Our local computer club provides free help to people in the community. Recently they sent out an email saying this:
I have now helped 6 people with a virus that has been infecting iPads. The message appears on the iPad screen stating that your software has crashed and you need to call Microsoft to repair it. The number to call is 1-855-720-2636. People who have called the number were told that they would have to pay $130.00 to get rid of it.The message stays on the screen and you can't get rid of it. This has affected iPhones as well. If you have this problem call me and I'll help you get rid of it For FREE.
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Younger readers may not know that until the 1990's, software could not be patented. I'm of the opinion that it should have remained that way.
There has been some recent pushback and it is certainly possible that court opinions will change, but really we need to reexamine the patent system in general. I think it often does more harm than good. I'm not saying we should abandon it entirely, but I do think that overly broad patents should not only be denied, but be punishable as they hinder commerce. I also think that the length of patents should vary with the industry. Perhaps tech patents for consumer goods should have a shorter lifetime than miracle drugs or vice versa and both should be shorter than they are now.
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I was never a fan of my public library. When I was young, I found the books in my own home to be all I usually needed. Of course not everyone has a home chock full of books and reference materials, so I was very lucky to have that.
When I was older, I found that the library still did not meet my needs. First, the technical books I wanted were seldom available. I might be able to request them from a larger library, but that took time. I also had to return the books and with most of these, I wanted them available longer. So my books came from bookstores, physical at first but later from the Internet. Again, of course I had the money to do that and not everyone does.
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Brace yourself: We may be headed towards a world dominated by a handful of tech corporations vying with each other to develop the best AI prediction algorithm.
That's from "Microsoft Bing Predicts and the future of gambling" at ExtremeTech. That article discusses how Microsoft Bing correctly picked winners for week one of the NFL season. That's groundbreaking, but the stuff about computer trading has been going on for some time now. People are still arguing as to whether it has caused market crashes, but there's no doubt that the best software with the quickest Internet connections has great advantages over anyone else.
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I use Apple computers, tablets and phones. I have long been disdainful of Microsoft and its incredibly crappy operating systems, so this is going to be a surprising comment: I do not hate Windows 10.
I will quickly add that I'd still rather have a Mac and I honestly think that you would too if you gave it half a chance, but I have to admit that if you do go the Windows 10 route, you aren't doing anything horrible. You'll probably like it. Unlike every previous version of Windows I have had the displeasure to experience, Windows 10 is quite decent.
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So Microsoft has now introduced a laptop. I wonder how Dell et al. feel about that? But never mind slapping your distribution chain in the face, what's this nonsense about luring us away from Apple?
Let's pretend for one silly minute that Windows actually was competitive with Mac OS X. It is not, of course, but let's pretend that I could actually do my daily work with the same ease that I can now on my Mac. Let's further pretend that the Surface Book was half the price of a Macbook (it isn't) and was as carefully crafted and would last twice as long. Yeah, I know: utter nonsense, but go along with me.
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The link below advances the idea that doctors and lawyers may lose their jobs to AI before many other professions.
Doctors and lawyers are much easier to automate than street sweepers. In fact, one of the big successes of machine learning is that you can take a simple algorithm, give it a database of patient records and it learns to diagnose diabetes or breast cancer better than people who have spent years in Med school.
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I walked out of my poker game a few months ago and have not been back - well, stormed out would be more accurate. I was angry and loud as I left. What caused my eruption was another player's insistence that poor people are lazy folk who don't try hard enough to succeed.
Why did that make me so angry? Part of it was how he said it: "po' people", imitating a Southern accent he doesn't posses naturally. He repeated that several times, making me angrier each time. He mixed in a few references to Obama, making it plain to me that racism underlay at least part of this. That certainly contributed to my anger.
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My kids are adults, so I haven't actually had the experience of this new way to teach math, but I have seen the frustrated comments from parents who can't understand it enough to help their kids. I was curious, so I looked into it and found that, for me, it's not hard and in fact is pretty much how I handle most math problems mentally.
I understand the goal, which is to teach how to really understand rather than simply memorizing some rules and applying them to problems. I get that, and I applaud it, but I wonder if it really works.
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Sometime in the late 1960's, I worked in a carpet mill as an assistant to the General Manager. I don't remember much about my duties, but I do remember the Accounting Manager. Actually, not him so much as his office, which abutted a larger room with twenty or so desks. A window in his office gave him a full view of that room, which would have let him supervise his clerks.
There were no people in that room, though. There was dust on the desks, and on each was a mechanical calculator. These were the type with a hand crank - you'd input your numbers and pull the handle to get printed results. I'd used such machines myself; they made a distinct sound, but now it was all silence. This once noisy Accounting Department had been replaced by outsourcing to a computer somewhere. That transition had happened before I was hired, but not so long ago that the room had been repurposed.
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I forget where I saw or heard this, but someone mentioned a G+ post and the interviewer or interviewee laughed and asked "Does that exist?". More recently I read a post that snarkily guessed that G+ has less than six million users. The strong implication was that Google Plus is dying because it lacks the users of the big boys like Facebook.
Well, G+ is very much alive. I and other people use it every day exactly because it is not crowded with the type of banal stupidity you find at Facebook and other "popular" networks. If it dies, it will only be because somebody at Google who is as dumb as the average Facebook user decides to kill it. It's not a "ghost town" at all - it's a village of more intelligent and interesting people.
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I keep reading about the great success of Windows 10 - 14 million downloads as I write this. That absolutely would be an impressive number if it were Mac OS X, but 14 million might be only around 5% of Windows users. I say "might be" because although Windows users are estimated at 250 million, that figure could include many machines that technically still exist but have effectively been abandoned in favor of tablets. So the download percentage may in fact be higher, but I still don't think it is high.
Then again, it is early days. The advertising push has barely begun. Certainly many more will explore Windows 10. However, all those technically abandoned machines will not and neither will many Win 7 users who saw the horror of Windows 8 and mistrust Windows 10 because of that.
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I have read several articles which defend Walter Palmer and others like him on the grounds that the money they pay allows other animals to live and that sometimes old sterile lions prevent younger lions from mating. Really, these hunters should be applauded as conservationists, they assert.
Personally I would say that a true conservationist would pay just for a picture of the animal his donation is supporting and that if animals do need to be put down, it should be done humanely - I assume the trophy heads will bring good money still.
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As sensible as it would be to eliminate or severely restrict the term of many patents, that's not likely to happen. However, there will come a time when just about everything reaches its zenith. Kurzweil famously thinks that will happen in artifical intelligence around 2045. I think he is wildly optimistic and expect to have no chance of seeing that in my lifetime - unless medical technology approaches its own singularity before then and my lifetime is greatly extended!
But both of those fields (AI and health) illustrate my point. There is a zenith or singularity for both. For AI, it's machines that can design smarter machines and for medicine, it's full understanding of cellular biology to the point of being able to achieve immortality and perfect health. Whether in 2045 or centuries later, it seems very foolish to bet against either one. They will reach the point where further improvement is not possible.
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Apparently Walmart thinks it can compete with Amazon and plans to offer a $50 per year membership patterned after Amazon Prime. That's set to happen this year, but details are sketchy. They might include some streaming content along with free delivery, but there will be nothing even close to what Prime customers enjoy.
First up: selection. Walmart apparently sells about a million different items. Amazon has 200 million or more. Walmart competes on low priced items, while Amazon offers a range of price and quality for many items. Walmart customers generally have far less income than Amazon shoppers, so cutting the membership to $50 is likely meaningless. Additionally, Amazon Prime includes much more: Free ebooks, free music and a Netflix like streaming service that also produces its own content. Walmart can't even begin to compete with that.
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