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: 5-11 November, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Amazon offers free shipping for Christmas
• Amazon uses more robots and fewer people this Christmas
• Mid-Term elections in the US...everyone has something to brag about
• CNN employee gets rich quick at the White House
• Amazon now lists more Apple products

Monday 5 November 2018

Pushed by competition, Amazon offers free shipping to all and to all a good spending Christmas...or something like that.

Enabled by better robotics, Amazon is hiring fewer seasonal persons. So, that $15/hour wage rings hollow this holiday season.

A closer look at the iPad Pro. It is impressive, but it is still a tablet. Can it run Linux? Please?

MIT researchers find and fix the reason why drones haven't been able to find those who are literally lost in the woods.

North Carolina rises in the tech world. Good climate, education, and low costs.

Tablet sales have declined every quarter for four years. The phones are better. The phones are more expensive, so no one can buy both a phone and a tablet.

Personalized pricing—offering special deals to frequent customers—levies higher prices on the poor. Should companies be able to choose their own prices?

Tuesday 6 November 2018

Another look at the refreshed iPad with emphasis on the pencil and keyboard. But can I ftps and vi on it?

The latest Amazon HQ2 rumor: they will pick two cities because no one city has enough (low-priced) tech talent. Amazing reasoning. They never stop chasing the dollar.

Amazon, wanting to join in the latest censorship movement, has dropped booksellers from certain "bad" countries. Will they contribute to burning books next?

Facebook partners with "US law enforcement" (who is that) to censor over a hundred sites deemed unworthy of free speech.

7-Eleven experiments with cashier-less stores, i.e., fewer persons with paying jobs.

Foxconn signs a $100Million deal with the University of Wisconsin. Students, no surprise here, are a bit skeptical about what all this means.

Who provides the answers in supervised learning (giving the correct answer to train AI systems)? It appears that really poor people do for really low wages.

Amazon is hiring its own drivers to deliver packages to homes. They are seasonal jobs only, i.e., low benefits. This is a shift from USPS, UPS, and Flex drivers.

Lexar releases a 512GigaByte MicroSD memory card. Now when you misplace the little thing...

Wednesday 7 November 2018

The mid-term elections in the US brought something for everyone. The party not in the White House gained, but the gains were below average. Let the spinning begin.

The UK Information Commissioner—do we have one of those in the US?—has found that everyone involved in elections tosses about everyone else's private information.

Yet another review of the MacBook Air. Apple makes a thinner laptop called the MacBook. Why do they still use the word "Air?"

Facebook's GraphQL data query language now has its own foundation hosted by the Linux Foundation. Maybe I should start my own Foundation.

The government of China is now using "gait recognition" to help monitor its subjects.

The residents of San Francisco pass a tax on successful businesses to help solve a problem that success has brought.

"Mining" crypto currencies has a higher energy cost than mining gold. Of course, since we use indoor computers for such computer mining, we can use the heat to heat homes and save energy.

Medicine collides with computing. Doctors seem to hate computers. In reality, they hate the designs of systems. Poor design is poor design.

At least one person understands the reality and limitations of supervised learning and what most call "AI."

A group of Amazon employees believe that their facial recognition software should be sold, so they can have high salaries, but not sold to law enforcement. Strange stuff happening here with so called adults.

Thursday 8 November 2018

A CNN employee speeds his way to career success with theatrics on national television.

Samsung sort of shows its foldable smartphone.

How about this one: employers are teaching people how to do their jobs in a "dwindling" talent pool. Let's see if any of that sentence is true.

Facebook puts an undo feature in Messenger. Pull back that message.

ooops, it was just a "calculation error" at Wells Fargo that had them foreclose on 545 home loans. Don't take it personal when the police show up at your door to evict you.

Friday 9 November 2018

The folks who run Google are attempting to become adults. "Let's hold down the partying, guys. We seem to be getting into trouble at parties."

AWS' CEO says they will continue to sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement. Concerns are not widespread at Amazon.

Facebook tells us that its data-gathering Portal gadget is not a data-gathering gadget.

Cord cutting sets a new record with 1.1Million people leaving in three months. Cut the prices and people won't cut the cord.

Saturday 10 November 2018

In North Dakota, there are jobs jobs and more jobs, but not so many people. They want their young to return after college.

Something called nowcasting will let you know if it is raining a block away so we can...I guess we can do something worthwhile knowing that it will start raining in two minutes.

Informed Delivery: the USPS will scan my mail and send digital copies to me. A great service, but they didn't build security into it and, well, the predicted has come true.

Google is helping the New York Times scan millions of photos and captions (the real challenge) dating back to the 1870s.

Amazon and Apple patch up some feuds as Apple's products now appear online.

Facebook, like Google and others, is trying to grow up and act like adults.

What happens when citizens don't trust they citizens who are employed by our own government? We spend money to compensate instead of restoring trust. This is bad for all of us.

Yet another look at the updated iPad Pro. This is a window to the cloud. Is that enough for enough of us?

Predictable and predicted: HealthCare.gov is a portal to everything, and some persons have hacked into it and stolen the information.

At least one person has a firm grasp on the obvious: the Amazon "search" for a HQ2 was phoney.

News Flash (not): voting systems, operated by the states, aren't secure. Manipulation isn't difficult.

Sunday 11 November 2018

Buy this year; wait till  next year—when to buy a computer. Start a business of some sort. Claim the purchase as a business expense.

Comedy and tragedy are still cohorts. A former Google employee and comedian writes a book about women at Google.

Apple's new security chip blocks the use of Linux. Perhaps this will be changed soon, perhaps not. As one Linux professional told me years ago, "I can't wait to get my hands on that Apple hardware. It's great."

A Chinese school teacher is caught stealing the school's electricity to run his crypto-mining computers.

So much for those secure credit card chips. Most merchants didn't change their systems to use the new features. They remain easy to hack.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Xbox One mouse and keyboard support arrive next week.

At least one person has a grasp of what Artificial Intelligence is and isn't.

Lime recalls one of its scooters. It appears that they fall apart.

Magic from Kurt Vonnegut.

One writer's experiences and expectations from NaNoWriMo and similar exercises.

Three things that cripple people who want to write. Of course the definition of "writing" cripples most.

Tips on writing a script. If it hits it big, the money is on another level.

Thinking about your own creative process. We all have one. Do we all realize it and try new things now and then?

Trying to reach the word count of NaNoWriMo? Here are some things you can always add to a scene. Who knows? Adding some of these may make the story better. Note, I could have written "may improve it," but that has fewer words.