Right on to the submitter, screw cameras that only work with a subscription, or a smartphone, or whatever.

http://tinyurl.com/dealexcelcam14

This is a pan/tilt camera with no zoom. I've bought 5 of these, and I'm very happy with them. I'm trying to get the neighborhood interested in buying these, so we can have a central website to run a "virtual neighborhood watch" out of, and also have pooled offsite recordings.

They have an embedded web server, and come with basic multi-cam watching/recording s/w for windows. Smartphone app that seems to be cloud-dependent(haven't used that myself). You can retrieve still images and video streams from URLs. Embed the image in your own web page and control all of the functions by clicking buttons/links to shoot command URLs at it. Camera FTP's images upon motion detection. Connect to it with Ethernet or WIFI. With a custom profile, they work with Zoneminder Linux surveillance s/w. Has remote camera and speaker you can use as a baby monitor, or like an intercom. Pretty good night vision, including infra-LEDs. They're meant for indoors, but I've had 3 of them outside for over a year, under the roof eaves, and they're still going strong with the occasional lens cleaning.

Only two complaints: they're really picky about voltages (5v), so Power Over Ethernet isn't stable. Mainly because the motors slurp a lot more power than the camera/networking. Secondly: they all come configured with THE SAME WIRELESS MAC ADDRESS, so you need to use an included configuration utility to fix that, and the Chinglish utility is a biotch to figure out.

You're exactly right. My dad made his teaching career by bringing computers to schools in the 1980s and 90s. What I remember him spending most time on was evaluating software and preparing lesson plans (often for other teachers to use). There was a multimedia CD with a trip to Scotland, it had river geography etc, and probably made for a much more useful geography lesson than "type your homework into the computer". Unfortunately, once IT in schools became more official the was no choice but to teach Word.

Interesting, America being different again ;-)

I found http://krebsonsecurity.com/201... which has some background. I'm not so sure about the security risk, there has been a recent slight increase in lost+stolen fraud in the UK (PDF graph, starting at £120M pre-introduction it reduced to £50M, but has since increased to £60M. (In step with other types too, so maybe it's just more crime in general.) That contradicts the person quoted though.

The other suggestion -- that people will pick the 'easiest' card in a competitive market -- sounds much more likely, especially as it's the reward cards that do use a PIN.

Not having a retailer take a card to check a signature helps -- they can't copy down the details to use online. In restaurants they must bring the machine to you, so you can type a PIN, and the card never leaves your sight (or often possession).

You can use VirtualBox headless (using vboxmanage), but it's not really the intended use case and there are better alternatives.

Though I tend to use vboxmanage for dealing with disk images, because I find the UI for that stuff to be absolutely terrible.

Generally agree. I use it for a handful of Windows apps I still need (like the updater for my GPS) and a few purpose specific Linux installs and it works fine for that. I'll probably keep using it as long as it still works. Worst case, KVM will probably do what I want just as well.

KVM is probably the closest alternative and is free (probably more so than VirtualBox is you go all church of Stallman mode).

Indeed, and some software falls into a realm where you pretty much need paid developers working on it to get anywhere (due to complexity of the code base or lack of interest).

By the way, now that I re-read this during a spare moment and once again think about it, I can again respond to you in what I hope to be a worthy way, yet this time focus on a different dimension of the thing at hand.

I would ask you to consider, simply, this other and possibly alien point of view: the "name-calling" types are simply enacting the lower (or if you like, "gutter") form of an idea that is nonetheless technically true. The name-callers are merely those who recognize this but also have a need to make you look worse in order that they know better, or otherwise focus on what they think is wrong with you, with little or no serious constructive suggestion concerning what precisely is wrong with your view and how better to regard the situation. Liike the thinking individuals, they see what the problem is; otherwise, they lack the clarity and objectivity to identify the problem and suggest a sensible solution. By contrast, they're simply bitching. But even those people are correctly identifying that somethng is amiss. They're just the least clever and easiest to ridicule among those who all arrive at the same conclusion.

The whole lot is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

The next fleet of trains will cost £16 billion, the lines the trains are for have an annual ridership of about 600 million, and we could assume the trains will last 55 years (same as the ones they're replacing). That's 16G/600M/55 = 48 pence per journey?

I wonder if a boring design would cost less. I suspect it doesn't make much difference in the end -- a custom design is needed to maximise capacity in the old tunnels in any case.

Cloning magstripe cards to use in ATMs. The chips can't be cloned.

http://www.smartcardalliance.o...

Hey now, normally the CRTC is as corrupt as they come. This is a group that has been heavily infiltrated by big media, who tried to institute 1996 level data caps, and who's outgoing president whined that the internet is their biggest obstacle to controlling what Canadians watch.

I'm actually somewhat baffled by what seems to be a series of decisions on their part which appear at face value to be in the interests of the Canadian public and not their telecom friends.

I imagine it's more likely they'll end up charging everyone less in order to make their service actually usable.

I think some American trains just look old. Bare aluminium (sometimes fluted!) and boxy corners.

Compare the newest NYC train with the newest London Underground train: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

(London's oldest trains are from 1972, and will be replaced in 2025. The next oldest are from 1980, and will be replaced this year. How long trains last seems to depend more on how well they were built and maintained, rather than simply age.)

It was similar in the UK, until the law changed to allow Visa and MasterCard to push the liability for non-chip fraud onto merchants. In the months leading up to that, everyone updated their card readers.

The law changes in the USA in October.