About 13 years ago, as a long-time C++ developer, I was asked to revamp a complex order form written in Excel, using VBA. It was a weird experience because it was like time-travelling back to about 1990, in terms of programming capabilities. Needless to say, after working on that for a few months, I wouldn't trust Excel for my lemonade stand, leave alone anything important. It is crazily unstable.

It's a bit more than a couple days. It's not, like, the whole year, but let's not hyperbolize in the other direction and minimize a very real issue. In Canada last year, there were weeks at a time where it was bad for you to go outside. Some jurisdictions were worse than others. I would say that we had anywhere between 4-6 weeks last year during the summer that exercising outside was probably bad for your health (in the Okanagan Valley).

But something that I find interesting living here is that much of the year, our air quality is a 1 (the best), and on moderately bad days where you can smell smoke but not necessarily see any haze, it'll rank as a 3. When I lived in Montreal, it was a 3 all the time. I mean, maybe that's not actually surprising--Montreal is a city of 4 million people (in the Metro area) and I now live in a city of 40k (the whole valley is 400k).

But yeah, the air is gross in cities, it's probably not good for us, and forest fires are making it worse. That's life now. I don't know what's actually to be done about it short of rewinding the clock 100 years. Hopefully battery tech gets lighter so when we finally do switch to EVs, we not only have reduced vehicle emissions, we also aren't pulverizing the tyres as quickly. Then maybe we'll see some city air quality changes.

The people complain bitterly when you try to tax them on anything, too. We have a carbon tax that's more-or-less revenue neutral, and gives back money as a carbon credit, so quite a few people make more than they spend. They don't like that either.

Basically they want the right to do nothing at all, pollute the air, make life miserable for other people, and if you tell them that that should cost more or be illegal, they throw a fit.

Capitalist systems are not inherently unregulated.

One of the costs of doing business is following the law. If your product kills people, it is not allowed to exist. If you can make it so your product no longer kills people, you can keep selling it, even if making it non-lethal is a cost on you. But everyone else is (supposedly) held to that same standard.

Capitalism didn't (and will never) find a solution until it was necessary to find a solution. Something that made it necessary for companies to find a solution was the government deciding that it was necessary to eliminate a dangerous substance. Then the companies that used to mine asbestos or make asbestos into products went and did something else because the cost of business involving asbestos was too high.

Unregulated markets aren't a necessary nor sufficient condition for capitalism.

Oh, sorry, I meant that as a consumer, you can't escape them, not that they're necessary. I 100% believe that we could make do without them if they would just stop using them. But if I want to buy frozen corn, right now, I have no options.

I believe Apple believes in privacy enough for them to want to make it an effective marketing tool, so they care about it more than other companies, yes. I don't think they have as deep rooted a concern for privacy at an ethical or moral level as they say (though I DO also believe that Tim Cook believes in privacy more than most, because of the realities of being a gay man from the South). But it doesn't matter, they don't have to want to do it for philosophical reasons as long as they do it, and they do.

Our education system has abandoned most 'life skills'. Those include things that everyone needs to know (basic cooking & cleaning; how to change a tire; how to manage money; etc.) But we're going to have a high school teacher (who usually can't code their way out of a wet paper bag much less design a ui or debug data access code) 'teach' students programming.

This will probably set the students programming skill back rather than helping them.

I could see if they wanted to focus on teaching students how to use typical UIs; how to use their devices securely; how to protect their identity; understanding (at a high level) how networks and routers work, etc but having people who can't code (or write user specs or write functional specs or design UIs or test cases) teach students who have no interest (or probably aptitude) in programming is a joke.

By the time most kids who really want to program have gotten to HS they will have already figured out more than than a HS teacher can teach.

We continue to degrade our education system a little more each year.

Based on other stories, there's likely nothing wrong with Apple's models, but they're meant to run on-device.

Why couldn't Apple just scale them up and run them on cloud servers? Because then they wouldn't have arms-length deniability when it comes to privacy.

I like Apple products, I appreciate the privacy focus. But having Google as their default search engine because they're the highest bidder is an obvious privacy hole. My theory is they want a similar out. You'll be able to use Siri on-device for things that make sense, but for larger, more complicated tasks, you'll need to ask Google because they have no qualms about giving your privacy away or taking someone else's to give a service to you.

Sure, there's plenty of zealotry to go around.

But there's basically NO WAY to get away from plastics. Try buying any frozen food without buying a tonne of plastic. A lot of FRESH food comes wrapped in plastic. I shop at a small grocer, and I can get away from some of it, but any baked goods that are brought in from off-site are in plastic. It's everywhere. I can't make the decision not to use it, without deciding to not eat half the groceries that are available. Even bags of rice are in woven plastic bags most of the time (though sometimes burlap, but always with a plastic interior liner).

I try and buy stuff that's in aluminum or glass, but my city doesn't even have a curbside glass recycling program--they want you to DRIVE your glass somewhere (it's not accessible by walking or transit very easily) which feels very much against the spirit of trying to recycle.

Reduce and reuse were always the first two things for you to try and do out of the Three Rs, but there's a limit to how much you can reduce your plastic consumption when they wrap every damned thing in 2 layers of it before putting it on the shelf.

I still get this kind of packaging for a lot of stuff, especially cheap, small things. Cables, etc. The worst of the packaging is almost always the name-brand stuff, where they still make packages meant to go on shelves and frustrate thieves and attract shopper attention.

If you can find a cheap Chinese knockoff (sometimes exactly the same product) you're often better off not just from a price perspective, but also a packaging perspective.

Hello, fellow 5-digit Slashdotter. I, too, have also not moved on.

I do participate in Reddit a lot, but I think it's an absolute garbage company. However, there are some really good communities to be found if you dig a bit.

I can't imagine how it could possibly be a good investment.

Clearly you have failed to wear your company mandated Shokkollar: Presented by HP(tm). This infraction will be reported and then you will be shocked. Shocked, we say.

FTA: "Samuel Sparks Fisher, who became the Commissioner of Patents in 1869, pointed out that “it must soon become a serious question to determine what disposition is to be made of the models.” The next year, Congress passed new legislation, dropping the requirement for models."

Re-read the post you replied to: "The USPTO will grant you a patent on your perpetual motion invention if you submit a working model."
If you can submit a working model, then I think you've got credibility (and have apparently discovered an error in known physics).

Also, by definition, a rejection for lacking utility would be inappropriate if the perpetual motion machine does work.

The problem isn't cramming people into cities, it's cramming people into cities WITH TRAFFIC.
Also, to a lesser extent, with traffic AND NO TREES.

Plant more trees. Plant trees between major roadways and homes. Have fewer cars on the road and more trains.

1 train with 4 cars can move 1000 people. That takes about 15 buses, but over 600 cars (on average, based on typical occupancy; in the best case, you might be able to reduce that to 200-ish). And those cars will require an enormous amount of parking--asphalt that just sits there and heats up in the sun, doing nothing productive.

If you want to move a lot of people around, cars are the worst way to do it, but that's the way that currently dominates. Our cities can be cleaner and less bad for our health if we treat them as places where people live as opposed to places where people DRIVE. City planning for the health of your population actually requires attention to that detail, it's hard to just stumble into it by accident. Plant trees, establish parks, get rid of parking lots, increase public transit into the densest areas. It's all doable, if we want to.