My 1999 Saab 9-5 included weather radio. Push the "WX" button on the radio and it would automatically scan the NOAA frequencies and select the strongest one. It was wonderful when making trips between western NY and CT in the winter; local radio would rarely have weather forecasts, but NOAA would alert me to lake-effect snow bands that would seriously impact travel.

Sadly, it was one of the first things to go when GM got their hands on Saab, and forced them to use the "corporate" radio instead of the Saab-designed radio. Along with radio buttons that you could easily press, accurately, when wearing ski gloves.

I used to have a Saab, and among the things about the Saab that I dearly miss was the radio having a "weather" button.

The US National Weather Service has a network of weather-radio stations. They're AM radio stations, just outside the usual AM radio band; the only difference between a standard AM car radio and a weather radio is that the weather radio's "dial" goes a little farther.

When driving in stormy conditions, the weather radio was incredibly helpful. During storms, the weather service would regularly update the station with warnings and information about travel hazards. One touch of the "weather" button and the radio would seek out the strongest NWS weather radio station.

Could an app do this? Maybe. If there's cell coverage, which is not a given in the Northeast due to terrain; and if the weather hasn't knocked out nearby cell towers; and if cell networks aren't overloaded as people lose power, and thus lose landline Internet. But when you're trying to drive through whiteout snow, the cognitive load of finding and using a weather app is too high; pressing a "weather" button is much less distracting.

Maybe instead of eliminating AM radio from cars, we should be requiring that cars have AM radios that not only pull in commercial stations (which also means "traffic warning" radio in the commercial band already installed by governments nationwide), but weather radio (with a physical control to access it) as well.

Where I live, FM radio is almost worthless during a natural disaster. I'm in hilly terrain, so the stations I can receive are limited, and the selection of stations with intelligible reception may change every few miles. Virtually all of those stations are part of nationally-owned radio networks, which means they're playing content from a central, national studio. There's nobody in the local station; if there's a "local DJ," chances are they prerecorded their schtick for the week on Monday.

In a regional emergency, the best one can hope for from the FM stations is that they'll start playing the audio feed from an affiliated local TV station. This isn't very useful, because the TV people are working for their TV audience, who can see what they're talking about. They don't always describe what they're broadcasting. In an emergency, you need clear communication of information, and "let's just use the local TV station's audio feed" doesn't provide this.

While AM radio is increasingly centralized as well, for whatever reason the AM talk stations are more likely to have at least one live body near a microphone in the office, and some vestige of a news organization. That means AM radio is more likely to break into the national programming with local information. I can't recall the last time that happened on FM radio around here.

If the US wants to get rid of AM radio in cars, we need to address how radio consolidation has all but eliminated useful, timely local news on FM radio first.

Not all supermarkets have retired them. In the Northeast, Stop & Shop still has use-as-you-go barcode wands, but not in all of their stores—just the ones in more upscale neighborhoods that are less likely to have shoplifting problems.

Scan-as-you-go, combined with reusable shopping bags, can be a wonderful experience, especially with a good, purpose-built scanner, and if the store is good about maintaining their produce scales with barcode printers.

The experience at Stop & Shop's big local competitor, Big Y, isn't nearly as good. Big Y uses a phone app instead of a bespoke scanner. The app eats your phone's battery like mad. It insists on making an ear-piercing beep every time you scan, with no ability to control the volume. And the "checkout" button is placed where you trigger it constantly by accident, while trying to hold the phone. On the other hand, Big Y's app lets you scan a QR code on your way out the door and pay via Apple Pay, rather than having to check out at a register (manned or self-service), which is nice.

As a whole, Big Y tried to do it cheap. Initially, they had one produce scale for scan-as-you-go; it was a modified deli scale and it displayed a QR code for you to scan—no printer to put a label on your produce for later reference (or for use at the self-checkout). They've since installed the same Bizerba printing scale that Stop & Shop uses... but with the printer disabled for some bizarre reason.

Sure, FACstamp sounds alluring, until you think about it a little. How do you get a FACstamp?

A central authority has to provide it. How does that authority know it's from a trustworthy source? Obviously you're going to have to provide proof of identity, to show that it really came from you. And that proven identity will be tied to an account, and that account data will be part of the FACstamp.

And no world government will ever abuse a system that requires your photo to be absolutely traced back to you, where people believe there's no way that attribution could be faked. After all, FACstamp is all about proving authenticity!

No one would use it to track down the dissident that took a photo of government misbehavior... or fake evidence that a political rival committed a heinous act... and certainly no government would ever think to suborn that central authority to make such things even easier.

It's not just that the idea assumes that it's possible to create an unhackable, indelible watermark that proves beyond doubt that an image is a genuine representation of reality. Nor the naïve belief that such a system will make photos "show true facts" and prevent the creation of photos that mislead. It's the failure to consider the unintended consequences of such a system! (Or, as usual, to assume those consequences can be overcome by "nerding harder"...)

Yeah, Hollywood has never created convincing fake imagery by photographing a video screen. That technology obviously doesn't exist...

Craftsman hasn't been great since they were bought by Stanley/Black and Decker. Now, they're just Black-and-Decker products with incompatible batteries. I guess their non-electrical tools are probably fine.

Their hand tools aren't fine. Under Sears, Craftsman hand tools were made in the USA and very high qualityâ"as one might expect given Sears' satisfaction guarantee. If a Craftsman tool "failed to give satisfaction," you could bring it to any Sears store and get a replacement.

Under Stanley/Black and Decker, Craftsman tools are made in China (an attempt to bring production back to the US failed) and markedly lower in quality. Even where the design is the same, the build quality is much worse. While many stores carry Craftsman hand tools, you can only get warranty support at a store that stocks the particular tool you're making a claim onâ"and good luck with that, because different stores carry different selections. Even then, you may have trouble getting the store to play along.

(Not to say tools have to be made in the USA to be quality, though it usually helps; there are plenty of high-quality Taiwanese brands like Tekton. But S/B+D clearly went with "lowest cost" rather than "reduced cost but not reduced quality.")

"How dare our employees actually use the benefits we offered them!"

Every publicly-traded company espousing this view publicly needs to take a significant stock hit. It demonstrates a clear lack of basic money-management skills: if you obligate yourself to provide a benefit, you need to plan on actually having to provide it. That means being prepared for the cost, both in fiscal terms and operational terms. If your company isn't reasonably prepared for a substantial chunk of your personnel to be out sick during flu season, that's not the employees' fault. It's a management failure at the most basic level.

Sure, you can offer fewer benefits. You'll probably lose employees, and end up hiring lower-quality employees. Or you can understand that this is a cost of doing business. If your business model can't absorb those costs, the problem isn't the employees; it's that your business model isn't viable.

I'm the first one to say that copyright law needs fixing, but this isn't a good example. The headline for this ought to be "Television 'museum' blatantly violates copyright law, is surprised by inevitable result."

"Bewitched" is a very popular, culturally-important TV show with obvious commercial value. In fact, you can buy it on DVD even now and it streams legally via numerous services, both paid and free-to-view—and you can bet Sony got paid by those free-to-view providers. So providing a copy on YouTube without licensing it is an obvious copyright violation with clear commercial impact. It's asking to be sued. It's not abandoned property,

Besides, it's not necessary to include the entire copyrighted program to preserve the ephemera that the "museum" says they're trying to preserve, such as local commercials, bumpers, station idents, and the like. For those things, there's a strong fair-use case. Not so for "Bewitched" itself.

A responsible curator would understand copyright and avoid violating it. If they truly needed to disseminate copyrighted material, they'd work with rights-holders to secure permission before publicly exhibiting the copyrighted work. Then they would have a strong argument if an overzealous rights-protection firm issued a takedown notice that YouTube wouldn't let them appeal. As it is? They should've known better, they did the wrong thing, and the result was predictable. I'm not feeling too sorry for them.

Should the law be different? Maybe. But it isn't.

Mentorship is absolutely possible via remote work, but the company has to embrace remote-collaboration tools and train their staff on how to use them—not just the technology, but also the etiquette.

Starting with little things like not instant-messaging someone "GM" and then waiting for them to reply. Not only isn't this a phone call, but if you feel the need to be "polite," then abbreviating the polite greeting to two letters is the rudest possible way to be "polite." An effective remote-work company will have a culture where starting an IM session without clearly stating what you need is rude.

Then we move on to effectively using collaboration tools like persistent chat, or productivity applications that support various forms of group editing. Most of the "problems" cited for remote work have established answers; it's just that most companies (and employees) don't actually use them—never mind master them. Any company that complains that remote work doesn't have the spontaneous interaction you get at the office watercooler hasn't figured out the "watercooler" Slack channel—or has locked persistent chat down into silos that counterproductively prevent cross-team communication.

And for God's sake don't IM me with "GM, can I call you for a quick moment?", then not read your IMs for 20 minutes before calling to ask me a question that could've been answered via IM...

If it happened during lockdown, they probably couldn't get another cryogenic freezer. They were in desperately short supply, because every pharmacy and doctor's office was looking for them because they were needed to store the mRNA vaccines. It's not like the local Home Depot has five of them in stock—they're specialty, low-volume devices. (Which is to say, given the downside of a failure, rational risk analysis says "buy two and use one of them as a "hot spare"—well, cold spare in this case.)

Weather Underground used to have insanely accurate mid- and short-term forecasts for my area, powered by personal weather stations. Their algorithms compensated for the relatively inaccurate PWS data (rarely calibrated or installed in standardized ways) by leveraging the sheer number of personal weather stations compared to National Weather Service observation stations.

Then IBM bought them, acted as if the PWS owners were a drag on the bottom line instead of the key to Weather Underground's success, drove many PWS owners away, and tanked the quality of the forecasts as a predictable result.

I doubt that whatever venture-capital firm winds up buying these assets will fix the damage, because it's not just technical, it's reputational.

"Completely lost and disconnected from the user base" might as well be Atlassian's corporate motto.

They got a huge following in large part because of smart licensing: for a few bucks a year, you could get a legitimate 10-user license. At first that included support; they pulled back on that. But it meant you could do something useful with their products at home, become an expert, and then champion their products at work.

Then they decided that they could either push people toward SaaS, or require them to buy very expensive enterprise licenses if they wanted to host their own instances. Now, if you don't want their limited "free" SaaS service, you're talking thousands for the minimum possible on-prem license.

Talk about turning an asset into a liability...

A company that's complaining that too many people are using their red Swingline staplers and thus costing too much tells me that the company is either

• About to go bankrupt and going to extremes to stave it off a few more days; or
• Needs to be seen "cutting expenses" and is unwilling to cut actual waste, like a powerful executive's pointless pet project, senior-executive salaries, or wasteful procedures (such as paying someone to inventory all the staplers, calculate staple expenditures, and then track the removal of staplers business-wide).

Either way, a directive like Google's would be my clear sign to find another employer, because a company that's willing to publish such an absurd policy isn't going to get better.

It's hard to answer the question because almost all of the Macs I've owned have been retired and recycled not because they died, but because they were thoroughly obsolete, usually after 8 to 12 years.

By the time Apple stops supporting them with software updates, they're usually getting pretty slow for modern software. Most of the time, I'll rebuild them with some flavor of UNIX and use them in a secondary role for a while. Eventually, I'll be ready to refresh my daily driver again and "newer" systems will trickle down to those roles, and then the oldest, most power-hungry, least performant machines will get retired for good. They still work, but they've reached the end of their useful life.

(I don't count hard drives wearing out as "dead;" they're wear items. Although I do have one iMac that got retired when an aftermarket replacement SSD failed after several years, because I had a less-obsolete iMac to replace it and I didn't feel like hauling out the suction cups again.)

The only Mac I've owned that was replaced because it "died" was an early-2000s iMac with a dead Nvidia video card, a casualty of the capacitor plague. It failed outside the warranty program, and was pretty slow by that time, so no great loss.