It is called a retcon. God does it all the time. Stan Lee at Marvel did it all the time.

I thought that architecture from Tera had been cancelled long enough. Never heard about much sales from it. It was interesting but if you read the description of what it does and think about how a modern GPU works you will see you are probably much better off buying COTS GPUs.

For years, these MCX folks allowed NFC payments, meaning potentially Google Wallet payments. Apple Pay comes out with an EMV based solution, and instantly block all NFC, taking Apple Pay and Wallet down together. So, Google was never seen as a threat, or at least never passing the threshold of needing-to-ban, even after years of use, but Apple is seen as a potential threat from literally Day One.

I wonder why Apple is seen as a threat more? Their network of friends? Number of potential users can't be it - many more Android phones than iPhone 6s. Number of cards already in iTunes? Ease of use (i never even tried Google Wallet)? Did Google leak some of the info back to the retailers where Apple is balking at that info leak?

Because Google Wallet and Apple Pay work in opposite ways.

For a retailer to support Google Wallet, they need to work with Google and their merchant processor to support Google Wallet. Because what really happens is the transaction details are forwarded to Google who then charges your payment method (credit card, debit, Paypal, bank account, etc). This is why Google knows everything about your transaction whenever you use Google Wallet. (Basically Google gets to know everything about what you're buying).

Apple Pay is nothing more than EMV so it's just an electronic credit card. Once you register your card through Apple Pay, Apple is no longer in the transaction. As long as the retailer takes credit cards, and has an NFC reader, Apple Pay will work. Most of the retailers listed by Tim Cook? They did diddly squat to support it. They just had working readers and probably someone came over and tried it and was successful.

Because to support Apple Pay means you need an EMV compatible terminal (swipe, chip+pin, NFC) and processor, and because of October 2015 legislation, people are supporting it by default since practically all new terminals have it. So all a retailer needs to do to get Apple Pay support is make sure their hardware (terminals) is upgraded (which they're doing anyways over the next year) and their processor supports EMV (which if they're doing chip+pin, they're going to have support for).

However, for Apple Pay to work, Apple needs to work with banks to ensure when a user scans a credit card,, they can get a token assigned in its place (the token is private between the user and the bank, and is basically just an index so the bank can determine who to bill).

So Google Wallet requires no effort by banks, etc., and effort by retailers to support. Apple Pay only requires hardware updates they're doing anyways which is minor, but effort by the banks to support EMV.

That's why Google Wallet's penetration has been low - there are probably more retailers that support Bitcoin than Google Wallet just because. (Though if your processor is adding support for Bitcoin, they probably have Google Wallet support as well).

For Apple Pay, because for retailers it "comes for free", which means its market penetration is far higher than what Tim Cook had in his presentation. Because retailers who already have NFC terminals practically already support EMV and that makes them Apple Pay compatible with zero effort.

So retailers may be inadvertently supporting Apple Pay when they don't want to because Apple Pay just shows up as a credit card.

I worked in Italy for a few years before emigrating to the US, so I can give an actual experience-based answer (i.e. anecdote rather than speculation) about what it's like in practice. I went from a $12k/year job in Italy to a $120k/job year in America. The food in Italy was far better, it was easier to travel within the country and outside it, the work-life balance was uniformly better, people seemed generally happier, they dressed better, and all of this was affordable. The houses and apartments were smaller, fewer people could afford to maintain cars, and there wasn't the same "opportunity" as in America e.g. to just pack up and go backpacking or take up windsurfing. On balance it's a tie. However for people earning less in America it will be a much worse deal here.

You talked about business and hiring. My experience will only be relevant if you're more concerned about quality of life of the population, rather than GDP or the wealth of the business owners.

What if the first thing that shows up in a google search about you is a court filing about someone else that shares the same name as you? Any HR department that takes a google search at face value isn't doing its job.

I think the "right to be forgotten" idea has good intentions but the problem is similar to the RIAA's resistance to the internet. A better reaction would be to give an alternative to people treating search engines and random internet sites as authoritative sources of information and instead give people something that they can trust that includes all relevant information. It could be similar to a credit score or a government run webpage that includes every individual's public information.

Sure, that's great, if you have a common enough name that millions probably share it. But if you have an uncommon name, or a unique spelling such that Google only turns up a few people, it's rapidly very easy to see who's who.

The right to be forgotten does not remove source articles. Just because you submit a request, doesn't mean the newspaper is forced to remove the article from its archives. No, the right to be forgotten applies to links. Perhaps if you Google your name, it brings up a DUI from 20 years ago you did (you were a young, reckless college student). All it means is that if people do the search of your name only, that no longer shows up. If they search by DUIs, then yes, your name shows up because it's true. But it shouldn't be the first damn thing that shows up if you've lead an exemplary life from then on.

In fact, rich people don't need this right because they hire "brand managers" that do this very thing. These companies use SEO and other techniques to bury bad news later on in the search because they know only about 30% of people make it to the second page of results, maybe 10% to the third, and 1% to the fourth. If you can get some bad thing put on page 10, it's "forgotten".

Do you not have any laws regarding the use of medical data in the US? In most of Europe businesses that handle medical data are controlled very strictly, and not allowed to share it with "affiliates" unless there is a medical need and you give your consent.

In theory yes. However, this is Google we're talking about, and this sensor isn't being developed from the goodness of Google's heart. No, Google makes money gathering information and knowing as much as possible about you. (It's interesting people think Facebook is worse, even though most of the data on Facebook was provided voluntarily by users of it. Google, OTOH, collects data involuntarily by your actions and by how big Google is ("too big to fail" anyone?)).

At the very least, Google will datamine your health information and suggest its affiliates target ads towards you, perhaps for ways to ensure your insurance premiums don't go up (and I'm sure Google would love to provide insurance companies with information on who saw that kind of service...). Or maybe show you ads for fitness equipment or something.

Add in a hack of the CurrentC system for its health data (and you can bet insurance companies would buy that data off hackers "off the books") and by the time the law comes around, it's too late.

I like those cargo pants that you linked to. What I can't tell on yours for certain, but one picture seems to say yes, is if it has a data pocket or not. The pockets on mine actually have another pocket under them that's vertical "behind the flap" and in the middle. I put my phone in one and often my Bluetooth mouse in the other where the big pockets are still available for other use. I gave up on belt holsters for my phone years ago and just bought pants that have their own, when I got laid off from NASA I switched to these from carpenters (carpenters appear to be the defacto standard at both Johnson and Kennedy).

I lost most of my really old stuff when hurricane Ike hit, I'm looking to get a new buckling springs keyboard soon with the requirement that it be multi-media, controlling volume at the system level seems to have won out over controlling at the speakers as time moved on and finding a good multi-media keyboard is a bit of a challenge. Daskeyboard appears to be my answer, even though I would prefer one of the model M clones from pckeyboard.com otherwise.

I'm from the American Southwest (even though I live in the Gulf region now). I'm the black-sheep geek from a family that has rural roots, both settler and Indian on my dads side, and poor European immigrant on my moms. Cast iron isn't even a question where I'm from, using something else makes as much sense as using a crescent wrench instead of the proper sized wrenches or not painting a steel fence. Cast iron is just what you cook with, be it the ever useful and popular skillet, the dutch oven, or my moms favorite the small griddle. Works equally well on a camp fire or stove. You find that lot in rural country people, these fancy ceramics and (now proven dangerous) Teflon stuff is just yuppy toys to us. I guess you can take me out of the sticks, but some of the sticks are still here.

I question how much it's still "oil". Oil, outside of reservoirs, evolves. The volatiles slowly separate out; their ultimate fate is evaporation and photodegradation. The shortest chains are lost rapidly, but the longer they get, the longer they take to disappear. As volatiles are lost, the oil thickens. It eventually becomes tar, and then basically asphalt.

The current Cray probably only keeps the logo of the original Cray. There was an additional purchase besides Tera that is not listed there.

It should be possible for Apple to actually make money from these donations.

In 2013, IHS estimateed Apple's costs to produce an iPad were between $274 and $361. Current retail price on an iPad Air w/ cellular is $829. Add in high-margin accessories and software, and it is quite possible that Apple could write-off a donation of around $1000 per device against $350 in cost. This $650 reduction in taxable income could save Apple about $227.50 in taxes... if they actually paid a typical 35% corporate tax rate.

While it's nothing to sneer at, realize that Microsoft, Adobe and O'Reilly are offering stuff that costs them far less. Apple's only making tax credits off their margin of 50%-ish. Software has margins of 90%+ because the incremental cost is practically zero (a CD that costs 5 cents in bulk and some paper materials).

And O'Reilly just has to basically front the cost of a basically free online service to them. Heck, they probably can fudge the author royalty numbers a tiny bit and it'll cost them barely anything.

For what an iPad costs, Adobe/Microsoft/O'Reilly don't have direct costs of nearly half that to actually build the thing.

Of that $100M in products Apple donated, it has a "real value" of over $50M. I'm sure of the $650M split between Microsoft/Adobe/O'Reilly, it barely equals that.

As for arguing about what they really need, well, they may not have direct access to a good teacher, but they certainly can use that stuff to interact with good teachers through video conferencing and other things.

It can be hard to get a teacher to come to the underprivileged areas (they're just like you and me and know where their job prospects are, too). But it doesn't mean they can't make themselves available using technology.

You know that's kind of old school. There is this new technology called "digital communications" which means that they can read the instruments from miles away, removing the need for the bunker since the mid 1960's or so. There were no bunkers for the Saturn V (I believe the first Saturn I flights still had them) or the Shuttle - everything was monitored from ~ 3 miles away. At the Cape the Range Safety Officer looks at computer screens at the Range Operations Control Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (probably 10 or 15 miles from the NASA launch sites on Merritt Island), and I am pretty sure similar practices are followed at Wallops.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I heard on twitter that this was not the crowdfunding satellite, but an early test, so your investment may be OK.

The loss includes the first satellite for Planetary Resources, the Arkyd, an orbiting telescope intended to hunt for asteroids.