It's the same in the UK, except chip and pin is the default and has been for around eight? ten? years already. I don't know if the magstripe is really used anymore either.

It's quaint seeing a foreigner (American) try to pay for goods with a card, and have to go through special procedures for the signature style payment.

Yeah, but the process of reducing "body frequency" is rather terminal - however ghosts can indeed walk through walls. Interacting with physical matter is a problem though - poltergeists must be able to change their frequency on demand.

Indeed it is quite a shame that they didn't take the opportunity to show off these capabilities with these very boxy buildings!

However ultimately buildings are going to have straight edges and not many curves, so a capability for curved structures may not be as useful as it first sounds. On the other hand I'm not an architect full of curved wall ideas thwarted by straight wall building practices...

But half the cost and half the time (and not using loads of wood) is certainly useful.

The article shows an internal picture of the post-install inserted rebar and concrete pour into the wall.

Also the plan would be for a printer to be installed on-site to do the printing of the components.

I think the buildings should be subjected to strength tests of course, before taking their word for it.

It's still a potential step forward in one aspect of house building.

Of course, this is recycled PR that might not be entirely truthful. The recycling of construction waste is a nice sounding feature. So it isn't the same printing material as the US based housing prints.

So there is still some manual work involved.

Indeed, in the UK the first floor is on the floor above the ground floor, whilst in the US it is the ground floor.

However the ground floor is still counted towards the total number of storeys in the building in both places.

The picture is of a five storey building, unless there is a smaller construction on the top (lift shaft housing does not count).

Well, it is "3D printing", albeit fairly coarse printing of large scale components. It's still a lot faster and cheaper (lower manpower requirements) than the alternative.

Also the "printer" can do the work on-site (eventually), so there's no need for the factory aspect. It can print the components for an entire house within a day. Assembly is cheaper than construction. It might not be printing a finished house, but to expect that would be silly right now.

As for finishing the walls, most houses require a plastering step anyway, even over drywall. The rough finish is actually better for that.

I hope the 3D printed structural components include ducting for water, electricity, etc.

Apart from not suggesting IntelliJ, this comment is pretty much spot on.

However typically he'll be integrating with his client's database, so he doesn't get to pick that - however Java has leading support for different databases and a decent ORM in Hibernate for abstracting away the database specifics.

In addition if you want to go funkier, but remain compatible with the JVM, you've got Clojure, Scala, Jython and more.

If the clients don't want Java on their systems, they will still be okay with it on their servers. Nothing simpler and more standard that a Java webapp in a Tomcat, and a Javascript front end to present the data dynamically to the users.

You aren't describing a web app there, you're describing a web page with a search form.

There is nothing stopping dynamic, fast, real-time updates of data within a web-app. A web app will have the front end UI and a (typically json) api to the backend (ajax or websocket) which is doing the hard work of running the searches, filtering, connectivity, authentication, etc.

IntelliJ is a whole level above Eclipse, in my experience. I used to use Eclipse only, for many many years, but since using IntelliJ I can see that the difference is night and day.

In my opinion, the person asking this ask slashdot should learn Java backend/middleware and Javascript Front End programming, because I've talked to a lot of businesses in the past year, and that's the model they are moving to, from Windows Forms front-ends for simple data presentation. Maybe his clients aren't right now, but one day they might, and his market is going to shrink.

If the users just want interactive reports, then it may be that using report generation software (Splunk, Birt, etc) is the sane way forward, rather than writing custom platform-specific tools.

Well, it launched in 2004 ... and space tech is usually about a decade behind again...

Luckily it is only one bank of flash that's bad, so they're going to work around it by disabling that one - probably means a reduction in overall capacity, but maybe it's enough to solve this issue (and/or it was overprovisioned in the first place).

We're probably talking about kilobytes of flash here, rather than megabytes.

At least they have identified a fix. But it surely won't be too long before more of the flash memory banks start exhibiting similar behaviour.

Still, 44x longer lifespan than originally planned == win in anyone's books.

Weird, my (otherwise useless) playbook charges from any micro-usb charger.

Meh, BlackBerries lack of support for the Playbook after promising BBOS10 for it and not delivering it says a lot. Additionally the fact that they got the security right means there are no Android hacks for it, so you're stuck with what it has.

I want to like this device for being different, but it's still a BB.

Luckily it can run Android apps, and includes the Amazon App Store for Android Apps on board.

But I don't know how it runs Android games that use the NDK, not the Android runtime...

It's an odd shape, but I've read a couple of things about it that are positive - non-obscured display because the keyboard is also a trackpad for example, natural left/right handed use, solid software...