Checks are inconvenient and hideously insecure, but they remain the one way for an American to (sort of) safely send money to a person or company without both parties physically present that doesn't necessarily result in third-party fees for either party. That's the problem banks have to solve to get rid of paper checks.

In my town, you can pay your taxes in cash (at the town hall, during limited hours, in person), by mailing in a check for the exact amount, or via credit card—which results in a 2.5% surcharge to cover the cost of using the credit-card network. Paying in person isn't a realistic option for most folks, as you'd need to take time off from work to do it. For a $2,500 property-tax bill, that's an extra $62.50, which isn't a negligible fee. Even factoring in the cost of the stamp and the envelope, it's way cheaper to mail them a check. The stamp is even cheaper than the cost for fuel and lost time to drive down and pay in cash.

And it'll get worse now that credit-card companies can charge different processing rates based on the rewards tier of your credit card, and merchants can pass along that variable rate as a surcharge to your bill...

Is this what clanker apologetics looks like?

Instead of 'video wall paper' can we just get the After Dark screensavers back into existence?

A "Model M" keyboard without the singular defining feature that makes the Model M iconic—the buckling-spring key mechanism.

What's next? A new Big Mac clone that only comes without any sauce?

...so whatever it is, it'll be rolled out half-baked with great fanfare, get forced onto various users by the sheer weight of Google's not-a-monopoly on just about everything, limp along for a year or two, and then Google will discover that the problem is more difficult than it first appeared, get bored, and kill it off in favor of the next exciting new half-baked thing.

This could be the greatest idea ever; Google's involvement is the kiss of death for it regardless, until proven otherwise. The odds aren't in the project's favor.

Well, Instapaper has been doing a fine job reading CNN's articles for me, both desktop and mobile... an extra click or two, but worth the effort.

It also depends on how effects-heavy the show was. Older shows shot on film and edited on film are pretty easy to re-scan in HD. Then you get to the 90s and you get shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation that were shot on film but edited on video—Paramount had to go back and re-edit the entire series, and redo a lot of the effects like phaser beams that were done with video paintboxes, to get an HD version.

One of the saddest cases is Babylon 5. The show was shot on film and protected for 16:9, because Straczynski saw HD coming. But the effects were done with early CGI, and so they were all rendered at 4:3 480i. And for various reasons including studio stupidity, nobody saved the raw CGI effects data, so it can't just be re-rendered on modern equipment—they'd have to redo all of the effects from scratch. When WB did a 16:9 DVD release, they didn't even bother re-rendering scenes with "video paintbox" effects like blaster fire; they just cropped the 4:3 480i down to 16:9 and upscaled those scenes (poorly).

From the great minds who broughhttps://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F25%2F03%2F03%2F182255%2Fhow-the-british-broke-their-own-economy%23t us "It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap" and "Inflation Is Your Fault"

I voted for Giant Asterioid in this last election and I feel cheated out of the world ending apocalpyse I was promised!

Here's a compromise: Make theaters publish the end time of the movie as well as the "start time" (of the trailers). As a Connecticut moviegoer, I care about when I'll be done watching the movie; it helps me plan the next thing. With trailers adding indeterminate front padding to the runtime, it's currently impossible. Just tell me when it will be over. (And if I do the math myself to figure out when the movie will actually start, oh well...)

Apple Pay doesn't share your card number ("primary account number" or PAN) with the merchant. It shares a device-specific Device Account Number (DAN) and a one-time-use token that's computed cryptographically. If the payment terminal is compromised, the bad guy gets the DAN and the token, not the PAN—and the token's already been used, so it's useless to them. The DAN isn't usable without a valid token.

Of course your bank knows about your transaction. But unlike using your card's magnetic stripe or EMV chip, Apple Pay transactions are anonymous *with respect to the vendor getting your name*. The EMV Payment Token generated by Apple Pay doesn't include your name. Since it also doesn't include your PAN, the merchant doesn't have a good way to match your transaction to you. All they know is that valid payment was tendered.

Apple doesn't know about your in-store Apple Pay transactions. The phone stores the DAN in its secure element, where it can't be decrypted by anyone but you; and the token is generated on-device using data from the secure element.

As for faster... it's much faster to double-click the side button on one's Apple Watch and then tap it to the payment terminal than to fish a card out of your wallet...

I'm an IT security specialist at one of the world's biggest banks. I'm not speaking for my employer, but I personally am a strong advocate of using Apple Pay. It's far more secure than the EMV chip or even the card-based tap-to-pay—which may not use tokenization, so the merchant still gets your PAN... and so does anyone who hacks the merchant.

Sounds like you have all the business bits sorted out before hand mr expert.. go out there and get em tiger!

I'm sure you have strong business acument and can get those factories spun up in no time! You'll be a billiionaire askign for tax breaks in no time!

...except the truth is, wood cutting boards are less likely to harbor bacteria in a way that causes illness, because it tends to isolate and kill the bacteria. Plastic, on the other hand, is nonporous so the bacteria stays on the surface... and since it tends to develop grooves from the knife cutting into it, bacteria gets trapped in the grooves where it is hard to clean. Plastic cutting boards sanitized to NSF specifications may be safer, but most homes lack the technology to do that, or don't use it if they do.

You're hand-waving away the most critical part of copyright: the "copy" part.

A physical library purchases a physical copy of a book. Thanks to the First Sale Doctrine, they can do whatever they like with that physical copy. They can temporarily transfer possession of it to someone else ("lending"). In doing so, they take the risk that they won't get that physical copy back. If someone doesn't return a book, the library has to purchase another copy to replace it.

Internet Archive made a digital copy of the physical book. That, in itself, is a copyright violation (unless it was done under the few fair-use exceptions, which don't apply in this case). IA now had two copies of the book, but only paid the publisher and author for one copy. They then "lent" a copy to someone else. Being a digital file, this didn't involve transferring sole custody of the digital copy to someone else; it meant making another copy of the work. Now there's three copies extant with one paid-up license. And if someone failed to "return" their digital copy? IA still had the original physical copy and the original digital copy; they didn't "lose" it to the "theft." That, right there, is where a fair jury following the law would find them guilty of copyright infringement.

(You can argue that the law isn't right or fair, but it is the law unless and until changed...)

DRM—even if IA had used it consistently, which they didn't—doesn't fix this. IA still had to make an unlicensed copy to digitize the work in the first place, and a DRM-laden "lending copy" is still a second infringing copy.

They could've worked with the rights-holders to negotiate a license allowing them to do this; they didn't. They relied on a flawed "fair use" argument, and it bit them.

"I'm Spartacus!"