While the WC Fields wino-stereotype is quite common in fiction, its actually not very common in the real world. Most alcoholics tend to be thin, and to a lesser extend borderline malnourished. Their poison of choice is alcohol, it occupies most of their spare time. In contrast, most western nations now have major dietary problems -- most people are overweight due to lifestyle, choice of foods, and lack of exercise. Its not that alcoholics or heavy drinkers are more healthy, its that they're not as unhealthy as the median (of fatties and smokers).
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 1
OS/2 was still the better OS, by ALOT. Its closed nature doomed its future, and there was alot of mistrust in IBM in the marketplace at the time, but in terms of stability w/ a gui inteface, it was unmatched. The OS lived on long past its best-before date in alot of utility devices like information terminals @ airports and kiosks, ABMs, and other devices into the mid-2000s.
To clarify, Canada has strong restrictions on automatic weapons (outright ban), and handguns (heavily regulated). Long guns are perfectly legal. There is an ongoing debate on the long gun registry, where at the cost of ~$ 1billion the government instituted a long gun registration service which has been a huge bone of contention in rural communities. Since it has been instituted (at least 5 years ago) there's no indication that its had a benefit to reducing gun-related fatalities.
I'm indifferent on gun legislation, as I don't own nor plan on owning firearms. But to state that Canada has an outright ban on firearms is not correct.
I'm trying to figure out why Canada decided to swing left wing of our American cousins, whereas Australia reads about some of the most egregious rights violations happening stateside and have a reaction of 'oh yeah, watch this!!!'.
*Not* that Canada is pure by any stretch of the imagination...in fact we seem to be regressing as a society too at the moment, but we're light years ahead of this type of nonsense.
Screw that... anything longer than 2 hours for a human ADULT is conclusively proven to be wasted activity... there's strong studies in multiple fields that show that the capacity for focus and absorbing/learning is limited... its why you can't realistically 'cram' for an exam and retain the information later... it stays in short term memory, you don't abosrb the comprehension. IIRC, the general consensus is 2hrs formal study, broken up by a minimum of 30 mins of divergent activity. Most working people figure this out intuitively...its called a coffee break / smoke break.
I am hesitant to post this, since it enters the realm of gender politics and uses some broad statements, but I'm going to make an argument around the influence of feminism in the classroom. There have been some very negative connotations for boys, given their a) slower development of communication skills, b) general tendencies towards physical development vs mental development at a young age, and c) the societal premise that 'book smarts' is more important than physical skills. in the last 30 years, look what gets cut from the curriculum? Home economics (e.g. basic cooking skills, how to manage a budget, etc), Shop (too expensive/dangerous), physical education (its not 'real' learning)...even basic stuff like basic chemistry has morphed into lesson plans and book learning, vs practice of experiements.
Quebec now has a ridicuously high dropout rate for boys in contrast to girls, they are now funding 'boys focused' learning programs to ensure they're engaged in the education system.
I would be interested in seeing the ADHD diagnosis broken down by genders. I strongly suspect boys are much more likely to be diagnosed as having a 'problem', when in reality its boys being boys.
PS Brain development students on small mammals (and now being done on primates) is strongly indicating that horseplay and physical interaction does far more to promote brain development and decision making capability than any other activity for young children... the potential implication is that putting children in a classroom at the ages of 4, 5, 6 is perhaps counter-productive to latter life capability.
In Canadian law, searching specifically for evidence to build a case for dismissal is heavily frowned upon -- its called 'constructive dismissal' and justices are very prone to levy huge penalties against employers for doing so. The premise is, when taken out of context, you can build a case to fire *anyone*. There must be demonstrable cause in terms of actual performance to justify evidence collection in support of dismissal.
If there was no sexual harassment, and the personal browsing policy was loosely broken, the case to dismiss him in on really shaky ground...this might be why he got the $40m parachute. If they had legitimate grounds to dismiss him, he would have violated his severance agreement.
Canada has a relatively modest penal system in contrast to the US; we arrest 1/5th the number of people per capita, with terms roughly half the duration. The last half / third of the sentence is focused exclusively upon rehabilitation and re-entry into society. I prefer our system. Yes, occasionally killers like Karla Holmoka get away with lax sentences and slip through the cracks of true justice, but the overal societal benefit seems to be much higher. Sadly, the US seems to be returning to the days of the Scarlet Letter, with MAAD and "child saftey" pathing the way.
The keyboard and battery alone make Blackberrys very good, if not the best, mobile wireless devices for the enterprise. Given Apple's 'f u' corporate service focus and poor enterprise support, its not a surprise that most large orgnaisations support the iPhone grudgingly, if at all. Blackberries don't provide great mobile internet browsing, because that's not their primary purpose. "Incompetent nazis" suggest to me you lack perspective and experience in supporting 10,000-100,000 users.
I'm in senior mgt in IT at a bank. One of our departments wrote an iphone banking front end app, took a handful of people a couple of weeks. we launched it, got lots of press, tons of 20 somethings moving their bank accounts to us so they can 'bank on their iphone'. The 100 million of banking infrastructure behind the personal accounts and payments system preexisted the iphone, but several thousand dollars of development effort allowed us to open up a new channel to customers. its more of a marketing/accessibility thing, but in terms of 'real' IT most of the mobile market is a joke in relative IT terms. its the snazzy front end, its the geocities of the 1990s; fancy graphics and a twirling icon for the hipsters who think they're gods gift to technology. The real plumbing of technology is serviced by veterans with years of experience and deep technical knowledge; i'm happy google is ignore the greyframers, because frankly we need them (note: i am under 40).
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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· Score: 1
"Well, right now, CEOs are both highly overpaid and free of responsibility."
Can you please reference some other time in history where this was not the case?
CEOs certainly are not as well compensated as the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century. The majority of their wealth is subject to income tax, so even through complicated financial mechanisms at the very least 20-30% of their salaries are re-entering the public sphere.
With wealth and progressive income taxes, its actually *more* benefical to have well compensated CEOS. If you had $300 million, i'd rather it go to one individual where $100m was being taxed back, than say 30,000 individuals that are living in a low income tax bracket where their taxation rate is minimal.
Being heavily consumer products driven now, Apple is very susceptible to a sudden shift in purchasing behavior. This year's hot commodity, is next years' rubick's cube or legwarmers -- 'that's so 2010!' or 'i already have one'. The iPad i interpret as a very dangerous product, from a lineup perspective... people are asking 'what does it do, that i can't already do'. 1 million units sold, great...what about next quarter? Also, as a company they're heavily invested in Steve Jobs as the head. If he moves on, for whatever reason, I doubt the investment community will have as much confidence in his successor (especially given previous experiences).
Microsoft doesn't have much growth potential, but their customers are heavily invested in their products -- especially at the corporate and government level. Apple's role in the corporate space is virtually nil -- a market they have pretty much given up upon.
If I were a betting man, I'd guess Microsoft will be here still as a Fortune 50 company in 10 years vs Apple.
My parents banned the use of swear words in our house, and even to this day it is highly frowned upon. Their rationale? Nothing religious. 1) Its impolite. 2) Its usually used in an insulting, degrading, or sarcastic manner, which promotes a negative attitude. 3) Its lazy -- learn to articulate your problem, and how to fix it. That's the way to get through life; if nothingelse you'll expand your vocabulary learning how to use other words creatively.
"Actually, WoW has exactly the same amount of 'grind' now as it had in Vanilla. My first ever character hit 60 in around 12 days of play time. My rogue (who I started levelling late in Burning Crusade) took around 12 days to hit 70. My paladin (who hit 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath was released) took roughly that amount of time as well. Blizzard has simply disguised the levelling grind with a huge network of quests."
That's not exactly what they're doing, what they're doing is providing a fixed amount of effort required to get to the level cap where the majority of players congregate. The biggest reason to play an MMO is the social aspect (raiding, pvp, even role playing for some people). The 'grind' gives you something to do, as a backdrop to supporting the social aspect. "Bill, do you want to come kill this dragon with us?" "Yeah, i'd love to, need to go get my widgets first though". The 'grind' is there to reinforce commitment to your character, and give you a sense of accomplishment that you share with other players.
Threadcapping MMOs is easy. A GM can give you "Sword of Awesome + 1million" with a few keystrokes, but it would be meaningless. The joy comes from participating in a shared environment, with a common set of rules, that emphasizes social interaction. You don't 'win' Wow or Aion, you go there to have fun.
Microsoft is faced with the necessity of branding their OS as 'new' and 'sexy', in the face of Appl's OS which is heavily advertised as 'new' and 'sexy'. Usability wise, the Apple desktop is actually a step backward from the Windows interface (but at least it has unix underneath for gearheads). Windows 7 removes some of the more egregious intrusions, but Slashdot isn't the primary customer of Windows -- the 100 million+ retail consumers deciding between a macintosh or a PC are the primary focus of the bells and whistles.
Lets presume the company accurately modded the game mechanics of major league baseball. Perfectly reasonable given its heavily statistics based.
MLB has maybe 1 perfect game a year, or every other year. Lets say once every 2 years to be generous. There's 32 teams, playing 180 games (roughly)...thats 16 matches x 180 times x 2 years with a chance of producing a perfect game. So statistically, a 1 in 5760 chance of producing a perfect game.
Presuming this is a moderately successful game title, they sell...say, 100,000 copies in the first month.
The chances of this happening on the first day of sale were actually fairly good. Certainl within the first week.
If i was on the board of directors, I'd recommend summary execution for the marketing rep.
It would depend upon the nature of hte hack. The promotional materials for his speech are light on details. Is this a top end ATM from NCR, or a white label generic ATM which are little more than PCs with a cash handler attached? What level of physical access does he need to the cabinet? Is this an internal exploit (implying you get your software/rootkit installed as part of a distribution) or he looking an something more subtle?
I'll reserve judgement on his expose until i read of the details; i understand why he wouldn't want to advertise the juicy details before his presentaiton, but on the other hand I'm skeptical around what he's implying.
"reminds of how big corporations treat people like livestock and make them toil for dimes in cramped spaces... a society's mindset reflects on every aspect of life."
But do the sheeple taste as good as the cows?
"If Visa were to design and offer a cryptographically secure solution, one based only on smart cards for the customers and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) at the banks, then I could safely route my charge authorizations over the plain ol' Internet. I wouldn't need to use the charge-per-transaction VisaNet. Visa would stop making money." Charge per transaction over VISAnet is a service charge VISA levies to banks, for using their network. VISA doesn't 'own' the transaction when its debit, so they need to generate operating revenue somehow. If the banks wanted to create their own network (like, Interac which is debit-only in Canada) they could, but most American banks are lazy in this regard.
As for your end-to-end HSM valid secure solution, it exists today -- the EMV standard (Europay/Mastercard/Visa) has been extraordinarily successful at eliminating card and transaction fraud...where deployed. Two problems though exist -- 1) the US in the midst of a deep recession hasn't even started deploying the technology nationally, and 2) until a nation is (mostly) EMV complaint all the way down to the terminal level, fall back transactions to magstripe still occur. Its the magstripe transactions that are the source of fraud.
To my knowledge, there is no direct copy ability or open hack for an EMV secured card. There are some theoretical man-in-the-middle and compromised HSM hacks discussed, but none have been used in practice.
Speech is construced as having accountability, especially regarding libel in british common law (and now canadian law). Free speech is not absolute -- it requires accountability. In this case, if a grieved person can *proove* who is spreading spurious lies (and they can prove they're lies), they have the right to restitution.
There are lots of other provisions and protections in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We also have hate crime laws. Its different than the US, its not perfect...but to paint canada with a broad brush of 'you're fascists' is ridiculous. Our country's founders had the motto of 'peace, order, and good government.'. Slightly different motivations than Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- although most of the time they correlate.
100% false. The russians hadn't even declared war on Japan until 3 months after the fall of berlin (as per their agreement @ Yalta). The russians had no intent of involving themselves in the capture of japan if not necessary, their casualties getting into berline 1st were enormous and they lacked a functioning navy to manage any threat to the japanese islands.
The use of the nuclear weapons was a necessary ploy, and potentially saved millions of japanese and american lives. Back-to-back bombings reinforced the following diplomatic message: "we will keep doing this until you surrender unconditionally". The japanese had no idea there were only 2 function bombs. At the time, japan was tentatively exploring surrender via diplomatic channels, but even then their expectations were unrealistic and heavily conditioned. I'd argue that 2 atomic bombs were less devastation than a 6-12 month embargo against the island, with the inevitable starvation and collapse of order (which was the other option).
To the allied command's credit, a number of british and american naval officers testified on Doenitz' behalf. The cold war was already underway, and the soviets took a hard line of 'execution for everyone' so alot of the commuted sentences were the result of negotiation behind the scenes.
I call BS. There's alot of good dramas from the 1970s, but in terms of epics and sci-fi... Star Wars is among the best. These movies brought SF to the mainstream, had a broad appeal to many ages, and yes I'll argue it was well acted. If you compare Star Wars to its contemporaries in any genre, it was a fantastically well done film. The trench run alone is among the best action sequences of all time. The first movie works as a stand alone product. The Empire Strikes Back is a transitional film, but it definitely ugprades the mood, tone, and seriousness of the content. It has strong synergies with Die Valkure and Siegfried in terms of theme. It works as a straight forward SF / action film, but also has deeper themes if you're willing to look. I recently re-watched these films with my sons, and I was *surprised* at how good the movies were; they were BETTER than i remembered.
I've been playing WoW off and on for 5 years. WoW is actually a problem for the PC gaming industry, since it consolidates so many players -- most likely if you're subscribed to WoW, your 10-20hrs a week of gametime is absorbed into the MMO. You're not buying and trying other games, or other MMOs for hte most part. Its good for Blizzard, but bad for diversity. In the 1990s you'd be playing 1-2 games every month, each costing around $40. Now a large chunk of people are playing 1 game for years, @ $12/month going to one developer.
That was my take...what is old is new again, but they've been selling these in canada for about 10 years (at least). Because the collector is raised off the roof and half spherical, it takes a substantial snowfall to cover the light collector...its maybe ineffective 1-2 months of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
While the WC Fields wino-stereotype is quite common in fiction, its actually not very common in the real world. Most alcoholics tend to be thin, and to a lesser extend borderline malnourished. Their poison of choice is alcohol, it occupies most of their spare time. In contrast, most western nations now have major dietary problems -- most people are overweight due to lifestyle, choice of foods, and lack of exercise. Its not that alcoholics or heavy drinkers are more healthy, its that they're not as unhealthy as the median (of fatties and smokers).
OS/2 was still the better OS, by ALOT. Its closed nature doomed its future, and there was alot of mistrust in IBM in the marketplace at the time, but in terms of stability w/ a gui inteface, it was unmatched. The OS lived on long past its best-before date in alot of utility devices like information terminals @ airports and kiosks, ABMs, and other devices into the mid-2000s.
To clarify, Canada has strong restrictions on automatic weapons (outright ban), and handguns (heavily regulated). Long guns are perfectly legal. There is an ongoing debate on the long gun registry, where at the cost of ~$ 1billion the government instituted a long gun registration service which has been a huge bone of contention in rural communities. Since it has been instituted (at least 5 years ago) there's no indication that its had a benefit to reducing gun-related fatalities.
I'm indifferent on gun legislation, as I don't own nor plan on owning firearms. But to state that Canada has an outright ban on firearms is not correct.
I'm trying to figure out why Canada decided to swing left wing of our American cousins, whereas Australia reads about some of the most egregious rights violations happening stateside and have a reaction of 'oh yeah, watch this!!!'.
*Not* that Canada is pure by any stretch of the imagination...in fact we seem to be regressing as a society too at the moment, but we're light years ahead of this type of nonsense.
Screw that... anything longer than 2 hours for a human ADULT is conclusively proven to be wasted activity... there's strong studies in multiple fields that show that the capacity for focus and absorbing/learning is limited... its why you can't realistically 'cram' for an exam and retain the information later... it stays in short term memory, you don't abosrb the comprehension. IIRC, the general consensus is 2hrs formal study, broken up by a minimum of 30 mins of divergent activity. Most working people figure this out intuitively...its called a coffee break / smoke break.
I am hesitant to post this, since it enters the realm of gender politics and uses some broad statements, but I'm going to make an argument around the influence of feminism in the classroom. There have been some very negative connotations for boys, given their a) slower development of communication skills, b) general tendencies towards physical development vs mental development at a young age, and c) the societal premise that 'book smarts' is more important than physical skills. in the last 30 years, look what gets cut from the curriculum? Home economics (e.g. basic cooking skills, how to manage a budget, etc), Shop (too expensive/dangerous), physical education (its not 'real' learning)...even basic stuff like basic chemistry has morphed into lesson plans and book learning, vs practice of experiements.
Quebec now has a ridicuously high dropout rate for boys in contrast to girls, they are now funding 'boys focused' learning programs to ensure they're engaged in the education system.
I would be interested in seeing the ADHD diagnosis broken down by genders. I strongly suspect boys are much more likely to be diagnosed as having a 'problem', when in reality its boys being boys.
PS Brain development students on small mammals (and now being done on primates) is strongly indicating that horseplay and physical interaction does far more to promote brain development and decision making capability than any other activity for young children... the potential implication is that putting children in a classroom at the ages of 4, 5, 6 is perhaps counter-productive to latter life capability.
In Canadian law, searching specifically for evidence to build a case for dismissal is heavily frowned upon -- its called 'constructive dismissal' and justices are very prone to levy huge penalties against employers for doing so. The premise is, when taken out of context, you can build a case to fire *anyone*. There must be demonstrable cause in terms of actual performance to justify evidence collection in support of dismissal.
If there was no sexual harassment, and the personal browsing policy was loosely broken, the case to dismiss him in on really shaky ground...this might be why he got the $40m parachute. If they had legitimate grounds to dismiss him, he would have violated his severance agreement.
Canada has a relatively modest penal system in contrast to the US; we arrest 1/5th the number of people per capita, with terms roughly half the duration. The last half / third of the sentence is focused exclusively upon rehabilitation and re-entry into society. I prefer our system. Yes, occasionally killers like Karla Holmoka get away with lax sentences and slip through the cracks of true justice, but the overal societal benefit seems to be much higher. Sadly, the US seems to be returning to the days of the Scarlet Letter, with MAAD and "child saftey" pathing the way.
The keyboard and battery alone make Blackberrys very good, if not the best, mobile wireless devices for the enterprise. Given Apple's 'f u' corporate service focus and poor enterprise support, its not a surprise that most large orgnaisations support the iPhone grudgingly, if at all. Blackberries don't provide great mobile internet browsing, because that's not their primary purpose. "Incompetent nazis" suggest to me you lack perspective and experience in supporting 10,000-100,000 users.
I'm in senior mgt in IT at a bank. One of our departments wrote an iphone banking front end app, took a handful of people a couple of weeks. we launched it, got lots of press, tons of 20 somethings moving their bank accounts to us so they can 'bank on their iphone'. The 100 million of banking infrastructure behind the personal accounts and payments system preexisted the iphone, but several thousand dollars of development effort allowed us to open up a new channel to customers. its more of a marketing/accessibility thing, but in terms of 'real' IT most of the mobile market is a joke in relative IT terms. its the snazzy front end, its the geocities of the 1990s; fancy graphics and a twirling icon for the hipsters who think they're gods gift to technology. The real plumbing of technology is serviced by veterans with years of experience and deep technical knowledge; i'm happy google is ignore the greyframers, because frankly we need them (note: i am under 40).
"Well, right now, CEOs are both highly overpaid and free of responsibility."
Can you please reference some other time in history where this was not the case?
CEOs certainly are not as well compensated as the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century. The majority of their wealth is subject to income tax, so even through complicated financial mechanisms at the very least 20-30% of their salaries are re-entering the public sphere.
With wealth and progressive income taxes, its actually *more* benefical to have well compensated CEOS. If you had $300 million, i'd rather it go to one individual where $100m was being taxed back, than say 30,000 individuals that are living in a low income tax bracket where their taxation rate is minimal.
Being heavily consumer products driven now, Apple is very susceptible to a sudden shift in purchasing behavior. This year's hot commodity, is next years' rubick's cube or legwarmers -- 'that's so 2010!' or 'i already have one'. The iPad i interpret as a very dangerous product, from a lineup perspective... people are asking 'what does it do, that i can't already do'. 1 million units sold, great...what about next quarter? Also, as a company they're heavily invested in Steve Jobs as the head. If he moves on, for whatever reason, I doubt the investment community will have as much confidence in his successor (especially given previous experiences).
Microsoft doesn't have much growth potential, but their customers are heavily invested in their products -- especially at the corporate and government level. Apple's role in the corporate space is virtually nil -- a market they have pretty much given up upon.
If I were a betting man, I'd guess Microsoft will be here still as a Fortune 50 company in 10 years vs Apple.
My parents banned the use of swear words in our house, and even to this day it is highly frowned upon. Their rationale? Nothing religious. 1) Its impolite. 2) Its usually used in an insulting, degrading, or sarcastic manner, which promotes a negative attitude. 3) Its lazy -- learn to articulate your problem, and how to fix it. That's the way to get through life; if nothingelse you'll expand your vocabulary learning how to use other words creatively.
Now? I don't let my kids swear in our house.
"Actually, WoW has exactly the same amount of 'grind' now as it had in Vanilla. My first ever character hit 60 in around 12 days of play time. My rogue (who I started levelling late in Burning Crusade) took around 12 days to hit 70. My paladin (who hit 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath was released) took roughly that amount of time as well. Blizzard has simply disguised the levelling grind with a huge network of quests."
That's not exactly what they're doing, what they're doing is providing a fixed amount of effort required to get to the level cap where the majority of players congregate. The biggest reason to play an MMO is the social aspect (raiding, pvp, even role playing for some people). The 'grind' gives you something to do, as a backdrop to supporting the social aspect. "Bill, do you want to come kill this dragon with us?" "Yeah, i'd love to, need to go get my widgets first though". The 'grind' is there to reinforce commitment to your character, and give you a sense of accomplishment that you share with other players.
Threadcapping MMOs is easy. A GM can give you "Sword of Awesome + 1million" with a few keystrokes, but it would be meaningless. The joy comes from participating in a shared environment, with a common set of rules, that emphasizes social interaction. You don't 'win' Wow or Aion, you go there to have fun.
Microsoft is faced with the necessity of branding their OS as 'new' and 'sexy', in the face of Appl's OS which is heavily advertised as 'new' and 'sexy'. Usability wise, the Apple desktop is actually a step backward from the Windows interface (but at least it has unix underneath for gearheads). Windows 7 removes some of the more egregious intrusions, but Slashdot isn't the primary customer of Windows -- the 100 million+ retail consumers deciding between a macintosh or a PC are the primary focus of the bells and whistles.
Lets presume the company accurately modded the game mechanics of major league baseball. Perfectly reasonable given its heavily statistics based.
MLB has maybe 1 perfect game a year, or every other year. Lets say once every 2 years to be generous. There's 32 teams, playing 180 games (roughly)...thats 16 matches x 180 times x 2 years with a chance of producing a perfect game. So statistically, a 1 in 5760 chance of producing a perfect game.
Presuming this is a moderately successful game title, they sell...say, 100,000 copies in the first month.
The chances of this happening on the first day of sale were actually fairly good. Certainl within the first week.
If i was on the board of directors, I'd recommend summary execution for the marketing rep.
It would depend upon the nature of hte hack. The promotional materials for his speech are light on details. Is this a top end ATM from NCR, or a white label generic ATM which are little more than PCs with a cash handler attached? What level of physical access does he need to the cabinet? Is this an internal exploit (implying you get your software/rootkit installed as part of a distribution) or he looking an something more subtle?
I'll reserve judgement on his expose until i read of the details; i understand why he wouldn't want to advertise the juicy details before his presentaiton, but on the other hand I'm skeptical around what he's implying.
"reminds of how big corporations treat people like livestock and make them toil for dimes in cramped spaces ... a society's mindset reflects on every aspect of life."
But do the sheeple taste as good as the cows?
"If Visa were to design and offer a cryptographically secure solution, one based only on smart cards for the customers and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) at the banks, then I could safely route my charge authorizations over the plain ol' Internet. I wouldn't need to use the charge-per-transaction VisaNet. Visa would stop making money." Charge per transaction over VISAnet is a service charge VISA levies to banks, for using their network. VISA doesn't 'own' the transaction when its debit, so they need to generate operating revenue somehow. If the banks wanted to create their own network (like, Interac which is debit-only in Canada) they could, but most American banks are lazy in this regard.
As for your end-to-end HSM valid secure solution, it exists today -- the EMV standard (Europay/Mastercard/Visa) has been extraordinarily successful at eliminating card and transaction fraud...where deployed. Two problems though exist -- 1) the US in the midst of a deep recession hasn't even started deploying the technology nationally, and 2) until a nation is (mostly) EMV complaint all the way down to the terminal level, fall back transactions to magstripe still occur. Its the magstripe transactions that are the source of fraud.
To my knowledge, there is no direct copy ability or open hack for an EMV secured card. There are some theoretical man-in-the-middle and compromised HSM hacks discussed, but none have been used in practice.
More detail can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV
Speech is construced as having accountability, especially regarding libel in british common law (and now canadian law). Free speech is not absolute -- it requires accountability. In this case, if a grieved person can *proove* who is spreading spurious lies (and they can prove they're lies), they have the right to restitution.
There are lots of other provisions and protections in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We also have hate crime laws. Its different than the US, its not perfect...but to paint canada with a broad brush of 'you're fascists' is ridiculous. Our country's founders had the motto of 'peace, order, and good government.'. Slightly different motivations than Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- although most of the time they correlate.
100% false. The russians hadn't even declared war on Japan until 3 months after the fall of berlin (as per their agreement @ Yalta). The russians had no intent of involving themselves in the capture of japan if not necessary, their casualties getting into berline 1st were enormous and they lacked a functioning navy to manage any threat to the japanese islands.
The use of the nuclear weapons was a necessary ploy, and potentially saved millions of japanese and american lives. Back-to-back bombings reinforced the following diplomatic message: "we will keep doing this until you surrender unconditionally". The japanese had no idea there were only 2 function bombs. At the time, japan was tentatively exploring surrender via diplomatic channels, but even then their expectations were unrealistic and heavily conditioned. I'd argue that 2 atomic bombs were less devastation than a 6-12 month embargo against the island, with the inevitable starvation and collapse of order (which was the other option).
To the allied command's credit, a number of british and american naval officers testified on Doenitz' behalf. The cold war was already underway, and the soviets took a hard line of 'execution for everyone' so alot of the commuted sentences were the result of negotiation behind the scenes.
I call BS. There's alot of good dramas from the 1970s, but in terms of epics and sci-fi... Star Wars is among the best. These movies brought SF to the mainstream, had a broad appeal to many ages, and yes I'll argue it was well acted. If you compare Star Wars to its contemporaries in any genre, it was a fantastically well done film. The trench run alone is among the best action sequences of all time. The first movie works as a stand alone product. The Empire Strikes Back is a transitional film, but it definitely ugprades the mood, tone, and seriousness of the content. It has strong synergies with Die Valkure and Siegfried in terms of theme. It works as a straight forward SF / action film, but also has deeper themes if you're willing to look. I recently re-watched these films with my sons, and I was *surprised* at how good the movies were; they were BETTER than i remembered.
I've been playing WoW off and on for 5 years. WoW is actually a problem for the PC gaming industry, since it consolidates so many players -- most likely if you're subscribed to WoW, your 10-20hrs a week of gametime is absorbed into the MMO. You're not buying and trying other games, or other MMOs for hte most part. Its good for Blizzard, but bad for diversity. In the 1990s you'd be playing 1-2 games every month, each costing around $40. Now a large chunk of people are playing 1 game for years, @ $12/month going to one developer.
That was my take...what is old is new again, but they've been selling these in canada for about 10 years (at least). Because the collector is raised off the roof and half spherical, it takes a substantial snowfall to cover the light collector...its maybe ineffective 1-2 months of the year.