They are harder to replicate, but there's more. The card holds a secret key, which it will never divulge, and has the capability of producing a cryptographic signature using that key. As such, a transaction gets signed by the card on your behalf, with enough information included in the signed field that duplicates become obvious, preventing replays, and that alterations become computationally untenable. As such, capturing the information, regardless of whether it is captured in transit or in situ, doesn't give you the ability to commit fraud with the stolen data.

Of course, as long as the magstripes continue to exist and be honoured, you can always go around the system. This will be the case for a few years at least while the transition is made. If data from a chip terminal is successfully intercepted, it will sometimes possible to recover enough to regenerate track 2 from a magnetic card (the only track that is required, and the one that is read by card reader dongles like Square) plus the PIN. That's enough to create and use a functioning magstripe ATM card.

Phone to phone is theoretically feasible if a mechanism exists to locate the other phone on the Internet, and a mechanism exists to reach it. If one or both phones is behind a NAT gateway (which the probably will both be), then you kind of need the carrier as a rendezvous point.

IPV6 may change the formula a little here, but I am not sure.

...and what if they use certificates?

Hell, just look at "Hello world" in Java to see part of the problem. You have to create a class, then create a method main() within that class, then use a very lengthy absolute path to the method to send out put to the screen (System.out.println()). On top of that, both your method and class definitions require a slew of keywords to prefix them, because the defaults are not useful in this context.

On accessors, I think a lot of that problem is groupthink. "We do it that way because that's the way we do it" is the mindset. Unfortunately, this has been reinforced by various frameworks, toolkits, standards and other accessories.

There are two approaches I have seen in Python, Perl and LISP that are kind of cool (though please don't misconstrue this to be saying that these languages don't have other problems worthy of critique).

One is to overload the accessors, naming the accessor the same as the variable it accesses, and if you call it with an argument, it sets it and returns same; calling it without an argument returns the current value. As an example, if you have a variable 'foo', then instance_variable.foo() would return whatever is currently the value of foo, and instance_variable.foo('bar') would set the value of foo in that instance to 'bar' and also return 'bar' (unless it ends up being massaged by the accessor).

The other is to use a general accessor, often named param() or property() or something the like. It takes one or two arguments; if one, it is the name of the variable to be accessed; if two, the second argument is a value to set. Otherwise, it works the same as in the first approach.

Common LISP (using CLOS) very strongly encourages the first approach, because all you have to do to create a very basic accessor (i.e. one that does not massage or validate) is say that it exists, and it does. You only need to write code for it if you need to do something specific in terms of validation or formatting.

In the end, I am not surprised that Java code is mostly fluff. This stems from a failure of the language to have sane defaults. The good news is that the IDE can write a lot of that for you, but if the IDE can write it, the question remains: why does it need to be written at all?

I know two families that are homeschooling.

In both of these cases, I find that the kids (five, total, between the two families) are extremely intelligent and show it, because there is no "anti-nerd" peer pressure for them to overcome. They speak clearly in full, complex, articulate sentences, and are not afraid to share their ideas.

On the topic of awkwardness, I don't see it. These kids have no problems speaking with adults on an adult level. Social groups exist for kids outside of school, and you should absolutely encourage your kids to get out of the house and do things.

Now, this is very important: I believe, in the cases of these two families, that a critical part of making this work is that the kids have all been encouraged to speak their minds. Sometimes they will pose a challenge to your existing ideas. When that happens, the correct response is to be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. In one of these families, the kids even got the family to change their religion, because the one they were following had too many inconsistencies. That's a big deal.

If you are inclined to take such challenges as "backtalk" then I don't think this will work for you. Your objective should be to raise children that can think for themselves; if that's not what you want, send them to school where they can learn not to think for far less effort than you could teach them.

I have done this. It works.

For bonus points, I was also able to compute my average "Calories I used" value over the period of months from my change in body weight and total intake (I logged everything I ate during this period). Amusingly, the number I got was 2395 kCal, which so close to the USDA estimate of 2400 for adult men as makes no real difference. I had expected it to come in much lower because I am not especially active.

For bonus points, if you, lke me, and like siddesu, choose to use the metric system for this, the computation is easy: Want to lose 1kg/week? Check it: 7 days in a week, and 7700 is nicely divisible by 7. Reduce your intake to 1100 kCal below your burn rate. That, by the way, is about the maximum safe weight loss.

One of the local weathermen (in the Albany, NY area) was laughing last night over the fact that the four different predictive models they use had thrown four radically different outcomes, ranging from 0.5" to 21" for our area. It isn't even that there was an outlier amongst the models -- the outcomes were fairly evenly distributed. Looking at it right now, it looks like their in-house model, which predicted 0.5-3", was the correct one for this storm.

Now, that said, it generally looked like this was going to be south and east of us, and that NYC was going to get clobbered. It seems to me as though it just went a bit further east than originally anticipated.

This was kind of what I was thinking. Interesting idea, but Comcast's price is too high when you consider the existing competition.

It means the same thing as a high-definition TV antenna -- nothing.

I don't see this as any different than any other MVNO deal. All four major carriers already have a number of deals with fifth-party carriers (e.g. TracFone, Cricket, StraightTalk, Republic Wireless, etc). and if Google wants to get into the MVNO business, then it makes perfect sense to sell to them. Why? Because if they don't buy from you, then they'll just buy from someone else.

MVNO deals produce less revenue per minute or megabyte than retail sales, it is true, but they also take a slice of the risk of dealing with retail customers off of the network owner and put it onto the MVNO. Think of it as bundling in reverse.

More importantly, if this is a violation of TOS, does that not mean that demander, if using said credentials to log in, is violating the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act, and committing a crime?

You fool! Don't you realize that the CFAA only applies to us mere mortals?

Taken from the manufacturer's website (emphasis added):

Wall Penetration

RANGE- R will penetrate most common building wall, ceiling or floor types including poured concrete, concrete block, brick, wood, stucco glass, adobe, dirt, etc. However, It will not penetrate metal. RANGE-R will generally penetrate up to one foot of wall thickness without adverse effects. While small metal objects embedded in walls (i.e. rebar, conduits, etc.) usually do not inhibit operation, a large enough metal object can impair operation. When this happens, the wisest course of action is to make more than one scan from different locations (move a few feet) for confirmation. If a porous wall is saturated with water, performance can also be degraded due to excessive absorption of the radar energy.

It seems a layer of sheet metal just behind the drywall would be a Good Thing. It may resolve some other problems as well.

Bluetooth is also a possibility but I think it would be slower than USB.

I can confirm tha tyou are correct on both points: It works for this purpose, and it is slower than USB. It might solve the tablet problem, though. I say might because i haven't tried it, but I have tried laptop to phone via BT.

Lucky you.

About a year ago, I started getting fax calls to my phone at all hours of the day and night. Worse, they were from a large number of different sources. As if that weren't bad enough, most of these sources were international, leading to garbled CID, if any CID at all, making it impossible to put a block on them (the form to block a number wouldn't accept any numbers not of the US-standard NPA-NXX-XXXX format). It was fucking ridiculous.