April 2012
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Speaking of digital cash: the Royal Canadian Mint just announced a government sponsored alternative to BitCoin
It’s called MintChip. From Hacker News:
Every MintChip has an ID, and every transaction is logged on both the sending and receiving device with the ID of the other device. This means that if someone takes your chip, they get a complete record of every transaction you’ve...
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Bringing Dollars and Cents Into This Century: How should the U.S. update its currency? #
Yours truly contributed to a New York Times “Room for Debate” forum on the future of the dollar:
Canada is eliminating the penny, but not the cent: digitally, consumers can still pay to the cent, for instance charging $1.03 to a credit card rather than paying $1.05 in cash. It’s almost...
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German publishers: "Iss not fair!"
Germany plans to introduce legislation that would require search engines to pay content owners for using snippets shown in search links to news items. Obviously this would be a curtailment of fair use, and as a result, free speech. But what’s truly amazing is that the stated reason for this plan is that search engines are making more money than new sites.
A site like Google News (or...