Airline systems tend to have problems because they were written prior to 1980, when things like BCD were still commonplace.

For software written after approximately 1980 (and definitely after the dawn of 8-bit personal computers), the "Y2K problem" was rarely about date-storage and calculation, and was mainly a usability and character-mode UI problem.

First, let's get one thing clear: programmers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't oblivious to the year 2000. Behind the scenes, most programs written after ~1980 either represented dates as 32-bit epoch time values, or represented years as a byte offset from some reference year. The result is, they were generally good for dates between around 1800..2050 or 1850..2100.

The REAL problem was the ubiquity of 80x25 character-mode displays. Especially back in the 1980s, wasting two characters of screen real estate on a seemingly redundant '19' was intolerable. The arrival of Windows and proportional fonts made programmers more willing to start using 4-digit dates starting in the early 1990s... but for charactermode programs, there was intense resistance even in 1995, with 2000 less than 5 years away.

In many cases, Y2K mitigation was REALLY an excuse to scare management into approving the replacement of DOS and terminal-based programs with Windows. The truth is, almost all programs written after the 1970s HAD arcane work-arounds to let users enter pre-1900 and post-2000 years, and they weren't really a secret... just ugly and kludgy. Like, entering/rendering dates after 2000 using a letter as the first character (ex: a0=2000, b1=2011, c2=2022, etc). Or rendering dates like 2004 as 19104 (naively printing it as "19" plus the byte-offset from 1900).

The irony is, a lot of systems that were supposedly remediated for y2k ACTUALLY have ticking time-bomb deadlines of 2038, or sometime around 2050 or 2100 that have been mostly forgotten about by now.

I can affirm old people vs low cars. I have a Honda Civic Sport Touring, which isn't even all that small, and my parents can't get in or out of it without assistance. Going back to a normal car after driving a Ford SportTrac for almost 15 years was a shock... for the first week, getting out of the car felt like standing up from a mattress on the floor... and driving through flooded parking lots after thunderstorms has become *scary.* With my 'Trac, water less than a foot deep was irrelevant. With my Civic, even 4-6 inches of standing water is heart-stopping to drive through.

The big problem with expecting a city to be "100% walkable" is the fact that it's a goal orthogonal to conveniences like modern-sized grocery stores and big-box stores.

A big grocery store like Publix or Kroger needs about 50,000 weekly customers to be financially viable. Packing 50,000 people into an area small enough for them all to be within walking distance is hard. The one possible loophole to this rule is, if the developer of a large condominium strikes a deal with a grocery chain like Publix to allow the store's customers to park in the garage for free (along with guests of the condo residents), it MIGHT be able to pull off combining a grocery store and large parking garage with skyscraper on top (so it can be marketed to condo residents as a super-convenient ultra-desirable amenity, yet still tap shoppers who live further away).

A store like Target or Best Buy needs a MINIMUM of 250,000-300,000 customers within local-market range before they'll even CONSIDER opening a store in the area. Short of surrounding the store with an ocean of 50+ story skyscrapers, it's damn-near impossible to pack enough people into a small area to make a store like that economically-viable from pedestrian shoppers alone.

Complicating matters further, there's a middle ground where NEITHER big-box stores + dense residential development are mutually-viable. If the store's parking is free while adjacent buildings charge for parking, it will find itself in an endless losing battle to keep people visiting adjacent buildings from parking there. If the store charges to park in its own garage, people who live a half-mile away won't shop there, and will drive 5-10 miles to a store where they can park for free instead.

The only reason stores like Walmart can build a superstore in the middle of (relative) nowhere and survive is because it basically wipes out almost every other store within 10-20 miles, and draws customers from up to 50-100 miles away.

For years, Miami's planning department operated under the delusion that "ground level retail" was some magic panacea. What really ended up happening: building owners demanded rents they considered proper for a big city, and the storefronts remained perpetually vacant (or opened, then went out business within a few months). The fact is, there's actually NOT a lot of market demand for small retail spaces devoid of free parking below condos that are owned mostly as vacation homes and spend most of their time unoccupied.

Townhomes can actually be quite good... as long as you've got a thick concrete wall separating your house from the neighbor's house. I'd argue that my back yard (surrounded by an 8-foot concrete wall, with aluminum-framed screen cage above it like you'd normally find around Florida swimming pools) is MORE private than my parents' yard (separated from their neighbors' with a chainlink fence on one side, and wood-plank fence on the other).

That said, I really like having my own yard and roof, and would hate living in a condo. When shopping for a townhouse, it's important to buy one that's legally a single-family home, and not merely a condominium that regards your yards (and maybe even your roof) as "common areas".

Based on the sources you quoted, I'm guessing that you're Canadian.

TBH, I've read a lot of articles (by Canadians) describing Toronto's transit system as "dire" and "awful", and have no idea WTF they're talking about. I was in Toronto last week, and thought it had the most spectacularly awesome subway and trolley system I've ever seen (as an American).

I mean, Line 1 (yellow?) and Line 2 (green?) had trains coming every 5 minutes or less... on SUNDAY, no less. In Miami, even fsck'ing METROMOVER (downtown) rarely manages to pull off a train more often than every 4-5 minutes, and Metrorail almost never has trains running more often than every 15-30 minutes outside of literal rush hour. Back around 2016, with ridership at its highest level in the system's history (partly, due to all the new condos that were built around the southern half's stations)... Metrorail suffered the biggest service cutbacks in its entire history, and the transit agency's incompetent leaders dared to publicly wonder why its ridership plummeted.

The big problem in America is, we spend billions of dollars building transit systems, then completely waste and squander them into uselessness by running trains 20-30 minutes apart. Or, in the case of the Washington Metro, cut corners on stations like Rosslyn in ways that create chokepoints and diminish the capacity of the entire system.

The problem wasn't so much 'interference' as CFL's intorerance to the "choppy" output of a Triac, and the random current trickles from a CFL that made it think you were toggling the local power switch on-off-on (which screwed up the relay-based "appliance" modules).

In theory, the "appliance" modules had a jumper you could cut to disable that. In reality, it seems like either the modules sold by x-10.com didn't implement it correctly.

From what I vaguely recall reading somewhere, the x-10 baseband IC had an embedded 555 & required a few capacitors & resistors to set the on-off-on trigger-timing to something like 500ms per state... but the modules sold by x-10.com either used out of spec components, or omitted them entirely, so even transient pulses lasting a millisecond or two could trigger them.

Assuming the "phantom on" problem WAS due entirely to omitted/wrong passive components, ones that implemented the external components properly (maybe tweaked to require a longer intermediate 'on' and or 'off' time to filter out trickle currents) could have fixed x10 (as a standard) to work fine for another 50 years.

Ditto, for Insteon. Insteon was a graceful evolution of X-10 & their light switches were (IMHO) *way* better, but Insteon's greed kept it from ever achieving mainstream success.

Personally, I wish "wi-fi" LED bulbs had X-10 and Insteon capabilities built in to fall back on. Granted, X10 was becoming painfully slow (back in the 1970s/80s, people didn't expect to have 20 individually-tweakable lights in a single family room), but Insteon's speed was fine.

Actually, X-10 works MUCH better today than it did 10-20 years ago.

Why? CFL finally died.

CFL fundamentally broke all consumer X-10 modules. Triac-based light modules couldn't safely/reliably be used with CFL. Even nominally-dimmable ones didn't work properly. Relay-based appliance modules got false-triggered and spontaneously turned themselves on unless you plugged an extension cord into the module, then plugged *both* the CFL's fixture *and* an incandescent (and 'on') night light into it.

From what I've read, the appliance modules are still too wonky to use, but the triac-based modules work fine with dimmable LEDs.

It's sad, but after almost **50** years, X-10 is *still* the most vendor-agnostic home automation standard. Though now that Insteon's patents are all finally expired, it *could* be revived by unlicensed thirdparty hardware.

This probably means DRM can be compromised on M-core CPUs, too. That's cause for celebration!

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

You know *nothing* about either South Florida *or* sea level rise.

Let's start with the fact that Miami's as-built ground level is quite a bit higher than USGS "base flood elevation". In most parts of the country, BFE isn't much different than present-day "ground level". In Florida, it IS different. Usually, by several feet.

Florida doesn't hide behind levees and dikes. We can't. Water would just spray up like a geyser. Instead, we raise the terrain itself. We dig big holes that become sparkling blue lakes & canals, and dump the spoil nearby to raise ground level. Florida is literally the biggest land-reclamation project in the history of the human race. That's not about to change.

Don't underestimate the willingness of Floridians to obliterate every square inch of its natural environment to protect trillions of dollars worth of real estate. Older buildings are "dead men walking" and will almost certainly be destroyed within 50-100 years. And then, they'll be replaced by bigger, higher, and more expensive new ones that will be good for at least another few centuries of climate change.

Right now, today, Miami Beach is in the process of raising every street on the island by several feet. Other cities around Florida have begun doing the same. The existing buildings won't be around in 50 years, but the roads will be ready for the new buildings that'll take their place.

The problem is, the people who scream the loudest about climate change hate nuclear fission & hydroelectric power even *more*.

Nuclear fission is far from perfect, but the cold, hard fact is... it's the best thing we *have,* and the only realistic option for simultaneously reducing carbon emissions and sustaining ever-increasing demand. Period.

On top of that, people forget that the US's population isn'a exploding, but it's still steadily grinding along towards 400 and 500 million over the next century or two. A century from now, Florida will have 60-80 million residents living in a megalopolis with the Everglades & Lake Okeechobee looking (from space) like a hard-edged urban park. The electricity to sustain that kind of growth (without even talking about carbon) has no realistic source besides nuclear fission. By the time nuclear fusion becomes commercially viable, it'll probably be time to replace the *second* round of future fission reactors.

With the *possible* gray area of renting a damaged house/apartment in a city that was recently destroyed by a hurricane, I can't think of anywhere in the US where a rental unit with only a porta-john would be legal.

And even post-hurricane, it would technically still be illegal, just unenforced for a few weeks (2-3 months, *absolute* max) because rigid enforcement would instantly depopulate a destroyed city of its entire low-wage workforce (who'd be priced out of anything left within an hour drive) & leave it unable to function enough to rebuild.

Even post-Andrew Dade County clamped down on unrepaired rental units after a few weeks. From what I vaguely recall (I was still a kid), landlords informally had until a month after the power got restored to at least have the house fit for human habitation (tarped roof, intact/replaced windows & doors, working plumbing), and had to allow anyone who wanted to break their lease & move to do so without penalty (and full refund of prepaid rent as of the date they moved out). Most landlords gave existing tenants with damaged units free rent until minimal repairs were done, and discounted rent until it looked good enough to have someone else move in within a day at the original rent if the original tenants weren't satisfied).

I genuinely feel sorry for people who aren't old enough to remember when biting into a Wendy's hamburger was almost a religious experience... dripping fat, tasty bits of crispy meat bits along the edge, and all. Or spaghetti & meat sauce at the Superbar. And the torment of having to choose between them, because *both* were awesome.

Wendy's *completely* went down the shit hole after Dave Thomas died. The closest you can get to a 1980s Wendy's hamburger *now* is probably Five Guys.

Burger King sucks now, too. They *literally* cost as much as Five Guys now, and are worth *way* less. If they slash their prices to become halfway competitive again, bring back the awesome grease-capsule FryPods, and start using Liquid Smoke again... I'll think about going back. Otherwise, BK is dead to me.

I'm still waiting for Hardees to make its way back to South Florida. It's 100% Burger King's fault, and I freely admit that half the reason I hate BK so much is because 25 years ago, BK paid Hardees to leave Florida & not return for at least a decade. BK deserves to burn for that.

Someday, if God smiles upon us, Jack in the Box will finally expand into Florida.

McDonalds was mostly OK until they ruined their burgers with disgusting cooked onions you can't pick off if you forget to order it without them, took away free refills, and jacked up their fries to now cost more than a fucking *Big Mac* used to. Oh, and before they started putting so absurdly much Big Mac sauce on them, they're now *impossible* to eat in a car.

Five Guys and Steak & Shake are pretty much the only fast food restaurants in South Florida that don't suck.

Even *Checkers* went down the shit hole a few years ago. Checkers! It's as if Wall Street has to take every possible opportunity to ruin everything that was once good and turn it into a withered husk like a cloud of locusts.

Oh, it definitely helps. The main problem is the fresnel... fresnels have artifacts when you look through them off-axis (ie, not directly through the optical center). The more you shift the image (while leaving the lens unchanged), the more off-axis your view of the image is.

A better design (within the constraints of "one screen with two rectangles" and "fresnel lens") would allow the left & right images to independently shift on the screen, combined with 3D-printable carriers that can be customized to shift the lens itself up, down, left, right, and adjust its tilt & wrap (relative to the eye & screen) so each eye is mainly looking through the fresnel lens along its least-compromised optical path.

With Google Cardboard + on-screen image shift (via custom-config barcode I made) to converge the images, I saw fresnel halos & the image was a little "fuzzy", but it at least converged and wasn't *painful* to use. I used it with +0.25 lenses (putting my distance far-plane just slightly beyond the apparent distance of the screen) and no prism correction (at the time, I didn't know I needed it... and shifting the images on-screen made it unnecessary anyway).

With my Quest2 and prism-free +0.50 lenses, I can only fuse the images if I tilt the headset *just* right... into a position it slips from within moments. It "sort of" works if I tilt my head, but then the rendering becomes fuzzy & my neck hurts from both the tilt & added headset weight.

With Quest2 and +0.50 lenses with prism correction, there's a tiny keyhole of sharp, fused clarity when the headset is positioned *exactly* right... but really, it's almost never *in* that position, and everything looks awful.

The key to accommodating vertical heterophoria with a headset is, center both images & the optical center of the lenses on the eye looking at them. In the real world, glasses require prism to shift the image relative to the eye looking at it. In a virtual world, you can shift the image *itself* to match the position of the eye looking at it.

Cardboard ironically "got it (more) right" by assuming the images on the single screen required shift adjustment along both the x and y axes. Quest fucked it up in the name of "simplification" by taking away the option to shift both eyes' images along X and Y axes.

The thing about vertical heterophoria is, human eye muscles simply *can't* independently shift one eye up & one eye down. The nerve bundle just isn't wired/coded to allow it. So even a *small* amount of vertical heterophoria multiplies & compounds any other issues that might be going on. By the same token, accommodating it makes any other issues a lot easier to compensate for.

Think of it this way: your brain has finite abilities to fuse misaligned images. Fixing one "at the source" (by shifting left/right images vertically) gives you more spare processing power to compensate for others (like lateral convergence).

Binocular fusion works until you exceed the misconvergence limit, then falls apart. The first sign it's at the breaking point is when the image you're seeing seems to "vibrate". At that point, your brain is randomly ignoring one eye or the other, and the vibration is caused by the constant left/right perspective shift.

Push the misconvergence a little more, and individual elements (like words on a page) look like they're drifting around. What actually happens is, one eye locks onto the "scene", while the other eye locks onto a detail while drifting around. Your brain edits them together into a seemingly normal scene where the element that has your attention is drifting around.

Finally, your brain just mostly ignores one eye... but uses its freed-up capacity normally used for binocular fusion to instead create fake 3D you won't even notice isn't "real" until you stub your toe on something "in plain sight". Except, it wasn't... it was on the other side of your nose, and the eye that "should" have seen it was being ignored until the moment the pain registered. Your brain & visual system trick you like that.

Update: apparently, Apple neither allows image-shifting nor prescription lenses with prism.

Given my experience with Quest2's fresnel + prism eyeglass lenses, I halfway agree with Apple not supporting prism-containing lens inserts. But it's shitty that they don't allow left-right image shifting.

With heterophoria, even a little bit of corrective image-shifting can make a big difference to usability & comfort. I made it most of my life without even *realizing* I have heterophoria, and it didn't become a serious problem until I finally needed reading glasses with magnification (plus-sphere) power. Up to +0.50, I'm ok & can still fuse. Above +1.00, my ability to fuse just shatters. It happens because magnification causes image shift, and my "normal" vision is *right* at the breaking point of what I can still fuse with some effort.

(... continued. Dammit, Slashdot! Give phone browsers "preview before post"!) ...defocus and distortion.

Better yet, make one with slightly less-aggressive fresnelization and a larger-diameter central area. I know some degree is unavoidable, but fresnels really don't stack well with cylinder (astigmatism) and prism correction in glasses.