Easily fixed, so long as the legislators don't try to overcook the law with too much complexity. The law should simply say, "You can have digital shelf price labels, but you can't change the price on those labels while the store is open to the public. If your store is open 24 hours a day, you can change the price between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., but you must make a clear announcement to everyone in the store immediately before the change and every five minutes until the change is completed, in every language commonly used in your area, stating that prices are about to change and the price displayed on the shelf when you picked up the item may not be the price you will be charged at checkout."

It preserves the supposed benefits of the digital labels, and ensures that customers have pricing transparency.

I'd even allow a carve-out for goods customarily sold at "market price," so long as the list of such goods is controlled by the state and price changes are limited to when the seller's wholesale price changes and current stock is exhausted.

I read "Cadmium Zinc Telluride," and all that comes to mind is a large, bright yellow Kia SUV.

Checks are inconvenient and hideously insecure, but they remain the one way for an American to (sort of) safely send money to a person or company without both parties physically present that doesn't necessarily result in third-party fees for either party. That's the problem banks have to solve to get rid of paper checks.

In my town, you can pay your taxes in cash (at the town hall, during limited hours, in person), by mailing in a check for the exact amount, or via credit card—which results in a 2.5% surcharge to cover the cost of using the credit-card network. Paying in person isn't a realistic option for most folks, as you'd need to take time off from work to do it. For a $2,500 property-tax bill, that's an extra $62.50, which isn't a negligible fee. Even factoring in the cost of the stamp and the envelope, it's way cheaper to mail them a check. The stamp is even cheaper than the cost for fuel and lost time to drive down and pay in cash.

And it'll get worse now that credit-card companies can charge different processing rates based on the rewards tier of your credit card, and merchants can pass along that variable rate as a surcharge to your bill...

A "Model M" keyboard without the singular defining feature that makes the Model M iconic—the buckling-spring key mechanism.

What's next? A new Big Mac clone that only comes without any sauce?

...so whatever it is, it'll be rolled out half-baked with great fanfare, get forced onto various users by the sheer weight of Google's not-a-monopoly on just about everything, limp along for a year or two, and then Google will discover that the problem is more difficult than it first appeared, get bored, and kill it off in favor of the next exciting new half-baked thing.

This could be the greatest idea ever; Google's involvement is the kiss of death for it regardless, until proven otherwise. The odds aren't in the project's favor.

It also depends on how effects-heavy the show was. Older shows shot on film and edited on film are pretty easy to re-scan in HD. Then you get to the 90s and you get shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation that were shot on film but edited on video—Paramount had to go back and re-edit the entire series, and redo a lot of the effects like phaser beams that were done with video paintboxes, to get an HD version.

One of the saddest cases is Babylon 5. The show was shot on film and protected for 16:9, because Straczynski saw HD coming. But the effects were done with early CGI, and so they were all rendered at 4:3 480i. And for various reasons including studio stupidity, nobody saved the raw CGI effects data, so it can't just be re-rendered on modern equipment—they'd have to redo all of the effects from scratch. When WB did a 16:9 DVD release, they didn't even bother re-rendering scenes with "video paintbox" effects like blaster fire; they just cropped the 4:3 480i down to 16:9 and upscaled those scenes (poorly).

Here's a compromise: Make theaters publish the end time of the movie as well as the "start time" (of the trailers). As a Connecticut moviegoer, I care about when I'll be done watching the movie; it helps me plan the next thing. With trailers adding indeterminate front padding to the runtime, it's currently impossible. Just tell me when it will be over. (And if I do the math myself to figure out when the movie will actually start, oh well...)

Apple Pay doesn't share your card number ("primary account number" or PAN) with the merchant. It shares a device-specific Device Account Number (DAN) and a one-time-use token that's computed cryptographically. If the payment terminal is compromised, the bad guy gets the DAN and the token, not the PAN—and the token's already been used, so it's useless to them. The DAN isn't usable without a valid token.

Of course your bank knows about your transaction. But unlike using your card's magnetic stripe or EMV chip, Apple Pay transactions are anonymous *with respect to the vendor getting your name*. The EMV Payment Token generated by Apple Pay doesn't include your name. Since it also doesn't include your PAN, the merchant doesn't have a good way to match your transaction to you. All they know is that valid payment was tendered.

Apple doesn't know about your in-store Apple Pay transactions. The phone stores the DAN in its secure element, where it can't be decrypted by anyone but you; and the token is generated on-device using data from the secure element.

As for faster... it's much faster to double-click the side button on one's Apple Watch and then tap it to the payment terminal than to fish a card out of your wallet...

I'm an IT security specialist at one of the world's biggest banks. I'm not speaking for my employer, but I personally am a strong advocate of using Apple Pay. It's far more secure than the EMV chip or even the card-based tap-to-pay—which may not use tokenization, so the merchant still gets your PAN... and so does anyone who hacks the merchant.

...except the truth is, wood cutting boards are less likely to harbor bacteria in a way that causes illness, because it tends to isolate and kill the bacteria. Plastic, on the other hand, is nonporous so the bacteria stays on the surface... and since it tends to develop grooves from the knife cutting into it, bacteria gets trapped in the grooves where it is hard to clean. Plastic cutting boards sanitized to NSF specifications may be safer, but most homes lack the technology to do that, or don't use it if they do.

You're hand-waving away the most critical part of copyright: the "copy" part.

A physical library purchases a physical copy of a book. Thanks to the First Sale Doctrine, they can do whatever they like with that physical copy. They can temporarily transfer possession of it to someone else ("lending"). In doing so, they take the risk that they won't get that physical copy back. If someone doesn't return a book, the library has to purchase another copy to replace it.

Internet Archive made a digital copy of the physical book. That, in itself, is a copyright violation (unless it was done under the few fair-use exceptions, which don't apply in this case). IA now had two copies of the book, but only paid the publisher and author for one copy. They then "lent" a copy to someone else. Being a digital file, this didn't involve transferring sole custody of the digital copy to someone else; it meant making another copy of the work. Now there's three copies extant with one paid-up license. And if someone failed to "return" their digital copy? IA still had the original physical copy and the original digital copy; they didn't "lose" it to the "theft." That, right there, is where a fair jury following the law would find them guilty of copyright infringement.

(You can argue that the law isn't right or fair, but it is the law unless and until changed...)

DRM—even if IA had used it consistently, which they didn't—doesn't fix this. IA still had to make an unlicensed copy to digitize the work in the first place, and a DRM-laden "lending copy" is still a second infringing copy.

They could've worked with the rights-holders to negotiate a license allowing them to do this; they didn't. They relied on a flawed "fair use" argument, and it bit them.

I guess we're moving from "what you see is what you get" to "what your printer hallucinates is what you get?"

How long before HP updates this so that the AI reformats your Word document to make room for inserting advertisements during the print process?

My 1999 Saab 9-5 included weather radio. Push the "WX" button on the radio and it would automatically scan the NOAA frequencies and select the strongest one. It was wonderful when making trips between western NY and CT in the winter; local radio would rarely have weather forecasts, but NOAA would alert me to lake-effect snow bands that would seriously impact travel.

Sadly, it was one of the first things to go when GM got their hands on Saab, and forced them to use the "corporate" radio instead of the Saab-designed radio. Along with radio buttons that you could easily press, accurately, when wearing ski gloves.

I used to have a Saab, and among the things about the Saab that I dearly miss was the radio having a "weather" button.

The US National Weather Service has a network of weather-radio stations. They're AM radio stations, just outside the usual AM radio band; the only difference between a standard AM car radio and a weather radio is that the weather radio's "dial" goes a little farther.

When driving in stormy conditions, the weather radio was incredibly helpful. During storms, the weather service would regularly update the station with warnings and information about travel hazards. One touch of the "weather" button and the radio would seek out the strongest NWS weather radio station.

Could an app do this? Maybe. If there's cell coverage, which is not a given in the Northeast due to terrain; and if the weather hasn't knocked out nearby cell towers; and if cell networks aren't overloaded as people lose power, and thus lose landline Internet. But when you're trying to drive through whiteout snow, the cognitive load of finding and using a weather app is too high; pressing a "weather" button is much less distracting.

Maybe instead of eliminating AM radio from cars, we should be requiring that cars have AM radios that not only pull in commercial stations (which also means "traffic warning" radio in the commercial band already installed by governments nationwide), but weather radio (with a physical control to access it) as well.

Where I live, FM radio is almost worthless during a natural disaster. I'm in hilly terrain, so the stations I can receive are limited, and the selection of stations with intelligible reception may change every few miles. Virtually all of those stations are part of nationally-owned radio networks, which means they're playing content from a central, national studio. There's nobody in the local station; if there's a "local DJ," chances are they prerecorded their schtick for the week on Monday.

In a regional emergency, the best one can hope for from the FM stations is that they'll start playing the audio feed from an affiliated local TV station. This isn't very useful, because the TV people are working for their TV audience, who can see what they're talking about. They don't always describe what they're broadcasting. In an emergency, you need clear communication of information, and "let's just use the local TV station's audio feed" doesn't provide this.

While AM radio is increasingly centralized as well, for whatever reason the AM talk stations are more likely to have at least one live body near a microphone in the office, and some vestige of a news organization. That means AM radio is more likely to break into the national programming with local information. I can't recall the last time that happened on FM radio around here.

If the US wants to get rid of AM radio in cars, we need to address how radio consolidation has all but eliminated useful, timely local news on FM radio first.

Not all supermarkets have retired them. In the Northeast, Stop & Shop still has use-as-you-go barcode wands, but not in all of their stores—just the ones in more upscale neighborhoods that are less likely to have shoplifting problems.

Scan-as-you-go, combined with reusable shopping bags, can be a wonderful experience, especially with a good, purpose-built scanner, and if the store is good about maintaining their produce scales with barcode printers.

The experience at Stop & Shop's big local competitor, Big Y, isn't nearly as good. Big Y uses a phone app instead of a bespoke scanner. The app eats your phone's battery like mad. It insists on making an ear-piercing beep every time you scan, with no ability to control the volume. And the "checkout" button is placed where you trigger it constantly by accident, while trying to hold the phone. On the other hand, Big Y's app lets you scan a QR code on your way out the door and pay via Apple Pay, rather than having to check out at a register (manned or self-service), which is nice.

As a whole, Big Y tried to do it cheap. Initially, they had one produce scale for scan-as-you-go; it was a modified deli scale and it displayed a QR code for you to scan—no printer to put a label on your produce for later reference (or for use at the self-checkout). They've since installed the same Bizerba printing scale that Stop & Shop uses... but with the printer disabled for some bizarre reason.