Defective security chips: 30 million bank cards affected by the 2010 error - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - Netzwelt - great, because of the idiots, EC cards and credit cards in ATMs suddenly have problems. And because of the stupid switch of most banks to V-Pay instead of Maestro, withdrawing money abroad (I'll be in Russia again soon) with the EC card is not possible anymore, because for these Visa idiots Europe ends at the borders of the EU and the banks only care about their own profit margins and not about customer comfort. What's the point of having an EC card with which you can withdraw money from 9.5 million ATMs worldwide without problems? Completely overrated. And because I now also need a new credit card due to ATM compatibility, it will probably also be from a defective batch and then I'll be in Russia in March and can see how I get money. And for all the nonsense that the pack spouts, you also pay fees.
Archive 6. January 2010
Questions and Answers about the Bank Card Fiasco - oh, great, they're switching back to the magnetic stripe. Brilliant idea, since it's no longer fully described on the V-Pay EC cards, which is why the cards only work in ATMs that use the chip. Super idea - so I potentially go from the frying pan into the fire, just because these stupid bankers want to save a few cents.
Python Package Index : promise 0.2.1 - quite a cool bytecode hack for Python that uses decorators to declare functions as "pure" or "constant" (or a few others) and thus enables optimizations of Python code. Specifically, expensive lookups can be avoided if you assure the compiler that within a function, for example, built-ins or named functions do not change dynamically but remain constant.