I've done some research into hypersonic technology, and it's not strictly true that hypersonic flights are necessarily less efficient per passenger mile. Sure, up to this point it has been the case, but we haven't explored in detail.

The US currently has tested a hypersonic glider that goes a heck of a long way, with a surprisingly good glide ratio, above Mach 20. Apparently it was to glide for thousands of miles, while only descending maybe 20 miles, implying a tremendously high glide ratio, over 100:1. If that's true, then you could have extremely efficient flight at Mach 20.

These "waverider" planes use radically different aerodynamics, so the old rules don't apply. They're nothing like the Concorde.

There is no "card". The chip in the iPhone generates a unique ID for every transaction, and that is all that is transmitted.

My theory is that a competitor airline is needed.

AB airlines flys A->B, and also A->B->C. Without any other reason, an A->B->C ticket would cost more or equal to the A->B ticket.

But AC airlines flies A->C, and is charging a smaller price than AB airlines.

AB airlines decides to complete by lowering the price for A->B->C so that it is less or equal to AC airlines A->C price. But they are not competing on A->B so they keep the price higher for A->B.

I don't know if the banks are selling credit card info; but I know that merchants are. Apple Pay prevents them from doing that, which is one of the big reasons that so many merchants in the US have stopped using NFC for payments, as this earlier Slashdot story describes.

A friend of mine was deeply involved in NFC payments at significant companies (not Apple) and says that not only is Apple not sharing the info; they can't. It's just not available. The NFC chips in the phone don't send out identifiable information.

What the banks are really concerned about is not that Apple is collecting information, but that their customers will realize the opposite -- that using Apple pay is far more secure than other systems. If people start waking up to the fact that all of the information merchants are getting from credit cards can and will be used against them; then systems like Apple Pay are going to destroy the status quo.

What better way to try to stop this then by spouting a Big Lie? The banks are saying that they are worried that Apple is collecting too much information. If they can seed doubt into customers for long enough, then they may succeed in killing it.

No, stop being an idiot.

"regular users" click on files in a list or 2-d grid. They would not even notice if the filesystem allowed more than one file with the same name, and the certainly do not give a damn about case insensitivity. Even if they type at a terminal they use filename-completion and do not care either.

It is also clear that it has nothing to do with user-friendliness or they would map more common errors, such as multiple spaces to single ones, removing leading and trailing whitespace, or mapping equivalent unicode to the same files. They don't do this because they realize that such complex details of the encoding do not belong in the file system api.

Case-insensitivity is a throwback to ancient ASCII-only systems. If you live in the stone age you may think it is a good idea. If you have been exposed to it all your life you may think it is a good idea. But if you were actually intelligent you would know it is wrong.

All modern systems are capable of storing different strings for filenames in different cases. So no, Linux has it right and Windows has it wrong. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you are simply Wrong, with a capital W.

No. Two different byte strings should identify two different files (unless one or both of them are invalid byte streams). Anything else is introducing complexity into the filesystem and potential bugs and security violations, of which this it an excellent example. Sorry, but Unix has it right, and Microsoft and lots of other systems are *WRONG*.

The new news that the government thinks they did it certainly changes my opinion, though I would be curious exactly what the evidence is. I find it hard to believe they would risk making a stupid blunder of an incorrect accusation, so the info must be pretty good, such as directly from a spy inside NK at the hacker facility.

My gut feeling is this is disgruntled Sony employees. Somebody thought it would sound cool to threaten theaters and are probably amazed at the result.

Chrome also complains about self-signed https, so you lose. Sorry.

Except NK denied being behind the hacking.

Now there is no reason to believe anything NK says, but I would think they would be very proud of their computer achievements if they had been behind it.

The reason they don't falsely claim they are behind it is because they are worried the actual hackers would be found and then it would be clear they were lying.

Because they wanted to arrest him for drug trafficking.

Deporting him would mean he would probably sneak back or arrange with his friends still in the USA to continue drug trafficking. If you assume that drug trafficking is something that you don't want (and under current USA laws is something the police are supposed to prevent) then this is a totally logical approach.

I suspect the North Korean will not have a problem getting the USA to give him a tourist visa. He *will* have some trouble getting access to ask the USA for one, and for actually getting out of North Korea to use it.

http://rationalitate.blogspot....

Seems like Houston has minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes, so no.

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.