iButtons still seem to be popular in Point of sales systems (for staff authentication. But those are little more then a unique id in iButton format.

I have a couple of TINI's around here somewhere. Lots of IO options. Even ethernet (albiet very slow) not bad for a decade old 8 bit microcontroller (with some 32 bit internal extensions)

A lot of smartcards of almost any kind run java. Mostly beacuse of dumb mobile phones with enabled apps on the smartcard (not what you would call apps nowdays:). Orginially written in C for a variety of sim based processors they moved to standardise on java.

Most C&P bank cards have had them for the last 5 years

That is not ironic. That is a sad state of afairs.

A) people who know how to execute people with life saving drugs do not want to.
B) people selling those drugs want to make money (and perhaps even help people) and can't if they have to jump through hoops to stop the drugs being used for executions.
C) It reall does not look good if the state buys said drugs on the black market to ensure they keep on schedule.

D) so now they have less qualifed people and less knowledge and are making mistakes? well no shit. Perhaps they should stop until they figure it out.

E) Mandating the electric chair if drug supplies are not tennable seems to be unbelivebly warped.

Not quite correct. Companies in the EU can not provide the drugs if they can not show that they are not being used for executions.

The last american company that manufactured thiopental manufactured it in Italy. They could no longer make that guarentee so they stopped making it. It is still manufactured by other companies although it has mostly been surplaced by drugs that are not quite so difficult to manufacture and store. It does still have uses in induced comas though (and as a truth drug in yet other countries)

It is not banned from being imported to the US. It just has to be very carefully tracked and cannot be sold for the purpose of exeution.

It is one of the drugs used for Euthenasia in some countries.

Back then a rag tag bunch of well armed citizens were no such thing. They were well organised militias and were getting soundly thrashed by bristish forces.
That changed when France and Spain openly joined the war in 1778ish (rather than just supplying weapons and training to the americans as they had previously been doing)

And it was more than just a war for american independence it was a world war in many respects as it involved the dutch, french, spanish and british empires.

It followed on after a breif haietus from the Seven years' war and the Anglo Spainsih war that also involved most of the european empires and were also contested in North America.

So no "The patriot" is not historically accurate.

Warped view of american history 101?

Well that is a big part of it (The US has an "equal time" rule I belive)
Another part of it is that you can not run overtly negative advertising against anyone. Party politial broadcasts can to a certain extent diss thier opponents but only within thier own claims. And there is that guarenteed right of reply. Third parties (not politically associated), as we do have legitimate third fouth and so on parties, can not make adverts for or against anyone. If they do they end up being billed to the pro party or in court to find out who funded them to discredit the offeded party (yes this can take a long while to be sorted out but it can be very damning and, as I said earlier, media do not want to be tangled up in that so they only marginally break the rules behind this.

Well they could. It just ends up in court a long time after it is relevant.

Now that does not hinder the press as they can and do pick up on things and tell everyone they know about it in print and on the internet. Even on the news and talk shows.

But It leaves parties and canditates very skitish as they could be billed with the cost of whatever happened and that will be auditied as part of thier election campaign.

Convoluted? Yeh. But this is the UK so Most things are and it sort of acceives its goals. Cant say if those are good goals as the bribry is now hidden but the election funding is there to see.

It is working then as it is proudly saying that it is not working. Try wiggling the SIM or a different SIM.

I never got any of mine to say that. They just did not break (apart from the plastic covers flying off (clip them back on or buy a new bling set for pennies)

You may actually have broken one. I am humbled Sir as that is quite an impressive feat.

I live in the UK.
Campain financing is regulated and audited. Also adverts in any media can be examined and used for procecution.
It is sort of this.
Any advert promoting a candidate or party must be credited to that candiate/party and hence on thier books for money. Any advert credited to a party MUST be given a right of response (If your whatever can fork out the money you must be given equal advertising to respond no matter which candidate/party you are running for).
If you or anyone else runs adverts that diss the opposition then the producer may end up in court (negative advertising is not allowed).

It sort of works for mainstream media (TV/Radio) and oddly is not often abused. It is terribly complex though. Thankfully it does not cover local drives. The internet is handled on a case by case basis with nothing done for blogs and what have you.

As I said it is not a great system but as mass media (TV/Radio) became popular it was deemed that the owners of those media could not be allowed to block parties/candidates from the ability to respond to any "Party political broadcast".

They have. In the prototype they use hydrolic valves.

Yep I've seen the same silly argument.
Europe wide the only thing that has changed is that the retailer is now responsible for any fraud using C&P cards if they are not used as C&P (say just swiped as that is the normal fallback). Non C&P cards (such as amerians visiting) are still the liability of the card processor/bank.
The client has never been responsible for fraud. Although I think there is a lower limit for credit cards they normally wave it unless the item was very expensive. But that is a slightly different set of liabilites then you have with debit cards.

The company accepting payment bumps the user off to an outside service such as "Verified by Visa" or mastercards equiv and let them handle the problem. These are run by the payment processors and as a card user you generally have to sign up to them seperately. They tend to use seperate information that is not on your card.

Then visa takes responsibility for fraud.

Yep

Not unusual. It is a motor in a cast iron body. They only thing likely to go wrong with it is the power cord degrading and sort of turning to dust. I have no idea what the coils on the motor were insulated with but it seems to have lasted and works well enough. I suppose it is not wiggled around enough to cause it to fail. Wire insulation from that period is very brittle (even 60 years ago it was brittle. but they designed it with that in mind. I wonder how well the insulation lasted the last 60 years)

Not ideal, but better than chucking it out on the street.

Sewers where a great advancement. Not to say that it could not of been done better. Combined sewers and street run off do cause problems. Industrial waste is now regulated and not in those same systems (mostley)
 

Nokia phones, even feature phones (not so much the smart phones). They are almost indestructable.
A 3310. Plug it in and it will work even if you have for some reason thrown it out of a plane or decided that it would like to see the bottom of the mariana trench. Dry it out and it will probably work.

Almost bullet proof (OK they are made of plastic so not really proofed against bullets). Not just that they put up with people mistreating them. You actually had to really try to damage them. Not accidental.