According to separate reports from different parts of the country, Apple denied coverage for two users in 2008 based on the fact that OSHA lists cigarette smoke as a biohazard. Both techs refused service to the computers not because the smoke damaged them, but because it’s considered hazardous to a tech’s health to work on a contaminated unit.

Both owners tried to appeal their cases, even going all the way up to Steve Jobs. Unlike this guy, they weren’t as lucky.

These are just two isolated incidents though, and in the comments at Consumerist some smokers are reporting having no trouble getting their computers serviced by Apple. It appears to be on a case-by-case basis, not a hard-set policy. Any smokers out there ever run into trouble getting Apple to repair hardware? [Consumerist via Slashdot]

I’m not quite sure what exactly is going on here, me being somewhat of a dullard and all, but I do know one thing: this there is one neat video.

[Random Good Stuff]

[Style14 via Engadget]

Veronica Belmont, of Tekzilla/Mahalo/BOL fame/general video on the internet fame, sees Apple finally going ahead with that Courier concept Microsoft keeps dragging their feet on. Or Apple subsumes Microsoft entirely. What do you know, Belmont?

BoingBoing’s/MAKE’s Mark Frauenfelder goes as DIY-y as is humanly possible and projects a future in which Apple is just a bunch of dudes with Arduinos and a pair of pliers. You see, we’ll just buy Apple’s designs, and your iMake object printer will print them out.

Brian Lam, Man With Hat, just wants his iPhone to get reception in San Francisco, for once. Hence, bunny hears.

There are a couple more, and they’re all in the same whimsical, not-quite-serious vein. Check them out at: [Maclife]

He’s a classy one, Mr Brin. Like our own Brian Lam. [CrunchGear, Ryan Block]

Clearly, when one computer goes down in Salt Lake City and it drags down America’s entire air traffic system, something needs to be done. At any rate, if you’re in the US and you have a flight to catch today, make sure to check its status before heading to the airport. [AP]

Yes, I think That Speers is such a horrid person that I had to learn how to say so in Klingon from our intern Don. It just baffles me that Speers actually sounds genuinely proud of his personal pseudo-academic project:

I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language. He was definitely starting to learn it.”

It’s great that he wanted to see how languages are picked up, but did he not think that there’s potential that he hindered his son’s social development by keeping focus away from a real language? I’m all for teaching foreign languages early on, but lets make it ones that are spoken on this planet, please. [Citypages viaGeekologie]

Photo by Star Wars Blog, probably not d’Armond Speers.

David Pogue instantly found a fan in me with his Apple-themed rendition of Britney Spears’ “Oops…I did it again” as memories of mornings spent singing into a hairbrush flooded back. Granted Pogue actually sounds better than both Britney and I.

[Brainstorm Tech]

Oxford defines the verb as: “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” I think they should include offline usage, too, like when you stop calling people back entirely or leave people at rest stops on road trips. What, you guys don’t do that? [CNN]