April 16, 2019
The research is in early stages, but it invokes ideas like uploading brains to the cloud or hooking people up to a computer to track deep health metrics…
Hm. This sounds like an idea for a cool science fiction…
Ah.
April 5, 2019
The combinations of formats and editions make it impossible for readers to pick between multiple versions of the same products, and allow those selling badly put together editions to piggyback on good reviews.
At this point, Amazon should just admit that its review policies are a complete shambolic mess. If they refuse to allow fellow indie authors from reviewing each other and even prevents their own friends and relatives from reviewing their work, how can Amazon justify trying to sell dreck this way?
Hypocrisy.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/05/amazon-shoppers-misled-by-bundled-product-reviews
Customers who purchased digital books from the Microsoft store will soon be forced to return them.
Already widely reported.
Note that if you buy ebooks *directly from the author – or *from Smashwords – then you get to keep them.
Yet another reason to cut out the middle man, especially if the middle man is a huge corporation that doesn’t care about its consumers.
via Microsoft’s ebook store closes, and will take all customers’ ebooks with it —
April 4, 2019
The Chinese government uses facial recognition for large-scale surveillance in public CCTV cameras, both to catch criminals and monitor the behavior of all individuals with the intent of turning the data into a score. Seemingly harmless offenses like buying too many video games or jaywalking can lower your score. China uses that score for a sort of “social credit” system that determines whether the individual should be allowed to get a loan, buy a house or even much simpler things like board a plane or access the internet.
Yeah. That’s a real advantage for human rights and democracy. And when the hackers get involved, it’ll lead to an entirely new definition of the term “face lift.”
April 3, 2019
Now that Trudeau has agreed to help out, if anything goes wrong we can always “Blame Canada!”
No, no, it’s a joke, alright, eh. Sorry, sorry.
March 24, 2019
Welp, it’s official. NASA announced they have confirmed another “Earth” (really, an “Earth-like planet” simply means it has enough water and is in the right orbit from its star to hypothetically support life).
Too bad it’s 500 light years away, which currently would take us a mere 70,000 years to reach.
But it’s a start…
March 5, 2019
[A]n obvious obstacle to identifying our neighbors is the tendency to limit our imagination to what we already know. But this should not necessarily remain the case in the future.
Frankly, I think it’s high time that somebody invent the warp drive so that the Vulcans will finally notice us.
blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/are-we-really-the-smartest-kid-on-the-cosmic-block/
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