NEWSWORTHY
When the whip comes down. On decision day for Uber in London, the ride hailing startup lost its license to operate in the city. Uber immediately appealed the decision by Transport for London. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tweeted that the ruling was "just wrong. Over the last 2 years we have fundamentally changed how we operate in London."
Hurry up and wait. AT&T announced plans on Friday for a broad rollout of super-fast 5G mobile phone service for customers, reaching parts of 15 cities within the next few months and the entire country by the middle of 2020. The plan is similar to–although slightly lagging behind–the rollouts of Verizon and Sprint. T-Mobile says it's going almost nationwide on Dec. 6. In a new report on Monday, telecom equipment maker Ericsson predicts 74% of mobile customers in North America will be on 5G by 2025.
Cashing in. India's fintech giant Paytm raised $1 billion of backing from investors led by T. Rowe Price in a deal valuing the mobile payments startup at $16 billion. Paytm is looking at expanding further into banking and insurance.
Pandora's box. Tim Berners-Lee, who more or less invented the World Wide Web, has some ideas for fixing the Internet. In an effort he's calling the Contract for the Web, Berners-Lee's proposals include that governments ban targeted political advertising online and that all companies issue reports on their progress towards diversifying their workforces.
Fragile. Elon Musk says he has uncovered the mystery of why the windows on the new Tesla Cybertruck cracked during a demo last week. Blame it on the sledge; sledgehammer, that is. "Sledgehammer impact on door cracked base of glass, which is why steel ball didn't bounce off," he tweeted. "Should have done steel ball on window, *then* sledgehammer the door. Next time." The cracked windows don't appear to have scared away buyers. Musk also said Tesla has received 200,000 preorders.
Schoolboy draw. Professional poker player and tech exec Dennis Blieden pled guilty on Friday to embezzling $22 million from his former company, online influencer marketing firm StyleHaul. Much of the money was transferred into cryptocurrency and used for online gambling, prosecutors said.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
When computer programming needed a breakthrough in the 1960s, a young MIT professor named Barbara Liskov realized that software didn't need to run as one long set of instructions–instead, code could be separated into modules. Her abstraction of programming is at the root of all modern programming languages and earned Liskov the Turing Award in 2008. In an interview with Quanta writer Susan D'Agostino, she explained how she got interested in programming:
I was interested in the underlying work. "How do you organize software?" was a really interesting problem. In a design process, you're faced with figuring out how to implement an application. You need to organize the code by breaking it into pieces. Data abstraction helps with this. It's a lot like proving a theorem. You can't prove a theorem in one fell swoop. Instead, you invent some lemmas and you decompose the problem.
In my version of computational thinking, I imagine an abstract machine with just the data types and operations that I want. If this machine existed, then I could write the program I want. But it doesn't. Instead I have introduced a bunch of subproblems — the data types and operations — and I need to figure out how to implement them. I do this over and over until I'm working with a real machine or a real programming language. That's the art of design.
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Microsoft Proved a Four-Day Workweek Improved Productivity in Japan. Can Its Results Translate to the U.S.? By Jenna Schnuer
Google and Twitter Changed Their Rules on Political Ads. Why Won't Facebook? By Danielle Abril
Deliver Us From A.I.? This Priest-Led Network Aims to Shepherd Silicon Valley Tech Ethics By Rebecca Heilweil
This Startup Wants to Be the PayPal of Weed By Richard Morgan
How Robots Are Changing the Construction Industry By Jennifer Alsever
Tesla's Cybertruck Stuns… For Better or For Worse By David Z. Morris
IBM Showcases A.I. That Can Parse Arguments In Cambridge Union Debate By Jeremy Kahn
BEFORE YOU GO
NASA has decided to put its entire library of images online for free. And there's a search engine. Now your phone can feature the gorgeous Crab Nebula or Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Need a new screensaver or wallpaper background? Have at it.
Aaron Pressman
On Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com
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