Too many companies get rendered irrelevant by not diversifying. Looking at you Blockbuster: After years of domination of the block and mortar video rental and sales niche, they passed up a chance to purchase the fledgling Netflix for $50 million US in 2000. (Current Netflix market cap is $28+ Billion.) Carl Icahn waged a proxy fight for control in 2005, and by 2010 the once great concern filed for Bankruptcy.

It's precisely why you see Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google making what appear to be crazy stupid acquisitions.

Brick and stone are siding commonly used in housing construction after the framed structure is built, typically from dead tree lumber... although metal framing is used in some commercial applications.

The monitoring of pollution levels in places where tracking them might not occur is chicken soup... can't hurt, might help.

There is no appreciable difference to our common planet whether environmental contamination of industry is Indian, Chinese, American, or European.

We do already have digital currency, and this is an incredibly poor idea.

What spawns such things from the government, you say? Why, they've seen the recent success of the homegrown crypto-currencies like the Bitcoin, and they want in because they confidently believe they should control all the money. The flaw in their venture is the basic lack of understanding of the principle tenet of Bitcoin: it is outside government meddling.

The interesting thing to me about the link is the mice were tested with the human gene against the corresponding chimp gene in a mouse brain as a control.

We have at least one allele for brain development identified in three species. Don't you just know experiments with the human gene inserted in the monkey is the next logical step? Hail Caesar...

I could've gone either way there, but you caught me right in the middle of attempting an alliteral analogy.... vis a vis poverty stricken third World nations.

In all seriousness, would the tradeoff of the luxuries one is entitled to in a 1st World country offset the purported privacy you might get in a 3rd World nation?

Odds are, people would still be clamoring to immigrate to the privacy stricken 1st World nqtions.

Yo dawg! We heard you like tricks. So we put a trick your trick...

We assume the information gatherers track us at every chance, often with our tacit permission.

No longer bordering on tinhattery, there exists the very real possibility everything you purchase in the electronics section might report your doings for fun and profit. If you can break the phone, why wouldn't you?

US arms manufacturers would certainly try to resist government pressure on this though, as the revelation of such a tactic would flat-line their sales abroad.

They're just not that difficult to manufacture.

If American military developers are not allowed to sell theirs, someone else will.

The market share of worldwide death-dealing is a real thing.

Exporting weapons that wind up being used against our own troops is fairly commonplace in this scenario, but hey, it's all about the corporate profits baby!

You don't see the beauty of it?

You and I both clicked on the story. Devilishly clever.