According to Wikipedia, the widely-known 1.0 SPM constant was first proposed sometime in the mid-late 1800s, usually attributed to PT Barnum, but apparently falsely. Perhaps the murky origins of the constant explain why it has been forgotten by physics, or perhaps it's just that modern commerce has made it much easier to measure with accuracy.

To make it more SI, I propose we switch to Suckers Per Second, and that SPS should be updated from 60 (in the Barnum era) to a lower bound of 395 (ref: Apple Watch, "sport" edition) and upper bound of SBP=17,000.

The point of BTC is disintermediation. If you scratch the surface, you'll learn that everyone hates conventional banks, CC, etc - mainly because the intermediaries are extracting such a high toll. Yes, they are convenient enough to use, but just barely. The prospect of a secure, trust-free and cost-efficient way to buy directly, that's BTC's niche.

Thanks, but the review's text could use a little editing...

Most of these tax avoidance schemes depend on the fact that corps pay tax only on excess profits. They don't pay tax on income, like, you know, *people* do. Notice that it's always unambiguous where revenue from, so a corporate *income* tax would be relatively loophole-free. Yeah, yeah, we'd have to drop the rates substantially, since corps pay such a low effective tax (relative to revenue) today.

obscure, poorly-defined, well-funded, with no vested constituency. what could possibly go wrong.

the DNS idea is stupid, but not surprisingly so, given the level of practice the Sony hack has disclosed.

Fake and/or predatory journals are an interesting phenomenon with repercussions greater than just whether they accept nonsense papers. Could the poster edit to include some commentary on why this is interesting?

interesting that these density improvements could both be applied to tape as well.

yeah, "tape yuck", but it makes a certain amount of sense for cool data. which we have lots of, always increasing. tape seeks are a minute or so, and if density is competitive, tape has a good chance to beat disks on price. certainly on power. the real problem is that the tape industry seems to be sort of demographically challenged...

Imagine the amount of mayhem being tacitly supported by makers of paper and pens.

Politicians think they are right to demand control of behavior because it is, theoretically possible. They don't seem to appreciate that their model for the online world is flawed: it's not like physical space, compact and easily policed. The net is a communication medium, which can no more be policed than paper, phones or *air* can be cleaned of mayhem...

In a just universe, whenever some knob uttered a platitude like that, they'd be struck by lightning or a meteor or turned into a pillar of salt.

yes, I definitely would prefer a potentially secure wireless protocol over an obviously insecure physical key. this is a no-brainer! even better: make it a public, *STANDARD* secure wireless protocol, preferably exactly the same one I use to authorize NFC payments from my phone.

how about dispense with passenger accommodations entirely? I'd rather be loaded into a shipping tube at the gate...