And as stores aren't allowed to pass the fees along to the card holder every person gets stuck paying for the rich guy with the black card.

Amen, brother. Any right wing neoliberals out there should be as hopping mad about this as about raising taxes.

Paying for a service you don't receive has no place in a free market economy. If VISA is providing a service that people value, then people will choose to pay with their card, despite any additional fees incurred for the service provided.

No, but really what VISA is doing is taxing every consumer, whether we value the service they provide or not, then gifting it back to card holders in the form of a rewards program with a spendy redemption clause.

At some level this is against my personal financial interest, but I pay for everything with my debit card (universally accepted in Canada) at the same price as those paying with credit cards, through I receive no bonus rewards. But I do get a nice free market glow of refusing to accept the terms of the free market-abusing assholes who run the credit card oligopolies. I make up my loss by working harder at being an unconsumer.

I did write "break pedal" while still sucking down first coffee. At least I didn't type "break petal". I've done that, too.

Some people experience a brief paralysis on waking. This is caused by different parts of the brain waking up in different order. The brain ordinarily wakes up the steering wheel before the gas pedal, but there are sometimes exceptions.

If you are a careful driver and plan ahead to avoid quick braking, and also accelerate at a very modest rate your benefits would be small with this kind of system. It helps compensate for aggressive driving but it seems like it won't benefit drivers that already are trying to get good gas mileage.

I live in a modest coastal city where the traffic is relatively sedate. My main problem avoiding unnecessary use of the break pedal is that so many traffic lights appear suddenly as you crest a hill or exit a sweeping turn giving you no immediate indication of phase, and then BAM! just before the point of no return it goes yellow.

I pretty much make all my velocity decisions in phase space: how close in position/velocity to I wish to be with the traffic around me at which points in the terrain? I've read that gasoline engines are at the top of their conversion efficiency mound when producing about 2/3rds of maximum rated power, so I'm not shy about briefly laying it on to make a quick adjustment in phase space, but always with the goal of making the least possible use of my brake pedal later on.

Also, we've pretty much capped our top speed at 90 km/l since we're driving a small truck. We had a lovely Toyota Truck from way back that traded some paint at xmas. The smallest replacement truck we could find at a fair price is the ubiquitous Ford Ranger, which is a complete joke as representing a "small" truck.

The chicken tax: Why it's hard to find a small pickup truck

Fifty years ago, the United States slapped a 25 per cent tariff on imported brandy, dextrin, potato starch and small pickups. This was in retaliation to tariffs on imported American chicken imposed by countries like France and Germany.

To this day, the 25 per cent tariff on small pickups remains.

Sad news, ideologues. The entire electable spectrum has left the chicken tax alone, from Nixon to Bush to Clinton to Carter.

Countdown traffic lights may cause accidents, study says

Guess what? The carbon emissions also have a definite consequence. If not climate, then conflict. What's really going on here is escaping the horror of first order terms; it's an actuarial NIMBY effect. One death is a statistic. A billion deaths are somebody else's problem, if the coefficient can be construed as the least bit vague.

The real problem with countdown lights is that they require driver judgement. What you really want are a kind of runway light which indicates whether, from where you are—maintaining your current speed—you're going to make it through or not. The number the driver needs is dependent on individual conditions.

One way to do this would be to pot amber indicators in the pavement calibrated to the speed limit (it really should be called the "speed notice" or the "speed weed"—expect to be noticed/plucked if you drive faster than this). If you're driving at the speed limit, and the nearest such indicator in your forward path is illuminated amber, then you will arrive at the intersection in the amber condition.

If you gun it from 150 meters out from some low initial speed, you'll probably notice that you're losing the race with the amber rabbit in time to rethink your testosterone surge. If not, count on losing the long war of technological measures designed to strip you of your driving privilege. Driving stupidity/dead pedestrians breeds cameras. What part of this simple equation can't these people figure out?

This helps to explain the mysterious Flynn effect, where IQ is purportedly rising in the general population, but it's hard to see in real life. Nobody takes an IQ test sitting behind a steering wheel after rushing out of the house 15 minutes after waking from a dead sleep to a shrieking clock, still fumbling with your phone to check that there's nothing vital you need to know before arriving at the last minute to an important meeting, first thing. That would cancel out the Flynn effect faster than McD's can serve up an egg McMuffin.

IQ is like the mass of the electron uncorrected by the Feynman diagram. Most people spend much of their day swathed in moron/anti-moron particle pairs with a half-life of about 200 ms. Plenty of time to bend metal.

Flywheels do a good job of capturing moronium heat loss from these interacting causes: poor public design, and brain-dead driving public. However, with less moronium in the first place, we could have better design and better decisions. A flywheel weighs about as much as one passenger and you carry it all the time. Cluons are like neutrinos. The extra mass is almost imperceptible.

Guess which is coming down the pike.

Ooops: Mouse slip on my Make Link add-on. I'm sure it clicks anyway, but here it is again: Olivia Fox Cabane: Build Your Personal Charisma

I just watched [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMu_md_5PQ4 Olivia Fox Cabane: Build Your Personal Charisma] after reading TFA.

TFA drive me nuts with the smooth smooth smooth smooth smooth "I'm going to say something eventually" writing style. About 25% of the way in, I was going "just fucking spit it out, if you've got something to say".

Olivia's video presentation is stiff for the first half, but warms up when she gets to warmth, and she does a reasonable job of the question session afterward. This is less a cult than simple consciousness raising. We so rarely think about how charisma is manufactured. We treat it like juicy sausage. Either you've got it or you don't.

What it really boils down to is that as emotional beings, many of us live life hanging our dirty laundry in the front yard, and letting the paper cups from our recycling bin catch in the wind and blow up and down the street. No, the charismatic house is the one with the nicely tended garden—even if there's a giant compost bin in the back yard behind the fence.

She also mentions the power of the placebo effect. I think by this she means that powerful people have to pay powerful fees in order to feel powerful medicine.

The rest of us can buy generics and do just fine.

Local DVD rental store: 10,000 titles in the back catalog. $7 for three rentals, one week. $10 for five rentals, one week.

Netflix can blow themselves blue.

True, I have to wait two years for hit titles to slide off the best renter shelf. This sometimes diverts me to the Criterion shelf. Actually, it's more of an entire wall display than a mere shelf, with as many titles as my local Blockbuster used to have in their entire single-copy foreign movie Independence Day refusnik kiosk (hidden behind the Snack and Grab), the top shelf of which barely came up to my belly button. When I wanted Gong Li, I had to show some butt crack.

I was always determined to stoop.

If the EFF really wants to take a bite of Orwellian ass, they should campaign relentlessly to have the phrase "identity theft" replaced by the phrase "credential theft".

FFS, no-one can steal my gosh-darned identity until they can call up any of my nearest and dearest family members and convince them that it is really me over the course of an hour-long phone conversation.

I'd count that as actual identity theft.

All we get for this careless throwing around of the phrase "identity theft" is taking the spotlight off how poorly designed and implemented many of these credential mechanisms really are. The big institutions ought to wear their own failures, rather than making their customers take the heat, in particular, the insane persistence of black marks even after one has conclusively demonstrated that the black mark was a bungle to begin with.

How this isn't covered under "slander" is scandalous.

The Australis link crashed my plugin-stuffed Mint 16 Firefox 28 shebang twice in a row. I got a good laugh. No problems recently, until this link.

Underling pulls some stupid shit. Boss gets word, but it's political suicide to divulge the mess. Voila! A conspiracy is born.

The man deserves it. He rocks. I've loved the precision of his engagement with fundamental assumptions since my first encounter with the Baker's algorithm.

My Writings is a good time killer. One of my favorite passages is this one:

Writing the proofs turned out to be much more difficult than I had expected. I worked very hard to make them as short and easy to understand as I could. So, I was rather annoyed when a referee said that the proofs seemed to have been written quickly and could be simplified with a little effort. In my replies to the reviews, I referred to that referee as a "supercilious bastard". Some time later, Nancy Lynch confessed to being that referee. She had by then written her own proofs of clock synchronization and realized how hard they were.

They did a fair amount of work together, judging by all the other places her name appears.

I welcome the centenarian SAT, wherein the desiccated (if not decrepit) demonstrate that they retain the mental flexibility to allow necessary social change to redefine the terms of continued living.

The movement loses most of its gloss when retirement age gets bumped to 165. Under present conditions, the extremely gifted can amass enough wealth by the present retirement age to coast on equity for a long time.

This of course all changes once life extension begins to rock the boat. Living forever will, however, always remain highly appealing for the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.

Nice. What's different or unfamiliar is incorrect.

'cause on the first day God wrote a specification document, on the third day he coded madly, on the sixth day God ticked off the last box on the acceptance test plan, and then he sat back and cracked open a can of Galactic Suds.

It comes in galaxies? You bet.

s/heal/heel

Second time this morning. Bad fingers, bad.

That view is no longer tenable

I've attentively followed every stray tidbit to cross my radar about the shadow sector since the publication of The Puzzle Palace, about the peripheral ghosts of which my algebra professor had direct experience.

The gold box agencies can do traffic analysis at scale. They can model metadata at scale. They can't break every damn cipher at scale—neither can they employ the rubber hose password-getter at large scale (the Soviets managed to cover about 10% of their population with blue welts over a thirty year period, but ultimately this did no favours to their economy).

The best approach to scaling crackers is to leak key bits in the purportedly pseudo-random number nonce stream. This is the hardest tampering to identify from the outside of a black box. Even when the black box is reverse engineered and one discovers that random is far from uniformly random (with no stray key-space correlates), some idiot applies Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

How about we agree to make a small exception for the industrial-scale tainting of purportedly random numbers, where discerning the difference between malice and stupidity achieves an elite level of algebraic epsilon? Oh, look, one digit in the source code for the random number generator has a wrong digit. Must have been a careless mistake—as if careless mistakes are a dime a dozen in the land where a poor man's nonce is a persistent agency's key-space collapsing back-channel.

The NSA does not randomly shoot holes in the protection of the American public. Worse than having no back door is having a back-door that somehow becomes shared with the wrong people. What they want is to inject a weakness that only they can exploit, even when their adversaries discover their handiwork.

Just off the top of my head, one way to achieve this is to require that exploiting the leak requires having the intercept history of the channel in hand since day one. The unfortunate flip side is that the specificity of these methods of single-party Achilles-heal exploitation becomes a smoking gun to the presence of a far-from-blind watch master. No ruse is totally perfect.

But you can always keep 90% of the population busy debating whether metadata has any value, such that any debate that makes any progress at all contains only those people who were already sophisticated cranks (recruitment/rubber-hose scale, to mention the carrot and stick). It all works out.

If scale matters, assigning a scant value to metadata can not be so much as trivially entertained by a thinking person. Pity we have so few.

s/basis rule/basic rule

That's a natural error, where my brain had the right word, and my speedy fingers went "close enough" as they often do when there's a hot, fresh, unfinished coffee on my desk they're trying to rush off and levitate.

Semantic interference often contributes. I think my brain went square dancing for a brief moment with the Peano postulates.