Archive for August, 2016
It’s not hard to pick out the banker in a Western. Just look for someone sporting sleeve garters and a translucent visor. This is a rare case in which Hollywood actually gets things right. In the late 19th century, sleeve garters served a practical purpose. Back then, you couldn’t walk into Nordstrom and ask for […]
Data breaching is big business. It is, as I wrote last week, something of an arms race. When we strengthen our armor, we don’t send the bad guys home in ignominious defeat; we send them off to upgrade their armor-piercing weaponry so they can return for another foray. The financial fraud arms race is as […]
Uh oh. It seems HEI Hotels has joined the ranks of The Home Depot, Target, and other substantial “hackees.” On August 12, HEI published a “Notice of Data Breach.” HEI Hotel properties affected by the breach (click to enlarge) You may not have heard of HEI, but you have certainly heard of the 20 potentially targeted […]
IT’S A FACT that Sir Isaac Newton set forth laws of motion and gravitation that have endured for nearly four centuries with precious little revision. It also appears to be a fact that the sight of a falling apple may indeed have catalyzed his theorizing about gravity. The part about its bonking him on the […]
Languages spoken in commerce-less civilizations typically have words for the numbers one through five—something to do with the fact that most of us carry around five fingers on each hand—but have no word for six or anything beyond. Instead, they make do with a catch-all word that roughly translates to “a whole bunch.” Societies engaged […]