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: 12-18 November, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Stan Lee dies at 95
• And Roy Clark died this week
• Singles' Day in China sets more record$
• The Commonwealth of Virginia just gave $1Billion to the richest man in the world
• Uber continues to lost $10Million a day

Monday 12 November 2018

Netflix: the classic collision between the tech people and the Hollywood people. Let's see if they can manage this without destroying themselves.

Got $2,000? You could buy a foldable Samsung phone. $2,000 for a telephone? How did we get here?

When did "junk news" become "election interference?" Did I miss something here? Election interference is blowing up polling stations and other sorts of interfering with the conduct of an election. Bad jokes? Interference?

The world is running out of the right kind of sand. Yes, sand.

Singles' Day in China: Alibaba has $30.8Billion in sales. This breaks all records for something or other. Nevertheless, it shows the buying power of the Chinese population.

News Flash (not): bicyclists are faster in traffic than cars. Well, if you don't have to obey any traffic laws...

Medium.com is unprofitable and is searching for money.

Tuesday 13 November 2018

Stan Lee has died at 95.

The Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace: no specifics, just a pledge for us all to just get along.

Palantir is worth $20Billion, but still loses money everyday.

Stronger rumors that Long Island, NY and Crystal City, VA will be parts of Amazon's new HQ2. Of course it was a farce as they are close to the Bezos' mansions.

Facebook has agreed with the government of France to allow access to their content-moderation process. Since this is all interconnected...what could possibly go wrong?

The Zuckerburgs, of Facebook information leaking fame, have funded an online education program that many schools use. Some students worry about privacy.

Apple's stock price drops amid predictions that we just aren't buying iPhones as fast as we used to. Market saturation.

Wednesday 14 November 2018

Good morning fellow Virginia residents. How does it feel knowing that our elected representatives just gave the richest man the world a Billion dollar$? But here come 25,000 jobs at $150,000 a year. If you believe that one...

Facebook pushes further into LinkedIn's territory with a jobs skills program. Once again, someone is telling us that there is a shortage of skilled workers (who will work for low salaries).

600,000 of us followed Russian-troll Instagram accounts. This is supposed to threaten the existence of western civilization or something?

Intel updates yet another line of processors. To be candid, I cannot follow the names of their processor lines let alone the technical differences.

I find this an odd story...Google is using technology from its DeepMind unit in London in health care. The story, however, indicates a lot of tension between Google and its own lab.

Thursday 15 November 2018

Uber continues to lose $10Million a day. Yet people still think Uber is the best something-or-other in the world.

Harvard, Congress, and Artificial Intelligence. Someone is going to make a lot of money giving the appearance of teaching.

Got'a get one of these: Intel's Neural Compute Stick 2. Plug it in and run heavy neural nets on my laptop or whatever. Only $100.

Samsung updates their Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for their coming generation of supercomputers in our pockets, i.e., smartphones with cameras.

The government of China, via ZTE, built and owns the telecommunications of Venezuela. Learning to control your subjects from the professionals.

Our government denies Oracle's protest of the winner-take-all Pentagon cloud computing contract.

Climate researchers admit, "we made mistakes here," Well, no duh.

Netflix experiments with a mobile-only service.

Google releases its Night Sight image processing to its smartphone cameras.

Friday 16 November 2018

News Flash (not): People don't like to admit bad things about themselves. The Internet is buzzing about a New York Times' report on Facebook. Why?

Facebook proudly continues its censorship program.

We have a new Raspberry Pi. The performance was cut to enable a $25 vice $35 price tag. We have reached the point where we are saying, "Sure the Raspberry Pi works, but let's cut back on expectations and make a cheaper model that compromises on ..." Really? Its a $25 education tool.

Nvidia has a good financial quarter, but not as expected. Hence, stock price falls 19%. No one fired the expect-ers who were all wrong.

Little did we know that all the world's problems are explained by the C Programming Language and memory unsafety.

The George Kaiser Family Foundation has money for perks for you if you are a remote worker and move to Tulsa, Oklahoma. They want employed digital nomads to settle, pay taxes, and be good people.

Jeff Bezos states the obvious: one day Amazon will go away. Sears did, so did dozens of other once world leaders in business.

Saturday 17 November 2018

The rich get richer; the poor live a rural life. Amazon to put 50,000 jobs on already populated and rich eastern cities. Why go where the cost of everything is so high? This wasn't supposed to happen.

Everyone wanted Amazon to come to their town. Here are some of the things representatives promised. Hey, Virginia gave $1Billion to the richest man in the world.

Are we in the golden age of story telling? Is the PodCast the ultimate story telling chair?

Our FCC completes the process and gives SpaceX permission to launch 12,000 satellites that will give everyone on earth Internet access. We shall see. Remember Iridium?

The convenient ATM is convenient for hackers. Most can be hacked in 20 minutes. That is where the money is.

The folly of the Freedom of Information Act. No lawyer? No information from the citizens who work for the government and hide information from the rest of the citizens. My FOIA request, requesting information about me, has been sitting for three years.

Sunday 18 November 2018

Musician and entertainer Roy Clark dies at 85.

Interface heaven: a 14-in-1 USB-C docking station.

YouTube has started showing real Hollywood movies at no charge with commercial breaks—just like NBC Saturday Night at the Movies (if you are old enough to remember that).

Former Facebook security chief admits that they knew the Russians were running a propaganda campaign in 2016. Well, duh. Of course. Why not? I guess I am dense. I don't see what the big surprise or problem is. Free speech is great as long as the Russians don't stand on the 21st century soap box and speak. Is that how it works?

Facial recognition, the low-cost of everyone on the Internet, and how they all connect to identify the persons in 1800s photographs.

Hey Virginia residents: more news on the goodies our representatives promised the richest man in the world. We are going to produce tens of thousands of computer science graduates to flood the market and lower wages for each of them to work at Amazon.

Writing deadlines are the key to many writers finishing pieces. Again, like in all techniques, try it. If it works for you, use it.

I love this post. Five simple ideas on writing. In my experience, these things work. Try them.

One of the reasons writing a book can be so difficult is that many approach it in one big step. This post shows how to make it into four easier-to-do stages.

Want to make a living as a writer? Here is how you should probably spend your time.

I like this, the Comfort Zone Sandwich and finally doing those things we always knew we wanted to do.

Title sounds silly, but this contains—in my experience—some pretty darn good advice about improving our writing.

Number one quality clients seek in freelance writers and others: RELIABLE.

It takes a long time for the writer of this post to get to the point, but there are three excellent points here. Two are You need to learn to write fast and write well. You have to write—regularly.