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Submission + - Small Bank in Kansas Creates the Bank Account of the Future 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Nathaniel Popper writes at the NYT that the Citizens Bank of Weir, Kansas, or CBW, has been taken apart and rebuilt, from its fiber optic cables up, so it can offer services not available at even the nation’s largest bank. The creation of the new bank, and the maintenance of the old one, are the work of Suresh Ramamurthi and his wife, Suchitra Padmanabhan who were born in India and ended up buying the bank in Kansas in 2009 after living in Silicon Valley and passing through jobs at Google and Lehman Brothers. Their goal was to find solutions to logjams that continue to vex consumers all over the country, such as the obstacles that slow money moving from one bank to another and across international borders. The new services that CBW is providing, like instant payments to any bank in the United States, direct remittance transfers abroad and specialized debit cards that can be set for particular purchases, such as those at specific stores, or at specific times might seem as if they should be painless upgrades in an age of high-frequency trading and interplanetary space missions. But the slowness of current methods of moving money is a widely acknowledged problem in the financial industry.

In the United States the primary option that consumers have to transfer money is still the ACH payment. Requests for ACH transfers are collected by banks and submitted in batches, once a day, and the banks receiving the transfers also process the payments once a day, leading to long waits. ACH technology was created in the 1970s and has not changed significantly since. The clunky system, which takes at least a day to deliver money, has become so deeply embedded in the banking industry that it has been hard to replace. CBW went to work on the problem by using the debit card networks that power ATM cash dispensers. Ramamurthi’s team engineered a system so that a business could collect a customer’s debit card number and use it to make an instant payment directly into the customer’s account — or into the account of a customer of almost any other bank in the country. The key to CBW's system is real-time, payment transaction risk-scoring — software that can judge the risk involved in any transaction in real time by looking at 20 to 40 factors, including a customers’ transaction history and I.P., address where the transaction originated. It was this system that Elizabeth McQuerry, the former Fed official, praised as the “biggest idea” at a recent bank conference. "Today's banks offer the equivalent of 300-year-old paper ledgers converted to an electronic form — a digital skin on an antiquated transaction process," says Suresh Ramamurthi. "We'll now be one of the first banks in the world to offer customers a reliable, compliant, safe and secure way to instantly send and receive money internationally."

Comment Unclear scope. (Score 1) 2

by Z00L00K (#48592521) Attached to: Two-Factor Authentication

It's a bit unclear in the article what components that are involved in the Two-Factor authentication.

There are too many variants of the two-factor authentication to consider to be able to give a good answer.

Submission + - Protection of Physicists and of the practice of the Scientific Method (spaz.ca)

Submitted by john_turnbull
john_turnbull writes: Under equality law (Europe & UK) I assert that scientists — and practising of the scientific method — are protected by international and also UK law..The most direct protection extends to physicists 'natural philosophers' as philosophy specifically protected too. Especially against actions by the state.
Religion or belief
(1)Religion means any religion and a reference to religion includes a reference to a lack of religion.
(2)Belief means any religious or philosophical belief and a reference to belief includes a reference to a lack of belief.
(3)In relation to the protected characteristic of religion or belief—
(a)a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a person of a particular religion or belief;
(b)a reference to persons who share a protected characteristic is a reference to persons who are of the same religion or belief.

http://spaz.ca/aaron/school/sc...

Submission + - Airbus attacked by French lawmaker for talking to SpaceX

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A French lawmaker lashed out at Airbus for daring to consider SpaceX as a possible launch option for a European communications satellite.

The senator, Alain Gournac, who is a veteran member of the French Parliamentary Space Group, said he had written French Economy and Industry Minister Emmanuel Macron to protest Airbus’ negotiations with Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for a late 2016 launch instead of contracting for a launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket. “The negotiations are all the more unacceptable given that, at the insistence of France, Europe has decided to adopt a policy of ‘European preference’ for its government launches,” Gournac said. “This is called playing against your team, and it smacks of a provocation. It’s an incredible situation that might lead customers to think we no longer have faith in Ariane 5 — and tomorrow, Ariane 6.”

Submission + - Hewlett-Packard Is Working On A Revolutionary Computer and OS

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Hewlett-Packard is planning to take an extremely ambitious step toward giving a refresh to the architecture of a traditional computer and its operating system. The company's research division is working to create a computer which HP calls The Machine. A key idea is that HP's design shall use memristors for both temporary and long-term data storage. There would also be other novel features such as using optical fiber instead of copper wiring for data buses. Next summer the team aims to complete an operating system designed for The Machine, called Linux++, bundled with emulation tools to run existing applications. Linux++ is intended to ultimately be replaced by an operating system called Carbon, which is designed from scratch for The Machine. The chief architect of the project is Kirk Bresniker and a working prototype of The Machine is expected to be ready by 2016.

Comment Re:you're doing it wrong (Score 1) 368

by Z00L00K (#48542269) Attached to: Overly Familiar Sci-Fi

We have cultural familiar elements that persists, we also have cultural familiar elements that changes.

A century ago it wasn't granted that women could vote - much less colored people.

But the core values within a family - has that changed much?

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