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: 14-20 October, 2019

Summary of this week:

• The Washington Nationals win the National League pennant
• Fortnite goes off the air for a while
• Columbus Day in America
• Google has a big hardware event
• Social media companies flail about with censorship
• IBM continues to slide financially

Monday 14 October 2019

The governors of San Francisco want to create an Emerging Technology Office so they can regulate more regulations. See my short story on this concept "The Disruption Prevention Division."

The current state of machine learning frameworks in research and practice.

Funny how some folks decide what other folks decide. It seems that if a person isn't buying the theory of man-made climate change, that same person cannot be in favor of environmentally friendly policies.

Strong rumors that Apple will have a $399 iPhone real soon now.

A survey of outdoor security cameras. One problems is that they need to have a good Internet connection.

Nvidia is basically remastering older video games to use their latest technology.

Fortnite has disappeared. Coming back soon, though.

Living micro-organisms where found on Mars in the 1970s according to NASA experiments. The news was erased.

Tuesday 15 October 2019

Security flaws found in the Unix/Linux sudo command.

Analysis of published text from the early 1800s reveal that...we are happier now than ever. These are the best of times.

Data mining now used by college admissions offices to study students that haven't yet applied.

The pendulum swings as women in the next generation (is it Z or have we run out of letters?) don't want to be "reachable" at all times.

The layoffs continue at Uber.

Mr. Zuckerburg is having dinner with CONSERVATIVES and is highly criticized. We used to like people who reached out to those who disagreed with them.

The surveillance state is alive and well in China.

The Internet Archive releases several thousand games from the MS-DOS era.

Wednesday 16 October 2019

Good news: today's kids are smart enough to outsmart smart devices that limit their use...or something like that. All kidding aside, I find it good to know that are kids are smart enough to figure out things.

Facebook shows why it should never have fallen into the trap of trying to regulate political speech.

Machine learning algorithms fail to distinguish true stories from false ones. I'm not sure who thought this would work.

LinkedIn adds a feature to help schedule real, face-to-face meetings.

Social media is about friends talking to friends. Someone decided they should move into the censorship business, and that hasn't worked. And that is the good news.

Yet Twitter has new policies for world leaders regarding free speech.

A look at Wheels: a company that rents two-wheeled electric vehicles. Not sure if we call them bicycles as there are no pedals. Sort of a lower-speed motorcycle.

Congress, with nothing much to do these days, investigates whether vaping companies ran advertising campaigns. I believe this falls under "a firm grasp of the obvious."

Bizarre story of a group in the Netherlands living in a hidden basement for years waiting for the end of time or something.

Welcome to my home. Please note that everything you say may be heard by Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and possibly others, but please, fell at ease. Make yourself at home.

Thursday 17 October 2019

The most recent Democratic presidential debate centers on fussing about successful American companies and how to regulate or parcel them.

After several years of trying, the governors in the UK drop the idea of having an age requirement to watch porn on the Internet. Technical solutions simply didn't work.

Our FCC approves the T-Mobile-Sprint merger.

A look inside what may be a new Google via "ambient computing."

IBM continues to slip financially.

Yahoo is closing Yahoo Groups and will delete all the old content. My neighborhood has used this for years.

It is good to be the CEO of Microsoft...for now. Satya Nadella was paid $42.9million this year.

Tracking the locations of students on college campuses. It may lead to information that helps students succeed. Yet ... what could possibly go wrong?

For now at least, the deepfake videos are of the porn variety. Put your favorite actresses face in a porn video. Political candidates? No one pays attention to what they say or do, so no one wastes time faking their statements.

Friday 18 October 2019

No Internet viewing today.

Saturday 19 October 2019

Wing actually delivers small packages to homes via drone. This is in Christiansburg, Virginia—near Virginia Tech and several FAA offices.

TurboTax is for-profit software that allows filing US income taxes. Some in government want filing such taxes to be free of charge, and that would kill the business. Guess what is happening behind the scenes?

Our military moves from 8" floppy disks to a new, solid state storage system. Comment unnecessary.

Japan plans to help NASA plan to build a planned lunar-orbiting space station. We are really good at plans when it comes to persons in space.

Boeing 737 planes crashed. Digging and digging through old emails reveals old concerns. Result: email systems will go away, communication will drop, problems will rise. We reap what we sow.

Microsoft is doing well in the cloud computing business, and that could send its value up 15%, i.e., buy buy buy.

Speaking of growing business...hacking outperforms everyone. Four billion records stolen in ten years. Not sure how that number was estimated, but it is certainly large.

Facebook has a $35Billion lawsuit pending in Illinois regarding the use of faces for machine learning without permission of the face owners.

Contrary to predictions, car ownership in America is up—especially in places where it was supposed to drop. Predicting the future is difficult and usually wrong.

Sunday 20 October 2019

HP releases a Chromebox—a Chrome OS desktop machine—in a small form factor. Coolness.

Razer has the first laptop keyboard based on optical switches. This means really short key travel which means really fast key movement which is really good for game players.

A look at a group that hacks Kindle Readers for fun, no profit, just making them personal.

Fossil's latest smartwatches can now make phone calls via iPhones.

Forbes magazine praises the Deepin Linux distribution from China. The videos look fine, but I don't see anything to match the adjectives in the article.

Considering WeWork and the "not-com" bubble.

Tech workers using airbnb choose lower-cost, smaller places to sleep that are in convenient locations. The luxury full-home rentals aren't renting.

Tesla still sees itself as a technology company. The auto industry, however, requires manufacturing. Tesla continues to struggle.

Google provides Image Descriptions that describe images to sight-impaired users. This is what we should be doing with technology.

Qantas completes a 19-hour flight from New York to Sydney. It was only a test, not an actual commercial flight with paying (suffering) passengers.

One method of outlining a novel. You are an adult now. You don't have to outline the way you were taught when you were eight years old. Think about it.

Places to look online for freelance writing jobs. Glassdoor and Indeed are not thought of as freelance sites, but have plenty of jobs.

How to raise what you charge as a freelance writer.

Writers should know more about intellectual property than the average person and the average writer. It is easy to learn. It is also easy for persons who know this to take advantage of persons who don't.