We had (maybe still have?) these robots on the University of Wisconsin campus here in Madison. They're a friggin' menace. All they do is stupidly get in the way on some of the busiest sidewalks in town. For months we had problems with them blocking curb ramps, causing problems for people with mobility devices.

They kept breaking out of their geofence and would go on the major bike paths adjacent to campus where they were supposed to be prohibited from operating. The robots would putz along at slow speed in the middle of the lane, with their profile being just low enough that if you didn't spot their little flag it was easy to run straight into them, particularly in the dark, as they crawled along the path. Frankly the city government should've just impounded and fined them for every damn one of them that strayed onto the paths. But we love "innovation" here so we keep letting this stupid tech bro crap keep going.

This! And so much of the "data" we're accumulating isn't even the million photos of their kids. It's "audit" data that's only temporarily useful or other pointless crap like marketing metadata that is utterly worthless for actual human endeavors apart from fleetingly feeding machines the bits they need to churn out the next advertisement we'll ignore. Much of this can be purged within days, or weeks, or at most months, but sits around indefinitely chomping through storage due to sheer obliviousness to the consequences or due to CYA policies that claim they need it for some vague legalistic or business reasons that are utter bullshit.

ScreenTime has been a mess for years. I've used it to lock out the ability to change account settings on my phone as an added security measure in case it gets stolen or I hand it to a co-worker lacking common sense (...why I'm using my own iPhone as a test device at work is an entirely different set of grumbles, but I digress). I'd say 50% of the time, settings never stick and it frequently fails to authenticate the ScreenTime PIN correctly... one time it was terrifyingly insistent on requiring a ScreenTime PIN but didn't seem to recognize the correct PIN and seemed dead set on locking me out forever (until another bug just reset everything... thank god for the swiss cheese model of bugs).

I tried to find a way to report issues to Apple but all they have these days seem to be useless forums where an "expert" (or "genius"?) immediately closes your question/comment and redirects you to a ten year old post about something tangentially related that doesn't address the fact you're trying to report an actual bug. If you want to *really* report a bug you have to be in a developer affiliate program, and I don't want to jump through extra hoops just to do work for them.

Anyway, I shouldn't be surprised ScreenTime is a mess--when I took in my iPhone for a battery replacement recently, the "Genius" at the store who helped me directed me to log out of several services which required first turning off my ScreenTime restrictions... he didn't have any idea what the heck I had turned on or how to turn them off. I had to demo ScreenTime for him, the Apple support guy. So the awareness of ScreenTime within the Apple Reality Distortion Field is apparently very low--basically a throw-away feature.

Apple's constant purging of the app store has been a thorn in my side every time I've upgraded devices--they no longer let you restore/copy over apps from another device, instead you have to newly download them from the app store. So any time they've deemed something "outdated" and purged it, you can't get it on your new device... which is tremendously annoying if the app would still work fine on that device, and particularly if it's something you paid for. I get that they want to impose limits on how long certain things will be supported, keep apps in line with their latest policies, and other seemingly noble goals, but I should also have the choice if I want to take the risk and keep running something that's outdated.

As someone familiar with the software in question that this article tries to stoke outrage about, I can assure you that its not the software itself magically inflating the prices. The software just does what the customer programs it to do... the chargemaster formulas can (and did) just as egregiously function that way entirely on paper, and in any number of competing health records software suites. The same Epic software discussed as "inflating" the prices at the organizations discussed in this article is used at institutions in Canada, the UK, Belgium, Finland, etc. where this ridiculous pricing isn't a thing. This is totally a product of our ridiculous health funding system in America... the software just follows the policies of the customer and the insurance system.

Used to be a huge Firefox fan and still acknowledge it's often faster and more customizable than Chrome... but... I hardly ever use it anymore because of the frequent, often incomprehensible UI redesigns. The basic layout of Chrome hasn't changed in ages--using it is almost all muscle-memory at this point--and that's a good thing. You shouldn't have to relearn a UI every time you open such a fundamentally basic tool as a web browser.

It's money laundering, but, with a MasterCard?

I think you missed my point that *far larger* capacity devices should seemingly be practical with advances in SSD storage; those marginally bigger smartphones than the iPod classic also end up chock full of other stuff since they're multi-function devices, so if you aren't using it solely as a music player, the effective amount of storage isn't much of a gain over what the iPod classics topped out at... what I'm getting at, is I'm surprised nobody is making 1TB+ portable media devices.

I did find your comment "most any decent portable music player that isn't made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo has a micro-SD slot allowing you to add another 400GB of storage" amusing too, because I have yet to find many options for a *decent* portable music player other than what the ostensible fruit-peddlers have to offer (and I'm not saying that as any sort of fanboy, I just really haven't found anything that stands out as a remotely better option for capacity, usability, and price... Apple cornered the market and then killed it).

The end of the iPod Classic series, based on the flawed premise that we'd get all our media from "the cloud," left the market without any quality high-capacity portable music/media players. Considering that 1TB+ SSDs are now in "quite affordable" territory, I don't understand why no company has made an affordable media player built around one (well, I kind of get why companies like Apple wouldn't want to make one... it potentially eats into their attempt to sell us all bandwidth-sucking subscription services). The only "high capacity" options readily available are smartphone type devices that top out at a paltry 256MB. So anyone with a sizable music library who wants to keep it in a high-quality format is pretty much stuck being unable to have their entire collection conveniently at their fingertips.

re broadband: in the Madison area for small business and home, not so great, but not terrible either. Big players are the telco DSL services and Charter cable... none of which are particularly cheap, fast, or reliable, but within a tolerable level of service. Very limited areas of the metro area have access to direct fiber services like AT&T UVerse. As for large business and academic connections though, there are some big pipes to tap into... UW and state government have some heavy duty net infrastructure, including extensive linkups to the "Internet2" academic network.

re taxes: In Dane County (where Madison is located), sales tax is actually 5.5% And if a Regional Transit Authority is created in the not-too-distant future, the plan is to fund that through an additional sales tax (kind of odd to fund an RTA with sales tax, but that's a different conversation all together). Anyways, 5.5 is cheap compared to the exorbitant sales taxes to be found around Chicagoland.

Madison is often a highly rated place to live and work, but lots of us who live here consider it a bit overrated... Wisconsin winters detract from the city's charms a whole lot. :)