Lifeboat Foundation

Samuel Arbesman — Aeon

My family’s first computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Billed by its pitchman, Star Trek’s William Shatner, as the ‘wonder computer of the 1980s’, I have many fond memories of this antiquated machine. I used to play games on it, with cassette tapes that served as primitive storage devices. One of the cassettes we bought was a Pac-Man clone that my brother and I would play. Instead of a yellow pie with a mouth, it used racing cars.

My most vivid memories are of the games whose code I typed in myself. While you could buy software for the VIC-20 (like the racecar game), a major way that people acquired software in those days was through computer code published in the pages of magazines. Want to play a fun skiing game? Then type out the computer program into your computer, line by line, and get to play it yourself. No purchase necessary. These programs were common then, but no longer. The tens of millions of lines of code that make up Microsoft Office won’t fit in a magazine. It would take shelves-worth of books.
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Quoted: “At the event, CEO Bill Barhydt said: “Our mission with Abra is to turn every smartphone into a teller that processes withdrawals. This is not just another bitcoin app. The wallet is a full-fledged digital asset management system, and you don’t have to understand it.”

Use of the application is straightforward and relies on a network of people around the world who act as tellers, charging small fees to help people transfer money abroad. A user can deposit funds into his or her account using a debit card or by meeting up with a teller in person and handing them cash. Then those funds can be instantly — the power of Bitcoin — transferred anywhere in the world. The person receiving the money has only to find a teller, show that he or she is the recipient of the funds, and exchange the digital cash (denominated in USD) back for their local currency.”

Read the article here > https://bitcoinmagazine.com/19490/abra-announced-launch-fest…d-bitcoin/

By Jared Newman — Fast Company

When Apple introduced the iPad 2 in 2011, it laid out a noble goal for the future of technology.

“Technology alone is not enough,” an Apple ad proclaimed. “Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things, but when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward.“
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By Michael S. Malone — MIT Technology Review

The view from Mike Steep’s office on Palo Alto’s Coyote Hill is one of the greatest in Silicon Valley.

Beyond the black and rosewood office furniture, the two large computer monitors, and three Indonesian artifacts to ward off evil spirits, Steep looks out onto a panorama stretching from Redwood City to Santa Clara. This is the historic Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Atari, Netscape and Google. This is the home of innovations that have shaped the modern world. So is Steep’s employer: Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, where personal computing and key computer-­networking technologies were invented, and where he is senior vice president of global business operations.

And yet Mike Steep is disappointed at what he sees out the windows.
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Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has had its moments of strength and weakness. The technology behind bitcoins, however, is a different story. While skeptics don’t expect a lot from Bitcoin as an alternative currency because of its volatility, they do have high hopes for the technological innovation that powers it, believing that it can be further developed to create something much powerful than Bitcoin itself.

To those who know Bitcoin as a great way of transacting online, but don’t completely understand its dynamics, it’s time to get acquainted with the cryptocurrency’s mathematical wonders that make anonymous, faster, and cheaper transactions of moving funds on the internet possible.

Most of us know that Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, but hashing serves a different function and purpose from that of digital signatures. Hashing actually provides proof that a message has not been changed because running the same hash always generates similar result.

Any message, regardless of the size can go into a hash function where the algorithm breaks it down, combines the parts, and “digests” it until it makes a fixed-length outcome called “digest”. However, a good hashing algorithm possesses some critical characteristics, in which the same message always produces the same result, as mentioned above, and it only works in one direction.

Continue reading “The Mathematical Wonders behind Bitcoin” »

By Jason Bloomberg, Intellyx — Wired

We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law: the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. We’re also familiar with the plethora of corollaries to the law, pertaining to everything from network speed to hard drive capacity to the number of pixels in our digital cameras. It seems that the natural behavior for technology advancement follows an exponential growth curve.

However, not all innovation follows such a curve. Organizational and process improvements, in particular, seem to proceed at a glacial pace. Management fads come and go, and they don’t even seem to be getting much better, let alone better at a faster rate.

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Armstrong and the Winklevoss twins have promising visions in securing Bitcoin exchange.

Bitcoin exchange Coinbase has brought innovation to the next level by opening the first ever licensed US Bitcoin exchange. Backed by $106 million from the New York Stock Exchange, banks, and venture-capital firms, Coinbase’s newly launched US exchange, said to be named Lunar, will provide greater security features; so as not to repeat the mistakes of Mt. Gox and Bitstamp, the former of which declared bankruptcy last year while the latter has sustained hacking attacks and is now back in the game.

Coinbase has already acquired licenses from 50% of the states in the country, which includes New York. The remaining 50% is still in the works and is necessary to complete to be able to provide full nationwide services. Also, Coinbase does not only look at expanding nationwide, it also looks at expanding worldwide in offering their Bitcoin-related services.

Of this plan, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said: “Our goal is to become the world’s largest exchange”.

Continue reading “Coinbase releases first licensed US Bitcoin exchange; Winklevoss twins gear up to do the same” »

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

In two recent videos, Jason Silva visits the idea of ontological design—that as we design our tools, so our tools design us in return. We devise and engineer computers and the internet, and now computers and the internet are remaking us.

Silva describes the process as endlessly circular, like the serpent eating its tail.

Why does this matter? Because, according to Silva, as we become aware of these feedback loops, we can design with more intention. Make spaces—homes, museums, skyscrapers, cities—in anticipation of how they’ll influence our brains.

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GM Overcoming Toyota & Ford Surmounting Honda, Unfailingly, For Life!

FIRST

The reason why Japanese automotive industry beat the U.S. car-makers is because, to them, it is an outright existential world to win and in the process spread a sense of Japanese exceptionalism.

They are fighting a most-lucrative World War merciless!

Continue reading “GM Overcoming Toyota & Ford Surmounting Honda, Unfailingly, For Life! By Mr. Andres Agostini” »