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People who design these games think about security. Sometimes (rarely) exploits get unnoticed and go into production.

I'm confused about why we are supposed to believe that there is anything exploitable about this particular card?


Look at all the horror stories of badly written programs or moronic CEO or things like that.

The other parts of the world are fucked up as well. There are probably a lot of "secure" lotteries, but there are probably also a lot of insecure ones.


(http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number_...)

Even smart people using good software can make mistakes.


80% of the cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor. With around $500B worth of existing reactor infrastructure worldwide, which runs on Uranium, don't expect that to go away too soon.


I do not think they are simply attempting to replace existing reactors. I know in many countries governments have slowed down building reactors because of environmental concerns and costs. With the dwindling oil deposits and increasing energy need, safe and reliable nuclear reactors will be in high demand.


Are they still using Francs for their units of reactivity, or did that get changed to Euros as well?


I'm not sure if this got modded down because people think I'm being facetious, but I'm seriously wondering what happened with that. For people who don't know, every country in the world, besides France, used "Dollars" for their units of reactivity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#The_Dollar_unit_of...

France, on the other hand, used "Francs". Conveniently, the exchange rate was 1:1. I'd be surprised if they went and changed everything to Euro's now, but I haven't heard anything firsthand from French nuclear engineers.


Comments which are voted down are often misunderstood. More often then not, those comments consist just of a single sentence. A few days ago I made a comment, which had 3 downvotes, however the 3 posts where I explained myself had 15 upvotes in total. I think it's great that HN has this feedback mechanism that sometimes lacks in real life (especially in non face-to-face conversations).


How is your first comment relevant? Answer that, and you'll figure out why you were down voted.


Well, I'm sure it's something that could be worked out, but there will likely be naming issues between French and Non-French nuclear engineers working together. It seems relevant to me, given that the topic was to bring French engineers into a U.S. startup.


You probably got downvoted because, most people don't know Slotin literally proposed a unit of reactivity called the "dollar", and most thought you meant to type "currency" instead of "reactivity" which would make it a bad sarcastic joke... I know my jokes often get downvoted too :)


Wow, this guy guarantees that if it isn't tested, it doesn't work. Important projects that people depend on like the linux kernel must have really good test coverage.


First of all, here is Downton Abbey Season 2 on Amazon [ http://www.amazon.com/Downton-Abbey-A-House-History/dp/B006M... ]

I'd like to know the actual stream bitrate he experienced. It's pretty hard for me to empathize without that number.


Too bad http://tacocopter.com/ isn't out of closed beta yet.


This reminds me of when Fred Wilson pirated the Knicks game because nobody let him pay for it: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/screwcable.html


This illustrates that free parking is a major subsidy to auto owners.

I've lived in some bohemian situations in the past, and largly, the most difficult part is dealing with people hassling you. People will literally call the police about, "I saw a guy living in a car", and then the police come to check it out, even if it's perfectly legal.


This reminds me of my friend's plan to use the American Express "black" card with no credit limit to buy American Express.


“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com


The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?


I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.


Web applications, maybe. But content which is primarily text? I like my text not to be Turing-complete, thank you.


Oh, really...

In an age,

* where the Internet can be seen on ever increasing number of diverse devices

* where every day people discover that every additional layer of software complexity adds security vulnerabilities

* where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites

* where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users

* etc.

you choose to ignore all of these usage scenarios by not even having a graceful fallback for your site?

Thankfully, most web administrators and developers are not as short-sighted as you, even most start-ups!

One more thing: if a new site, even one that has been heavilty recommended to me, does not provide even basic information without scripting or has a horrible front-page with a default NoScript Firefox installation, I treat it as I would a spam site and I immediately desist from using the site and ignore the link.

You will not waste my time with lack of basic Web competence and awareness.


First of all, calm down.

I think people disabling JS for security should be willing to accept the downfalls.

"where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites"

I don't know what you're talking about here. I've never seen a default install of any browser (on a desktop) except IE in Windows server have JS off by default

"where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users"

I will grant command line users should be accommodated where they will be expected to be a large proportion of your users (linux install instructions, for example) otherwise, give me a break. Why should I take my time working for .01% of users using a command line.

Now, I don't think this means that people should be using JS when it's not necessary, like if your page is mostly text. But all of the use cases you cite are a small minority of the users of most sites.


While I agree with your position on a non-JS fallback, I cannot even remember the last time I installed a browser on any machine (OS X, Windows, Linux) where Javascript was not turned on and enabled "out of the box". The smartphones I've used (iPhone and a galaxy S) also both have JS "out of the box", so the parents comment isn't far from the truth in my opinion.


Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.


I really don't think there is a place for traditional encyclopedias anymore, digital or hardcopy.

Of course we still want and need curated collections of information. But I fail to see the value of large collections of information that say a tiny bit about everything. I think the real value comes from knowledgable experts curating information about their niche. Which in my experience is not at all what traditional encyclopedias were (I'm 24).


Ultimately that's not going to be as important as Wikipedia having stolen the mindshare - it is now the place people go to in order to look things up. It's all very well Britannica claiming to be more citable, but in practice Wikipedia wins because it has far more articles with more detail in them. If the fact you want to cite is not on britannica.com, you can't cite it from there.


Fail at step 1 because I cannot even get to the site (and more importantly, neither can Google), because Britannica does not understand how the web works ...

11 years after the web ate their expensive lunch meetings, they still don't get the web.


Google has parsed and indexed info thru JS for a while now. [1]

[1] http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm


Interesting that we now think "The website is broken" because google can't index it... rather than "Google is broken" ?

I remember reading somewhere google executes javascript as part of its crawling...


http://www.google.com/search?q=site:britannica.com gives about ~1.5M results.

They have interesting robots.txt, though:

http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt

I would recommend them to hire a web designer.


Not that I think the future is britannica.com is the future either, but not working without javascript is unlikely to be the thing that stops them (or any site, really) from succeeding.


I just tried it without JavaScript. It works. It's not pretty, but it's fully functional as far as I can tell. They basically have two different UIs — if you have JavaScript, you get a modern UI, and if you don't, you get a simpler UI that's optimized for a very primitive browser (e.g. those old phone browsers that could only do 32KB per page or whatever it was). Seems fair enough. If you really can't get on there, you might want to check your connection or something.

But hypothetically, even if it were completely JavaScript-dependent, the trend is clearly toward sites that involve more JavaScript, not less, so I don't see why that would preclude being "the future."


> ... and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

Huh, I just pulled up five articles at random and they all had edit buttons. Granted, it doesn't let you edit the main article, but you can create your own version of one or send a suggestion/correction to the editor.


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