I remember when milk, soda, juices, oils, etc., were distributed using glass bottles. The number of injuries was tiny. Local dairies most often provided milk. There were local bottlers for soda and juices as well. Stores collected the empties for reuse or recycling. Some of us even had the convenience of deliveries to our door by a milkman. Moving to plastic was not done for the consumer's convenience -- it was done to allow centralized production and cross-country shipping. The food quality was better when delivered in glass containers. Our bodies are now saturated with plastic microparticles. Some plastics are now known to mess with our biochemistry. It is not as what the OP suggested, a simple reality that jagged broken glass was everywhere, cutting people's feet. It was scarcely a hazard at all.

A controlled news media is almost by definition a corrupt news media. This is true whether it be government control or corporate control. Unfortunately, there are those who like validation more than truth. They will listen to only (e.g.) Fox News because they know that whatever is said, it will make them feel that they are right, never wrong. So for them, the idea that the "good people in authority" should dictate the news, in the literal sense of dictation, is a much-desired utopia. As for those people in authority, controlling the media is a defense against their own failings. Controlling the media is an admission that you can not do your job, so you might as well try to pretend that you can. Controlling the media is a means to hold on to power with a pretense of democracy. Telling people that you wish to control the media is a big warning flag that you are unfit.

As others have pointed out, this is just a tiny piece of the much broader problem: how do we limit the impact of our technology on the environment, and in particular in the recycling of unnaturally toxic components? Airpods are an almost negligible part of the technology waste problem. One untenable solution is to return to the stone age by eliminating our technologies. But can we have our cake and eat it too? A possible method is single point recycling by plasma arc de-molecularization of all waste. I know, it sounds very Star Trek, however, trial facilities have been built and tested. This method breaks down both organics and inorganics under extreme temperature. Then the products are recombined into manageable forms, e.g. water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, some reclaimable elemental solids, and a small amount of metallic slag. I have read that the combustion energy produced is enough to run the plasma arc, so the process might possibly pay for itself.

If obtaining a reasonably accurate reading of the total weight is the problem, why not measure the strain on the landing gear at the gate?

Traditionally, TLDs have been used to either designate a general usage category, e.g. commercial, education, military, government, and so forth, or designate a geographic area of origin, e.g. us, ch, de, and so forth. The geographical designator has been abused, for example, the use of the "tv" designation. However, if we keep with this tradition, then obviously the "amazon" domain can only refer to the geographical region of Themyscira, which by a very long period predates the usage in southern new world continent.

In chronological order, I have created real-life programs using Fortran (1969), Basic(HP 1972), 6502 machine code, Forth, Pascal, Prolog, HyperCard/Hypertalk, Mathematica, Java, PHP, Javascript, Python, Swift, Typescript. That's over an almost 50-year span. Today, actively, I use Typescript, Python, Mathematica, and Swift. I did not include SQL because it is always embedded in some other language, and I did not include spreadsheets.

I am another "me, too, Fortran". I wrote my first program in September of 1969. Programs were entered on Hollerith cards, of course, and the output was a impact line printer. The workspace was 56 kilobytes. After midnight, academic work was kicked off the machine so that the accounts for a local shoe manufacturer could be run. In fullness of time, I got to use a dedicated teletype. Played a lot of Lunar Lander. In subsequent years, I moved on to HP Basic, Forth, Pascal, Perl, Java, Mathematica, Python, and as dementia slowly overtook my brain, Javascript. These days, I still do Java, Python, and Javascript. Have toyed with Swift.

Just to chime in on a couple of trends I noticed in the earlier posts. First just because a vast population of hackers out there may be able to view your browser history, does not mean they will. Frankly, you are not interesting to hackers. You are interesting to advertisers, which what the Congressional Bill favors. Second, if there was an FCC privacy rule protecting you, it can not be overridden by a Terms of Service agreement. A TOS is just a contract between you and the ISP. In the hierarchy of law, that is the lowest level. If there is a local, state, federal, or Constitutional provision that protects you, that ends the story right there.

As I was reading the comments for this article, I was thinking to myself that it was just another is a series of such legal actions. Ultimately Google (and other public search engines) will have to maintain blacklists of information not to be to revealed, entries in the lists made upon demanded by any first party to the item. But then I looked at the upper right corner of the comments web page, and there was a advertisement for "Public Records Online". This, as most of you know, is a fee based service that pulls any and all public records for a given person. The fee-based aspect puts this service in a different category than Google. Currently no one is arguing that such fee-based services be restricted from viewing public records. Suppose the courts ruled that even a fee based search must respect the "right to be forgotten". The public records are still publicly obtainable, we have just made it less convenient. By restricting Google, you have made necessary to pay a fee. If the courts shutdown the fee-based service, we have just made it necessary to employ a investigator to hit the pavement and track down records the old fashion way. So the 'right to be forgotten" seems to be about the convenient availability of public records, not about erasing the public record. Even "sealing" court records does not help -- all major city libraries keep newspaper/magazines morgues. It becomes difficult but not impossible in such circumstances to find out anything about anybody. I understand that it is tough for some one who has successfully been rehabilitated to escape their past. But I believe we have to stop blaming the Internet for loss of privacy when frankly all that the Internet did was make the information more accessible -- it did not generate the information, it did not promote the information, it just made it more difficult to hide.

To be honest, as an "old" programmer, I do not have any trouble keeping up. But I am not special -- anyone who makes the effort can keep up. I think that is the point of the Dice article cited in the post -- you can keep up and it is not that hard to do so. And you can change you job with the times. I have worked in my fundamental area of physics, then process engineering, then metrology, and now programming and communications. For the software portions of my work, since starting in 1969 I have used 8 languages, on 7 operating systems.Toss in a few variations for different frameworks. So long as I can read, I can keep up. As for the "dead at 35" meme expressed in the cited InfoWorld article (which the article author Neil McAllister promptly kicks to the curb), I just say "See here kid, I'll retire when I'm good and ready."

"Choosing not to decide is still making a choice." There are those who may wish to stay partially off the grid by not registering to vote. There are those who consider absence to be a show of protest. Let those who wish to vote do so, freely without needing anything except a state ID. Let those who do not wish to vote live in peace.

Ideally, competition based on quality to price ratio in each market niche is how business should work. But every business man on the planet would happily embrace monopoly if it is his own monopoly. Capitalism is not about competition, it is about control. Against that, John Q Citizen has to depend on civil regulations to keep product standards high, and financial practices honest, for example, minimum wage standards, lemon laws, safety and health standards. But, what would happen if the USA had a minimum wage law that said a USA company must pay at least $xx.xx/hour to any wage earner, regardless of that earner's citizenship or geographical location? We would be smoked by China corporations, that's what would happen. The best we can hope for is that a manufacturer will, despite capitalistic pressure, take some personal pride in the design of its products. Oh Wait, that is Apple.

This is not an isolated problem. All vocations either do or will require life long vocational retraining. New technologies are introduced very frequently in areas such as building construction, business systems, environmental systems, mining, agriculture, metalworking, and so on. The time has passed when you could learn to weld on the xyz welder, and thereafter be employed for life, working with only that tool and that skill. When John Henry saw the stream drill, what he should have done is to put down his hammer and say "teach me to run that stream drill". The associates degree should be just the first certification -- the student needs to be taught to pursue and obtain more certifications throughout his or her working life. Also, my feeling is that the curricula needs to involve as much "why" as "how".

Quite true. It is also important to distinguish a testable hypothesis, which can be promoted to an accepted theory by such tests, as opposed to a whimsical musing, for which no tests either positive or negative are possible. The Theory of Evolution started out as a hypothesis that could explain certain observations. This hypothesis was put forth by Wallace and Darwin. Decades of further investigation provided positive tests, and no negative tests. Accordingly, the hypothesis became a theory, and in fact became so well accepted, it is considered a law of nature. In comparison, there are no tests for creationism. Anybody can claim that every observable aspect of the Universe was created just a few millennia/centuries/years/days/seconds ago, with everything in place such that observations make the Universe appear to be older and appeared to be evolving. But such a claim denies its own testability. Hence it can never be promoted to accepted theory. It is just a whimsical musing, nothing more.

With respect, please note that there is a 1942 Supreme Court ruling on the matter. Quote from Justice Frank Murphy: "There are certain well-defined and limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise a Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or “fighting” words – those which by their very utterances inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." Basically, the court says that free speech is to convey ideas and opinions, but not as a psychological weapon. A better point, in the replies above, is that a blog is a privately controlled forum, for example just like the O'Reilly Factor on Fox TV. The moderator gets to decide what is acceptable and what is not. Such forums are by no means venues for free speech. So Constitutional protections have no meaning to the original question.