They did not claim that the warranty was voided, they claimed that servicing would cause them to violate OSHA regs. This is nonsense. Hell OSHA allows employees to work with asbestos, lead, PCBs, acids, bases, petroleum distillates, beryllium, radioactive shit, and pretty much everything else nasty you could think of. What OSHA does is set permissible exposure limits, training requirements, and work practices such that the employees will be safe while working with nasty things.
Apple may decided to implement training and exposure monitoring, and conduct the repairs in a fume hood or even sub the work out so someone who's not so finicky but they can't just ignore a contract unless the other party backs down. These people should take Apple to small claims court.
it's okay the overwhelming majority of the previous 29,999,999 posts were either bad puns, five steps to profit jokes, or bad car analogies, so if you'd said something useful that would have been bad form.
The U.S. Congress should ban the use of Photoshop and other digital manipulation for photos used in advertising. In fact all they really need to do is amend the "truth in advertising" laws.
OMG! some almost inconsequentially minor problem!!! There should be a law!!
Actually I think that the esteemed Mr. Doctorow has taken exactly the kind of step that is best for dealing with this sort of thing. He has mocked them publicly.
Your book list would be different depending on what the class is. Is it a history of SciFi? or is it a survey of SciFi. I think you should ignore fantasy altogether. You will find it nearly impossible to adequately cover even the most basic selection of sci-fi in a high school class.
Since the OP asked for specific suggestions here are a few. This is actually fairly hard since scifi is often long. For instance I would want to suggest Stranger in a Strange Land, the Robot trilogy, the Foundation trilogy, The Invisible Man, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, and that would just be from the early and classic periods. I could keep going but the reading list would be way beyond what a high schooler could digest in such a short time.
More recent works which are also great: Neuromancer, Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Snow Crash.
When going through this list a good idea occurred to me. For a final project make each student pick a different Hugo award winner, write a paper and do a presentation to the class. The Hugo awards for best short story is also a good starting place.
Carbon nanotubes act a lot like asbestos in our lungs. We don't know that it is carcinogenic yet, but in the initial reaction that CNT causes in mouse lung tissue is the same sort of reaction that asbestos fibers cause. It's not surprising because CNT are so similar to asbestos fibers. They are nanoscale fibers, they are highly resistant to chemical degredate. So I think it would be safer to assume that it is a probably human carcinogen and behave like it is so that 20-40 years from now we don't have hundreds of thousands of people with CNT related lung cancer.
These would be for my own use only -- I'd never allow a third party unrestricted access, but it might be useful if there's ever any question about what happened in an accident.
Uh well if you caused an accident that video would be discoverable evidence. If you tried to erase it that would be destroying evidence, and could get you in really big trouble. Actually you don't want such video looking forward at all. Almost be definition, if you hit something with the front of your car it is your fault. However side and rear facing cameras would be more likely to capture evidence of someone else causing an accident.
As for "computer engineers are most likely to crash"... correlation does not imply causation
Correlation does not prove causation, but in this case I believe it does strongly imply causation. Car crashes are almost always caused by one of the involved drivers. If computer engineers do indeed get into more crashes then either they are more likely to cause them or other drivers are more likely to crash into cars driven by computer engineers, or computer engineers are more likely to be driving faulty cars. Of these three possibilities only the first makes any sense at all.
Teaching of formal logic is extremely rare these days. Typically only college level math, programming, or philosophy students will have course work in formal logic. It could be that there is a correlation between training in how to think rationally, and thinking rationally.
Or maybe the sampling methodology is just soOoo whacked that it all means nothing.
So why do we move back to a stupid argument between the absolutes of Capitalism vs Communism when the correct solution is somewhere to be found in the middle? And different peoples enjoy different solutions. It so turns out that corruptibility of humans by nature dictates we should be closer to capitalism that communism. If the author of this article thinks the internet has far too much communal activity, so be it. But make rational arguments and don't play on the red scare... we're adults now, we're past that.
Maybe because the issue isn't bi-polar, and we are trying to discuss a new way forward. However since "Communisim" has been thoroughly discredited in the public mind, entrenched powers that are threatened by a developing fairer economic paradigm use "Gawd-damned Comm-yooo-nism" as a straw man to avoid debating the issue of inherent injustices of our current chosen economic system.
We cannot go on with this threat to our infrastructure. Write letters to you congress people and demand that they pass a law BANNING ALL SOLAR FLARES! We should take to the streets in protest. We need sanctions! It's time to get tough! The UN should pass a resolution! Boycott all products that are sun related! Show 'em who's really in charge!
I've looked into Amtrack a few times for traveling. I live in the SF Bay area, and it would be appealing for a trip down to LA (friends) or up to Portland (Dad). I've typically found it would be more expensive than either flying or driving, and actually takes longer than driving. It'd be $220 round trip to Portland for me and my son but that's for a coach seat. Have you ever sat in a coach seat for 17 hours? It'd be about $650 to get to Portland and back in the smallest room they have.
Right now a flight on Southwest would cost about $380 for both of us and takes 5-6 hours including security, waiting, and other hassles. So I was wrong a bit cheaper and much slower than flying. I can drive in about 10 hours, for about $80 in gas.
High speed rail would be more attractive if it were comfortable and reasonably priced unlike amtrack. Here's the real bummer, I'd love to take the Coast Starlight train to Portland, but $650 do do it in minimum style is pretty over the top.
Maybe this is an exceedingly small county, but if not I call BS on their claim that they calibrated them all the day before. I frequently work as an election worker. Because of this I get to witness first hand the logistical heavy lifting that goes into pulling off an election. It is far from easy. A typical single precinct voting location has 4-6 voting booths. Locations with multiple precincts might have 2 times that many. There are a few hundred precincts. So for a county that uses all touchscreen machines it would be reasonable to assume they have several hundred touchscreen machines, maybe over a thousand.
They are claiming that the day before, in addition to distributing the machines to the precincts and all of the other tasks, they booted up every one, and then ran it through the calibration routine? I don't buy it. I think they are in CYA mode. If they did really do it, I bet it was done by a volunteer who booted up 10 machines at a time then calibrated them all as fast as he could, and did a really lousy job.
At least in this case it appears to be a result of rampant incompetence. I am convinced that the Diebold machines are programed they way they to facilitate election theft.
The space shuttle fleet will be retired soon. The Russians will be giving us lifts up to the ISS. How does this work? Maybe I am unaware of some replacement vehicle that we have in the works?
How about this for a compromise: You teach what you want to in church, or a class on religion/philosophy, and scientists will teach what they want to in science class.
Okay this is a bit of a side issue here, but I always get irritated when people say the intelligent design belongs in a philosophy class. It doesn't belong there anymore that it belongs in a science class. Philosophy is... well instead of me trying to explain lets let wikipedia do the heavy lifting, "Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions (such as mysticism or mythology) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument."
Thus "intelligent" design belongs in the dustbin of stupid ideas, or in Sunday School. Or perhaps is belongs in a rhetoric class, as the embodiment of lots of logical fallacies and deceptive arguemnts.
I thought the whole idea of faith is that you are willing to believe something that is difficult to believe in the presence of opposition. I'd guess that St. Peter will deny all the Texans from heaven because of their weak faith.
But functionally, Agnosticism is equivalent to Atheism.
Agnosticism is really the only rational or scientific answer. All religions require faith in something that is unprovable. Agnosticism simply says "I don't know". Personally I apply Occam's Razor, and lean toward atheism, but Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb that can point you in the direction of greater probability, it never proves anything by itself.
What really bothers me is not that people choose to believe odd things like the world was created in 6 days approximately 7000 years ago, but that so many people have a complete lack of understanding about what science is. Science is two things. First it is a process. That process uses the scientific method to test hypotheses and then uses peer review to test whether the method was applied without error. The second is a body of knowledge that has been derived from the use of the scientific method. The problem is that in school kids are taught that the body of knowledge is science. They are never taught the method itself. This allows dogmatic people to assert that their body of knowledge, derived from some old text, can also be "science." I believe that the proper answer to intelligent design crap is to teach a whole year of scientific method, formal logic, and rhetoric as a requirement for graduation from high school. This would lead to a population that would be able to make ration decisions, reject the rhetorical tricks that are so often used by demagogues, and would lead to a more effectively functioning democracy.
As soon as you engage creationists or other anti-science dogmatics on the subject of which is correct, you loose. In science there is no right and wrong, there are only models that more effectively approximate our experience of the world. The real point here is not that creationism is wrong, but that it is not science.
Science = Gotta Wear A Darwin Fish on your car is kind of closed-minded as anything else. It's characterized by surrounding yourself by people who exclusively think like you already think, and not being challenged.
Interesting, we were having a discussion about creationism. I would agree that being a rational person does not preclude religious belief. I think it clearly precludes a belief that the earth was created in 6 days about 7,000 years ago. But then you have to go and drag evolution into it. Again being rational does not require having a particular bumpersticker, but to deny evolution without evidence is as irrational as saying that the earth is flat.
Which version of creationism? Lots of people believe that the earth is about 7000 years old and was created in 6 days. This version HAS been disproved by the scientific method.
High school science tends to be rather basic. Here is a way you can make F=ma really fun.
You can buy model rocket kits in bulk for education from many vendors. I like the people at this site a lot: http://www.apogeerockets.com/
Get a kit for each kid, or one for each team of two, and make them go home and build them. They can handle it. These kits are easy enough for a 4 year old with little testors and a little elmers. (I know because my son assembled one at that age (except for the parachute)) Then teach some of the physics... calculate how high, how fast, etc, and then go launch them! Use of an appropriately small motor will allow you launch on the football field. Actually the site above has a whole education section, with educational materials, technical info, newsletters, rocket kits in bulk, etc.
I know it's not free, but I bet you could get a local hobby shop to sponsor the activity, or even hit up us/.ers. $10 each from 20 people would get you enough for 24 rockets!
Slashdot Mirror
They did not claim that the warranty was voided, they claimed that servicing would cause them to violate OSHA regs. This is nonsense. Hell OSHA allows employees to work with asbestos, lead, PCBs, acids, bases, petroleum distillates, beryllium, radioactive shit, and pretty much everything else nasty you could think of. What OSHA does is set permissible exposure limits, training requirements, and work practices such that the employees will be safe while working with nasty things.
Apple may decided to implement training and exposure monitoring, and conduct the repairs in a fume hood or even sub the work out so someone who's not so finicky but they can't just ignore a contract unless the other party backs down. These people should take Apple to small claims court.
it's okay the overwhelming majority of the previous 29,999,999 posts were either bad puns, five steps to profit jokes, or bad car analogies, so if you'd said something useful that would have been bad form.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
This has all happened before and it will all happen again." Battlestar Galactica.
The U.S. Congress should ban the use of Photoshop and other digital manipulation for photos used in advertising. In fact all they really need to do is amend the "truth in advertising" laws.
OMG! some almost inconsequentially minor problem!!! There should be a law!! Actually I think that the esteemed Mr. Doctorow has taken exactly the kind of step that is best for dealing with this sort of thing. He has mocked them publicly.
Your book list would be different depending on what the class is. Is it a history of SciFi? or is it a survey of SciFi. I think you should ignore fantasy altogether. You will find it nearly impossible to adequately cover even the most basic selection of sci-fi in a high school class. Since the OP asked for specific suggestions here are a few. This is actually fairly hard since scifi is often long. For instance I would want to suggest Stranger in a Strange Land, the Robot trilogy, the Foundation trilogy, The Invisible Man, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, and that would just be from the early and classic periods. I could keep going but the reading list would be way beyond what a high schooler could digest in such a short time. More recent works which are also great: Neuromancer, Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Snow Crash. When going through this list a good idea occurred to me. For a final project make each student pick a different Hugo award winner, write a paper and do a presentation to the class. The Hugo awards for best short story is also a good starting place.
Carbon nanotubes act a lot like asbestos in our lungs. We don't know that it is carcinogenic yet, but in the initial reaction that CNT causes in mouse lung tissue is the same sort of reaction that asbestos fibers cause. It's not surprising because CNT are so similar to asbestos fibers. They are nanoscale fibers, they are highly resistant to chemical degredate. So I think it would be safer to assume that it is a probably human carcinogen and behave like it is so that 20-40 years from now we don't have hundreds of thousands of people with CNT related lung cancer.
These would be for my own use only -- I'd never allow a third party unrestricted access, but it might be useful if there's ever any question about what happened in an accident.
Uh well if you caused an accident that video would be discoverable evidence. If you tried to erase it that would be destroying evidence, and could get you in really big trouble. Actually you don't want such video looking forward at all. Almost be definition, if you hit something with the front of your car it is your fault. However side and rear facing cameras would be more likely to capture evidence of someone else causing an accident.
As for "computer engineers are most likely to crash" ... correlation does not imply causation
Correlation does not prove causation, but in this case I believe it does strongly imply causation. Car crashes are almost always caused by one of the involved drivers. If computer engineers do indeed get into more crashes then either they are more likely to cause them or other drivers are more likely to crash into cars driven by computer engineers, or computer engineers are more likely to be driving faulty cars. Of these three possibilities only the first makes any sense at all.
It was God 'at created man, but it was Sam Colt 'at made 'em equal.
Teaching of formal logic is extremely rare these days. Typically only college level math, programming, or philosophy students will have course work in formal logic. It could be that there is a correlation between training in how to think rationally, and thinking rationally.
Or maybe the sampling methodology is just soOoo whacked that it all means nothing.
I mean really, if some "extra" weight leads to longer life maybe it isn't extra.
So why do we move back to a stupid argument between the absolutes of Capitalism vs Communism when the correct solution is somewhere to be found in the middle? And different peoples enjoy different solutions. It so turns out that corruptibility of humans by nature dictates we should be closer to capitalism that communism. If the author of this article thinks the internet has far too much communal activity, so be it. But make rational arguments and don't play on the red scare ... we're adults now, we're past that.
Maybe because the issue isn't bi-polar, and we are trying to discuss a new way forward. However since "Communisim" has been thoroughly discredited in the public mind, entrenched powers that are threatened by a developing fairer economic paradigm use "Gawd-damned Comm-yooo-nism" as a straw man to avoid debating the issue of inherent injustices of our current chosen economic system.
How many bad analogies can a CEO pack into one paragraph?
We cannot go on with this threat to our infrastructure. Write letters to you congress people and demand that they pass a law BANNING ALL SOLAR FLARES! We should take to the streets in protest. We need sanctions! It's time to get tough! The UN should pass a resolution! Boycott all products that are sun related! Show 'em who's really in charge!
I've looked into Amtrack a few times for traveling. I live in the SF Bay area, and it would be appealing for a trip down to LA (friends) or up to Portland (Dad). I've typically found it would be more expensive than either flying or driving, and actually takes longer than driving. It'd be $220 round trip to Portland for me and my son but that's for a coach seat. Have you ever sat in a coach seat for 17 hours? It'd be about $650 to get to Portland and back in the smallest room they have.
Right now a flight on Southwest would cost about $380 for both of us and takes 5-6 hours including security, waiting, and other hassles. So I was wrong a bit cheaper and much slower than flying. I can drive in about 10 hours, for about $80 in gas.
High speed rail would be more attractive if it were comfortable and reasonably priced unlike amtrack. Here's the real bummer, I'd love to take the Coast Starlight train to Portland, but $650 do do it in minimum style is pretty over the top.
Maybe this is an exceedingly small county, but if not I call BS on their claim that they calibrated them all the day before. I frequently work as an election worker. Because of this I get to witness first hand the logistical heavy lifting that goes into pulling off an election. It is far from easy. A typical single precinct voting location has 4-6 voting booths. Locations with multiple precincts might have 2 times that many. There are a few hundred precincts. So for a county that uses all touchscreen machines it would be reasonable to assume they have several hundred touchscreen machines, maybe over a thousand.
They are claiming that the day before, in addition to distributing the machines to the precincts and all of the other tasks, they booted up every one, and then ran it through the calibration routine? I don't buy it. I think they are in CYA mode. If they did really do it, I bet it was done by a volunteer who booted up 10 machines at a time then calibrated them all as fast as he could, and did a really lousy job.
At least in this case it appears to be a result of rampant incompetence. I am convinced that the Diebold machines are programed they way they to facilitate election theft.
The space shuttle fleet will be retired soon. The Russians will be giving us lifts up to the ISS. How does this work? Maybe I am unaware of some replacement vehicle that we have in the works?
How about this for a compromise: You teach what you want to in church, or a class on religion/philosophy, and scientists will teach what they want to in science class.
Okay this is a bit of a side issue here, but I always get irritated when people say the intelligent design belongs in a philosophy class. It doesn't belong there anymore that it belongs in a science class. Philosophy is... well instead of me trying to explain lets let wikipedia do the heavy lifting, "Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions (such as mysticism or mythology) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument."
Thus "intelligent" design belongs in the dustbin of stupid ideas, or in Sunday School. Or perhaps is belongs in a rhetoric class, as the embodiment of lots of logical fallacies and deceptive arguemnts.
God Dammit! Some of us watch BG on hulu and are still waiting for the last episode. Could you keep your spoilers to yourselves. Sheesh.
I thought the whole idea of faith is that you are willing to believe something that is difficult to believe in the presence of opposition. I'd guess that St. Peter will deny all the Texans from heaven because of their weak faith.
But functionally, Agnosticism is equivalent to Atheism.
Agnosticism is really the only rational or scientific answer. All religions require faith in something that is unprovable. Agnosticism simply says "I don't know". Personally I apply Occam's Razor, and lean toward atheism, but Occam's razor is only a rule of thumb that can point you in the direction of greater probability, it never proves anything by itself.
What really bothers me is not that people choose to believe odd things like the world was created in 6 days approximately 7000 years ago, but that so many people have a complete lack of understanding about what science is. Science is two things. First it is a process. That process uses the scientific method to test hypotheses and then uses peer review to test whether the method was applied without error. The second is a body of knowledge that has been derived from the use of the scientific method. The problem is that in school kids are taught that the body of knowledge is science. They are never taught the method itself. This allows dogmatic people to assert that their body of knowledge, derived from some old text, can also be "science." I believe that the proper answer to intelligent design crap is to teach a whole year of scientific method, formal logic, and rhetoric as a requirement for graduation from high school. This would lead to a population that would be able to make ration decisions, reject the rhetorical tricks that are so often used by demagogues, and would lead to a more effectively functioning democracy.
As soon as you engage creationists or other anti-science dogmatics on the subject of which is correct, you loose. In science there is no right and wrong, there are only models that more effectively approximate our experience of the world. The real point here is not that creationism is wrong, but that it is not science.
Science = Gotta Wear A Darwin Fish on your car is kind of closed-minded as anything else. It's characterized by surrounding yourself by people who exclusively think like you already think, and not being challenged.
Interesting, we were having a discussion about creationism. I would agree that being a rational person does not preclude religious belief. I think it clearly precludes a belief that the earth was created in 6 days about 7,000 years ago. But then you have to go and drag evolution into it. Again being rational does not require having a particular bumpersticker, but to deny evolution without evidence is as irrational as saying that the earth is flat.
Which version of creationism? Lots of people believe that the earth is about 7000 years old and was created in 6 days. This version HAS been disproved by the scientific method.
Just like Doctor Nick!
High school science tends to be rather basic. Here is a way you can make F=ma really fun. You can buy model rocket kits in bulk for education from many vendors. I like the people at this site a lot: http://www.apogeerockets.com/
/.ers. $10 each from 20 people would get you enough for 24 rockets!
Get a kit for each kid, or one for each team of two, and make them go home and build them. They can handle it. These kits are easy enough for a 4 year old with little testors and a little elmers. (I know because my son assembled one at that age (except for the parachute)) Then teach some of the physics... calculate how high, how fast, etc, and then go launch them! Use of an appropriately small motor will allow you launch on the football field. Actually the site above has a whole education section, with educational materials, technical info, newsletters, rocket kits in bulk, etc.
I know it's not free, but I bet you could get a local hobby shop to sponsor the activity, or even hit up us