Actually, that's a feature. Accelerating Darwinism for those whose daily existance is consumed with staring at and thumbing at their phones all the time.

They might have the power. They certainly don't have the interest. They get paid for everything that moves through their site. Unless their reputation took a real hit on some counterfeit things that they were shown to have known about, they won't spend money (significant amounts) to vet products when that would only reduce their sales volume.

How about I summon your Uber-Tesla to take me to lunch from it's quiet day depreciating in the parking lot while you work, and you never see it again? I'll pick up my accomplice along the way, then I'll be seen leaving the car at my destination. He'll shut off autopilot and drive it off to somewhere secluded and dark. Your robotic money maker is no longer yours. Expensive unattended stuff, inviting strangers to come inside where the controls are, may not end well.

You've hit the nail on the head. This craze will end soon after one of these driverless wonders runs over a 5-yr old kid and the operating company is sued into oblivion or legislated out of existence.

How exactly is a service that you have to sign up for and costs $10.99 a month "subscription-free"?

I think he chose smart bulbs, rather than smart switches, for at least some of his lights. No response will be forthcoming from those little beauties if the switch is off.

Please. Mathematics provides a basis to model the physics. The mathematical model is not the physics. Models fit the physical world remarkably well, but not perfectly. For example, the equations of Newtonian mechanics fit the observed world very well until we could measure relativistic effects accurately. There are singularities in many of these equations where the behavior of the model may not fit the actual physics. To assert that properties of the model at obvious singularities "proves" the physics should be looked at with a great deal of skepticism.

A list of who voted absolutely must be maintained as an essential component of election integrity. In Virginia, you identify yourself, and observers from both parties sitting at the table note your name. They mark it in the Big Listing Book, and then you vote. So both parties know whether you showed up -- and it IS public information. The bonus intimidation seems to be a recent development, and not at all an enhancement.

Right idea, math is a little off. A 45m diameter rock has a volume of ~48,000 cubic meters. It if were all water, that's $65B/48k or $1.35 million per cubic meter. Said cubic meter is 1000 liters, so that's $1,350 per liter. Don't spill any.

Good points. Nonetheless, the credit card issuers still have an incentive to minimize fraud, if only to avoid the hassle of fighting with the merchants over who's to blame for the loss and how much they are liable for. They would much rather enjoy wallowing in the usurious interest rates and substantial transaction fees they charge than spend time in court with the merchants.

Because under US law, credit card companies are liable for the cost of credit card fraud above a nominal amount, they have strong incentives to continuously search for and attempt to block fraudulent transactions. I don't think there is any comparable legal driver that forces health providers to bear the financial cost of similar fraud from patient info loss, nor are they necessarily "in-line" to see the exploitation of information stolen from them. Moreover, the health care industry sees their mission as serving patients and collecting all the money they can get for that, not as guarding IT systems from compromise. We should not be surprised that no hospital calls to tell us about suspicious use of our patient info.

OneCrypt... TwoCrypt... RedCrypt... BlueCrypt

Remember that under US law, when you pay via credit card, you have rather strong protections that largely take your side when you dispute whether a merchant delivered what you ordered. No such provisions exist when you pay using PayPal. This is especially valuable in the era of internet ordering, rather than brick-and-mortar purchases.

The hypocrisy is that the party currently occupying the White House has gone to extraordinary efforts to apply big data analytics to identify and exploit the very differences (race, income, ethnicity, education, etc.) that this article decries in order to maximize their political gain in elections. They go to great lengths to discriminate along the same factors that they want other organizations to be blind to. To quote from just one article describing Obama's 2012 campaign:

"To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts. ... The efficiency and scale of that process put the Democrats well ahead when it came to profiling voters."

So, exploit the demographics (e.g. profile and discriminate) when it helps your party, but wag your finger at the rest of the world when they do it even "inadvertently".

Your math skills need considerable upgrade. Making conservative estimates (ignoring deductions, using the unmarried tax rates, etc), a $60K job pays $3700 per year in Iowa state income tax. 84 of those amounts to $310,800 per year. 10 years brings $3,108,000 to the state. In 100 years, the state will not recoup the $38 million in taxes from worker income taxes alone.

Math is more informative than off-the-cuff assertions. Embrace it.