Consumers won't like it unless they get theft and fraud protection equivalent to what the credit card companies offer (and are required by law to offer). I use a credit card b/c "who cares if it gets stolen I'm not liable." Whereas if someone steals money from my bank account I'm going to have show the bank was at fault in order to get the funds *restored.* With credit cards I just call the company, dispute the charge and don't pay the bill. If this group of retailers wants to take on that liability, then I don't see a problem. But I suspect they won't take that (very expensive) liability on, and so you're right that consumers won't like it..

Yeah - well said. I come back to slashdot every once in a while, but in comment threads with an idiot to informed quotient like this one, I won't be back again for a long time.

The plural of anecdote is not data. While your CS class of 250 makes for an interesting story, it is not relevant (pro or con) to discussing the causes of national trends.

Nice hack. I think I've typed on one of those way back when, but I can't remember what for. IIRC, that model has a lighter action than the model M? Still clicky but not that crazy machine crack like the M? Do I remember that right? Pretty cool you've made it last..

IIRC Win 98 was an unworkable mess from the start.

Link to save on research: http://www.wuft.org/news/2014/...

There's is a genetic component to intelligence, but it's just a very insignificant one, at least as far as modern science can tell. Read this book to learn more: http://www.amazon.com/Intellig...

The main problem with genetic arguments is that environmental advantages swamp genetic advantages when it comes to human intelligence, however defined. And importantly, how you define intelligence is driven by culture, which unsurprisingly means that the advantaged people in a culture are measured as more intelligent.

I like the way Nisbett goes after this topic b/c he doesn't deny any impact of genetics for intelligence, but he does give strong research evidence that it's not a meaningful measurement, so not really worth worrying about.

As a greybeard who used to write dynamic gopher sites, I really like to write in Ruby/Sinatra now. It gives me access to lots of nice features (I can install activerecord when I need it) and I can build APIs super quickly and everything in between. And I can get down to the bottom of the network stack pretty easily when I want to. I do miss the Ruby/Rails built-in testing framework, but otherwise haven't looked back since switching from that environment.

I think the really interesting issue here is whether the programming should favor the occupants or the overall situation? And how to balance?

If you have the choice between running down a pedestrian or swerving to hit a concrete barrier at high speed, you might want to choose the pedestrian if your goal is to preserve the lives of the occupants who may die if you choose the retaining wall.

But all low speeds, you want to pick the retaining wall because the occupants wouldn't die - it would just damage the car.

Or in the OP example, picking the smaller car to crash into might increase survivability for the passenges of the autonomous car, but increase deaths for the smaller car being hit. Whereas hitting the larger car (more solidly built, more mass) might injure the occupants of the autonomous car more..

Going further OT here.. My understanding is that transactions into and out of some bitcoin exchanges can effectively wash out this "paper" trail? So if the criminal seller and buyer arrange to exchange bitcoins via certain exchanges (designed to wash/hide transaction histories), criminal seller hands over one set of bitcoins and criminal buyer walks way with different bitcoins altogether? Since there's no regulation to my knowledge of money laundering in bitcoin exchanges (yet) this isn't even an illegal business practice?

I disagree - godaddy should not rely on last 4 digits of CC for anything related to security. Paypal giving up the last 4 digits is way less of a problem than godaddy relying on them. The two systems interlocked of course is where this real misery occurred.

How much more expensive? I went to their website and they don't even print their price list anywhere I could see.

Yeah double plus. I just went an enabled two factor on my registrar account. Kind of obvious that having a weak auth there is a major security hole but I hadn't really been paying attention to it.