I didn't see anything in the stories saying the pins were all exactly four digits. The examples of bad pins given in one story were four digits long, but most debit systems in North America accept larger pins. For the past 25 years, I've banked primarily with RBC (the largest bank in Canada), and I've always had a 6 digit pin. I have travelled a fair bit in that time, and the only place I had problems was at the ATMs for smaller banks in New Zealand, which had GUIs limiting pin input to 4 digits.

That summary is misleading. It's based on an NSA response to a FOI request, worded as follows:

(emphasis mine)

That could be network folders (ie: directories) and Word documents, they never said anything was on "paper". The way I read that quote was that they've got heaps of contracts, stored in lots of directories, and even if they did a search they'd have to read each document returned to see if it was a contract pertaining to the FOI request. They're trying to say that's too burdensome, which in theory gives them a way of not supplying the information. In practice, a judge might decide they should be able to do the search in a reasonable amount of time, and force them to comply.

This update might be the death knell for the Java4K contest. That would be a real shame - lots of great developers have submitted games over the years, such as Markus Persson of Minecraft fame. But after the recent changes and now this red text warning, I'd bet most casual users will turn off Java in their browser (and who can blame them?) A contest with only developers can still be fun, but not as fun as having several hundred or thousand people play your game.

I thought it was because your hand creates a big buffer of air in front of it, like a bow wave. The fly is so small, it's easily buffeted ahead and aside, so any manoeuvring gets it out of the line of your hand. Even easier when your hand approaches a hard surface - then the air squishes out to the sides, and the fly goes out with it. This is probably easier to visualize in a body of water - float a cork or a small piece of plastic in your sink, put your hand in the water, then try to squish the item up against the side of the sink. It won't work most of the time, as the bow wave will push the item off to one side, and it only gets worse the faster your move your hand.

I expect that's why fly swatters are just a mesh - so the air can flow through without creating an air buffer.

Looks like a rehash of the story we saw here a couple of years ago. I've only read the first few paragraphs of this new article, but I haven't found anything different from the previous one. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, I'm just saying it looks like the author just took the information from previous stories and rewrote it in his own words, without adding anything new.

A working link: http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2013/07/scienceshot-new-shrew-has-spine-steel.

This question was already on slashdot, back in March. It was titled "What's the Best RSS Reader Not Named Google Reader?" I mean really, does Slashdot's search suck so bad that the editor's couldn't find that previous question? If so, then Let Me Google That For You. First three results:

1. This page
2. Google Reader Being Retired
3. What's the Best RSS Reader Not Named Google Reader?

It may not be humble, but the front page clearly lists nine indie game bundles (5 games in each), under a heading "Indie Bundles - 100% of sales to developers".

Apparently Telus' deal to buy Mobilicity got blocked by the government yesterday. When Mobilicity won their spectrum block in 2009, it was on the condition that it not be sold to any of the existing wireless providers for at least five years. As you said, the intention was to bring in some competition for the big three. Mobilicity had been warned the sale would be blocked on that reason alone, but they went ahead and got approval from everyone else first (shareholders, regulatory approval, etc.) I guess they were hoping that the government would just rubber-stamp the sale if all other parties had approved it.

I expect Rogers will get the same response.

Agreed on both points. I think the free Oracle offering is designed to encourage adoption and ease upgrade. So you start with the free Express edition, and build up a nice little business, but then performance or space becomes an issue and so the easiest course is to upgrade to Standard Edition for $$. And the developers working for you are all now familiar with Oracle and PL/SQL, so big business and government that run Enterprise edition for $$$$$ have plenty of developers to choose from.

I'm not sure what datatypes you're referring to. Enum and Set are kind of neat, but other than that both MySQL and Oracle seem to stick to the datatypes defined in the SQL standards.

Funny you should mention Java - were you aware that Oracle databases provide Java integration? It's kind of like MS SQL Server's dotNet integration. So you can do stuff like add your own Java libraries, or store Java objects directly in the database. I've never used it, but I suppose that would qualify as a "rich data type", right?

I am a DBA, and FYI there are multiple editions of Oracle. I'm not sure what use cases you were thinking of, but if you're looking for a free edition there's always Oracle Express Edition. Free to download, use and distribute, and allows databases up to 11GB. I've worked at companies that run bigger MySQL installations, but I would venture that they are less than 1% of the MySQL user base. The majority of MySQL installations are small ones to back websites, such as Wordpress installations. You could easily replace them with Oracle Express. For other use cases, there's Oracle's NoSQL database, or Oracle's In Memory database (called TimesTen for some obscure reason), and they used to market Oracle Database Lite for mobile apps.

So in summary, Oracle has a bunch of products that would compete with MySQL, and we can't understand why they don't just give MySQL away to Apache or some other foundation. Maybe they have support contracts that actually bring in some money.