Summary of this week:

The folly of computer voting systems
Microsoft leaves the fitness band market
Google's big event with lots of AI and chatting
Google launches the Pixel phone
Theranos closes labs and lays off hundreds
Replacement Samsung phones catching fire, too

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday October 3, 2016

45,000 programmers are using the Microsoft Bot Framework to build chat bots. It's a numbers game.

Melinda Gates and her efforts to bring women into STEM. Take care with discriminating to end discriminating.

Tales of woe and just plain stupid decisions in the world of computerized voting.

Cheap computing, better software, and unintelligent approaches to machine learning. It all works well.

The New York Times publishes some of Trump's tax returns. ooops, that's against the law, but we are a nation of special people, not of laws.

Baidu makes a jump in speech recognition. It is now faster than text input on smartphones.

The rich get richer as the rich kids at Stanford and MIT lead the nation in getting money to make money.

What if instead...Being more ethical was the most important Key Performance Indicator?—Seth Godin

Linux Kernel 4.8 is released.

Man-made lakes revealed to generate dangerous greenhouse gases. Are natural lakes also evil? Are these guys kidding?

A European government agency wants to take money from a successful American company. They will succeed.

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Tuesday October 4, 2016

Google is to have a big event today and show some phones and such.

Giving some police officers body cameras seems to have all police officers behaving better. Sounds good, but we are new to this.

Speculation about living to 150. This post focuses on economics.

Industry group publishes an audio-over-USB-C spec. Goodbye analog headphone jack.

Amazon changes it policy on product reviews, compensation, and who trusts whom.

After 500 years, a little reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Church of England.

Our State Department stops talking to the Russians (right after our NASA sends the Russians more $$$).

Microsoft backs out of the fitness band market.

Facebook's Marketplace is rolling and already home to all sorts of illegal sales.

Clinton aides also got a sweet deal with the FBI.

Google buys into point-to-point RF-based Internet services.

When government employees abuse their fellow citizens, trust goes away. This is predictable and was predicted.

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Wednesday October 5, 2016

Google held their big event. Here is one of many reports on it. More AI, more chatting with computers, and the Pixel phone.

Our government ordered Yahoo to read our email for us. Sounds illegal, but in today's America, who knows.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft claim they don't read our email like Yahoo.

One of Google's less obvious but more useful new products is a modular WiFi router that eables mesh networks.

Actions on Google coming real soon now to allow developers to work on Google Assistant actions.

Facebook admits to technical difficulties explanation for all those illegal sales on its Marketplace.

Look out America! Here come Blue Bottle Coffee outlets with $3 cups of coffee.

Amazon launches Prime Reading so we can read more books "for free."

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Thursday October 6, 2016

Georgia Tech is offering online Master's in Computer Science, but still charging too much $$.

With Google's entrance in the market, the smartphone world is over. Choose Apple or Google. What's the difference?

Despite SpaceX getting all the publicity, Boeing will probably beat them to Mars easily.

Theranos: the classic startup. Hype, publicity, bad management, and unemployed people.

Story Terrace: pay them pennies and someone will write your family history for pennies.

Google claims 20million students using Chromebooks—double the number from last year.

AI experts leave Apple, start own company, are bought by Samsung. What did Apple do wrong?

Disney drops out of the market for buying Twitter.

Apple opens a programming school in Italy. Flood the market with programmers and lower wages.

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Friday October 7, 2016

Hurricane Matthew is walking uping the east coast of Florida.

Free speech? Not in Iran.

Google opens a computer school in Oakland for kids of color. Good for Google.

Big companies buying little companies—happens often, succeeds rarely.

Duolingo: chatbots plus language translation equals language learning for people.

More self-driving cars. Wait for the solution to collapse and version 3.0 of all this comes.

Bill Gates (that guy with all the $$$), wants taxpayers to pay for tech research.

Those safe, replacement Samsung phones are catching fire, too.

Blue Origin advances the state-of-the-art of reusable space craft. No nation has done what they did.

My friends arrested in India for IRS phone scams. I call them friends because they called me everyday.

Facebook toying with the idea of free Internet access in the US.

This is not a joke. Must see video: Bigfoot possibly spotted on wildlife webcam. This is not April 1st.

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Saturday October 8, 2016

In depth look at G-Drive's 8TeraByte, Thunderbolt disk, for those who need 8TeraBytes.

Sharp has a new monitor with 7,680-by-4,320 pixel resolution. Where were these when my eyes functioned that well?

How to look smart in meetings? Is that an oxymoron?

We officially blame the Russians for hacking the hackable election systems we installed.

How government regulations and regulators are killing the contract economy. Hence, people will lie to their government.

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) virtual assistants (VA) and the conversational user interface (CUI) from Google (and everyone else).

Everyone should read this: the growing gap between citizens who do and don't work for our government.

Schneier has an excellent article on the danger of the insecure Internet of Things.

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Sunday October 9, 2016

Germany wants to eliminate the internal combustion engine by 2030.

Just when we thought it couldn't get worse...the 2016 election does. It isn't that the two major candidates are boring or disagreeable, they are both downright disgusting persons who need a lot of personal counseling.

Those self-driving cars will know where and when we are and will report that to a central authority.

Here come the USB-C gadgets. They are so small and cute. What happened to RS-232??

This photo symbolizes the election of 2016. How did we get here?

Seth Godin on seeing the leaks in our organizations and doing something about them.

Mitre offers a $50,000 prize for finding holes in IoT networks.

How our central government uses our local governments to watch us. What are we doing to ourselves?

The first update since 1994—386BSD is here. I am old enough to know why "386" is important.

Ilegally recording liars to catch their unethical behavior. Unethical acts to stop unethical acts can be problematic.

Here are a few more tips to spurring creativity. Look, try, keep what works.

There is an art and craft, and great utility, to learning to write where ever and when ever you are.

Want to "publish" a "book." Yes, I use quotes because we aren't sure what these words mean any longer.

Some thoughts in the upcoming November and NaNoWriMo.

The act of observation and gathering ideas.

Creating and community. Get out there and observe.

More writing advice you may ignore. Almost nothing is universal. Try things. Keep what works.

The writer and the Call to Action.

Different ways to plot a novel. There are different novels, and there are different methods.

And a completely different method for the novel: asking questions.

For adult writers of fiction: tips on storytelling. Again, adults.

Rejections and freelance writing. If you can't take rejection, choose another field.

Super tidy? Not necessary, but having some semblance of organization in your life will allow more time for writing. Make good choices.

Good thoughts on story structure and links to good resources.

"...you cannot become a best-selling author without others."

Writing when your real job pays a lot and writing just doesn't make economic sense.

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