Thank you for the explanation. I have been a Netflix subscriber since June 2002 and I did feel offended by the large price jump in my plan (2 Blu-Ray discs + streaming)

I believe that you are making a mistake in dis-integrating the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com sites.

• My family receives great value from the Netflix suggestion service. After rating almost 1,600 movies and TV shows, the suggestions have become a source of eclectic discovery that are almost always spot-on.
• I appreciate the way that queue selections move effortlessly from the DVD queue to the instant queue.
• My family very much appreciates having a single web site at which to search for movies. Once we find a movie, we can then choose the medium on which to receive it.

Though you may see DVD and streaming as distinct businesses, I do not. I rent movies and TV shows from Netflix and consciously decide how I want each delivered.

I hope that you will reconsider your decision to separate Quikster.com and Netflix.com. While they are combined, you offer a service which is stronger than either is independently.

– Art Z.

Update: When I replied to Reed’s email to me, my note was, essentially, rejected. The email address from which his note came, “does not reach [the] customer service team.” Netflix has made three significant mistakes in just a few weeks:

1. A huge price increase
2. Announced a dramatic worsening of my user experience with their web site(s)
3. Made it painfully difficult for me to contact Netflix with my thoughts on the issue

As I was walking to work this morning, it struck me I have another boundary around my work life of which I had not even been consciously aware. When people want to schedule a phone call with me, I tell them that I am available 9:00am to 5:00pm central time. While that is strictly true, it has always bothered me a little bit to say that because it sounds like I work a very short day. What I have been unconsciously doing is protecting a couple of pieces of my workday from interruptions, one at the beginning of the day and a second at the end of the day. Though I am always at my desk well before 8:00 and usually at my desk well after 5:00, I usually do not answer the phone if it rings outside that time period. I keep my early mornings and late afternoons for work that requires uninterrupted thought.

I think I will change my response when people ask about good times for a phone call with me. Something like, “I am available for phone calls between 9:00 and 5:00″ would be a bit more truthful.

Free to Good Home: Unused Phone Books

I don’t know how well it works (yet) but I just used the National Yellow Pages Consumer Choice & Opt-Out Site to decline all five of the big books that have been delivered to our doorstep annually. Several years ago, we cut the cord and terminated our AT&T home phone service, switching to a VOIP service for a fraction of the cost. About two years ago, we stopped using even that, switching to just our cell phones. We do still have the old home phone number but pay just $5.00 per month now to have it forwarded to both of our cell phones.

The only reason that we have been getting paper phone books is that our business still maintains a phone number with AT&T… solely for the purpose of maintaining a listing in the phone book. Having that number has bestowed the privilege on us of receiving the Big Books which no one actually uses. Writing this post has me thinking that it is probably time to port that final number to our VOIP provider since I cannot remember the last time that a legitimate customer looked us up in either the yellow or the white pages.

It’s amazing how hard it is to change life-long habits. Dropping our satellite TV subscription a decade ago seemed huge but turned out to be a non-event. I think that cancelling our last wired-line phone service, and our last phone book entry, will be the same.

We have come a long way since the early 1970s when my dad listed himself in the Chicago phone book at Zeke Zzzypt. That only lasted a year, though, because he got too many crank phone calls. You can still find  traces of his gag if you search the internet for “Zeek Zzzypt.”

Sales tax is used to pay for stuff that we want. Here in Missouri, it pays for things that I care about like schools and roads. I presume it is the same where you live, too, though you may call it a Value-Added Tax (VAT) instead of a Sales Tax. On the one hand, I want to avoid paying tax because it’s money out of my pocket. On the other hand, I have to realize — we all have to realize — that the more I/we avoid paying taxes, the bigger the funding crisis becomes for the functions that we expect of our government. How can you, for instance, demand the highest quality education for your children while at the same time starving your local school district for funds?

Sales tax, in and of itself, is largely revenue-neutral for a business. Sure, there is some accounting expense involved in remitting the monies to the various tax authorities, but the tax itself comes from the purchaser and the costs are pretty much evenly shared by all businesses. As a business owner, I readily admit that I would rather send sales tax to one place than 50 but that’s another story…. My point is that asking Amazon to collect sales tax is not going to significantly impact their business. Amazon might raise their prices a bit to cover their added accounting costs but that’s just business; all businesses charge enough to cover costs plus some profit.

Generally speaking, I choose to shop locally rather than buy from Amazon. Yes, I pay more. But I also know that I am supporting business owners and employees within my local community. My taxes get used here in my county to pay for stuff that I care about. There is real value to me in being able to walk into a store, pick up the item that I want, perhaps test it, and bring it home with me. I want these stores and my neighbors (the employees and business owners) to stay here so I vote with my dollars. You vote with your dollars, too. I am not telling you how to vote, just encouraging you to vote consciously to nurture the businesses and services that matter to you.

Paying taxes is not the solution but it is part of the solution. As a members of this society, I think that we all have as much responsibility to fund our society as we do to oversee how those funds are spent.

I made the connection because these queries came in close proximity to my opportunity to start a paid digital subscription to the New York Times. I chose to subscribe, to pay for news articles that I have been reading for free, because I want to support NYTimes journalism. Even more important, I want to support its journalists. As I have watched newspapers dwindle and die across the country, I have come to realize that I have a personal responsibility to nurture the reporting on which I depend. My subscription is not much money, just 99 cents for the first month and then $5 a week. Do I get five bucks worth of enjoyment out of the NYTimes each week? Heck yes! No brainer.

A couple of years ago, the free St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Suburban Journal switched to a paid subscription model. My wife skims it; I used to get annoyed at the unread piles of paper in the driveway which I had no way to stop. After she introduced me to the reporting on my kids’ local schools and I discovered a columnist who’s articles I thoroughly enjoy, I found that I actually looked forward to the next issue. When the Suburban Journal ran a front page story asking for subscriptions so that they could continue to pay the photographers and reporters to cover the local school events, I did not hesitate; my $24 check went into the mail. If not the SJ’s reporters, whose? If not my subscription, whose? Is local professional reporting worth 50 cents a week to me? Heck yes! No brainer.

Personally, I am not looking for money. I write this blog largely because I enjoy sharing my thoughts about a wide variety of subjects. The key word in that sentence is “sharing” which, to me, implies a bit of dialog, a bit of feedback, a bit of connection with y’all. Lately, though, I had been feeling pretty disconnected from you, my Gentle Readers, and that disconnection led me to believe that you did not really care what I wrote or whether I stopped entirely.

It’s amazing how a little positive feedback can completely turn around my attitude. Just being asked about my silence made all the difference in the world.

Believe me, I am not laying the blame on anyone but me for my silence. Besides a feeling of isolation, I have spent much of the last several months delving into technologies that are geeky in the extreme and about which I am far from expert. Since I try to write for a “general” audience (not programmers) and since I try to write about subjects where I (at least believe that I) know what I am talking about, that has left me with less to say that at other times in my life. I think that I am past the not-knowing now and can share some of what I have learned with you. With a little bit o’ luck, you will enjoy the upcoming articles.

Returning to the mainstream of this evening’s symposium I do hope that you will actively support the journalism that you enjoy. If you are reading/watching/listening to stuff from a commercial venture, even if it is a not-for-profit such as NPR or PBS, be sure that you kick some money into the ecosystem. You can do that by buying stuff from the advertisers or sponsors. You can subscribe. The important thing is to remember that the writers and photographers need salaries and the companies have bills to pay. If you take everything for free then you contribute to starving them. If they starve, eventually they will die.

If you are consuming “volunteer” journalism, such as this blog, the best support might be the easiest: Send a little love back to the author. Post a comment on the blog. Write an email. Share the blog with a friend. As for me, I would love to hear from you.

P.S. To the guy who I talked to at the EAA 32 event on Saturday: I am embarrassed to admit that I have already forgotten your name. Would you get back in touch with me?

I will not be buying any of these ebooks, though, and I discourage you from buying them. If you were to you buy an ebook from Google, you would accept a license which states, “Restrictions. You may not sell…, transfer, or assign your rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party….” Take note, publishers: When I buy something, I reserve my rights to sell it, lend it, or give it away.

If I sold you a paper book, would you accept any restrictions from me on what you could do with it after you paid for it? Why would you accept such restrictions on an ebook?

The pointy haired boss and Wally begin to discuss software jobs.

Click the image to read the whole comic. The disturbing question is: Which job do I hold???

I thought you couldn’t patent prior art? Clearly, I’m wrong.

Don’t believe me? I just spent half an hour tightening up my Facebook privacy settings; it was a bewildering maze of pages and checkboxes and pop-up windows. I thought maybe I was just dim, that it couldn’t be as hard as it seemed to be. But no; it really is that hard. The New York Times counted the words and discovered that Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the US constitution!

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.

Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.

The last straw was discovering a page which allowed my personal information to be shared with third-parties (advertisers and other businesses) when my friends do stuff, not because of my own actions. Here is the page, after I turned everything off; all of the boxes had been checked when I first came to the page.

Just one example: I am perfectly happy allowing my friends to know my birthday but I was angry to discover that, when a friend of mine “visits a Facebook Platform application or website,” my birthday was revealed to the business running that “application or website.” That’s just not right; I did not give my permission for this. I do not want it to happen. Facebook added this “feature” and began giving out this information without asking me.

In response to that discovery, I have done a couple of things. First, I took the time to go through every Facebook privacy page and tighten up the settings. My friends can still see stuff about me. The friends of my friends can also see some stuff about me. To the extent possible, I have blocked business’ abilities to obtain my data. Second, I have removed all of the data which I do not want publicly shared. Since I cannot trust Facebook to keep it private, I no longer store those data in my Facebook profile.

If you are reading this on Facebook, you should know that Facebook is posting a copy of my original article. I actually wrote this on my own blog at www.CheerfulCurmudgeon.com and I invite you to visit the site directly. Facebook does not copy everything from the blog and you are missing good stuff by staying in Facebook and not coming over to the actual website.

I choose to control access to my data, sharing it only with the people that I trust. Facebook has proven, time and again, to be a very untrustworthy arbiter of our data.

From LiveScience.com, U.S. Life Expectancy May Have Peaked:

A team led by Harvard’s Majid Ezzati published these findings today in the online medical journal PLoS Medicine. The analysis — the first to look at mortality trends county by county — is based on mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1959 and 2001.

…

[The team found that] life expectancy rates rose for most of Americans over the last four decades by about six years, from an average of about age 71 to age 77. Yet a sizeable portion of the population, mostly in rural regions, saw those modest gains level off and even reverse starting in the 1980s. This is in contrast to all other industrialized nations.

It is disturbing that our government has assured that all Americans have access to electricity and telephones and we are working hard on getting broadband internet access into every home but we do not assure that everybody gets good health care.

If you are a member of a grocery insurance program, you will show your membership card at the cash register and will pay a fixed amount of money for your week’s groceries, regardless of how much you need that particular week. Based on some research that I have been doing, I believe that through careful negotiation and the buying power amassed by a large membership, the grocery insurance programs ought to be able to obtain groceries from local supermarkets for as little as 35-45% of “list prices.” These savings will be passed on to members through lower membership fees and lower weekly at-the-cash-register fixed payments.

Membership in the grocery insurance programs will be a neat perk which businesses can offer to their employees. I know that, as a business owner, I am always looking for ways to compensate my employees which do not impose additional income tax burdens on them. The grocery insurance program membership fees would be deductible expenses for the business and, I hope, would be “carved out” by the IRS and not considered taxable income to the employees.

All in all, I think that this will be a tremdously adventageous program which will help Americans.

I can only think of a couple of small problems but I’m sure that we will quickly get them straightened out.

1. About 46 milliion Americans, about 18% of us, will not be able to join a grocery insurance program, primarily for one of three reasons: 1) they are unemployed, 2) they have jobs but their employers do not choose to offer this perk to them, or 3) they have reputations for eating too much food and are ineligible.
2. Grocery list prices, the prices marked on the shelves and actually paid by the 46 million people who are not grocery insurance program members, will be 2-3x higher than today’s prices.
3. Individuals who want to join a program on their own (not through an employer) will need to pay significantly higher membership fees and won’t receive the tax benefits.

Let me reiterate that these are tiny problems. About 82% of us will be unaffected by them and will actually see our grocery bills go down so, in the balance, this is all for the good.

Does this sound ridiculous? Why? We Americans buy health care exactly as described here.

In Introducing the Google Chrome OS on the Official Google Blog, Google writes,

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends….

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010….

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web….

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year….

What does this mean to you? Several things, all good if you a) use your computer mostly for stuff on the web, and b) like to save money, and c) don’t mind that virtually all of your files will be “elsewhere” instead of stored on your own computer.

1. Turn on your Google Chrome OS based computer and, within a very few seconds, you will be up and running on the web (using Google Chrome, of course).
2. No (or at least few) worries about viruses and Trojans which exploit Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Office. You will have the security of Linux without the geeky requirements that you actually understand Linux.
3. You will be able to run this on existing hardware, which ought to breathe new life into old machines.

The kicker is that, in Google’s grand vision, all of your email, letters, documents, spreadsheets, databases, etc., will be stored on Google’s servers. You will use GMail for your mail and Google Apps instead of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. If you are big, you will use the paid versions of these apps. If you are small, ads might be in your face all the time. It is not coincidence that GMail and Google Apps came out of “beta” the same day that Google introduced Google Chrome OS.

Is this good for you? How much do you trust Google? It is certainly cool technology, certainly priced right, and certainly convenient.