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: 4-10 March, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Mercedes enters all-electric car racing
• Censorship continues to thrive
• Sam's Club has full-item scanning
• Here comes Microsoft Lite again
• Facebook to change course to ephemeral encrypted one-to-one communication (maybe)
• Elizabeth "I'm a native American, I think" Warren wants to break up "big tech"

Monday 4 March 2019

Mercedes now has an all-electric powered race car and is joining the E racing circuit. I guess it is quieter for the fans.

SpaceX docks its passenger capsule—without any human passengers—at the ISS. Now if it re-enters earth's atmosphere safely...Any volunteers for the first human ride?

Thanks to a new law in Vermont, here are 121 data brokerage companies that buy and sell persons' data. Also some tips for hiding and deleting personal data.

Light—a company that makes a 16-camera imaging system—is now partnering with major smartphone makers and security system integrators.

Those folks who run Facebook continue to ... well ... misbehave I guess. The global lobbying effort against privacy laws and such.

Researcher believe they can turn CO2 gas into solid carbon for burial. So, we can reduce CO2 in the air. Odd, the folks who don't want man to change the atmosphere are going to try to change the atmosphere. I hope they know what they are doing, but I doubt it.

Tuesday 5 March 2019

I guess I'm behind the times in browsers. Brave is lauded as a good Chrome replacement in this article.

Sam's club now allows "scanning" an entire item instead of just the bar code. It becomes much easier to spend money.

Here we go again: Windows Lite. Microsoft is creating a lighter version of the OS to run on what are basically Chromebooks.

When iPhones don't sell, the people at the bottom—those who actually make them—suffer the most.

It appears that the "wrong kind of books" are climbing the charts on Amazon. Books about censorship and "conspiracy" theories are selling well. Now, how can "we" censor them and stop this trend?

Political ads in Canada are gone from Google. They have a law about political speech there. The censors win. This is bad for all of us.

Fornite is out; Apex Legends is in. 50million players the first month. The definition of success has changed.

Qualcomm and Apple are about to meet in court over patent disputes. There is much $$$ at stake.

Google boasts about how it underpays its employees. Perhaps I am reading this wrong.

It appears that Google is still building that infamous search engine for the government of China.

Facebook does good things now and then. New features for legacy accounts for those who have died.

Linux 5.0 is released.

This story about VW's old new all-electric dune buggy look-alike is all over the Internet. The new vehicle is the opposite of everything the original was.

A ten-year study in Denmark shows no link between vaccinations and autism. This is a sound research study. It is not, however, 100% of the world's population. No such studies exist. And if there is one child...and so the vexation.

Wednesday 6 March 2019

On second thought...folks start reading the details on the Amazon office deal in Northern Virginia. It looks good for Amazon. As is often the case, the area will benefit in the long-term.

The AI hype is now just plain silly as companies claim to have "AI" in their products are just running ads.

The Russian governments moves forward with building its own "Internet"—one that is easily monitors and censors.

If you use computers to mine crypto gold, and you don't have any computers, simply steal computer time from others folks.

News Flash (not): 60 Minutes, and other news media outlets, don't quite tell people the truth about how they will interview them and use their material in the news reports. This is a major part in the story of the death of journalism and major news outlets.

The small Israeli moon probe sends back a photo of itself with the earth in the background.

American university research labs do some research for the American military. If you can't hack the American military, hack the relatively soft universities.

Thursday 7 March 2019

Mumbling around the table, our President calls him "Tim Apple." Why not? The name rings.

There is still a Blockbuster video rental store in Bend, Oregon. It is the last in the world.

The government of France just levied a 3% tax on successful American companies.

A Georgia Tech study finds yet another glitch in self-driving car technology. Find 'em and fix 'em. These too will be overcome.

Apple makes prototypes of their new iPhones (everyone does this). They tightly control who has these, except they make mistakes now and then and hackers get the phones.

Apple moves 1,200 jobs "down south" to San Diego.

Facebook celebrity owners and managers are hurting the company. They have lost 15million users in the last year.

Google finally releases its booking assistant software—Duplex.

Amazon is closing all of its little pop-up stores. We have one nearby. I have bought several things there. I will miss it.

American gullibility and the Momo hoax. Yes, there is much garbage on the Internet. Still, we tend to exaggerate and hyperventilate.

Friday 8 March 2019

A detailed report on the Uber-for-whatever businesses. Most are still alive, and that is a pretty good picture. It is all low-pay, part-time jobs that benefit those of us who have money and kind of like to see others working for us.

An analysis of Zuckerburg's privacy essay. It is an opportunity for Facebook to grab a new market and make lots of money.

Facebook proudly proclaims its success in censoring others. Wait, is that right? When did we decide that censoring speech was a good thing?

ooops, 809Million email accounts left exposed on the Internet. Privacy? oooops.

Back in the 1990s, Microsoft learned the hard way that the key to staying out of trouble in Washington D.C. was to spend $$$ on lobbying. Amazon, for one, learned from Microsoft's mistakes.

Got $5K? Get this new camera from Leica. Great lens, 47MegaPixel resolution. Outstanding quality.

Tesla laid off 8% of its workforce last week.

Someone has a firm graph of the obvious: Philadelphia bans cashless stores. Read it: This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. Refusing to accept the note means you don't want me to pay for your product. Thank you.

The Captain Marvel movie opens this weekend. I suppose we will break all the old records and set all the new records.

Saturday 9 March 2019

How do you fund the North Korean military? Steal money online. $500Million in crypto currency stolen recently.

Back to the 1960s. SpaceX takes a few more steps to being able to put persons into space. Boeing has some trials in a few months. Who know? Maybe by the end of the decade American can once again put persons into space. What went wrong?

Back to the 1990s. Microsoft ruled and some Congress-critters wanted to break it up and run it. Now some want to break up and run Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Odd how some smart folks can't see history repeating. They can't see that the current big tech companies will fall off just like GM, IBM, Microsoft fell off. Too big to fail? Give them time. They will shrink and others will rise.

Justice at universities? Sorry, no. Yet another person punished when they did nothing wrong. Someone else hijacked their IP Address etc. to do bad things. Authorities seem to be clueless about all this.

It appears that hard disk drives have parts that vibrate when hit by pressure waves. Hence, they are microphones. Hence, they can be used as listening devices.

Strong rumors about Apple's smart glasses that should arrive within 12 months. Maybe someone will make augmented reality practical. This would change almost everything.

The wasteful lives of the rich. Going public with your company? Throw a $10Million party. How can you spend $10Million in one night. Consult these plutocrats.

Sunday 10 March 2019

Jerry Merryman dies at 86. He was one of the engineers at Texas Instruments who invented the handheld calculator. I used them for years. We lose another pioneer in this time we call the computer age.

Disney promises to put its entire film library on its new streaming service.

The awful story of a boy who spent 47 days in ICU because his parents insisted on being the doctor. I guess someone can say they were abusive while others say they were libertarian. They boy suffered immensely and had no say in any of the this. One day the boy may hate his own parents for doing this to him. Perhaps the media will drive the boy to hate everyone else while loving his parents. A sad story.

A look at our Air Force's flying drone program. They would fly along with manned aircraft and take the hits. The cost per vehicle is 1/50th of the manned ones. They would be quite effective updates to the V-1 flying bombs of WWII.

ooops, Iran-based hackers steal 10TeraBytes of data from Citrix. This must be some sort of world record. On second thought, a $500 disk drive is all that is needed to hold this much data. I have a 4TeraByte drive for backups at the house. Wear an overcoat and carry this out in your pockets.

How is it that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the world's leading economist? I must have missed that Nobel Prize ceremony or something.

It appears that the self-driving car is a fantasy. The technology has not delivered as promised. There are limited situations where it all works. Do most of us live in those places? Maybe.

How Apple hopes to build devices on recycled materials. They are progressing, but probably won't ever reach the goal.

Facial recognition, emotion detection, and toss in the TSA for good measure. The result was predictable and predicted. Lots of taxpayers' money wasted.

The Elizabeth Warren criteria for breaking up business. It leads to grocery and other stores not being able to sell their own, cheaper brands. I guess their failures make them exempt from her policies. Only punish the successful? I guess I don't understand how this all works.

The richest of the plutocrats in tech. Quite a list. Much the the wealth of these men (all men) is tied to the "value" of the stock price of their companies, which could change quickly. Few of them own anything tangible.

Apple is now working day-to-day in its new Pentagon West building. They have a store across the street that sells t-shirts that are available no where else.

Someone else seems to understand how the words we put around "writer" limit our thinking and our lives.

Ways for writers to keep writing.

Fiction writing: the value of an idea versus the value of how well it is written. The writing part is the jewel.

Writing can be like running: it doesn't matter how slow you run (or write), as long as you keep running (or writing). Stay with it. Enjoy what happens.

Memoir writing: narrow focus, theme, stick to it.

Someone actually takes a critical look at the Harry Potter books. They weren't that good.

A look back to learn from science fiction writers of the past.

A good post about writing for business and story and plot and all those things that business writers aren't supposed to know.