On 27 March, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed into law one of the strongest right-to-repair laws in the US. Similar to other bills that have passed in recent years in California and Minnesota, the law requires electronics manufacturers to give both consumers and independent electronics repair shops access to the diagnostic data needed to repair …
Tag Archives: Technology
Apple Anti-Trust Lawsuit; Julian Assange’s Extradition Paused
Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced that it was filing a lawsuit against Apple over the tech company’s monopolistic practices. Among these monopolistic practices are making it difficult for iPhone users to switch to other brands of smartphones and limiting the ability of competitors to build rival software. Previously, the EU has filed …
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End of NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Mission
In 2021, the helicopter-like drone known as Ingenuity landed on Mars’ surface. This NASA-built helicopter became the first vehicle to engage in powered flight on another world. Last week, however, NASA announced that Ingenuity had sustained damaged to its rotor blades and can no longer fly. Ingenuity was launched on the same craft that brought …
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Recent Trends in the Reshoring of US Jobs
With Labor Day being tomorrow, it’s a perfect time to talk about this subject. Across the US, too many cities have seen the same pattern. At one time, a large manufacturing employer provided steady income that allowed individuals working there to obtain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Such jobs often came with pensions and other benefits. …
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Is Technology Making Us Lazy?
According to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Have I just given away the blog’s answer to the question in the title? Not exactly, because my answer to the question “is technology making us lazy” is…not exactly. At first glance, you might believe …
Youtube Algorithm: Let’s Call it Censorship
Last month, I was given a Youtube video to show to my class. This video was published on CNN’s Youtube channel. The things I noticed right away about this 4-minute clip is the number of views it had: about 4,000. The video was published in 2010, but if it was published this year, I have …
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Geoengineering Is Not the Answer
The data don’t lie. Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have been steadily increasing in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, and today the atmospheric concentration of this greenhouse gas is higher than it has been for millennia. 3 million years ago, when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were the same as they are currently (407.8 ppm as of …
The Technological Promise
28 July 2019 – In 1833, the German-born inventor John Adolphus Etzler looked upon a world being rapidly transformed by the steam engine and mass production related to the industrial revolution. He saw a world that was extremely close to being transformed into a Utopia, and believed that with the available technology of the time, …
Green Humanist 