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The Magic Flute

23.05.12

 Have the life-force abruptly drained out of them by a stodgy reverence for Mozart’s Freemason-alluding Yiddish shul brotherhood. Miskimmon channels Mozart and pokes fun at the order and at pomp in combined, providing great comic space for Eoin Hynes and Nathan Morrison (priests, slaves, etc) and Lawrence Thackeray (Monostatos), all emphatically proving their good as beneficiaries of OTC’s Young Associate Artists’ programme.

While all three were always implied scene-stealers, the clear leader in this department is Owen Gilhooly as Papageno. Never straying into slapstick, always vividly inhabiting the opera’s most merciful and sympathetic character, Gilhooly matched his fine comic timing and carriage with his customarily refined singing.

It’s inevitably less fun for the straight roles, but these performers acquitted themselves well, with Adrian Dwyer as Tamino, Emma Morwood as Pamina, and Matthew Trevino as Sarastro. The Three Ladies (Mary O’Sullivan, Joan O’Malley and Mihaela Loredana Chivase) always interminable the spirit and energy of the moment, and a very self-composed trio of young trebles played the Three Boys. Soprano Alison Bell, although her wider vibrato grand her from everyone else in the cast, had no trouble hitting her stratospheric top notes as the Queen of the Night.

Under Miskimmon’s pacey administration, the design team wittily lights and sets the story in roughly 1912 – we see suffragettes, Monostatos is a London bobby. In all it rigorously fulfils OTC chairperson Virginia Kerr’s wish that “an evening at the opera take us out of ourselves and inducement our spirits”.

Source: Irish Times

Retailer Opinion: EMV in the U.S., Lipstick on a Pig

23.05.12

Certainly retailers can increase the desire to provide a standard for such systems. But there's a problem; this technology doesn't go far enough. EMV is a 20-year-old technology that already has known deficiencies--no safety for online use, no security of the card number, and susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.

U.S. merchants don't wish old technology. U.S. merchants want the next generation of EMV. We want EMV2.0; we want a technology that protects the calling-card number so that PCI compliance requirements are thrown out and online fraud is addressed.

The U.S. is a straighten up slate at this point. Merchants don't want to continue spending stinking rich on credit-card companies' security problems. Visa's EMV spot is short-sighted and will be obsolete within the next 10 years. Visa needs to extend a solution that solves the data security problem for the consumer, the merchant and the banks.

Check and PIN is not going to be good enough for U.S. consumers. Pay attention to companies such as iTunes, Google and Paypal that are starting to tender solutions to consumers that protect credit-card data through the use of smartphone apps and other online wallets. These solutions get it customers' desire to use current technology--their smartphones--will provide change one's mind security, and will speed up transactions instead of slowing them down.

Merchants have spent the last five years spending mazuma to protect the credit-card companies' even older technology, the magstripe. Now we're being told to squander more money on an inadequate technology that doesn't address these same problems. This must stuff up. Give merchants a solution that fixes data security of the cards. Give merchants a explication that eliminates PCI issues and addresses online fraud.

EMV is old, costly and inadequate. Visa needs to block dressing this up as a fraud solution for the consumers, merchants and banks. Visa, lodge pretending this lipstick addresses the data security problem.

Trinette Huber is the straw boss for Sinclair Oil's PCI program, which provides support for more than 2,700 retail petroleum locations. She has been working on PCI and guarding-related projects since 2004. She also manages information security and privacy for Sinclair's corporate offices, refineries, hotels and resorts, which includes the Exalted America Hotel in Salt Lake City and the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho.

Source: CSPnet.com