Magnetic strip data contains different information than what's read off the card; it effectively replaces the CVN for swiped card-present transactions. The issuing bank goes through a different (though functionally equivalent) routine to authorize the payment when they're sent PAN/CVN/exp instead of the raw track data.

Actually, that's simply because it's against PCI regulation to store the CVN.

Most companies don't realize that asking for it on subsequent transactions is pointless so long as you ask for it the first time: you can still prove (with reasonable certainty) the customer had the card in-hand at some point; i.e. it wasn't bought from a Russian warez site.

In practice that's not true at all, but since when do theory and practice ever overlap?

It's not required in order to make the transaction (nor, technically, is anything other than the account number; however, your interchange costs increase and your ability to fight chargebacks decrease by providing less information).

Two words: fraud detection.

Or just ask a bunch of random coworkers to forward it to you, citing that you missed/deleted the original and want to make sure you have a copy. Tweak based on the variances you discover.

People caught peeing in a bush are treated the same as child molesters under this law. It also includes people that in any way benefit from solicited sex, including the family of people willingly involved in the sex trade.

Violent offenders are already incarcerated, and those that have been released from prison after serving their time are still pretty closely monitored. This proposition sought to make a crime "more illegal" in order to increase the government's authority. The weasel-wording of the bill's description ("increase penalties for sex trafficking") allowed that to get through with an overwhelming majority; suffice to say, I'm not impressed.

This is the correct behavior (in most states). Hate it? Me too. Bitch at your local government person.

I imagine this allows ill patients to get access to something that will bring a much cleaner and painless death than downing an entire bottle of painkillers; i.e. more like a cyanide capsule.

It's easy to buy a lethal dose of caffeine (fairly cheap!) off Amazon, but going by how having way too much coffee feels, that would be a pretty crappy way to off oneself. Seems to go against that whole "dignity" thing they're aiming for.

The TED talk has a few clips.

Unsubsidized smartphones easily cost $600+, which constitutes grand larceny (often a felony) in most states.

I agree that the current holder of the device is probably not the person who stole it, but over a few data points it probably wouldn't be terribly difficult (yet) to track it back to the original thief, what with everything being location-aware these days. That said, you're right - if we just shut the devices off immediately, the desire to steal phones should drop to nearly zero overnight.

Do you actually carry multiple batteries?

Serious question. I hear people gripe about this all the time, but I don't know ANYONE who actually carries extra batteries. I only hear of people either carrying a charging cable or asking to borrow one.

So, you *actually* want a phone that gets better battery life.

I think the heart of it stems from the fact that even non-users are affected by this kind of thing - at least unless they go massively out of their way to avoid it. Look at the opposition and non-adoption of the DNT header, to actively* express that you do not want to be tracked by these companies. They just don't care about the human side of things if there's money to be made.

But at the same time, it's like the banking crisis. In theory, a single business going under should only hurt its direct customers. There's going to be some ripple effect in there, but what we see today is far beyond what anyone would have expected. There's now so much interdependency between these companies that one doing something stupid affects half the world.

However I don't blame SV for this. It's just a lot more prominent because there's so much (largely stupid and pointless) tech coming out of here. Give it a couple years now that we're no longer throwing $2m at a random college kid with no business model and aspirations of ten million users and you'll see it die off quite a bit (VCs are, it seems, finally looking at the business side of things again before investing). It was happening in NY and Boston too, just not nearly to the same degree since those investors weren't all high on recent tech IPOs.

* Yes, fuck you IE10 for not understanding the concept of "actively". Even when you're using new tech, you somehow manage to still screw it up for everyone.

Plows scrape the asphalt pretty aggressively precisely to remove layers of ice - a significant factor as to why roads in colder climates need to be repaired quite frequently.

Sure, but that doesn't mean someone legally allowed to fill the market must do so. There's a huge market for $1000 Ferraris, but you don't see them rushing to fill it.

Yes, that's technically true.

However, that's only illegal because we invented "better" laws to make something that was already illegal (unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material) "more" illegal (breaking the encryption used to prevent the former).

Politicians need to stop rejecting these "we need better tools" lobbyist-created laws and tell them to use the perfectly valid tools they already have in place. I know this will never happen, but wishful thinking. Being illegal - in terms of the letter of the law - is a pretty binary thing. I think content producers should have every right to sue people for distributing their material, but we don't need to give them stuff to make gumming up the legal system with their stuff any easier.

It's like the arguments claiming that it would be legal to drive high if we legalized marijuana: of course it's not - that's both a DUI* and reckless driving. You don't need to add a new law for driving high because it's already illegal under other laws. Distributing copyrighted content that you're not the rights-holder of has been illegal since we introduced copyright, so adding the DMCA** was completely unnecessary.

* There are slight differences between DWI and DUI, and the meaning varies slightly from state to state. Many places are intentionally vague on the meaning of "under the influence" to (rightly) catch non-alcoholic substances that impair one's ability to safely operate a vehicle.

** The law is fundamentally flawed anyway, as it's outlawing a specific implementation of an undesired behavior. It would be like making murder by bludgeoning someone with a lead pipe illegal. Great - I'll just use a knife instead. You're trying to stop the murder, not the misuse of lead pipes. As such, it'll be obsoleted by the next major round of technical advances.