Okay, maybe this is more in the "confuse future archaeologists" category....
They'll just put it down to religion. When an Archaeologist doesn't know what something's for, the answer's always relgion.
What do you call someone who goes around saying things that they know are untrue?
A politician.
It wasn't a bad episode, though in retrospect, it kind of felt like a ripoff of Enemy Mine in a lot of ways (the book, that is).
... all of them? Seriously the inclusion of a trained Shakespearian actor (Stewart) was the only saving grace of that branch-off of TOS.
come on... it's not like the series didn't have any redeeming qualities at all... is it?
I can think of one really good episode. It involved the captain getting his brain rewired and living an entire lifetime on another planed in a dream induced by an alien probe. Why was it good? Because it focused on one character (played by Patrick Stewart) and really developed him.
The one with Picard leading the kids up the lift shaft was also good.
And I enjoyed the whole "Sometimes a cake is just a cake" episode. I mean, it was absurd, but it was amusing.
Worst episode? Anything with Wesley Crusher. They were almost all painfully written. How many times can a single kid put everybody in mortal danger and then somehow manage to save the day in some contrived fashion?
Why would they need to compromise your CAs? They can compromise any CA, because unless the client uses a tighter-than-normal designated requirement, it will trust any cert for your domain as long as it is signed by any of dozens of CAs. That's what makes TLS so flawed.
The boss doesn't ask employees to leave. The employee just gets to work one day and find their desk on the front lawn.
You mean we get to keep the desk? If I had known that, I'd have gotten myself fired a long time ago!
Even most people who treat money as their number one priority day to day would doubtless change if they recognized a threat to their physical existance. Einstein didn't particularly make a big deal out of money. That's actually on the record, as there are accounts of just how little he asked for a salary when he hired on at Princton. But, his day to day priorities definitely included support for doing physics, and hot babes. I'm pretty sure from the things he said about where he feared German antisemitism was leading, that he was willing to put both those things aside for the duration of getting out of Germany.
Self checkout is just making the customer do the cashiers job for free before realizing that customers suck at doing these things correctly because it's not their job.
So what's the cashiers' excuse for not doing it correctly?
No, seriously. I tend to order things with various customizations (e.g. no [insert ingredient]). I haven't done the math, but I suspect that I have at least a 10% return rate at many businesses. How hard is it to push "Only" followed by the ingredients that the customer specifies? Point-of-sales systems suck, but at least if I'm in control of it, I can see that the order is right, and if it is wrong, it's my fault.
You're on the right track, but that implementation is way more complicated than it needs to be. Any PIN should be handled by the device itself, and should be easy to change to any arbitrary PIN. Or you might even use a fingerprint reader.
You should be able to basically eliminate any additional risk from a modified device or payment terminal (except perhaps the risk of someone physically stealing the device and using it) by doing the crypto as follows:
In an ideal world, the transaction would then be applied to the default credit card in your online account profile, but you should have the ability (up to a few days after the transaction) to redirect the transaction to a different card by logging in to your online payments account and saying "Bill it to X". Alternatively, you could have multiple PK pairs, one for each account, and you could choose the account on the device itself.
The way you handle offline sales with this model is also pretty straightforward. You use either a mobile app on your phone or a website on your computer (requires browser support), as follows:
The existence of that transaction ID in the merchant's account is proof that the payment occurred. At most, the only thing the merchant would have to do to prevent fraud would be to ensure that nobody uses the same transaction ID to pay for more than one purchase. This is, of course, a trivial local database lookup.
You would also need an app (mobile or desktop) that can download the public key from the device (if the device gets stolen, you'll need to associate the new device's public key with your payment account) and occasionally update its firmware to fix any bugs in the crypto code.
ATT's customers should be able to leave, because ATT sucks.
AT&T's customers would need a viable alternative first.
Err... steeenking.
The ones with the skunk glands?
Badgers? We don't need no steeeking badgers.
In the 1970's there was a book called "Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television", or something like that. One of the arguments was the limited image quality of the 512 line scan made even very poorly faked emotions very hard to distinguish from the real thing, and so children who got their learning examples of human expressions from TV would have a hard time telling who was really feeling emotions or just faking them. The author also claimed that emotions such as Rage, Fear, and Strong Suffering would come through better than subtler emotions such as Boredom, Fondness or Compassion, so TV scripts would come to emphasize those emotions which at least somewhat worked and ignore the rest. Perhaps there's something to these ideas.
While you are at it, what happens if they test specifially with medical personnel who have been told they need to spot people faking pain to get their opiate fix,and avoid at all costs encouraging their addiction?
There's a good precedent for your argument that this is a question of instinctual skill vrs trained skill, but it doesn't take anything like a billion examples to train a person in the example I'm considering. A very common way to teach health care personnel to recognize Fetal Alchohol Syndrome is to give them an album with several hundred photos of people in various life stages, all suffering from FAS. This method has worked since the time when the photos were black and white, and in fact, using color shots or video footage doesn't seem to have any impact on success or the number of examples needed. Once someone is trained that way, the success percentage is in the very high 90s, and stays that way, at least for a typical crreer. Similar methods are used for other diseases, for example most people have learned to spot Down's syndrome from just a few examples, but where the syndrome produces only some of the usual appearance effects, spotting the 'borderline cases' with high accuracy can be taught this same way, usually taking about 15 minutes.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
