the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

globinfo freexchange Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss China's superiority in supercomputer power field and the possible impact on China's domination in the CryptoCurrency markets of the future. As Herbert describes based on a related article from Technology Review : If you want to crunch the world’s biggest problems, head east. According to a newly published ranking, not only is China home to the world’s two fastest supercomputers, it also has 202 of the world’s fastest 500 such devices—more than any other nation. Meanwhile, America’s fastest device limps into fifth place in the charts, and the nation occupies just 144 of the top 500 slots, making it second according to that metric. The world’s fastest supercomputer is still TaihuLight, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. Capable of performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, it’s almost three times faster than the second-place Tianhe-2. The Department of Energy’s fifth-pla

A secretive British police investigation focusing on journalists who have worked with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents is still active more than four years after it was launched, The Intercept has learned. The investigation – codenamed “Operation Curable” – is being led by a counterterrorism unit within London’s Metropolitan Police, under the direction of the force’s head of Specialist Operations, Mark Rowley. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the status of the investigation last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The disclosure that the probe remains active prompted criticism on Monday from the National Union of Journalists, the U.K.’s largest journalists’ organization. Sarah Kavanagh, a spokesperson for the group, said that news reports based on the Snowden documents had exposed unlawful covert surveillance activities in the public interest. “ The media are often the only group in society able to reveal the intelligence and secur

Οι ηλεκτρονικοί υπολογιστές που χρησιμοποιούνται για την παραγωγή του κρυπτονομίσματος Bitcoin καταναλώνουν μέσα σε ένα χρόνο όση ενέργεια καταναλώνει ολόκληρη η Ελλάδα σε ένα εξάμηνο. Συγκεκριμένα, σύμφωνα με έρευνα του Digiconomist, οι μηχανές του δικτύου του Bitcoin καταναλώνουν 30,14 TWh (Τεραβατώρες) ανά έτος, τη στιγμή που αντίστοιχη ποσότητα (περίπου 28,2 TWh ) χρειάζεται η Ελλάδα ανά εξάμηνο. Η ιδιαίτερα μεγάλη κατανάλωση οφείλεται στο ότι στο δίκτυο του Bitcoin ιδιαίτερα ενεργοβόρες μηχανές λειτουργούν αδιάκοπα, προκειμένουν να επιβεβαιώσουν τις συναλλαγές που πραγματοποιούνται με το κρυπτονόμισμα. Καθώς η βάση της αξιοπιστίας του είναι ότι οι συναλλαγές επιβεβαιώνονται μέσω αλγορίθμων, η τεράστια κατανάλωση ενέργειας είναι το τίμημα που πρέπει να πληρωθεί για να αποφεύγονται οι απάτες. Για κάθε μία συναλλαγή με Bitcoin υπολογίζεται ότι απαιτούνται περίπου 300KWh. Οι πληροφορίες αυτές κυκλοφορούν λίγες μέρες αφ’ότου η τιμή του Bitcoin έφτασε στα

This article reassesses the relationships of the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense with the American entertainment industry. Both governmental institutions present their relationships as modest in scale, benign in nature, passive, and concerned with historical and technical accuracy rather than politics. The limited extant commentary reflects this reassuring assessment. However, we build on a patchy reassessment begun at the turn of the 21st century, using a significant new set of documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. We identify three key facets of the state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or absent from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the work; and 3. The level of politicization. As such, the article emphasizes a need to pay closer attention to the deliberate propaganda role played by state agencies in promoting the US national s

Part 3 The idea of a universal basic income for all citizens, regardless of employment status, is an attractive one. Few would disagree with the idea of creating a safety net to ensure that someone who is down on their luck or unemployed could afford food, shelter and clothing at a minimum. However, extending universal basic income to the entire working population of a large country could be less feasible than introducing it in certain cities or for select populations. For example, there are presently around 32 million employed adults in the UK plus almost another nine million economically inactive individuals aged 16-64. If each of these roughly 40 million people received, say, £500 each month, this would equate to almost £20 billion a month or £240 billion a year – approximately double the annual NHS budget. It’s difficult to imagine this occurring at a time when governments across Europe are taking every opportunity to implement austerity. Billionaire