Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 10-16 September, 2018

Summary of this week:

• CBS chief resigns on sexual misconduct charges
• India's identity database is hacked
• Apple introduces three new iPhones $$$ $1,000
• Facebook is saving the world (sort of)
• Hurricane Florence hits the Carolinas

Monday 10 September 2018

Facebook claims to be deleting fake accounts as fast as bot create them—a billion fakes in a few months.

Travesty in India. People believe wild rumors and become wild themselves.

The head of the Columbia Broadcasting System resigns amid charges of sexual misconduct in the workplace.

One threat of AI: the rich get richer and the poor get...well, you know. Jobs disappear. Money flows to the AI creators who eliminated the jobs.

How Reddit reversed its fortunes and once again became a place engineers wanted to work.

We have the first Atlantic crossing by an autonomous sailboat.

SpaceX has another launch and landing; this one in bad weather.

Tuesday 11 September 2018

Today's American teen: they all have smartphones, text one another, and don't use Facebook.

7-Eleven, America's general store, moves to Apple Pay and Google Pay.

ooops, India's Aadhaar identity database, containing the biometrics and personal information of over 1Billion (with a B) is hacked.

Mercedes shows its concept of an autonomous urban vehicle. They need to go a little less on the future style stuff.

A trial project begins that may one day clean all the plastic from the Pacific Ocean. What strikes me as odd is that all this plastic is off the US's west coast—the home of the environmental movement. Why did those folks pollute the ocean?

The terrain map of Antarctica is better than any other place on earth. I guess we had a reason for spending the money to do this.

Looking for a college major for your kid: actuarial science. Low debt, high employment, better-than-average salary. Good stuff.

Rich kid goes to Harvard, writes software so friends can chat. Now he is in The New Yorker and thinks he can save the world from his creation. Did we really need saving?

AT&T has a plan for AirGig. It will use power lines to move broadband to rural areas. I hope it works, but have plenty of doubts.

Wednesday 12 September 2018

HP releases a new metal-spewing 3D printer. Don't worry, they cost $400,000 each.

Facebook now has software to read text from images and translate languages as well.

The jobs and lives of Amazon delivery drivers. And they all work for the richest an in the world. I suppose there is a lesson here somewhere.

Just to pile on...Amazon patented a system to transport workers safely around warehouses in cages. Of course they don't do this, but, gosh, it sure looks bad. And they all work for the richest man in the world.

The cryptocurrency industry opens a lobby in Washington DC.

Verizon will offer stationary (not mobile) 5G service for broadband Internet on 1 October for a few places. One day, we can all have mobile 5G, not yet.

The EU is about to impose copyright "protections" on the Internet. As often happens with regulators, the consequences might not be good.

Coming soon to Windows 10: Storage Sense. It will move rarely used files to the cloud. I hope it fixes the problems with my Intel NUC that has a tiny C: drive.

Thursday 13 September 2018

Nvidia announces their Tesla T4 GPU which is designed for inference workloads in data centers. This is the first Turing architecture model for data centers.

Apple has its big event and shows new iPhones ($1,000 yuck) and a new Watch.

Regulators in the EU did what many feared. No one knows what this means in practice, but steps touted as copyright protection might clobber many of us.

New Flash (not): Silicon Valley executives didn't want Donald Trump to be President.

Google extends their video conference application to 100,000 participants. Now someone with that many employees can have a company-wide meeting online.

Zuckerburg promises to save all us adults who cannot decide for ourselves on election days.

Friday 14 September 2018

Don't like Facebook? Create your own social media site. Don't want to do that? Get regulators to fix Facebook.

Fun and games: create your own climate model and tell people how much better life would be if everyone listened to you.

Jeff Bezos donates $2Billion to build non-profit preschools in poor neighborhoods. I hope he hires a few people who know how to do this.

Some realism about the world of the self-driving car. They are further away than often touted.

Nvidia attempts to put its technologies into health care and other fields.

A few Google employees resign over the company's building of a censored search engine for the government of China.

Apple has raised the price of the iPhone by 40% in three years. Consumers don't seem to mind—yet.

Saturday 15 September 2018

Amazon is ready to tell us where its next big building will be. I feel they knew all along, and their US tour was for ego stroking and data collection. They pulled off quite a scam.

A in-depth look at Nvidia's latest GPU gaming offerings.

The newest Nvidia GPU cards have one-click over clocking.

North Korean government operatives don't care about promoting candidates in US elections; they just want to steal money.

A new study says...wait for it...Facebook is saving us all from us all.

Nothing like being a few decades behind the curve...a few Congress-critters are alarmed at AI deepfakes and what they might do to an unsuspecting public. This tells us what elected officials think of the intelligence of the electorate.

Seth Godin offers basic tips about communication in those Skype and such group calls. Really folks, try a little harder to be clear, concise, and communicate.

Everyone on the Internet seems fascinated by the storm surge simulation The Weather Channel made. Really? Why?

"it's possible that the measure was insufficiently scrutinized."—the cry of almost every legislator and regulator after the fact. Trouble is, the measure applies to the rest of us, not the legislators and regulators.

Twitter admits a stifling liberal bias in its workplace.

Sunday 16 September 2018

Apple gives $1Million (with an M) to the Red Cross for Hurricane aid. That is nice, but a paltry amount given the $$$ they have.

Got lots of data at home? Get one of these 14TeraByte disks from Seagate. Less than $600. I'm not sure what you have that is this big, but it might be interesting.

Qualcomm introduces the Snapdragon Wear 3100 for smartwatches.

Yikes! It is 2018 and our phones cost more than our computers. Where did we go wrong?

No Isolation: a little company that is trying to use cute telepresence machines to reduce loneliness among the isolated. It does make it much easier to ease the all-alone feeling of the elderly and ill.

It appears that the government of the state of California has so much money that they will launch their own satellite to monitor climate change. Deficit? What deficit?

The cost of living may squash Silicon Valley and San Francisco under the weight of their success. They are the affluent poor with family incomes over $250,000 a year, but no kids because they can't afford a home.

I like this post. Good tips for focusing while writing. Bear down. Get to it. Whatever cliche seems to work. Sprint for 30 or 60 minutes. I can draft almost 2,000 words in an hour of banging on the keyboard. Rest afterwards.

The use of a storyboard to help create a story (hence the name). Use a physical board and Post-Its a few times before looking at the computer-based ones.

Yet another fluid way to reach an outline for a story or book, a.k.a., a longer story.

Some things that some writers feel when writing a book. Note: what you feel is what you feel and is normal for you.

Some nonsense about writing and being a writer. If you write, you are a writer. 'Nuff said.

This is an EXCELLENT post that lists little-known but quite useful pages on the Internet.

You want to write nonfiction. Which area? How can you find an area where you can write and make some money for your efforts?

Tips on having persons go to your website.

One writer's lessons from seven years working freelance and earning a living.

Just words. I can write more. Well said.