As you can see, the paint starts chipping off pretty quickly, but the plane has survived hundreds of crashes.

Bell closes deals for The Source, Virgin Mobile Canada
Last Updated: Thursday, July 2, 2009 | 5:10 PM E

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen opened up a can of worms when he made the case for unmasking passwords in his blog. I chimed in that I agreed. Almost 165 comments on my blog (and several articles, essays, and many other blog posts) later, the consensus is that we were wrong.

I was certainly too glib. Like any security countermeasure, password masking has value. But like any countermeasure, password masking is not a panacea. And the costs of password masking need to be balanced with the benefits.

The cost is accuracy. When users don’t get visual feedback from what they’re typing, they’re more prone to make mistakes. This is especially true with character strings that have non-standard characters and capitalization.

SIR – I was struck by your leader on debt, not so much for its conclusions, but by its language (“The biggest bill in history”, June 13th). You used the adjective “rich” no less than seven times to describe countries that now stagger under a monumental weight of indebtedness. By the same token, the adjective “emerging”, when used with reference to developing nations, seems almost pejorative, given that so many of these countries now have better prospects for economic growth: zestier demographics, larger foreign reserves, dramatically reduced sovereign-debts, stabler banking systems, and superior household finances and savings rates.

Could there be a more accurate way to describe the supposedly rich economies? If not “poor”, then how about “grievously indebted”?

Tim Price
Director of investment
PFP Wealth Management
London

By Daniel Flynn

ROME (Reuters) – With only five months to go until a new global pact on climate change, none of the Group of Eight nations is doing enough to curb global warming, with Canada and the United States ranking bottom, a study said on Wednesday.

The “G8 Climate Scorecards,” compiled by environmental group WWF, said even the greenest members of the rich nations’ club — Germany, Britain and France — were not on track to meet a “danger threshold” of limiting temperature rises to below two degrees Celsius.

G8 leaders gather in Italy next week to discuss the world financial crisis and climate change, hoping to make progress toward a new pact on global warming due to be signed in Copenhagen in December to replace the 1997 Kyoto deal.

They will be joined by members of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Major Economies Forum in a bid to forge broad consensus.

London Canada and Japan were blocking a possible deal on climate change at the Copenhagen summit, Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Adviser, warned yesterday.

Speaking at the World Conference of Science Journalists, Sir David said that the two countries had stepped into the breach left by the Bush Administration, which had strongly resisted cutting CO2 emissions.

“Copenhagen is faltering at the moment,” said Sir David. “The Americans are now fully engaged. But several countries are blocking the process.”

Governments previously were able to hide behind the US’s intransigence on climate change, he said, but the pro-climate policies being launched by the Obama administration means this is no longer possible. “The time has come for people to reveal their cards,” he told delegates.