With PIN-based transactions on financial cards, the PIN is defined by the contract as the method of your approval, so no other signature is required. And I have yet to meet a cashier who is qualified as a graphologist who is legally qualified to compare a signed charge slip with the signature on the back of the card. Instead, most cashiers are trained to ignore the signature, other than making sure they got one. Some chains don't even show the customer's signature to the cashier, and some don't require the customers to show their charge card.

As this rolls out, we will see that certain issuer's cards will have PIN requirements, others will have signature requirements. It will vary by bank.

Something to note is that many banks will certainly get it wrong as this rolls out. We observed this from Canada's EMV experience. The Canadian bankers all thought they'd define a certain set of rules with EMV that would ensure every card was secured by defining PIN requirements, offline transactions, dollar limits on the cards, etc. It turned out that their cards were almost unusable for a lot of transactions, and they succeeded in making lots of people switch back to cash. The US banks are not eager to repeat that experience, but they are just as likely to get it wrong.

This will likely not be a smooth transition. Merchants and customers are all going to run into roadblocks, and lots of people are going to be upset before it's all done. I'd suggest patience, and to politely let your bank know of trouble as soon as you encounter a problem. The more complaints they hear, the more incentive they'll have to fix it before their customers jump ship for the few banks that get it right.

It's kind of sad that you underestimate kids like that.

The US market is moving rapidly to chip, as the PCI has mandated a liability shift as of October 2015. After that date, any merchants who don't demand a chip instead of a mag stripe will be fully liable for any fraud on the account, so the incentive for retailers to abandon mag stripes is very strong.

I have no doubt that Coin will be implemented well, and will provide a measure of physical security that plastic cards don't. However, be assured that retailers are indeed suspicious of them because they are not original cards. No institution has yet decided to officially say yes or no to them - everyone is kind of waiting for guidance from the PCI. And with Chip-and-PIN only a year out, they may just decide to not decide.

Once the merchants have the terminals in place and the liability has shifted to them, the issuers will have strong incentive to deploy chip cards, as they will have the least secure piece of the system. Mag stripes will be gone in just a few years.

That will depend on your bank, and your account. Some banks will require customers to use PINs, others may not.

Yes. Teach him or her once, and they feel like they now know the secrets of science. They'll soon be looking up exact lat/lon for their location, and setting it more precisely than the affordable (cheap) mechanism can handle, which is just fine. This also teaches them how to find Polaris. And if they ever get the itch to take some photographs, they'll have the right tool for the job.

After looking at Saturn's rings and spotting the Galilean moons, they're going to want to see other famous features; looking for the Messier objects is a great challenge for kids. This will quickly teach them a few other foundational skills, too: how to read a star chart, Right Ascension and Declination, and sidereal time. All this can be done on a relatively inexpensive 4" reflector with a small equatorial mount on a tripod.

A Dobsonian will give much clearer pictures for the money, and is great for viewing easily identifiable objects, but it's not going to give them a working understanding of celestial mechanics.

I'm sorry that such hell holes persist in 21st century USA, but that has nothing to do with my comment. We have fiber criss-crossing the entire state, including the remotest northern towns. Yes, the money may have originated primarily from the cities, but it's being spent statewide. And we have impoverished areas, But public money can only pull fibers just so far. We can't drag one up every driveway in the state.

If you want to fix your state, start by voting to raise taxes by an order of magnitude across rich and poor alike. If you're always led by selfish people who won't ever raise taxes, nothing will continue to happen.

Interesting idea, but the data doesn't support it.

While Massachusetts has 858 people per square mile, the population density of Minnesota, 68.1, is almost identical to Mississippi, with 63.7 people per square mile.

U.S. Census data also shows a significantly higher percentage of residents with internet connectivity in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, and significantly lower percentage in Mississippi. (Sorry, the source, http://www.census.gov/prod/201..., doesn't list the exact percentages, but I'm sure they'd be available if they were relevant.)

If density were that much of a factor, I would expect the states with similar density to have similar connectivity rates. The data doesn't bear that out.

Comparing the average ACT scores of the three states, Massachusetts comes in at 24.1, Minnesota at 22.8, and Mississippi at 18.7. Minnesota is closer to Massachusetts than Mississippi.

It's also worth noting that Minnesota's more recent governors have made statewide high speed internet a priority to help grow the economy.

At least someone is thinking of the children!

Heartbleed may be a huge IT problem, but you seem to have forgotten that health care system decisions are not made by IT security managers. They are run by demi-gods that we mere mortals are instructed to refer to as "doctors." And the doctor's prioritized view of IT is this:

#1. Be Available. I may need this system right this second in order to save a life. I don't care if it's my kid's Nintendo DS, I'm telling you it might save a life.
#2. Stay The Hell Out Of My Way. Don't interrupt me when I'm saving someone's life. And you don't know when that is; just that if you're interrupting me, it probably is now.
#3. Give Me Exactly What I Want. For I am the giver of life and death, and you must respect me.

So unless a problem is currently causing them an outage (so not just any old problem, it has to be causing an actual outage), it won't rise to the level of severity that says "skip all quality control processes and immediately patch this."

It doesn't matter if the router is vulnerable to hacking. It doesn't matter if a hacker who pwns the router could brick it. It doesn't matter if he is stealing patient records. Those things aren't interfering with #1, 2, or 3. So follow procedures, deploy it in a lab, go through testing and QA, and install it only on Wednesday afternoons when the hospital admins are all on the back nine.

Given our track record with Juniper, "drop everything and patch now" is a foolhardy approach, especially with something as important as a border router or firewall. I wouldn't apply any of their patches without seeing a long track record of safety. With heartbleed there was an unknown level of risk that they would be attacked; with any given Juniper patch there is a known risk the network would just go down.

Of course, given the choice, I wouldn't select a Juniper device to route packets to a doghouse, and would never place one as a mission critical node on any network. Then again, that's not my choice to make, just one we have to live with.

Apparently the sound from your mic and the echo from your gyroscopes were both parsed by your speech-to-text converter. I guess it works better than we thought!

Apple fixed that problem. The iPhone has no battery door, so it can't be removed in case you don't want the phone to spy on you.

When you look at the technical advancements in agriculture, they're composed of small features integrated in to (or bolted on to) existing equipment. You don't need a new tractor, you just need to mount a GPS receiver and a database onto your old one. A processor no bigger than a cell phone can do lots of that. Adding electrically operated valves to an existing fertilizer or pesticide spray system? Again, very small. It doesn't have to auto-steer, it just has to know where it is, and where it's been.

The makers don't have to build the tractors, they just want to improve them.

I realize reading the article is considered bad form, but if you read it you'd learn they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. That's somewhere between zero to two months. Lots of big shops have a monthly patching cycle, and you don't just drop every patch into a mission critical system the day it arrives.