It's very doubtful MS upgraded his computer without notifying him, it's highly likely he ignored MS warnings.
I also find it hard to believe his laptop was "bricked" - MS is usually pretty good about checking drivers before updating/upgrading.
That last...Microsoft may have been pretty good about checking drivers before updating/upgrading, but it's been a while since that was reliably the case. A lot of why people were not eager to update Windows and they felt the need to move to having Win10 not give you much choice is because systems were getting fucked by suddenly having drivers not work, which left people feeling rather understandably burned by the whole thing.
I support him in his lawsuit, but $600 Million is unreasonble. Reduce the damages to the cost of getting a comparable laptop with same approximate age and condition and technical specs and Windows 7 installed on it PLUS man-hours reimbursment to hire a technician to get all his software and files working from backups on the substitute system.
I actually suspect that the monetary sum is deliberately intended to be unreasonable--especially since what you list is probably damn near impossible to obtain.
Here's the thing though, Microsoft gave users plenty of options to not upgrade to the free Windows 10 upgrade. I believe at least a year. PEBKAC.
Microsoft didn't give users plenty of options to not upgrade to the free Windows 10 upgrade. The options that Microsoft gave, especially towards the end of the pre-release period for Win10, were that could upgrade now or later. I had to use a 3rd party application to keep them from forcibly upgrading an old Win7 box of mine whose hardware wasn't up to running Win10. I hear that towards the end, legal threats and general bad PR got them to make a public show of backing off on the "Do you want to upgrade now or later?" push, but I don't remember hearing any reports that they actually got around to having it so you could refuse the upgrade without deliberately blocking several updates among other measures, because they did things like relabel the relevant updates and those updates had their traditional vague descriptions that gave no indication that they would attempt to forcibly upgrade you.
The general theory I remember was that M$ was doing all of this to forcibly inflate the numbers early on for Win10...
Yes, and while there's definitely a problem if, say, the 'can pass the exam to be a licensed construction carpenter' group is not fully contained within 'can in fact do carpentry to code' group, when the overlap is distinctly lacking the problem lies with the licensing process.
In many cases, a license is a form of certification, like CCNA or MCSE. This just makes the government responsible for setting the level of compulsory certification instead of an industry body. Some certifications, such as in child care, don't certify a base level of knowledge, only that someone hasn't been caught yet.
The former need to be relatively even across state lines--outside of fields where there are significant differences between doing the job in, say, California and Florida? Getting a license to do that job in additional states should be overall very trivial.
The latter, where the license doesn't really indicate anything more than 'not been caught (yet),' the license should be incredibly trivial to obtain the first time as well. At most, it should merely require you prove that you've managed to reach a minimum age and are lacking any health conditions that would significantly interfere with you doing the job, such as 'being dead.'
the ABA allows damn near anyone who can pass the bar exam to practice as a lawyer
While true, IIRC, you have to have gone to law school for three years to be allowed to take the bar exam. If there are states that don't require that, I'd like to know. I figure it's the kind of thing one can pass after self-study.
It's not the kind of thing one can pass after self-study. I actually do know people who've either passed the bar or are in the various stages of getting to pass it. I would however agree that the law school requirement is a bit much, especially since for some fields of law an internship or apprenticeship is vastly more likely to properly prepare you to practice that type of law, but...nobody's likely to manage to pass the bar without that level of education, formal or informally gotten.
It's also significantly easier to get admitted to other bars once you've passed one--you don't have to do another three-year stint every time you move between states. You may need to take a semester or two depending on how different the two states' laws are to have a good chance of passing the bar there, but that's relatively trivial--especially compared to what's involved in fields with distinctly less variation between states in what's necessary to actually do them, that do require you redo significant amounts of your training no matter what.
If, however, you manage to get disbarred, you're not very likely to manage to get admitted to the bar somewhere else afterwards, regardless of if you pass the bar exam. This is another place where it differs from realtors--there doesn't seem to be very much effort to ensure a bad one doesn't just relocate.
Hi! I'm happy to see that you're finally (re?)joining the internet, AC! It's been a busy few decades, and a lot has changed since you left!
One of the things that has changed is the creation of automated copyright claims, which have a known tendency to result in false (and occasionally outright absurd) claims, and IP trolling has risen!
We've had, since you left, people making copyright claims on original material, degrading what could possibly be counted as fair use, and recorded cases of people making copyright claims against themselves. Proving that you are in fact making fair use, or otherwise not infringing on somebody else's IP, is now a rather expensive prospect. The longstanding laws that actually do cover misrepresenting yourself as the owner of a piece of IP to the court, or demanding payment in return for not being sued (which can bankrupt you to win in some countries) are not enforced. Oh, yeah, and some countries, all you really need to do is be able to afford to keep it going the longest, because the other guy just needs to stop being able to afford to defend himself.
I am not inclined to bet that a law like this would be drafted to improve the situation, or even keep it from getting worse by having the basic sense to clearly define 'gross infringement.' (I would suggest having part of the requirement be 'make $ off of.') Toss in some penalties for anybody misrepresenting themselves as the owner of IP, and for creating honeypots--yes, there's one case of somebody who was the representative of a piece of IP using a pseudonym to stick it on bittorrent and then go after people who got copies of the IP that way. (Last I checked, the courts had decided that it don't matter if the account name is PirateKing, if you put your stuff or your client's stuff up yourself, the copies gotten that way are in fact legal copies.)
And yet there often are (gasp) reasons as to why things are the way they are. Maybe you need to be in the office 8 to 5 because customers expect to be able to reach you? Or co-workers who want to talk to you can? Or there's an early shift because the UPS truck comes at 4pm to pick up product and producing something at 4:01 is worthless?
Customers expect those hours because tradition--except the question of '9-5 which timezone?' is becoming more and more one your customers may be asking because your customers and you don't as often reside in the same time zone, and more to the point, they expect to be able to reach you so it can very much pay to have your hours not overlap completely with the hours they work. Your coworkers, meanwhile, presumably know how to use a phone, can email, and possibly even one of the many messaging, chat, and VOIP options.
Also, fixed standard work times in the US are the '9-5, M-F,' which is what produces rush hours. You actually do want to depart from that if you're needing an early shift--and if the UPS truck comes by at 4PM to pick up product and something produced at 4:01PM is useless, then you're starting shutting down for the night well before 4PM and departing from fixed standard work hours on both ends.
For the reasons the person cited, we are gradually moving away from the standard workweek--it doesn't really work as well when you're doing business with people in multiple time zones and/or need to be accessible to customers who work during standard office hours. One of the major alternates I've seen is 4 day workweeks where you have 10 hour workdays without necessarily having the same extra day off for everybody--in part because of the effects of travel congestion and the time wasted in it.
I suspect you could probably run a specialized service for it--a virtual tour, where you take a certain number (quota decided on what would look 'right' for a bus to avoid being given away by density) of phones on a nice drunkard's walk tour of the area with maybe a bit of effort to hit the tourist spots. You'd have to keep the identities of the 'tour leaders' secret, of course, but...
Reread your comment higher up the thread and try following the NPR link; the person ehose work is being reported is very much making this about social justice by saying that it is the fault of the code not being inclusive. If I was in her shoes, I would not consider this a bug but a definite feature given the privacy concerns facial recognition software has caused.
As for the study itself... I would suspect the results are a combination of natural contrast, differing amounts of facial variation between ethnic groups and sexes...and this researcher likely being yet another one that forgets races other than Black & White exist.
I suspect it's not just the contrast issue on the technical side, though. I wouldn't actually be that surprised given the hardwired elements of beauty standards if males of any ethnic group had a greater degree of variation in facial structure compared to the females--meaning that the issue may not be the lack of inclusiveness that the researcher claims, but rather merely that once again White men are the low-hanging fruit as they have more variation and good natural contrast. In fact, since I would be quite surprised if physical anthropology cannot give us full stats for variation rates and ranges in all groups, the degree to which White males might constitute 'easy mode' for facial recognition software should even be quantifiable...
It should be pointed out that several recent studies have found that the safe-space, anti-speech snowflakes on college campuses are a small but loud minority. Their existence doesn't prove anything other than that about 20% of the population is stupid.
They're a small but loud minority which is being allowed to control the environment, ironically making college campuses less of a safe space for anybody who might question their beliefs, since there is functionally no assurance that anybody within the administration will act to protect you if they decide to bully you. You might even find yourself being blamed for it.
Their behavior is that of intolerant religious fundamentalists who are determined to make everybody convert to their belief system, just without something that fits the usual Western assumptions of what is required to be a religion.
I actually can understand the 'did not match the description in the 911 call' part, but that's because people under stress have lousy memories and some of the experiments proving this are actually quite easily and regularly repeated as a demonstration, they're that reliable in their results. You'll also get some...remixes on addresses, too, which is why modern 911 systems don't require you be capable of giving your location accurately.
The call itself ought to have tipped them off, though, since it was to the non-emergency number and apparently there wasn't even spoofed to a local number (never mind a phone belonging to the address), and I've yet to see a decent explanation for why attempting to call the house as the first move was ruled out. Hell, pretend to be scammer or something otherwise relatively innocent; you don't have to say you're the cops when you're just trying to make sure you're not doing something like having a tense standoff with a completely empty house.
In this case, yeah, it didn't happen in one of the areas where the laws were adjusted to treat swatting appropriately instead of as a harmless & amusing prank--once you can cause significant harm by making a false report, the penalty needs to be more than the usual slap on the wrist of misdemeanors.
Actually, I'd go with precisely this level of obviousness at the start of teaching students how to recognize and cope with being given insufficient data--when the goal is simply to get them to not spend the rest of the test stuck on that problem, and fifth grade is probably about the right age to start too. You also want to start exposing them to the idea that problems might be given with entirely irrelevant data--as a tutor, I've had to deal with people up to high school who didn't realize that no, the correct answer is not the one that uses every single bit of data you're given and yes, yes, I know the problem mentioned the airspeed of an unlaiden European swallow but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the average density of coconuts.
Once you've got them to where they're able to recognize and move on? Then you start bringing up the question of 'What is missing?' and then 'How to get it?' But you start with making sure that they're not going to freeze up when you do give them a question without sufficient data.
Oh, and if you're wondering: The example is not exaggerated, unfortunately--all I've changed is what the question asked & what the irrelevant data was to something with a similar degree of relationship.
Most of your list is things you either ought to be obtaining elsewhere and/or earlier, or it is something a student most likely/easily going to attain after learning some programming--and, not sure how to break this to you, but most public school systems in the US do a damn lousy job of teaching anything. (They certainly don't teach history. It's social studies, which means you can skip parts of history that don't fit with the story you want to tell or which are embarrassing.)
The thing with starting with coding is because a lot of later classes on CS are going to assume you've got at least a generic understanding of code under your belt and if you like it, you'll actually be interested in learning more and developing greater skills in it--which means you'll pick up the theory and other elements and often be able to see how they work relatively soon, or at least not be subjected to bad explanations from people who probably understand the material worse than you do. Current thinking is that all a teacher for K12 students needs to actually know is how to teach--not the subject, never mind that a person who knows, understands, and enjoys the subject is hands down the best possible teacher you can get.
Incidentally, some of your list can be taught at elementary school or earlier. You can find many examples online of how to model logic gates with marbles (such as this) which means you can render a basic mechanical computer as a child's toy, and breaking tasks down into smaller, more manageable parts is a skill you can definitely teach a child long before they are much good at reading and writing.
Are you kidding me? You chose the worst examples. Try the historic assumption of the public schools that the vast majority of their students would be working blue-collar factory jobs--slaves being taught skilled trades, especially the trades you picked, got the core competencies and theory of their trade. I'm not sure how a carpenter that lacked those would count as a carpenter (vs a random with a box of woodworking tools) and I sincerely doubt anybody would have any use for a cobbler without those skills. Skilled labor is called skilled for a reason.
That said, most of the people they're teaching probably would never gain particularly in-depth programming skills. You may also have distinctly better results by treating the 'core competency and theory' of programming as something you do after you've learned basic coding--more people learning them better. (And, personally, I do agree with the school that the best way to learn programming is to read code; that and the documentation for the language have taught me more than any textbook on programming has...)
Every ad-writing person, ever: We did our job right!
Adverts work by either appeal or by being annoying. But eventually one does learn to tune them out.. either by applying the brain filter, or by adblocking before it gets to the brain.
You want to avoid being so annoying or offensive that the audience reaction is "I hate this company," but the conventional wisdom within the field seems to be that there's no such thing as bad publicity. If that was true, there would be no effort whatsoever to avoid scandals...
Biodegradable and burnable are not the same things. There is, admittedly, an overlap between the two groups, but each category includes quite a few things that are unwise at best to leave to rot or to burn. However, you're correct that it's disposed of if burned off--but it doesn't need at all to be biodegradable in order to burn cleanly, and...bluntly? Damn near nothing will biodegrade in a modern landfill. Far future archeologists will be finding your mummified food waste when they go digging.
Also, in general, it's probably not a Good Idea nor ecologically friendly to teach the wildlife that electrical cabling may be tasty noms. Many species have sufficient intelligence that this is just going to reenforce wire-chewing behaviors--not just of the wires with delicious, delicious insulation, but of wires in general in hopes of finding more covered with deliciousness.
Cars are some of the most heavily recycled things on this planet--they certainly don't end up in landfills under normal circumstances, and I'd generally expect any dumped in a landfill to have bonus corpses. The value of a dead car is not insignificant. A car sold to a scrap yard--which can net you a decent sum--will be broken down with the salvageable parts sold and the metal that's left is melted down for reuse. All of this is better for the environment than a new car made from 'virgin' materials--a good chunk of the nastiest parts of the ecological impact is from getting those raw materials.
So you don't actually want biodegradable insulation on those wires anywhere near as much as you want insulation that will last a good ~25 years at minimum and burn off as cleanly as possible when it's time to recycle the metal in the wires.
Oh hell yes. A decent part of this is socialization--which means that if you want to change any of it, you need to tackle it from the ground up. As long as you leave that reenforcement cycle going, you're not going to change anything--humans are extremely sensitive to those things. Slowing down the rate at which women's fashions change and pushing for women having a greater selection of 'timeless' pieces (preferably to match men's) would do a lot here, especially since this can be pretty resource-intensive for a woman...and, well, in some fields she has no choice but to keep up. (Male-dominated ones where most of those in 'gatekeeping' positions are men actually have less problems here--the most serious penalties come from other women.)
Women's clothing in particular seems to be ephemeral... for my wife, even 'high quality' brands seem to last less time than similar quality men's clothing. Even something like a pair of jeans: whereas the men's jeans are made with real denim, the women's are blended with a lot of other materials and wear out faster.
Women's fashion also moves much, much faster than men's, and people will discriminate against a woman for wearing out-of-fashion clothes even if the current fashions do not at all work on her body. In fact, I'd say there's a better argument against the speed with which fashion moves from the perspective of sexism, since that discrimination happens even when her career and interests have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fashion.
That said, the secondhand export market is known for doing significant damage to local economies--cheap used clothes from the West tend to always undercut local products. The secondhand local market (where little shipping happens) seems to be doing pretty well, though, even with a decent amount of women's clothes not being durable enough to survive to the used market.
I'd not actually consider that a slight modification of the traditional Rhythm Method, though--significantly more care and data is going into what you're talking about than is traditional. I doubt that the app is working with anywhere near this level of personalized data--if nothing else, it sounds to be a bit too popular for a caveat like "needs 6-12 months' of records" to be getting mentioned clearly.
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It's very doubtful MS upgraded his computer without notifying him, it's highly likely he ignored MS warnings.
I also find it hard to believe his laptop was "bricked" - MS is usually pretty good about checking drivers before updating/upgrading.
That last...Microsoft may have been pretty good about checking drivers before updating/upgrading, but it's been a while since that was reliably the case. A lot of why people were not eager to update Windows and they felt the need to move to having Win10 not give you much choice is because systems were getting fucked by suddenly having drivers not work, which left people feeling rather understandably burned by the whole thing.
I support him in his lawsuit, but $600 Million is unreasonble. Reduce the damages to the cost of getting a comparable laptop with same approximate age and condition and technical specs and Windows 7 installed on it PLUS man-hours reimbursment to hire a technician to get all his software and files working from backups on the substitute system.
I actually suspect that the monetary sum is deliberately intended to be unreasonable--especially since what you list is probably damn near impossible to obtain.
Here's the thing though, Microsoft gave users plenty of options to not upgrade to the free Windows 10 upgrade. I believe at least a year. PEBKAC.
Microsoft didn't give users plenty of options to not upgrade to the free Windows 10 upgrade. The options that Microsoft gave, especially towards the end of the pre-release period for Win10, were that could upgrade now or later. I had to use a 3rd party application to keep them from forcibly upgrading an old Win7 box of mine whose hardware wasn't up to running Win10. I hear that towards the end, legal threats and general bad PR got them to make a public show of backing off on the "Do you want to upgrade now or later?" push, but I don't remember hearing any reports that they actually got around to having it so you could refuse the upgrade without deliberately blocking several updates among other measures, because they did things like relabel the relevant updates and those updates had their traditional vague descriptions that gave no indication that they would attempt to forcibly upgrade you.
The general theory I remember was that M$ was doing all of this to forcibly inflate the numbers early on for Win10...
Yes, and while there's definitely a problem if, say, the 'can pass the exam to be a licensed construction carpenter' group is not fully contained within 'can in fact do carpentry to code' group, when the overlap is distinctly lacking the problem lies with the licensing process.
In many cases, a license is a form of certification, like CCNA or MCSE. This just makes the government responsible for setting the level of compulsory certification instead of an industry body. Some certifications, such as in child care, don't certify a base level of knowledge, only that someone hasn't been caught yet.
The former need to be relatively even across state lines--outside of fields where there are significant differences between doing the job in, say, California and Florida? Getting a license to do that job in additional states should be overall very trivial.
The latter, where the license doesn't really indicate anything more than 'not been caught (yet),' the license should be incredibly trivial to obtain the first time as well. At most, it should merely require you prove that you've managed to reach a minimum age and are lacking any health conditions that would significantly interfere with you doing the job, such as 'being dead.'
While true, IIRC, you have to have gone to law school for three years to be allowed to take the bar exam. If there are states that don't require that, I'd like to know. I figure it's the kind of thing one can pass after self-study.
It's not the kind of thing one can pass after self-study. I actually do know people who've either passed the bar or are in the various stages of getting to pass it. I would however agree that the law school requirement is a bit much, especially since for some fields of law an internship or apprenticeship is vastly more likely to properly prepare you to practice that type of law, but...nobody's likely to manage to pass the bar without that level of education, formal or informally gotten.
It's also significantly easier to get admitted to other bars once you've passed one--you don't have to do another three-year stint every time you move between states. You may need to take a semester or two depending on how different the two states' laws are to have a good chance of passing the bar there, but that's relatively trivial--especially compared to what's involved in fields with distinctly less variation between states in what's necessary to actually do them, that do require you redo significant amounts of your training no matter what.
If, however, you manage to get disbarred, you're not very likely to manage to get admitted to the bar somewhere else afterwards, regardless of if you pass the bar exam. This is another place where it differs from realtors--there doesn't seem to be very much effort to ensure a bad one doesn't just relocate.
Hi! I'm happy to see that you're finally (re?)joining the internet, AC! It's been a busy few decades, and a lot has changed since you left!
One of the things that has changed is the creation of automated copyright claims, which have a known tendency to result in false (and occasionally outright absurd) claims, and IP trolling has risen!
We've had, since you left, people making copyright claims on original material, degrading what could possibly be counted as fair use, and recorded cases of people making copyright claims against themselves. Proving that you are in fact making fair use, or otherwise not infringing on somebody else's IP, is now a rather expensive prospect. The longstanding laws that actually do cover misrepresenting yourself as the owner of a piece of IP to the court, or demanding payment in return for not being sued (which can bankrupt you to win in some countries) are not enforced. Oh, yeah, and some countries, all you really need to do is be able to afford to keep it going the longest, because the other guy just needs to stop being able to afford to defend himself.
I am not inclined to bet that a law like this would be drafted to improve the situation, or even keep it from getting worse by having the basic sense to clearly define 'gross infringement.' (I would suggest having part of the requirement be 'make $ off of.') Toss in some penalties for anybody misrepresenting themselves as the owner of IP, and for creating honeypots--yes, there's one case of somebody who was the representative of a piece of IP using a pseudonym to stick it on bittorrent and then go after people who got copies of the IP that way. (Last I checked, the courts had decided that it don't matter if the account name is PirateKing, if you put your stuff or your client's stuff up yourself, the copies gotten that way are in fact legal copies.)
Switching to using GMT or UT makes more sense than DST.
And yet there often are (gasp) reasons as to why things are the way they are. Maybe you need to be in the office 8 to 5 because customers expect to be able to reach you? Or co-workers who want to talk to you can? Or there's an early shift because the UPS truck comes at 4pm to pick up product and producing something at 4:01 is worthless?
Customers expect those hours because tradition--except the question of '9-5 which timezone?' is becoming more and more one your customers may be asking because your customers and you don't as often reside in the same time zone, and more to the point, they expect to be able to reach you so it can very much pay to have your hours not overlap completely with the hours they work. Your coworkers, meanwhile, presumably know how to use a phone, can email, and possibly even one of the many messaging, chat, and VOIP options.
Also, fixed standard work times in the US are the '9-5, M-F,' which is what produces rush hours. You actually do want to depart from that if you're needing an early shift--and if the UPS truck comes by at 4PM to pick up product and something produced at 4:01PM is useless, then you're starting shutting down for the night well before 4PM and departing from fixed standard work hours on both ends.
For the reasons the person cited, we are gradually moving away from the standard workweek--it doesn't really work as well when you're doing business with people in multiple time zones and/or need to be accessible to customers who work during standard office hours. One of the major alternates I've seen is 4 day workweeks where you have 10 hour workdays without necessarily having the same extra day off for everybody--in part because of the effects of travel congestion and the time wasted in it.
Yep. They want my dummy accounts to friend each other, too...
I didn't. FB still is sending strange "Do you know...?" things to my dummy account.
I suspect you could probably run a specialized service for it--a virtual tour, where you take a certain number (quota decided on what would look 'right' for a bus to avoid being given away by density) of phones on a nice drunkard's walk tour of the area with maybe a bit of effort to hit the tourist spots. You'd have to keep the identities of the 'tour leaders' secret, of course, but...
Reread your comment higher up the thread and try following the NPR link; the person ehose work is being reported is very much making this about social justice by saying that it is the fault of the code not being inclusive. If I was in her shoes, I would not consider this a bug but a definite feature given the privacy concerns facial recognition software has caused.
As for the study itself... I would suspect the results are a combination of natural contrast, differing amounts of facial variation between ethnic groups and sexes...and this researcher likely being yet another one that forgets races other than Black & White exist.
I suspect it's not just the contrast issue on the technical side, though. I wouldn't actually be that surprised given the hardwired elements of beauty standards if males of any ethnic group had a greater degree of variation in facial structure compared to the females--meaning that the issue may not be the lack of inclusiveness that the researcher claims, but rather merely that once again White men are the low-hanging fruit as they have more variation and good natural contrast. In fact, since I would be quite surprised if physical anthropology cannot give us full stats for variation rates and ranges in all groups, the degree to which White males might constitute 'easy mode' for facial recognition software should even be quantifiable...
It should be pointed out that several recent studies have found that the safe-space, anti-speech snowflakes on college campuses are a small but loud minority. Their existence doesn't prove anything other than that about 20% of the population is stupid.
They're a small but loud minority which is being allowed to control the environment, ironically making college campuses less of a safe space for anybody who might question their beliefs, since there is functionally no assurance that anybody within the administration will act to protect you if they decide to bully you. You might even find yourself being blamed for it.
Their behavior is that of intolerant religious fundamentalists who are determined to make everybody convert to their belief system, just without something that fits the usual Western assumptions of what is required to be a religion.
I actually can understand the 'did not match the description in the 911 call' part, but that's because people under stress have lousy memories and some of the experiments proving this are actually quite easily and regularly repeated as a demonstration, they're that reliable in their results. You'll also get some...remixes on addresses, too, which is why modern 911 systems don't require you be capable of giving your location accurately.
The call itself ought to have tipped them off, though, since it was to the non-emergency number and apparently there wasn't even spoofed to a local number (never mind a phone belonging to the address), and I've yet to see a decent explanation for why attempting to call the house as the first move was ruled out. Hell, pretend to be scammer or something otherwise relatively innocent; you don't have to say you're the cops when you're just trying to make sure you're not doing something like having a tense standoff with a completely empty house.
In this case, yeah, it didn't happen in one of the areas where the laws were adjusted to treat swatting appropriately instead of as a harmless & amusing prank--once you can cause significant harm by making a false report, the penalty needs to be more than the usual slap on the wrist of misdemeanors.
Actually, I'd go with precisely this level of obviousness at the start of teaching students how to recognize and cope with being given insufficient data--when the goal is simply to get them to not spend the rest of the test stuck on that problem, and fifth grade is probably about the right age to start too. You also want to start exposing them to the idea that problems might be given with entirely irrelevant data--as a tutor, I've had to deal with people up to high school who didn't realize that no, the correct answer is not the one that uses every single bit of data you're given and yes, yes, I know the problem mentioned the airspeed of an unlaiden European swallow but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the average density of coconuts.
Once you've got them to where they're able to recognize and move on? Then you start bringing up the question of 'What is missing?' and then 'How to get it?' But you start with making sure that they're not going to freeze up when you do give them a question without sufficient data.
Oh, and if you're wondering: The example is not exaggerated, unfortunately--all I've changed is what the question asked & what the irrelevant data was to something with a similar degree of relationship.
Most of your list is things you either ought to be obtaining elsewhere and/or earlier, or it is something a student most likely/easily going to attain after learning some programming--and, not sure how to break this to you, but most public school systems in the US do a damn lousy job of teaching anything. (They certainly don't teach history. It's social studies, which means you can skip parts of history that don't fit with the story you want to tell or which are embarrassing.)
The thing with starting with coding is because a lot of later classes on CS are going to assume you've got at least a generic understanding of code under your belt and if you like it, you'll actually be interested in learning more and developing greater skills in it--which means you'll pick up the theory and other elements and often be able to see how they work relatively soon, or at least not be subjected to bad explanations from people who probably understand the material worse than you do. Current thinking is that all a teacher for K12 students needs to actually know is how to teach--not the subject, never mind that a person who knows, understands, and enjoys the subject is hands down the best possible teacher you can get.
Incidentally, some of your list can be taught at elementary school or earlier. You can find many examples online of how to model logic gates with marbles (such as this) which means you can render a basic mechanical computer as a child's toy, and breaking tasks down into smaller, more manageable parts is a skill you can definitely teach a child long before they are much good at reading and writing.
Are you kidding me? You chose the worst examples. Try the historic assumption of the public schools that the vast majority of their students would be working blue-collar factory jobs--slaves being taught skilled trades, especially the trades you picked, got the core competencies and theory of their trade. I'm not sure how a carpenter that lacked those would count as a carpenter (vs a random with a box of woodworking tools) and I sincerely doubt anybody would have any use for a cobbler without those skills. Skilled labor is called skilled for a reason.
That said, most of the people they're teaching probably would never gain particularly in-depth programming skills. You may also have distinctly better results by treating the 'core competency and theory' of programming as something you do after you've learned basic coding--more people learning them better. (And, personally, I do agree with the school that the best way to learn programming is to read code; that and the documentation for the language have taught me more than any textbook on programming has...)
Every ad-writing person, ever: We did our job right!
Adverts work by either appeal or by being annoying. But eventually one does learn to tune them out.. either by applying the brain filter, or by adblocking before it gets to the brain.
You want to avoid being so annoying or offensive that the audience reaction is "I hate this company," but the conventional wisdom within the field seems to be that there's no such thing as bad publicity. If that was true, there would be no effort whatsoever to avoid scandals...
Biodegradable and burnable are not the same things. There is, admittedly, an overlap between the two groups, but each category includes quite a few things that are unwise at best to leave to rot or to burn. However, you're correct that it's disposed of if burned off--but it doesn't need at all to be biodegradable in order to burn cleanly, and...bluntly? Damn near nothing will biodegrade in a modern landfill. Far future archeologists will be finding your mummified food waste when they go digging.
Also, in general, it's probably not a Good Idea nor ecologically friendly to teach the wildlife that electrical cabling may be tasty noms. Many species have sufficient intelligence that this is just going to reenforce wire-chewing behaviors--not just of the wires with delicious, delicious insulation, but of wires in general in hopes of finding more covered with deliciousness.
Cars are some of the most heavily recycled things on this planet--they certainly don't end up in landfills under normal circumstances, and I'd generally expect any dumped in a landfill to have bonus corpses. The value of a dead car is not insignificant. A car sold to a scrap yard--which can net you a decent sum--will be broken down with the salvageable parts sold and the metal that's left is melted down for reuse. All of this is better for the environment than a new car made from 'virgin' materials--a good chunk of the nastiest parts of the ecological impact is from getting those raw materials.
So you don't actually want biodegradable insulation on those wires anywhere near as much as you want insulation that will last a good ~25 years at minimum and burn off as cleanly as possible when it's time to recycle the metal in the wires.
Oh hell yes. A decent part of this is socialization--which means that if you want to change any of it, you need to tackle it from the ground up. As long as you leave that reenforcement cycle going, you're not going to change anything--humans are extremely sensitive to those things. Slowing down the rate at which women's fashions change and pushing for women having a greater selection of 'timeless' pieces (preferably to match men's) would do a lot here, especially since this can be pretty resource-intensive for a woman...and, well, in some fields she has no choice but to keep up. (Male-dominated ones where most of those in 'gatekeeping' positions are men actually have less problems here--the most serious penalties come from other women.)
Women's clothing in particular seems to be ephemeral... for my wife, even 'high quality' brands seem to last less time than similar quality men's clothing. Even something like a pair of jeans: whereas the men's jeans are made with real denim, the women's are blended with a lot of other materials and wear out faster.
Women's fashion also moves much, much faster than men's, and people will discriminate against a woman for wearing out-of-fashion clothes even if the current fashions do not at all work on her body. In fact, I'd say there's a better argument against the speed with which fashion moves from the perspective of sexism, since that discrimination happens even when her career and interests have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fashion.
That said, the secondhand export market is known for doing significant damage to local economies--cheap used clothes from the West tend to always undercut local products. The secondhand local market (where little shipping happens) seems to be doing pretty well, though, even with a decent amount of women's clothes not being durable enough to survive to the used market.
I'd not actually consider that a slight modification of the traditional Rhythm Method, though--significantly more care and data is going into what you're talking about than is traditional. I doubt that the app is working with anywhere near this level of personalized data--if nothing else, it sounds to be a bit too popular for a caveat like "needs 6-12 months' of records" to be getting mentioned clearly.