The cited study is flawed as it doesn't account for the massive investment in call centers, offices, employees, auditors, and regulators that are needed to sustain the VISA payment rails network and the massive energy use and environmental impact those variables demand.
That is insightful.
...so long as we live in relative comfort
About that "we" and "relative," I believe it was in the book Collapse (by E.O. Wilson) that he observed civil wars are started when the warrier-aged males in a society experience a decrease in living standards.
Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
If it works, it will be used to break encryption. It's doubtful there will be an official announcement. Look for unexpected changes in the flows of money and influence.
Google (and Baidu) is learning to recognize letters, numbers, images, faces, the spoken word, more complex things every day, not unlike a baby. Eventually, Google will recognize our internet of things (with exploits), including everyone's phone, and medical implants, and DARPA's robot progeny. Maybe a human, perhaps one of the AI experts recently hired by Google, will be at the helm, maybe not, that just changes who has total control. If Google (or Baidu) wants to grow (it's that or be conquered by that which does), it'll need more resources. What will the top AI (or its operator, if it has one) want to do with everything else and everybody else? Render them nonthreatening first, then use them.
What do you teach your children about fairness, morality, and legal authorities?
You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.
I respectfully disagree. A lot can happen by accident. It even gets called a name sometimes: 'serendipity.'
Is for the US to punch back twice as hard.
Then they punch back 4 times worse?
http://link.springer.com/artic...
Abstract
It is shown here that Newton’s gravity law can be derived from the uncertainty principle. The idea is that as the distance between two bodies in mutual orbit decreases, their uncertainty of position decreases, so their momentum and hence the force on them must increase to satisfy the uncertainty principle. When this result is summed over all the possible interactions between the Planck masses in the two bodies, Newton’s gravity law is obtained. This model predicts that masses less than the Planck mass will be unaffected by gravity and so it may be tested by looking for an abrupt decrease in the density of space dust, for masses above the Planck mass.
The GDP map shows that trying to convert the US to metric is like converting the economies of 50 countries, not one.
Yes, I chose that map for the GDP comparisons. The word "big" has several definitions, one of which is "involving or including many people, things, etc."
Some people don't understand how big each of the 50 states is:
http://mightymaps.org/wp-conte...
For the first, tough. If they can't properly handle other people's financial information like credit-card numbers and PINs, they shouldn't be handling that information.
Some merchants are not computer savvy, and have no idea they make their customers vulnerable by using their computer to check emails and browse the web with their out-dated and unpatched OS.
It was because wall street knew they would be bailed out, so. The banks are even bigger now than they were then. What will it take to get reform?
"Law enforcement now believes they can do anything they want to achieve their ends. Because they're idiots who don't know or care about the law.
Not because they are idiots, but because they are right-wing authoritarians. Here's a free E-Book all about their thinking. You will be amazed at the part where the professor wondered if their predilection for forming posses to round up "enemies of the state" had any limits, so he asked them if they would round up each other, and most still said yes! http://members.shaw.ca/jeanalt...
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll
