Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book

Items I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture, and of course Writing

This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it, his Day Book. I encourage you to see Jerry Pournelle's site and subscribe to his services.

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This week: 26 June-2 July, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday June 26, 2017

Follow the money; Mac malware is surging.

All the tech CEOs stayed in Washington and met with the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.

Believe it or not, the cost of cell phone service in the US is dropping. My bill isn't.

Starsky Robotics: truck drivers teach programmers how to driver trucks without truck drivers. Culture clash on the job as the drivers work themselves out of jobs.

Boom! IT layoffs in India of all places. What happened to the gilded generation?

Surveillance state: traffic ticketing cameras hacked. Results invalidated.

Surveillance state: all these cities install sensors to hear gunshots. Hacking is next. What could go wrong?

SpaceX launches again and lands the launcher again for reuse. What did NASA do over the weekend with our tax dollars?

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Tuesday June 27, 2017

The news is how everyone gets the news. Ad blocking stalls. People pay subscriptions.

Google continues to move into schools with a special version of Earth that comes with lessons for classes.

Debian Linux developers find a problem in Intel's newest processors.

Apple teams with Hertz on self-driving cars. Apple has the technology, Hertz has the cars and drivers.

Volvo signs on with Nvidia for self-driving car technology.

Amazon continues evolving its Alexa to be the home computer.

MIT researchers have built tiny prototype drones that drive and fly. Interesting concept.

What the iPhone and all the smartphones did to the world in the last ten years. Sometimes we forget.

More nostalgia from Nintendo: the Super NES Classic Edition.

Counter-terrorism or censorship? The big tech companies go in together.

The public beta test for iOS 11 is released today. There will be many stories about hands-on testing this week.

Here comes DiffBlue—Oxford-based AI company whose software tests other software.

Independent tests show that Google's home speaker is six times better at answering questions than Amazon's.

No surprise here: the European Commision fines American Google $2.7Billion (with a B) because it can.

High tech immigration and murder in Kansas. The tale of hatred and stomping the American dream.

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Wednesday June 28, 2017

Petya: a new day, a new ransomware attack spreads across the globe.

The new Yahoo launches a new email design.

Big brother surveillance growing in China with facial recognition technology everywhere.

Facebook hits 2billion monthly active users.

Training data goofs: Volvo self-driving cars, having never seen a kangaroo, can't recognize one.

NBC sports creates a Premier League package. $50 for the season, no cable TV needed.

A view of the remarkably unremarkable appearance of the self-driving trucks Google Waymo is testing.

Let's move to London and use the free gigabit WiFi hotspots.

Google shows a new look on its news site.

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Thursday June 29, 2017

The iPhone is 10 years old today.

Google opens its experimental apps to everyone to try.

Elon Musk starts digging very restricted tunnels under his property in LA.

Someone analyzes Facebook's restricted speech rules and of course finds discrimination. Censorship can be tricky.

Some people are depressed in this political era. Nothing new as many were depressed in the last era. Some ideas on how to keep going.

IT jobs that don't require a college degree, "new collar." It works for many.

A look at iOS 11 on the newest iPad.

Yet another court tells an Internet company what to do in other countries. Extraterritoriality in the 21st century.

And more of this from our DHS and TSA telling foreign countries how to screen people at airports. What gives?

O'Reilly stops selling individual books. Buy a Safari subscription instead. Go to Amazon for a single book.

7,400 mayors worldwide pledge to abide by Obama's climate change economics. Time will tell. None will be in office when the real economic crunch hits.

Silicon Valley pushes programming classes in public schools. Increase the pool of potential employees so you can lower salaries. oooh, sounds cynical? Run the numbers. It is simple economics. Have the taxpayers train a large workforce for you.

This year's Amazon Prime Day will be July 11th. Let the shopping begin.

"Never pretend you know what you don’t know."—Gerald M. Weinberg (well said, as usual)

"...Paul Ryan and the Republicans are trying to sell their plan with facts, concepts, details, and logical arguments. That won’t work. You need an aspirational story about how to get to better coverage than Obamacare via American ingenuity."—Scott Adams. Yes, but...well, I guess what we need won't happen.

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Friday June 30, 2017

Our FCC gives $1million a year to dead people. Our taxes at waste.

Researchers demonstrate that researchers can use tech information better than police departments. They use Twitter to predict riots long before police can.

What's up in Dubai today? Little drone cars with cameras to watch the crowds.

Facebook continues to play with solar-powered drones.

Google continues its efforts to end discrimination by discriminating in its hiring. Such efforts have lots of problems.

Twitter wants to join the "fight" against fake news. Censorship has a new partner. Editorials as well.

Pop!_OS: System76 creates its own derivative of Ubuntu for its great Linux systems. Could have spent $ on the name.

Sometimes I just wonder. Our Dept of Justice keeps trying to get legal permits to require a company to give it data stored in other countries. Extraterritoriality.

Several stories today about how wonderful the next macOS update is.

The government of Germany will now fine Facebook if it doesn't remove hate speech quickly. The folks at Facebook have to be wondering, "We just wanted a way for guys to connect with girls. How did we get here?"

Paste LEDs to your eyelashes. Sure. Why not?

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Saturday July 1, 2017

More talk and examples of people in Silicon Valley behaving badly.

Men with money showing how money can go with behaving badly.

The story of Russian Christians who fled persecution and hid in Siberia.

Services from Google that few of us know or use.

The Raspberry Pi team is given the Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert Prize.

All the screaming about climate change while the screamers drink water from 1million/minute plastic bottles.

A California court continues to use software that mistakenly states people should be in jail. It's only a bug! (not)

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Sunday July 2, 2017

oooops Researchers show that child-play can hack into giant wind farms.

Someone invented tech to hail a ride and not be tracked: it's called a pay phone and cash. Already invented.

When our Federal government collects data, it is only a matter of time beforew someone hacks into it.

Stories from the women who worked at Bletchley Park. We know how the story ended, so it all seems predictable. It wasn't. Britain was close to losing everything. Thousands of the people at Bletchley were just kids who didn't know what they were doing, but they understood what failure meant and they tried really hard.

Canada turns 150.

This post has some humble and sensible ideas about moving into part-time and maybe full-time writing.

Examining the market for hometown stories. You can write these years after the fact.

A good experiential exercise to learn how good a person and a writer you are.

17 lesssons for better writing. Of course the list is too long, but there are some good ideas there.

Journal writing tip: You should never write down an intention unless you have an emotional connection to it, or you should change the wording until you feel an emotional connection to it.

Spend time with like-minded persons who encourage and read your writing and talk to you. This is all hard enough let alone trying to do it alone.

The next-level writer. Grow in one way or another.

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