Sounds like you've done a lot on making different pieces of the IT puzzle work together on the infrastructure side. Maybe there's something there?

When it costs eight or nine orders of magnitude more to produce the money than the face value of the money itself, that's generally regarded as a design flaw. It's a sure bet that you could absorb a whole heck of a lot of losses from counterfeiting for the cost of inventing new quantum particle manipulation and testing technologies and distributing them throughout a banking/finance system. By the time it pays for itself, you'd need to have currency that can survive commerce via warp drive.

Separate point -- even if the physics don't preclude the whole concept, what do you want to bet you couldn't do the testing in a non-destructive manner (i.e., without affecting the properties of the quantum particles). "Well, it WAS a real $20 bill. Oops."

This one seemed pretty intuitive to me. If you've lived a longer life, you probably have a bigger list of personal experiences to pick from where there are words/phrases to build passwords around that are meaningful to you.

I wonder at what point gTLDs are going to make it harder to recognize a URL when it comes up in text. Right now, I expect it's not too hard to write code that identifies a URL as a URL and sets up a link. But when my website name can be AUTOEXEC.BAT, things might get a bit different.

I hope they succeed, but... all that talent, and they couldn't think of a name better than "Space Command?"

"As close to the original as possible" with "state of the art 21st Century technology..." hmm.

When in the simulation does it reach the point where it starts simulating the Curie supercomputer simulating it?

This seems to be the heart of a lot of the confusion in this thread. Basically, whether or not they stole data (or whether it's possible to steal data) isn't relevant, because that isn't the crime they were charged with.

What they WERE charged with was trying to get system access they weren't authorized for, which they didn't do; they just logged in and took what was within the purview of their own authorized account access. That's what the judge pointed out.

Whether they're guilty of some other crime or not remains to be seen. But the judge is saying you can't charge someone with a random crime that sounds related, you have to charge them with whatever crime they committed, if you want it to stick. Just because a computer was involved doesn't make it hacking. It's like someone used a crane to drop a car on top of something to destroy it, and the person responsible got charged with wreckless driving.

Boss to Dilbert: My laptop is too heavy.

Dilbert to boss: Try deleting some files to make it lighter...

Yes, but you don't see them as much in restaurants, I see more Micros stuff there... or even grocery stores. Empirically, just from personal recollection, they seem to be popular in all the brick and mortar types of chains that seem to be struggling themselves. Hmm.

I wonder if they may be betting that the market for point of sale systems will diminish as stores like Borders and Circuit City go bankrupt in favor of online retailers like Amazon? Possibly better to sell now before that happens.

Of course, what's really happening is that people now know the closely guarded secret, that Global Warming is caused by the lack of Pirates in modern times: Link to Forbes article

Quick, where's the laser wrench? And the fusion shovel?

Your post reminds me that when I first had real Internet, I was on local BBSs, too, and they were more fun. At least until MUDs came along. I think that was what really won me over, as much as I hate to admit it. And then I guess they found a way to make the Internet profitable, so it became self-sustaining.

Makes me wonder, what did it take to win other people over to the Internet from what you had before?

Thinking back, I sometimes wonder if BBSs weren't more fun then than the Internet is now. Now it's too... I don't know, serious. People do work with it. Students can look things up for school. You can shop for stuff. Sure, there are games, and social networking, and so forth, but it's missing something.

BBSs, though, they were all for fun. Maybe you got some modems and ran one with your friends. If you were keeping pace, you went for the latest software and added "doors" for things like games and such. They were pretty small deals; you knew most everyone on your board, it was like your own private club or treehouse.

Oh well, I guess you can never go back again.