#Breaking News: Australia's 4th largest bank #NAB unleashes new cashless society experiment,customers unimpressed, appears ppl prefer money

NAB glitch sparks concern over payment systems

By Emily Bourke

A crippling computer glitch at NAB has raised questions about the vulnerability of the payment systems used by Australian banks.

The bank's customers have been affected by technical problems, which have locked them out of their bank accounts.

Wages and Centrelink benefits had been delayed, settlements and property deals frozen and ATM and eftpos transactions shut off.

Last night the NAB issued a statement saying it had begun to clear the huge backlog of outstanding transactions from Wednesday and Thursday.

The bank is also opening up extra branches today.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/27/3078267.htm?section=justin

Tron’s Triumphant Return to Cyberspace

• By Adam Rogers

You will like Tron: Legacy. That’s not a prediction—it’s a command. Don’t even try to fight it. Come December 17, when the movie comes out, your butt will be in a seat and your head will be plugged into migraine-inducing Urkel goggles like everybody else. The people from Walt Disney have made sure of it.

The studio has put an estimated $170 million into this choo-choo train, and it is chugging down the track. The producers started leaking images and designs three years ago. They showed a trailer at Comic-Con before they even had a green light to make the movie. The number of dollars invested in the franchise will likely enter the mathematical regime created by reclusive Russian geniuses for defense budgets and bank bailouts. Los Angeles visual f/x house Digital Domain deployed the latest 3-D cameras and motion-capture technology to render a younger Jeff Bridges as the villain. 

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/ff_tron/

Literacy may have stolen brain power from other functions

By John Timmer 

The human brain contains many regions that are specialized for processing specific decisions and sensory inputs. Many of these are shared with our fellow mammals (and, in some cases, all vertebrates), suggesting that they are evolutionarily ancient specializations. But innovations like writing have only been around for a few thousand years, a time span that's too short relative to human generations to allow for this sort of large evolutionary change. In the absence of specialized capabilities, how has it become possible for such large portions of the population to become literate?

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/literacy-takes-over-the-brain.ars