I'm a strict follower of the DannyB philosophy. If I'm not allowed to block the opening ad before I can see content, I NEVER see the content -- I just click away. Same applies to sports videos as to news feeds. If it starts with an inbuilt ad, I click away promptly.
I used to carry cash just under the reporting limit at the US/Canadian border ($10,000) for the simplest of reasons:
1) I receive part of my income in US dollars and keep them in a US dollar account in Canada. 2) Converting currencies involves a bank conversion charge of about 3-3.5% 3) Using a Canadian credit card in the USA invokes an additional fee for conversion.
So, on a shopping trip with my wife, I pay for rooms in cash, she pays for purchases in cash. Simple.
I sent my first email from a Digital Equipment Corp VAX via ARPANET from my office at MIT to a colleague on sabbatical at the University of Tokyo in 1976. The only difference between that and today's email systems was that routing was up to you, e.g., you had to specify how the mail would hop to its destination.
To me, the horror show is that not only is your privacy compromised by the NSA drag net, but that for any reason they deem sufficient, the FBI, CIA, IRS and probably several other agencies will get to share in the haul. In other words -- anything you say or send on line might well be perused by literally hundreds of feds of all different stripes.
If you believe that all of those eyeballs are honorable, honest, folks with a need to know, you're very naive. There'll be all kinds of breeches. Cabals sharing "interesting" sexting images with each other, folks playing the stock market on the strength of insider information gleaned on the net, etc. Open season.
The interesting wrinkle in this for me is that Spotify is available in Sweden and Norway but not in Canada. I guess they haven't caught on here that the best way to stymie unauthorized downloading is to offer a convenient alternative.
Having travelled fairly often to Europe and Asia before I retired, my "trick" for accommodating jet lag as quickly as possible was a walk in the sun. You should go out for a walk and let the sun reset your clock.
Having taught Mechanical Engineering for about 40 years, always with good student ratings, I believe that face time is an important aspect of the teacher-student classroom relationship. Good teachers gage the students' comprehension of the material being presented or discussed by the look on classroom faces. After you get to know a class, you know which students are good indicators of comprehension. Obviously, you then adjust your examples and explanations to surmount whatever conceptual barriers are slowing or even preventing wide understanding of a tricky bit.
To give a trivial example of a conceptual leap, young kids, learning the concept of subtraction for the first time, will often answer "5" when presented with "5 - 3 = ?". Misunderstand the symbols, take away the "3" and you're left with "5". Logical to them. What they are missing is that the numbers are not entities themselves, but represent the count of something else. Drawings on the board make that clear.
In the early 70s I taught two televised distance courses and even though the connection was two-way (I could see the class in a wide-angle view and hear them as well), both they and I found it very unsatisfying. I couldn't focus on any particular student, I couldn't chat with them after class individually, they couldn't reach me off-hours.
In the 90s I tried running a forum on the web site for two courses I taught. They rarely used it -- they always came to my door to ask their questions. Why? Because they didn't want their peers to know that they were not getting it and they wanted a longer more detailed explanation than a forum would provide. Answering a student's question requires understanding why they don't already know the answer.
Ditto. Further, I used to pay for an annual subscription to NYT Crossword Puzzles and I let that lapse because it really annoyed me that I was already paying NYT a substantial sum (~$60/yr) for that privilege and felt that I should have had free access to the rest.
More annoying to me are video ads that cannot be stopped. Clicking on the Microsoft ad at the top of this page starts a video that cannot be stopped except by leaving this site.
"Nearly all of Thomas Edison's inventions benefitted from prior art."
You can leave Thomas Edison out of that sentence. Nearly all inventions are combinations and evolutions of prior art. In 40 years as a Mechanical Engineering consultant and professor, I've only seen two or three completely original, i.e., unprecedented, ideas.
In Canada, CTV has the franchise and even better, has an iPad app that showed the opening ceremony (actually about 15-20 seconds later than it was on TV). Having looked at the show on TV, I discovered that the iPad 3 image was actually better on the Internet. Unfortunately, CTV's desktop machine access is the pits for me -- it uses Silverlight and looks really bad; smearing images, etc.
Mike could use his Toronto connection to have a squint.
The thing about the prohibition of DRM circumvention that amazes me is that it is virtually unenforceable. If want a backup copy or a clone for my car to protect the original from the kids, I can make it in a few minutes and no one will ever know. I have done no harm. If I try to sell my copy at the local flea market, then I am doing harm.
What this kind of law does do is to promote and educate a whole generation of scofflaws. I think a lot of folks make an internal distinction between the laws of the land and their own moral compass. When they perceive that these clash, i.e., when breaking the law is not even slightly immoral or harmful, but is rather convenient, they do. Draconian laws simply move the boundary in their calculation in the wrong direction. Further, outlawing the tools to defeat DRM will be as effective as the war on drugs has been or prohibition was; an underground supply quickly rises.
A dark net or alternate DNS system could be stymied pretty fast by simply enacting a law saying that every ISP filter out all but DNS requests made to their own servers.
This is the crux of the whole matter -- governments are only gradually coming to grips with the notion that the Internet has given ordinary people an instantaneous voice. The old school still believe that they were elected in place of the people who elected them, that their judgement replaces that of their electors and that they don't have to worry about the electorate until the next election. That was the way it had to be when it took weeks for goings on in a government to propagate to the electorate.
The solons in our governments haven't yet understood that today it is only a matter seconds before we know what they're saying and doing and that a few minutes after that, we know what other people (often quite knowledgeable) are parsing and thinking about it. The 'net is full of chaff, but most people who care about an issue will encounter thoughtful takes on it in minutes; takes that change their thinking about it. It's really quite wonderful.
Years after I had taken an engineering exam (and passed it) the professor retired. Meeting him socially much later (I was by then a prof myself), I asked if he knew that most of the students in that course had known that the 50 questions on his final exam were from a set of 250 and that virtually every fraternity had compiled that list. His response was "Oh sure, but then if you know the answers to those 250 questions, you know the material I taught."
The other factor, it occurs to me is sales tax. Perhaps some of these restrictions arise because the vendor won't collect the tax and remit it to the foreign country.
(untitled comment)
Dear Admiral
Traveling in the USA with cash.
1) I receive part of my income in US dollars and keep them in a US dollar account in Canada.
2) Converting currencies involves a bank conversion charge of about 3-3.5%
3) Using a Canadian credit card in the USA invokes an additional fee for conversion.
So, on a shopping trip with my wife, I pay for rooms in cash, she pays for purchases in cash. Simple.
Email Sent in 1976
I contributed.
(untitled comment)
If you believe that all of those eyeballs are honorable, honest, folks with a need to know, you're very naive. There'll be all kinds of breeches. Cabals sharing "interesting" sexting images with each other, folks playing the stock market on the strength of insider information gleaned on the net, etc. Open season.
(untitled comment)
Jet Lag
Face time is a vital component of teaching
To give a trivial example of a conceptual leap, young kids, learning the concept of subtraction for the first time, will often answer "5" when presented with "5 - 3 = ?". Misunderstand the symbols, take away the "3" and you're left with "5". Logical to them. What they are missing is that the numbers are not entities themselves, but represent the count of something else. Drawings on the board make that clear.
In the early 70s I taught two televised distance courses and even though the connection was two-way (I could see the class in a wide-angle view and hear them as well), both they and I found it very unsatisfying. I couldn't focus on any particular student, I couldn't chat with them after class individually, they couldn't reach me off-hours.
In the 90s I tried running a forum on the web site for two courses I taught. They rarely used it -- they always came to my door to ask their questions. Why? Because they didn't want their peers to know that they were not getting it and they wanted a longer more detailed explanation than a forum would provide. Answering a student's question requires understanding why they don't already know the answer.
(untitled comment)
(untitled comment)
Re: Don't pollute the history: Edison was a tweaker
You can leave Thomas Edison out of that sentence. Nearly all inventions are combinations and evolutions of prior art. In 40 years as a Mechanical Engineering consultant and professor, I've only seen two or three completely original, i.e., unprecedented, ideas.
CTV Olympics
Mike could use his Toronto connection to have a squint.
DRM is really useless and this law doubly so.
What this kind of law does do is to promote and educate a whole generation of scofflaws. I think a lot of folks make an internal distinction between the laws of the land and their own moral compass. When they perceive that these clash, i.e., when breaking the law is not even slightly immoral or harmful, but is rather convenient, they do. Draconian laws simply move the boundary in their calculation in the wrong direction. Further, outlawing the tools to defeat DRM will be as effective as the war on drugs has been or prohibition was; an underground supply quickly rises.
Alternate DNS Not Likely
Re: "We, the people" is not something they can comprehend.
The solons in our governments haven't yet understood that today it is only a matter seconds before we know what they're saying and doing and that a few minutes after that, we know what other people (often quite knowledgeable) are parsing and thinking about it. The 'net is full of chaff, but most people who care about an issue will encounter thoughtful takes on it in minutes; takes that change their thinking about it. It's really quite wonderful.
Re: Re: Life Lessons
(untitled comment)
Re: That's my library.
(untitled comment)
Re: Don't take my money
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