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This newsletter is available online by
clicking here. The archived newsletter are also available by
clicking here.
The News In Review newsletter is a service
provided
by Understand The Times that
is a compilation of the news articles
previously posted
on our site . Understand The Times does not
endorse these events but rather is
showing the church the current events.
The
purpose of posting these articles is to warn the church of deception from a
Biblical perspective.
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November 25 - Cash Is Dead. Are Credit Cards Next?
Article: Technology For A Global Monetary System
The future of money has arrived, and it's called
Coin. It looks like a credit card. It's the size of a credit card. It swipes in
credit card machines. But it holds the
information of up to eight of your debit, credit, rewards, or gift cards. And
you can switch between cards by simply pressing a button. The new product,
launched recently, promises to change the way consumers spend money in a secure
and efficient way.
The key technology is a Bluetooth signal. To
load information from your different cards, just swipe them on a card reader
into your Apple or Android phone and take a picture of the card.
If you're too far from your card-like, say, you leave it at the restaurant-your
phone gets a notification. And the Coin's battery lasts up to two years.
People use cash less. Receipts are redundant with online banking. And
products like Coin allow people to pay digitally, instead of with a physical
credit card. Could the George Costanza wallet be a thing of
the past?
Read Full Article....
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December 2 - Unregulated? Bitcoin goes mainstream and why that's a good thing
Article: Technology For A Global Monetary System
Bitcoin has captured broad public attention, now
that it has surged to $1,200 per coin, which is by far an all-time high. The
coins were valued around $13 apiece just under a year ago.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency. You can't hold it in
your hand, or carry it like cash. However, more and more transactions are
occurring in the virtual realm, with banks exchanging dollars and every other
kind of currency by virtual means. When you think about it,
unless you still deal in cash, most of your transactions are virtual.
Bitcoin works exclusively in this virtual
realm. It was introduced in 2009 as a "peer-to-peer" open-source virtual
currency, which means that it's not controlled by any one entity, but rather by
the users of the currency itself.
Bitcoins are created, mined, if you will, by
users who install programs on their machines. These programs generate bitcoin
that people can put into digital wallets. Wallets are just long strings of
randomized characters, designed to be encrypted and virtually impossible to
hack. Your string of characters can even be written down and carried in your
wallet rather than saved online, however there are digital wallets online.
Read Full Article....
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December 4 - Smart watch lets parents track kids
Article: Miscellaneous
This holiday season
some parents are going high-tech and
getting their child a watch that tracks their every move. It's called the
FiLIP: a watch and phone with GPS geared at kids aged 4 to 11 -- basically
before they are ready for a smart phone.
Parents
can program up to five numbers into the gadget,
which kids can call with the touch of a button. Using the FiLIP app, parents
and other preauthorized adults can track the child's location, make calls,
send texts and set "SafeZones." Parents get an alert when a child leaves a
safe zone.
"What we learned
after doing a lot of interviews with families, with moms dads and kids, is
that they would like to have some of the
sophisticated technology of a smartphone but take away some of the features
like internet access," Kirbak says.
Read Full Article....
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We hope the Weekly News In Review has been a
blessing to you.
Sincerely,
Roger Oakland
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If you live in the United States, you live in a
high tech surveillance grid that is becoming more oppressive with each passing
day. In America today, the control freaks that
run things are completely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and
recording virtually everything that we do. If we continue on the path that we
are currently on, we will be heading into a future where there will be
absolutely no privacy of any kind. 
You can use your phone to figure out your heart
rate and track how much you walk. But the powerful sensors inside smartphones
can do more than keep you updated on your health:
They can also turn your body into a password.
Pope Francis sent special greetings to the
Archbishop of Constantinople today,
expressing his desire for continued dialogue between
the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
From fighting terrorism to processing payments
in the blink of an eye, facial recognition
is set to change our ideas on privacy.
SmartMetric has announced that
its fingerprint-activated payments card will be
available for quantity sales in the first quarter of 2014.
For most of the latter half of the 20th century,
religious life in the United States was marked by four consistent trends:
oldline Protestant membership was declining;
evangelical Protestants were growing; Roman Catholics were hovering just above
the replacement level (with new immigrant growth slightly exceeding the amount
of erosion in the white ethnic base); and each succeeding generation of adults
was participating less in religious institutions.
