There is no comparison between the past and today. Every idiot has a smart phone and internet - not everybody could publish; obviously, some managed somehow in the past but it was rare.

The problem is, that's basically the way it works now, albeit in a badly degraded state. Car companies mostly bolt in entertainment systems from one of a small number of vendors. At some point, the entertainment system started needing to know stuff about the car itself, and without adequate standards, that meant that the systems became mostly non-swappable, but the car companies are still buying them from the same few vendors.

What this means is that you don't have competition, because it isn't readily customer-swappable, so there's limited incentive for the infotainment system vendors to improve, because they only have a few potential customers (Ford, GM, etc.), not a few hundred million, and to keep those customers, the products only have to be just slightly better or less hassle to integrate.

When the car companies build it themselves, at least the quality is the responsibility of the same company that is gaining or losing sales because of that quality, so there's some incentive to make things better.

Depends on whether he asked to be invited and if so, why. If the answers are "yes" and "to meet a girlfriend", then it screams of something nefarious. If the answers are pretty much anything else, it doesn't. :-)

To add to that, autism tends to run in families, and according to one study I was skimming, women who are autistic apparently are more uncomfortable during pregnancy to a statistically significant degree. So not only does Tylenol not cause autism, but in fact, autism (in the mother) appears likely to cause Tylenol (use).

I always enjoy when an article uses vague weasel words like "toxic environment". It almost always means the paper is crap.

It is likely to usually be a neurologically targeted autoimmune condition. Yeah, it can have various triggers, just like any autoimmune disease, but typically an allergen or an infective agent that tricks the immune system into attacking your own cells. So there's arguably some truthiness here, anyway. :-D

This sounds like it is being promoted by supplement companies that sell probiotics. To be fair, there is definitely evidence that certain bacterial conditions in your digestive tract can cause neurological disorders. Parkinson's is less common after a vagotomy, and symptoms can be lessened with a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT). So I can't rule out the possibility that a major dose of antibiotics adequate to wipe out the gut bacteria followed by large amounts of probiotics to populate it could reduce the severity of symptoms for some subset of autism cases. But it seems pretty dubious to me without something insanely aggressive, like multiple rounds of oral vancomycin followed by an FMT.

Yes, the article isn't great... reading has declined if you do not count slop as reading.

This is where easy access is NOT a good thing. There used to be a higher barrier to entry to get something published, so you had to have something worth saying for all that effort. Now any moronic flat earth conspiracy nutcase can publish and build a support community (or cult) plus if they can play the social media game, play victim and drama queen themselves into being placed on the "fair and balanced" side of the idiot media which promote engagement and controversy of any inane distraction.

You can't hone your mind on slop. Some people have to curate the content; the market used to help, now it harms. The intellectual elite used to help, now they are demonized (classic fascism) or impersonated (charlatans.) People can't judge real from fake having been overwhelmed with slop before they can even accept a class on critical thinking. When I took it in college, from the philosophy dept. we had about 1/4 who outright rejected it and were not capable of passing it once they were emotionally threatened and this was before widespread internet!

Some mental case who'd be shamed into conforming or simply figure out they are a tom boy or a lesbian now takes their confusion to the level of sex change. Access to fringe justifications building communities to bully and advocate; techniques are available to help sell anything... Some people when isolated and out of touch get GROUNDED but now you can self-isolate and find the wrong kind of support, the kiss-ass kind that placates and AI is going to take this to the next level of dysfunction. A queer kid who is confused and maybe has some chemical pollution contributing to that, they used to work it out eventually but now they get pulled by every possible option trying to sell them a narrative. Sure, a few fail and end up dying so we try to save them all in pursuit of utopia, but like all such pursuits, we make it worse trying to eliminate the margin of failure - it never can go to zero. Life is analog and messy, absolutism does not ever work. For a tiny rounding error of people, plastic surgery is their only way to survive but like big pharma, there is a lot of money in treatment; also like addicts, the sunken cost of investment creates a huge effort to rationalize their decisions thru selling what they did to themselves and even to others. It takes a lot to admit the mistake. Reminds me of a pyramid scheme before it collapses (now called other things and promoted by the Heritage Foundation; yeah, the con artists have a lobby group.)

As humans keep proving, banning people from making mistakes does not work. Look at Trumptards, you couldn't have done much more except jail their leader and they'd still be hell bent on righteous self destruction. They'll peer pressure each other to drink of the orange drink... even when it looks bad, they'll sell themselves and try to get us to drink.

Oh, holy crap. Talk about a small world. I was working at a company that did the operating system software for a competitor of theirs (Kerbango) right around the turn of the century. Unfortunately, at the time, most people's home Internet connection just plain wasn't good enough to do streaming audio in any meaningful way, so the product never shipped.

As for streaming video, YouTube didn't even start until 2005, and Netflix didn't start streaming until 2007. So what Philips shipped in 2003 was also several years too early to be practical. But yeah, they definitely shipped something earlier, anyway. ;-)

The only reference I could find to Zoomer being released in 1992 is an uncited mention in the Wikipedia article, which seems likely to be erroneous given the Byte article linked below.

Nope. The timeline doesn't work. Palm wasn't even founded until 1992. Newton was unveiled to the general public in May of 1992 and was first sold in August of 1993. Zoomer was released, as best I can tell, in November of 1993, by which time the Newton UI had been demonstrated publicly for 18 months, and had been available to the public for three months.

This timeline is supported by this article from Byte Magazine, which talked about a beta version of the Zoomer that they tested in October of 1993.

So either Apple and Palm (or possibly GeoWorks) just happened to design remarkably similar UIs at around the same time or Palm copied Apple. There's no way it could possibly be the other way around unless Apple literally pulled a Xerox Parc and conned GeoWorks/Casio into demoing some early internal alpha UI, because Apple released Newton months before Zoomer was shown to anyone outside of the company, and announced Newton a year and a half earlier, at least to the best of the information I could find on the Internet about events that happened right around the dawn of the world-wide web.

You're welcome?

Depends in part on whether the cable is allowed to slide freely in the tether loop. If it is, then any extra length can come from the entire cable, or at least a large enough portion of the cable to prevent it from snapping, I would think.

Seems like with an anchor and a solid styrofoam buoy or similar, they could float the line a few feet above the sea floor on a flexible tether and prevent this problem more permanently.

Apple's were the first ones that anyone took seriously. Before that, you mostly had HTPCs, which were kind of niche.

Wow. Today I learned about two devices I had never heard of. But look at the user interface of the Samsung tablet from that era and the GridPad tablet. Compare with the Palm. They're nothing alike.

Now tell me the Newton UI wasn't a major influence on Palm's UI.

The appearance of Fox News was when any appearance of trying to be honest in newmaking went out the window. So yes, it really is. They made the talking head gallery into an art form.

Before that, there was a clear line between news and interviews, and biases were largely subtle, mostly in the form of choosing which stories to cover, rather than in the form of deliberately interposing large amounts of commentary into the coverage itself. This is not to say that there weren't editorials, but they were clearly delineated from the news portion of coverage. After the rise of intentionally biased news sources, that all stopped.

And no, most major news outlets were not intentionally biased before that. They had biases because the individual people reporting had biases, but that's not the same thing as the corporate entity dictating that bias by fiat. Most journalists prior to the Fox News era would have resigned rather than put up with that. It was very much seen as a violation of journalistic ethics back then.

Well, one of those is basically the same as one of mine, to be fair. IMO, it's not 24-hour aspect that's the problem. It's the entertainment aspect. CNN was founded in 1980, and Headline News was founded in 1982. The quality of news/journalism didn't really start to decline rapidly until the late 1990s, and it cratered by the mid-2000s.

Before Fox News, CNN was the only 24-hour news source. It had no competition, so it had no incentive to spin the news and sensationalize it to get viewers. If you wanted news some time other than first thing in the morning, noon, or 6-ish in the evening, you went to CNN. When Fox News and MSNBC started competing, they added more entertainment to differentiate themselves, the 24-hour news-entertainment cycle became a thing, and things went horribly wrong.

But I mean if you think news quality started going downhill significantly before the mid-1990s, I'd be curious to know when you perceived the decline.

s/many/nearly all/

It turns out that when advertising is free, the worst elements of society that provide the least benefit to society take advantage of it to bad ends.

Wish I had met him, but sadly, I didn't, so I can't say. I did meet Sam Donaldson (who overlapped with him at a different network) and Katie Couric (who missed overlapping by only a few years at the other major network), and they seemed like decent people. I'd imagine Cronkite was as well. Most of the journos back then were.

The fact that part of what is ostensibly mainstream media spews stuff that would lead to a post like this is exactly why trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Back in the 80s and before, journalists actually had to take the time to learn enough about their stories to sound intelligent. And that meant that when they interviewed a talking head in politics, if the politician lied, the journalist would often correct them.

In the post-news era, we started seeing more and more talking head "news", where news channels spent more and more of their time having guests on the show who spew whatever bulls**t they want and nobody calls them on it.

And in the post-truth era, that level of idiocy began bleeding into the news, with "journalists" putting spin on the news, with the destruction of fact checking, and with the quality of the reporting spiraling.

What do I blame for this? Two things. First, the rise of Fox News, created by Rupert Murdoch to be an intentionally conservatively biased news source. Second, decades of media consolidation producing steady declines in pay and in job availability for people who work in journalism, leading it to become a less and less desirable field, resulting in most of the best and the brightest choosing other fields. This is not to say that there aren't intelligent journalists, just not nearly as many as a percentage of the total. Also, media consolidation has resulted in fewer voices in general, which further erodes trust.