But it's not just the multi-billionaires. It's the many more multi-millionaires that produce nothing but wedge themselves into every transaction.

Look at any product that can be bought from an American company or direct from China. That HUGE price difference is how much the American company is skimming off the top.

It doesn't require nearly as many people working nearly as hard as we have now to provide for everyone.

Checks have been in use since shortly before 1659, so far more than a century of experience (as well as statutes and caselaw) applies. There's even some evidence that similar transactional instruments existed in antiquity.

Thankfully, banks have processes to deal with this easily and quickly, and as long as you pay attention to your bank statements, the risk of successful check fraud is minimal. Check statement against what you think you're paying, verify anything questionable, call the bank if you don't recognize the transaction.

They've been dealing with this problem for centuries now. First evidence of a modern-ish type of cheque (hand-written, paid by bank, etc.) was from 1659. There are multiple processes and statutes in place for dealing with it, most of which require timely notice of mis-paid checks. So, while paying by check risks fraud, so does every other method of payment, because you might not know it's a fraudulent transaction until after you've handed over the cash and the guy ran for it.

This is only news because the amount is high, and the victim didn't notice until too late. Time to file a police report (on the fraud, not the bank), and talk with a lawyer (many offer free initial consults to see if there's anything they can do, possibly including working on contingency).

The robots are coming. I'm not talking about the toys, I'm talking about the real robots that can do everything a human can do, but better, and cheaper. And I do mean everything. From mining coal, to taking tickets at the movie theater, from fighting wars to flipping burgers, from building houses to building more robots, from doing your taxes to running your business enterprises. Literally every job from janitor to CEO is in jeopardy. NEAR TERM jeopardy. Like as in the next two to three decades, at most. The technology to create human-capable robots is no longer a pipe dream, it's now become a pure function of time, training and money, a.k.a. inevitable, and soon. Once the transition begins, short of a Butlerian jihad, it doesn't end. The entire concept of "an economy" is nearing it's conclusion. So everything we can do now to begin softening the blow on society, the more successful we're going to be moving into this new world which nobody seems to be planning for.

I guess you didn't read very carefully. They found a marker that appears 5 years before a diagnosis and also part of the mechanism of smoking and other things causing lung cancer AND potentially how to interrupt it. That's a good bit more than simply finding a well known correlation.

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Since Microsoft doesn't honor their license agreements, why should anyone else?

It's not THAT unlikely that if you have Porsche money, you can afford to get 3 phase service in your home.

I get that there was probably a panicy passenger, but given 4.5 hours to land if they turn around or 4 hours to land if they continue to their destination and nothing but water under them either way, they may have actually prolonged the situation slightly by turning back.

They were half way there. It made no sense to turn around at that point.

Maybe he thought it was off.

Not only did they panic over a poorly chosen Bluetooth device name, they turned around AT or just past the halfway point, apparently to maximize the damage and inconvenience. They could just as well have continued as normal and sorted it out at the destination.

How about perform an exploratory laparotomy just in case you implanted a bomb?

I doubt it rises to that level. The device had a name that happened to be Bomb. Yelling FIRE is a specific communication of a dangerous condition.