If you read the support article, you'll see that it mentions that it may not be able to get your heart rate if you have tattoos, not that you'll have to keep entering your PIN because it thinks you've taken it off your wrist.

I regard the threat to my privacy and civil liberty by criminals like Mark Rowley as much more significant than that posed by terrorists. Snowden didn't make companies add more encryption. Overreach by government agencies caused it. They're just trying to shoot the messenger but they created the problem by circumventing or ignoring the law.

Imprisonment is irreversible as well - you can't get your time back.

Do the math - bottled water doesn't even move the dial compared to agriculture. Total US consumption of bottle water per year = 10 billion gallons or about 31,000 acre feet. An acre-foot is about what one household uses per year, so it's the equivalent of a small city. In contrast, California uses 38 billion gallons a DAY. Stopping bottled water will not solve the water crisis. Alfalfa would certainly have a bigger impact.

http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Well, you could say that about Japanese as well, at least with regards to hiragana, the phonetic alphabet. Doesn't make the language a lot easier to learn, though.

Telephone and electricity wires cost money to run as well. We mandated that the utilities provide service to all and they used to simply spread the cost over the entire customer base. As long as you're profitable in the large it doesn't really matter if each customer turns a profit. However, if a company is not required to do so, they will, of course, focus only on profitable customers.

We chose to subsidize services that were viewed as vital, such as phone and electricity. Cable TV is not a necessity but internet access may be.

It's funny, but I find Postgres much easier and quicker to setup than MySQL. Probably just familiarity. I will say that in 20 years of using Postgres I've never had it eat any data. MySQL, well, I'd had it destroy its data a couple of time.

That gap was pretty small. I remember doing postgresql back in '97. I actually wrote an early JDBC driver for Postgres around that time, but it was for an internal project and we didn't release it as open source.

I second the Apple Keyboard, though I use a Mac so all of the keys make sense.

You can abuse the C pre-processor as well. The early versions of the Bourne Shell are, essentially, written in Bourne Shell through the use of a mess of C macros. When I was working at a Unix vendor I was assigned to track down a bug in the shell and that was just...wrong. Some time around Sys V somebody un-macro'ized the code.

If the security sucks, the product usually still works. That's the basic problem.

The web browsers and email in early smartphones were crap, but the phone part worked. The original iPhone was a crappy phone. Turned out people wanted a decent web browser and mail more than they did a decent phone.

Well, many banks shut down their ATM network at night anyhow in Japan so it's not as though it makes any difference.

There are standalone ATMs at many convenience stores in Japan. Thieves have taken to busting in the window with a backhoe and grabbing the whole machine.

I did most of my work on Unix before I started at Apple in '95. All of the new OS development was being done in C by then. I suspect that before most of the OS development had been done in 68K assembler, not Pascal. When the switch to PPC started, Apple needed a cross-platform systems programming language and Pascal was not it.

This article from '93 references how the industry mindset had switched to C/C++ and that pushed Apple.

https://www.schneier.com/essay...

One thing to remember is that at that time, both Macs and PCs were not very powerful machines and large applications were being developed for Unix workstations.

UCSD P-system was a virtual machine. introduced back in '78. I think it was most popular on the Apple II, though it ran on PC's and even the PDP-11. I went to UCSD in the mid 80's and we learned Pascal on PC's but the PDP-11's (these were small graphics workstations, not minis) were running RT-11, if I remember correctly and we used them for the assembly language class.