Agree. Coded in Scala. A large language -- makes C++ look tame, by comparison. Which in turn makes many 3rd party libs harder to read. Java 8 (look at Streams) offers many similar features in a smaller language that's easier to communicate. Learn Scala? Of course. But don't dive into its depths. We must all budget our time.

Here's a good wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... summarizing the known approaches. Interestingly, most symmetric encryption schemes seem to be secure (you just need to increase the key size apparently): it's the public/private schemes that are in trouble.

He doesn't. Which is why he opines on unknowns when no one else will.

Objective-C is not classic. That leaves you C++, a rather large language. Large in the sense that there are a lot of rules to learn (with good, practical reasons). But you don't need to know the whole language in order to be productive. And it's fun!

Nobody. We're discussing the article here.

As for the relatively recent evidence of dark matter showing its imprint in the CMB, well, again, doesn't this support my thesis that this is a rapidly evolving field? Cosmology textbooks have a short shelf life. Thirty years ago, for example, one of the big questions was whether the universe was open or closed. Now that we know it's open, and in fact expanding at an accelerating rate, we find that wasn't quite the right question. My physics textbooks, by contrast, are still readable. If a science gets dated quickly, then isn't that reason to think it's speculative?

I'm a bit skeptical of such cosmological estimates. If there is more dark matter in the universe than ordinary matter (by a factor of 4:1 they say), wouldn't you expect it to somehow figure in the "calculations" going back to the big bang? I saw no mention of it in the article. In fact, come to think of it, you seldom hear much about that big elephant dark matter in the room in the first minutes after the bing bag.

Love reading about cosmology, but I think readers should be warned this is a very speculative field of study. Ideas and models in vogue today will likely not be in a few decades. I'm reminded of my physics professor of many years ago who claimed "Cosmology is as mature as botany was before Darwin."

Agreed. Even if this privacy thing does become an issue, it's can probably be technically addressed. For example, if the only information is in the collision of watermarks, and if those watermarks are not steganographic, then the client app downloading the file could be made to modify the watermark. That way downloaded files will look like ripped files.

Pew! And I was worried about kilobots turning on us. It's them yottabots we should be worried about. Oh, wait a minute.. I think they've so throughly won we call their collective reality.

For you and I further down the food chain, it'll probably be a while. For researchers, though, it's arguably already useful. FTA:

True, 'though I imagine there will always be at least 'individuated asymmetric transparency': some people will be much better at 'managing' their transparency than others.

Not quite. The current wisdom is that You Can Have the Placebo Effect, Even If You Know It's a Placebo.

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Remind me again, why is this story in the idle section?

No part of it. Apologies for being vague. I was trying to say that though in both transaction types, credit card and NFC, your personal information is revealed, in the case of Google's NFC implementation, this personal information will likely be fed into a live, real time "adworks" infrastructure that cross-correlates this information with information unrelated to the transaction (GPS location, connecting other dots). I don't imagine the credit card companies are anywhere close to such an infrastructure: their business models are not anchored around selling your personal information, so they have less incentive to build such a personal information capturing pipeline.

The scary thing about this, I think, is that companies like Google and Facebook will only get better at capturing, slicing and dicing this personal information as time goes on: their business models depend on it. And as the tools of their trade become ever more powerful, they will end up in wrong hands. But I digress..

Sure, it's better if you have to tap that button. But you still give up a lot of privacy through this payment method. Every time you pay this way you advertise your identity, your location, and the time of your purchase.

This personal information leakage is a lot different than that the type that can be gleaned from say ordinary credit card transactions. It'll no doubt be captured in a way that makes connecting the dots easier, faster and more real time.

I'd use this technology if it implemented something like digital cash. Until, then, I'll be holding up checkout stand traffic--like the guy in that commercial..

More like ...looking enviously at Google.