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Comment Re:UK as well (Score 1) 1387

Fahrenheit (I even had to go and look up the spelling) has completely disappeared. I have absolutely no idea what the weather in Fahrenheit means other than doing some mental arithmetic.

I don't agree. I've found that us Brits tend to use Celsius for cold temperatures and Fahrenheit for warm when discussing the weather (a national past-time). So when its Winter we say its 2 degrees outside, but in the Summer we say wow its 90 degrees and people will know what the weather will feel like. If you told me it was 35 degrees C I would know it would be hot but not how hot. Equally, if you told me it was 20 degrees F I would know it was cold but not how cold.

Submission + - colorful history of personal checks (bradfordexchangechecks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bradford Exchange Checks, a leader in online check printing industry has created an infographic showing the history of checks from the third century A.D to the present. The infographic tells a really interesting story about how checks came into use and the many times throughout history when they were utilized.
Security

Submission + - The World's First Computer Password? It Was Useles (wired.com) 1

Submitted by
MikeatWired
MikeatWired writes: "If you’re like most people, you’re annoyed by passwords. So who's to blame? Who invented the computer password? They probably arrived at MIT in the mid-1960s, when researchers built a massive time-sharing computer called CTSS. Technology changes. But, then again, it doesn't, writes Bob McMillan. Twenty-five years after the fact, Allan Scherr, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT in the early ’60s, came clean about the earliest documented case of password theft. In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn’t nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he’d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system. 'There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,' he remembered in a pamphlet (PDF) written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. 'Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.' To spread the guilt around, Scherr then handed the passwords over to other users. One of them — J.C.R. Licklieder — promptly started logging into the account of the computer lab’s director Robert Fano, and leaving “taunting messages” behind."

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