Its only a matter of time before I can make payments via NFC on my Android phone.
Oh, I should have mentioned... I've been making payments via NFC on my Android phones for nearly three years. Actually, these days I'd say about 80% of my in-person retail purchases are made with my phone.
Apple doesn't follow standards.
Bluetooth, USB, GSM/CDMA? Apple follows standards just fine when they need to.
The real problem is the lack of standards. Japan has e-wallets, there is Google Wallet and now it looks like there will be a third and incompatible Apple wallet.
There are standards. Japan is its own world, but the Google Wallet and ISIS (a consortium of mobile network operators and banks who created the ISIS wallet -- yes they're looking for a new name) relies on standard EMV payment protocols -- slightly modified by the US Visa, MC, AMEX and Discover organizations, but not incompatibly so. Apple will follow the EMV standards as well, or they'll get nowhere, because retailers are a slow-moving, cost-conscious group.
Visa and MasterCard announced two years ago that they'll implement the "liability shift" the end of 2015, which means that from 2016 onward 100% of fraud will be charged to whichever entity in the chain (merchant, merchant acquirer, clearing house, issuer) does not have the EMV smart chip technology implemented. Since merchants get stuck with 98% of fraud, and other links in the chain are moving slowly, this will provide a huge incentive for merchants to install EMV-capable point of sale terminals. That doesn't require them to deploy NFC-capable terminals, but they will, and many of them are.
Not even Apple is capable of creating an entirely new payment ecosystem. They'll play ball with the banks and card associations, or they'll go nowhere.
I haven't found one.
Ah, you have no sense of humor. That explains a great deal.
The more niche your work are the easier it is to get traction because no one else will bother to cater to that niche.
Traction, yes. Broad attention, no.
His comic appeal to people who merely believe themselves to be above average.
Bah.
It's got nothing to do with intelligence, or even knowledge in a general sense. It's that his comics so often rely on specialized knowledge. For example, a couple of my favorite strips are the "sudo" strip and the "Bobby Tables" strip. The former is only understandable to someone who has at least a passing acquaintance with *nix system administration, and the latter requires some knowledge of SQL and SQL injection attacks. Neither of those things is hard to understand. They don't require great intelligence. But they're not generally known. And to people who require an explanation, they're not funny (I have t-shirts of both, and I have never gotten so much as a chuckle from anyone to whom I have to explain the basis for the jokes).
You'll note, of course, that I'm not actually addressing your real point, which is a snarky argument that only people who like to feel themselves smarter or more knowledgeable than most would enjoy the strip. That's because it's not worth addressing.
Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority.
I should have qualified this to point out I'm talking about his comics, more than What If. HIs What If series is very accessible, by design.
Randal Munroe is evidence that if you draw stick figures for long enough you will eventually gain recognition.
Sure, as long as your stick figures are saying and doing incredibly witty things.
Actually, Munroe's success is really surprising to me in spite of the brilliance of his work, because so much of what he draws is accessible to a relatively narrow audience. Not all of it, not even the majority. But there's enough that is only understandable to people who know more than most about computers, mathematics, physics, etc., that none of the non-geeks I know really like it.
If you push people, it is expected that they will act, regardless of the law preventing certain actions.
Well, then pretty soon those people so lacking in self control will do all their acting behind bars.
Why is this sneaky? Being very clear and saying..."If you want YOUR money back, we expect this to be done" is perfectly acceptable.
FTFY.
it has everything to do with it. they didnt JUST pass amendments and laws. they then had to back up those laws with the threat of force many, many times because the states refused to to do it.
True, but still an utter red herring.
Global warming exists. Anyone who denies that is also a moron. But it's certainly not manmade.
I don't get the focus on whether or not the warming is anthropogenic. Should we ignore all problems that we didn't make?
Supposing that the warming isn't primarily anthropogenic, there's still plenty of reason to believe that the greenhouse gases we're adding are making it worse, and in fact we can even make some reasonable estimates of how much worse they're making it.
At the end of the day, you'd really better hope that you're wrong about our ability to modify the climate. Because the current climate of Earth is not typical. In fact, there isn't really a "typical" climate for the planet. Ice core histories show us that it swings between much hotter than it is, and much, much colder (by "colder", think "equatorial oceans frozen 30 feet deep for millenia"). Both extremes will be unpleasant for us, and I say "will", not "would", because it's gonna happen. When? We have no idea. We know that climate changes can happen very rapidly (couple of decades), even without an obvious precipitating event (big meteor, supervolcano eruption, etc.), and that they come at apparently-random intervals.
So if we want this planet to be nice for us long-term, we'd better learn to engineer our climate. Or get even better at adapting our local environment. Or both.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.
