No, the point was to suppress slave uprisings, not rebel against the central governement.

This has been said many times before, but obviously not often enough: Market share is only one way to play the game. Other goals are things like "profit" and "shareholder value."

There is a little German car maker you might have heard of named Prosche. They make sehr viel money. Their stock is doing sehr gut. They don't really care about market share. Now, nobody bothers them about this or writes little essays about how Porsche will never catch up with Toyota or GM, because everybody understands they are playing for profit, not market share. For some reason, many people don't understand this with Apple. They keep talking about market share.

Apple has no debt. They are making lots of money -- okay, so is Microsoft. Their stock is up, what, 70 per cent this year -- Microsoft's has been dead in the water for years. Apple has two different product lines that are doing fine: Computers and iPods. They are working on a third, the iPhone. Microsoft has two products of the same type, Windows and Office, that make money. Everything else they have touched, like the Zune and the Xbox, has been a financial disaster.

Let Microsoft keep its market share. Apple is making money and making its shareholders happy. Like Porsche.

Researchers at the RFID CUSP (ConsortiUm for Security and Privacy) published an informative report in October. They show how to build skimmers, describe relay and replay attacks, and how the transaction counter can be used to invade privacy. They show in the current generation of RFID-enabled smart cards there is no mutual authentication between the reader and the card, so it is not difficult to build or buy a reader to scan cards. Track 1, which usually contains the card holder name, is transmitted in the clear. Track 2 is transmitted in the clear, with PAN (account number) in 3 of the 4 types of cards currently being issued. The nominal read distance is 10 cm, but only if the reader complies with the IS0 14443 spec. http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/~kevinfu/papers/RFID-CC -manuscript.pdf