The Anthony dollar would be a perfectly good dollar coin if it weren't so similar in look/feel/weight to a quarter. A reversible higher-power USB cable is a great improvement on micro-usb, but why did it have to wait until after mico-usb was ubiquitous? They are too close in size and easily confused.

Micro-usb finally ended the era of needing to carry around a separate charger for every little device. Now with USB-C I have to carry (and risk losing or not having) micro-to-c adapters everywhere.

The charging and data transfer issues are the spoiled icing on the already burnt cake.

If they want to get people to use this, provide information to them to help them control their exposure.

Close contact is supposed to be proximity to someone for 10-15 minutes. Have the app alarm audibly once I have been in proximity with anyone else using the app for more than 8 minutes. Let me whitelist my family members so I'm not getting constant alarms.

That lets *me* impact *my* exposure risk while still going out in public and even having brief encounters with people. If I linger at the farmers' market too long, the alarm lets me move on before increasing exposure risk.

That's much more appealing than feeding a bunch of personal data to a faceless app/company/bureaucracy and waiting for a contract tracer to call and order a quarantine.

People pushing Medicare drug negotiation need to realize that the only leverage the government has against the manufacturer during negotiation is to not cover drugs that don't offer a lower price at the bargaining table. So if it happens, don't be surprised when your favorite pricey highly-advertised brand-name drug is no longer covered by Medicare.

I would be interested in seeing Medicare refuse to cover any drug that is advertised on TV. It avoids the free-speech problem of banning ads, avoids the stupidity of taxpayer dollars subsidizing TV shows through drug ads, and might drive down the price of drugs. I suspect the drug makers would choose to give up the ads to keep Medicare coverage.

A big part of the problem is the USA is subsidizing pharmaceutical research for the rest of the world. What the USA really needs is to find a way to collect on that bill, especially to the wealthy/developed world. Drug re-importation is a crude hack but at least a step in that direction.

I appreciate that the Seattle PD is trying to do *something* to fix this problem, but their solution would likely not have saved the life of swatting victim Andrew Finch. Finch was murdered by Officer Justin Rapp who will face no consequences for his actions. The idiot who made the swatting call has at least been charged, but the trigger man got a pass.

Finch wasn't a gamer and had no reason to believe he was at risk for swatting. He died because he twitched the wrong way when he was startled at the front door by shouted commands, bright lights, and a bunch of body-armor wearing cops pointing their guns at him.

Should everybody register for this service? If so, will that just cause cops to ignore the list even more?

What is really needed is police training on de-escalation and considering the probability that a call is legitimate instead of just the worst-case possibility. And for dispatch to pass along to the responding officers important information like the 911 call coming from thousands of miles away and the 911 caller still being on the call (both true in Finch case IIRC). Also, training (or more training) on the realistic human response time to commands when an innocent civilian is startled by multiple contradicting shouted commands, bright lights, and multiple cops pointing guns at them. You watch the videos of many of these police shootings, and complying with their commands before they shoot would require superhuman cognition and reflexes.

Around 2000, I spent over a month one summer driving around the US with camping gear, a stack of AAA maps, AAA books for each state listing campgrounds, and no plan other than to see interesting things like national parks. I drove around 10,000 miles. Most mornings, I spread out a map on the picnic table and figured out where to go that day and where I would be able to sleep or shop if necessary. No GPS and a basic analog/digital cell phone that kind of worked (analog, $0.69/minute roaming) in most non-mountain areas. It was an unforgettable experience. It's a shame if newer travelers are unable to experience some of these things.

As the driver found out, USA atlas with 1-2 pages per state should be in the toolkit purely as a backup map. AAA still has good state-level paper maps that are usable for everything except in-city driving and are good for trip planning even with a GPS.

On most trips, I still try to carry the state-level maps and usually use them a couple of times for something. I have yet to see a good way on a small-screen phone or GPS to answer questions like "how far away is the coast," or "how much out of our way would it be to go to that town" or "what's the next sizable town within 2 miles of the road we are on," which a glance at a paper map answers. GPS will tell you the closest town but it may be way off your route.

I do think GPS has been a big benefit for safety. Reading maps while driving was never safe but often necessary before GPS.

Yeah, saying they are "presumably, not really aware" is BS. I'm not sure why the post's author felt compelled to express sympathy for people perpetuating a scam that takes advantage of vulnerable people. The people who both manage and make these calls are criminals, and they should pay for their crimes with whatever $ they have and loss of freedom. Sympathy should go to the victims.

I engaged one of these guys once who for whatever reason would not hang up on me. He was articulate and seemed quite intelligent. I called him a scammer and a criminal who should be in jail. I told him he should be ashamed to face his family. I told him to get an education and a real job. He claimed he was going to school in preparation for the merchant marine, which I agreed was a real job. He eventually admitted he was a scammer. He was totally aware of what he was doing.

My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?

It seems we have a case here of a law (the ADA) abridging a constitutional right. Again, we're not talking about a wheelchair ramp or a swimming pool or service dogs; we're talking about creative content. Courts seem to pretty strongly favor free speech over other interests even if those other interests are compelling (e.g., Citizens United).

The reality here is that the public is being harmed by the removal of and ceased production of this content. At a minimum, I wish UC Berkeley would ask the current DoJ to reconsider; they might come up with a different response than the Obama DoJ. (Plus UC Berkeley should cut off all interactions with Gallaudet if it can be found that institution was complicit in these actions.) But if there's a chance of winning in court on free speech grounds, UC Berkeley could do us all a service by getting that ruling. Of course, none of those actions coincide with Berkeley's own institutional political agenda, so they probably won't happen.

How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?

Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?

We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?

*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.