Gruber at DaringFireball nails it:

What Apple gets and what no one else in the industry does is that using your mobile device for payments will only work if it’s far easier and better than using a credit card. With CurrentC, you’ll have to unlock your phone, launch their app, point your camera at a QR code, and wait. With Apple Pay, you just take out your phone and put your thumb on the Touch ID sensor.

Tim Cook was exactly right on stage last month when he introduced Apple Pay: it’s the only mobile payment solution designed around improving the customer experience. CurrentC is designed around the collection of customer data and the ability to offer coupons and other junk. Here is what a printed receipt from CVS looks like (https://twitter.com/fromedome/status/526027483901333505). It looks like a joke, but that’s for real. And that’s the sort of experience they want to bring to mobile payments. ...

And the reason they don’t want to allow Apple Pay is because Apple Pay doesn’t give them any personal information about the customer. It’s not about security — Apple Pay is far more secure than any credit/debit card system in the U.S. It’s not about money — Apple’s tiny slice of the transaction comes from the banks, not the merchants. It’s about data.

Apple's great strategic advantages over Google, is that they put their customers (i.e. the people who buy Apple's goods and services) needs over their partners needs to be able to data mine those users.

"The eruption is closer to #Dyngjujokull than #Bardarbunga so we may need to retrain journalists in pronunciation"

Good luck with that.

https://twitter.com/gislio/sta...

> It suffers from SQL that lacks proper commit controls.

Wat?

> Implementations I've used leak connections like a seive, forcing restarts of the database servers on a regular basis.

While that must have been frustrating for you - that's not a common complaint, so was probably specific to either your DB or configuration.

> PHP's biggest problem is lack of modularization and encouragement of inline script hacking.

You mean you suck at writing decent code, without being forced to do things 'properly' ?

That's, er, function hashing - http://news.php.net/php.intern...

> Many of the problems with PHP are from the crappy language implementation.

Yes, because switching to a subtly different language implementation is not going to cause any problems running code that was written for the standard PHP implementation.

> It's Quercus [caucho.com]. It's certainly worth a look as a Zend alternative.

That was release 7 years ago. No one appears to really use it.

Do you really think that if it was such a great improvement over the Zend engine that people wouldn't be using it?

yeah - http://php.net/password_hash

It's now pretty easy to do password hashing correctly.

The author who says that this is 'most alarming' is missing one key thing; sometimes people use computers that belong to someone else.

Any company that needs it's employees to be able to use the internet, but also want to be able to detect any employee that is sending documents via the internet to outside of the company would love to use this, as well as have every permission to install this on their own computers. They could then have the employees computers trust the SSL proxy, and it could easily detect any documents being transmitted.

Poul-Henning Kamp covers this at the end of his talk at http://www.infoq.com/presentat... from 14:40 .

Interesting post, but this is wrong:

Australia dithering leaving NATO to avoid complete economic meltdown when they suddenly can't sell their mining produce to it any more

Australia realised during World War 2, that they were completely dependent on the US to be able to prevent invasion and occupation of Australia from Japanese forces. Since then they a strategy of doing everything that the US wants, to retain the strong military alliance between them.

Although it would hurt massively in the short term, I can't see _anything_ that would break that alliance. It would basically be a declaration that Australia would be prepared to become allied with and accepting military occupation by China.

And it would just be the short term - if there was a military conflict with China that shut down trade, having several hundred million people suddenly unemployed in China would cause a faster change in government there than not being able to buy the latest iPhone or more plastic crap would in the US and Australia.

If it's for either the current version of a technology or is for a technology that is version free - keep it. e.g. The Data compression book, and The Pragmatic Programmer are both 15 years old but are still great books that people could learn a lot from.

If it's for a technology that has had a newer version (or versions) released - probably bin it. Even a book a couple of years old will be massively out of for technologies that are advancing rapidly. e.g. a book on how to develop for iPhones that was released in say, late 2009, would be almost completely irrelevant now.

likely not the indented result of last night's exercise

Really? People are getting all worked up over paragraph formatting when there's an emergency going on?

Well this might - be really I'm not sure I _want_ this to work. http://jsfiddle.net/Danack/3pFUS/6/

Fiddle is here http://jsfiddle.net/Danack/3pFUS/

@-webkit-keyframes blink {
                from { opacity: 1.0; }
                to { opacity: 0.0; }
                0% { opacity: 1.0; }
                50% { opacity: 0.0; }
                100% { opacity: 1.0; }
        } .blink {
        -webkit-animation-name: blink;
        -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
        -webkit-animation-timing-function: steps(1);
        -webkit-animation-duration: 1s;
        }