Sorry, you're factually incorrect. There are plenty of cars made in Germany with a US badge. Ford and GM both have factories building US-badged cars in Germany.

The very first piece of internet malware was a worm that exploited sendmail on several operating systems, way back in the late 1980s and spread without user interaction (it wasn't an MUA worm like pretty much all of the email worms since, but a worm that really did exploit bugs in the MTA).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Mostly because they use the NSA spy program to identify the ACs and send the mounties to snowboard them.

(caveat - they don't waterboard except in summer)

Have to agree that all this focus on End Game - whether in Diablo or in WoW, totally cheeses me off.

I hate end game. Everyone shouts and yells and gets upset if you don't do it perfectly - it's a GAME. you're supposed to have FUN.

At least GTA V never had a cash auction house.

Which is why I switched.

I managed to coax Ubuntu 13.04 (32-bit) into life on a Sony Vaio laptop, Athlon 1000, 512MB RAM (from c.2001) with Windows XP a couple of weeks ago.

I had to hack the install scripts to make it run with the VESA graphics drivers (the ancient ati ones were broken) but it ran quite nicely (without the composting desktop environment) with LXDE. Firefox was very responsive on it while compiling a bunch of code at the same time, running MySQL and a commercial Windows app under Wine.

Windows XP will not be missed.

It's kind of hilarious to read people singing the praises of XP, which most geeks regarded as a bloated "Fisher Price" version of 2000.

Absolutely. Each new version of Windows is bigger, slower and more cumbersome than the last. People whinge and complain for a few months, and instead of switching to an alternative, they train themselves to get used to it. Then they buy a bigger computer to mitigate the lack of speed. That doesn't fix the constant dumbing-down of the UI, though.

Then the cycle repeats. I'm sure psychologists have a name for it.

It's a bit like that Monty Python thing where the knight keeps getting limbs chopped off but still fights on.

'On the downside, how many kids/grandkids are there that will know how to fix their parents/grandparents Linux machines?'

"Probably close to the same amount that will know how to fix their Windows 8 machine."

so zero, then because windows 8 can't be fixed, it uses massive hdd space and always runs about 20 live tiles that constantly break and oem software breaks too because they assumed it would be like win7, and it is not, you can't power it off without invoking the shutdown command. and while it can be learned in 20 minutes on youtube (i did that when mom needed a new laptop) how many people who know xp will have a chance at fixing win8? which cannot be fully repaired because some of the live tiles are immune to deletion.

My first modems were back in the 1970s, when 300 baud was fast and really expensive.

I've had them for occasional use up until around 2006, but I added DSL around 1996 and cable modem in 1999.

But I used to set up modems for various uses in business much later than that.

Actually, if you live near the gulf coast, building a house that can float, and using the first story as a garage and for washer/dryer/mudroom is a very useful thing to do.

In Vietnam and many nations they build houses that are essentially boats on poles that float up when the rivers periodically flood.

Just go to the Seattle Times and read some of the actual scientific research from one of the world's top research universities in the article (two-part) on climate change

Now. Stop whining. Do something. But get your head out of the sand.

Very true, but that's 5% of normal production when there's already a shortage. The DRAM market is highly cyclical, so this is coming at the point in the cycle where prices are already on the rise due to a shortage of production, which is just about the worst time for this to happen.

How often does that happen? Pretty infrequently I'd wager - at least not frequently enough to warrant the inevitable privacy battle with the unions and the much higher installation cost of a fingerprint system when compared to an RFID reader based system (especially given you already have maintenance staff with expertise of RFID systems given they are maintaining the Oyster system already).

Since I'd bet the cleaners have to wear an identification badge and will continue having to do so after any fingerpirnting system were to be put in, put the RFID chip in the badge and the additional cost of the badges is pretty close to zero. Additionally an RFID badge can be dual-purposed to work on the Oyster system for when cleaners need to go through the ticket barriers.

Basically, fingerprinting is a bad idea because:
1. The cost of fighting it with the union vs the trivial savings a fingerprint reader system can possibly give over an RFID badge system. (Given that the cleaners and their union are not computer experts - how do they know to trust the company when it says "We only store hashed versions of your fingerprint, not the actual image"? They can't verify it. Not even the person installing it can verify exactly what's being done with the images before hashing given the software is going to be closed source. And in any case, an image does go to the server before hashing and if a server is compromised, the fingerprint images can still be siphoned off by the intruder as they come off the readers.
2. The cost of the fingerprint readers and maintaining them, especially considering cleaners will probably often have dirty hands because of the nature of their job and that the readers are likely to be in conditions that are not very good for optical systems - dirt, high humidity etc.
3. RFID system will still prevent the most popular form of abuse, phoning a mate to sign in for you if you're late. You're not going to get your RFID card to your mate already at work any quicker than getting yourself + RFID card to work.
4. Given the stations all have CCTV it won't be hard in any case to prove that someone has been touching in for someone else when it is noticed by a supervisor.

Basically a fingerprint based signin solution is expensive and overcomplex when compared to its possible benefits over a much cheaper RFID card in the ID badges that the cleaners almost certainly already have to wear to work.

The initial hardware for card based systems is far far cheaper though. The cost difference will probably buy an awful lot of cards. The London Underground also has a huge existing network of card readers too, so it's likely they get a very good bulk discount on RFID readers. Millions of commuters manage to find their card while walking to and from a tube train, workers can manage it too (the RFID cards will work through a wallet, you don't even need to get the card out).

It's extremely unlikely the fingerprint scanner device itself does any mathematical transform, much more likely an image is sent to whatever the fingerprint reader is connected to, and code running on this system does the actual work (it makes for a cheaper embedded system if you can use a less powerful microcontroller and offload the work to the server that must be present for the system to work). Compromise the server and you can get the images as they come off the scanner. Or the police can request to management that code is put into the system to send the images of fingerprints to them.