Either way, Kepler's prolific rate of discovery means that further examples of systems of this sort may be just around the corner.

BBC: Kepler star trio find is mystery to astroseismologists

History is replete with examples of the inevitable failure of paper money systems, from our own founding days, to inter-war Germany, to the monetary crisis of 1970s Latin America.

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Although there were some specific examples of our latest, networked systems being subjected to cyber attack (notably the interception of video feeds to UAVs by terrorist forces), these wars were more about countering insurgent forces using terrorist and relatively disorganized small and medium sized unit tactics with kinetic weapons vs. any real cyber component.

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Next week, in my final installment of this series, I will show some examples of medical procedures that typically are not part of these third party payer systems, and demonstrate in a stark manner just what damage third party payers and government involvement is bringing to health care.

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Or online-shopping sites with real-time inventory synchronization, or real-time banking and investment systems, or thousands of other examples of the new face of the new data warehouse: always on, open to as many as possible, blindingly fast, and increasingly designed for the consumer as much as for the hard-core data junkie.

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Transportation, financial systems, emergency services, utilities, and government applications are just a few examples of services that need absolute availability and robust security.

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This is very much the way certain kinds of machine intelligence systems work (including ExpertMaker which I have covered) where representative examples are used to model much larger populations.

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While there are industries where it makes sense to allow duopolies or even monopolies to obtain economies of scale and network effects computer operating systems and electric utilities might be two examples the tradeoff usually is that they must accept closer government regulation to prevent price-gouging and other abuses.

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