bloopletech

The news is also 4 months old. Original press release (unfortunately sans 'Bermuda Triangle scary secrets discovered? what do we know?'): https://news.uci.edu/research/all-powered-up/.

The sheer laziness of the article to not even link to the PR release is amazing.

I have just read through the mailing list thread referenced in the article, and with the important caveat that I am not an expert in this space, it seems that WoSign has failed to comply with the basic requirements a CA has to meet to be trusted by the major browsers. And compounding these failures, Richard Wang (apparently the managing director of WoSign) either doesn't grasp, or is intentionally trying to minimise the severity of the failures. Compounding the situation more, it seems that WoSign may have acquired StartCom. If true, this seems to be a much larger story, because of the (probable but not yet proven) concern that any failures WoSign is exhibiting, StartCom will exhibit too. Also Richard Wang seems to want to keep the nature of the relationship between WoSign and StartCom as vague and secret as possible. This is concerning because, in the case of CAs in particular, if they haven't done anything wrong, why are they trying to hide it?

The other thing I didn't realise until I read the thread is that this situation seems to be currently unfolding - there are posts on the thread from Richard Wang dated September 2nd.

I understand your general frustration, but to respond to your specific point here, AR does actually support executing generic parameterized SQL statements:

Model.find_by_sql(query, binds=[])

http://devdocs.io/rails~4.2/activerecord/querying#method-i-f...

Model.connection.select_all(query, name = nil, binds=[])

http://devdocs.io/rails~4.2/activerecord/connectionadapters/...

I just tried this. Card: NAB Visa (payWave). Handset: Nexus 5. Merchant: 7-11.

The app read the card correctly and gave the card number and expiry. When I tried to use it in store the eftpos terminal returned roughly: Err 226 contactless card not allowed. The terminal fell back to swipe/insert mode and the merchant told me 'contactless not allowed'. Inserted the (same) card and paid successfully.

I was disappointed because for me, being able to carry just mmy phone for day to day would be awesome, and NAB has no phone solution yet.

You may be interested in http://www.intidyn.com/Newsroom/article-0009.html - the probable cause of fibro has been identified - which will be a huge boon to the sufferers - including my girlfriend.

How do you resolve the cognitive dissonance between the content on the RapGenius site and the words by the RG founders?

Is the content on the site itself just as offensive? If so, how do you feel about the MCs and the large numbers of album sales etc. that they attract?

Back of the envelope calculation:

(1920 * 1080 * 3 * 60) / 1024.0 / 1024.0 => 355.96 MB/s

300mbps wireless n:

300 / 8.0 => 37.5 MB/s

Given that the whole point of HDMI is image quality, how are they going to shove 355MB/s through a 37.5MB/s link without lowering the quality hugely?

It all seems rather pointless to have a large, high quality display and content, and force it through a small link.

I sympathise, but isn't that really the point: if you can't re-stream it how you want, is the existing streaming service really easy to use?

Indeed. Here's the full list of P&G brands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Procter_&_Gamble_brands

As a non-US non-sports fan, can someone explain the context for this? I have no real clue what this fight is about.

As far as I can tell, this fight seems to be between two ways to watch a sports game:

1. on over-the-air broadcast, which is free to receive. 2. cable television, which is not free to receive.

Apparently Aereo makes (1) easier, which presumably means more people will choose (1) instead of (2).

What I don't understand: * If I could watch the sports game for free, why would I ever choose to pay for it instead? * If they (I think in this fight 'they' refers to the NFL and MLB) don't want me to watch the sports game for free, then why do they allow/provide free broadcasts in the first place?

From what I can tell, the whole sports game watching market looks even more ludicrous than the arbitrary restrictions online TV/ebook market (the number of books in the kindle store that are available - then suddenly disappear when I log into my Australian amazon account - presumably publishers/authors love losing money).

In Australia, we've even moved beyond EMV; the majority of merchants now accept Visa PayWave and MasterCard PayPass for tap-and-go.

[edit: Oh, and all my debit/credit cards are now paywave/paypass enabled, and they are all from the big 4/5 banks]

The Coin page doesn't mention this at all; does it have this? If not, it sounds like a step backwards.

Obligatory: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

Whats the liability difference between the systems at work and the systems for the general public?

Strong crypto is, and should be, available to everyone.

Nvidia, AMD, or Intel? Proprietary or open source drivers?

I often have problems during upgrades using the proprietary drivers. The solution is usually: 1. Uninstall proprietary drivers. 2. Reboot, make sure the fallback mesa/vesa works (i.e. you can boot to graphical login). 3. Install proprietary drivers again. 4. Reboot, make sure the graphical login works, then run glxinfo | grep -i opengl, and make sure the renderer is GeForce or Radeon or whatever, NOT "Mesa".

Yes, it's stupid, and yes, we shouldn't have these problems in 2013, but the proprietary drivers tend to just have more compatibility issues.

Sure; I could have been clearer here.

Specifically, you can do an EFT transfer from a bank account to any other bank account in Australia via online banking, and it's free (at least in all the times I've used it).

In the case of ETFPOS terminals, EFT is always free for the payer (the customer), and credit cards are usually free for the payer, but do sometimes have a fee for the payer (certainly AMEX and Diners).

As I've now been corrected on, both types of transaction have a fee for the payee (the merchant).

The fee for the terminal itself is definitely true - I was mainly thinking of fees in terms of payers, i.e. the customer, not the merchant.

Though given there are alternative methods for credit/debit payments (i.e. alternative terminal types, like the swipe thingy that plugs into iPhones) it'll be interesting to see if people keep the combined EFTPOS + credit/debit card terminals, or abandon the EFT side, as the number of non-debit bank/keycards dwindles.

Just a note, for most countries, the best non-cash way to send money is an international wire transfer (sometimes called a telegraphic transfer). This is _not_ western union. which is ludicrously expensive, it's done bank to bank.

Credit card transactions do sometimes have fees attached; specifically I was referring to EFT, which for person-to-person has no fees at all, and doesn't attract fees to the payer at the POS (whereas credit cards can).

Yeah, the real question I was getting at was, given the Australian market is even more insular and stagnant than the US, why do we have much better systems?

What you're saying sounds plausible; a comparison of the US and Australian regulations on deposit banks would be interesting.

I will only point out that you're paying for this kind of convenience in getting your money back - and the cheap flights - somewhere.

Are you serious? Why would _anyone_ design a system like this?

In Australia, the equivalent is EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). You can deposit money to anyone's account by telling the bank their BSB (Bank/State/Branch number) and their account number; however this is not sufficient information to withdraw money.

To withdraw money: 1. at a physical bank branch: a. you put your credit/debit card in a POS terminal and enter your pin/sign to authenticate. b. provide yous credit/debit card and photo ID to the teller. 2. at an ATM: credit/debit card + pin number. 3. online banking: either the credit/debit card number and a password and often a pin as well, or a separate number and password.

All of these use an independent authentication source to the bank account number.

Also the delays quotes here are insane: In Australia, there are essentially 2 ways to pay for something (excluding cash): 1. EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) 2. Credit card (possibly using a debit card) transaction.

On POS terminals, you can choose either; the differentiator being whether you want to use a savings account (EFT) which goes via your bank, or a credit (or savings account accessed via debit card) account, which goes via MasterCard/Visa.

All forms of EFT take 1-2 business days between banks, pretty much all the time; and they're universally free for the payer.

Credit/debit transactions seem to take 1 day universally.

We have a fairly stagnant banking system, with 4 major banks having basically the entire consumer market (and the vast majority of the nonconsumer market as well). Why, in a small, stagnant market like ours, do we fare much better than the US system?

[edit: I forgot to mention, checks are dead here, they're now almost only used for large transfers of money where: 1. you don't want to use EFT; 2. they're over the daily online maximum for EFT transfers, and you can't be bothered to go to a bank branch (although you can only get bank checks at a branch AFAIK); 3. You want an immediate guarantee that the ammount was paid and the date/time/payer/payee (as opposed to waiting 1 day for the payment to come through).]

Well that's nice; I'm glad to see that our common interests as HN users extends only to the US border.

Widespread unchecked surveillance is evil in and of itself, it doesn't matter _who_ is doing the surveilling.

Following your argument, if the Chinese government engaged in exactly the same sort of surveillance against you that the NSA does, you'd be fine with it, since it would merely be international espionage. But in the end, the same information about you is being stored. And your information is probably less trustworthy with the Chinese government than even with the NSA!

'Spying' in the traditional meaning is qualitatively different to dragnet surveillance of all communications.

I understand that all countries engage in a level of spying, and that friends may not always remain so, but the US' seemingly widespread lack of trust in _any_ other country, only works when you're (1) right and (2) the most powerful country.

These may not always hold true, and it's when bad things happen that you need friends you can trust (and that can trust you).

These look nice, but what makes them any better than a Raspberry PI?

I'm probably missing something, but it looks like it has the same inputs/outputs as a PI, but with only 720p output (as opposed to the 1920x1080 of a PI). The form factor looks to be larger and the PCB looks a lot more complicated. And it's $30 more expensive?

As someone who currently uses a different player (mplayer2) which shares an upstream (ffmpeg) with VLC, how much of the codec/format improvements are due to/push to the upstream projects?

I really hope all these great improvements are shared between the media player projects as much as possible.

I use linode as well and, given that I follow the industry at least as much as the average HN user, I'm very surprised I haven't heard of these 'disgraceful' practices.

Could you please elaborate?

Bluray support was problematic in the past, but in 2013, on Ubuntu: 1. Install http://www.makemkv.com/. 2. Insert Blu-Ray disc. 3. Click copy.

Now it's ripped, you can play it through any decent media player - mplayer2, mplayer, VLC, etc. etc.

Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.

Do you actually know that? Presumably if there is US regulation/law around selling and marketing food products, then Soylent will have to be compliant just like everything else?

Though, given I live in Australia, a country which

adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health

and I can still buy all the Quarter Pounders and chocolate I want, it seems these bodies are more about food safety, than choosing my diet for me.

One of the most surprising things about the commentary on Soylent, is the level of vitriol and anger that they are pushing out a meal replacement product without an exceptionally high level of testing and scientific design; and that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong, or totally and completely impossible.

(For examples, just read the comments on this article, or any of the Soylent-related articles).

It seems to be based on a presumption that we all have amazing, carefully designed and scientifically tested diets as is, and Soylent is going to make our diets demonstrably worse, or (apparently) make us really sick, or (even) kill us.

Given that 69.2% of the adult US population is overweight, it would seem that our current amazing diets are perhaps not working.

Of course, the vast majority of us make it up as we go along, influenced by food manufacturers and marketing, and the people around us, as well as our parents.

Sure, food manufacturers have more scrutiny than you or I, but no one is making sure that any particular combination of food in the supermarket is going to lead to a healthy diet - nothing stops me from choosing and carrying out a bad diet - and many many people 'choose' and carry out bad diets as is.

Do you seriously think that, when the supermarket put in an entire aisle of confectionery, that they were doing it as some attempt to give us a good diet?

Or that coke is attempting to help us lose weight when the dump all that sugar - or HFCS - in?

If you think the person buying Taco Bell for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and KFC for dinner is following a carefully designed, healthy diet, you are deluded. If you think these people don't exist - you're deluded there too.

To be not evil, Soylent only has to be _not worse_ than the average existing diet.

Now, I agree that a complete meal replacement product should get more scrutiny than the average person's diet - and Soylent is! I certainly haven't had my diet designed by a group of food scientists or dieticians.

You gave the reason yourself: The existing market is segmented, and none of those markets shouts 'average HN user'.

Compare the marketing/segmentation of the existing products:

Senior citizens: For old people / a worse replacement for regular meals / medical.

Women losing weight: I'm fat / unhealthy / a worse replacement for regular meals / temporary, once I've lost the weight I'll switch back.

Bodybuilders: DUDE, CHECK OUT MY LATS. I ALWAYS DO 10 x 10 DP SETS AND THEN SLAM DOWN A PROTEIN SHAKE. DUUUUUDE.

Soylent: For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost.

Now which of these is going to attract, and which is going to repel, the stereotypical HN user?

Of course these are stereotypes, but this is marketing, and segmenting often uses stereotypes to push people into making different purchasing decisions: As an average HN user, I'm going to feel weird/wrong buying a women's weight loss shake, or a senior citizens medical food, or a gym expert's protein shake, but I'm going to feel great buying Soylent, because I fit into the marketing.

My point is that none of the existing products on the market market all these points: * An equal replacement for food, instead of a worse substitute on one axis or another (at least nutritionally); * An all the time replacement, not just for a specific purpose; * Market direct to the consumer (this seems to be the issue with some of the replacements used in hospitals).

Now, whether Soylent actually meets these claims, or whether the stereotypes are actually relevant to the contents of the products themselves, is largely irrelevant at this point. This is marketing, and HN users are gullible to it like everyone else. (Personally, I'm rooting for Soylent)

Re the name, which a bunch of people who seriously fail to see why that name: because it is rebellious in exactly the way average HN users are suckers for.

I'm confused by your last line. Here in Australia, both the major pizza chains (Dominos and Pizza Hut) have full online ordering. Personally, I always use them when ordering pizza.

Is this a US cultural assumption? Or is there something else I'm missing?

Does VLC 1.1.5 support HI10P (10-bit H.264 video)? That would be one reason to upgrade, as many anime releases now use HI10P (http://wiki.bakabt.me/index.php/Hi10P).

Looking through the changes that mpv introduces, it looks like they've brought back encoding. The primary motivation for yet-another-mplayer-fork, is that they are explicitly removing complex, obsolete code in an effort to encourage fresh blood to join the developers; given that what they are removing includes 'teletext' support, this is probably not a bad thing.