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Comment Re:Fairly well prepared. (Score 1) 562

The EU Regulatations still have bans on animals and vegetables grown in Germany, UK, Spain, France, and most of Europe. The quarantine range has been reduced since the 80s, but it's still in place, and will probably be for many years to come.

All sheep in parts of Britain still need to be tested for radiation before they're allowed to enter the food-chain.
Wild Boar in Germany for the most part still can't be safely consumed.

Comment Paper. It grows on trees. (Score 1) 167

We had a full model UN in high school. Since all the seating was assigned ahead of time; the vote-keeping was done entirely on pre-printed ballot sheets. basically in the format:

Sheet 1
Name: Y N A ...
Name: Y N A
Total: [blank] [blank] [blank]

And they were based on the seating at the university's lecture hall we used, they all listed countries in order as they were seated, starting with the centre.
You pass out the sheets to the centre people, and then they pass it along to the end; they're forwarded up;

At the front: Tallied per sheet;
the totals transferred to the log sheet
Sheet 1 :[blank] [blank] [blank] ...
Sheet X :[blank] [blank] [blank]
Totals :[blank] [blank] [blank]

And you had totals, with fairly rapid turn around and summations. Secret votes just had a stack of paper with "Country: ____ Y N A" and they were required to fill it out and put it into the box going around. to be condensed and summarized onto the above formattetd sheets at the front by the two lackies.

Junk character filter? Really? I wonder what the threshold is. Wow, this really makes it a bit difficult to nicely explain the formats, but then what can you really do about it. I wonder what the thresholds are.

Comment Re:Have to punch it in at the gas stations now (Score 1) 461

I think that is insane that the US can be one of the few countries left in the world that VISA and MASTERCARD don't force the required use of Chip-and-PIN for all purchases. Canada switched over a few years back, most of the EU switched recently. Japan and Korea has switched, as have some south american countries.

Only once in the US had the merchant a terminal and provider that declined my card under "Service not available. Use Chip-and-PIN" when they tried to swipe my card. (That caught me off guard, since I've gotten used to only signing)

But, it's standard practise for VISA/MASTERCARD to require the use of Chip and Pin for all card-present transacions, and with every year, more of the world is upgrading their infrastructure.to support these requirements. I know on my latest agreement it was expilictly stated that "The magnetic stripe is only valid for use in the United States. All credit card transactions must be completed with the use of Chip and Pin"

-- Canada

Comment Re:Does that really solve the problem? (Score 1) 461

Not to mention that outside the US, all VISA/MASTERCARD cards require a PIN on the card for the transaction to complete. The magnetic stripe on the credit card has been rendered "Only valid for use in the United States" in most of the world as well. Becasue they are required to use Chip-n-PIN for all in-person transactions.

Only once in SoCal have I been required to use my pin, and that's just because they have international customers. Since I lived there, they swiped the card, and it errored : "Service not authorized. Use Chip And PIN." (I hadn't used the pin on my card in the 4 years since moving to the US, so I had forgotten it, and needed to pay with cash, but that's besides the point)

Comment Re:One more reason to use Google Apps (Score 1) 399

Keylogger doesn't defeat it, that's the entire point.
Even if a keylogger was able to sniff out your password, unless they physically had your phone, or able to intercept your SMS en route. They would not be able to log in. The SMS is a single-use throwaway, so that it is always required, and not predictable from previous input.

Comment Re:Women of /., please comment (Score 1) 417

But, they make toilets in japan that play the sound of running water, in the vain hope that it will stop japanese women from continually flushing the toilet while they urinate becasue they think the sound of them urinating sdhouldn't be heard by others.... even if it means htat they have to waste many many gallons of water.

Comment Re:Legibility (Score 1) 280

It's quite legible on this laptop (15" screen, 1920x1200 native resolution)
not familiar with the text, but I read the entire thing through with no real hassle.

What is your first-langage, and what portion can't you read?

Medicine

What US Health Care Needs 584

Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very precisely and in a nonpartisan way what is wrong with the institution of medical care in the US — why it is both so expensive and so ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. "Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has... enumerated and identified... more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we've discovered beneficial remedies... But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we're struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver. ... And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it's the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you've made almost no difference. Our deficit problem — far and away — is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care. ... Like politics, all medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems — of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of diverse components must somehow mesh effectively. ... This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do."
PHP

Eight PHP IDEs Compared 206

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"
Earth

Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff 303

hollywoodb writes "The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean, renewable energy, Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012 ... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff."

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