Here's an idea someone should try:

-- Create a web page that succinctly explains why QR code menus are bad - data harvesting, price hikes based on your identity, potential phishing scams, etc. Tell the viewer they should insist on a traditional paper menu. And make sure it renders well on a phone screen.
-- Generate a QR code for the page and print it out on pieces of paper
-- The next time you're at a restaurant that uses QR code menus, quietly replace the restaurant's QR code with yours.

Now, when the next customer who sits at that table scans your QR code, they will get a page teaching them why QR codes are bad. If enough people did this, maybe the public will start to reject these digital menus. Though the cynic in me says restaurants will just switch to some other horrible practice.

The solution is obvious. Just replace the steering wheel with a touchscreen. Then do the same for the airbag. /s

If you want my opinion on the worst interface of all time, look no further than the telephone. Think about it. If you want to call someone, you have to enter a bunch of digits. And what do these digits mean? Well, every country seems to do things differently, but in the US, the first three digits are the area code (which supposedly tells you roughly where they are), the next three are a prefix (which once told you what switch you were going through), and the last four are the line number. But today we have number portability and mobile devices, so none of these numbers really mean anything anymore. Furthermore, one person may have multiple numbers (home phone, mobile phone, work phone), and a single number may reach multiple people (some work places use a single number for an entire office, relying on extensions to reach individuals). People's phone numbers can and do change regularly (job changes, new home phone number, etc). And of course caller ID doesn't always give you the true number of the caller. Many companies will use their toll-free number for the caller ID, and scammers pretty much always put in a fake number. And on top of all that, there is a rather limited quantity of phone number available. The whole system of phone numbers is so badly broken and deficient, it's amazing we even bother to use it anymore.

And yet people don't seem to mind it at all. Sure, I hear complaints about scammers spoofing phone numbers, but if that could be fixed, it seems like people would be perfectly happy with the current phone number situation. Personally, I wish we could move from PSTN to SIP with its addresses that resemble email addresses, because it's a lot easier to identify john.smith@example.com than 1-738-398-2835. SIP would also mean I'm no longer dependent on a phone company for my phone service, as long as I have the technical know-how to setup my own.

Once the information is available, third party websites will be able to use it to allow indiciduals to more easily browse and make use of the information. Think of sites like pcpartpicker.com that allow people to find and price-shop computer parts across multiple sellers, all because the pricing information is public. It will now be possible for people to browse medical procedures in a similar fashion. Now if we can just get insurance companies to publicly disclose their negotiated prices for the same procedures, we'll have a complete picture.

It's too bad Slashdot won't retire this graphic to prevent people from using it going forward, given that I haven't seen it used correctly in more than a decade.

Yahoo still exists. When you visit one of their pages, it makes about 10 million GET requests from their server to pump up their page view count, assuming they count every GET request as a page view (this is corporate America - OF COURSE they count every request as a page view).

All these designers who think white backgrounds are a good idea should be forced to be oncall where they get paged every night at 2 or 3am and are forced to stare into a screen that has the brightness of a thousand suns so they can understand the pain I go through every time I have to do the same, which is most nights. And then maybe they will understand just how painful those white screens are when your eyes are adjusted to the dark and how once they adjust to the 8 million lumens of light you won't be getting back to sleep any time soon. This really needs to happen. Unsurprisingly, dark screens don't create the same kinds of problems, but do I get any dark screens at 3am? Listen, being oncall and getting paged in the middle of the night is bad enough, so let's not make it 10x worse with your stupid white screens, ok? Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is.

Magnetic fields can be useful for spacecraft propulsion, but we'll likely get better results using a magnetic sail.

With the demise of Net Neutrality, I kind of expect the big ISPs to try wringing money out of major internet sites. For example, threaten to throttle Netflix unless Netflix agrees to pay some sky-high peering fees, or inject high latency and dropped packets to Facebook and Google unless these companies also pay the insane peering fees. Don't be surprised if the cost of Netflix goes up as a result, even if your ISP isn't one of the big ISPs doing this. Everyone seems to expect ISPs to create fast lanes for specific sites and sell these fast lanes to their customers, but because everyone will be watching for this, I think it's less likely to happen.

Much like the article suggests, they probably won't do this right away, and when they do, expect them to do it slowly and incrementally. Start by charging just a small increase in peering fees, then gradually increase those fees over time to "boil the frog".

One major problem with Facebook (and other social media sites) is that they are built to be centralized. If you want to connect with someone on Facebook then you also need to be on Facebook. What we need is a decentralized social media platform built on open protocol specifications that can be implemented and reimplemented by different companies. That's how the web works. If the web had been built the way Facebook was built, you would need Facebook's special browser to view Facebook, Google's special browser to view Google sites, Amazon's special browser to view Amazon, etc. But because the web is built on open standards, I can run whatever browser I want to view their sites, whether it be Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, or any other browser that implements the standard base of HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality. And if I decide I don't like my browser I can switch to another and still access the web. Email also works this way. Don't like your email provider? Find another one and you will still be able to communicate with your friends. Sure you'll need a new email address, but it will still work. Or if you're technically inclined, run your own email server. That's what I do and I love it. But I could never run my own Facebook server because there are no options for me to be able to do that, nor would Facebook ever allow such a thing to exist because their entire business model is based on having complete control over your data.

Having a common standard for social media would also go a long way toward eliminating the fragmentation in social media. Obligatory xkcd.

I remember when I was growing up, if I said I was bored my mom would always respond with, "if you're bored I can give you something to do." Of course being bored doesn't mean I have nothing to do. If that were true I could always find something to do, even if it just meant counting from one to a million. No, boredom comes from not having anything to do which I find interesting or stimulating. What I've learned is that I find far more satisfaction (and less boredom) by building or creating things. While it's easy to download a game on my phone or computer, I find it more stimulating to build my own. This is true even if the game is something simple like tic-tac-toe. Figuring out how to display the game, handle inputs, detect if someone wins, and build a decent AI is something I find interesting. Had I downloaded a tic-tac-toe game I would be bored with it, even though it would surely be more polished than my version. Not everyone likes programming, though, but there are a lot of areas that involve creativity: woodworking, sewing, painting, writing, cooking, landscaping, etc. It's just a matter of finding what you like.

Also,

What happens when an application becomes unresponsive and you can no longer move or minimize the window?

What happens when you use this with a program like Synergy and your mouse moves off the side of the screen while dragging a window? (Chrome freaks out when this happens.)

I want my sunlight at the beginning AND end of the work day. Can't we just fall back in the mornings and spring forward in the afternoon? The shorter work day would be nice too!

Farewell Cassini. You were an explorer, a pioneer, a scientist, a teacher, but most importantly, you were an inspiration to us all. You may be gone, but the legacy you left and the knowledge you taught us will outlive us all. Goodbye old friend, you will be missed.

How can there be 14 trillion cameras in the world today, as the summary claims?

Well, the summary did mention the number came from Gartner, so that explains quite a lot.