There's an offline mode that's available in Europe where the card verifies the PIN entered on the terminal. This mode has been shown to be vulnerable to compromised hardware as response for a valid PIN is predictable. The cards in Australia are incapable of verifying the PIN at all - you can set or change your PIN for many cards using an online service without the card present.

US is really that backwards? And I thought the "offline mode" in Europe where the card verifies the PIN was bad enough.

We have NFC credit cards in Australia now. They don't seem to have caused a big uptick in fraud. Also, the worst you could do from a distance (assuming you could communicate with the card for long enough) would be to process a payment of up to $100 - you can't actually copy the card.

Coin is going to be dead in the water as soon as US requires chip cards. The whole point of chip cards is that the key never leaves the chip and it can't be copied. They talk about supporting it in the future but can't elaborate on a plan, as they don't have one. They also have blatant misinformation about "chip and sign" on their site. "Chip and sign" uses the ICC chip to verify card presence, but you sign the receipt rather than entering a PIN. The Coin people claim you still use the magnetic strip, but that just plain isn't true.

Samsung's latest phones do NFC payment in Australia. There's no reason it couldn't work, besides vendor apathy.

The early prototype fast neutron reactors in the UK had issues with handling of the coolants, and are proving very expensive to decommission. Irradiated light metals coating the insides of pipes are difficult to deal with apparently. It's probably nothing that couldn't be solved with additional R&D, but how long before it actually pays off? The UK gave up on it before getting to a viable level.

A standard US outlet is only rated at 13A and the voltage can be up to 120V, so your kettle will be rated at about 1500W at 120V, and therefore will have a 9.6 Ohm element. If you happen to have 110V where you are, it will be running at 1260W which will take even longer to boil.

It must take longer to boil water in the US then. In Aus a standard electric kettle has a 2.4kW resistive heating element. I bet little things like that would be most irritating for someone making the transition to a 100-125V country.

I think you mean "fucking magnets" - how do they work?

I think s/he is trying to make a point that African crises are largely confined to Africa. They haven't started any world wars, operated oppressive colonies in remote places, etc.

I had persistent bluescreens that I tracked down to an overheating SAS controller. It was not a pleasant experience. It's been pretty stable since then, though.

No it isn't, at least not on OSX. On OSX by default it uses no proxies at all, and you have to dig into that preference sheet to enable it at all. Then it doesn't always switch properly when changing networks.

You're very much a minority case. Most people want system-wide proxy settings. It annoys me that Firefox needs its own proxy settings. I want to set/change proxy settings once and have all my applications switch over. I don't want to have to mess with per-application settings.

Get your FLOSS personalities right: Eric S Raymond is the gun nut.

Competition's never a bad thing. I'll take three viable web browsers over two. No-one wants to go back to the days of sites targeting specific browsers. "Best experienced with Netscape" - screw that.