Slashdot insists that I actually type the punchline, a zebra

Not so sure about "years later". I have an Asus laptop that I bought three or so years ago and it has facial recognition login. That was cool at the time and I figured what the hell I paid for it already so I trained it to login using my face. It worked really well.

That was three years ago, I haven't changed the configuration but now it doesn't work any more :(

I do, the right crop can turn a bad large picture into a good small one.

I was a smart kid at school and in my country they did, at that time, attempt to fast-track such children. This was many years ago and these days they have learnt from their mistakes and handle the whole thing much more sensitively.

It was a disaster for me however - they just advanced me into the next academic year. I could still learn the material with no effort and was still bored, but now I was also the smallest (important when you're age 7 and nobody wants you on their informal games team) and although I was smarter my shaky social skills were now a year behind everyone else's.

Coupled with a few other factors (poverty at home relative to others) it set me back *a lot* in life and I was 30 or so before I really got over it.

tl;dr Teacher, leave them smart kids alone

Chip and PIN has seen widespread use for years now and would probably stop this kind of attack. Remember you have hardware-based encryption happening not only in the card reader but also in the card itself. An amazing amount of crypto happens at step one just so that the card can satisfy itself that it is indeed inside a valid reader. Then some more so that the reader can be confident it has a real card. Once all the authorisation and monetary amounts are complete then the reader finally dumps out an encrypted blob. Malware that had got root in the POS terminal could deny the transaction from happening but could not change the amount or snarf any of the card information. The only time I have heard of any cracks in this scheme was a murky story of collusion with employees at the card reader manufacturing facility, which is a lot less of a risk than poorly-configured POS.

Where security is concerned I don't want New And Shiny, I want Old And Tested. I'll stick with iptables.

Our government used global warming to justify creation of a complete new tax ("Carbon Tax".) Call me cynical but that is in itself all I need to feel very suspicious of the whole thing.

I believe we need a new Godwin's law that kicks in the first time someone expresses their opinion by calling someone else a moron or an idiot. I sometimes run OpenVPN on my Android handset; The phone is my property, I am not an end user, and the reason I use OpenVPN is nothing to do with work. So no I do not have "MDM" and am also NOT A MORON.

I think "religious choice" is a bit strong. it would be more correct to say that it is part of the furniture for adherents to some religions. I know plenty of people who are not religious and also don't like to eat meat. There is anyway a great military tradition of avoiding meat; Roman Legionaries for example were pretty hardcore guys but hated meat and if they were forced to eat it through circumstances (run out of other things to eat) then unrest and perhaps even near-mutinies were not uncommon.

Well actually this is a WWW site, it's called a "World Wide" web for a reason you know.

You "translate" when you convert one language to another, for example during translation into French you will be replacing the English word "mother" with its French equivalent "mère". However "transliterating" is different. Both English and French use the same letter M for the sound at the beginning of "mother." As it happens so does Cyrillic use the same letter M. This is not guaranteed for all letters though and with a different example "father" Cyrillic uses a circle with a vertical stroke through it for the sound at the beginning. Because the Russians have no native words for many modern concepts and computer terms they are happy to borrow from other languages. Russians use the word "online" in the same sense that we do. Although when you actually hear a Russian speak that word it sounds more like "orn-layeen".

Thanks found and bought a used copy very cheap, 4 quid delivered to UK.

I've been experimenting with Sleep as Android which uses your phone's accelerometer to measure your physical movements and thus your mental state during sleep, When it detects REM sleep it plays an audio loop "you are dreaming". Not managed to do anything exciting in my dreams yet but looks promising to me.

"Too much choice" might be a real argument in some contexts (such as Linux desktop) but certainly not in the world of Android phones.

Most people don't flash a custom ROM or change the launcher. Literally everyone I know just accepts (and grumbles about) whatever configuration the vendor burnt in at the factory. The more adventurous ones just possibly might create a custom wallpaper or ringtone but that's it.

Unbelievably some don't even know they can install apps, or do know but avoid doing so "in case I mess anything up". Quite rightly they understand that they hold in their hand a complex computer for which they will get absolutely no assistance to fix anything they do which stops it working.

Put your handbrake on if your vehicle is stationary. It is politeness for the guy behind you, so you are not shining a bright red light in his eyes for 45 seconds. Also if someone rear-ends you, and you are forced forward to hit the car in front, then your insurance company WILL ding you for it.