With a budget of just $1,200, and room for one carry-on and two check-in suitcases, both of no more than 60 kg (132 lbs), total, how would you prepare for living completely off-the-grid for two years in a remote village in the Himalayas?
That's the question asked by the Shortwave Listening Post, based on a user request, obviously with an intended focus on radio equipment and accessories. The necessities like food, shelter and warm clothing apparently being taken care of for you. Radio certainly would seem like the way to go for inexpensive entertainment and information in very remote areas, but answers that instead include satellite internet services (that stay within the budget with 2-years of service) could be equally interesting, if they are in fact available and practical.
http://swling.com/blog/2014/09/virtual-radio-challenge-ii-two-years-off-grid-in-the-himalayas/The US is about to finally embrace the secure chip-based authentication system called EMV-the standard was pioneered by Europay, MasterCard, and Visa-that the rest of the world has already adopted. Pushed by mounting fraud costs, credit card companies have crafted incentives for merchants to switch to the sophisticated readers needed to accept the cards. "There was a lot of skepticism about whether it would ever happen in the US," says Michael Misasi, an analyst with the Mercator Advisory Group. "All of the data breaches that have happened have woken people up, and progress has been accelerating this year." The first serious milestone is October 2015. By 2020 the swipe-and-sign magstripe reader will be as hard to find as the credit card impression rollers they supplanted.
The end is nigh for online credit card fraud, too. Systems like Apple Pay and
Visa's newly announced Visa Token Service (something Discover, Bank of America, Citibank and American Express offered several years earlier) accomplish the same security goals as EMV, but also work online. They replace the static credit card number with a temporary token that changes every time.
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/emv/