If somebody's on your phone, somebody or something is at your house. In the case of incoming calls at my house, it's usually an answering machine (and most of the calls are either spammers, or robocalls from the pharmacy saying a prescription's ready, or recently robocalls from the electric company saying they're doing street construction and the electricity will be down for an hour, or oops, down for another hour.) Outbound calls are usually Tivo phoning home to get the program data or one of us calling a cellphone to find it.

But the NSA can still tap your POTS line, if you're talking to somebody who's previously gotten a call from somebody who's previously gotten a call from a foreigner.

RPi and BeagleBoneBlack have HDMI video built in (though BBB won't do 1080p and RPi will, because the graphics chip is heftier even though the CPU's a bit slower.) None of the Pogoplugs I've seen have video; they're headless only.

But yeah, if this x86 thing has SATA, that does make some extra applications possible.

No, it's not a blazingly fast computer, but both the Arduino and RPi are computers. If you want a built-in graphics chip, no, Arduino doesn't have one of those, but you can still drive simple displays. If you want to listen to sensor wires and turn on LEDs, either one will work, though the Arduino and BeagleBoneBlack have a lot more connector pins than the RPi, but you can do microcontroller jobs with either one. If you want an operating system, yeah, Arduino isn't going to run anything very sophisticated, but it's still more powerful than the 8-bit computers my friends were using in the late 70s and early 80s. (Not me - I was using PDP-11s, VAXes, and mainframes back then, or vacuum tubes; I'm only now catching up with this retro integrated circuit stuff :-)

The main problem with Raspberry Pi is that it's an earlier ARM spec; the new Beaglebone Black is ~$45 and has a newer ARM version so you get more choice of operating systems (I've read that RPi can't do Ubuntu, but BBB can, though reviewers differ on whether RPi can also.) On the other hand, the RPi has a more powerful graphics chip, so it can do full 1080p, which the BBB can't (which answers the question of which one I'm going to get to put next to my TV.) BBB has a 1 GHz CPU and a lot more I/O pins than RPi, but so far I haven't been doing anything where that matters, and I can use the Arduino to play with sensors.

Yes, it's a fiat currency, called into being by somebody, not backed by anything, only tradeable for what other people will offer you. But the important difference from government fiat currencies is that it's designed so there's a limit on how much of it can be made, unlike traditional fiat currencies which were limited by the amount of cheap metal available for coinage, or modern fiat currencies which are limited by the number of zeroes you can fit on a piece of paper, i.e. limited only by the greed of the government and the people's unwillingness to overthrow them. It's not like Zimbabwe dollars which have had at least 30 zeroes dropped of them, leaving what a friend of mine referred to as "homeopathic quantities of money". Sure, Satoshi acquired a bunch of the coins for himself up front, and potentially he could still be mining more, but the number of them is never going to get above 22 million or whatever.

Bitcoins could still lose most of their value, like those once-valuable Beanie Babies, but they can't hyperinflate.

I really do need to pay enough attention to this comet, figure out if it's worth a trip to the middle of nowhere to watch.

Spent Thursday with friends. We had a US-style turkey dinner (well, veggies for me) at church at lunchtime, hung out for the afternoon, went to Korean BBQ for dinner, and on the way there we saw people waiting in line at Best Buy.

Ok, going to restaurants technically counts as "buying things", but we didn't actually do that Friday.

Stealing CPUs for mining probably isn't worthwhile. Using your own GPU isn't particularly worthwhile (unless it's winter and you have electric heat, and aren't buying new hardware.) ASIC miners are available surprisingly cheaply on eBay and IIRC DealExtreme, and if you're going to buy mining equipment, the best choice is probably them or maybe FPGA boards. But from what I hear, GPU mining with stolen electricity is probably still profitable, at least if you're infecting machines yourself; not sure if it's profitable if you're also renting botnet time.

Wednesday's /. article on Jolla Phone and Sailfish OS. Sure would have helped if the summary had mentioned what "Meaningless-Name" and "OtherMeaninglessNameOS" were :-)

I used to offer to help them get the FTC's $50,000 reward for stopping telemarketing abuse by turning in their boss. None of them took me up on it :-)

But that program's over, so I usually just ask them how their family feels about them scamming people for a living. Most of them just hang up, some of them get mad.

Unfortunately, the US government will probably try to find a way to do just that. If they can allege a link between Satoshi and DPR-or-Ulbrich, that gives them a better excuse to try to pry information out of anybody involved with Bitcoin, either through legal process in the US or through possibly-illegal wiretapping overseas.

Paypal's primary niche in the early days was being a popular way to pay sellers on eBay using credit cards. The seller could accept Paypal much more easily than opening merchant accounts with multiple credit card services, and the buyer didn't have to give the seller their credit card number, and the transaction fees were competitive. It was way better and faster than buyers having to mail sellers a check, waiting for the post office, sellers having to wait for the check to clear, buyers hoping the seller wasn't scamming them; it cuts a huge step out of the non-credit-card market.

That's going to be difficult.

If your car gets x mpg in the US, your cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car is about $1M / x. ($5 per gallon * 200,000 miles / mpg) So a 20mpg SUV will cost you $50K in gas, or a 50mpg Prius will cost you $20K. (Pro-rate if you're just keeping the car a few years, of course.) If the price per mile for electric is equivalent to 100 mpg, then it's going to save you only $10K over a Prius, but $40K over an SUV.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of the driving I do is less than 10 miles each way, but there are a lot of 40-50 mile trips that I make frequently (one is to work, on the days I don't telecommute), also between Silicon Valley and SF or Berkeley. I'd need a car with at least 200-mile range that I can charge at home in 6 hours to feel really comfortable driving that. If I could afford to maintain three cars (I don't have parking for them, and would rather not pay for the insurance and registration), I'd be fine with the current electric cars, which would get used for most non-commute driving, but my wife and I would still have full-range cars if we needed them, though I'd rather wait a few years.

When Bitcoin was new, you could successfully mine bitcoins using your CPU. But the parameters on Bitcoin keep making the amount of computation higher, and these days the CPUs have been left in the dust, GPU-based miners are getting passé, and it takes ASICs to really keep up. Part of that's competitive speed, and part of it's the cost of electricity, which as a botnet herder you don't actually care about, but you've got to have a mining client that can run on the GPU without being noticed, so it can't run if the user is doing graphics-intensive GPU stuff. Harder to hide that without being detected.