It becomes the government's business the second a doctor is involved, unless you want to deregulate the medical profession.

This has been going on with Microsoft for a while now. I had a cheapo Windows 8 tablet (I think it was MicroCenter's house brand.) The Windows 8.1 update broke a bunch of features, like screen rotation and the light sensor, as Microsoft pulled the drivers from the update. Maybe they had to be recertified or something, but I can't imagine there being a massive difference between 8 and 8.1.

I agree 100%.

Nope. The second a medical professional is involved, society gets a say in what happens.

Here's a related example. In the US, the rules on involuntary committal to a mental institution were made much stricter, mostly by court case law. The courts had found that a lot of people were being involuntarily committed to metal institutions because their family members wanted power of attorney so they could take their money. In other words, siblings or children were having their relatives committed so they can get money. The courts found this wasn't isolated or rare, but widespread.

Now, extrapolate that mentality to assisted suicide. I'm not saying it should be banned, but it must be very tightly regulated and audited.

The law should be straightforward and clear. Assisted death should only be for terminal cases with chronic pain. Approving it for any other case is manslaughter and should be prosecuted as such.

'Round about 1996 the computer lab at the university I went to had 486 and Pentium Gateway 2000 desktops with USB ports. They went completely unused, and we regularly turned off USB in the BIOS to free up IRQs for other things. The first time I saw a USB peripheral of any kind were the keyboard and mouse on an iMac.

My grandma's cousin lived in Eureka California near the coast in a nice open plan ranch house. Air conditioning was handled by a couple of oscillating fans and windows that opened. Heat was supplied by two extra incandescent lamps she'd leave on at night, and a Franklin stove for the one month out of the year it gets down into the 50s.

An amazingly efficient system for her. It wouldn't quite cut it where we live, when it's well below freezing for a third of the year with almost no sun, then into the 90s and 100s for two months of the year with high humidity.

My son's coach has the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and uses them to take pictures during competitions. He says, though it's the only reason he bought them, it keeps his hands free to use his walkie talkies to talk to the other coaches and refs, check his clipboard, and do hand signals. He keeps them in a mode that records everything, so when something cool happens, he says "Save that picture" and the last few seconds are stored away. He got some amazing pictures that would have been missed if he had to pull a camera up or his phone out.

It's a niche use case, but it works remarkably well.

Why is the price a headline? The first video conferencing systems in the 1990s cost upwards of $80,000 in 90's money, which didn't include the requisite leased line.

A company finds that the product they are developing does not meet their quality requirements and does not launch it. I don't see why an apology is necessary. Nobody is paying for Siri AI stuff.

What they should be apologizing for, and fixing, is why Siri doesn't work as well as it did two iOS revisions ago. I mainly use it to control music playback while driving, and it has problems finding podcasts, bands, albums, songs - just about everything. It all worked perfectly a year ago.

It doesn't matter how many more solar panels you have when they are covered in snow.

Only if you do zero commenting or documentation. I'd estimate 30% of my typing is code, the rest is documentation, comments, updating tickets, etc...

I learned to touch type in a writing and composition class in high school where we had to write something every day. Not anything major, but a story or report or poem. About halfway through the year I was touch typing.

It's an unofficial list of rumored announcements. You're reading a bit much into this.

Some of it is. Not most of it. China stopped importing plastic waste about 7 years ago, which kind of tanked the market for waste plastic, to the point that governments were paying recycling companies to get it off their hands. Some entrepreneurs set up illegal "recycling" centers in Vietnam and Cambodia, masking the destinations with intermediaries in South America, as you had to be a certified recycling facility to get the payouts.

That's the situation now. Dumping garbage in these rivers has been happening for decades. The fake recyclers didn't come up with the idea. They figure no one would notice the extra junk mixed in with what was already there.

Also, even though China stopped importing recycled plastic, the Yangtze has the most plastic pollution of any river in the world. That's not coming from western sources.

That's just the Pacific patch. The stuff eminiating from the rivers in Asia ends up caught in hundreds of patches of junk between the islands in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. You're right that marine waste needs to be fixed, too, but plastic that dissolves in seawater isn't going to fix that, as nobody would use it in marine applications.