Wait a minute, there are still doctor home visits? I thought it was something that less and less people remembered each day, on the way to be firmly forgotten. WOW.

Uh-huh, since, obviously, using a hash of the CC number for that purpose is out of the question. What a doofus of an AC.

You didn't seriously expect there to be a parallel decimal interface between the terminal and the chip on the card, did you? That stuff was en vogue in instrumentation in the 70s, when you could buy digital voltmeters of various kinds with parallel digital output, sometimes binary, sometimes BCD, sometimes even 1-of-10 decimal. Chip cards use a standardized serial protocol.

It's even worse. They don't have to guess at all. They can all just use one arbitrary combination, and keep trying it on each card. They've got enough cards to get tens of thousands of hits.

LOLWUT? Who cares about the cards, they are meaningless by themselves, the information about underlying accounts (whether credit, checking, etc.) is what counts, and it is most certainly shared! By changing the amount of average monthly balance on the checking account I can select what kind of spam I get via USPS. Seriously. The running joke around here is that if you keep the average above $10K, you are bougie since all your firestarter paper comes by mail!

You would be surprised at how much changes in the vacuum environment in an orbit around a star. Suddenly the whole tether needs to be insulated, lest whatever working fluid you carry freezes in the shadow or boils in the sunlight. The insulation needs to survive flexing in those temperature extremes. Earthbound liquid ocean environment is quite thermally benign - it is all within the confines of liquid salty water. Almost none of the non-metallic materials used in this 100+ year old pre-SCUBA technology would withstand the environment of space for any usable length of time.

From your linked page:

This is the problem. BCD is bad at cache utilization (it wastes 17% memory) and bad at utilizing the instruction set of the processor (unless the processor natively supports BCD). If you want to see how to do extended precision integer math, quite efficiently, using nothing more than platform-native ints and with no memory inefficiencies, look no further than this C implementation

Adding a decimal floating point datatype to the CPU may well bring no performance gains at all, since most CPUs are constrained by the memory bandwidth. Good code can do non-decimal extended precision arithmetic faster than the memory can keep up, so those IBM-peddled data types help with nothing.

This is not informative, it is patently false, and you just pretend that floating point is this black box that nobody knows anything about.

Of course we all know that a tree can be walked in a given order and used to generate a list of nodes: there's your bytecode. All it means is that good bytecode should represent a tree, not a string of basic blocks like the usual bytecode does...

Scopolamine has no side nor primary effects that would make it suitable for use as you claim. So, are you an idiot, or did you mean something else?

Nope. They did not do so intentionally, because, maybe, just maybe, they had no choice. It wasn't their intention to weaken anything, they were just told "you do it or else we'll do xyz to you".

'Twas detector malfunction, please accept my apologies ;)

MAC authorization is not even remotely sufficient in my view. 802.1x is the minimum you need.

That's what makes it even sadder. True but oh so sad...

You must be so confused. It's ransomware: it encrypts your files with a public key. The private key is controlled by the gang. You don't pay, you end up with a bunch of random-looking data substituted for your files, since the gang destroys the unique private key after the time is up. Yes, you're basically just back to where you were, before you "installed" the software. The "bother" is with the software being ransomware. It's malware. It installs itself when you don't pay attention, like most people out there...