it as anything more than liking something more than other people. The need to characterize them as "insane" or attempt to diagnose them with random disorders seems short-sighted to me. ......Only because it deviates from the norm, I suspect. I believe parents driven by instinct can't imagine another "healthy" person having different feelings than themselves.
(shakes head) 'Deviates from the norm' to a sufficient degree that it has been clearly labeled as a disorder. Ponder the word "deviant." Are you a happy deviant? Isn't that ok?
Have a look at DSM-IV 299.00 Autistic Disorder. Specifically, Asperger syndrome is primarily characterized by a person's one-sided social relationships and imbalanced interactions. Research shows (generally) that HF Asperger's sufferers have an inability to recognize or process social cues, communication, and other information when interacting with other people. Mistaking pets, machines, or entirely inanimate objects for persons with which one has full human relationships is one of the red flags for this diagnosis.
This spectrum is classified under "Pervasive Developmental Disorder" ...so "Insane" is maybe not the right word. However, as much as PETA likes to use the phrase "pet parents," asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle of "mental disorder."
Pets are meat. Children are minions. There's a difference.
Mod parent up. This is brilliant, probably the best thing I've seen on /. in years. Following Bradbury's theme, how about.....
HTTP 451: An error in your society has prevented your client from receiving the specified content.
(And I love the fact that HTTP 450 paves the way for this.)
As of the beginning of 2012: "Despite a modest launch and a limited distribution in terms of markets, Nokia's N9 model [Meego] has reached sales estimated between 1.5 and 2 million devices. According to Nokia's own quarterly report and analyst company Canalys analyses, the combined deliveries of the comparable Lumia (WP7) devices summed to approximately 1.2-1.5 million in the last quarter."
http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/smart-phones-overtake-client-pcs-2011
http://www.pcworld.com/article/248778/nokia_reports_loss_but_sells_more_than_1m_lumia_phones.html
It's also curious to see that Nokia N9/Meego phones are close to the 2-million sales mark with virtually nonexistent marketing, and Nokia did not sell that phone in the North American market at all -- stateside N9's were all grey market. For historical comparison, internal Nokia sales reports say the predecessor N900 sold 100,000 in its first month and well over 1 million by 2010 (which means the N9 sales are better than the N900), and yet they refused to sell the N950 at all when it was completed in 2011 (despite nil market overlap with WP7 phones). Apparently there are a lot of nerds out there, but Nokia doesn't want their money.
You had me there for a second... thought they were giving away N900 phones, and I'd have to jump on it. It's the first phone that I will probably replace with another of the same model.
Instead, they're giving away the skeleton of the N9, running a mashup of Harmattan, Gnome, and Ubuntu's Unity interface, with gestures lifted (and flipped) straight from WebOS. Don't take that the wrong way -- I think WinPhone7 mostly took the *good* bits from those other OS's; I just think msft ought to acknowledge that WP7 (and now Windows 8's Metro i/f) is highly derivative of open-source software.
And I still want an *actual* keyboard, not the smudgy hot mess in the hands of most iPhone (and Lumia 900) users.
Feh.
From http://law.justia.com/cfr/title22/22-1.0.1.6.33.html#22:1.0.1.6.33.1.3.1
22 C.F.R. PART 51—PASSPORTS
Title 22 - Foreign Relations
PART 51—PASSPORTS
51.6 Damaged, mutilated or altered passport.
Any passport which has been materially changed in physical appearance or composition, or contains a damaged, defective or otherwise nonfunctioning electronic chip, or which includes unauthorized changes, obliterations, entries or photographs, or has observable wear and tear that renders it unfit for further use as a travel document may be invalidated. [ Note that this says MAY, and more to the point does not say IS... so a revocation judgement has to be made by.... ]
51.4 Validity of passports. ... ONLY IF, in the judgement of the State Dept, the mutilation warrants revocation ]
(h) Invalidity. A United States passport is invalid whenever:
(1) The passport has been formally revoked by the Department; or [
(2) The Department has registered a passport reported either in writing or by telephone to the Department of State, or in writing to a U.S. passport agency or to a diplomatic or consular post abroad as lost or stolen.
(3) The Department has sent a written notice to the bearer at the bearer's last known address that the passport has been invalidated because the Department has not received the applicable fees.
Improper visas or clearly wrong authorizations is one thing, but the intrinsic validity of a properly issued passport to its proper owner is clearly not a decision delegated to airline staff. That judgement is for immigrations or passport officials to make, not some Jetway jockeys who've mistaken themselves for State Department employees. Seems to me that a lawsuit for injunctive relief is perfectly appropriate -- specifically to prevent AA or other airline staff from making legal declarations about the invalidity of a passport. And it's not like this would be burdensome, either: If Jetway Jane sees that you don't posses a passport or a visa for a destination that requires one, you've violated the terms on your ticket, and will be denied boarding because it's a ticketing issue. But If Jetway Joe thinks your passport might be invalid, he should call the resident officials at the airport to make a determination -- not try to impersonate them.
Why is it that decent, smart people get it in their heads that they can only do one thing? Years ago I had some bungee-manager give me a lecture on how I was spreading myself too thin, and successful people chose one thing and did it well. Nonsense. Successful savants maybe, but creative/skilled people who've been doing something well for a decade or two..? (I'd steadfastly refused to choose between the management and tech tracks at my company, and my good performance in solving/building/managing/selling didn't fit their vision of a career.)
Instead of trying to find a place for yourself as a good systems engineer who will be applied to good peoplems, go look for an enterprise or business sector that could use someone like you. One of the coolest things I did in recent years was to stop thinking as an IT security geek (please, not another PCI assessment or pentest clown show), and got a yearlong gig with the UN as a governance reform manager who happened to specialize in IT. Same crap, but new challenges and way more satisfying work.
Look at the org's business, not the tech. Some examples: I have a engineering/physics/software geek friend who signed on last year with a biotech firm that does fish tagging. Instead of looking up up up the tech hierarchy, he now runs a small operation with just a couple of guys, doing world-class work. Another friend topped out in engineering management at a certain large redmond org, and decided that where she was working was more important that the specific engineering challenges, so she's now working for a school system in Hawaii. Both are incidentally now working on improving their health and have time for music that they'd been puting off for years. Second life in the real world. Nice.
iPad = a rock? Well, if you put it that way, I have to agree!
Ya doofy n00b, there's nothing Android about the Touchpads. Did you miss the... and the part about the...? And the big firesale... and then the open...? (*sigh*)...
Yeah, I guess you did.
Do ya live under that rock^h^h^h^hiPad?
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee....
The intersection is "fun to drive." The Tesla is a miniscule 2-seater that's not easily driven with the roof on except by hobbits. The Ural is an open 3-seater that drives like a lightweight car. Smart's a 2-seater made by cutting a C-class in half and stuffing in a motorcycle-spec 1000cc turbo. All more or less cargo-less with high smiles-per-mile. You get the point: quite comparable in actual use.
Everything else is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the Tesla roadster with its top off looks sporty (Don't be so smug -- I'd hardly call it beautiful), but with the standard roof on, it looks like a funny-lookin' guy with a bad toupee; the automotive equiv of old Gov. Blagojevich. And no matter what's under the hood, Accord says "soccer mom" and Altima says "first decent job and apartment, but I'll sell it when she gets pregnant." Ask a woman between the ages of 25-35, and apparently you'll be told the Fiat 500 is adorable**. The Prius looks like a wheel chock to me, but Portland hippies think it's sexy. Ask a guy from 2hrs east of here, and he'll say you & me we're all f@99ots because we don't have a diesel pickup with duallys and mudders. Ask the next guy down the line, and you'll get a completely different mix. YMMV.
Anyway, trying to mimic Apple's marketing success of the iPhone with anything outside of a 2-pay-period-disposable-income item is harder than you would think. Can't easily think of a successful example, but I could pave a highway coast to coast with the bodies of those who've failed. Currently Fiat is doing reasonably well on that path** with the 500, but Tesla would do well to avoid counting on that working for them.
I can't help but think that the folks over at Ural motorcycles/IMZ America have a better sense of the market right now. They've just introduced a new "Model T" at the low end of their range, bringing the basic Ural 2-wheel drive sidecar motorcycle to the US for under $10k. Irbit Motorworks (IMZ) is Russian, the design is sourced from midcentury BMW, and the last decade+ of updates (e.g. new cylinders/heads with modern compression, better mpg/reliability, etc) have been pushed by enthusiasts in the US and EU. It intersect with the Tesla in the "sheer fun to drive" category, and my guess is that with an economy just holding on, there's gonna be a lot more of these on the road.
In another post I muttered about T-Mo staying on as the value carrier in the US: "T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on."
Same goes for Ural/IMZ versus Tesla. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Tesla business model is too "lean on the rich to get thru hard times" which all too often degenerates to "ran outta high-end customers, so try to screw the next class for as much as we need to stay afloat..." You wanna impress me Tesla? Go buy the tooling for the Corbin Merlin or Sparrow and start turning out fun electric 1-seaters for $15k -- price-competitive with the Fiat 500, Smartcar, and Scion iQ.
I was just in another window, messaging a colleague about how there's still value in doing really lame or stupid things as long as you do those things consistently, and establish a common scope and language... so that you can then start to do real work. IOW: "You don't know how f---ed up things really are until you try."
This doc is basically the product of a terribly depressing concall on which CA after CA lamented the lack standards... and 5min from the end, one of the participants stepped up and said something like "Hey, we drafted this amateur-hour recommendation doc by ourselves -- how would the group like to adopt it?" This document is a very sad, sad, incomplete, short-sighted, sad (did I say sad?) first step -- basically munging together RFC 3647 with some ideas from PCI, but still sets no real standards for actual operational security of a CA.
However, if this gets adopted & reissued by a real standards-issuing body, /then/ people can say "Hey, ISO/IEC 2XXXX security standard for CAs really sucks; why don't we make it not suck..." THEN this doc will have had real value in ensuring there's a place for the non-suck document when it's done. (BS7799=suck, but it became 27002 and in the process set the stage for other standards that are, frankly, quite good.) The first step out of a swamp is still a step in the swamp.
-Jon
I used to work for a UN agency and spent a year specifically working on governance reform for IT. The idea that "the" UN has email systems is kind of funny. While some agencies have well-designed, well-run, consolidated communications & IT systems, those are more the exception than the rule. By and large, each agency has multiple divisions or programmes that run their own IT systems with little to no effective oversight. Disparate systems and dependence on abandonware are prevalent. Governance & policies are (*ahem*) lacking in most cases, and enforcement is by and large nonexistent. Tell a Deputy Director that he has to have a password of more than four characters or change it more than once a year? Good luck with that.
There is simply no framework or middle ground for getting an agency or multiple agencies to adopt best practices when their reality vacillates wildly between disasters/getting shot at/real work one day, and political fights/internal corruption/not having enough money to run simple services on the next. While seeing this on pastebin is disappointing, it's not the least bit surprising. It falls more in the category of "someone noticed the door was hanging open and put some mild effort into it" rather than "1337 h@xx0r broke into a fortress."
The sad part is that the likely outcome of this event is a long series of dreary Euro-proper weekly meetings at UNDP and other agencies, eventually resulting in a task force of a dozen people at the Secretariat charged with defining what "fix" means, followed by a slew of small teams at each affected agency to work on the perceived ICT policy, operation, and configuration problems. But no authority will be given to those teams to mandate changes to their respective ICT Chiefs. In 6-9 months a series of changes to security controls will be recommended, but they'll be overridden, redirected, and mangled by their respective IT orgs; in all probability the money & effort will be unrecognizable and the effects negligible. It's like The Office without the slightest hint of humor.
I've been with T-Mo for almost 15 years, and this is good news. Not great news -- I'm sure there will be more trouble for T-mo in some form or another -- but at least not this year, and probably not next. But you know what this does mean? I'm re-upping my contract with T-Mo. When T-Mo came calling last year (one of several "PLEEZ don't jump ship" themed customer retention campaigns) I told them desire to have a GSM phone was only trumped by a desire never to be an AT&T customer again. As long as the death star doesn't gobble them up, T-Mo can keep having my money.
Oh, and btw -- T-Mo coverage is more than adequate across the US & Canada, (Iirc I still don't have coverage in rural Neb and WY, but no trouble anywhere else), data services are cheap, and they actually have decent humans in the corp stores. T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on.
Nonsense. $120 avg per shot is not cheap, but it's by no means gouging or a "money grab." That fee has to cover back R&D costs of development -- averaging $250 million -- and Guardisil is a first-to-succeed research effort that took about twice as long as average (about 20 yrs) to develop. That means Merck started out in the hole for somewhere south of 1/2 Billion dollars. They don't even recoup dev costs (plus two decades of investors' interest losses) until they sell ~3.5 million doses, and that doesn't even address the "last mile" costs of refrigerated transport and storage, compliance with legal regs, medical recordkeeping, and a few bucks for the overscheduled intern to swab you with an alcohol wipe and stick the needle in you. Three times. Each time for less than the cost of a good tire on your car.
How exactly did you arrive at the firm belief that this is a gouging "money grab"? Show me the math.
I had my two preteen boys vaccinated last year.
Why?
Because somewhere out there are probably at least two girls who will will be safer for it in future years.
Sure, there are lots of other reasons for them, but HPV vaccinations for boys are more about doing the greater good.
The anti-vaccine protesters are kooks who can't count.
And the anti-promiscuity hand-wavers... are also kooks who can't count (and have no grasp of history).
Even the most basic grasp of statistics makes vaccination a clear and positive decision.
Just to be clear, I'm a serious fan of Cyanogen's work from the Zaurus era (went thru several generations of SL & C using his and others' work), and appreciate the effort that has gone into this. But as others have pointed out, the HP is going to some effort to ensure the hardware is a dead end, while WebOS remains a high-end viable platform and the dev base is very much alive. Seems if you're going to work on a niche market ubergeek-OS-mod, you ought to have higher goals.
Dammit. That's the wrong way!!! I have an HP Touchpad, and the hardware is mediocre, but WebOS is a work of art. Otoh, I also have multiple android 2.2 & honeycomb devices, and by and large they're fast and flexible, but the OS and app markets are buggy and malware-infested. Why port the middling-common-denominator OS to HP's crummy hardware? "Upgrading" the HP tablets by loading Android is like upgrading a Ford Fiesta with an Isuzu diesel. Sure it'll keep you on the road, but it ain't pretty and it ain't gonna be fun.
What's *really* worth someone's time and effort is a port of WebOS to better hardware. Ginmme an illicit port of WebOS to some of the nicer Samsung 5-10in tablets, the Lenovo K tablet, etc etc (anything with more ports and a faster proc) and I'd be all over it.
Mod parent up. Very insightful, and cuts to the core of the "HP gave up too fast" argument. Apotheker is just the latest in a string of lousy managers, but it's worth noting that the core of HP's current train wreck was NOT Leo's panic over low Touchpad sales and high-risk alternative proposals. It's that HP's board is so adrift that Apotheker was allowed to turn his panic and high-risk ideas into instant ill-planned actions . It's the speed that is indefensible. I suppose the title of CEO conveys a certain direction-setting authority, but even the captain of a supertanker is not allowed by the engineers to demand turning at such a speed that the ship will flip over.
One has to wonder what the metrics and thresholds were for success. Honestly, given the uptake in the past few weeks, WebOS's position has been as positive as could be reasonably expected. Reviews that say WebOS is #2 in function to Android? That's fabulous. So why quit 10 steps out of the gate? If HP was in this for the long haul, they've terribly screwed up tactically. If they were looking for short-term results, they've terribly screwed up in their strategy. Any way you slide this, it's a failure of leadership, not market or technology.
Look, I work for a certain large software company, and the volunteer group I work with still chose to install Ubuntu on computers we give to people as part of a county-sponsored social program. Even if cost were no problem (which it very much is), Win7 is a non-starter because of mem/cpu requirements vs donated hardware. After ~three years of experience, we've probably given out 200-250 Ubuntu systems, and the support requirements for Ubuntu are *excellent* compared to XP or any other Windows variant.
Initially we were afraid that the support would kill us, but these systems seem to actually be fairly long-lived without massive support calls. To be honest, the worst cases tend to be when a recipient comes back and says "My boyfriend/abuser/pimp/dealer couldn't figure out Linux so he 'upgraded' it to [XP/Vista] and now it won't work." After being burned a few times, we became pretty strict about no supported OS = no support; we offer to backup their docs/pics to a cd, then re-image the drive back to Ubuntu.
You'll need to have reasonable standards for the hardware you accept for donation (ex: min P4/512/40gb/dvd-cdr), solicit 15-17in LCDs or be choosy re CRTs (here, dead crts cost $ to dispose of), choose an Ubuntu LTS release as a base (10.04LTS is working great for us), make sure you have a maintainable customization script/jumpstart/imaging solution (script *everything* -- there are tons of scripts out there you can adapt to your needs), write a quickstart sheet for all manual/user-specific configs (show users how to create non-priv accounts for kids and guests), and configure auto-updates to match the connectivity of the users (don't turn on auto-download for dialup users...).
As long as you design your customizations to rely on existing sources (unless you run your own repository), your users should be more or less self-supporting. Now this doesn't mean we're totally carefree. The new Unity interface in Ubuntu 11.x is really too confusing for our users, which means we may have major customizations to do next year when 12.04LTS is released. (Or we may switch to Linux Mint or another Debian/Ubuntu variant). But for now, we're quite happy with the results.
Talk about the walking dead... wow.
Nokia dumping Symbian in an age when lo-end CN knockoffs come with Android 2.x, and HP is putting WebOS on printers... actually makes a little sense.
Nokia dumping Harmattan/Maemo6, an in-house controlled solid full-scale OS with a UI that's 4 years too late.. seems lazy or poor judgement.
Nokia jumping on WinPhone7, with zero control of a third-party franchised OS that has a great UI but functionality 4 years behind the curve... seems genuinely self-destructive.
Bye, Nokia. Nice knowing you.