Google acquires Twitch.tv, Moisture Minder, Online Privacy (AGAIN?!?!)

Google Acquires Twitch.tv

Coming off last week's DOTA2 International Tournament 4 (TI4), we now know how big online PC gaming really is. Didn't think that many people were involved? Ha. Think again, and check the stats, noob! Google has now finally purchased one of the biggest game-streamers there is: Twitch.tv

They purchased it a little late in my opinion, the industry may be at its peak this year and in 2015. There's still room for profits, but if they didn't have the foresight to buy them out last year or the year before, I'm not sure they'll have the foresight to manage it, or get out in time to make that profit they're chasing. I'm sure they're not in it to help the gaming industry, considering Facebook beat them out over the Rift, and I haven't seen many investments in computer gaming recently. Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope to see them at TI5, at least they will draw bigger sponsors and vendors next year.

Moisture Minder Wally

One excuse I have for not blogging the past month is that my water heater failed, and started gushing water directly out of its side. I woke up to one of my small dogs lapping water in the bedroom. I thought to myself in a daze, "I don't remember bringing his water bowl in here, and the direction I'm hearing it from doesn't sound like he's drinking from the toilet, heck he's not even big enough to reach it. He must have peed and is drinking his own pee off the floor. Gross." As I rolled out of bed and set my feet on the tile, they submerged about 2 inches in water. Hot water. I still wasn't sure what was happening, as I stood up, I could hear a faint gushing of water. Sometimes I can hear my upstairs neighbors flush their toilet, or even taking a shower if I listened very carefully (which I don't often do, don't worry) but this was alot louder than those sounds. I walked toward the gushing sound, opened the utility closet, and saw the water rushing from the side of the tank at about the same rate as your shower faucet would be on full blast when filling the tub for a bath. It was that fast. Long story short, I cut the water feed, then I cut the breakers and electricity to the whole house, because to my horror, I saw a surge protector floating in the water with about 7 wires connected. The water covered the entire floor of every room in my 1,200 sqFt condo, I was moved into my parents house for the full month, and it took another 22 days to complete the full restoration of all the old formica cabinets (2 baths and kitchen). The dogs are okay and everything is back to normal.

The point of that story is to let everyone know about this product I read about that would have saved me from all of that crap: The Wally Moisture Minder

You connect a central hub unit to your Wifi, install the app, and then place the wireless sensors anywhere in your home that you are worried may leak one day. The sensors send signals to the app within 5 minutes of detection. It would have saved me alot of time and heartache if I had this product installed at the base of my water heater utility closet that morning. It would have gone off after about 5 minutes or less, and I may have mitigated the damage to only that closet, and been able to replace the water heater. Instead, I had to replace over $17,000 worth of cabinets, furniture, and flooring. I was also out of my home with construction and restoration workers in & out for over a month. Not the best experience. Like a carbon monoxide or smoke detector, everyone should have at least 1 or 2 of these things installed. Technical Papers for the Wally

Online Privacy 2014

Are we still talking about this? I hate to include this in this week's blog, but it's still all over the news. Can everyone just accept the fact that nobody will ever have true privacy? If you want privacy, move to your own island, get off the grid, stay off the internet. I've said it before and I'll say it again: As soon as you go "online", you're signing an invisible TOS that specifies you may fall victim to cybercrime, spammers, hackers, and any other type of electronic evil entity (EEE) you could imagine. Stop doing questionable things online, stop being paranoid. Remember the early 90's? When you would log on AOL 3.0 just to talk to your friends about your day? Join chatrooms to discuss hobbies or other cool stuff? I don't remember being concerned about privacy back then, do you? Why do we have so much to hide today? It's because we've volunteered all of our most secret, private information to go up "into the cloud". WE put it there. Nobody stole it from us. There's nobody to blame here. Would you stop trusting all the banks of the world because the one you used got robbed? No, you wouldn't, so stop crying about the entire internet being insecure. I'll try not to rant about this topic anymore but it just keeps popping up, so I thought I would address it again. If I change my opinion or some hacker/privacy invincibility software finally gets created, I'll post about it. Until then, get a VPN and be smart with your sensitive data. There's not much more we can do.

Google's Self-Driving Car & It's Ripple Effect On Traffic

   A recent article has pulled back the curtain surrounding some of the mystery of the Google self-driving car. Instead of processing road conditions and obstacles in real-time, as they happen, the Google car is following a pre-plotted virtual track that has been laid out for it on specified roads. The car still has to react to dynamic and spontaneous events, such as a pedestrian walking out in front of it, or even other human drivers, but I just wanted to help clear the air about what the technology is really capable of, including its limits. As of 2014, there are 2,000 miles "mapped" for Google Car to use, however they also boast that there have been 700,000 miles driven. This means that the same 2,000 mile route has been driven 350 times, it doesn't mean that you could send the Google car off for 700,000 miles alone and it would never crash. The technology of course is still very cutting-edge and impressive, but there's still a lot of work left before they "take over the roads" as everyone seems to be concerned about.

Some questions regarding laws that will be affected by the automated cars include:

Orange - Unanswered Questions

Red - New Problem Created

Green - Problems Solved

• Gas/maintenance/repair cost 

Who will be responsible for the fuel and maintenance of the vehicle? Will the manufacturer program the vehicle with alerts of low fuel and drive itself to the gas station and fill up? Will it be fully electric? Will the passenger be required to pay for the service to cover the cost of gas?

• Drunk driving

 Will people be allowed to enter the vehicle drunk? What if they abuse the controls in the vehicle (emergency stop, etc) Can they bring open containers into the vehicle? Why or why not?

• Distracted driving

 This issue would be eliminated entirely from society. Prove me wrong.

• Speeding

 Also would not be a problem anymore.

• Wreckless driving

 The car would always be following the same path, driving at the same speed. There would be no cases of a wildly swerving, out of control Google car flying through neighborhood streets. There would be a lot of wreckless driving though, because there wouldn't be any wrecks!

• Insurance

 Who would the insurance fall under? Would passengers have to pay for insurance while they're in transit? Would Google only be liable for the health of the passenger and damage to the car? WHat if someone with no other form of transportation wanted to commit a crime, and used the Google car as the getaway vehicle?

• Seniors

 Senior citizens who are unable to drive any longer would be able to have their freedom back. I live in South Florida so I see alot of really bad older drivers and I also see this as another point which would cut down on accident

• Young drivers

I counted this as a potential "problem" because younger people, who typically get to experience driving as young as 16, would not have a chance at learning how to drive. They would just sit in the car and go. Eventually we would be phasing out all skills and sense of awareness most of us only use while driving. We would always have video games, though.

• Accident faults

How could we prove a system malfunction in a Google car? What if two of them crashed? Who would defend or represent the Google car system in a court of law if something ever happened? I listed this as a problem and not a question because it creates the problem of figuring this out, and it is one of the most important problems that should have been solved long before this venture met the pavement.

• Parking/need for Parking Lots 

Solved with simple math and accounting for annual tourism numbers. The only problem with this plan is that people would have to be willing to carpool, and the Google cars would have to increase in size for mass transit. You wouldn't need parking lots because the car would stop at the curb to unload passengers, it wouldn't need to park anywhere other than its own car lot, or if there were some type of "Park & Wait" program built into this plan.

Future Considerations:

• Jurassic Park vehicles/Theme park transportation

Let's remember the cars from Jurassic Park. They were on physical tracks, but we're talking about the same thing. We could use these cars on tours (such as Lion Country Safari down here in Florida) or any other zoos or wild adventure setting (think African Safari tours, or other dangerous places). Taking driving out of the equation, you could focus on enjoying the ride and snapping pictures. You could use it for long distance applications also, a 5-hour trip to Key West? No problem. Not as much planning required, and you won't have to worry about missing that exit anymore either.

• Partial self-driving traffic

Let's say 50% of the population are manual drivers, the other 50% are automated Google cars. What problems would arise? Well, we've had a preview of the interaction, and the only accidents that have happened were because a human rear-ended the Google car. Things would still be somewhat inefficient because the 50% human drivers would still be a bottleneck to the system. Traffic would operate at full efficiency with 100% automated cars.

• Fully self-driving traffic

With 100% of the cars on the road being fully automated, there wouldn't be a purpose for traffic lights. Think about it, the lights are only to inform humans about what the other lanes are doing, because we can't know or calculate that sort of thing ourselves. But a Google car can. A Google car could see another one coming, and perform calculations (by adjusting speed) to avoid the other cars. In this way, traffic would constantly flow through each other without ever contacting one another (though it may come very close) Cars would only need to come to a full stop when they are dropping off their passengers, as traffic jams would be non-existent (or avoidable)

Hardware used:
Light Detection And Ranging (Lidar remote sensing/visual sonar)
Velodyne 64-beam laser (to generate 3D visual map)

Sources:

Why Google's self-driving car will fail

How does Google's self-driving car work?

Google's Official Blog Post from 2010

Google's Official Blog Post from 2014

Who gets the traffic ticket?

Mapping out tracks for Google cars 

Land Rover's Transparent Hood

One of the hot tech news articles that have been floating around online recently is that Land Rover was able to invent this Transparent Hood technology. However, for the rest of us who have been following tech, specifically cloaking and invisibility concepts, we already know that the military has been toying with things like this for years. It is still exciting that it has finally landed on the consumer market, and everyone who uses it will benefit from it. There are also some differences between traditional cloaking concepts, and what Land Rover has patented.

The traditional cloaking method I am referring to is known as Quantum Stealth Technology.
This method removes visual light, infrared light, thermal signatures, and the shadow cast by the target. This method is different from what land Rover has announced because this method does not use cameras, batteries, lights, or mirrors. This method works by bending the light waves around the target.

The Land Rover method uses cameras and a windshield projection system. It is also possible by using augmented reality. The cameras are located on the lower-front bumper of the vehicle, and the video is fed to a projector inside the car, and projected onto the inside of the windshield. The video feed is superimposed onto the hood of the vehicle, so it looks like the hood is transparent.

Now you can see that the Quantum Stealth method is far superior, as one can view the object from any angle, and never see the target, whereas Land Rover's method is only useful from inside the car. However, someday I am hopeful that the car manufacturers will start making hoods out of the Quantum Stealth material.

Here are two products you can use to build your own transparent hood system:

Car Rear Vehicle Backup View Camera (Waterproof)

Garmin Head-Up Display (HUD) Dashboard Mounted Windshield Projector

After the basic setup, you would need to tinker with the transparency settings on the projector to get it just right, possibly even digging into the software itself to customize the display output further. This setup probably wouldn't look exactly the same as the examples, and wouldn't include visuals of the tires as it's simply projecting the image onto the dashboard, but it's the same concept. To be perfect, you would also want a much wider reflector lens that spans the entire width of the windshield, and that means more tweaking of the display output. The project would require a ton of customization but the point is, it's not impossible to do on your own, so don't feel like you have to buy a Land Rover to get this type of technology. I'm sure we will see it on every make and model in the next few years.


Sources:  
http://www.businessinsider.com/land-rover-invented-a-disappearing-hood-2014-4
https://www.landrover.com/us/en/lr/
http://www.hyperstealth.com/Quantum-Stealth/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nj0vCSBFT8
http://www.occupycorporatism.com/home/scientists-perfect-nano-tech-develop-invisibility-cloak/

Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster

Slow internets got you down? Keep getting pwnd in-game because of choppy video rendering? Thinking about a new computer? Should you buy one or just build a quick fast setup?
I had the same questions 3 years ago and I ended up just building a cheap setup with the fastest components at the time, also was able to salvage some leftovers from a previous purchase.
I ended up with the following items for about $300 shipped from Newegg:

PowerColor AX4650 1GBK3-H Radeon HD 4650 1GB 128-Bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16

PNY Optima 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

RAIDMAX Tornado ATX-238B Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Case 

AMD Athlon II X2 245 Regor 2.9GHz Socket AM3 65W

BIOSTAR A770E3 AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

Western Digital Caviar SE RFHWD3200JS 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"

Almost all of those items were refurbs or open-box discounted (2011) I already had a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and I was going to use it as a Linux box so I didn't need the extra $100 for an OS. This was an easy and cheap build to get online and do what I needed. Eventually I was able to upgrade the video card and even got to run Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, DOTA2, and other medium load games on it with low settings.

The motherboard and processor are the bottleneck on this system.
Anyway, the point is that you can build a decent computer very cheaply now if you have the main peripherals already. It's been this way for a while, but a new piece of hardware has emerged to help us build even cheaper than before: The Raspberry Pi

I'm a little late to the scene here but I'd like to write about it anyway, because I plan on building a small Pi cluster in the near future.
From my understanding of a simple Pi Cluster (let's say 5 nodes), you'll need:

5x Raspberry Pi = $210

Pi Power Hub = $30
Wi-Pi wifi dongle = $10
5x  Cat6A Ethernet Cables (1-Foot lengths) = $25 (this is one exception where you could go with quality-tested cables for a total of closer to $60)

Don't forget the typical desktop peripherals you'll need too: keyboard, mouse, monitor, ethernet cables, etc. (Think of this project as an extension of your existing desktop setup)

Items above are priced at MCMelectronics.com and BlueJeansCable.com
 
For a custom-built rack, sized to whatever specifications and dimensions you can think of, check out  Sheep Plastics, very affordable and very customizable pieces of acrylic to mount your Pi onto.
Heck, you could probably even build a full-size tower from them too.

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Sources:

Blue Jeans Cables

MCMelectronics.com

A 32-node Pi cluster

How-To build a Raspberry Pi server cluster

40-core cluster with 20GB RAM & 5TB Storage

Mini-Cluster Setup

Small cluster from Southampton

Custom-cut acrylic

The Swallowable Pill-Cam

Introducing the Pill Cam! Brought to you by Given Imaging , this little bugger floats through your gastro system, taking snapshots of your intestines, and sending the images back to a device you can wear on your chest or belt, and turn in the device to your physician for further examination. This pill-cam is already in use in over 80 countries, and the FDA finally approved it for use here in the United States.

The hardware involved is:
Two Energizer 399 1.55V, 54-mAhr silver-oxide coin cells
One Aptina CMOS image sensor
Four LEDs on each end of the pill
One microelectricomechanical system switch 

The software involved is:
RAPID Reader v8

This is great technology because it's bridging the gap between macro-tech and nano-tech. We're able to ingest technology now, and send it through our digestive system. It's sort of like sending a satellite into outer space, or a submarine down into the depths of the Mariana's Trench. Sure we can observe and study our intestines with other methods, but this is right up close and personal. It gives us a much better perspective, it even allows us to visually experience the path that food or medication might take through our system. We might be able to discover more unknown behaviors of the human body this way than in studying static images and data.

Future applications for this technology could include delivery of medication directly to the site of the problem, instead of putting the whole body through the stress of delivering the medication, and recruiting more organ systems than necessary. I imagine this same pill with a remotely controllable cap or delivery system. I imagine this pill technology getting smaller and smaller, to the nano level we've been dreaming of, and battling with cells of all types at the cellular level.

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Sources:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/04/fda-approves-pillcam-colon-colonoscopy/

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/default.htm

Pillcam Colon 2 Technical Specs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_MEMS

PillCam Software 

Bitcoin

****Update 9/30/2019: Yes I realize I'm an idiot****

I originally had drafted a nice little entry about what bitcoins are, how they work, why it's so popular, etc. but I couldn't get excited enough about the topic, and I really thought bitcoin was going to just fade away like any other internet fad. Then I saw Google Trends this week, and it's still the top-searched subject. I can't and won't ignore the fact that bitcoin is hugely popular now, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Since everyone still seems to be interested, I decided to post the entry after all. I'm still getting used to blogging, and realizing that I can't always pick and choose the topics, I need to go with what's popular, so I can reach the most people possible and help them out any way I can.
Hope you like it.

Simplest version of how Bitcoin works

More technical explanation

Some bitcoin terminology:

Block -A record that contains and confirms a waiting transaction

Chain - The public group of blocks (transactions) in chronological order

Double Spending - Spending the same bitcoin in 2 places at the same time, in hopes they will process before either transaction is confirmed.

Mining - A way for bitcoin users to earn bitcoins by using their hardware's processing power to confirm transactions in the block chain

Wallet - The virtual container for private keys & signatures

Signature -The mathematical algorithm used to prove ownership of a bitcoin

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Steps to start working with bitcoin.

1. Get the software.

2. Get the wallet.

3. Start mining.

4. Start spending.

5. Monitor the economy.

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My personal problems with Bitcoin, and why I won't invest until they're resolved: I have considered buying bitcoin just to reverse-engineer the system to learn how it works, but honestly after doing some research for this blog entry, that's not necessary. I know enough to steer clear of it. It may be great for short-term investment (if you're lucky) but here are the reasons I won't invest in Bitcoins for long-term:

1. Bitcoin is 100% dependent on technology and computer systems. You need it to create a bitcoin, send a bitcoin, and receive a bitcoin. What happens when our internet protocols change or evolve? What happens if a worldwide crisis (or local crisis) occurs where we lose connectivity? What happens when someone figures out how to counterfeit bitcoins? It's these reasons that make bitcoin unpredictable both long-term and short-term. This also cancels out the argument that people use regarding the "value of the U.S. dollar declining" because at least deflation is predictable. Bitcoins are not, there is no precedent for a digital economy of this scale, and there are no economic indicators to warn people when to sell or rumors that might benefit mass purchase. This tech dependency also precludes the poorer households or economies from buying bitcoins. This will expose contradictions in the people crying about government control and the 1% because not many people in the 99% will either afford or care about investing in bitcoin. The labor theory of value also comes into play here. Would the average person be willing to work as hard for 1.5% of one bitcoin as you would for $12 cash? No, they wouldn't.

2. Hard currency will always be better (more valuable to the most people) than a representation of the same currency (reserve notes, certificates, stock, bitcoin). Sure, you might not make $1,000 on an ounce of silver in 1 year, but guess what? You won't lose it either. There's less risk and more stability with hard currency, because the value is within the physical material itself, not the cost or risk of transferring that value to another form.

3. Most of you will scoff and stop reading after this sentence, but we need a government at some level. You can substitute "government" for whatever word you want here, but some system has to be in place for checks & balances. The control does not have to be as high and invasive as it currently is, but we do need a government in place to help guide and manage the economy. Alot of people are looking to bitcoin as the government end-all, or a government "work-around". Governments are meant to be social guardians. Not all of them in the world are, but in the United States, it is our social guardian. The fact is that even if we're able to build up bitcoin to become the primary economy, there will still be structure, control, and rules in place. Guess what those things are collectively known as? A Government. Some might say "No it's not, it's a self-governing system" well, you might be right, but there's that word again right in the middle of your rebuttal: Government. Until people stop crying about the government and start working together to solve problems, I'm not investing. Same with DOTA2.

4. There is no way to safeguard your bitcoins. Over $1M was stolen from a company in 2013 because someone was able to pull off some simple social networking people have been using since the early 90's to gain access to unauthorized areas online. If you have cash in your hand today, who do you depend on? Who do you have to trust? Yourself only. If you have bitcoins stored online who do you have to trust? You have to trust the company hosting your bitcoin wallet, and all of the people involved with that company, along with the company you're spending your bitcoin on. Sure there's risks with cash, but it's much easier to mitigate than the wild wild west of the internet. It's not as bad as it used to be, but there's still more problems online than offline.

Sources:

Bitcoin Guide from Instructables

Risk factors

Quantum Teleportation & Potential Role of the 3D Printer

Updated Article November 2014: http://www.naturalmachines.com/

Updated Article July 2014:  http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-explains-quantum-computing-so-even-you-can-understand/

Updated Article May 2014:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/science/scientists-report-finding-reliable-way-to-teleport-data.html?_r=2

Updated Article * http://io9.com/physicists-say-energy-can-be-teleported-without-a-limi-1511624230

The basic idea of quantum teleportation is this:

1. Scan & disassemble an object (at the molecular/atomic level). Disassembly of the object is imperative here, otherwise it would only be a clone or copy.

2. Transport the disassembled "material" to another location (without traversing physical space). The disassembled object needs to be transported to another location. The object cannot be destroyed, that would mean the transported object is different than the original. The transportation method cannot use air, sound, light, or any other physical medium.

3. Reassemble the "material" at a target location, in the exact form it was broken down previously.

I had a fleeting through recently about 3D printers, and how they seemingly can create an object out of thin air, and I thought about teleportation, and whether the two would ever intersect. I realized that it's possible, but there are several giant problems currently keeping the two incompatible.

Today we have 3D printers, which are capable of performing the last step of teleportation: re-assembly. The reason we may not be able to utilize 3D printers for this experiment is because 3D printers are only able to create objects based on a blueprint or plan of some type. These printers can be used someday to manifest the object, however they will still need the core ability to "receive" the teleported item before printing it.

Will 3D printers have a role in teleportation at all?
Physicists at ETH Zurich performed teleportation successfully on a 7x7mm chip. They were able to do this without any type of re-assembler, the material simply appeared out of thin air. It may be that 3D printers have no role in teleportation at all, and will remain a neat piece of hardware with no potential contribution to the teleportation industry.

For example, there is a laboratory in North Carolina which is currently able to synthesize vaccines for a specific virus on-demand. A lab in California could report a virus at 1:00PM, and the lab in North Carolina could send them the digital "plans" (or blueprints) by 1:30PM. The lab in California could upload the digital data to the physical machine that is capable of synthesizing the vaccine, having it ready for injection by 2:00PM. 

1st Teleportation violation: The vaccine received & "re-assembled" is not the same material that was scanned at its origin source, it was simply cloned at another location using plans from somewhere else.

2nd Teleportation violation: The digital information traverses the physical space between the origin and the destination, via physical communication cables. Once again, the goal is to send the object directly to its destination, invisibly, without traversing physical space. Disappearing, reappearing.


In any case of quantum teleportation, there is no reassembler involved at all, the item just...... appears.  So what medium is used to transport the object? The answer lies in Quantum Entanglement, when two independent particles interact with each other in real-time, without physical connection, and with response times faster than the speed of light.

Once quantum teleportation is solidified and we can transport human beings consistently, without issue, there will be a few regulatory & practicality issues to contend with. First, we can't just have people teleporting whenever and wherever they want to. We would need a finite number of assigned teleport pads to receive and send people. What if the pad is taken?  Problems arise.
What would the energy cost or monetary cost be to the user?
What if two people tried to teleport to the same place at the same time?
What if the teleporter crashed or lost power during transmission?
Would there be a system in place to control who can go where?

At the end of the day, no, I don't believe 3D printers will ever have a role in teleporting objects.

Sources:

Realization of Deterministic Quantum Teleportation with Sold-State Qubits

Why don't we have teleportation?