I think calling it a disaster is an exaggeration. Most of the problems described will be fixed in time: The spped will improve (already at some merchants is it quite acceptable). Also, as everyone migrates to the system, the confusion over insert vs swipe will go away as well...

These IMHO are the REAL problems:

1) The roll-out has been slow. Every article I've read says that the scanners and software are very expensive so a lot of merchants can't afford to adopt it or are delaying adoption. This is just stupid greed. The credit card companies should provide these at cost they would be dirt-cheap. Merchants would snap them up.

2) In Europe, where they have had this system forever (actually theirs is better - chip and pin!), it has not decreased crime. It has just pushed the fraud to online internet merchants. On the internet, you just provide your credit card numbers just like you always did. Why doesn't Visa and MC provide everyone with a free USB-powered reader to use at home on the internet? Sure, it would be a substantial one-time cost. The reasons then don't are #1 and #4.

3) The credit card companies adopted chip and signature which still leaves your card vulnerable to being stolen. They should have used chip and PIN (like Target does BTW), but they were too afraid it would "confuse" consumers and they would use their credit cards less. WTF? REALLY???

4) Why do these problems exist at all? Because these credit cards are a stop-gap measure. The credit card companies assume that people will pay for everything with their phones in 5 years, and credit cards will be obsolete, so there was no incentive to spend the money to do it right.

Amazon Fire TV with Kodi - works great

I looked at that credit card. However, if you read the reviews, people are saying that if you don't carry a balance, then, at some point, they are going to drop your credit limit to just above your balance for that month. This results in you having a maxed-out credit card and tanks your credit score. No thanks.

I don't really care about Chromecast Support. I bought the Fire TV and liked it so much I bought 2 more and canceled my cable subscription*. The voice search works great. Lots of good content. An it even has a VLC app that has network support so you can use the Fire TV to stream your local audio and video files!**

*Obviously, there's a lot of content on cable that you won't get with the Fire TV, but it's enough for me.
**I've had trouble watching some .mkv files with the VLC app. I think there may be an upper limit on file size? i.e. 2 GB?

There is almost no funding for gun violence research because the gun lobby knows it will produce more papers like this one.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

Hopefully that will change, but i think the U.S. will switch to the metric system first.

Thanks!!

That's what I thought, but I cannot find it on their website. Is it still there?

I should have said - there does not appear to be any way to turn off Wifi even when logging into the router directly.

My Comcast modem has wifi turned on. A year or two ago, I read that this could be turned off by changing a setting at Comcast's site. I cannot find that option. Does it still exist?

BTW - I would like to replace their modem, but I also get my phone service through it. I am starting to explore VOIP phone services such as Magicjack. (I want to keep my old phone number and be able to use my fax.

1) It's not the holy grail. It's been shown that if our energy consumption continues to grow along its current trajectory, then the temperature at the surface of the earth will reach the boiling point in several hundred years. Now, presumably the growth of our energy consumption will slow down at some point. But what this thought experiment demonstrates is that any power source that generates denovo heat on the earth is part of the problem. Ultimately, the source of our power will have to be the sun.
2) Even if a fusion generator could be created, it would also have to be cheaper than current sources of energy such as solar. Good luck. This hurdle may be more difficult than creating the fusion generator in the first place.
3) However, the real answer to the question: There have been so many failed predictions about when we would have practical fusion power, that no one believes in it enough anymore to put even more money into it.

While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
 

What exactly do people hope to treat with these things? You can't treat pneumonia or diabetes. You can't treat dementia. You can't treat cancer (trust me on this - the obstacles are mind-boggling). You can't treat COPD or any kind of endocrine disorder. You might be able to treat blood clots (heart attacks, strokes) and atherosclerosis. Maybe. What does the article say:

"deliver a highly targeted dose of drugs or radioactive seeds" - hmm we can already do this, and much more easily.
"clear a blood clot" - okay, that would be good. Although, it would have to work very fast. (Then how do you get the robots out again?)
"perform a tissue biopsy" - hmm, already easily done. Plus you need a reasonable large sample (the bigger the better) - how do you get the sample out of the body after you have it?
"even build a scaffold on which new cells could grow" Hmm, first you would have to destroy whatever tissue is already there to make space. Then where do the new cells come from? I don't think so...

Haha! No more Norton AV for you!

I bought a couple of these keys a few years ago - they are still sitting around in a drawer somewhere. I wasn't too worried about the durability - it seems fine. When I tried it, my issues with were:

1) Very few websites supported it, and those that did made it a pain to set up. Looking at their website, it is supported by gmail, lastpass, dropbox, evernote. I suppose there is a complete list of supported websites and I'm too lazy to go look for it. Any banks support this?
2) Using it on Linux required installing additional software
3) Too expensive - $18 - $50 each. That's fine if I only needed one, but if I have to buy a few in case I lose or break one, then buy a few for the wife and the kid, and then it is only supported by a few websites... Well, not worth it for me.
4) The website is hard to read - written more for IT people than for the lay person. FIDO? OATH-TOPT? I've got no idea what they are talking about on most of their website. The "For Individuals" page is easy to read, but light on details and as soon as you leave it, you are in deep water. Also, can you get duplicate keys in case you lose one? I could never figure out this question from the website. Some sites like gmail allow you to associate more than one key. If there is a list of supported applications and websites, does it also state whether they allow a backup key? If the Yubico wants me to buy and use this thing, it needs to do the research for me and tell me exactly how and why I would want to use it. Something like this hypothetical example*:

1) Buy a Yubikey Neo to use wirelessly with your phone. Keep it on your keychain. Use it to access Lastpass on your phone.
2) Buy a Yubikey Standard for each computer at home and keep it plugged in. Associate it with the same Lastpass account as in #1 - for convenient use on your home computer and as a backup for the one on the keychain.
3) Associate the home Yubikey's with every family member's Lastpass account so that the whole family could share them.

*No idea if this scenerio is possible. Anyone? How would you use it with an ipad or iphone? (do the latest ones have NFC yet?)

Anyone care to extrapolate from current benchmarks as to how this new processor will compare to Intel's desktop offerings? I would like to see Intel have some competition there.