I don't buy it. They've made it to massive scale without anyone going bankrupt; clearly no one is paying 0.3% of every transaction ($100 billion/year) to keep the current system afloat. The internet itself is evidence that you can have billions of secure, complex transactions where each party just pays a minimal amount for access to the network and no third party needs to be paid for every transaction (roughly $0.06 for a couple hundred bytes in this case).

This is just banks trying to muscle in on some nice-looking transactions.

Yeah, but you have to regard this as a probabilistic effort: when you spend the $2,000, do you have a greater than 0.2% chance of solving the problem? If not, you're throwing your money away. And chances are, you donâ(TM)t know your odds when you start, so then things become really speculative.

This line is really chilling. The fact that it passes without comment shows that we've now gotten used to living in an authoritarian state instead of a democracy. In a country that actually supported free enterprise, a company wouldn't have to worry what the president thinks of their perfectly legal business decisions. Nor would they need to be on the president's good side to run their business as they see fit in the future. âoePolitical ramificationsâ of this sort have no place in a free, non-corrupt society.

These reports always assume a 6 oz. serving of coffee, which isn't how people have drunk it in the U.S. for a long time. A 12 oz. serving of brewed coffee contains 140-240 mg caffeine, so 400 mg/day is actually roughly 1.5 to 3 servings.

Also, as usual, this looks like an observational study, so they can't actually say whether people are healthy because they drink coffee or people drink coffee because they are healthy or some third factor drives both.

Well, there is one, but it's been a long time since I needed it. If you get your vehicle semi-stuck in a deeply rutted road (or off-road), with a manual transmission you can often "rock" it free: let out the clutch to start moving forward, push it in to roll back and up the other side, repeat to go forward again, increasing the travel each time until you get up and out of the rut. This can work well when you're stuck in a gravity well without enough friction to pull yourself out or even to build the momentum at the bottom to get yourself to the top. But it's not common to need this, and careful drivers can usually avoid it.

The name is actually âoemolten saltâ and it is generally something more exotic like LiF-BeF2, LiF-NaF-KF or NaCl-MgCl2, not simple table salt (NaCl).

You can say "we replaced human computers with electronic computers". "Computer" used to be a job title.

If you think the Pope should refrain from offering moral advice because some people may not follow it, I think you may have misunderstood how the Catholic Church works.

Who wants to get up two hours before dawn in the winter? Not me! Who wants to get up two hours after dawn in the summer? Not me!

This is just like the people who stop taking their meds because they feel healthy. Get over it!

I really don't understand all the moaning and groaning about daylight saving time. People naturally wake up earlier in the summer and later in the winter, and DST is the most straightforward way to adapt our work schedule to that. We get 6 months of better sleep/work alignment in exchange for adjusting our sleep schedule by an hour twice a year. It's a big reward for not much effort, especially considering most of us adjust our sleep schedule ant the start and end of every weekend anyway, i.e., around 100 times a year.

I think the answer is no if you don't have clean access to the proprietary software, e.g., if you decompile or reverse engineer it in violation of a license agreement that you agreed to. That taints the spec, which taints the clean room reimplementation. I think this also applies to leaked software - if you know it's someone's trade secret, but you use it anyway to create a competing product, you can be sued.

But then if you want to plan meetings with people in other regions, you have to keep a table of "customary business hours" for every part of the world for every time of year. That ends up looking like a time zone / DST table, but without the standardization.

Theoretical and prophylactic are not the same thing. Quantum decryption is indeed still a future threat, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't protect yourself now. Various parties are already using a technique called "harvest now, decrypt later" to record web traffic today that they may be able to decrypt and read with quantum computers later. So using non-quantum-resistant encryption today is as risky as using plain text, just with a delay before the consequences appear.

I've ridden in one. It was just like riding in any car, but a little disconcerting to have the driver's seat empty while the car did its thing. Maybe a little smoother and more predictable than the average Uber.

Given how many Waymos there are on the road and how little trouble weâ(TM)ve heard about - despite breathless coverage of every incident, - Iâ(TM)d say they seem to be doing better than human drivers.