Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adedeji / a bunch of bananas ate a monkey /

America goes Fish, Chip and PIN (EMV), at last

What most people find hard to believe is that USA, and India, two of the most technological advanced countries (well, it could be tough believing that for India if you have been there) still use magstripe cards. Magstripes are unsafe (easy to clone and super error prone) and so yesterday that I wouldn’t be surprised if Moses paid for things with that in the desert.
Finally, heavens intervened. Visa and MasterCard, in USA, are migrating their credit cards to EMV standards by April 2013 (Fish, Chip and PIN). Now that counts for something as most Americans prefer credit cards (easy money) and there are more of that circulating around than debit and prepaid cards.
So good bye to card clone frauds. But trust those boys, they are  coming out with something else soon 🙁

Nigerian House of Confusion

HOUSE OF REPS FUEL SUBSIDY PROBE:
Farouk Lawan: What is Nigeria’s daily fuel consumption?
Diezani: 52million Liters
NNPC: 35m liters
DPR: 43m liters
PPPRA: 24M liters
Okonjo: 40M liters
Farouk Lawan: What was the subsidy for 2011?
Dieziani: 1.4Trillion
Okonjo: 1.3Trillion
CBN: 1.7Trillion
Farouk Lawan: Can we have the KPMG REPORT?
Okonjo: I have to go through the report first
Diezani: I have not seen the report
Farouk Lawan: What is the production capacity of our local refineries?
NNPC: 30%
PPPRA: 20%
DPR: 13%
Diezani: 15%
Farouk Lawan: Does Nigeria pay subsidy on locally refined Products?
Diezani: It depends
NNPC: The lay man cannot understand how it’s done
PPPRA: Yes
DPR: No
Farouk Lawan: Why is Kerosene still scarce?
Diezani: Because its use by the aviation industry as aviation fuel
NNPC: Because there is no subsidy so NNPC overstretched its resources
PPPRA: it’s not properly deregulated
Farouk Lawan: what is the balance in the subsidy accounts?
Diezani:It’s a virtual account
NNPC: There is no account in existence as the lay man will look at it
PPPRA: The account is a technical one
CBN: There is no account with us for subsidy
Okonjo: The account exists but not with a bank.

Introduction to Government Budgeting

The recently (and sadly) aborted subsidy strike has brought to fore how expensive (or is it wasteful) our government is – check this out:
Government is budgeting for the following:

PURCHASE OF COMPUTER & ACCESSORIES:
(I). 90 HP DESKTOPS @ N300,000 = N27,000,000;
(II). 20 HP PRINTERS @ N150,000 =N3,000,000;
(III). 60 NOS. UPS @ N55,000 = N3,300,000;
(IV). 75 NOS.HP LAPTOPS @ N314,000 = N23,550,000 AND
(V). 10 NOS. SCANNERS @ N190,000 = N1,900,000.

What manner of PC are we buying at 300K a pop? And HP laptops at 314K? Are these mobile servers?
It seems I’m in the wrong business 🙁

Genome on demand

The human genome was cracked some years ago by some mad hat scientists. That adventure took about 10 years although the completed map took another 3 years to show up. Guess what, same hack would take just a week if we are doing it today.

That was in 2000. Using the same extrapolation, your genome could be hacked and analyzed (and probably backed up on a USB drive, Lord helps you if it gets virus infected) in 19 minutes by year 2022 and 2 seconds in 2032.

Actually, those figures are wrong. I think at the rate at which we are going, our genomes could be analyzed online real time in 7 years. And with human models being simulated by some smart folks, vaccine and drug development would leave the realm of the lab into pure algorithms.

Maybe we would finally conquer cancer, engineer immortality, figure out teleportation and  finally do away with work. My vacation ends in 24 hours and I wonder why anyone hasn’t figured this out. Sad.