Category Archives: Culture

Culture, Technology

Alexa, KILL !

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  • A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov’s “Three rules of robotics”.

I wrote in my previous post that there is a much more sinister aspect to “Keyless Killers“.

Infiniti, the automobile manufacturer, is showing how their cars have the convenience of remote starting using Amazon’s voice device, the Echo aka “Alexa”.  You can see how this works in the following video:

Infiniti has a step by step guide to set up their cars to use the Echo’s Alexa command to start their cars just by saying, “Alexa start my Infiniti QX-50”.  You can read the guide HERE.

Why is this “sinister“?

How about this murder mystery scenario?  A jilted ex-lover of our beautiful actress in the video sneaks up to her house, as she slumbers peacefully, and talks through the window saying, “Alexa start my Infinity QX-50“.  The car parked in her garage dutifully starts, filling her house with carbon monoxide, and beautiful actress never sees the sun rise ever again.  When the constabulary arrives to investigate, they find the car running and assume she must have been the one in five billion who left her car running, accidentally.  No signs of foul play.  No fingerprints.  No incriminating DNA.  Cause of death, accidental.  Case closed.  Jilted ex-lover thinks to himself, “Excellent!”.

Interestingly, as I previewed this post and played the video, my Echo heard the command “Alexa…” by the actress and lit up showing that it was listening for what it should do.  Kind of spooky.

Ain’t technology grand?

Business, Culture, Technology

Keyless Killer?

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My Dad brought to my attention a news story that people are dying because of keyless cars. It was from a New York Times article describing how people are leaving their cars running in their garages because the no longer need to turn a physical key to the off position.
As we all know, the Times is the queen of “fake news“, hence I needed to look at the numbers.

The story describes how “dozens” of people have been killed by the deadly assault keyless cars. The total number killed according to the story was 28 which is  4 more than TWO dozen, so it is technically “dozens“. That’s tabloid journalism for you, to make a click-bait headline.  Once again we need to delve deeper into the numbers.

Just as an aside, VEHICLES OF WAR don’t need KEYS to operate.  You can start almost all WAR MACHINES, tanks, humvees, MRAPs, personnel carriers, WITHOUT A KEY.  As a deadly keyless operation assault car, you can turn on and off a VEHICLE OF WAR without turning a physical KEY.  But I digress…

The “dozens” of people killed is over an 12 YEAR period. That makes the “death toll” a bit more than TWO per year. Not exactly headline news. “Stop the presses!  Breaking news!  Last year, two people were killed by because they forgot to turn off their car!  Oh the humanity!”   But let’s delve deeper.

The article says that 8.5 million cars sold annually have keyless operations. Over 12 years that would be more than 100 million assault cars with deadly keyless operations. For a back of the envelope analysis, let’s assume only half of those cars are running today (50 million cars), because some of the cars will have been crashed or have become inoperable.

Say that you park your car in the garage once per day. You need to drive to work, the store, school, whatever and return to the garage. That means with 50 million cars, the cars get parked AT LEAST 5 times per week.  With the 52 weeks in a  year, that gives us 13 BILLIONS opportunities to NOT shut off the car, per year. Over 12 years that would be 156 BILLION opportunities to leave a car running in the garage.

With 28 deaths and 156 BILLION parking cycles, the death rate is 0.000000018% !!!   For the betting folks, that’s ONE IN 5.6 BILLION.

Putting it into perspective, you are 300 times more likely to be hit and killed by a METEORITE.

BUT there is a potentially more sinister latent hazard that isn’t described by the queen of fake news. I’ll cover that in the next entry.

Culture

Pure FAKE News!

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This was posted on Yahoo as news, “These Are the Guns Criminals in America Love“.  You would think from the title that the article would list the firearms most often used to commit crimes.  BZZZZT, NOPE!

The story (which should be classified as fiction NOT news) comes from some ridiculous website called cheatsheet. Probably an apropos name. The author cheated (which must be a requirement to write for cheatsheet) by copying information from other websites and came up with this completely FAKE NEWS conclusion as to the guns that are most often used by criminals. But there is also a subtler message in this FAKE NEWS crap that I’ll explain later.

What the author (if you can call him that) Barri Segal did was to take a list compiled by CBS News of the most popular firearms based on LEGAL sales. He then searched if any of them were used in a crime. If any crime was committed with a firearm on the list he ranked it as “most popular with criminals to commit crimes” based on the SALES ranking to LAW ABIDING CITIZENS.  How the editors let this crap go unchecked before getting published is quite the mystery to me, unless there are no standards for reporting.  I think the latter is most likely the case.

Here’s an analogy as to what the RETARDED author did to arrive at his conclusions.

Let’s look at the ranking of the top five living presidents of the United States by popularity. The order is:

  1. Barack Obama
  2. Bill Clinton
  3. George H.W. Bush
  4. George W. Bush
  5. Jimmy Carter

Barack Obama said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor“, which was a LIE. Every living president has somewhere along the line told a LIE.  However, we rank Barack Obama as the NUMBER ONE BIGGEST LIAR of all the living presidents, using Segal logic. Okay, maybe he actually was, but you get the point. The conclusions in the article are complete BULLSHIT.

Here’s another analogy.  It’s an oldie but goodie.  “God is love,  Love is blind.  Ray Charles is god.”  Same logic that the RETARDED author used to research his list.

The subtler message in the article is that LAW ABIDING CITIZENS are CRIMINALS based on their choice in firearms purchase. Again more BULLSHIT.  The message is that popular firearms SOLD TO LAW ABIDING CITIZENS such as AR-15s are the weapons of choice for criminals, even though they are RARELY used in crimes.  Once again, those on the left who hate the Constitution are using FAKE NEWS in these made up “studies” to push an agenda.

It astounds me that complete RETARDS can write articles which are NOT based on FACTS, and that these misleading articles are widely distributed by SUPPOSED NEWS SITES, such as Yahoo.  SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on you Yahoo!

Does no one read the crap before allowing publication of stories or does a FAKE NEWS story with a catchy social justice warrior headline guarantee publication?

I think we all know the answer to that question.