Coffee shop employees are perfectly capable of skimming credit cards so they can perform illicit transactions also. I've had that happen to me too. The technical ability to so easily skim numbers is what enables fraud. There's no encryption there.
"I never authorized that charge" was not sufficient for my bank. So then it's off to court...
Because the courts are the best way to reverse transactions. I've had the scenario you describe regarding road tolls and car rentals, and I challenged it with my bank. Got me exactly nowhere. I suppose I could go to court for a $75 fine, but who has time for that?
Legally some jurisdictions may consider it a one-time charge, but technically they have everything they need to perform a second charge, and it's your blood sweat and tears to challenge the fraud. That waiter skimming cards will not be deterred by your long, expensive, legal-system charge reversal plan.
The non-anonymity of MC transactions is a huge liability. Not only does my MC payment for my coffee allow me to pay for my coffee, but it also allows the merchant to perform future transactions (whether valid or not). It's an authorization not a one-time transaction. This price is just too high and is the source of all CC fraud. There is no reason why any merchant needs to know who I am. If customers choose to disclose their identity to sign up for their email spam, that's their problem, but I should not have to pony up my identity to perform most consumer transactions. The only reason merchants check ID's on transactions is as a flawed fraud protection measure. It protects them, but at my expense.
Anonymous transactions are be better.
Him theory is not considered credible by anyone I've ever talked to (I am a theoretical physicist). I can't really say more, I haven't studied it.
And we all hope a method to compute at strong coupling will arise. And if one does, one could computer the bound state spectrum of the dark matter sector, and do the calculation the authors suggest correctly. Maybe their suggestion is even correct, but their calculation is wrong without consideration of bound states.
No one has "identified" anything. This is a paper with a proposal, an idea, a hypothesis. Behind it lie a rather gigantic pile of assumptions and parameters to fit the data. It's long been speculated that Dark Matter may not be simple, but rather could be as complicated as the visible spectrum (which contains electrons, photons, atoms, and the entire periodic table). But there's a huge problem with making predictions in a strongly interacting theory: you generally can't. "Strong interactions" mean that most computations do not converge. For instance we cannot, from first principles, calculate the mass of any atomic nuclei.
So this means the "dark matter sector" contains essentially a whole periodic table of stuff, and we're hopelessly unable to compute anything. This paper in particular ignores the possibility of bound states (e.g. atoms, mesons, etc) in the dark matter sector, which IMHO is just silly especially with strong interactions.
Bitcoin, people. The answer is bitcoin.
Wikipedia is usually a good reference. These two articles talk about it. It's the oldest evidence for "dark matter". Either that or it's evidence that gravity doesn't behave entirely the way described by Einstein. The latter view has fallen out of favor due to the lack of good theories adopting that viewpoint. The former has fallen into favor due to the copious selection of theories containing a particle with little or no interactions (it's easy to do). Neither of these theory-spaces has been proven to be correct (yet).
Hey look, it's $something_we_dont_understand, and ooh, I can claim it's evidence for $todays_fad!
Astrophysics is big, messy, complicated, and difficult to measure. We just can't send probes to other galaxies to see what's really going on. Most of the time these things have more mundane explanations. But, until we figure out why galactic rotation curves are wonky, everyone will claim everything is due to dark matter.
I've been using GPG for more than a decade, but in recent years I've stopped signing my messages because it often trips up poorly-configured spam filters. That, combined with the fact that you can't be certain that the recipient has received or read a message makes using GPG (and potentially losing your email) risky.
While "read receipts" exist in many proprietary formats, we need it to be standardized and deployed globally. Hey, let's use our GPG keys to do it?
I've always wondered whether Bitcoin actually originated with the CIA, NSA, or Federal Reserve (or analogous agencies in other countries), or maybe a major bank.
I mean, it's a brilliant kind of experiment. Let it loose in the wild and see how it behaves, as a prelude to adopting an official, government backed version, using the lessons learned from Bitcoin. It's the kind of thing you want to have in the wild, to see what people do with it, before adopting something in an ad-hoc and flawed way (like credit cards..).
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
