All of us remember where we were on 9/11. I was teaching an International Relations class when two of the students came in late, stood in the doorway, and said we should all go to the cafeteria where we the big TV had been turned to CNN. They mentioned the WTC and that the first tower had fallen.
I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I frankly didn’t believe a single airplane could knock over a WTC tower. It all sounded a little far-fetched. But the students looked very distraught and were insistent so I elected to break early and we all got there in time to see the second tower fall.
We saw many reruns of the airplanes which hit the buildings in the hours which followed. Classes were not suspended but a lot of people at the university gathered around the numerous cafeteria television sets for the rest of the day.
It was obviously early in the term but ironically (or not) I was already discussing Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden. At that time I was already very worried about him.
Because of this I was quite quick to blame the whole thing on him. Even before North American air travel had been resumed I had been cautioned not to jump to conclusions about what still had not been officially determined to be a deliberate act.
We must not be too hasty. We must get in all of the evidence and then only judge carefully.
A few days after air travel resumed I found a newspaper article supporting the idea that bin Laden and Al Qaeda was responsible. I cut it out and put it on the bulletin board next to my office door (*my* bulletin board) and a day later it was gone.
That’s about 0.0014%
If someone offers you a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, just take it. Don’t risk being called a Samsungphone-o-phobe.
BTW. There is only one kind of battery which explodes. Not all Note 7s have them. But this is the very first Note 7 which is sealed. Users can not remove the back and see if they have the funny battery.
There is no way for the “lay observer” to know if any particular phone is dangerous or harmless. There is no way to interrogate the phone’s “about phone” information to find this out. No app can do this. Only a factory-trained expert can make the determination.
They don’t have special cover-patterns or screen images or cases. They all look the same from the outside.
So some airlines have banned them from all their flights. And all of them have to go back to Samsung for inspection and replacement. Samsung is instructing the owners to turn them all off immediately and use other devices instead.
The perception of threat and reasonable risk appears to be contextual. As does the response to that perception.
Politically Correct Phone Ownership?
Unjustified Margins 