Geekly Update - 21 December 2017

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

You may not have known that Mr. Rogers was a fan of break dancing and an early promoter of electronic dance music. Watch and be tickled!

A year ago, the U. S. government seized $500,000 worth of Bitcoins from a dark-web opiates dealer. Now, the government is asking a court’s permission to sell the coins, whose current market value exceeds $10 million.

Life does imitate art, and sometimes it's really cool. Watch a man equipped with a Star Wars-inspired bionic hand play the piano. (Okay, now try it while wielding a light saber.)

This just in from the "Yes, But Why" department: People can now get McDonald’s meals delivered to them via UberEATS, paying only McDonald’s menu prices and UberEAT’s fees.

Three months after Mark Zuckerberg pledged to stop foreign and domestic election saboteurs from distributing misinformation via Facebook ads, they were still buying ads that attempted to sway Alabama’s controversial Senate election.

San Francisco’s city council has cracked down on one corporation’s illegal use of an autonomous robot to frighten homeless people away from its headquarters. The corporation is a non-profit, “charitable” one, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The homeless took direct action, blinding the bot’s sensors with a tarp, tipping it over, and covering it with barbecue sauce.

Oops? A former Facebook exec says that FB, and all social media, are ripping apart society, the exact opposite of what they were conceived to do. Chamath Palihapitiya, formerly a VP for user growth, says he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make.

A man fed up with package thieves created a fake package that, when lifted, fires one or two blank shotgun shells to scare thieves away. Now he will make a BlankBox device for you; only $60 for a single-shell or $85 for a double-shell. The home surveillance video of his last “victim” is well worth watching!

An anonymous early investor in Bitcoin is giving away $86 million of the cryptocurrency to charities via his newly formed Pineapple Fund. Why “pineapple?” “I like pineapple. The only bad thing about pineapple is you can't eat too much :(

Wawa, a wildly popular East Coast chain of hoagie-making convenience stores, is adding selfie-screens that let customers take photos of themselves and their purchases that are displayed on monitors throughout a store. What could possibly go wrong?

North Korea has launched its own version of Netflix, with a few catches. Citizens’ use of the Internet is constantly monitored by the government, only state-approved video is allowed, and watching South Korean video is punishable by death.

Ambulance use has dropped as patients switch to much cheaper and arguably faster alternatives such as Uber and Lyft. A friend reports getting picked up by Uber at 3:00 a.m. within two minutes, and transported 4.5 miles to the ER door in less 13 minutes, for less than five bucks. Unlike ambulances, Uber took him back home just as efficiently and inexpensively.

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