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

Here is a typical comment on implementation:

The Fort Zumwalt School District revised its electronic communications policy in June. “Basically our policy says that our teachers cannot have private conversations on a social network site,” said Superintendent Bernard DuBray. “You can have students on Facebook and other sites, but you don’t have a private conversation on them.”

Any communications between students and teachers has to be open and available to parents and administrators, he said.

From: http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/stcharles/education/article_d45b61a8-b87b-5bb6-a641-9f143f6f4b3d.html#ixzz1Ud4qVBIn

The law prohibits social networking contact between students, past and present, and teachers. Here are just a few reasons why it is a bad law.

Teachers play a critically important role in the lives of many students. Often, kids will talk to teachers about things that they will not discuss with their parents. For instance, one of my high school friends trusted one of her teachers enough to have frank dialogs about sexual identity and pre-marital sex. These conversations happen in ways that are comfortable for the student. Most important, these conversations take place in private. If a student is comfortable talking on Facebook or via text messages, blocking that channel discourages the communication. I know a family of children suffering in an abusive home situation. (Yes, the local authorities are aware.) Can you imagine any of these kids talking to a teacher about it if the conversation was also open to the parents?

This law sends a whole host of bad messages to students. It tells them that, as a group, teachers are untrustworthy. It tells students that they are not skillful enough to judge safe versus unsafe private communication with teachers. It tells kids that they cannot learn about safe social networking with their teachers, though other adults are OK. It tells them that lawmakers and school districts can protect them in their on-line activities. None of these messages are true.

The Amy Hestir Student Protection Act overreaches any bounds of sanity. It forbids me, as a grey-bearded computer engineer, from having a private conversation on LinkedIn, a social networking site geared towards professional careers, with my high school physics teacher. It forbids a student from sending a text message to a teacher, even one saying, “Caught in traffic. Will be 5 minutes late. Don’t let the field trip bus leave.” It forbids a teacher from responding via text message, “OK.”

As adults, we certainly need to keep our kids safe. We do that by teaching them good judgement and empowering them to practice that judgement in reasonably safe venues. We encourage our children to grow into independent adults who can protect themselves. We fail completely with bad laws like the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act.

Atlantis Shuttle Launch, July 8 2011. Photo by Robert Scoble

I am very proud of what we have done and sad to reach the end of this era.

The bicyclists need to stay on the trails that were made for bikes and off the roads in southwest St. Charles County.

Why, Joe?

I get more complaints about this single issue than any other issue. The speed limit is 55 mph. You come around a corner and there are two bikes in your lane. You can’t pass them, and it becomes a hazard.

This sounds like an opportunity for education on sharing the road and respecting all persons’ rights to use the roads within the limits of the law. 55 mph is the speed limit; there are no minimum speeds on the proposed county roads. It is perfectly legal to drive a car or ride a motorcycle at 15-20 mph; so why ban bicycles? If you are in a car behind two bikes, or any kind of slow vehicle, I would hope that a polite toot of the horn or flash of the headlights would encourage the slower vehicle to move over and let you by.

We live in the 21st century, Joe. Segregation is “out.” Coexistence and cooperation are “in.” There is plenty of room for all of us here in St. Charles County. Won’t you join us?

If you live in St. Charles County, I encourage you to contact your council representative.

!STL 06/424 3SQ AD CLSD WEF 1006300501

In English, this NOTAM (federal NOTice to AirMen) says that the St. Charles Municipal Airport will close at 12:01am CDT, Wednesday, June 30, 2010. After 67 years of service, the owner will shut it down forever.

I returned to flying, after a 13 year hiatus, at this airport. Countless pilots have learned to fly at St. Charles Muni. Innumerable stories have been told. Lessons learned. Camaraderie savored. Airplanes loved.

You can read more about it in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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.

Most annoying, though, is that you can only get the cool “features” like better organizing bins and shelves if you buy a bigger box. There are only two of us; we don’t need a 26 cubic foot fridge. Here in the good ol’ U S of A, some folks still seem to believe that bigger is better. T’ain’t so.

Neither “incent” nor “incentivise” are words. “Motivate” is a word. There is no verb form of “incentive.”

In plain language: According to the Obama administration, if the US government spies on you and you do not like it, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot even sue in federal court.

Details in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s article, In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s.

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Trite though it may sound, it is not safe to assume that “we’re from the government and we’re here to help you” is anything  short of misleading. We emperil ourselves if we allow the executive branch to place itself outside the system of checks and balances of the judicial branch.

This web site, and the others for which I am responsible, now display a warning similar to this when visited with IE6:

Sample IE6 warning message

For more information, see Moving Past Internet Explorer 6.

• AirTran Airways ejected nine people from a flight (including two women and three children, ages 7, 4, and 2) because two of the men in the group discussed the proximity of their seats to the engines.
• Amtrak police arrested photographer Duane Kerzic for refusing to delete pictures he had taken of Amtrak trains. Kerzic took the photos while standing on the public platform of New York’s Penn Station. He was trying to enter Amtrak’s own Picture Our Train photo contest.

AirTran has since apologized to the people who were removed from the flight and given them full refunds. Amtrak has changed Kerzic’s arrest charge to trespassing.

We all know the old joke: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. As a society, we seem to have taken this to heart… and it is wrecking our quality of life. Our paranoia is making people miserable while neither saving lives nor improving safety. If we want to keep people alive, to improve the level of safety in our lives, we are working way to hard in much the wrong areas.

Here is one example. I am quite sure that you can think of dozens more.

In 2001, just 2,976 Americans died from the terrorist attack using airliners. I say “just,” though this is a terrible trajedy, because 17,448 people died from alcohol related traffic fatalities in the same year. Worse, the drunk driving deaths go on year after year after year: 17,419 more people in 2002; 17,013 people in 2003; 16,694 died in 2004; 16,885 in 2005; and 16,005 in 2006.

That’s about 101,000 dead from drunk drivers and about 3,000 dead from maniacs in airplanes.

What the heck are we doing? How can anyone, in good conscience, profess that all of this paranoia is about saving lives?

The beginning of the new year is a good time for resolutions. Let’s resolve to set aside our paranoia and turn our attention and our resources to things which can actually make our lives better. We live in a bountiful world, courtesy of a loving G-d and the the loving attentions of our fellow human beings. Let’s enjoy it.

I am going to dress up as a voting United States citizen.

Yup; you read that right. I am going to dress up as a voter because voters are so potentially dangerous that several school districts (Ft. Zumwalt, Francis Howell, and Wentzville) have canceled classes on election day, November 4. I blogged about this last February, in Paranoia is Not Safety. Since then, I forgot about it, figuring that this was so ridiculous that nothing would come of it. Wrong!

When I look around my county, I see students coming into contact with voters all over the place all the time: in stores, in shopping malls, at movie theaters, on sidewalks, at public libraries, in public parks, etc. Of course, no one recognizes these voters as the predators that they are because 364 days of the year, the voters are cleverly disguised as ordinary people including trustworthy neighbors. Thank goodness that for one day of the year, all of these perpetrators are unmasked and gather at polling places so that we can keep our children away from them.

Someone should make a list of all of these voters. If it is not safe to let our children be in the same building with them on November 4, I cannot imagine how it would magically become safe on November 5. If any of the school teachers, administrators, and support staff happen to vote, by no means should they be allowed back into the schools the day after election day. Someone should also check for 18 year old voters who are still enrolled in high school, a particularly pernicious bunch. These heinous fiends intermingle with teenagers on a daily basis and might never be spotted if we do not catch them at the ballot box.

Here are a few tidbits from “Several Schools to Close on Election Day,” published in the Suburban Journal, October 29, 2008, page C1. I cannot link to the article because it did not appear in the on-line edition of the paper.

Fort Zumwalt School District Superintendent Bernard DuBray said,

They’re expecting a huge turnout. We’re concerned with that kind of turnout about the security in the building, so it just made sense to close the schools.

What kind of turnout is that, Dr. DuBray? Do voters become a marauding pack above a certain critical mass? Is there evidence of such behavior? Has it been observed in the wild?

Rich Chrismer, director of elections for St. Charles County responded to phone calls from people “wondering why he would allow strangers to vote in a school building” by getting the superintendents “to agree to shut down their schools on November 4.” Mr. Chrismer, did you ever think to point out that these voters are not strangers? Did you mention that the voters are people who live within the same voting district as the school? Did you tell the callers that these voters live in the same neighborhoods as the kids who attend the schools?

[Added 11/4/08] I sent a copy of this posting to Dr. DuBray. He was kind enough to reply and point out that the newspaper misreported this item. All of his schools are closed on election day. The make-up day is Friday, November 7. It gets more absurd: The same Dr. DuBray who decided that voters are too dangerous also decided that they are not too dangerous if the students have already missed a day of school recently. Some of the Ft. Zumwalt schools will hold classes on November 4 because they had been closed on October 9 and those students need to make up the day. Are the voters dangerous or not, Dr. DuBray?

This foolishness will not stop until we citizens, that would be you and me, loudly voice our opinions. We deal a hard blow to our children and ourselves and our country when we pretend that students need to be physically separated from American citizens exercising the right to vote.

• Fundamental Christian Americans know what is right, not just for America but for the whole world.
• The laws of the USA should reflect fundamental Christian beliefs (e.g., anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage).
• The United States of America has a moral obligation bring its vision of “right” and “truth” to everyone in the world.
• The ends justify the means (witness the Iraq war and trumped up security theater which does little to actually enhance our national security).

Selection of Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate illustrates this brilliantly. She is certainly pro-life and very Christian. She is also powerfully driven to realize her visions for the city and state which she has governed. She is such a “babe” that one of my neighbors actually has a sign in the front yard reading, “I (heart) Sarah.” Is that supposed to be a good reason to vote for someone???

Palin comes with a bunch of political baggage neatly summarized by an email written by Anne Kilkenny which is circulating on the internet. In all my years dealing with email, this is the first chain letter which I remember being objectively verified as factually accurate. Even with all of Palin’s bizarre and sometimes illegal behavior, McCain chose her as his running-mate. Why? I think because what she did is less important to McCain than that she follows his “platform” as I wrote it.

Do I want a president who will tolerate a VP who has knowingly violated Alaska ethics act to try to get someone fired? No.

Do I want a president who will tolerate a VP who creates the political and legal turmoil which is coming to light these days? No.