I also love hockey - I think it edges out NFL football on my TV sports list. I'm able to separate the entertainment from the entertainers... otherwise I'd have a hard time listening to music or watching films! Baseball is still my favorite stadium experience, and unlike football I can watch just about any level from high school up without losing my mind.
Dying is for quitters.
and the pace is simply glacial
I get your criticisms, except this one. I mean, we are firmly in "subjective" territory here... but the setup-action, setup-action pace of football is fun for me. I like the tension that builds up. I hesitate to ask what you think of the pace of baseball?
Rugby is played by sissies. Hurling is where the real men go to play. They really should rename it "hematoma ball".
But Jobs didn't want third party applications on it. There was no App Store. And when prompted about third party apps, Jobs envisioned some kind of web app system. But he didn't want the perfection of the iPhone soiled by third parties.
That is indeed what he said, but I suspect that was just spin. As evidence, I'd point to the yanking of a substantial portion of the OSX team onto iOS development to get those features added. I think he was just putting a positive spin on his not-quite-finished product. "Reality Distortion Field"
No, I think it is completely unacceptable that we don't have a permanent solution in place. I was just responding to TWX's post - which to my reading implied that the spent fuel requires a lot more attention than it actually does.
The pools aren't necessary forever - 5 to 10 years and then they can be moved to dry casks. Already, over 20% of spent fuel is stored this way. Hardly permanent, as the casks need to be reconditioned/rebuilt every 30-100 years - but not the active process that you describe.
At current rates, with no reprocessing or advances in technology.
I wouldn't invest in any 4-engine aircraft, including the A380. Boeing hedged their bets and kept price pressure on Airbus by keeping the 747 up to date, but neither plane has a chance against 2-engine aircraft unless oil stays low indefinitely.
We are talking ATM cards, are we not?
I like trains and try to keep up with stuff, but there are guys who spend all day on forums arguing about stuff like the look of the front of the train. NYC used to have styled, raked ends - but this limited the flexibility of the trains to be added or removed from sets. When they are all squared-off, it is trivial to link them together. In any event, IIRC the London and NYC trains are all built by the same two manufacturers - Bombardier and Kawasaki. The styling mostly differs in materials used (aluminum vs. stainless) and the look of the fiberglass end caps.
Far more distressing than the look - to me - is the lack of automation. NYC is just now starting to add updated signalling. They still manually close the doors with a conductor!
Yeah, they definitely aren't sleek looking. In general, they are stainless steel for ease of maintenance, and boxy because they don't go very fast.
It's worth noting that the "newest" NYC trains are actually a design from the late 90s. This generation is pretty much done and there is a new design being worked on now. In contrast, the London train you linked to first debuted in 2010 (according to Wikipedia). I suspect the 2016-designed NYC trains will appear more up-to-date. Or not...
The cost of fraud is paid by their honest customer's banking fees. Even if you as a customer get refunded by the bank, when a fraudulent transaction occurs on your account, the money has to come from somewhere.
The cost of new ATM machines is paid by the honest customer's banking fees as well. That money also has to come from somewhere. Like most business decisions, it is a cost-benefit calculation.
And somehow they arrived at different answer?
Sure, why not? As TFA illustrates, sometimes the losses that banks are incurring differs between the US and Europe. No one has (so far) started blowing up ATMs in the US, so why would the banks spend money making them explosion-resistant? Similarly, if the cards aren't being counterfeited at a rate deemed unacceptable by the banks, why should they upgrade all of their ATMs?
As an aside, the big American credit card companies (not the ATM cards) are switching to chip cards. After 2015, if you are a merchant and don't upgrade to a chip reader, you will have to accept responsibility for any fraud. The transition is estimated to cost around $8 billion, so there is pushback from the merchants and it will be interesting to watch it all play out.
It just makes it harder to counterfeit the card. You could put a card reader/keypad reader on an ATM and harvest hundreds of number/PIN combinations and then fabricate fake cards to use those credentials. If there is also a chip, this becomes more difficult. I have to assume that in the US, number/PIN harvesting does not cost the banks enough money to jump on board with the chips, which would require retrofits to their machines (over 2 million in the US) and more expensive cards.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
