What is maximum mast height?
There are loops in Europe like this, but you need a mast that you can take down, which means you are limited in boat size
- for sailboats anyway.
I’ve been utterly fascinated by this since I learned about it a few months ago. It seems like a very approachable but still serious adventure and achievement once done.
Japan started the war with a surprise attack, but Russia intended to go to war with Japan and everyone knew it. Japan just figured that, as the smaller country, it ought to try to seize what advantages it could
Hmmm. Politics of the 1800s are weird. Both sides were imperialists, expanding their domains far beyond their historical norms.
Russia expanded eastward. Japan expanded westward.
You're right that Japan ultimately was the one who started the attack though. But I'm also looking at Russia's expansion to seek a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean and connect it up with the Tran-Siberian railway.
Russia definitely was encroaching upon the East. But Japan also was encroaching upon the West, with the 1890s Sino-Japanese War. Soooooo... both are kind of imperialistic assholes on this event, now that I think of it.
Maybe they should avoid conversations that don't lead to accurate information instead? I can forgive lack of precision (especially when qualified), but knowingly giving another person inaccurate information is an act of sabotage.
While occaisionally talking about things that are not bullshit but sound exceedingly like it, just to keep people on their toes. The ongoing research into quantum time crystals is a particularly good topic for this.
My advice would be to simply don't hang out too much with people who believe in bullshit. People who look things up on their phones are mostly fine; they have a healthy habit.
(IME, people who complain about others having their phones out tend to be insensitive and disrespectful. The scenario I usually see is such a person happily getting their fill of social media, putting their device away, and then imposing themselves on someone else and expecting them to drop everything they were doing and engage in a conversation.)
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton is a very approachable introduction to Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Shopenhauer, and Nietzsche and the practical takeaways from their teachings.
Contactless cards did exist here in the US a number of years ago. I had one from Chase. Then around 2014 when it expired, the replacement card did not have contactless payment anymore. According to this article it was simply a lack of demand: http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/Chase-To-Disco...
You can still get contactless cards from Amex at least (I'm not sure about Chase). But you have to specifically request them (and hope you can find a CS rep who knows what you're asking for). I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing - it's hard to get a true measure of demand when people don't even know it's a possibility...
Lack of demand or lack of interest from the banks to invest in the technology/security? I'd love to know why the US adopted "Chip and Signature" rather than "Chip and Pin". Requiring a signature is essentially worthless. My understanding was that it was a combination of US customers not being familiar with using a PIN and concern over where the liability lies if fraud occurs (the assumption being that if someone uses a PIN then the card owner gave them the PIN).
There is an attack on chip-and-PIN cards when the ATM system hasn't been upgraded to chip cards. The problem is that the PIN for chip-and-PIN is same as for ATM withdrawals. The terminal also gets enough information from chip cards to clone the magnetic strip. The result is that compromised terminal can produce cloned cards that can be used to withdraw cash from ATMs.
I don't think chip and signature is a requirement - most places seem to ask for a PIN rather than a signature.
Just swiping the card, however, also works just fine and I now use it everywhere again because I can't be bothered to remember and type in yet another passcode. Just more friction in the process.
An increasing number of terminals now reject the swipe, with the screen stating something like "this card has a chip, please insert and wait". Cashiers are starting to ask, before you swipe, "does your card have a chip?" I even used a terminal yesterday where, after inserting the card, it asked me to identify whether my card was a "Citibank Card" or "Visa Debit Card" (ambiguous, since the card was a Citibank card with a Visa logo). The implementation of this chip rollout in the US is a mess.
The selection was because your card had multiple AID's on it. Some terminals still need some work, and sometimes configuration, to handle AID selection properly. The US Common Debit AID is still not widely supported, which is why many grocery stores still haven't rolled out Chip & PIN support - they don't want to pay the credit card interchange fees because their merchant or terminals don't support the debit AID.
So yes, the chip rollout here in the states is a giant clusterfuck for the time being. It will get better soon, once the hodgepodge of banks and hardware vendors get everything straightened out.
What about the October 2015 liability shift? If grocery stores "still haven't rolled out Chip & PIN support", then they face liability for counterfeit and lost or stolen cards. Issuers can conditionally allow fallback transactions [1], do you know if issuers are generally denying fallback transactions? Is the prompt "this card has a chip, please insert and wait" for a swipe on a card with a chip due to the merchant's policy to avoid the liability shift, or is it due to the issuer denying fallback?
The liability shift only matters if the potential loss outweighs the cost of running all transactions as credit until your issuing bank and hardware support the US Common Debit AID is greater than the potential fraud liability.
For a grocery store <1% per transaction and 3% per transaction is a pretty huge difference, one of my local stores that only takes debit cards still doesn't support chip cards because of the madness with the US Common Debit AID preventing them from enabling the EMV support on their terminals.
> most places seem to ask for a PIN rather than a signature
That is for debit, which is an entirely different thing than credit.
There are no US banks that implement Chip & PIN. Heck, it's nearly impossible to get a Chip & PIN capable card for travel if you have a US issuing bank.
Swipe support will in theory eventually be disabled (e.g. authorizations declined by your issuing bank) at some point in the future when Chip & Signature is being rolled out.
If you're typing your PIN code into a terminal in the US, you are using debit though.
> There are no US banks that implement Chip & PIN. Heck, it's nearly impossible to get a Chip & PIN capable card for travel if you have a US issuing bank.
Not entirely, but your last sentence is true. Some issuers do PIN credit cards. I have one from First Tech Federal Credit Union that uses PIN and touts it as a benefit. When I used it in Europe, it worked exactly as expected and prompted for my PIN just like in the States. There are a handful of smaller issuers that also do PIN primary (mostly credit unions but at least one Florida bank with a card catering to Cuban trade does) and a few more that have PINs but the PIN is secondary so it isn't asked for unless the terminal's configuration insists on it.
Here US, some stores when using a chip credit card (not debit/checking account btw) requires a pin instead of a signature, not sure if they call it a pin but it's 4 digits to verify purchases . . . instead of signature.
I have a MasterCard that takes a pin. I've been asked to enter the pin at several places, including WalMart. It is a credit card, not a debit card.
Frankly, I'm baffles by these claims that US cards don't work with chip and pin because so far, if I use the chip, I have been required to use the pin.
I also have a corporate amex with a pin set up, but I've never used it.
My guess is that the signature thing probably carries more weight as a contract for payment owed; and if that's not actually true it still feels true enough to make it more of a comfort to the retailers/customers.
I had one from Wells Fargo and was pretty sad when my new card didn't have it. I used to love to pay for things without taking my card out of my wallet.
That doesn't make sense, adding the contactless facility mustn't cost more than pennies. As a store owner contactless saves a lot of friction and time at check out. Once the transaction is processed on the terminal surely the whole system upstream is identical.
My experience from the US is... interesting. I tapped-and-paid $700 (not a typo) when visiting NY... and American Express had no idea I was in the US (unless they cooperate with US Border Controll). In the UK, I'm limited to 30 GBP.
Many airlines transmit level 3 purchase data as part of the credit card transaction, which will contain your complete itinerary -- which can be fed into the bank's risk system.
I'm a subscriber to the NY Times. Out of curiosity I disabled Ghostery and reloaded this article's page. It took 5.5s to load the page and then almost 30 seconds to load the _49_ trackers/widgets/beacons etc. This all over a 25Mbps connection. Page load time with Ghostery installed; 1.08s. I want to support the sites I value, but I'm not going to stop using ad blockers anytime soon.
You inspired me to look into this more and it turns out that George Orwell was inspired to invent Newspeak (from his book 1984) from his experience with Basic English. He was initially a big proponent of it but eventually turn against the idea.
I'm sure I'd love to have a private office but just how feasible is that? My current company has 18 full-time "knowledge workers", where in the world is a startup going to find them all private offices?
I'd really love to know what the alternative is that we're all missing out on? I've worked in cubical farms, bullpens and open-plan offices and none of them are ideal but headphones, IM and established boundaries mean I can work in peace when I want to.
I believe Joel Spoelsky (I think) had something different too, where it wasn't a real private office with a huge space and thick walls but something with thinner walls that let light in but were opaque
I'm sure you can probably also work with a local university that has an industrial design program. Maybe some of their students can design cheap portable structures that are easy to assemble, cheap to build, aesthetically pleasing, and yet offers a decent amount of both auditory and visual privacy?
The cynic in me thinks that, in most places, it would be like the Better Off Ted episode where the bosses decided it was too risky to let people "just do whatever the hell they wanted", but they could express their individuality through one of four preselected and inoffensive themes: Green Bay Packers, cats, space, and race cars.
I think people who have the problem of open work spaces wouldn't mind something as uniform and boring as a cubicle or a near equivalent since it's seen as a lesser evil.
Going from an open office plan to individual offices increases the square footage per employee by about 40. This is only about $4,000 a year per employee (in a really expensive office space market), and makes a huge difference in that employee's productivity.
Consider it part of their compensation. After all, you'd not hesitate buying them a $4,000 computer setup to do their work, why is there so much hesitation on offices?
Split them into 3 separate offices with 6 people a piece.
I don't think the argument is that every worker needs their own personal office but clumping an entire company's worth of staff into one big room isn't an effective place to do work.
This, definitely. The team I'm on needs a shared lab space where we have a guaranteed area to set equipment up and collaborate during integration. Instead we're spread across the whole office, and there's never enough space in the shared lab so some of us have to do noisy things in cubicles.
My first software developer job was working in a converted house where each large room had about 10 people in it. Each room was usually split up so that you had about 2 or 3 people grouped together, depending on the project.
Overall it was a very good layout. Out of all the places I've worked at, it comes in second to working at home (which I now do exclusively). It seems to be a good compromise between open-plan and giving each person their own office.
Yes, but does UK citizenship / resident-alien status / locality have anything to do with eligibility for .ie TLD registration?
The description of who can use *.ie is slightly vague on Wikipedia, but indicates there has to be a "tie" to Ireland. Moving the company out of the country seems like it might break whatever tie was there if it's based on any of the above criteria.
It's already too complicated to me as an Ugly American to differentiate Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK, (Great) Britain and/or England, I'm hoping someone with more expertise can comment.
Ireland and Great Britain are islands. On these two islands are two sovereign states: Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (also known as UK). The UK consists of four parts: England, Wales and Scotland on the island of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the island of Ireland.
.ie is the domain of the state Ireland.
.uk is the domain of the UK.
Ireland is not part of the UK, but it is part of Britain.
Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but that's a completely different country from Ireland. Being UK born or based gives you no privileges over the .ie domain at all.
