I've never seen a journal require that I cite my funding sources, but most grants require that you put some boilerplate that they provide in the acknowledgements containing both the funding body and the grant number. And it's usually a good thing to do, because if you want to ask the funding body for more money in the future then being able to point at a number of papers that were funded by them in the past is helpful in showing that you spend the money well.

Not sure if this is true on the other side of the pond (though I'd be surprised if it isn't in the rough ballpark), It typically costs about double someone's salary to employ them in a university (office space / equipment, part salaries of admin staff, technicians, tax obligations and so on). That means that, assuming that the $120K/year is paid to him as research grants and not a gift, it allows him to pay a salary of about $60K/year. On our pay scales, that's near the top end of what we pay postdocs and the low end of what we pay lecturers (associate professors, I think, in US terminology). Any equipment that you might need for a particular project, plus travel expenses, are extra.

It's a nice amount to have, but it's not enough to fund a faculty member full time. If it's guaranteed funding over 10 years, then it's definitely worth chasing. If it's money that just turns up as a gift, that's great. If it's something that requires the normal grant application process, then it's probably less attractive than normal funding bodies.

Maybe you don't read the Acknowledgements section? Most funding agencies have some boilerplate that goes in there. For industrial funding, there's usually no requirement, but we typically put something along the lines of 'We gratefully acknowledge Google, Inc. for its sponsorship.' This usually helps a bit the next time that you ask them for money, because you can say 'look at the cool stuff that you funded last time!' and easily point out the relevant papers. If a company wants to sponsor work but not take the credit for doing so then we'd be a bit concerned about why.

The US is about the only market where magstripe is still relevant. Everywhere else ditched them years ago.

Because antitrust regulators generally don't care about companies with around 20% market share? The entire point of antitrust regulation is to ensure that there is a functioning market. If you have a small enough market share that you can't impose your will on the market without suffering a loss of sales, then there is no need for regulators to get involved. If you have the 80% market share that Android enjoys, then there's a lot more potential for evil.

It's not so much that people want the Google apps, it's that they want third-party apps. Have you ever looked in the Amazon App Store? It's a wasteland compared to Google Play. Google has successfully convinced people that selling an Android app means listing it in Google Play. This means that successful phones have to have Google Play installed, but if you want to preinstall Google Play then you have to also preinstall a big bundle of other Google stuff.

That was part of the argument, but the bigger part was that IE was free (subsidised by the OS cost) and bundled with the OS, which made it almost impossible to compete with. Netscape was the incumbent with the dominant market share in the browser market, but they charged $30 (I think), or free for noncommercial use. IE was free, which got them most commercial customers (they were paying for it with Windows and had no option to not pay for it if they didn't want it). It was preinstalled, which got them the non-technical users (who wouldn't think to install a different browser).

Really? Where is the fierce competition for Google Play? I have three app stores installed on my phone and tablet:

• F-Droid. Open source stuff only - my first port of call for apps, but I'm not exactly a normal user in that respect.
• Google Play. Basically everything is here.
• Amazon App Store. Occasionally there are good free things here. Range is very limited, few commercial apps are listed.

If you ask 10 people on the street what options there are for buying Android apps, how many of them would you expect to have heard of anything except Google Play?

If iPhone market share rose to the point where they have a dominant market position that can be used to gain advantage in other markets, then the iPhone should indeed become the subject of antitrust investigation. Until then, no.

Here's a nice list of EMV vulnerabilities. The latest one 'wedge' involves a MITM between the card and the bank. Since publishing with a prototype device, the authors have found people manufacturing much smaller ones that can just have a chip from a stolen card popped in them to do fraudulent transactions.

Well, some of Europe. The patent was owned by a French company, so most of Europe waited for it to expire around 10 years ago. Want a good example of the patent system causing economic damage? There's one.

You're missing the latest EMV attack (published around November last year), which relies on the fact that the EMV protocol doesn't authenticate the bank, only the card, making it possible to MITM.

Well, it's validated by someone. Unfortunately, it turns out that the card reader doesn't contain anything to validate that the remote party is actually the bank, making it vulnerable to all sorts of MITM attacks. Especially fun as a lot of them use poorly-secured WiFi for their last hop...

This has been repeated a number of times in the thread and I really have no idea why. I find it odd that the USA deploys a technology that was shown to be insecure five years ago and has since been shown to be broken in a lot more ways.

You know, it helps if you read the entire sentence before replying.