Films for planes review of "Life"

Life ☀️☀️

In the mood for some sci-fi I punched this up on a transatlantic flight. At first I thought I’d made a reasonable choice. Nice start, interesting idea even if you sort of knew what the plot would be, good special effects to get the story moving.

Lots of it was too dark to see properly so I couldn’t entirely tell what was going on.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

  1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting

  2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain

  3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen

  4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored

  5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it

So any movie I watch on a place gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.

Mobile payments taking off for contactless commuting

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one-in-ten contactless journeys on London’s buses and tubes now paid for by the likes of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. The latest figures from Transport for London detail over one billion journeys on the transit network using contactless cards, with almost £2 billion spent by commuters since the cards were first accepted in 2012.

In total, 40% of all pay as you go journeys are now made using contactless. This is up from 25% in early 2016.

From Mobile payments taking off for contactless commuting

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Blockchain Technology Could Reduce Investment Banks’ Infrastructure Costs by 30 Percent, According to Accenture Report | Accenture Newsroom

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Blockchain technology could reduce infrastructure costs for eight of the world’s 10 largest investment banks by an average of 30 percent, translating to $8 billion to $12 billion in annual cost savings for those banks, according to a new report by Accenture

From Blockchain Technology Could Reduce Investment Banks’ Infrastructure Costs by 30 Percent, According to Accenture Report | Accenture Newsroom

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Guru

Alan Woodward, one of the security-wallahs that I take very seriously, pointed me to a new paper from the University of Luxembourg: “Guru: Universal Reputation Module for Distributed Consensus Protocols“.

We introduce reputation module Guru, which can be laid on top of various consensus protocols such as PBFT or HoneyBadger. It ranks nodes based on the outcomes of consensus rounds run by a small committee, and adaptively selects the committee based on the current reputation. The protocol can also take external reputation ranking as input.

Persistent reputation of pseudonyms is one of the key mechanisms that I think

Bitcoin can be an asset but not currency – China central bank adviser | Reuters

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Virtual currencies like bitcoin are assets but bitcoin in itself does not have the fundamental attributes needed to be a currency that could meet modern economic development needs, a Chinese central bank adviser said.

From Bitcoin can be an asset but not currency – China central bank adviser | Reuters

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PSD2 impact on payments – Icon Solutions

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PSD2 and Instant Payments to drive a 37% decline in online card volumes by 2027 Boosted by increased consumer convenience, Instant Payments will overtake cards by 2025 Retail Instant Payments in Europe will hit €725bn in transactions by the end of 2027 Single card payments set to decline from 40% to 11% market share by 2027 Instant Payments will become one of the main online payment tools in Europe, accounting for roughly €338bn of direct online expenditure

From PSD2 impact on payments – Icon Solutions

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