I'm fine with the terminal showing me the amount; it's just the extra step of pressing "Yes" or "No" that seems superfluous to me. How about just going straight to the signature (or PIN) stage, and giving me an "Accept" or "Cancel" button, and show the amount on that screen as well?

When I travelled to New Zealand, where chip & PIN is common, I was amazed that absolutely every store asked to see the signature on my card. In the US, nobody cares, apart from perhaps one or two very rare merchants that have probably been burned by not checking the signature.

That said, I've never had my card stolen (though I've had it replaced after a possible threat of being skimmed), so as long as my bank is willing to still take the liability if it's stolen, I don't care if the number is written across my forehead. I'm all for ease of use, and signature or PIN verification is an extra step that I don't terribly mind skipping...

Speaking of extra steps, what's the point of the terminals that ask the user to verify the amount? Most of them are tied to the register (so there's no manually keying in the amount), so they're never wrong. (And any situation where something is wrong - an item is scanned twice, or the register's price differs from the label - is usually not obvious from the total amount shown.) I'd be happier if they just skipped the "is this the right amount?" screen and went to "sign here to pay " - the number would still be there for confirmation, and I'd be out of there 2 seconds faster.

Pssssh, plebe. I'm a multi-hundred-trillionaire.

Skepticism and suspicion are fine. However, this is rarely what happens. Nobody (on either side, typically) really wants to hear all the facts - they make a snap judgement on whether it serves their personal goals, whether that be to make their reelection easier, or to impose their personal religious/economic/etc. views on other people, or whether it was proposed by "their side" or if it should be subjected to Not-Invented-Here syndrome.

This article is a pretty poor example of skepticism or suspicion; the author clearly has a bias, and misstates many facts to serve that bias, whether knowingly or inadvertently. Some examples:

"Trading in" is misleading here. There are many agencies that will provide a rebate or discount for replacing an old stove with a newer, more efficient model. What is disallowed is selling your old stove to somebody else. Instead, you need to (for example) sell it as scrap metal, not usable as a stove.

I'm not intimately familiar with the laws of the Puget Sound area, but looking online quickly shows that their rules are similar to the ones in effect in my area. Using old stoves is not explicitly banned except on certain days when air quality is forecast to be particularly poor. And even then, it is never banned for a house whose only source of adequate heat is such a stove - this is a major arguing point of the article, which states that laws like this risk freezing households who rely on wood stoves for heat.

This is just a red herring. Most smokers I see leave their window at least cracked, and in any case, I know very few people who would want to live daily in an area where the air is like the inside of a smoky car. Additionally, the volume of air used by a stove is much larger than the volume of air inside a car; the stove is putting out much more soot, it's just sending lots of air with it.

As I said before, the EPA rules don't say anything about the use of existing stoves - just that any stove manufactured or sold should meet the new requirements.

It's pretty clear to me that the linked article was poorly researched, and written by somebody with an axe to grind.

Please save your lovely Ars rant for a submission that is actually FROM ARS. I mean really, this is Slashdot - I don't expect you to RTFA, but can you at least mouse over the link?

Random comparison: NVIDIA's A New Dawn demo that was released with the GTX 690 a yearish ago has 40,000 strands of hair, and the whole scene has 4 million triangles. So maybe in another 10 years, GPUs will be able to make real-time rendering look like what we saw in Avatar.

There are still a LOT of quality enhancements to be made to video games. You can play Pac-Man at 60fps on a card from 5 years ago (or 10, or 15)... That doesn't mean that people stopped buying graphics cards. As the technology advances, game developers find ways to take advantage of it, making environments more detailed and realistic. When a low-end GPU can render any photorealistic scene (meaning one that is completely indistinguishable from a photo) at 60 fps, I will entertain the thought that maybe we've hit the peak. But by that time, somebody will have come up with more ways to use the technology (looking backwards, this might include such non-pixel-pushing tasks as adding physics, or particle simulations for water, fire, smoke, etc.).

Only the top-of-the-line model had liquid cooling, and only a small percentage failed. I bought mine in 2005 and used it as my primary machine for 5.5 years with no issues. I then sent it to a relative, who I believe is still using it with no issues.

Any mechanical system will fail some of the time. This particular one was a catastrophic, sucky failure, to be certain. And yes, it probably happened more often than it should have; but it was far from a certain demise as you might seem to imply.

I have an even better unexpected "crash" story - I was carrying my bike to the stairwell, the door to which was held open for me by somebody else. In my gratitude, I rushed through the door; and in clumsiness tripped over my own feet at the top of a flight of stairs. The bike and I bounced down the stairs, and I landed at the bottom, where my head smacked against a windowsill. Luckily, I had my helmet on, so I immediately started laughing. I doubt I would've been seriously injured without a helmet, but it probably would've drawn blood, and laughter would not have been my response...

I've also slipped a few times on gravel and snow, and at least banged my head on the road a little bit. Never had so much as a scratch on my head. I think helmets are a very good idea.

...because nothing says "low cost" like "Hey, let's take the most expensive part of an EV, and embed it in a couple hundred square feet of specialized carbon fiber!"

Parent and GP are both right, kind of. The original iPod had a Firewire port right on it. The third-generation iPod switched to the 30-pin dock connector. This connector is the same connector that was used all the way through last year, when Apple switched to the Lightning connector instead.

However, within this connector, different devices support different features. The connector contains pins for both Firewire and USB, each with their own power (Firewire is 12V unregulated, USB is 5V regulated). Another feature that varies by device include video output.

Any accessories that didn't take the easy way out and support charging via both USB and Firewire will work on any device. The problem many people encountered, however, is that many accessory makers DID take the easy way out, especially for car accessories. A 12V unregulated power supply is really easy to get in a car - everything runs off of 12V. So an old 30-pin charger can basically just connect the cigarette lighter directly to the phone, with a fuse inline for safety.

Eventually, Apple dropped Firewire support in new devices. Anything that supported both Firewire and USB kept working - however, many accessories didn't. After all, why add in a 5V regulator and other components if they're not strictly needed?

1. "Lab-grown circuits that are thousands of times thinner than a human hair" is exactly what one could use to describe current silicon circuits. In fact, this study made transistors that are a micron across (which is, at best, hundreds of times thinner than a human hair), compared to current state-of-the-art silicon which is in the 22-28 nm range.
2. "A fraction of the energy required" does not describe the current study, nor was it their intent, from what I understand about the researchers' claims.

That's not to say that the research isn't very valuable; it looks like the level of integration they've managed is significantly better than what anybody else has achieved. But at the same time, there are lots of other ways that you could build a circuit that uses more area, costs more, takes longer to build, and is less power-efficient - this is just one more. All they've demonstrated is that you can hook together more than a handful of transistors successfully - but nowhere near the billions that they'd need for a commercial product.

The real breakthroughs have yet to be made; making it cheaper, smaller, faster, more efficient, and easily manufacturable - all at the same time. Not until all those problems are solved will it even have a chance of replacing real silicon. Until then, this is yet another case of a university PR rep boasting about their institution's research with grand claims about what the future holds, while not really reflecting the true nature of the research at hand.

(Admittedly, it is more boring when you adhere to reality.)

If what I'm doing is playing an MP3, what good does "orders of magnitude faster" do me? Do I hear my music played back an order of magnitude faster? (Assuming I were to buy that estimate, which I don't: Faster, maybe - but I'm guessing 1 order of magnitude so - these are 11.5W parts running at about half the clock speed and low voltage so they only consume 4.5W. I wouldn't place a bet on who would win between a mobile ARM SoC at ~1.9 GHz/~3W and one of these at ~800 MHz/~4.5W. It might very well be the ARM with a clock discrepancy that high, even if you include Intel's ability to write compilers better than most other companies.)

Ditto watching a movie^H^H^H^H^H cat video. Or editing a Word document.

There are usage scenarios where the speed will make a difference, sure - load time while web browsing, for example. But I spend 3 seconds loading a web page, and then 30 seconds reading it. Taking the 3 seconds and making it 1 second is a pretty crappy tradeoff if my battery dies 10x sooner.

If anything pushes Windows RT into oblivion, it'll be Microsoft. (This assumes you believe that they haven't already done so.) Intel releasing a marginally lower-power bin of the same silicon they're already selling isn't it.

Seriously. 4.5 watts is easily an order of magnitude higher than what you'd get from a power-efficient ARM SoC in the same scenario. Heck, 4.5W is higher than the PEAK power draw of many ARM chips. For scenarios like playing an MP3, mobile chips can measure more like 30 mW - over 2 orders of magnitude lower.

Maybe these people aren't eating lunch in the city any more, but the people I know who have moved there want to live there exactly because they want to spend their time and money there. They aren't moving there because it's more convenient, or less expensive, or has better housing - they move there because there's better food, better nightlife, better social atmosphere.

Of course, this ends up benefitting the high-class, trendy local establishments, possibly at the expense of the ones that are not.

I'm sure they're pricing many people out of the housing market - but that's happening everywhere within about an hour of any of the tech companies, save for a few spots that have a reputation of being unsafe or in an undesirable location (adjacent to train tracks or highways, perhaps). It's not unique to San Francisco. Although the presence of a bus stop may amplify the effects of techies in a small area, the techies moved to the city before the bus service started. (I work for a company where it is a perennial request to run a shuttle from the city for the employees that already live there.) Additionally, there are bus stops in many other areas - a friend of mine often rides one from south San Jose, for example. And it's not just distant destinations, either; I have seen an Apple bus dropping off about a dozen employees a mere 3 miles from the mothership, in a completely boring (but still expensive) neighborhood.