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.

Sure, FACstamp sounds alluring, until you think about it a little. How do you get a FACstamp?

A central authority has to provide it. How does that authority know it's from a trustworthy source? Obviously you're going to have to provide proof of identity, to show that it really came from you. And that proven identity will be tied to an account, and that account data will be part of the FACstamp.

And no world government will ever abuse a system that requires your photo to be absolutely traced back to you, where people believe there's no way that attribution could be faked. After all, FACstamp is all about proving authenticity!

No one would use it to track down the dissident that took a photo of government misbehavior... or fake evidence that a political rival committed a heinous act... and certainly no government would ever think to suborn that central authority to make such things even easier.

It's not just that the idea assumes that it's possible to create an unhackable, indelible watermark that proves beyond doubt that an image is a genuine representation of reality. Nor the naïve belief that such a system will make photos "show true facts" and prevent the creation of photos that mislead. It's the failure to consider the unintended consequences of such a system! (Or, as usual, to assume those consequences can be overcome by "nerding harder"...)

Yeah, Hollywood has never created convincing fake imagery by photographing a video screen. That technology obviously doesn't exist...

Craftsman hasn't been great since they were bought by Stanley/Black and Decker. Now, they're just Black-and-Decker products with incompatible batteries. I guess their non-electrical tools are probably fine.

Their hand tools aren't fine. Under Sears, Craftsman hand tools were made in the USA and very high qualityâ"as one might expect given Sears' satisfaction guarantee. If a Craftsman tool "failed to give satisfaction," you could bring it to any Sears store and get a replacement.

Under Stanley/Black and Decker, Craftsman tools are made in China (an attempt to bring production back to the US failed) and markedly lower in quality. Even where the design is the same, the build quality is much worse. While many stores carry Craftsman hand tools, you can only get warranty support at a store that stocks the particular tool you're making a claim onâ"and good luck with that, because different stores carry different selections. Even then, you may have trouble getting the store to play along.

(Not to say tools have to be made in the USA to be quality, though it usually helps; there are plenty of high-quality Taiwanese brands like Tekton. But S/B+D clearly went with "lowest cost" rather than "reduced cost but not reduced quality.")

"How dare our employees actually use the benefits we offered them!"

Every publicly-traded company espousing this view publicly needs to take a significant stock hit. It demonstrates a clear lack of basic money-management skills: if you obligate yourself to provide a benefit, you need to plan on actually having to provide it. That means being prepared for the cost, both in fiscal terms and operational terms. If your company isn't reasonably prepared for a substantial chunk of your personnel to be out sick during flu season, that's not the employees' fault. It's a management failure at the most basic level.

Sure, you can offer fewer benefits. You'll probably lose employees, and end up hiring lower-quality employees. Or you can understand that this is a cost of doing business. If your business model can't absorb those costs, the problem isn't the employees; it's that your business model isn't viable.

I'm the first one to say that copyright law needs fixing, but this isn't a good example. The headline for this ought to be "Television 'museum' blatantly violates copyright law, is surprised by inevitable result."

"Bewitched" is a very popular, culturally-important TV show with obvious commercial value. In fact, you can buy it on DVD even now and it streams legally via numerous services, both paid and free-to-view—and you can bet Sony got paid by those free-to-view providers. So providing a copy on YouTube without licensing it is an obvious copyright violation with clear commercial impact. It's asking to be sued. It's not abandoned property,

Besides, it's not necessary to include the entire copyrighted program to preserve the ephemera that the "museum" says they're trying to preserve, such as local commercials, bumpers, station idents, and the like. For those things, there's a strong fair-use case. Not so for "Bewitched" itself.

A responsible curator would understand copyright and avoid violating it. If they truly needed to disseminate copyrighted material, they'd work with rights-holders to secure permission before publicly exhibiting the copyrighted work. Then they would have a strong argument if an overzealous rights-protection firm issued a takedown notice that YouTube wouldn't let them appeal. As it is? They should've known better, they did the wrong thing, and the result was predictable. I'm not feeling too sorry for them.

Should the law be different? Maybe. But it isn't.