05.28.08
Dell: beware
The New York State Supreme Court has dealt a blow against Dell by ruling that the company and its affiliate, Dell Financial Services, engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices.
Justice Joseph Teresi ruled against the companies late last week, saying that Dell repeatedly misled customers and failed to live up to promises. The monetary damages have yet to be determined, but New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said that Dell will eventually have to pay back customers. The company will also have to turn over any “unlawfully earned” profits to the state.
“For too long at Dell the promise of customer service was a bait and switch that left thousands of people paying for essentially no service at all,” Cuomo said in a statement. “We have won an important victory that will force Dell to live up to its responsibilities and pay back its customers for profits that were pocketed but not deserved. This decision sends an important message that all corporations will be held accountable for the promises they make to consumers.”
The list of things that Dell did to deceive consumers is fairly long. To start, the company lured in customers by running attractive promotions offering no-interest or no-payment financing options, but then only approved a very small percentage of those who applied (only seven percent, according to the complaint submitted by Cuomo on behalf of New York residents, which is significantly lower than Dell’s typical approval rate).
Free open-source equivalents for Windows Software
Very useful post. The Windows software for which equivalents are listed:
- Microsoft Office
- Microsoft Outlook Express
- Microsoft Internet Explorer
- Winzip or WinRAR
- Microsoft Visio
- JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA or Other Commercial IDE’s
- Nero
- VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC
- Microsoft Remote Desktop for Windows
- Microsoft Internet Information Services
Cutting up a chicken
Via What Geeks Eat’s post on BBQ chicken, this instructive video:
Thoughts toward retirement
These are the random thoughts toward retirement from an earlier post, arranged and expanded and organized by decade. Obviously these thoughts don’t apply to everyone—Bill Gates, for example, didn’t even finish college and took the enormous risk of starting his own company, yet he seems okay for a comfortable retirement. These thoughts consist mostly of the advice I would give my own younger self.
It should be noted that some people never retire, but just continue working until they die. The reasons can be any of these:
Chipotle cleanup
After you cook your chipotle ribs, you have a small can of chipotles in adobo that must be used up. The Eldest passed along a couple of recipes, and I just made this one, which turned out to be extremely tasty (and easy):
SOUTHWESTERN SWEET POTATO SAUTE
2 large sweet potatoes (about 24 ounces total), peeled [They're crazy. Wash, don't peel. - LG]
3 tablespoons vegetable oil [olive oil]
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 to 1 chipotle in adobo sauce, finely chopped [I used 1. - LG]
1/4 cup pepitas (hulled pumpkin seeds)
Kosher salt and freshly milled black pepperCoarsely grate the sweet potatoes, preferably using the grating disk of a food processor. (You should have about 5 cups.) [I used the Kitchenaid Food processor and the 4mm grating disk. - LG]
Heat the oil in a large skillet over high heat until hot. Reduce the heat to medium-high; add the sweet potatoes and cumin and sauté, stirring constantly, until the potatoes are almost tender, 3 to 5 minutes.
Add the chipotle, pepitas, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook for 2 minutes more or until the sweet potatoes are tender.
Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals; 2005; by Sara Moulton
Kids need more vitamin D
Vitamin D is important all over the body, and generally speaking people in the northern half of the US certainly don’t get enough, and many in the sunny southern half don’t get enough because they stay indoors, use sunblock, and in general avoid the sun. WebMD on the kid requirements:
Children and teens need 10 times more than the recommended dose of vitamin D, a clinical trial suggests.
“Our research reveals that vitamin D, at doses equivalent to 2,000 IU a day, is not only safe for adolescents, but it is actually necessary for achieving desirable vitamin D levels,” study leader Ghada El-Hajj Fuleihan, MD, of the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Lebanon, says in a news release.
Kids are advised to get a daily vitamin D dose of 200 IU. That suggestion came from an Institute of Medicine panel that based its recommendation on the amount of vitamin D needed to prevent rickets in infants.
However, more and more vitamin D experts have begun to suggest that children and adults need much more vitamin D than previously recognized.
New evidence strongly supports this opinion. El-Hajj Fuleihan and colleagues enrolled 340 schoolchildren in a one-year study. These 10- to 17-year-old kids attended schools in Beirut, Lebanon.
A third of the kids received an inactive, sham treatment. Another third got the recommended 200 IU/day dose of vitamin D3 (as a weekly dose of 1,400 IU). And, after an earlier safety study showed it would not be toxic, the remaining third of the kids got 2,000 IU/day of vitamin D3 (as a weekly dose of 14,000 IU) — 10 times the recommended dose for adequate daily intake.
After a year of treatment, vitamin D levels went up slightly in the placebo group, and went up slightly more in the normal-dose vitamin D group — to 16 ng/mL for girls and to 20 ng/mL for boys. That’s well below the 30 ng/mL level the U.S. National Institutes of Health states may be desirable for overall health and disease prevention.
But kids who got 2,000 IU/day vitamin D3 saw their vitamin D levels soar — to 38 ng/mL for girls and to 35 ng/mL for boys. None of the kids showed signs of vitamin D toxicity.
“Supplementation of children and adolescents with 2,000 IU a day of vitamin D3 is well tolerated and safe,” El-Hajj Fuleihan says. “This is particularly relevant in light of the increasingly recognized health benefits of vitamin D for adults and children.”
Good news for gay marriage
Voters in California OPPOSE the state constitutional amendment that would outlaw gay marriage. Peter Hecht reports in the Sacramento Bee:
Signaling a generational shift in attitudes, a new Field Poll on Tuesday said California voters now support legal marriage between same-sex couples and oppose a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
By 51 to 42 percent, state voters believe gay couples have the right to marry, according to a May 17-26 poll of 1,052 registered voters.
However, the same poll revealed a California electorate that remains sharply divided over gay marriage – split by age, political affiliation, religion and the regions where they live.
The poll was taken after the May 15 California Supreme Court decision overturning a state ban on same-sex marriages. The results marked the first time in more than 30 years of state polling that a majority of Field Poll respondents favored making gay marriage legal.
In 2000, more than 61 percent of voters approved Proposition 22, a statute declaring that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid in California.
The state Supreme Court ruling overturned Proposition 22. Opponents of gay marriage have circulated an initiative likely to appear on the Nov. 4 ballot that would amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage – negating the court decision.
Based on the Field Poll, the ultimate outcome of the gay marriage issue in California could hinge on the age of the electorate.
Reflecting stark differences in generational attitudes, 68 percent of voters between 18 and 29 years old said they favored allowing same-sex couples to marry. Fifty-eight percent of voters 30 to 39 and 51 percent of voters 40-49 favored gay marriage. That compared with 47 percent of voters 50-64 and 36 percent of those over 65 who supported the idea.
Deflecting Earth-bound asteroids
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the likelihood of an asteroid hitting the Earth and the damage that would do. Now it seems as though some serious work is being done to meet the threat:
An Asteroid Deflection Research Center (ADRC) has been established on the Iowa State campus to bring researchers from around the world to develop asteroid deflection technologies. The center was signed into effect in April by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost.
“In the early 1990s, scientists around the world initiated studies to assess and devise methods to prevent near-Earth objects from striking Earth,” said Bong Wie, the Vance D. Coffman Chair Professor in Aerospace Engineering and director of the center. “However, it is now 2008, and there is no consensus on how to reliably deflect them in a timely manner,” he noted.
Wie, whose research expertise includes space vehicle dynamics and control, modeling and control of large space structures, and solar sail flight control system development and mission design, joined the Iowa State faculty last August. “I am very happy that Professor Bong Wie has joined the faculty at ISU,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, executive vice president and provost. “His work on asteroid deflection is exciting and of great importance.”
The ADRC will host an International Symposium on Asteroid Deflection Technology in fall 2008. Scientists and engineers from NASA, the European Space Agency, academia, and the aerospace industry will be invited to the Iowa State campus to formulate a roadmap for developing asteroid deflection technologies.
The social cost of lead pollution
As noted in previous posts (here and here), lead in the environment of children results in violent adults given to crime (and terrorism: Pakistan is heavily polluted with lead). Now Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News has this report:
The effects of lead weigh heavy on the minds of people exposed to the metal during childhood. Two new studies of adults who lived in lead-contaminated housing as kids find that higher lead levels in the blood during childhood are associated with smaller brains and with an increased risk for violent criminal behavior.
“Lead has special status as a risk factor because we can prevent it,” comments David C. Bellinger, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and an expert in environmental and public health. Bellinger, who was not involved in the research, wrote a commentary on the studies that appears with the new research in the May 27 PLoS Medicine. “There are a lot of risk factors for these kids and lead was one among many. It’s hard to prevent poverty,” he says. “But with lead, we know the pathways to exposure and we can prevent it.”
Mothers of the studies’ participants were recruited from 1979 to 1984 from neighborhoods in Cincinnati with a lot of old, lead-contaminated houses and historically high rates of childhood lead poisoning. Blood lead levels were measured in the pregnant moms and then, after they were born, in the children at several intervals until they were at least 6 years old. Of the children, now 19 to 24 years old, 250 participated in the study examining the association with criminal behavior, and 157 participated in the brain imaging study. The reports appear in the May 27 PLoS Medicine.
Nice touch
Via reader Rachel, a heads up on a sublime aspect of Barack Obama’s recent commencement speech at Wesleyan. (Previously on the speech here and here.)
To review: Obama was there in place of the ailing Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy had given Obama a huge boost in the legitimacy-and-legacy category by endorsing him, even if it didn’t help much in the MA. primary. And Kennedy’s most famous speech was his “concession” speech at the 1980 Democratic convention in New York, when he brought the house down (I was there) with his defiant reassertion of the liberal values that he thought the doomed incumbent, Jimmy Carter, had abandoned. His speech ended with these words:
For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
The structure of Obama’s speech, these 28 years later, built toward praise of Kennedy’s legacy and record, and ended with these words:
That is all I ask of you on this joyous day of new beginnings; that is what Senator Kennedy asks of you as well, and that is how we will keep so much needed work going, and the cause of justice everlasting, and the dream alive for generations to come.
As Rachel points out, this ending was
an allusion so subtle that Kennedy himself might be the only person who caught it. Obama took the speech of Ted’s lifetime… and put the three key words – work, cause, dream – into the last line of the text. Poetry into prose, a private tribute to the man whose endorsement took Obama from runner up to winner.
What is so elegant about this touch? Precisely that Obama did not feel obliged to spell out all the links. (“And what I ask of you, in Senator Kennedy’s own unforgettable words…”) Politicians shouldn’t be obscure. But a willingness to assume good things about the public — its knowledge, its understanding, its ability to rise above the most immediate appeal to pocketbook or prejudice — is part of what makes a politician into a leader. Even if the intended audience for this close was strictly the Kennedy family, it is an impressive bit of craftsmanship.
More free books
ManyBooks.net has 20,706 eBooks available and they’re all free. You Kindle and Sony Reader Digital Book owners can stock up.
Can this be true?
A company claims to split water into its hydrogen and oxygen components cheaply to produce a (single) gas that then burns as a welding tool or to boost fuel efficiency in a car. Look over their site and watch the videos. Very strange.
D.R. Harris and the Duke
I used the D.R. Harris Marlborough shave stick this morning and the Simpsons Duke 3 Best brush and got the usual fine Harris lather. My English Gillette Aristocrat with a Sputnik blade of some uses cut away the stubble, and the oil pass with All Natural Shaving Oil left my face totally smooth. D.R. Harris Arlington aftershave completed the ritual.
