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2015 Shaping Up To Be an Annoying Year in Tech

by OliveMahony Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal is running a feature today called “The Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2015.” Sounds great. I’m ready to hear about my future. Sock it to me:

Virtual Assistants You Won’t Want to Fire

“You have an 8:30 a.m. meeting with your supervisor. Last time you met, your heart rate was high. Go to bed early tonight, don’t drink coffee before the meeting and leave home early—traffic will be heavy.”

That’s how much smarter predictive personal assistants like Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana will begin to get….

Seriously? This is what my smartphone will allegedly be doing in the new year? Just kill me now.

As for the rest of the list, call me underwhelmed. Apple watches, Windows 10, yet more fitness trackers, e-credit cards, and an endless procession of “Uber for ____” apps? What happened to my flying cars?

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2015 Shaping Up To Be an Annoying Year in Tech

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The IRS Is Coming For Your Offshore Bank Account

by AugustFrewin Posted on July 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s always been a pretty simple arrangement for America’s superrich: Park your money in a country whose banks know how to keep a secret and then underreport your assets to the IRS. Without a way to independently verify how much money you have abroad, the taxman had to take your word for how much money you had stashed in a Swiss vault or in a sunny haven like the Cayman Islands. But as of yesterday, the US government will require foreign banks to report their American clients’ assets, or face 30 percent tax penalties on some offshore deposits.

The move is part of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was introduced in 2010. Since then, more than 80 countries have agreed to open their ledger books to the feds. After some complicated last-minute negotiations, even Russia and China have started to cooperate.

Companies and individuals have long used offshore banking to keep their taxes low: Last year, American multinationals kept an estimated $2 trillion (yes, with a “t”) abroad, according to a Bloomberg analysis. In recent years, tech companies have become some of the most enthusiastic offshore depositors. Between 2010 and 2013, Microsoft more than doubled its foreign stockpile to $76.4 billion, while Apple increased its pot abroad more than fourfold to $54.4 billion.

But while big US companies have stowed a massive pile of cash abroad, US banks hold even more money for foreign clients. According to Tax Justice Network, a British-based advocacy and research group, out of the $21 to $32 trillion kept offshore globally, about 22 percent is kept in the United States—a fact that’s not lost on countries complying with FATCA, some of whom are embracing the law because it means they’ll get to learn a few things about their own citizens’ holdings in the US.

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The IRS Is Coming For Your Offshore Bank Account

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IKEA makes big investment in wind energy (some assembly required)

by KaleyMaxey Posted on April 12, 2014

WINDË Power

IKEA makes big investment in wind energy (some assembly required)

By

ShutterstockLet’s hope that couch holds up in a stiff breeze.

IKEA — though not exactly a friend to forests, and way too fond of dubious meatballs for our taste — still wins greenie points for having a Scandinavian way with alternative energy. Ninety percent of its massive warehouse stores will soon host rooftop solar panels, including sunny south Florida’s largest solar array, and Brits will be able to buy solar panels in U.K. stores starting this summer. On Thursday, the company one-upped its own clean cred by announcing its investment in a giant wind farm in Illinois.

Hoopeston Wind is the most recent in a series of wind investments by IKEA, including several farms in Canada, where the furniture behemoth is the largest retail wind investor. The Illinois farm will produce 98 megawatts of electricity when it comes online in 2015, or enough to power 34,000 Expedit-enhanced homes. That’s more than twice the electricity that all of IKEA’s U.S. operations consume, and about 18 percent of the company’s global consumption. All of those megawatts will be sold locally, and IKEA will count them toward its overall renewable energy goal: to be totally carbon-free by 2020.

When it comes to putting up wind power, IKEA is actually lagging. (Maybe they were struggling to read the instructions?) The American Wind Energy Association credits Walmart, of all companies, with kicking off the airy trend when it started buying a lot of energy from a Texas wind farm in 2008. Microsoft and Facebook both made flashy commitments to wind energy last year, while Google has been steadily ratcheting up its wind game for years.

This wind rush could be about, yes, corporate responsibility and a commitment to a more sustainable world. It’s also about the bottom line. Volatile fuel prices are driving smart companies to make long-term investments in more reliable power — and we’re OK with that, as long as they fix those wasteful bookcases, too.

Right now, IKEA’s new farm is saddled with the very Midwestern name Hoopeston Wind, but the company already stole our punchline about rebranding it:

“We haven’t figured out if it will say ‘IKEA’ on the blades,’’ [Rob Olson, chief financial officer of IKEA U.S.,] said. “Or maybe we’ll use the iconic names for our products on the wind turbines? We’re not sure.’’

WINDË coming soon to a utility near you.


Source
IKEA investing in Illinois wind farm, Chicago Tribune
IKEA Buys Illinois Wind Farm in Global Renewables Push, Bloomberg

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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IKEA makes big investment in wind energy (some assembly required)

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White House Unveils New Climate Data Project

by NormaBoismenu Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The story was originally published by The Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The White House today unveiled a new Climate Data Initiative to make government-held data more available to researchers and businesses, and improve climate change preparedness across the country.

President Barack Obama had already mentioned the data initiative in a list of new programs announced in his big climate speech at Georgetown University last June. Today was its official unveiling.

One part of the data initiative is a new climate-focused section within the Data.gov website—called Climate.Data.gov—which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will run. The climate data site will also offer infrastructure and geographic mapping data sets—showing bridges, roads, canals, etc.—from such agencies as the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Homeland Security.

To solicit ideas from the private sector on how to use all this data to create images and simulations showing coastal hazards, NOAA and NASA are launching a Coastal Flooding Challenge.

Making more of this type of information publicly available, the Obama administration announced, will “stimulate innovation and private-sector entrepreneurship in support of national climate-change preparedness.”

According to the announcement, several companies—including Intel, Google, Microsoft and Esri (which creates geographic information systems software)—have committed to create new mapping software, applications and other technological tools for visualizing and preparing for climate-related risks. Nonprofits, academic institutions and local groups are also providing technological support.

In a White House blog post accompanying the announcement, chief presidential science adviser John Holdren and White House senior counselor John Podesta called the initiative an “ambitious” effort to make government data available to the private and philanthropic sectors.

The Climate Data Initiative, they wrote, “will help create easy-to-use tools for regional planners, farmers, hospitals, and businesses across the country—and empower America’s communities to prepare themselves for the future.”

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If Bing Wants to Attract Power Users, It Needs an Advanced Search Page

by Rad7edzw Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias embarks on a short tour d’horizon of Microsoft’s future today and ends with Redmond’s white whale of a search engine:

And then there’s Bing. I am obsessed with Bing. Not because I use Bing or because Bing is a commercially important product but because Bing is a socially important product. Steve Ballmer’s heroic determination to compete with Google on search has helped us resolve a lot of very thorny issues that would arise if Google Web Search became a monopoly product. But while we all (in some ways even including Google) owe Ballmer a debt of thanks for doing this, it’s far from clear that it’s been a smart business decision for Microsoft. All the “Scroogled” ads in the world aren’t going to turn this into a market-leading product, and Google at this point seems to be benefiting from both superior engineering and strong network effects. But what will we do if Bing goes away?

I’ve used Bing. It works fine. In some ways it’s better than Google. In others it’s not. But there’s a very specific reason I’ve never switched: Bing has no advanced search page. Oh, you can do an advanced search if you care to remember the syntax for all the operators, but like millions of other people, I don’t care to do that. Google, conversely, makes it easy for me to do an advanced search. They also allow me to restrict a search to a date range, which is very, very handy.

Now, it’s true that most people don’t ever do an advanced search of any kind. They just type a few words into the search box and press Enter, which is one of the reasons that 99 percent of the world is hopelessly incompetent at searching the internet. But serious users use it, and it’s serious users who can end up being evangelists for your products. So why not add an advanced search page? The cost is basically zero, so it’s not like there’s really any downside. What’s the holdup?

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If Bing Wants to Attract Power Users, It Needs an Advanced Search Page

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 January 2014

by inurdieproc1965 Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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After her vacation last week, Domino is now tanned, rested, and ready for 2014. And what better way to start the year than with a classic cat-in-a-bag photo? I tried to lure her into a Microsoft bag (yeah, I went ahead and bought that Dell tablet), but she wasn’t interested. Is this a bad sign for Microsoft, or merely a preference for something that crinkles more invitingly? You be the judge.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 January 2014

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Outsider Challenges Papers on Growth of Dinosaurs

by Myrna Posted on December 16, 2013

Nathan P. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, says that while trying to study why dinosaurs were so large, he found discrepancies in papers discussing the creatures’ growth rates. Excerpt from: Outsider Challenges Papers on Growth of Dinosaurs Related Articles A Struggle to Balance Wind Energy With Wildlife Energy Secretary Calls Oil Export Ban Dated Energy Secretary Voices Concern Over Dated Oil Export Restrictions

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Outsider Challenges Papers on Growth of Dinosaurs

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Patent Reform Takes a Hit From the Tech Industry

by KaraBloomer Posted on November 20, 2013

Mother Jones

Tim Lee reports that a key provision in Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s patent reform bill has been axed:

One provision would have expanded what’s known as the “covered business method” (CBM) program, which provides an expedited process for the Patent Office to get rid of low-quality software patents….The CBM program provides a quick and cost-effective way for a defendant to challenge the validity of a plaintiff’s patent. Under the program, litigation over the patent is put on hold while the Patent Office considers a patent’s validity. That’s important because the high cost of patent litigation is a big source of leverage for patent trolls.

The original CBM program, which was created by the 2011 America Invents Act, was limited to a relatively narrow class of financial patents. The Goodlatte bill would have codified a recent decision opening the program up to more types of patents….But large software companies had other ideas. A September letter signed by IBM, Microsoft and several dozen other firms made the case against expanding the program. The proposal, they wrote, “could harm U.S. innovators by unnecessarily undermining the rights of patent holders. Subjecting data processing patents to the CBM program would create uncertainty and risk that discourage investment in any number of fields where we should be trying to spur continued innovation.”

It would be hard to overstate just how self-serving and absurd the IBM-Microsoft position is. The notion that an expedited process for evaluating business process patents would discourage investment is laughable. This is the purest example of special pleading since Rob Ford tried to justify his crack use by explaining that he was hammered at the time.

Which wasn’t that long ago, was it? This just goes to show how common special pleading is—and also goes to show just how seriously we should take it. The good news here is that apparently the CBM provision is still alive in the Senate, so there’s still a chance it could make it into the final bill. We can hope.

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Nearly 50 percent of new electricity generation added in 2012 was renewable

by Myrna Posted on December 5, 2012

Nearly 50 percent of new electricity generation added in 2012 was renewable

By Philip Bump

Every month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission puts out a report called the “Energy Infrastructure Update” [PDF]. It is done in Microsoft Word by someone whose first priority isn’t aesthetics.

But it does contain interesting information! Among which, this time: From January through October, 46.2 percent of new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. was renewable.

From Renewable Energy World:

During the first ten months of 2012, 92 wind projects (5,403 MW), 167 solar projects (1,032 MW), 79 biomass projects (409 MW), seven geothermal projects (123 MW), and 9 water power projects (12 MW) have come on-line. Collectively, these total 6,979 MW or 46.22% of all new generating capacity added since the beginning of the year.

By comparison, new natural gas capacity additions since January 1, 2012 totaled 67 projects (5,702 MW) or 37.8% while three new coal projects added 2,276 MW (15.1%). Nuclear and oil represented just 0.8% and 0.1% of new capacity additions respectively.

For the first 10 months of 2011, renewable energy constituted just under 30 percent of new generation.

The story here is wind, which accounted for 77 percent of all new renewable production capacity.

Earlier this week, we noted that consumption of renewably generated power continues to increase. For that to happen, production must increase too, of course. In that sense, it’s bad news that so much of the new renewable capacity is wind, since wind is also the most at risk as Congress drags its feet on a key tax credit that allows wind to compete with fossil fuels. If it’s not renewed, the pie chart next year might look like this:

And that, Microsoft Word or not, is ugly.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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