"Security flaws" are not necessary in a lot of these cases, for the most part if you can reach the TV's IP address you can get to the camera because they put **NO** thought into securing it any further than that.

The same can be said about building automation systems, security systems, HVAC systems, etc. I worked in physical security (key cards, cameras, alarms and the like) for over a decade and a half and the utter lack of security on many of the products was appalling. For example AMAG, the second largest vendor of key card systems, only supported MSDE or SQL 2000 with no service packs until 2012. The most expensive security camera that I ever had to install had one user, root, with a hard coded password of 1234 which could not be changed (we only installed those once, at the customer's insistence. Nice camera though). Cisco's miserable excuse for a video system only worked with XP with no service packs (when SP2 had already been issued).

The Target breach was through a remote access connection for the HVAC installers, rather than through the hardware. The entire company used a single easily cracked password on all installations to allow anyone in the company to service any site, and when they were granted remote access they just used that same password. This is unfortunately common throughout all the construction trade, we had a list of passwords that we had ferreted out used by other companies. I could have logged into any installation done by three of the six largest security installers in North America, and probably half of the others.

More likely they probably won't even bother to kill the camera, just create another press release saying they did.

If it's got the Apple logo on it there will be no shortage of suckers.

That was probably the right thing to do. It's called differential diagnosis, and it doesn't mean that the doctors didn't suspect Lupus from the start. They were being careful to rule out alternatives in order of priority.

If your Word document that you're writing has a grammatical error, it could be caused by many things, from a typo to bad autocompletion to hackers messing with your desktop or bad choice of language dictionary packs etc. You don't start the first treatment by rebooting the computer and replacing the whole MS Office suite. You first try a bunch of less invasive things.

I would say under-regulation, or more to the point, mal-regulation. Unregulated markets inevitably settle into a worst case scenario given time.

In the case of residential property (which is what your link refers to), I agree that some of the regulations there are bad and need to be revised or eliminated. But they have nothing to do with the commercial space falling into squalor.

The current president is destroying the government. There's only a banana republic to be inherited going forward.

Pretty much this.

Banks and payment processors are making money for doing next to nothing every time someone uses a card... other organisations, especially merchants want in on this as they're the ones paying (directly, you're still paying indirectly)

Does anyone actually do this? Sounds like an urban myth to me.

The benefit of gift cards to shops is that they encourage people to spend more precisely because people donâ(TM)t want to lose that 44p. So if you've a gift card for £20, you spend £21 and pay the rest in cash/card.

If inflation is not a tax, then where does the value of newly printed or fractionally lent money come from? Money has no intrinsic value, it's a mere token -- if you add more tokens, the value of every existing token is suddenly lowered.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any, nor does it freeze any value -- all it freezes is some _money_. Any money that's temporarily out of circulation increases the value of any actual assets that are in use.

As for borrowing costs, you got that reversed: if there's inflation, borrowing gives you an advantage by having the real cost decrease as time goes. With deflation, you need to actually pay to borrow.

My observation has been that any streaming package that includes ESPN is automatically well more than 4 times as expensive as any package without it. Perhaps the cable companies should find a way to dump ESPN and pass along the savings to remain viable.

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%, not 1%. Surely, they wouldn't be so incompetent if they meant it?

They don't claim that an inflation of 20% is good, indeed -- but only because with the economy hurting so much even financial institutions can't reliably make money. But, their claim is that any deflation, even of 1% or lower, is worse than a runaway inflation. And that's pure bullshit.

Well... and how, pray tell, the regular folk could make their voices heard? By now 2/3 of those polled who gave a yes/no answer want to Brejoin, yet your three largest parties all swear to keep out.

There's no need for a "backing", what matters is that it's impossible to "print money". Physical metal coins are only one way to do so, and not even the best (as they can be mined, and take up metals that could be put into useful work). Of course, current cryptocurriences are not that good, either -- waste of electricity, waste of disk space (Bitcoin currently needs 700GB to meaningfully participate), transaction costs, etc. Metal coins are merely the most traditional one.

Too bad, those in power (and money = power) have grown too attached to the ability to pull money out of thin air. Debasing of coins was popular for thousands of years, most countries defaulted in early 20th century (Germany 1914, UK 1925, US 1933) then successively removed remaining safety barriers (US went into freefall in 1971). And most of money from nothing is "produced" by banks rather than governments.

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

Fair point, I forget how utterly stupid businesses, particularly large businesses can get about boneheaded requirements that they mandate but do not use or do need, but could better solve it in a separate path rather than mandating it on what should be the 'wrong' product category.

Particularly surprising to forget since I'm basically continuously exposed to that in my job, but guess it eventually faded into the background of me not thinking explicitly about it anymore..