> If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist.
I present, for your consideration ([1], [2]) some of many articles written about the Echelon program, more than 10 years go. These two were by the BBC and The Guardian, hardly niche publications. They were published in 1999 and 2001. It has been widely known, for decades, that the NSA was conducting large scale surveillance on a global scale. There was even a hollywood movie about NSA surveillance in the 90's (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998).
If they are going to a subscription or patronage model, they will need to cut way more jobs and costs. That type of model can work but you have to run very lean, and you might end up replacing those ad banners with ones begging for money. Organizations like NPR and Wikipedia are some of the largest to use such a model, they have the benefit of goodwill and tax breaks due to their non-profit status, and their cost structure and business model looks very different from most valley startups. You can kiss that valuation goodbye.
What you describe is basically running an online magazine or media organization. You hire writers to write pieces, and users pay a subscription fee. This is what the NYT times. The article mentioned that this was their original business plan but it was scrapped.
What is the benefit of having the helmet attached to the suit directly instead of detachable like the existing suits? If I was spending months in one of these aboard the space station, I think I would prefer to not have the helmet flopping around behind me all the time.
The average income in Africa is below $1000 / year. You aren't going to sell a $60,000 container to a subsistence farmer, even if the whole town pitches in.
Only if it goes both ways. The ability to purchase in-game currency with fiat currency actually makes inflation worse by introducing even more money to the in-game economy. Most games currently do not allow in-game currency to be "legally" converted back to real world money directly. Their solution is the ability to convert large amount of in-game currency to meaningful metagame items. In Eve, you can use in-game currency to pay for your subscription. In GW2, you can use in-game currency to pay for "gems", which are used for microtransactions such as server transfers, rare skins, additional bank storage, etc. These gold sinks serve as an important valve to control inflation of the economy by permanently removing that currency from the game.
It sounds like you are speaking about the deficiencies of some particular game, this certainly isn't true of all MMOs. GW2 and Eve both support buy orders, for instance. Items that drive the economy are also not always obtained incidentally, often they must be crafted by someone with high enough skill using rare components.
While this is likely true at the consumer level, it is not true at the enterprise level. Raid6 is used extensively, and the file hash is stored in metadata, separately. The files are walked periodically to detect and repair corruption. The same is done for parity. This has to be done with zfs too, via zfs scrub. I just don't think you can directly compare zfs with raid, as zfs is a filesystem and therefore implements some of the same things that other companies end up building on top of raid with their own custom filesystems.
I have webpass, it's quite good. However it's only available in large apartment complexes, and I'm not sure that will ever change given the nature of their approach.
The author seems confused about the nature of this attack. It has nothing to do with using the go language or any other, it's purely about the choice of consensus algorithm and the vulnerabilities of a small ecosystem. In a small blockchain, it's much easier for bad actors to gain enough hashing power to control proof of work. I do see they are moving to a proof of stake algorithm, I hope that works out.
Still unclear to me why some of these smaller coins exist, except perhaps for rampant speculation. From the krypton site: "$KR is my vision for an ultra-fast blockchain that can realize all of the features of Ethereum with fewer initial coins, faster speed and lower inflation." That sounds ok, but right now none of those things are the primary problem with Eth.
Technology has been making existing professions obsolete for the last few thousand years. The first guy to get a horse and cart was putting dozens of manual laborers out of work. And yet somehow we have persevered, and vast swaths of our population have not become unemployed. Quite the opposite, as our unemployment rates continue to fall. When industries change, people do lose their jobs and that is difficult. One good solution would be to offer generous education and training assistance along with job placement so these workers can find a new job with new skills if necessary. If they don't want to go back to school, then why does society owe them anything? People lose their jobs all the time, for many reasons. Just because you drove a cab for 10 years doesn't entitle you to cab driver job safety for the rest of your life.
I am a bit surprised to see Singapore so low on the list. I wonder if they count all the small bookstores in shopping plazas? The last time I lived there (early 90's), there were a ton of micro-bookstores like this: http://friendlybooking.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Orchar...
This reads like a college application essay, and I don't mean that in a good way. The first half of the piece is just a list of high school accomplishments and the second half is vague and full of platitudes. Tell us what you learned when teaching seniors. Specific techniques you have found that worked, and ones that didn't. The highlight of the entire piece was a description of how one senior didn't understand how to tap his cellphone screen correctly, and that particular part desperately needed a proofreader.