Back when credit cards were still charge cards too. When revolving credit cards (where you don't have to pay each money) changed their names to credit cards (credit is a positive, charge is a negative), AMEX kept the charge card description.

AMEX reminded me of this twice when I didn't pay in full at the end of the month. They said they didn't work that way and I wouldn't be able to charge anything until I paid it off. I replied that I didn't mind because I only used it on corporate trips and I didn't have another one for months, by which point the company would have reimbursed me and I would pay AMEX.

I was very much against them, in fact swearing I would smash my passport's smart chip when I got a new passport that had one.

But having read it with my phone, I'm impressed. You need key data from the printed page to make the NFC work and as you mention, the passports are unreadable when closed.

I think it's really well done. I'm a bit unsure quite what it's good for since it is slower than swiping it, I can only figure it was done just because putting that much info in a barcode was infeasible.

Now let me submit my pic as a link to a PNG or whatever instead of printing out a picture, having them scan it back in and turn it into a JPEG2000.

I have a VISA card with NFC and multiple tag readers for my phone and none of the tag readers can get any info like that out of the card. I've got apps that can read fare cards, passports, etc. but I can't find anything on my credit card.

What am I missing?

That's how long it takes to consume the metal spark plug electrodes.

Also, I have to stop and put in liquid every 300 miles or so, but that is immaterial to my range calculations.

And besides that, if you look at the charts, this doesn't cause a loss of capacity, even an apparent loss of capacity. Instead the voltage just reads high during charging. It appears it can foul up capacity remaining estimates, but not actually change the capacity remaining.

And yet here is the other side of the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_inventions

Wi-Fi being on that list.

CSIRO talks out of two sides of its mouth. It wants to take credit for Wi-Fi. They promote themselves this way, and you even see the Science Minister of Australia (Evans) stating "It's hard to imagine an Australian-invented technology that has had a greater impact on the way we live and work".

But then in technical circles where they face informed response, they play things down.

And no, CSIRO did not discuss with IEEE the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard. The standard was published in 1997 and CSIRO didn't pipe up until later. They were not even on the 802.11 committee. This is standard submarine trolling.

And their FRAND terms? They wanted $4 per device. This would amount to more than the entire cost of a WiFi chip.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-government-invented-wifi-and-sued-its-way-to-430-million/

Brazil confiscated huge amounts of money 23 years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21876149

'In her first act, Zelia, as she was known, went on national television to tell the country that all bank accounts were being frozen and that no-one could access more than 50,000 new cruzados in the currency of the time (a sum then worth about $1,250).'

This isn't a new thing, you just didn't know about it before. It's not necessarily going to shake all confidence in the system just because you suddenly found out about confiscation.

What is it they think SV CEOs and VCs really know how to do well actually?

It isn't solve the world's problems, it's monetize them.

It's more along the lines of turning what used to be a one-time $35 dollar product you purchase into a $8/month for-the-rest-of-your-life monthly service fee.

It's presumably for the type of machine that buys back cell phones.

http://www.ecoatm.com/

No, Slot 1 was to allow them to put the cache on the same board as the processor soldered down so they could sell you the cache RAM instead of empty sockets you could fill with cheaper SRAM from another company.

And yeah, once they moved the L2 cache RAM on-die, there was no advantage to slot 1 anymore and a ton of downside in the cost of it. So they dumped it.

Intel has frequently leveraged their CPU dominance to try to become the #1 seller for other items on the motherboard too. They did it with their special gigabit ethernet chips that attached to the FSB instead of PCI for example.