Covered this week; Former SCOTUS John Paul Stevens identifies the pink elephant in the room… Would Uber’s self-driving car business be stronger outside Uber? Facebook, let’s trust ’em as far as we can throw ’em… Rusty Staub dies at 73… Chicago Blackhawks accountant steps into goal in a pinch… Apple truly needs to make SIRI smarter… Tesla runs into some choppy waters…
March 26, 2018
For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”
March 27, 2018
Uber halted testing nationwide last week. Given the huge challenges facing the project – and Uber as a whole – Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi should consider a drastic remedy: sell off the project to another company.
March 28, 2018
The message is clear: Zuckerberg thinks we’re idiots. How are we to believe Facebook didn’t know — and derived benefits — from the widespread abuse of user data by its developers. We just became aware of the Cambridge Analytica cockroach…how many more are under the sink? In more lawyerly terms: “What did you know, and when did you know it?”
March 29, 2018
Rusty Staub, baseball’s lumbering Le Grand Orange and one of the finest and most durable hitters of his time, playing in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s mostly for Houston, Montreal, Detroit and the Mets, died on Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 73.
March 30, 2018
On Thursday night in the middle of a National Hockey League game between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Winnipeg Jets, an unfamiliar figure in a No. 90 Blackhawks jersey stepped onto the ice at the United Center.
March 31, 2018
“It’s easy to see that this is a concerted effort by Apple to make Siri smart. Or, at least, smarter than she has been. It’s no secret that Siri is perceived as lagging behind her competing AI cousins at Amazon (Alexa), Google (Google Assitant), and Microsoft (Cortana). While the other assistants are picking up new skills on a daily basis (Alexa Skills and Google Actions are massive, growing categories), Siri is still struggling to take notes and turn off lights. When Apple released the long-awaited HomePod, critics praised the speaker’s sound quality but unanimously called it crippled by Siri’s lack of smarts.”
April 1, 2018
“Tesla is having a tough time of late. Its Autopilot advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) is once again the center of attention in a fatal crash. Deliveries of the Model 3, its budget electric vehicle, are far below the company’s goals. Meanwhile, Elon Musk made a series of April Fool’s “jokes” on Twitter on Sunday about the company going bankrupt even after a sale of Easter eggs. Despite this attempt at levity, Tesla’s share price continued to slide on Monday, losing almost seven percent in the morning, having shed more than 20 percent of its value in the last month.”
