Do you remember Professor Seymour Papert and his book Mindstorms? At a time when such things were expensive for adults, he put computers and a remote-control robotic turtle in kids classrooms. Armed with a simple robot programming language, these kids created amazing things and broke many educational paradigms. But have you heard anything of this recently?
Last week, the Google toolbar, software I have run for years, upgraded itself. As a result of the upgrade, it started offering to translate pages for me.
It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates pitched a new form of capitalism on Thursday that would help better serve the neglected poor Read the rest of this entry »
Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite’s day. I thought, “Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.”
Given that we all want health and spend trillions to “care” for it, it’s sobering how little thought we give to its true meaning. Read the rest of this entry »
The Getty Images Settlement Demand Letter is a deliberate attempt by Getty Images to intimidate and bully recipients Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Brown made a submission recently to the Michigan Republican House Task Force on Jobs. While the whole thing is worth reading, this part was especially hard for me to read.
Roughly half of the $700 billion bailout, Warren added, was “don’t ask, don’t tell money. We didn’t ask how they were going to spend it, and they didn’t tell how they were going to spend it.” Read the rest of this entry »
One big question still remains, though. Here it is:
If I were Frank DiPascale, Jr., and I saw what was happening in the summer of 2008, I would have put aside perhaps ten or twenty million dollars very quietly and gotten the hell out of dodge. Read the rest of this entry »