There's about 300km from London to Amsterdam. However, due to this little thing called the North Sea, the trip on a high-speed train (a real one) takes a bit more than 4 hours (if you get your connection right between the Thalys and the Eurostar in Brussels). Otherwise it takes about 5 hours.

But of course the train will take you from Amsterdam Centraal to London Victoria, not from Schiphol to Hearthrow, Luton, or, God forbid, Gatwick.

So overall, I'm not sure which trip is going to release the largest amount of CO2. Probably the plane one, cause the Eurostar runs mainly on nuclear power...

Why did you leave a position as a "star programmer" to move into network administration? Why restart at the bottom of the ladder?

I just scan everything. And I mean everything.

The Fujitsu S1500M is a great piece of kit, but pretty expensive. But it can scan and OCR big folders in a manner of minutes. And the software does not suck, which is much more than can be said about the software that usually comes with flatbed scanners. I just hope it could remove the staples as well.

All those scans are just dumped in one big folder. Then Spotlight makes it a breeze to find something. Anectodal evidence shows that it works on Windows too.

I still keep the original paper version, in one big paper folder. Once a year I review the content, throw away the outdated files and move the rest to long-term storage.

Now, if a provider offers an electronic delivery option, I usually pick that instead, if the provider is reliable.

If it was such an interesting feature, TV manufacturers could just licence the tech from PrimeSense, the company behind Kinect, and built it straight into TVs...

Or any other spreadsheet program.

Now of course I admit that Excel is probably not as flexible as R. However, unless your job is to produce stunning, tailor-made graphs, a spreadsheet application will deliver results a lot faster.

The NFC industry suffers from two bigs issues.

1. Huge installed base. There's already lots and lots of installed contactless systems : while many are supposed to follow standards, the standards are unfortunately not good enough to make sure that a NFC phone that would work in London would also work in Amsterdam.

2. Unclear business model. NFC involves too many powerful stakeholders : SIM card manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, service providers (banks, transportation operators), mobile telcos ... They all want a vut of the action: making them all agree on a clear business model is very difficult.

I hoped that the combined pressure and will of mighy Google and Apple would finally move things forward. Looks like the complexity of NFC defeated another big corp.

Totally agree. This book gets great reviews because it is entertaining, but fails totally as an "guide". It will not turn anyone into a security practioner.

Regarding the author, while his heart is certainly in the right place, his research has erred a little on the sensatianalistic side ("Chip and Pin is Broken!"). I will have a look at this book, but my expectations are low.

... and most of them run in a controlled environment (server-side). So lots of Joel's advice is not going to apply.
Then they have the balls of comparing their move to the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X!
In the end, while their story is interesting, it adds really little value to the "Rewrite/No Rewrite" debate.

I'm all for energy-efficient algorithms and datacenter but this PR is nothing but green-washing. IBM's algorithm is just faster so it uses less energy. Duh.

Automatically spreading loads across datacenters in multiple locations to take advantage of local environmental conditions so you don't have to use chillers, now that's something.

Effective Java, Second Edition, by Bloch. This book is quite unique and can save you a lot of journey time as you travel the path from "beginner" to "expert". I wish it had been available when I started. Caution: it can make you grow a beard and mumble about the advantages of respecting the .equals() contract.

The weaknesses of this algorithm are well-known and a new version that fixes those issues has been available for a long time. Now, does anyone knows whether this new version has been deployed everywhere? Who is still relying on the older version?

BTW, the algorithm used by 3G networks is different. It is based on AES and the design is publically available.

Encrypting a hard drive protects the confidentiality of its data. It does not prevent you from cloning the hard drive i.e. it does not protect the authenticity of the hard drive.

In many applications that use RFID tags, authenticity is much more important than confidentiality. Those researchers seem to propose a way to authenticate the RFID tag using its "fingerprint". What I'm saying is that a dynamic challenge-response scheme is much more practical and more reliable.

Crypto is not only about encrypting data.

If you want a secure challenge/response mechanism it would require much more power, an active tag would be required.

An active RFID tag (i.e. a battery powered tag) is not required. Just look at DESFire cards: probably not as cheap as passive RFID tags but they can handle a simple challenge/response mechanism. If you want something more beefy, look at the DDA mechanism specified by EMV and used by Visa and Mastercard: it uses RSA with 3 levels of public keys. It works just fine on simple microprocessor-based contactless cards.

Just use a sensible crypographic authentication mechanism and be done with it. I guess that it is interesting from a "pure science" point of view but I'm not quite sure that this should be used to detect fake passports.