Thanks for the trip down the memory lane. Here is my story-line. I did my under-grad in engineering in Bangalore, in the late 80s. Casio fx-100 was the workhorse then, solar powered calculator were just becoming popular. After that I did my MS at Arizona State, bought a fx-82g (think I bought it from Target in Mesa), graphics calculator, I still have it, not in working condition though. After spending a few years in US, moved back to my hometown, my kids who are in high school now bought a casio calculator last year ! That was a kick-ass moment for me, seeing the cycle repeat. Not sure how long my kids are going to use the calculator, they have the big smartphones, some of the examinations, including the SAT allows calculators, not smartphones.

Folks, I read the paper by Omar and Co in a fair amount of detail. Here is the gist. Some ATMs do not have a true RNG (Random Number Generator), something like FIPS 140.2 compliant. With such defective systems in a particular country, at a particular time and for a particular amount and a system which can do a transaction at mS granularity accuracy an attack is possible. And the card has to be in the system (which is recording) for a longer time than it is for a typical transaction. That is a very NARROW vulnerability (not that it is justified ...). The paper clearly says on a large set of ATMs they could NOT decipher the "algo" for the UN generation. This is a exploitation of a very very corner case. The paper also clearly says that EMVCo HAS ALREADY published rigorous tests to test the randomness of UN generation (before this paper was published). So the title here, in the BBC website and some of the comments are way off. (understand that BBC and /. have to have readership ...) Couple of additional comments, EMV cards are unclonable (so are the SIM cards used in phones which use similar technology), the standards are open (you can download the standards for free from the emvco website) and there are plenty of fraud detection algos running on issuer servers to detect suspicious transactions. The paper in the second page unambiguously states that AFTER the introduction of EMV cards "card-not-present" transaction fraud went up, precisely because EMV cards are secure. There will be always studies like this which exposes flaws (this particular one was an extremely corner case) which generally strengthen the current systems. I have followed the research coming out of cambridge on related topics (have exchanged notes with some of them), they are fine researchers and if you read the paper, you will see that they are NOT saying EMV is insecure but are identifying corner cases and defective implementations. Cheers, -Bhaktha

It certainly great that a standard is being promulagted for the battery charger port. But please do remember that this does not mean that chargers are interchangeable, they might be, but manufacturers might insist using their own chargers for technical and non-technical reasons. But my main gripe is about the connector itself. It is extremely hard to almost impossible to be used by older people (that is a significant population). My parents had no problem using the Nokia connector (especially the thicker older one) but are finding extremely hard to insert the micro-USB connector to connect the charger on the new phone I bought them recently. Any thoughts/solutions ?

Have been in the industry for a while, we usually went by these definitions (which IMHO is fair and unambiguous). primarily based on the underlying transmission technology, which ofcourse dictates the kind of services that can be offered. 1G - Analog tranmission (AMPS etc) 2G - Digital transmission and narrow-band CDMA (GSM, IS-136, IS-95 etc) 3G - W-CDMA (3G and qualcomm's equivalne offering) 4G - OFDM (LTE and WiMax) Ofcourse then there are intermediate versions, GPRS, EDGE were called 2.5, HSPA was called 3.x (higher the speed, higher the x). Going by those I would have expected .16m and LTE-advanced would have been 4.x ... Hope that gives some clarity.

Politics aside, this is a great symbolic gesture by the White House. Hopefully the publicity will make a few people think of installing a solar water heater and be kind to Mother earth. Understand that this technology might not be applicable for all parts of the world, but there is significant portion of the world where the solar water heater makes eminent sense. Currently I live in Bangalore, India. I have a solar water installed in my house with a 300 liters storage volume. It works for 95% of the year flawlessly supplying hot water for the whole family. On the rare days, when the water temp is not hot enough (it is never colder than ambient temperature), we have a valve in the bathrooms which will route the hot water thru a electric heater. According to my calculation we need to spend about 1000 rupees in electricity charges per month for going completely electrical water heating. The unit cost me about 50 K rupees to buy and install. So it makes good economic sense to me and hot water is always available. BTW it is estimated that we really need one hour of good sunshine (post noon, because the solar panels are facing SW direction) to heat up the water. These are really popular in India, wish it was adopted more than the extant situation. The city is planning on making this mandatory for all new houses. I was actually planning to install PV's to generate all the electricity needed for our family (BTW based on the past 15 months consumption data, we consume ~ 250 KWh per month). Spoke to a few poeple, did the math, PV's are still economically not feasible. If anyone has any solid data or leads let me know, I will certainly be interested in knowing more. Additional data: I have a UPS installed in the house (rated at 5 KVA, with four 12V 120AH batteries, which I believe can store approx 8 KWh of energy) which should be enough supply the house in the night times. So ideally with the right PV's (which can generate about 10 KWh per day with a few hours of sunshine) I can completely go off the grid and tap into the grid only on emergencies or when we have unusuall

Yes and No. Wide-band CDMA (aka WCDMA) is the basis for 3G. Narrow-band CDMA or usually just called CDMA is still considered 2G technology. Don't mean to be pedantic, CDMA technology as described in IS-95 is considered widely to be 2G technology. W-CDMA deployed in 3G and CDMA2000 is generally considered 3G.