You know, I liked the Amiga. But it was a machine of such contradictions. It had preemptive multitasking, but no isolated application heaps. So if an app didn't clean up properly, memory leaked not just until you closed the app, but until the machine restarted. And if an app crashed, all its allocated memory leaked until you restarted. Even the Mac had isolated application heaps from day one. As cool as the graphics system was, it just about impossible to deliver a much-needed new generation without breaking compatibility with everything. They really painted themselves into a corner there. Even things like the filesystem that made DMA read/write impractical. It had so much baggage to work around right from the start.

Nah, seriously, rampant piracy on the Amiga drove developers away and killed the platform. The IBM PC had businesses paying for site licesnses, which more than made up for widespread piracy by home users. Apple had their cult following who were paying for the big-name Adobe, Aldus and Macromedia packages, andfor some reason actually paying money for shareware as well. But there was just no money in developing for Amiga because no-one ever paid for software.

lol people like you are what killed the Amiga. no-one wanted to make Amiga software because everyone pirated it. without software a platform dies.

No they can't. They invoke a SUID binary that always runs as root to do the password change. That means an exploit in the SUID password change tool could potentially do anything the root user has permission to do.

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.