The New York Times – “George J. Laurer, whose design of the ubiquitous vertically striped bar code sped supermarket checkout lines, parcel deliveries and assembly lines and even transformed human beings, including airline passengers and hospital patients, into traceable inventory items, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Wendell, N.C., near Raleigh. He was 94…The Universal Product Code made its official debut in 1974 when a scanner registered 67 cents for a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. (The package of gum is now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.) “It was cheap and it was needed,” Mr. Laurer told The New York Times in 2009. “And it is reliable.” The concept that replaced price tags and revolutionized commerce had evolved over several decades, the result of fluky coincidences and the expertise of several collaborators…The bar code sped checkout lines by some 40 percent, eliminated labor-intensive placement of price tags on every product, and resulted in fewer register errors and more efficient inventory controls. But Mr. Laurer often said that he was amazed at how omnipresent it became…”
IEEE Computer Society’s Top 12 Technology Trends for 2020 - PRNewswire – “IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) tech experts unveil their annual predictions for the future of tech, presenting what they believe will be the most widely adopted technology trends in 2020. Six of the top 12 technology predictions have been developed into peer-reviewed articles published in Computer magazine’s December issue, covering topics that include cognitive robotics, practical drone delivery, and digital twins. The tech future forecast by the world’s premier organization of computer professionals consistently ranks as one of its most anticipated announcements. [Note – scroll down through the newswire release to read The top 12 technology trends predicted to reach adoption in 2020 – including Legal related implications to reflect security and privacy.]
Why every website wants you to accept its cookies - Vox/Recode: “…cookies are pieces of information saved about you when you’re online, and they track you as you browse. So say you go to a weather website and put in your zip code to look up what’s happening in your area; the next time you visit the same site, it will remember your zip code because of cookies. There are first-party cookies that are placed by the site you visit, and then there arethird-party cookies, such as those placed by advertisers to see what you’re interested in and in turn serve you ads — even when you leave the original site you visited. (This is how ads follow you around the internet.) The rise of alerts about cookies is the result of a confluence of events, mainly out of the EU. But in the bigger picture, these alerts underscore an ongoing debate over digital privacy, including whether asking users to opt in or opt out of data collection is better, and the question of who should own data and be responsible for protecting it…”