Apple Pay is basically a contactless EMV wrapper for iPhones. SoftCard complies with EMV too, but I've seen nothing indicating that Apple Pay will work with SoftCard processors. This is purely a contractual thing though; there's nothing technical to stop it from working.
What this stops is someone writing an app that uses NFC for whatever they want -- if someone wants to use Apple Pay plus NFC with their own EMV-compliant processor, they just need to talk to Apple's legal department. If someone wants to write an app that leverages Apple Pay, they can also do that.
Basically, you can't roll out something like Google Wallet for an iPhone, but you can support all sorts of NFC payment types with it.
Rural areas often subside things like mass transit through regional governments as well so it's a bit of a two way street.
It's not even close to a two way street. Urban areas massively subsidize rural areas, even just in transport, and even after you include the very modest subsidies for public transit. Roads are funded with gas taxes, which are related to miles driven.
The reason you don't think it's even close to a two way street is precisely due to the fact that the necessities of rural living are subsidized.
If they weren't, cost of living would skyrocket... and suddenly, all natural resources would be unaffordable to most people in urban areas. Energy would cost more than the average wage earner could afford, everything but the most basic foods would be for the ultra rich, infrastructure maintenance would be too costly to keep up with.
It's like trees: you get to see the trunk and the branches and leaves, but never forget the huge root system underneath that supports the tree. Without the roots, the tree WILL die.
Yeah; I was expecting to see something that could top http://zentasrobots.com/ which has been covered on Slashdot a few times, but instead saw an ad for Edison and 3D printers. I find the MorpHex significantly more cute and creepy than this thing, even with its back-lit translucent body parts.
No, the phone is shown at exactly right angles, and they're right, the lens is photoshopped out. Meanwhile, it's 1 mm. What is that, the thickness of 2 business cards?
I think they were just holding it wrong while taking the pictures.
A "pure" LA degree these days tends to be a survey degree; graduates are expected to be jacks of all trades, master of none. This is great as a secondary layer of education if you're self-motivated to pursue some more focused line of work/work experience as well, but doesn't do much by itself other than show that you're a good generalist.
However, how many people with a STEM degree have mastered their field? Usually STEM jobs are all about lifelong learning in the field. LA degrees are more of a kickstart into this same arena, providing more options but less focus.
I know people with fine arts degrees who are excellent software analysts (eye for detail, patterns, etc). They also do great in the human interface design departments. Many people who go in for STEM education have a really difficult time communicating their work to others, which not only affects documentation, but also collaboration in the workplace, and it promotes the silo effect.
You really need a mix of people from both arts and sciences for a healthy workplace, no matter what field you're in.
What about someone like me who has a liberal arts degree in CS?
In that case, CS stands for Communications Studies or Computers Studies, not Computer Science. CompSci is sometimes lumped in with Applied or Engineering sciences, but I'd question any school that would take what should be a course load focused on the mathematical theory and design of computational systems and place it in the Liberal Arts discipline.
To take the opposing view: I know someone who got hired to do tech writing for an embedded systems company who was finishing off a combined CS and English Lit. degree, and had already generated a Liberal Arts certificate based on the cross-discipline work they needed for that.
I also remember the intense difficulty most people in CS had with writing a critical paper on ANYTHING.
I think the end result is that it doesn't really matter which degree the person has: what's important is that they can display that they can work across disciplines, present themselves well, and learn technical detail well enough to perform with it under pressure in a short period of time.
After all: which would you rather have doing a programming job: someone who got a 2.0 average in a CS degree and spent evenings and weekends playing MMORPGs, or someone with an Eng Lit. degree with a 4.0 average who has been writing Android apps as a hobby and did their major paper on the effects of digital media on 21st century literature?
Actually, depending on the programming job and the wage/contract you want to pay out, I guess it could go either way.
A good dealer can integrate a variety of aftermarket add-ons, have alternative financing and insurance packages on-site, provide extra customer services such as roadside assistance and no-hassle inspections and initial tuneups. Not much of a reason, but it's what they give for their existence.
It's also hazardous/lethal to overdose on arsenic, and yet eating apple cores isn't going to cause problems. For that matter, eating foxglove flowers will stop your heart, and yet digitalis is the go-to drug compound for people with heart issues.
For that matter, you can die from swallowing water.
Of course, this is all beside the point, as the idea here is that your blood is pumped outside your body through a screen of magnetic particles and then pumped back in without the pathogens (and without the particles). People undergoing such an invasive process in a controlled lab are unlikely to be swallowing buckyballs and having them tie their intestines in knots.
More to the point, when people use, "Google," as a verb, they mean to actually use Google, as opposed to using any brand of facial tissue available when saying, "Kleenex."
Besides, if Coca-Cola can retain, "Coke," as a trademark when vast portions of the country refer to basic soft carbonated soda drinks of any type as, "coke," then I don't think that those challenging Gogole's trademark have much of a chance.
Let me Xerox off a few examples of when similar Noun/Verb phrases lost their trademark in the past.
That misses the bit where I mentioned quarterly drive rotation, precisely for this reason.
A parity drive is also a good idea of course, but it will likely result in fewer rotations due to the extra hassle.
Using my method, I've moved over the years from storing 128MB of data in a box to 2GB -- and I'm likely just about to do another round of replacements in my backup drives as my 1TB are getting a bit long in the tooth.
I think you missed my point -- I'm not debating whether pollution harms (negatively affects) our current environmental balance from the perspective of humanity -- that's pretty much the definition. The fact is that "the environment" is much too loosely defined in this debate on AGW, and just throwing around terms without carefully defining what you're talking about and then stating that debate has ended, well, you can see that the debate rages on; mostly because people aren't working off the same word definitions.
Your clarifications definitely narrow down what is being debated from your perspective, and I agree with your conclusions, but unless we want more annoying "is not!" responses (which are not debate, it's true), we need to apply scientific rigour to the terms we're using, recognizing when others are abusing words and clarifying our own use of said words, or else we haven't really progressed the overlying debate(s) at all.
[edited] I agree with your basic premise but most Creation Science opponents ignore and will not address contrary evidence, preferring instead to ridicule and cast aspersions, as you do. What is there to fear from an open discussion and equal treatment of all available evidence, unless a predetermined outcome is the goal?
There was a good comment on some/. thread last week, talking about finding the balance between proving scientific theories and repeatedly disproving the same fallacious data.
The issue here is that of confusing scientific research and politics/religion. AGW crosses the line quite often, but opponents to AGW spend most of their time across the line. Actual discussion can start once these two are separated, and they can both be presented for what they are, instead of studies being presented as proof for a political agenda, and politics prompting scientists with finite resources to "run the numbers again".
pollution harms the environment...you cannot contradict that fact
Sure he can. Whether he'd be right is up for debate.
"Pollution AFFECTS the environment" is something that is pretty much a fact. It could even affect it by destroying all human beings -- but the environment itself will likely self-correct (possibly by destroying all human beings).
The only problem with punch tapes is that we've ALREADY lost the readers for them, without even having a minor apocalypse. I guess if people kept backing up to punchtape though, we'd still have workable units that could plug into this decade's computing devices.
Because video isn't data in motion (most of the time), you can just get a safe deposit box and keep a drive there, cycling it semi-regularly to prevent against bitrot/drive failure. I just keep one backup hooked up locally, and one in storage, and rotate them quarterly. Some stuff I also have backed up to data DVD locally, but if all three hard drives fail at the same time, my DVDs probably won't fare much better.
Then again, I did my VHS -> Digital backup around 15 years ago, and burned everything to video DVD back then. I've since re-ripped from DVD and done the MPEG-2->h.264 conversion, but I still have the DVDs (including their campy menu screens).
Yeah; I didn't add that bit to my post as it didn't really add anything to the discussion and would have confused some people -> TL;DR.
But yeah; I see MS doing something similar with ANY game they buy; Xbox platform first, then Windows, then everyone else, by which point the game isn't what it was originally intended to be.
Bungie was a developer for the Mac platform that brought us many excellent games, such as Marathon and Myth in the 90's. It was working on a game called Halo, that was supposed to leverage all the Mac features to create a hugely amazing game.
In 2000, Microsoft bought Bungie, and the delivery date for Halo slipped. Turned out that the reason for the slip was that all dev work on the Mac version halted, and MS put all Bungie's efforts into porting it to XBOX. It then came out as an XBOX exclusive title (the launch title).
Eventually, Bungie left MS in 2007, but had to leave the Halo franchise behind.
This is pretty much what I expect to happen 14 years later with Minecraft, with the exception that Minecraft already exists (like Myth II did at the time of the Bungie buyout) and so isn't likely to be the killer app at the center of the deal.
I think I would have written in to complain about the entire show; the "wardrobe malfunction" wouldn't really have played into the complaint at all. But then, I didn't watch the superbowl that year, and so didn't have to put up with the sensationalist half time show.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple Pay is basically a contactless EMV wrapper for iPhones. SoftCard complies with EMV too, but I've seen nothing indicating that Apple Pay will work with SoftCard processors. This is purely a contractual thing though; there's nothing technical to stop it from working.
What this stops is someone writing an app that uses NFC for whatever they want -- if someone wants to use Apple Pay plus NFC with their own EMV-compliant processor, they just need to talk to Apple's legal department. If someone wants to write an app that leverages Apple Pay, they can also do that.
Basically, you can't roll out something like Google Wallet for an iPhone, but you can support all sorts of NFC payment types with it.
Rural areas often subside things like mass transit through regional governments as well so it's a bit of a two way street.
It's not even close to a two way street. Urban areas massively subsidize rural areas, even just in transport, and even after you include the very modest subsidies for public transit. Roads are funded with gas taxes, which are related to miles driven.
The reason you don't think it's even close to a two way street is precisely due to the fact that the necessities of rural living are subsidized.
If they weren't, cost of living would skyrocket... and suddenly, all natural resources would be unaffordable to most people in urban areas. Energy would cost more than the average wage earner could afford, everything but the most basic foods would be for the ultra rich, infrastructure maintenance would be too costly to keep up with.
It's like trees: you get to see the trunk and the branches and leaves, but never forget the huge root system underneath that supports the tree. Without the roots, the tree WILL die.
Yeah; I was expecting to see something that could top http://zentasrobots.com/ which has been covered on Slashdot a few times, but instead saw an ad for Edison and 3D printers. I find the MorpHex significantly more cute and creepy than this thing, even with its back-lit translucent body parts.
No, the phone is shown at exactly right angles, and they're right, the lens is photoshopped out. Meanwhile, it's 1 mm. What is that, the thickness of 2 business cards?
I think they were just holding it wrong while taking the pictures.
"Is that a camera protruding from your back or are you happy to see me?"
I find the imagery in this joke rather... disturbing.
A "pure" LA degree these days tends to be a survey degree; graduates are expected to be jacks of all trades, master of none. This is great as a secondary layer of education if you're self-motivated to pursue some more focused line of work/work experience as well, but doesn't do much by itself other than show that you're a good generalist.
However, how many people with a STEM degree have mastered their field? Usually STEM jobs are all about lifelong learning in the field. LA degrees are more of a kickstart into this same arena, providing more options but less focus.
I know people with fine arts degrees who are excellent software analysts (eye for detail, patterns, etc). They also do great in the human interface design departments. Many people who go in for STEM education have a really difficult time communicating their work to others, which not only affects documentation, but also collaboration in the workplace, and it promotes the silo effect.
You really need a mix of people from both arts and sciences for a healthy workplace, no matter what field you're in.
What about someone like me who has a liberal arts degree in CS?
In that case, CS stands for Communications Studies or Computers Studies, not Computer Science. CompSci is sometimes lumped in with Applied or Engineering sciences, but I'd question any school that would take what should be a course load focused on the mathematical theory and design of computational systems and place it in the Liberal Arts discipline.
That said, see my previous response to the GP :)
To take the opposing view:
I know someone who got hired to do tech writing for an embedded systems company who was finishing off a combined CS and English Lit. degree, and had already generated a Liberal Arts certificate based on the cross-discipline work they needed for that.
I also remember the intense difficulty most people in CS had with writing a critical paper on ANYTHING.
I think the end result is that it doesn't really matter which degree the person has: what's important is that they can display that they can work across disciplines, present themselves well, and learn technical detail well enough to perform with it under pressure in a short period of time.
After all: which would you rather have doing a programming job: someone who got a 2.0 average in a CS degree and spent evenings and weekends playing MMORPGs, or someone with an Eng Lit. degree with a 4.0 average who has been writing Android apps as a hobby and did their major paper on the effects of digital media on 21st century literature?
Actually, depending on the programming job and the wage/contract you want to pay out, I guess it could go either way.
A good dealer can integrate a variety of aftermarket add-ons, have alternative financing and insurance packages on-site, provide extra customer services such as roadside assistance and no-hassle inspections and initial tuneups. Not much of a reason, but it's what they give for their existence.
oblig www.dobugsneeddrugs.org
The actual article (not the IB times pileup) is linked in the comments here already.
It's also hazardous/lethal to overdose on arsenic, and yet eating apple cores isn't going to cause problems. For that matter, eating foxglove flowers will stop your heart, and yet digitalis is the go-to drug compound for people with heart issues.
For that matter, you can die from swallowing water.
Of course, this is all beside the point, as the idea here is that your blood is pumped outside your body through a screen of magnetic particles and then pumped back in without the pathogens (and without the particles). People undergoing such an invasive process in a controlled lab are unlikely to be swallowing buckyballs and having them tie their intestines in knots.
More to the point, when people use, "Google," as a verb, they mean to actually use Google, as opposed to using any brand of facial tissue available when saying, "Kleenex."
Besides, if Coca-Cola can retain, "Coke," as a trademark when vast portions of the country refer to basic soft carbonated soda drinks of any type as, "coke," then I don't think that those challenging Gogole's trademark have much of a chance.
Let me Xerox off a few examples of when similar Noun/Verb phrases lost their trademark in the past.
Did you know, AC can actually kill people! Think of electric chair!
Thanks for the imagery... I'm now thinking of Anonymous Cowards running around killing people (and elephants) with electric chairs....
That misses the bit where I mentioned quarterly drive rotation, precisely for this reason.
A parity drive is also a good idea of course, but it will likely result in fewer rotations due to the extra hassle.
Using my method, I've moved over the years from storing 128MB of data in a box to 2GB -- and I'm likely just about to do another round of replacements in my backup drives as my 1TB are getting a bit long in the tooth.
I think you missed my point -- I'm not debating whether pollution harms (negatively affects) our current environmental balance from the perspective of humanity -- that's pretty much the definition. The fact is that "the environment" is much too loosely defined in this debate on AGW, and just throwing around terms without carefully defining what you're talking about and then stating that debate has ended, well, you can see that the debate rages on; mostly because people aren't working off the same word definitions.
Your clarifications definitely narrow down what is being debated from your perspective, and I agree with your conclusions, but unless we want more annoying "is not!" responses (which are not debate, it's true), we need to apply scientific rigour to the terms we're using, recognizing when others are abusing words and clarifying our own use of said words, or else we haven't really progressed the overlying debate(s) at all.
[edited] I agree with your basic premise but most Creation Science opponents ignore and will not address contrary evidence, preferring instead to ridicule and cast aspersions, as you do. What is there to fear from an open discussion and equal treatment of all available evidence, unless a predetermined outcome is the goal?
There was a good comment on some /. thread last week, talking about finding the balance between proving scientific theories and repeatedly disproving the same fallacious data.
The issue here is that of confusing scientific research and politics/religion. AGW crosses the line quite often, but opponents to AGW spend most of their time across the line. Actual discussion can start once these two are separated, and they can both be presented for what they are, instead of studies being presented as proof for a political agenda, and politics prompting scientists with finite resources to "run the numbers again".
Is there a website dedicated to Gore misquotes? There should be, but I can't find it with Google.
The GW one didn't even make it on Snopes.
pollution harms the environment...you cannot contradict that fact
Sure he can. Whether he'd be right is up for debate.
"Pollution AFFECTS the environment" is something that is pretty much a fact. It could even affect it by destroying all human beings -- but the environment itself will likely self-correct (possibly by destroying all human beings).
The only problem with punch tapes is that we've ALREADY lost the readers for them, without even having a minor apocalypse. I guess if people kept backing up to punchtape though, we'd still have workable units that could plug into this decade's computing devices.
A few years ago, someone came up with a FUSE plugin called SlashdotFS -- it encoded your data into slashdot posts, with redundancy.
From the number of unreadable posts I see viewing at -1, it appears some people are still using it for backup purposes.
Because video isn't data in motion (most of the time), you can just get a safe deposit box and keep a drive there, cycling it semi-regularly to prevent against bitrot/drive failure. I just keep one backup hooked up locally, and one in storage, and rotate them quarterly. Some stuff I also have backed up to data DVD locally, but if all three hard drives fail at the same time, my DVDs probably won't fare much better.
Then again, I did my VHS -> Digital backup around 15 years ago, and burned everything to video DVD back then. I've since re-ripped from DVD and done the MPEG-2->h.264 conversion, but I still have the DVDs (including their campy menu screens).
Yeah; I didn't add that bit to my post as it didn't really add anything to the discussion and would have confused some people -> TL;DR.
But yeah; I see MS doing something similar with ANY game they buy; Xbox platform first, then Windows, then everyone else, by which point the game isn't what it was originally intended to be.
Remember when Microsoft bought Bungie?
Bungie was a developer for the Mac platform that brought us many excellent games, such as Marathon and Myth in the 90's. It was working on a game called Halo, that was supposed to leverage all the Mac features to create a hugely amazing game.
In 2000, Microsoft bought Bungie, and the delivery date for Halo slipped. Turned out that the reason for the slip was that all dev work on the Mac version halted, and MS put all Bungie's efforts into porting it to XBOX. It then came out as an XBOX exclusive title (the launch title).
Eventually, Bungie left MS in 2007, but had to leave the Halo franchise behind.
This is pretty much what I expect to happen 14 years later with Minecraft, with the exception that Minecraft already exists (like Myth II did at the time of the Bungie buyout) and so isn't likely to be the killer app at the center of the deal.
I think I would have written in to complain about the entire show; the "wardrobe malfunction" wouldn't really have played into the complaint at all. But then, I didn't watch the superbowl that year, and so didn't have to put up with the sensationalist half time show.