My daughter suffers from a medical condition (POTS) that can cause her to black out with little or no notice. As a result, she's never had a driver's license. But it would be most helpful if she had a self-driving vehicle to take her on routine errands, such as grocery shopping, without having to pay the continuously increasing rates of ride-hailing services. (Yes, we know about Instacart, which is fine for packaged groceries, but less dependable for fresh items.) There are millions of people in the US and elsewhere who would benefit from having these services, especially when public transportation options are limited. As I get older, I find it more challenging to drive on city streets at night. This issue is made worse by the speed bumps, which raise the lights of oncoming cars to shine directly in my face. Rain also makes it harder to see the road. I would welcome the opportunity to switch to FSD mode in those situations when I have to drive in poor conditions. It's as much for my safety as for the safety of others. I know that full self-driving is less than perfect, but I'd rather take my chances with some of them on the road instead of the people who routinely run through stop signs, treat red lights as advisory, and ignore various regulations about illegal turns and speed limits.

We made our home an HP-free environment when Her Worship La Fiorina was CEO. Not even HP-branded paper. Now I see that the paper could have had a secret chip that would not have allowed you to print anything negative about HP. I would have lost it right about the time Carly introduced the Windows-only HP iPod.

I decided to make our home an HP-free environment in 2002. Her Worship La Fiorina was the inspiration for that. I had a couple of remaining reams of HP-branded paper, so we didn't really eliminate all things HP until early 2004. That decision seems to have served us well. No ripoff printers, no junky Pavilions or Compaqs, etc. None of their corporate dramas with the HPE/HP split. Laptops at home are Apple and Dell. Printers are Canon and Xerox. For now, no reason to even consider an HP product.

Of course! Use open source software when you can

In case you thought apartment rents were high, WeWork charges about $400/month for a "hot desk" with coffee. Contrast: Planet Fitness charges $10/month for a "hot treadmill" with showers. Maybe you don't spend 30-40 hours/week at the gym, but still....

For many years, studios would pour fortunes into promoting movies via newspaper and TV ads. Today, young people, who are the primary moviegoers, are less likely to read newspapers or watch TV shows at their scheduled times, if at all. So now, studio marketing increasingly focuses on the Web, with trailers, coupons, interviews, and more. I can find movies that interest me, and check the RT score for movies when they come out. The studios, of course, want you to buy tix in advance so that you won't be influenced by bad reviews. The studios know that poor reviews are likely to discourage potential buyers from going, and weigh more heavily than positive reviews.

I use the RT score as a useful indicator, not always the final word. If a collective score is 40 or below, I probably won't waste my time on that movie. If it's 70 or above, then I know that the overall opinion is favorable and my interest will be confirmed. (That warned me away from last year's Passengers, and sent me to see this year's Colossal.) In the 40-70 gray zone, I'll probably save my money and wait a few months until I can stream it or rent the DVD from Redbox. But this isn't the behavior that the studios want, so RT and Metacritic make useful scapegoats. We all have many options for entertainment and spare time activities, so we're not going to waste our time and money on bad flicks.

Incidentally, while the studios are moaning about the negative impact of collective wisdom on the Web, they should also be joyous about the greatly expanded worldwide market for their marketing messages. In the past, American movies were released overseas long after their runs here, fewer of them were subtitled/dubbed for international markets, and international grosses were small. Today, international releases are synchronized with the domestic one. Sequels like Furious 8 and Pirates 5 earn much more money internationally than domestically, since they feature international stars who are basically review-proof. Studios release movies straight to DVD or to streaming; there's no reason they couldn't release movies straight to international markets without a domestic release. Pirates 6 anyone?

Back in the day, there were a few journals that were recognized as having high standards for refereeing and publication. In academic computer science, these were the journals that were the most important for promotion and tenure, and even carried greater weight than some of the highly selective conferences. Promotion and tenure are the keys to long-term (perhaps lifetime) careers in the most prestigious universities, and that situation remains largely unchanged today.

As we look around the world, though, it's clear that there are many thousands of academics in universities of varying quality who would also like to have their work published, even if it's not in, for example, one of the ACM's or IEEE's Transactions journals. So we now have a slew of journals focused on computer science, some of which are, to be polite, not very selective about what they publish, as long as the authors pay the publication fee. There are also more and more low-quality journals that publish online using an open access approach. Many of these journals use highly credible names, and it's easy for a novice to confuse them with well-known and higher-quality journals. If you do a search on "fake journals in computer science', you will see that there are hundreds of such journals; if you go to the web page for such a journal, it looks real, complete with editorial board members who hold academic positions. Life would be simpler if these fake journals didn't exist, but most of them seem to find enough paying authors to put out new volumes of their journals. If your papers are continually rejected by the program committees for various conferences, this may be the only way to publish your work, even if it's not very good. Indeed, some of these journals have published papers that were generated by bots.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with submitting your work to be published in one of these fake journals. You can tell your Mom that you are a published author, and you can include this "publication" on your CV, but it won't help you to become a full Professor at a reputable university.

If you are not an academic at an institution that evaluates your publication record for promotion, then this whole process probably seems silly to you. In that case, you can view the promotion process as a game where you play by certain established rules, just as people in industry tend to play by a different set of rules to get promoted and earn raises.

Yes, the public access points make it easier to connect, but there is only a single ISP: the Cuban national telecommunications monopoly, ETECSA. To use the Internet, you must buy their scratch-off cards at their offices, which involves waiting in line. You can then use them on your own devices or at the aging Windows machines at ETECSA's centers. The cost of access has dropped to $1.50/hour, but that's a lot of money in a country where the average monthly income is $25. If you are associated with one of the universities, particularly the Universidad de Ciencias Informaticas west of Havana, Internet access is reasonably good (and free), but outside of that, only about 4% of Cubans connect to the Internet. Others get information from "The Packet", whose managers download and assemble materials, including books, movies, news, etc., onto electronic media and make it available to all.

The good news is that the Cuban government isn't blocking access to websites, and that smartphones are becoming more widely available, but the absence of alternatives to ETECSA means that costs are likely to remain prohibitive for the vast majority of Cubans for the foreseeable future.

Human Uber drivers tend to run red lights and stop signs, too. So maybe their autonomous vehicles are programmed similarly. Uber humans routinely ignore bike lanes and frequently stop in them. Traffic in San Francisco would be less painful if we didn't always have several thousand ride-hailing drivers cruising the streets while waiting for a fare, adding to the already grim traffic situation here.

As a graduate student, I bought and used the first three volumes of these books when they first came out. At that time, computing resources were much more limited and much more expensive than they are today. Knuth's volumes made me appreciate the value of algorithms and the logical thinking needed to develop them. As a programmer, the turnaround time on submitting computing jobs to your computer center could be long, so it was in your best interest to exert some self-discipline and check your code carefully before pushing the card deck through the input slot. If you created software products, you had to create tapes (well before floppies, FTP, and email) and send them off to your customers, incurring manufacturing and shipping costs. So there was a significant financial disincentive associated with having to fix and replace buggy software. That's one reason why program updates were so infrequent, at least to the mid-1990s when downloads became more common. Today, it's relatively easy to build an app and make it available for download; if there's a bug, you can make the fix without extensive delays, and quickly provide an update at low cost, other than to your product reviews. My sense is that many developers would benefit from the more rigorous approach to programming inherent in Knuth's books, but I would also note that modern web and mobile applications are far more complex than anything that Knuth envisioned at the time, and that algorithms alone don't do enough to address the issues faced by today's full-stack developers working with a large number of software components and libraries.

Side note: Knuth's books predated electronic publishing and were typeset, necessitating careful proofing of the galleys prior to publication and many months of delay between completion of the manuscript and actual publication of the book. The errors made by human typesetters weren't always caught, which led to bugs in the published book (and in some of the algorithms and code). Knuth offered a reward of $1.00 to anyone who was the first to find and report an error. No email then, so you had to write a letter or make an expensive long distance phone call. Knuth actually sent out hand-signed written checks, but not many people cashed them, preferring instead to display the signed check as proof that they had found an error in one of these volumes. If you were wondering about Knuth's inspiration for creating LaTEX, this note should help explain that.

I'm glad to see another piece of the ridiculously outdated Cuban trade restrictions disappear; I'm hoping that the rest of the 57-year embargo goes away soon.

As for the telecom issue, there are two key issues for the Cubans. The first is that there is very limited bandwidth for Internet access. Cuba just doesn't have enough high-sped satellite or undersea connections to allow video streaming and other high-bandwidth uses. Instead, someone will burn DVDs with movies and other content, then share them with others. It's like the old sneaker-net. So ETECSA (or its successor) will have to address the bandwidth issue before Cuba can have better Internet access. The proposal for the cable to Florida seems like a good start.

The second issue is limited public access to the Internet. If you are at the UCI (Computer science university), it's easy to get on the Internet from their machines, which run Nova, a UCI-developed Linux distro. Home computers with network access are extremely rare, so most people wanting to get onto the Internet must go to an ETECSA-run center and pay for access. The rate is about $2 US/hour, payable only in "hard" currency CUCs, extremely high in a country where average monthly salary is about $25. Overall, the estimate is that about 3% of the Cuban population is on the Internet, mostly through ETESCA's nauta.cu portal.The situation isn't any better with mobile phones, where ETECSA hasn't yet reached 3G speeds and there are no data plans. More info on the ETECSA site (in Spanish).

Aaron Levie of Box tweeted that if the California DMV existed when cars first hit the road, then they would have required Ford to include a horse in each car. Exactly right.

There will come a point down the road (sorry for the pun) when my wife and I will no longer be able to pass a driving test and thus drive. Rather than being stuck at home, as is now the case for many people, I want to be able to call up a driverless car in the same way that I would call a car service today, and then use it for point-to-point local transportation. While I greatly enjoy the opportunity to drive myself around, I'm not going to need a steering wheel or normal pedals in that situation. An emergency brake and a web-connected alarm, a la OnStar, will be enough. I hope that the legislatures in other states don't follow the erroneous lead of California.

It's not only tough to find the least intelligent member of Congress, but tough to find the dumbest one from Texas. Louie Gohmert gives Joe Barton a lot of competition for that honor. Gohmert opposed changes to marriage laws by saying "when you say it’s not a man and a woman anymore, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?"

I saw the article yesterday, and it did a good job of explaining a phenomenon that has been happening for 20 years or more.

But I'm afraid that it won't convince "the average Joe/Jane that their nice safe middle class office job isn't so safe." That's because the average Joe or Jane doesn't read newspapers much anymore, and they certainly don't read the Times. I also suspect that Joe and Jane, if they or their family members have salaried jobs, have already seen this situation and perhaps been affected by it. If you want to get the message out, then it has to get to the cable news channels, where it can be explained in basic English and illustrated by a couple of interviews. The extreme right-wing is already against the H1B program for its own reasons.

When you combine the H1B assault on the middle class, with the "workforce optimization" programs used for hourly staff, you get a severe squeeze on all workers, which helps to explain why so few people outside the 1% feel secure in their jobs and their lives.

As noted elsewhere, the authorities in Irving, Texas, didn't act in a way that was consistent with a potential bomb threat. If they found a mysterious unattended package on the street, they would have cleared the area, brought in the bomb squad, and destroyed the contents of the package. But neither Ahmed's school, nor the cops that they called, did any of those things. Either they didn't act to protect the students and teachers in the school (on the assumption that it might be a bomb) or they knew from the outset that the clock wasn't a bomb, in which case it was Islamophobia in action.