News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Alexa NSA And Bay Doors — With the recent concerns about Alexa and privacy we put the question directly to her:
“Alexa, do you work for the NSA?” we asked.
“No,” she said. “I work for Amazon.”
Hope that makes you all feel better.
For what it’s worth, we also asked her to “open the bay doors”.
She said she couldn’t do that and called us Dave.
Just sayin’.
Buying Bitcoin, A Personal Adventure — With all the talk about bitcoin we decided to buy some.
We enrolled at Localbitcoins. com being guided there from Bitcoin.org, a well-established site where you can also find information about the cryptocurrency.
We found a seller, Georgia-based Swift-Bitcoin, and accepted an offer of about $100 at an exchange rate of $11,276.62 per bitcoin.
Getting the coin required us to take a photo — no scan accepted– of our drivers license and send it to the seller. He thought the first one was fuzzy and made us take another. We then had to make a cash deposit at a Bank of America according to his instructions, write “No Refunds” on the receipt, and send him a a photo of the receipt next our face.
He then released our purchase and we are now proud owners of about .009 bitcoin.
Remember, bitcoin is not meant to be an investment, albeit it’s probably not a bad one right now. It’s designed as a medium of exchange with an intrinsic value set digitally and kept true by a cryptography-secured public ledger (blockchain). Just about all government-issued money in the world — including the United States — is “fiat” which means the value is arbitrarily determined by a government or government-connected bank.
God Proved By Computer Program — There is a certain type that insists science requires a disbelief in God.
One thing about which we have become certain is that God has a great sense of humor.
Kurt Gödel was an Austrian mathematician and a good friend of Albert Einstein, who like Einstein fled Nazi Europe for New Jersey and became Americans. Einstein always thought that Gödel was the brains of the duo.
Gödel developed a logic-based proof of God’s existence over the course of decades.
Since 2013, computer scientists Christoph Benzmüller of Berlin’s Free University and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo of the Technical University in Vienna have been addressing Gödel’s proof with software.
Yup. It works.
Still don’t expect the typical atheist to be convinced.
Brave Web Browser Now Default — We have been experimenting with the Brave web browser for the last two months and have just made it our default replacing Firefox.
Brave is free and open sourced and is based on the Chromium engine.
It is the project of Brendan Eich who, in 2014, was chased by the self-proclaimed defenders of tolerance from the Mozilla Foundation that he co-founded. Eich had contributed $1,000 to California Proposition 8 that held only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. That made him a bad man in the eyes of holier-than-thou progressives.
Prop 8 easily won but was deemed unconstitutional by activist judges.
Among the Mozilla products is Firefox.
Anyway, Brave is much faster than Firefox and doesn’t seem to slow to the point where a restart of the program is required as has been our experience with the Fox. It also appears more respectful of privacy than Google Chrome.
You can find out more about here and here.
You can download it here.
Elon Musk Calvinism — Hipster captain-of-industry hero Elon Musk is claiming that we live in a computer simulation.
The Bank of America thinks there is a good chance he is right.
Take a moment to laugh — or tremble if you should have an account with BoA — then realize that there is a strand of logic here.
Nature follows laws and this makes science possible. It is impossible, however, to account for these laws by nature alone. Even truth itself can’t be found from a recipe.
Obviously, there is something beyond nature. Musk and the BoA analysts appear to be staring at the red pill pondering whether to take it.
We encourage them. They will not find the Matrix though. The reality that awaits is not Agent Smith but God.
Read the Bible, Elon. It’s a good thing.
4G 5G smartphones — Your smartphone is 4G? What does that mean? The “G” stands for generation.
The first generation or 1G were the analog cellphones of 1983. 2G was digital and allowed for texting. 3G allows for internet access and 4G allows for wireless broadband connections.
5G is expected to come out next year and be between 10 and 100 times as fast as 4G.
And LTE? That stands for “long-term evolution.’
As of 2010 there were 5 billion mobile cellular subscriptions in the world. The Earth’s population is about 7 billion.
A prominent British Bitcoin developer blogged last week that the potentially revolutionary concept is dead.
“Despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly,” wrote Mike Hearn, who was the Bitcoin guru at Google before becoming the Bitcoin guru with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Bitcoin is a currency based on a digital ledger rather than a commodity like gold or the “full faith and credit” of a government. It has no central authority. It has been steadily growing in acceptance since its unveiling in 2009.
Hearn writes the the Bitcoin system can’t move money, has unpredictable fees, allows buyers to take back payments after obtaining goods and is controlled by China.
A vicious blow-up last summer involving death threats and malware attacks between factions led by Hearn and California programmer Gregory Maxwell, an open-source advocate, prompted Hearn’s post of doom.
The Hearn side wants the Bitcoin system to allow for larger blocks of transaction data while the Maxwell side opposes this because it would led to a centralization of authority, removing the “rule by math” and bringing politics into the decision process.
Well, it appears the Maxwell side won hence the Hearn column.
So is this end of Bitcoin or just growing pains? Time will tell.
The New York Times has a more detailed story about the matter here.
History was made Nov. 12. 
Police stopped a driverless car.
There was no driver to ticket, of course, albeit the offense actually wouldn’t have garnered one anyway.
The car was a Google model and the site of the stop was Mountain View, CA., where the tech giant is headquartered.
The violation was impeding traffic. The car was traveling at 25 mph — it’s top speed — in a 35 mph zone.
The cop talked to a passenger. In the end, he decided the law hadn’t been broken.
Hat tip Bob Small
Remember how you thought the future would be about flying cars? Well, the future is here or almost here anyway.
Terrafugia, a company founded by a group of M.I.T. graduates in 2006, has made a flying car and is circulating a video of it (see below). The vehicle, called the Terrafugia TF-X, is expected to hit the market about 2021.
Orders are being taken for a transitional craft — appropriately called the Terrafugia Transition — now. The cost is $279,000.
The Transition is described by the company as a “street-legal airplane”. They are calling the TF-X a “flying car”.
Terrafugia is the only car company registered in Massachusetts.
Sunlight Foundation reports the impending launch of a House Open Source Caucus, led by Reps. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, and Jared Polis, D-Colo.
“Traditionally, members of the House of Representatives have been presented with a limited plate of options when choosing technology to run their offices and manage their web presences. Members that wanted to take advantage of open source solutions — which are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective — faced significant uncertainty and were pushed towards a small selection of proprietary options.”
Sunlight says that the impending launch of the Open Source Caucus is an indication that things are changing.