Trust this insofar as you trust Wired. They say that the microwave will leave scorch marks, so this is NOT recommended. I suppose blunt force trauma is virtually undetectable or at least explainable by wear and tear throughout the course of your travels.

This is a legal gray area, but a couple years back Wired suggested that hitting the passport's chip with a hammer would disable the RFID without obvious signs--a disabled RFID chip does not invalidate the passport.

I'm going to go ahead and make a claim with just as much evidence as you just provided--none--namely, that Microsoft has some hidden code that runs down the battery when it detects Apple hardware. Which is easier, designing hardware to make an operating system run inefficiently, or designing software to make hardware run efficiently? Microsoft is cleearrrly just trying to make Mac hardware look bad so people go back to PC hardware, bringing some market share back to Windows.

Where were they when we spent billions of government dollars on undeclared wars and racked up a huge deficit during the Bush years? Hypocrisy much?

It's no use, they require more vespene gas.

I wouldn't call myself pro-DRM, but I'm just glad that battle.net has remained free--you know they could charge a nominal fee and people would still be all over it. As a paying customer with a broadband connection, I'm willing to live without LAN play so that Blizzard makes the money I'm sure they deserve. Modern broadband ensures that there's essentially no bandwidth impediment to everyone using battle.net in the same location anymore (as others have pointed out).

By your argument, the Chinese murdered children at random because they underengineered some school houses in an earthquake-prone region. What about New Orleans, where our government, with a gajillion times the resources of an impoverished Chinese provincial town, failed to construct adequate levees in a similarly disaster-prone region and exacerbated the loss of life with inadequate relief efforts? Should I even mention the TVA coal ash spill ? While we don't have the level of political repression the Chinese government perpetrates, we had our fair share of coverups and misinformation surrounding both of those incidents. Please stop throwing stones--you're going to get our glass house shattered in short order.

Bringing the conversation back on topic, what happened was a tragedy and, in my humble estimation, could have happened anywhere in the world. The amount of abuse perpetrated in our nursing homes, for instance, is appalling. What caught my eye is that they even have camps in an attempt to address the issue of "internet addiction"--have you guys seen this elsewhere, or is it as Chinese a phenomenon as "fat camps" might be an American one?

I am going to agree with you for the most part—I feel that human-centricity doesn't necessarily imply a lack of rigor. Just because it requires dealing with the horribly complicated mess that humans are, one can still approach the problem at hand using rigorous, human-centric strategies. Learning how to work with human variation is not completely an intuitive affair, as there are a lot of frameworks, each with its own merits about how to understand humans and their behavior, and how to apply this understanding to disciplines like software engineering. Maybe this lacks "formality" in the sense that it's not formulaic in nature, but saying it's not rigorous is pejorative in a way that I'm not comfortable with.

On the other hand, saying that Simon's description of human decisionmaking is as "solid as mathematical formulas behind computer science" seems a bit silly to me—at best, it's just a good lens through which to explain some facet of human behavior, but even if Simon's work were a perfect, unassailable analysis of the human decisionmaking process (which it is not—how can we prove that neurologically speaking Simon is correct? We can prove that algorithms work all the way from the number theoretic level), understanding just decisionmaking wouldn't be enough for our purposes.