They might as well announce they're getting Yettie insurance. They had their payment system compromised by people that got access to their point of sale system at one of their stores and then used that to gain access to their central system.
That has nothing to do with chip and pin.
It has everything to do with chip and PIN. It would've prevented the security breach entirely because with chip and PIN, getting the card number by itself is useless. You need the smart chip on the card and the PIN to activate it before you can do anything with the card number. Since you can't use the numbers without the chip and PIN, there is no incentive for thieves to steal the card numbers - they are just numbers, not a magical way to access someone else's money.
And ultimately, how would you do chip and pin for online retail? You know, people that literally have to type their credit card number into a field?
TLDR... I don't think chip and pin is going to accomplish anything and in so far as I understand the issue it wouldn't have stopped the breach at target in the first place. So i don't know why they're talking about it like its a solution to anything.
I don't get why people keep trying to blame Target's security for this problem. The problem all along has been that you can buy stuff using nothing more than a plaintext sixteen-digit number that "belongs" to someone else. I'm not saying Target isn't at fault for failing to secure their network. But giving your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant makes your card just as vulnerable as Target's network was during their security breach. The current system is like telling your bank to authorize payment if someone gives them "your secret password." Then you proceed to give that very password out to every merchant you visit, so they can tell the bank and collect payment. Well if you're giving your password in plaintext to every merchant out there, it's not very secret is it? And anyone who steals the plaintext or overhears it or copies it can make charges to your account (whether it be a thief who stole them from the merchant, or an employee at the merchant, or the guy standing behind you in line who snapped a picture of your card with Google Glass).
The way I understand how chip and PIN works, you insert the card into the reader which powers up the chip. The merchant transmits the transaction info to the chip. You enter your PIN which gets transmitted to the chip. The chip then uses the private key embedded in it to encrypt those pieces of data. That encrypted data and the card number is sent to the credit card processor, who holds the card's corresponding public key. They look up the card number, find its public key, and decrypt the data. The card number is no longer the gateway to your money, it's just a reference number for looking up the public key. It's the public/private key pair safeguarding your money and authenticating the transaction, and using the private key requires physical access to the card's chip and the corresponding PIN.
Dunno how the head of an animation company doesn't know this. What's important is angle of view. A 5" phone held 1 foot away from your eyes has the same angle of view as a 50" TV viewed from 10 feet away, which is the same as a 50 foot theater screen viewed from the back at 120 feet away, or a 0.42" Google Glass-type screen on your eyeglasses just 1" away. The image for all of these occupies exactly the same size on your retina.
Yes, there was a Danish study of this. A repeatedly refilled water bottle has a much higher level of bacteria etc. than tap water.
That bacteria comes from your own mouth though (transferred as you drink from the bottle). While they'll grow to the point where you can smell them if left long enough, it's hardly a rationale for not refilling your own bottle. Unless you're in the habit of injecting a sugar or nutrient solution into your water bottle, I can guarantee you your mouth has higher levels of bacteria than your refilled water bottle. (You could argue against sharing refilled water bottles, since someone else may have different bacteria than you do.)
Actually I'm not even sure you can use a magnetometer to find a lost aircraft. The permeability of aluminum is very close to that of a vacuum, and almost the same as wood. A quick google search says the permeability of titanium (used primarily in the engines) is about the same.
I'd agree with you about that behavior being malicious and "over the top"... but then there's the question of whether or not it was legal. That's really all the court system is supposed to determine. It might be a fine line, but ultimately, I think the courts did the right thing here.
If you volunteer information to a competitor and then it turns out the info you provided was bogus... it was still information you VOLUNTEERED. There would be a clear legal case here if Novell signed a deal to PAY for this information from Microsoft, and it turned out they received bad info because of a willful intent to mislead and fail to live up to the terms of the contract.
I'd agree with your legal take on it. However, regardless of legality, there is still the incentive for a company in Microsoft's position (controlling both the OS - Windows - and competing software - Word) to pull this sort of dirty trick to the detriment of the market and the consumer, but for their own self-benefit. It wasn't a part of this trial, but Microsoft had already pulled this type of trick before. It told all the software companies that OS/2 was going to be the GUI successor to DOS. So companies like WordPerfect got busy porting their DOS apps to OS/2. Then at the last minute, Microsoft dumped their partnership with IBM, declared that Windows was now the successor to DOS, and oh by the way here's a nice new word processor we made called Word which runs on Windows, since WordPerfect hasn't got their Windows version ready yet...
The cleaner solution, which allows companies to volunteer info this way but which eliminates the incentive to hurt the consumer (and competitors) for their own self-benefit, is something those of us opposed to Microsoft's tactics back then have always called for. Break Microsoft up into two separate companies - one which makes operating systems, and one which makes applications. If they had been broken up, Office for iOS and Android would have been released years ago instead of just recently. It's pretty obvious Microsoft was holding it back in hopes of using it to steer people towards Win Phone 8 and Win RT, and slowing down abandonment of Windows as their OS for productivity apps.
You see the same problem playing out in ISPs - where the companies which own the wires are also providing content, and deliberately throttling the content of competitors (e.g. Netflix's speeds on Comcast improved immediately after their agreement to pay Comcast, long before any new infrastructure could have been installed). Or how cellular service providers are able to lock down the phone you buy to their network - forcing you to buy your phone from them or from a third party who is getting their phones from them.
The incentive for this anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior disappears if you simply prohibit companies from owning both the platform/pipes and the content that runs on that platform/goes through the pipes. Can you imagine what the automobile market would've been like if Standard Oil and Ford had been one company, and only Ford cars had been allowed to fuel up at Standard Oil gas stations?
It's even more wonderfully complex than that. TFA says that a T-shirt worn by a female placed next to the rats produced no change, while a T-shirt worn by a male reduced the levels of pain. But placing both T-shirts together cancelled out the effect of the male T-shirt. So the preservation of quantum state by a female observer also extends to a male observer if a female is present. I guess this explains why her POV always prevails in a relationship.
Oh really? How many US nuclear reactors were built after 1986 then?
Chernobyl was an inherently unstable RBMK reactor design using a positive void coefficient. That means when the cooling water turns to steam, it increases the rate of reaction. Keeping that reactor stable is like balancing a basketball on your finger - one small mistake and it falls over. In the course of that fateful test, they pushed the reactor beyond a critical point. The water began evaporating, triggering a positive feedback loop which caused the fuel to generate more power, which caused more water to evaporate, causing more power generation, until the fuel basically exploded from the heat and energy buildup (at which point the chunks were spread far enough to stop the reaction).
That reactor design was never used outside of research in the West for that very reason. All the Western designs use a negative void coefficient. If the cooling water vaporizes, it slows down the nuclear reaction. That's really the secondary tragedy of Chernobyl - that it's held back nuclear power in the West. It's as if people had decided that powering things with electricity was bad because lightning could kill you, and they thwarted research and development of electric power for decades.
Nuclear plants might be safer/cleaner than coal and all, but when they fail (and they always seem to, due to people attempting to cut costs and corners) it leaves areas of land unusable to us humans. Not just a little unusable either. It does it for such a long time that it might as well be considered permanent. Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.
Actually, hydro makes more land unusable for humans as a matter of normal operation. The land set aside for the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam is larger than the Fukushima evacuation zone (1045 sq km vs 800 sq km), and it permanently displaced more than 8x the number of people who were merely evacuated (1.3 million vs 157,000). To be fair, Three Gorges generates about 2.3x the power that Fukushima Daiichi did (22 GW * 0.45 capacity factor = 9900 MW average, vs 4696 MW * 0.9 capacity factor = 4226 MW). But if you're going to condemn Nuclear on the basis of unusable land after an accident, then clearly you must condemn hydro for rendering more land unusable in the course of normal operation. And the vast majority of that 800 sq km Fukushima evacuation will be completely safe within a few years or decades. The land made unusable by hydro will remain unusable as long as the dam is there.
Also, nuclear is safer than hydro, wind, and (roof-mounted) solar. Statistically it's the safest power source man has invented. It's just that it's an incredibly concentrated power source so when an accident happens, it's a big accident that gets reported by the news nation-wide or world-wide. Wind and solar accidents are spread out so you don't see deaths associated with them reported in the news, even though per MWh generated they kill roughly 5-10x more people than nuclear. Kinda like how airliner crashes make the news while most car accidents don't despite killing roughly 400x more people each year. In fact in 2011, wind killed more people than the Fukushima Daiichi accident despite generating only about 1/6th as many MWh as nuclear. (Hydro is even worse - the worst power generation-related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams resulting in about 175,000 deaths and 11 million refugees.)
You're targeting the symptom, not the disease. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the President (both Bush and Obama) knew full well what the NSA was doing, and were instrumental in putting the program together and setting up new laws and courts to skirt around the 4th Amendment. They're in full Cover Your Ass mode right now, trying to dump the blame for this entirely on the NSA, so they can wash their hands clean in time for the next election.
The NSA is just a tool, an instrument. Its behavior is as good or as bad as the politicians want it to be. As the saying goes, a bad workman blames his tools.
That cuts both ways though. A lot of what we consider to be "good' food isn't actually good food, it's just what we've been conditioned to consider to be good. I'm Asian and grew up with tofu. I love the stuff. Yet many Westerners despise it and refuse to touch it. Same goes for sushi - search the Youtube videos for "first time eating sushi." You'll see lots of Westerners gagging as they try to eat California rolls, even though they don't actually contain any raw fish. A lot of what makes a food good or bad is all in your head, and can be taught (in or out).
That really depends on whether this is just an oleophobic layer put on top of the paint, or if the paint itself is oleophobic. Like you I suspect it's the former. But if they've managed to create the latter, then it should last until the paint wears through or flakes off.
Looking further to the future, when we develop 3D holographic displays, you should be able to take one of the images from a Lytro camera and directly convert it into a hologram. The total angular shift would be limited (basically to the width of the lens - move your eye beyond it and surfaces which were hidden in the original pic would be revealed in the hologram). But it would still be an honest to goodness hologram, as in you could move your head side to side a bit to peek around corners (which you can't do with current 3D video - the two viewpoints sent to your eyes are fixed).
The only question is if computers synthesizing the 3D info by analyzing two pics shot simultaneously with two lenses will be able to match this capability before we develop 3D displays.
Funny that you should bring up a car analogy. In the 1940s and 1950s, as cars began to get faster, more people started dying in accidents. As a result, manufacturers started building the car bodies to be stronger and more rigid. Of course when we started doing systematic crash testing in the 1960s and 1970s, we found out that this was absolutely the worst possible thing they could have done. With a rigid body, the entire force the impact is transferred to the occupants. The car stops immediately, while the passengers keep going... until they hit the front of the car at full speed. The better solution was to design a strong passenger compartment and belt the occupants to it, while the rest of the car was designed to deform and shatter to lengthen deceleration times (decreasing peak acceleration forces) and dissipate energy. Which is actually what a phone with a plastic body and a metal internal frame does.
Anyhow, I think Samsung and LG are on the right track here. The electronics inside a phone can survive several hundred Gs (you can literally shoot them out of a cannon with little ill effect). The only fragile part is the glass screen. So both companies are working hard to develop flexible screens. The only remaining issue would then be scratching the screen; but most people seem content to put a cheap plastic protector on their screen to ward off scratches.
I mostly use OneNote (was using Evernote for shared stuff, but am transitioning that to OneNote now that it's free). The biggest problem I run across is permanency. If you write something on paper, it's pretty much permanent (unless the ink fades or the paper turns to dust). If you write something in OneNote, then later accidentally select it while typing something else and don't notice it, it's gone. For shared notes, if someone wants to cover up a problem, they could simply delete someone else's remark pointing it out.
The same characteristic makes it difficult to use these note-taking apps for event tracking. For certain tasks (e.g. customer relationship management), you want an immutable record of events which you can refer back to in the future. Worst case you may even need for it to stand up in a court of law. You get this permanency with pen and paper (at the cost of disorganization). You don't get it with OneNote or Evernote.
(Yes I realize for serious customer relationship management, I should be using real CRM software. But I just fix stuff on my extended family's computers, and have been bitten by accidental deletions more than once.)
We don't filter the water. We have an EPA waiver not to have to filter our water. Only one in the country, since the water up in the Bull Run Watershed is so pristine (no human activity allowed in the entire watershed area, over a hundred square miles, 1/3 of the water is supplied by dew drip off of fir trees).
That doesn't change the fact that fish, birds, frogs, etc crap in the water. This whole thing is the same reason a lot of people believe in homeopathy - the idea that extremely diluted quantities of a beneficial substance still carry the same benefits. Homeopathy is basically the converse of the disgust reaction we have to inconsequentially miniscule contamination - the idea that extremely diluted quantities of a harmful substance still carry the same harm. The ISS has one of the most sophisticated water reclamation systems ever made, whose filtration provides cleaner water than what you get out of the tap. But people are still "grossed out" over the fact that astronauts are effectively drinking their own pee. Out of sight, out of mind.
The environment is dirty, and our bodies are fully capable of surviving with that dirt. This incessant demand for absolute cleanliness is probably the cause of the rapid increase in allergy rates. The prevailing theory is that allergies are result of over-cleanliness. Our immune systems are supposed to gradually build up resistance and tolerance to all sorts of pathogens and contaminants. But our modern, ultra-clean standard of living deprives our immune systems of gradual exposure to those substances. Then when we encounter it for the first time, our body goes nuts and overreacts, causing an allergic reaction.
Our water comes from the source much cleaner than would come out of the filtration systems used in other cities.
The cleanest water you can get is distilled. You slowly raise the temperature to boil off contaminants with a boiling point lower than water. At the boiling point of water you're getting pure H2O. The residual is everything with a boiling point higher than water. While it's absolutely clean, it's actually bad for you because it lacks minerals and salts your body needs, and the lack of dissolved content means metal from the pipes carrying it leech into it at an accelerated rate. So it's instead packaged in plastic or glass bottles and sold in stores. Rainwater is effectively distilled, except it picks up a lot of contaminants as it floats through the air, then falls down to the ground.
The next cleanest you can get is reverse osmosis filtered. The pores in the filters are so small that nearly all contaminants are removed. Like distilled water, it's actually too pure. They have to add minerals and salts back into it for health and taste reasons. While it's too expensive to use for most municipal water supplies, a few cities on islands or in extremely dry regions do use them to provide tap water.
Then come the spring waters, which are naturally filtered through miles of sand and rock.
There's a difference between income and wealth. The IRS tax stats are freely available for anyone to view. The bottom 80% of Americans (that's a roughly $80k/year income cut-off) account for about 40% of the income, closer to 45% after taxes.
Wealth is the integral of income (minus expenses). It's just how much of that income you're able to save or spend on durable or appreciating assets. A large percentage of lower- and middle-class income is spent on consumable necessities (food, clothing, gas, etc). But a lot (if not most) of it is also spent on things with no long-term value and depreciating assets with negative ROI (movie/concert tickets, iPhones, HDTVs, eating out, interest on credit card debt, the latest and greatest [anything], etc).
Given that income distribution is still pretty healthy, you can still amass a large amount of wealth if you simply live within your means and spend/invest your money wisely. I've met a little old lady who worked in a library all her life who has a half million dollar fortune, a carpenter who works out of a pickup truck who owns three houses. In my younger days I made about $40k/yr, yet over 5.5 years managed to save up over $100k for a down payment on a house. I had to live like a hermit, but it's doable. It's all about how you spend your money. If you're blowing it on things which will be worthless in a few years (or tomorrow) while blaming the 20% of people who own 95% of the wealth for all your woes, you've already lost. Yes the system can be improved, but "the man" holding you down is usually yourself.
Note that uranium is extremely dense - 19.1 kg/liter - so we're not talking about a huge amount of material. 100 pounds is only about 2.4 liters - a little more than a half-gallon milk carton.
I wouldn't blame the contractor for requesting a design change in the Kansas City walkway case. It wasn't a cost-cutting move like in the Citicorp building case. The original walkway design was one of those stupid architect/engineering designs which looked fine on paper but was impossible to actually manufacture. The original design called for 3-story tall rods hung from the ceiling to support both walkways. To install it would've required the lower walkway on the floor, attaching the rods to it, threading the retaining nuts for the upper walkway from the top down (a process that probably would've damaged the threads on the nuts enough to compromise their structural integrity), lowering the upper walkway from 4 stories up through the rods until they met the retaining nuts but keeping it suspended (the rods can't support it in compression), then simultaneously lifting both the upper and lower walkways to connect the rods to the ceiling.
The design is fine if you can magically materialize the rods, retaining nuts, and walkways in place, as they appeared on paper. But it's one of those designs where it's completely impractical to get from the disassembled parts to the completed design. The contractor correctly called out this idiotic design and suggested splitting the rods in half - one for the upper walkway, the other for the lower walkway. That way they could connect the rods to the upper walkway, lift it in place and mount it to the ceiling. Then attach the rods to the lower walkway, lift it in place to mount it to the upper walkway.
It was the architect/engineers who didn't properly vet the change. If the two rods had been above/below each other with a mating connector (emulating the original single-rod design), all would have been fine. But the contractor had suggested offsetting the two rods sideways so they could both be sent through the upper walkway, using the walkway itself as the mating connector. That offset (1) transferred the entire load of the lower walkway onto the upper walkway instead of just the rods, and (2) converted what was supposed to be entirely axial loads on the rods into a torque on the walkway floor; a floor whose structure wasn't designed to withstand that much torque, and didn't on the night of the disaster. The engineers should have caught that and come up with a different design.
Scientists publish their completed research in scientific journals. There is no genuine reason for publishing emails that were exchanged whilst the research was still in progress. Only in-genuine and dishonest reasons.
"Police offers present their completed incident and arrest reports in court. There is no genuine reason for publicly releasing recordings of what the officers do whilst the incident and arrests were still in progress. Only in-genuine and dishonest reasons."
Just saying. Seems to me if you're going to have public employees, you need to hold them all to the same standards of transparency.
Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions â" overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island â" would be virtually impossible at sea."
Simply being at sea doesn't prevent the cooling problem. Remember, Fukushima was right on the ocean. The problem is that the cooling system has to have at least two loops. An internal loop of coolant (usually water, though salt has also been used) actually travels inside the reactor. Consequently it picks up some residual radioactivity from being exposed to all those neutrons flying around. You cannot just use this single loop for cooling, or else you're releasing this radioactive coolant into the environment.
A second external loop of coolant cools the internal loop via a heat exchanger. This external loop picks up nowhere near as much radioactivity, and the coolant (water) is safe to dump back into the environment.
If it were just one loop, you could come up with a clever design using thermal expansion to make the water flow through it to provide passive cooling in the event of a pump failure. But with two loops (and the inner loop being closed), you're pretty much reliant on active pumping to remove heat from the reactor core. The problem at Fukushima was that power to these pumps failed, and backup generators designed specifically to supply power in that scenario were flooded and their fuel source contaminated.
I don't see how putting the plant on a floating platform helps in this scenario, unless you're willing to open up the primary cooling loop to the environment and just dump water straight into the reactor (with the resulting steam carrying both heat and radioactivity out). Which was pretty much what they ended up doing at Fukushima. If they'd done it before the cladding on the fuel rods melted, we'd only be dealing with a small amount of radioactive water (deuterium, tritium, etc) being released into the environment as steam, instead of fission byproducts being directly released. So I don't see how being by vs on the ocean makes any difference for this scenario.
Maybe you could design the steel containment sphere to act as a heat sink, allowing sufficient cooling when submerged? But the containment's primary job is to contain what happens inside. That's why it's a sphere - it encloses the largest volume for the least amount of material and surface area, and its mechanical behavior under stress are very easy to predict. This is precisely the opposite of what you want from a heat sink. You want the most surface area for a given enclosed volume. Which makes me suspect that the steel containment could only operate as a heat sink if you're willing to compromise its protective strength somewhat.
The other problem I see is that putting it out at sea hinders accessibility. Meaning more mundane events like a fire, which are trivial to handle on land, become much more problematic at sea.
This. Most people still incorrectly concentrate on sequential read/write times. SSDs are only about 4x faster by that metric - 550 MB/s vs 125-150 MB/s.
Where SSDs really shine are the small, rapid read/writes. If you look at the 4k r/w benchmarks, a good SSD will top 50 MB/s 4k speeds, and over 300 MB/s with NCQ. A good HDD is only about 1.5 MB/s, and maybe 2 MB/s with NCQ because of seek latency - the head needs to be physically moved between each 4k sector. That 100-fold difference is what makes SSDs so much faster in regular use, not the sequential r/w speeds.
We've shown Americans how we deal with leakers by our handling of Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Snowden had no choice but to go to our enemies for asylum.
Please don't compare Manning to Snowden. Manning copied everything he could get his hands on and released it all without any consideration for whether or not it had a valid reason to be secret. He threw the baby out with the bathwater. Snowden has been careful to release only the things he feels violated the oath he and others took to the U.S. Constitution. One is a vandal. The other is a genuine whistleblower if not a patriot and hero.
For him to be a hypocrite, he'd have to spy on americans. If he has to do propaganda for the Russians to survive, then who cares? It's the Russians' problem, not ours.
I dunno why you think he has to spy on Americans to be a hypocrite. By doing propaganda for the Russians, he is affirming that sometimes you have to compromise your lesser values in order to protect greater ones. That's exactly what he's whistleblowing the U.S. government for doing - compromising Americans' privacy in order to (in their best estimation) protect their safety. If you actually listen to what Feinstein and others who defend these programs are saying, they're not evilly rubbing their hands together while cackling with glee that they're violating the Constitution. They implemented these programs because they genuinely thought the benefit (improved safety for Americans) was worth the cost (warrant-less searches and degradation of privacy).
What differentiates what he's doing IMHO is that if something is written in the Constitution, that kinda implies that it's an uncompromisable value. That you cannot violate Americans' 4th Amendment rights even if doing so would result in greater safety. Exceptions can be made during martial law and war, but no such declarations were made (unless you consider the war on terrorism to be a real, declared, and unending war).
1. Kids shoot up schools. Why schools? Why not shopping malls before Christmas or movie theaters during blockbuster premiers?
1) Kids are in school 30%-40% of their waking lives. It's normal that a disproportionate amount of everything that happens to them happens at school.
2) They don't really shoot up schools. Statistically a kid is much more likely to be shot outside of school than in school. It's just that "school shootings" have become a thing for the media, so the threshold at which one will become a national news story is much lower than, say, a bunch of gang members shooting each other in a drive-by shooting, or a bunch of teens being killed in a car accident. Despite the impression you get from the media, if you want your kids to be safe from shootings, you're better off sending them to school. Normalize for the time they spend in school (#1 above) and statistically they're even safer.
3) When a shooting happens at a school, the vast majority of victims are other kids simply because of the demographics of the people in the area. So it gets classified as kids shooting kids. When a shooting happens outside of a school, the majority of victims are adults. So it gets classified as a "regular" shooting incident even if a significant number of kids were victims
This is just the flip side of Windows RT. Microsoft developed RT to hedge their bets. If the market stayed with x86, they could sell regular Windows. If the market switched to ARM, they could sell Windows RT. RT didn't need to be successful, it just needed to be there.
Now Intel is doing the same - they're hedging their bets. If the market stays with Windows, they can can sell CPUs for Windows machines. If the market switches to Android or whatever OS over Windows, then can sell CPUs for those machines.
That's really what the phrase "Wintel is dead" means. It doesn't mean there are no more Wintel boxes being made. It means the Microsoft-Intel partnership is no longer an exclusive partnership as if they were one company. They're starting to treat each other as just another disposable business partner.
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It has everything to do with chip and PIN. It would've prevented the security breach entirely because with chip and PIN, getting the card number by itself is useless. You need the smart chip on the card and the PIN to activate it before you can do anything with the card number. Since you can't use the numbers without the chip and PIN, there is no incentive for thieves to steal the card numbers - they are just numbers, not a magical way to access someone else's money.
You buy a card reader for your home computer.
I don't get why people keep trying to blame Target's security for this problem. The problem all along has been that you can buy stuff using nothing more than a plaintext sixteen-digit number that "belongs" to someone else. I'm not saying Target isn't at fault for failing to secure their network. But giving your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant makes your card just as vulnerable as Target's network was during their security breach. The current system is like telling your bank to authorize payment if someone gives them "your secret password." Then you proceed to give that very password out to every merchant you visit, so they can tell the bank and collect payment. Well if you're giving your password in plaintext to every merchant out there, it's not very secret is it? And anyone who steals the plaintext or overhears it or copies it can make charges to your account (whether it be a thief who stole them from the merchant, or an employee at the merchant, or the guy standing behind you in line who snapped a picture of your card with Google Glass).
The way I understand how chip and PIN works, you insert the card into the reader which powers up the chip. The merchant transmits the transaction info to the chip. You enter your PIN which gets transmitted to the chip. The chip then uses the private key embedded in it to encrypt those pieces of data. That encrypted data and the card number is sent to the credit card processor, who holds the card's corresponding public key. They look up the card number, find its public key, and decrypt the data. The card number is no longer the gateway to your money, it's just a reference number for looking up the public key. It's the public/private key pair safeguarding your money and authenticating the transaction, and using the private key requires physical access to the card's chip and the corresponding PIN.
Dunno how the head of an animation company doesn't know this. What's important is angle of view. A 5" phone held 1 foot away from your eyes has the same angle of view as a 50" TV viewed from 10 feet away, which is the same as a 50 foot theater screen viewed from the back at 120 feet away, or a 0.42" Google Glass-type screen on your eyeglasses just 1" away. The image for all of these occupies exactly the same size on your retina.
That bacteria comes from your own mouth though (transferred as you drink from the bottle). While they'll grow to the point where you can smell them if left long enough, it's hardly a rationale for not refilling your own bottle. Unless you're in the habit of injecting a sugar or nutrient solution into your water bottle, I can guarantee you your mouth has higher levels of bacteria than your refilled water bottle. (You could argue against sharing refilled water bottles, since someone else may have different bacteria than you do.)
Actually I'm not even sure you can use a magnetometer to find a lost aircraft. The permeability of aluminum is very close to that of a vacuum, and almost the same as wood. A quick google search says the permeability of titanium (used primarily in the engines) is about the same.
I'd agree with your legal take on it. However, regardless of legality, there is still the incentive for a company in Microsoft's position (controlling both the OS - Windows - and competing software - Word) to pull this sort of dirty trick to the detriment of the market and the consumer, but for their own self-benefit. It wasn't a part of this trial, but Microsoft had already pulled this type of trick before. It told all the software companies that OS/2 was going to be the GUI successor to DOS. So companies like WordPerfect got busy porting their DOS apps to OS/2. Then at the last minute, Microsoft dumped their partnership with IBM, declared that Windows was now the successor to DOS, and oh by the way here's a nice new word processor we made called Word which runs on Windows, since WordPerfect hasn't got their Windows version ready yet...
The cleaner solution, which allows companies to volunteer info this way but which eliminates the incentive to hurt the consumer (and competitors) for their own self-benefit, is something those of us opposed to Microsoft's tactics back then have always called for. Break Microsoft up into two separate companies - one which makes operating systems, and one which makes applications. If they had been broken up, Office for iOS and Android would have been released years ago instead of just recently. It's pretty obvious Microsoft was holding it back in hopes of using it to steer people towards Win Phone 8 and Win RT, and slowing down abandonment of Windows as their OS for productivity apps.
You see the same problem playing out in ISPs - where the companies which own the wires are also providing content, and deliberately throttling the content of competitors (e.g. Netflix's speeds on Comcast improved immediately after their agreement to pay Comcast, long before any new infrastructure could have been installed). Or how cellular service providers are able to lock down the phone you buy to their network - forcing you to buy your phone from them or from a third party who is getting their phones from them.
The incentive for this anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior disappears if you simply prohibit companies from owning both the platform/pipes and the content that runs on that platform/goes through the pipes. Can you imagine what the automobile market would've been like if Standard Oil and Ford had been one company, and only Ford cars had been allowed to fuel up at Standard Oil gas stations?
It's even more wonderfully complex than that. TFA says that a T-shirt worn by a female placed next to the rats produced no change, while a T-shirt worn by a male reduced the levels of pain. But placing both T-shirts together cancelled out the effect of the male T-shirt. So the preservation of quantum state by a female observer also extends to a male observer if a female is present. I guess this explains why her POV always prevails in a relationship.
Chernobyl was an inherently unstable RBMK reactor design using a positive void coefficient. That means when the cooling water turns to steam, it increases the rate of reaction. Keeping that reactor stable is like balancing a basketball on your finger - one small mistake and it falls over. In the course of that fateful test, they pushed the reactor beyond a critical point. The water began evaporating, triggering a positive feedback loop which caused the fuel to generate more power, which caused more water to evaporate, causing more power generation, until the fuel basically exploded from the heat and energy buildup (at which point the chunks were spread far enough to stop the reaction).
That reactor design was never used outside of research in the West for that very reason. All the Western designs use a negative void coefficient. If the cooling water vaporizes, it slows down the nuclear reaction. That's really the secondary tragedy of Chernobyl - that it's held back nuclear power in the West. It's as if people had decided that powering things with electricity was bad because lightning could kill you, and they thwarted research and development of electric power for decades.
Actually, hydro makes more land unusable for humans as a matter of normal operation. The land set aside for the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam is larger than the Fukushima evacuation zone (1045 sq km vs 800 sq km), and it permanently displaced more than 8x the number of people who were merely evacuated (1.3 million vs 157,000). To be fair, Three Gorges generates about 2.3x the power that Fukushima Daiichi did (22 GW * 0.45 capacity factor = 9900 MW average, vs 4696 MW * 0.9 capacity factor = 4226 MW). But if you're going to condemn Nuclear on the basis of unusable land after an accident, then clearly you must condemn hydro for rendering more land unusable in the course of normal operation. And the vast majority of that 800 sq km Fukushima evacuation will be completely safe within a few years or decades. The land made unusable by hydro will remain unusable as long as the dam is there.
Also, nuclear is safer than hydro, wind, and (roof-mounted) solar. Statistically it's the safest power source man has invented. It's just that it's an incredibly concentrated power source so when an accident happens, it's a big accident that gets reported by the news nation-wide or world-wide. Wind and solar accidents are spread out so you don't see deaths associated with them reported in the news, even though per MWh generated they kill roughly 5-10x more people than nuclear. Kinda like how airliner crashes make the news while most car accidents don't despite killing roughly 400x more people each year. In fact in 2011, wind killed more people than the Fukushima Daiichi accident despite generating only about 1/6th as many MWh as nuclear. (Hydro is even worse - the worst power generation-related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams resulting in about 175,000 deaths and 11 million refugees.)
You're targeting the symptom, not the disease. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the President (both Bush and Obama) knew full well what the NSA was doing, and were instrumental in putting the program together and setting up new laws and courts to skirt around the 4th Amendment. They're in full Cover Your Ass mode right now, trying to dump the blame for this entirely on the NSA, so they can wash their hands clean in time for the next election.
The NSA is just a tool, an instrument. Its behavior is as good or as bad as the politicians want it to be. As the saying goes, a bad workman blames his tools.
That cuts both ways though. A lot of what we consider to be "good' food isn't actually good food, it's just what we've been conditioned to consider to be good. I'm Asian and grew up with tofu. I love the stuff. Yet many Westerners despise it and refuse to touch it. Same goes for sushi - search the Youtube videos for "first time eating sushi." You'll see lots of Westerners gagging as they try to eat California rolls, even though they don't actually contain any raw fish. A lot of what makes a food good or bad is all in your head, and can be taught (in or out).
That really depends on whether this is just an oleophobic layer put on top of the paint, or if the paint itself is oleophobic. Like you I suspect it's the former. But if they've managed to create the latter, then it should last until the paint wears through or flakes off.
Looking further to the future, when we develop 3D holographic displays, you should be able to take one of the images from a Lytro camera and directly convert it into a hologram. The total angular shift would be limited (basically to the width of the lens - move your eye beyond it and surfaces which were hidden in the original pic would be revealed in the hologram). But it would still be an honest to goodness hologram, as in you could move your head side to side a bit to peek around corners (which you can't do with current 3D video - the two viewpoints sent to your eyes are fixed).
The only question is if computers synthesizing the 3D info by analyzing two pics shot simultaneously with two lenses will be able to match this capability before we develop 3D displays.
Funny that you should bring up a car analogy. In the 1940s and 1950s, as cars began to get faster, more people started dying in accidents. As a result, manufacturers started building the car bodies to be stronger and more rigid. Of course when we started doing systematic crash testing in the 1960s and 1970s, we found out that this was absolutely the worst possible thing they could have done. With a rigid body, the entire force the impact is transferred to the occupants. The car stops immediately, while the passengers keep going... until they hit the front of the car at full speed. The better solution was to design a strong passenger compartment and belt the occupants to it, while the rest of the car was designed to deform and shatter to lengthen deceleration times (decreasing peak acceleration forces) and dissipate energy. Which is actually what a phone with a plastic body and a metal internal frame does.
Anyhow, I think Samsung and LG are on the right track here. The electronics inside a phone can survive several hundred Gs (you can literally shoot them out of a cannon with little ill effect). The only fragile part is the glass screen. So both companies are working hard to develop flexible screens. The only remaining issue would then be scratching the screen; but most people seem content to put a cheap plastic protector on their screen to ward off scratches.
All the stats I've seen say we work marginally fewer hours than 20 years ago, and significantly fewer than 50 years ago.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-hours
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/10/why-the-french-are-fighting-over-work-hours.html
What's changed is that the middle class has proportionately less income to splurge on luxuries such as playing golf.
I mostly use OneNote (was using Evernote for shared stuff, but am transitioning that to OneNote now that it's free). The biggest problem I run across is permanency. If you write something on paper, it's pretty much permanent (unless the ink fades or the paper turns to dust). If you write something in OneNote, then later accidentally select it while typing something else and don't notice it, it's gone. For shared notes, if someone wants to cover up a problem, they could simply delete someone else's remark pointing it out.
The same characteristic makes it difficult to use these note-taking apps for event tracking. For certain tasks (e.g. customer relationship management), you want an immutable record of events which you can refer back to in the future. Worst case you may even need for it to stand up in a court of law. You get this permanency with pen and paper (at the cost of disorganization). You don't get it with OneNote or Evernote.
(Yes I realize for serious customer relationship management, I should be using real CRM software. But I just fix stuff on my extended family's computers, and have been bitten by accidental deletions more than once.)
That doesn't change the fact that fish, birds, frogs, etc crap in the water. This whole thing is the same reason a lot of people believe in homeopathy - the idea that extremely diluted quantities of a beneficial substance still carry the same benefits. Homeopathy is basically the converse of the disgust reaction we have to inconsequentially miniscule contamination - the idea that extremely diluted quantities of a harmful substance still carry the same harm. The ISS has one of the most sophisticated water reclamation systems ever made, whose filtration provides cleaner water than what you get out of the tap. But people are still "grossed out" over the fact that astronauts are effectively drinking their own pee. Out of sight, out of mind.
The environment is dirty, and our bodies are fully capable of surviving with that dirt. This incessant demand for absolute cleanliness is probably the cause of the rapid increase in allergy rates. The prevailing theory is that allergies are result of over-cleanliness. Our immune systems are supposed to gradually build up resistance and tolerance to all sorts of pathogens and contaminants. But our modern, ultra-clean standard of living deprives our immune systems of gradual exposure to those substances. Then when we encounter it for the first time, our body goes nuts and overreacts, causing an allergic reaction.
The cleanest water you can get is distilled. You slowly raise the temperature to boil off contaminants with a boiling point lower than water. At the boiling point of water you're getting pure H2O. The residual is everything with a boiling point higher than water. While it's absolutely clean, it's actually bad for you because it lacks minerals and salts your body needs, and the lack of dissolved content means metal from the pipes carrying it leech into it at an accelerated rate. So it's instead packaged in plastic or glass bottles and sold in stores. Rainwater is effectively distilled, except it picks up a lot of contaminants as it floats through the air, then falls down to the ground.
The next cleanest you can get is reverse osmosis filtered. The pores in the filters are so small that nearly all contaminants are removed. Like distilled water, it's actually too pure. They have to add minerals and salts back into it for health and taste reasons. While it's too expensive to use for most municipal water supplies, a few cities on islands or in extremely dry regions do use them to provide tap water.
Then come the spring waters, which are naturally filtered through miles of sand and rock.
There's a difference between income and wealth. The IRS tax stats are freely available for anyone to view. The bottom 80% of Americans (that's a roughly $80k/year income cut-off) account for about 40% of the income, closer to 45% after taxes.
Wealth is the integral of income (minus expenses). It's just how much of that income you're able to save or spend on durable or appreciating assets. A large percentage of lower- and middle-class income is spent on consumable necessities (food, clothing, gas, etc). But a lot (if not most) of it is also spent on things with no long-term value and depreciating assets with negative ROI (movie/concert tickets, iPhones, HDTVs, eating out, interest on credit card debt, the latest and greatest [anything], etc).
Given that income distribution is still pretty healthy, you can still amass a large amount of wealth if you simply live within your means and spend/invest your money wisely. I've met a little old lady who worked in a library all her life who has a half million dollar fortune, a carpenter who works out of a pickup truck who owns three houses. In my younger days I made about $40k/yr, yet over 5.5 years managed to save up over $100k for a down payment on a house. I had to live like a hermit, but it's doable. It's all about how you spend your money. If you're blowing it on things which will be worthless in a few years (or tomorrow) while blaming the 20% of people who own 95% of the wealth for all your woes, you've already lost. Yes the system can be improved, but "the man" holding you down is usually yourself.
Note that uranium is extremely dense - 19.1 kg/liter - so we're not talking about a huge amount of material. 100 pounds is only about 2.4 liters - a little more than a half-gallon milk carton.
I wouldn't blame the contractor for requesting a design change in the Kansas City walkway case. It wasn't a cost-cutting move like in the Citicorp building case. The original walkway design was one of those stupid architect/engineering designs which looked fine on paper but was impossible to actually manufacture. The original design called for 3-story tall rods hung from the ceiling to support both walkways. To install it would've required the lower walkway on the floor, attaching the rods to it, threading the retaining nuts for the upper walkway from the top down (a process that probably would've damaged the threads on the nuts enough to compromise their structural integrity), lowering the upper walkway from 4 stories up through the rods until they met the retaining nuts but keeping it suspended (the rods can't support it in compression), then simultaneously lifting both the upper and lower walkways to connect the rods to the ceiling.
The design is fine if you can magically materialize the rods, retaining nuts, and walkways in place, as they appeared on paper. But it's one of those designs where it's completely impractical to get from the disassembled parts to the completed design. The contractor correctly called out this idiotic design and suggested splitting the rods in half - one for the upper walkway, the other for the lower walkway. That way they could connect the rods to the upper walkway, lift it in place and mount it to the ceiling. Then attach the rods to the lower walkway, lift it in place to mount it to the upper walkway.
It was the architect/engineers who didn't properly vet the change. If the two rods had been above/below each other with a mating connector (emulating the original single-rod design), all would have been fine. But the contractor had suggested offsetting the two rods sideways so they could both be sent through the upper walkway, using the walkway itself as the mating connector. That offset (1) transferred the entire load of the lower walkway onto the upper walkway instead of just the rods, and (2) converted what was supposed to be entirely axial loads on the rods into a torque on the walkway floor; a floor whose structure wasn't designed to withstand that much torque, and didn't on the night of the disaster. The engineers should have caught that and come up with a different design.
"Police offers present their completed incident and arrest reports in court. There is no genuine reason for publicly releasing recordings of what the officers do whilst the incident and arrests were still in progress. Only in-genuine and dishonest reasons."
Just saying. Seems to me if you're going to have public employees, you need to hold them all to the same standards of transparency.
Simply being at sea doesn't prevent the cooling problem. Remember, Fukushima was right on the ocean. The problem is that the cooling system has to have at least two loops. An internal loop of coolant (usually water, though salt has also been used) actually travels inside the reactor. Consequently it picks up some residual radioactivity from being exposed to all those neutrons flying around. You cannot just use this single loop for cooling, or else you're releasing this radioactive coolant into the environment.
A second external loop of coolant cools the internal loop via a heat exchanger. This external loop picks up nowhere near as much radioactivity, and the coolant (water) is safe to dump back into the environment.
If it were just one loop, you could come up with a clever design using thermal expansion to make the water flow through it to provide passive cooling in the event of a pump failure. But with two loops (and the inner loop being closed), you're pretty much reliant on active pumping to remove heat from the reactor core. The problem at Fukushima was that power to these pumps failed, and backup generators designed specifically to supply power in that scenario were flooded and their fuel source contaminated.
I don't see how putting the plant on a floating platform helps in this scenario, unless you're willing to open up the primary cooling loop to the environment and just dump water straight into the reactor (with the resulting steam carrying both heat and radioactivity out). Which was pretty much what they ended up doing at Fukushima. If they'd done it before the cladding on the fuel rods melted, we'd only be dealing with a small amount of radioactive water (deuterium, tritium, etc) being released into the environment as steam, instead of fission byproducts being directly released. So I don't see how being by vs on the ocean makes any difference for this scenario.
Maybe you could design the steel containment sphere to act as a heat sink, allowing sufficient cooling when submerged? But the containment's primary job is to contain what happens inside. That's why it's a sphere - it encloses the largest volume for the least amount of material and surface area, and its mechanical behavior under stress are very easy to predict. This is precisely the opposite of what you want from a heat sink. You want the most surface area for a given enclosed volume. Which makes me suspect that the steel containment could only operate as a heat sink if you're willing to compromise its protective strength somewhat.
The other problem I see is that putting it out at sea hinders accessibility. Meaning more mundane events like a fire, which are trivial to handle on land, become much more problematic at sea.
This. Most people still incorrectly concentrate on sequential read/write times. SSDs are only about 4x faster by that metric - 550 MB/s vs 125-150 MB/s.
Where SSDs really shine are the small, rapid read/writes. If you look at the 4k r/w benchmarks, a good SSD will top 50 MB/s 4k speeds, and over 300 MB/s with NCQ. A good HDD is only about 1.5 MB/s, and maybe 2 MB/s with NCQ because of seek latency - the head needs to be physically moved between each 4k sector. That 100-fold difference is what makes SSDs so much faster in regular use, not the sequential r/w speeds.
Please don't compare Manning to Snowden. Manning copied everything he could get his hands on and released it all without any consideration for whether or not it had a valid reason to be secret. He threw the baby out with the bathwater. Snowden has been careful to release only the things he feels violated the oath he and others took to the U.S. Constitution. One is a vandal. The other is a genuine whistleblower if not a patriot and hero.
I dunno why you think he has to spy on Americans to be a hypocrite. By doing propaganda for the Russians, he is affirming that sometimes you have to compromise your lesser values in order to protect greater ones. That's exactly what he's whistleblowing the U.S. government for doing - compromising Americans' privacy in order to (in their best estimation) protect their safety. If you actually listen to what Feinstein and others who defend these programs are saying, they're not evilly rubbing their hands together while cackling with glee that they're violating the Constitution. They implemented these programs because they genuinely thought the benefit (improved safety for Americans) was worth the cost (warrant-less searches and degradation of privacy).
What differentiates what he's doing IMHO is that if something is written in the Constitution, that kinda implies that it's an uncompromisable value. That you cannot violate Americans' 4th Amendment rights even if doing so would result in greater safety. Exceptions can be made during martial law and war, but no such declarations were made (unless you consider the war on terrorism to be a real, declared, and unending war).
1) Kids are in school 30%-40% of their waking lives. It's normal that a disproportionate amount of everything that happens to them happens at school.
2) They don't really shoot up schools. Statistically a kid is much more likely to be shot outside of school than in school. It's just that "school shootings" have become a thing for the media, so the threshold at which one will become a national news story is much lower than, say, a bunch of gang members shooting each other in a drive-by shooting, or a bunch of teens being killed in a car accident. Despite the impression you get from the media, if you want your kids to be safe from shootings, you're better off sending them to school. Normalize for the time they spend in school (#1 above) and statistically they're even safer.
3) When a shooting happens at a school, the vast majority of victims are other kids simply because of the demographics of the people in the area. So it gets classified as kids shooting kids. When a shooting happens outside of a school, the majority of victims are adults. So it gets classified as a "regular" shooting incident even if a significant number of kids were victims
This is just the flip side of Windows RT. Microsoft developed RT to hedge their bets. If the market stayed with x86, they could sell regular Windows. If the market switched to ARM, they could sell Windows RT. RT didn't need to be successful, it just needed to be there.
Now Intel is doing the same - they're hedging their bets. If the market stays with Windows, they can can sell CPUs for Windows machines. If the market switches to Android or whatever OS over Windows, then can sell CPUs for those machines.
That's really what the phrase "Wintel is dead" means. It doesn't mean there are no more Wintel boxes being made. It means the Microsoft-Intel partnership is no longer an exclusive partnership as if they were one company. They're starting to treat each other as just another disposable business partner.