Pointless without EMV

Don't expect it soon. The whole point of EMV is to be IMPOSSIBLE to clone. To the credit card chip designers, this thing is exactly the same as a clone-and-spoof attack.

They put a little computer on the card and run encrypted protocols with the store terminal.

The details of the computer are closely held. (I was once asked to work on hardware for one, but it would have required a major security clearance investigation and a contract that, IMHO, would have made it difficult to work on anything else cryptographic afterward.)

They also do their best to avoid designing in things that might make its operation or storage subject to tapping or observation by electrical or mechanical means.

1) Did they FIND any exceptional and useful photovoltaic behavior in the compounds tested?

The NSA certainly knows, and can tell any company they like.

Good point.

Government signals intelligence has a long track record of being used for industrial espionage, leaking both sales and tech info from foreign competitors to the country's own companies.

Examples include China's military leaking Cisco (and apparently other compaies') tech to Huawei, the US bugging Totyta and Nissan for the benefit of US auto companies and leaking intercepted info about competitors' bribery attempts that resulted in Raytheon and McDonnell Douglas getting big contracts that Thomson-Alcatel and Airbus had almost closed, to name just a few.

Even US companies have to worry about US government intercepts, since the US government has been playing favorites domestically as well. Some big examples, not involving signals intelligence, came out of the mortgage crisis, when some banks and other financial institutions were slaughtered (even those NOT in trouble), so their corpses could be absorbed by others with better political connections (and contribution records).

Now a 3rd option is in my area. Haven't noticed any throtteling on Netflix or Youtube. Even a test torrent worked just fine.

Part of the problem is that the government defines "competition" (especially in communication regulation, ever since the initial rollout of analog cellphone service) as starting with two competitors. It writes regulations that stop pushing for competition at two.

As I understand it, with two "competitors", rational pricing optmization algorithms actually drive them to splitting the customer base about equally with a high profit margin. No collusion is necessary - the price and market share transmit enough information to drive the effect.

With four or more you're virtually certain to get somebody squeezed into a small market share but still able to survive. His best strategy, near term, is to compete with a low price or better price:performance ratio and grab market share. This starts a price or price:performance war that drives the market price toward cost plus a livable profit margin and/or makes the better service necessary for market survival. By the time this settles out the little guy is usually a big enough guy that he doesn't get squeezed out.

With three competitors the high profit / low service level equilibrium is somewhat unstable, so it might go any of several ways (three gougers, squeeze out the little guy, or {usually} the price/service war).

1) Did they FIND any exceptional and useful photovoltaic behavior in the compounds tested?

2) How much will this sort of crunch make up of the revenue lost to the rest of the world's migration away from US-based cloud services, in the wake of Snowden's revelations?

Indeed this is ridiculous that the IA would retroactively remove stuff though as you say hopefully just disable access instead.

I think the archive actually does just suppress access rather than purge the actual data, so they can again display it once copyright runs out (if it ever does...).

I also think the point is that newbies may not know about robots.txt and that even an experienced webmaster might accidentally allow access to something private long enough for it to get archived, or receive and honor a takedown notice, so this allows the correction of the error.

It's an 'archive' and should reflect how stuff 'was' at the time; legalities of that obviously being quite murky and hard to defend against expensive lawsuits, but still.

That's why. They have limited funds and need them to buy more disks and stuff, not fight lawsuits. If the choice is not display some stuff or go broke and not display anything, the choice is also obvious.

I wish, though, that they were able to detect when a domain changed hands and not honor robots.txt requests retroactively past the boundary. IMHO a new owner is a new web site that happens to have the same name.

Especially: I wish domain name parking sites didn't put up robots.txt files that cause the archive to immediately purge/hide the previous owners' content. I've lost access to a lot of content from dead sites that way. (It also keeps the owners from rescuing their old content if they don't have personal backups.)

Radishes - both the bulbs and the greens - are just fine (though spicy) in salads.

Also: My chickens LOVE them, though they like grain, chard, bugs, and blueberries progressively better. (I'm not sure where mice and shrews fit into the hierarchy but I'm sure they'd be near the more-desirable end.)

A single large radish, tossed the flock, is the starting move in a game of chicken soccer. The radish quickly takes on the appearance of a soccer ball as they take enough bites to make it dotted red-and-white all over.

And [favored banking companies] don't even have to pay large premiums upfront---dinners, jobs and lobbying is so much cheaper than premiums.

Don't forget major campaign contributions - to candidates and the party - and helping the campaign operations in other ways.

What upgrade could do that with ICE vehicles? Switching to unleaded or low-sulphur diesel were about the only things, everything further improvement (catalytic converters, better efficiency) requires changing vehicles each time.

Unleaded required car changes, too.

Earlier vehicles had valve stems in the engine - especially on the exhaust valve - which were lubricated by lead from the antiknock additive. I understand that valve slides had been changed far in advance of the requirement. But the lead additive was sold for a time for owners of older cars to add in order to protect their engines.

Similarly, some antismog oxygenates caused a lot of car fires in older cars, by rotting the rubber tubes in the parts of the fuel systems that had to flex. (This, of course, got a lot of older, high-pollution cars off the roads, reducing pollution (if you don't count the smoke of the burning car...). Thus the environmentalists didn't complain - or warn people.)

Similarly, ethanol stripped the coatings off the inside of older cars' fuel systems and attracted water, starting corrosion; dissolved some gasket sealents, creating manifold leaks, and dissolved plastic float valves from carburators, again causing major damage to (and retirement of) some older cars. (Sometimes some gasoline would have methanol in it, due to a mistake or a crooked supplier, and this would strip things almost immediately.) Many modern vehicles have different materials,and are rated for substantial percentages of ethanol in the gasoline.

Fukushima has an advantage as a site: Since it's depopulated due to the radiation hazard, there's nobody to complain about how "those ugly windmills are ruining my view".

One thing that has amused me, over the latter half of this year, is the strings of advertisements trying to get people to buy property in Belieze and move there, as a retirement home and/or tax haven.

Apparently the authorities chasing of MacAfee (allegedly on trupmed-up evidence in an effort by corrupt officials to seize his remaining wealth, or something of the sort) has caused others. seeking a comfy paradise and tax haven, decide this country is too risky and look elsewhere.

It would be interesting to find out how badly this has hurt the country's property values and economy.

Not everybody in the country. Just much of the capital city slum around the transmitting tower.

Notice that the field got so weak that, in part of the country, it was too weak to be adequately processed by a RADIO RECEIVER.

A country-covering station can easily transmit several hundred thousand watts. A fully illuminated fluorescent tube of the era is burning 10 watts per foot - at 4our or eight feet per lamp. Assuming ten thousand apartments, each with a four-foot lamp (with some wires arranged to get it to normal brightness), and you lose 400,000 watts from the radiated power.

This device will also interfere with the radio signals. It will both attenuate them and create harmonics due to the rectifiers.

"Raising ground resistance" by having radio-energy-utilizing devices pull power from the air is a non-trivial issue.

Example: A former colleague had, previously, been a plant manager for a factory in a small African country. The plant was in the country's capital, home to their "voice of the fearless leader" high-powered radio station.

One day, while touring the plant, he found a collection of burned-out fluorescent tubes, and had them hauled away. Shortly after he was contacted by his maintenance head, who asked him not to do it again. It seems there was a black market in burned out fluorescent tubes.

The radio station was so strong that, if you put three feet of wire on each end of a burned-out tube it would light up quite nicely from the radio power. A lot of people couldn't afford electricity and light fixtures. But a burned out tube and six feet of wire was readily available. So much of the town's houses were illuminated this way.

So many were, in fact, that the radio signal would no longer reach the edges of the country. So Fearless Leader would send his troops through town when the attenuation got to be a problem, and they'd confiscate and smash the tubes of all the improvised radio-powered lights they found. After each such raid, the people would be down at the plant to buy more "dead" tubes, creating a profitable side-business for the maintenance guy.

They told us about a similar case to this in EE school in the '60s. This is the story. (I have no footnotes to see if it's real...)

Power company ran high lines over a dairy farmer's land. But they would still charge him tens of thousands to run power to his site.

Farmer ran some wires under the high-tension lines and coupled well enough (B and/or E fields) to pull a bunch of power. Stepped it down with some transformers and ran his milking machines with it.

Power company noticed the drain on the high-line, looked for the source of leakage, found the farmer, and sued. Farmer said that "they should keep their power in their wires". Judge agreed and threw the suit out.

Power company, not to be stymied, analyzed how the farmer had designed his tap. Then they switched the power on the high lines in order to throw some destructive transients into his equipment (without bothering the regular grid, of course). Farmer's equipment didn't have adequate surge protection to handle this sort of thing. Result: His equipment was destroyed and his milking barn caught fire.

The lesson was about the dangers of transient on transmission lines and the fact that the energy is actually transmitted in the space AROUND the lines. But it had the subtext that trying to take advantage of the latter is really hazardous due to the former.

I stopped using Chrome because it's extensions were not up to par with Firefox addons.
And now I feel less inclined to use Chrome at all.

Ditto. What does Google hope to accomplish with this? Switching to Firefox takes less than 5 minutes.

I stopped using Chrome because they kept forcing updates that changed the interface, without asking for permission or providing a reverse-compatibility option.

The last straw for me was when they deleted the ability to purge entries from the suggestion pop-down in the address bar without completely purging the browsing history, shortly before I typoed up a not-safe-for-work URL. I'm now back on Firefox evan at my desk, while the rest of the company is still on Chrome.

I'm with the FOSS people on this point: Reducing a user's control over his own computer - especially in job-threatening ways - is evil.

They can probably determine which time zone the user mostly is in from the logs alone.

With drug users working on Doper Substandard Time? That would be a stretch.