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: 8-14 April, 2019

Summary of this week:

• AMC announces a third Walking Dead series
• Censorship continues to thrive ... why?
• Walmart adds more robots to stores and special pickup areas
• Walmart, if we haven't noticed, is a technology company
• We have a photo of a black hole (looks rather unimpressive)
• Israeli moon probe reaches the moon, but crashes
• The trailer for Star Wars IX is released

Monday 8 April 2019

A place for civil discourse? (a subjective thing). ChangeAView.com is born from a reddit area.

News Flash (not): Main stream media takes a poll of its followers and shows that social media is bad. Conflict of interest goes unnoticed.

In the UK, a proposal to fine online companies for Online Harms. In the early days of Facebook et al, humans viewed each post before the world did. That became too expensive as the customer base rapidly grew.

Microsoft changes its Windows 10 policy for removing attached storage like thumb drives and external drives. Quick removal becomes possible.

Fingerprint sensor fooled by a 3D-printed finger print. Security? Nice try, but not this time.

Tuesday 9 April 2019

Apple rumors retracted. The bigger Apple portable computers may not come this year.

In India, where 80% of the vehicles have only two wheels, the scooter market is where electric vehicles will arrive first.

The "duty of care" and other cool slogans are emerging in the UK where a "super regulator" may take over the world and set everything right on the Internet. What could possibly go wrong?

"In 2014, Amazon announced that it would power its rapidly expanding fleet of data centers with 100 percent renewable energy." That hasn't worked out so well. Hence, well, back to fossil fuels.

Elections are coming in India. What better way to celebrate the world's largest democracy other than censoring 1million Facebook accounts a day? I just don't understand how censorship has become so accepted.

And our Congress is cheering on the censors. Of course objectionable material is objectionable. The problem is who decides who the objectors are.

Twitter, wanting to do its part in limiting speech, is limiting the number of followers or following-ers a day.

The Internet Request for Comments (RFC) series is now 50 years old. This is how everything starts.

Google studies remote work and how to make it work.

Real News but not News: on-time arrival is up with US airlines. The airlines are not better at their jobs. They simply have added time to the trips. Coast-to-Coast is now six hours, instead of the five it used to be.

High school students crash the WiFi system so they cannot access homework assignments. It appears to be a wonderfully successful learning program though the "teachers" are not teaching what they perhaps intended.

Wednesday 10 April 2019

Udacity lays off 20% of its employees. Income isn't matching expectations in online education.

A first in the world...Google opens a commercial delivery to homes using drones in Canberra, Australia.

Google releases Anthos: software that manages hybrid cloud deployments on the cloud services of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

A couple of our US Senators have a bill that will ban the big online companies "from designing addicting games or other websites for children under age 13." How will anyone prove any of that?

Walmart continues to add package pickup in stores and more robotics to scan products on aisles and mop the floors.

Facebook created a group video watching feature. Guess what that means. And of course movie pirates love it.

The government of China will soon ban its subjects from mining Bitcoin.

AT&T expands its actual 5G service to seven more US cities. Since there are no phones that work with 5G, they have a WiFi hotspot gadget to use.

Thursday 11 April 2019

This must be really important because it is all over the Internet: we have a photo of a black hole. Looks like a kid pushing a flashlight up against a blanket.

Our Dept of Defense's giant cloud computing contract crawls forward. Only Amazon and Microsoft are left. Investigations show there were some ethics problems, but not enough to derail the whole thing. We shall see.

Google announces several new AI services in its cloud computing.

Google Cloud also pushes into retail with services for stores and online sellers.

Facebook rolls out several new censorship services to combat fake news. If anyone can find tall this fake news would be one thing. Then the real trick would be to find the supposedly hundreds of millions of persons who are faked by it.

ooops, it appears that all those hotel booking services online have little to no security built into them.

Apple Podcasts gets an update that is easier to use and helps the listener.

Amazon employees admit that, yes, they do listen to what you say to Alexa. Hence, they do listen to the chatter in your home all the time.

4,520 Amazon employees want Jeff Bezos to do something or other, what is not stated, about climate change.

Friday 12 April 2019

The Israeli moon probe made it to the moon, but apparently crash landed. I guess that doesn't count as a success.

SpaceX has another success. It launched its Falcon Heavy rocket and safely landed all three boosters for reuse.

YouTube TV is now $50 a month. They are pricing themselves out of the market.

NASA releases its study of long-term health affects of being in low-earth orbit. And we extrapolate to say that we can go to Mars.

The twisting tales of Foxconn and Wisconsin.

Uber is going public. So it releases its financial details and admits that it will probably never make a profit.

Disney announces some details about the Disney+ entertainment service. $6.99 a month starting this November.

Jeff Bezos says Walmart should pay its employees more. Walmart says Amazon should pay at least a penny in Federal income tax. There are no boy scouts in this industry. 

Saturday 13 April 2019

I guess it IS difficult being a super-rich plutocrat: Facebook spent $20Million last year on personal security for Zuckerburg.

A ten-year study of 30,000 persons shows...eat the right whole food. Skip all those tablets that come in bottles as they don't help.

Instead of waiting decades for all those all-electric, self-driving trucks, let's just do a few simple things we can do now.

Some of us are old enough to recall this financial crash and that financial crash. We puzzle of the race to buy into Uber: a company that loses $10million a day and has no hope of profits.

Uber went public, and Lyft—only recently gone public—sees its stock price plunge.

News Flash (not): sometimes the wrong story is spread far wider and faster than the right story. I think this started a few thousand years ago. Now we can blame YouTube. That makes us feel better to have a villain.

ooops, hackers bust into FBI files and release lots of information on lots of Federal law enforcement persons.

The 996 schedule (work 9AM-9PM 6 days a week), the energy of youth, hard work, learning, growing, and considering the alternative of being unemployed. Of course there is lots of room for abuse. There is also the other side.

So much for the idea of an affordable Tesla.

Sunday 14 April 2019

Meanwhile, in the US Congress, who says Rs and Ds don't agree on anything. Both parties want to bar the IRS from creating a no-cost way to pay Federal taxes like most other countries have. Hence, we will continue to pay several companies for tax-preparation software.

Real soon now, machine learning will not just point us to entertainment like what we like, but will create entertainment just for us. We shall see.

Stratolaunch just put the world's largest airplane into the sky. In a couple of years they will be launching low-earth orbit satellites at a lower cost.

Linux and the desktop market. Real soon now has been said for 30 years. Real soon now we might see something.

Everyone is claiming credit for that fuzzy image of a black hole. GNU was the heart of it—I guess.

Once again, shareholders of a company run by a celebrity CEO want to oust that person and simply have a well-run business that provides value to customers. Odd idea (not).

One writer's brainstorming method. Note, you write something, anything as simple as an alphabetical list to begin. But you write some words on paper to begin writing.

Don't have time to write? A few practical tips on finding a few moments here and there.

And if ten steps weren't enough, here are twenty steps to writing a novel.

Have you always wanted to write a novel? Here are ten steps to help you start. No, nothing new hear, but a pretty good concise guide.

135 markets for writers.

Qualcomm jumps into the market for AI accelerator processors for data centers.

A few more places to look for freelance writing jobs.

Good advice for a writer, "Don’t create something for everyone. Create something for someone."