Yes. Nearby theater: audio is too loud to listen to comfortably, and the levels were so off that speech was impossible to understand, with the mid-range almost totally cut out and bass dominating. It had a THX certification at one point; I complained on the THX complaint site, and a few months later the certification disappeared. Audio is still shit, though. It's even worse with their new mini-IMAX; I was plugging my ears through Transformers because they were hurting. And you know how things start sounding like they're "clipping" when they're too loud? Yeah, that was happening. In a movie theatre. Fuck that, I'm not going to pay to be physically assaulted.

Wikipedia suggests agnosticism was never an opposition to gnosticism (and it has sources, as such a hot article is apt to):

Agnostic (from Ancient Greek - (a-), meaning "without", and (gnsis), meaning "knowledge") was used by Thomas Henry Huxley in a speech at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869[9] to describe his philosophy which rejects all claims of spiritual or mystical knowledge. Early Christian church leaders used the Greek word gnosis (knowledge) to describe "spiritual knowledge." Agnosticism is not to be confused with religious views opposing the ancient religious movement of Gnosticism in particular; Huxley used the term in a broader, more abstract sense.[10] Huxley identified agnosticism not as a creed but rather as a method of skeptical, evidence-based inquiry.[11]

Of course, it's been extended since then to mean any number of things. Wikipedia sticks with the classic "no knowledge" and "knowledge is impossible" (strong agnosticism) definitions, but the other ones are used by other people. I was just cataloguing ones I've seen.

I'm not generalizing to all older students since I can't. However, the first-year University students in my class had an easier time of the course than the older adult students. It wasn't hard to pick up on, and it was made even easier by many group assignments and occasional debates. They didn't grasp logic, they fumbled through the group assignments, they made strange arguments in the debates, they argued with the professor about every assignment and every test. This wasn't an enormous class, and when I say they, I mean they: all of the older students, despite being outnumbered by the young. I don't know what type of justification you're looking for other than that, I can't provide their grades or anything.

I chalked it up to (that is, I guessed that it was because of, based on what they were saying) their having a long life experience apparently devoid of critical thinking, with many irrational beliefs and decisions, and indeed an entire means of making decisions/beliefs apart from critical thinking. Like I said, you can't come to skeptical thinking overnight, and I'm going to guess it's harder when you've been living with and building your life upon non-skeptical thinking.

I wrote a post a few days ago splitting agnosticism into three definitions. I think I was wrong, I can count at least six in use around the internet.

Atheist is "I don't believe".

Agnostic is "I don't know" OR ("strong" agnosticism) "knowing is impossible" OR "maybe I believe" OR "I don't want to say if I believe" OR "I don't care" OR "I don't believe because I don't have evidence, but will change my mind if I get it". The first two types aren't incompatible with atheism, and don't answer the same question; the third indicates either that you think there's evidence of theism, that you're leaning towards faith instead of rationality, or that you haven't taken the time to think about things; number four is silly; number fives may as well just call themselves apatheists; and six is just the very definition of "weak atheism". From what I can gather agnosticism maybe originally referred to the first two definitions, but since it's being used by people who don't want to identify as theists or atheists (maybe because they believe the whole "atheists are all dickish militant anti-theists" notion), it's nearly useless now.

Maybe you can't teach it to the fullest extent in school, but you can certainly help it along. The Critical Thinking course I took in University covered a few things that would be invaluable for any school-age child, and none of them at a level that couldn't have been done in high school:

Basics of logic and evidence
Breaking apart a written argument into separate propositions and conclusions
Applying logic and evidence to arguments to figure out their soundness and cogency
Rational vs. irrational beliefs

This is big, and surprisingly, non-obvious stuff. The course was extremely easy for me since anyone with a CS or math background should have the logic stuff down pat, but some of my classmates (especially the older ones) seemed to struggle with what was a big paradigm shift for them. Many people don't even think to try to break arguments up and figure out if they actually make sense, they'd rather just go with whatever "feels" right.

Yes, you can't ensure that someone doesn't leave school credulous and unskeptical, but if you give them these skills early on it'll hopefully be easier for them to learn a skeptical attitude on their own with time.

It sounds like a big long press release.

What? Might as well have said

Since the article doesn't specifically mention anything that makes the Fire more developer-friendly than any other device. The vague claim that it's easier to port to than other devices is dubious, but it's also worded so vaguely that it might mean "porting to the Fire alone vs. porting to every device in existence at once". Would it be any different if the developer was solely targeting the Nook Tablet, or the Transformer? Doesn't the iPad have an even bigger advantage in this respect since it has a relatively enormous userbase?

Multiply that vague claim several times, add in a general description of the device ("[a] tablet you can take anywhere that stores books, games, videos and other kinds of media"), some praise ("We can't wait for the Kindle Fire 2"), and you've got the article. I totally expected a disclaimer at the bottom about it being paid-for.

Black aren't just their "premium" drives, they're also their high-energy/high-noise drives. I tend to buy Blue and Green, which I've still found to be perfectly fine even if slightly lower performance. I'd shell out a few more bucks for premium versions of these drives if they were available.

In philosophical circles, and where people haven't been raised listening to annoying people repeatedly shout that "atheists are all evil militants", the definitions of agnosticism and atheism aren't exclusive. They're:

atheism: I don't believe in the existence of gods
agnosticism: I believe the existence or non-existence of gods to be fundamentally unknowable

You can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. There's no overlap, atheism and agnosticism are answers to completely different questions; atheism answers "do you believe in gods", agnosticism answers "do you believe that the existence or non-existence of gods is knowable". Notice that "atheist" doesn't mean "I know with certainty that God doesn't exist". That's a subset of atheism we often call "strong atheism", but it's just a subset. So you see, there's no "faith" here. Atheism just means "I have no belief in gods", nothing more, nothing less.

There is another definition of agnosticism and atheism, that is:

Statement: God(s) exist.
Atheist (other): false (with certainty)
Agnostic (other): unknown
Theist (other): true (with certainty)

The problem with this is that we cannot, rationally, consider the existence of anything for which we have no evidence to be false with 100% certainty. Nothing. So you're agnostic towards gods; you're also agnostic towards unicorns, leprechauns, Reptilian Obama, invisible teapots, and so forth, because that's the only rational course. This is a silly way of looking at things, however. You can't live life as though unicorns might exist, just because you don't have any evidence against them. So instead we use the other question: do you have belief in gods? As in: do you consider "gods exist" to be true? Using the other definitions again:
Atheist: no
Agnostic A: no
Agnostic B: Uncertain
Agnostic C: yes
Theist: yes

Okay, you've agnostic groups A and C can be merged in with our normal Atheist/Theist definitions, leaving us back where we were, but with a third category:

Do you have a belief in gods?
Atheist: no
Agnostic (type 2): uncertain
Theist: yes

It happens, it can happen with any belief, but it's shaky ground. In this state, you are considering theism to be potentially plausible. If you're doing this without evidence, this is an irrational state, make no doubt.

Short: atheism means "no belief in gods", not "I believe there are no gods". Agnosticism either means "belief in gods is unknowable" or "existence of gods is unknown" or "I'm uncertain where I believe in gods". The first two aren't incompatible with theism or atheism. The third is a shaky middle ground where one is not atheist, not fully theist, but still seems to be swayed by theism for some reason, which may be as irrational a position as theism.

Android has Exchange support. Honeycomb added full device encryption, and ICS carries it over. It's right in the changelist.

I said iPad specs shouldn't be required for an education tablet or made necessary when making a comparison between education tablets. That's all I said. You've read too much into my post.

The Fire was just an example of a tablet that doesn't have iPad specs. Replace it with whatever you like.

The screen size is one part of a tablet's hardware. I don't know whether a 7" screen would be sufficient or not, but do you need the iPad's CPU and GPU?

And I'm also not saying that iPad isn't the best choice. It might very well be, I would think mostly due to a combination of durability and education support from Apple.

It is hard to blame Samsung for the problems with the phone because they are just taking advantage of a free phone software environment. Rather than spending lots of money developing the phone software they just picked it up free.

But that's not so. A number of things you've got on your phone weren't just "picked up" from Android. That menu you see when you start the phone? That's not standard Android. The touch screen drivers that steer the keyboard you don't like? Device-specific. The Exchange app? Added by your carrier or by Samsung, it's not a Google app.

You can have the common complaint that Google doesn't lock their system down like Apple which is so horrible and etc., but then the question arises as to whether Android would have the traction it does today if it was locked down. Would every phone manufacturer want to just make an Android phone, with no spiffy customizations or anything to differentiate themselves other than hardware specs that no one cares about?

The iPad does not retail for (much) more than tablets of similar spec, and Apple has always offered educational discounts.

But you don't need tablets of iPad spec for educational use, so they do cost significantly more than is necessary. Something like the Fire might not be specced high enough for the latest 3D games, but it would be perfectly adequate for textbooks and supplementary material.

VGChartz' numbers are notoriously unreliable, unsourced, some say fabricated. We don't know how many copies of Skyrim have sold for the PC, and the game has sold 7 Million total by now, not 3.4. Likewise I'm pretty sure Activision hasn't said how many copies MW3 has sold for each individual platform.

8000 Euro? I know you folks pay significantly more for electronics, but really? What type of TV is this and when did you buy it?

Switching between the two destroys muscle- and spatial- memory.

No, it doesn't. I can type with either very quickly without looking at what I'm doing. The brain is a wonderful thing.