Posts by Paul Campbell
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Paul, you're giving them too much credit. They won't even accept the metric system.
But they use the metric inch .... (exactly 2.54cm) ....
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Pins for credit cards are AFAIK unknown in the US - even ubiquitous use of debit cards apart from ATMs and supermarkets is relatively recent - some places still even run cards manually (or a small hotel will just take an imprint) though they get charged more these days.
BTW if you buy petrol and ever get asked by the machine for your zipcode on your foreign card '00000' often works. When you use a credit card in a petrol pump it wont ask for a pin or signature - but may sometimes ask for a zipcode - only some places will take debit cards and will of course ask for a pin.
In some states and some times (California keeps changing the law) you may be asked for a picture ID - they expect a driver's license, some people have never seen a passport and may be confused.
The 'pre-approval' thing in restaurants is largely part of the dance involving tips - it's almost a mating ritual and embedded in the culture, it's normal and doesn't (necessarily) mean they're ripping you off.
Many Americans are confused by our abandoning of our 1/2/5c coins - but we could do it easily (or more easily than them) because we have ubiquitous EFTPOS (and because we include GST in quoted prices rather than adding sales tax in after).
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I'm a Bruce Schneier fan .... not quite as fanatic as that previous link though
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Among other things I do crypto for a living - not financial transactions though - I have a real problem with how non-transparent our online financial system is - I want a system without secrets (well except maybe for large primes) that black and white hat hackers have banged their heads against for a while.
SSL is a great example - SSL man-in-the-middle attacks are becoming doable .... and of course my bank's online presence uses it .... that's useful information I probably wouldn't have if it were a secret, it tells me I should be visiting tellers
However - it's not just the online world - I was visiting my teller about a year ago and watched with horror as she picked up a cordless phone and phoned in my international transaction to head office - DECT's crypto is secret - I DO work with DECT day to day, doing completely legit work, but the crypto is on a need to know basis - you just poke bits at silicon you're expected to trust - and the crypto has been reverse engineered and is widely supposed to be compromised for many phones if not officially completely cracked yet - lots of phones don't actually do the crypto correctly anyway and end up just being in the clear without you knowing.
One can buy sniffer cards off the shelf, we use them for debug - the people who sell them are very suspicious (of us) so it's obviously an issue
Anyway if she can make that call and I can break the base station crypto (or it's just off and the bank doesn't know) I can listen in and then later make the same call using the same account number and appearing to have the same phone number etc etc to move money into my offshore account ....
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It may be that there was a machine or machines at a car park that were fitted with a fake stripe reader - we had reports of someone doing this to ATMs in NZ a few years back.
Of course while the cards with chips are 'completely safe' - they can still be read by a fake stripe readers since they still have mag stripes.
On a slightly different topic US credit card companies are currently canceling cards or raising interest rates through the roof - not because of a fraud scare but because of a change in the federal credit laws coming up in Feb that basically means they will not be allowed to increase the cost of credit card interest retroactively - for example if you got a low interest card at say 6% and you put $10,000 on it if they increase the rate to 10% that can only apply to new debt you build up after the rate change.
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I'm amused by Cory's Pirate Finder General (well I'm amused by the term not the actual proposal which seems to me to be a logical extension of ACTA)
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I think in many ways this benefits New Zealand bands - how many NZ bands have every gotten into that 'really wealthy' category? on the other hand if the total music $$ are being spread around a bit more evenly many more of them will come our way
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I think Stephenson missed the obvious in Diamond Age once you can assemble anything from atoms up the cost of things is the cost of the energy required - physical objects in the real world become as easy to copy as things like music or movies - the argument we're having here is just the beginning our kids will be having this argument about physical objects - "But I designed that chair/DVD/house/painting/$20note - how dare you make a copy ...."
2000 years ago there was no copyright, if you wanted to copy a book you went down to the forum and there was guy with educated slaves who would get it done for you. 1000 years ago there was no copyright, traveling minstrels were the publishing companies of the day - copyright for books showed up to help the publishers when the printing press was created - music wasn't really copyrighted until it was written down and published - in victorian times when the middle class started to buy pianos - most of our modern copyright system is less than 150 years old
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Simon - I'd agree about the Enemy/Toy Love Dunedin/Auckland thing .... but then the Cook was a very very different place than it is now - Fri/Sat upstairs was the place to be in the late 70s/early 80s for all those bands and you didn't have to be a national headliner to get in any local band that could wow a crowd could get a gig - downstairs in the front bar was where the artists and poets hung out and snarked at each other depending on which CP splinter they were currently following - now days it's just another booze barn - so sad
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if your box makes a hum that's probably the hard drive (and maybe a fan) - putting it in a box behind a glass door may not be a good thing - they can get toasty warm - unless the back of the box is appropriately open.
Why do you want to choose aspect ratio? probably depends on your TV and whether you can handle 'pan&scan' (where some bozo back at the factory decides which bits of the 16:9 screen your 4:3 will move to - when they get it wrong it can be stupidly wrong) or despise letterboxing - different people have different preferences - on an HD set it's more an issue of how do you want to look at 4:3 - on the wide screen - with the sides chopped off or stretched - again different people prefer different things