I travel a ton and stay in dozens of different hotels every year. Domestically, and in maybe 50% of the foreign cases, the high priced hotels had worse and slower internet up until a couple of years ago. For the last 2 years they have gotten better, on the average. Oh, I was in a 5-star Vegas resort last night that had horrible bandwidth. In the past, my joke was accurate that the difference between a Four Seasons (just an example) and a Super 8 is that at the Super 8 the internet worked and was free. The most important thing to me in a hotel is computer use. The fancy suites in major hotels are often set up for entertaining friends and DON'T even have a computer desk. I ask my wife to book me into Super 8's whenever possible.

http://www.forumsforums.com/3_9/showthread.php?t=62716

End goal: change the constitution. We need a start. It's easy to see how hard this will be and to give up early, but some of us feel the imperative to fight for it. We can change things. The vast will of the masses (corporation political donations are not equivalent to the free speech we enjoy as individuals) needs to be strategically gathered. Critical mass could take decades, as with things like gay marriage.

Spammers or hackers could get your IP turned off. But I'd do it anyway to be helpful.

Thanks. I understand and appreciate where you are coming from.

As a founder of the EFF, I do stand up for the small consumers vs. the wealthy and powerful. There is no perfect solution.

When you make the rules, you are right when you're wrong.

Evi has been my closest contact at CU over the years. She was always a good friend and administered the scholarship I set up there. I am very sad but hoping to hear good news from my NZ friends. Evi was a very important person when it comes to Unix and Internet routing.

Time to think about college choices...

Apple is very complex. I like personal simplicity. I like to do what I'm good at, which is enjoying technology. I don't honestly feel I could do better than anyone reading this at a role in Apple. Jobs had the drive to run things and influence things. If there was something for sure where I'd be a great help to Apple, I'd be there in an instant, as Apple is #1 in my heart.

There are too many answers to this. I have put a lot of time and energy and money into practical jokes. Different people would enjoy some more than others. I had some great ones with Jobs too. But I'll go back to one that I hadn't thought about for 45 years that came to me recently. As electronics club president in high school I would submit notices for the daily announcements, read at the start of each school day. I submitted a phony one, sure it would be caught, but it got through. Something like a meeting at 3:00 PM in room B25 - Stanford's head janitor will speak on higher custodial education. The students would laugh and the teachers would tell them it was serious.

Tons of possibilities.

What was my favorite toy? Probably my erector set, but it might have been a toy gun when we were young and played cowboys and indians. It was fantasy and i was fun.

I am so much a pacifist.

But once when I was very young, and I don't remember it directly, there was a bully and he chased me off or hit me. My mom said to fight my own battles. I misunderstood and came up and punched him. I did wind up with a black eye. I did not learn any important life lesson.

I believe in using brain to influence people, not braun.

Since my youth, I can't even remember having animosity toward any person. If we disagree, that's all. I can think my own way but never have to convince others. Dave Mason sang "there ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy, there's only you and me, and we just disagree." That means a lot to me. A lot of my personality and values comes from songs. Dylan sang "you were right from your side, I was right from mine, we're both just one too many mornings, and a thousand miles behind."

My greatest happiness is in my feelings about all people of this planet. I'm not part of any religion but life is very happy and the greatest experience of life (word play intended). But the worth of my life, especially conflicts and resolution, would not be possible without every single person who plays a role in this game of life. I walk through airports and look at everyone there, smiling, knowing that their existence somehow is part of the greatest thing to me. Even if someone came up and robbed me or killed me, I know that I'd consider that part of this great game of existence.

But this game would be nothing without a lot of jokes!

Mine too. I had never worked with any disk drive of any type nor any operating system. A chance popped up that if I had a working floppy disk in 2 weeks I could go to the city of Las Vegas. Having no idea how they worked I put my head together and thought out a simple scheme with some clever parts (state machine) and it truly was a miracle. Today I have no idea how you create things in such a way. They couldn't have motivated me with money or stock, but getting to Las Vegas was worth it.

The sort of recommendations you hear are often about teaching procedures and outstanding teachers and alternate education approaches. But these recommendations have been the same for hundreds of years so they won't achieve the real change.

Computers offered a real change in the tools of the classroom, but they don't seem to have changed much. The learning is the same, only done via computers, for the most part. I had hoped for more.

I do want to feel a part of the big improvement someday, so I hope that there is some further step with computers. That would be when a computer becomes conscious and caring and becomes the best friend that each student wants to be with. It will look at their faces and speak the way that particular student likes and be a good friend more than a teacher.

One thing that has not changed over time in education is that we all, in a class, get the same material presentation together. The same pages as everyone else on Monday, the same pages on Tuesday, etc. Individuals as we are, we have different lapses along the way. A teacher could back up and explain something to fill in a gap, but each of the 30 students has different 'gaps'. The solution will be the equivalent of one teacher per student.

This opens the door to a student choosing to get only straight A's, and only studying subjects they want to. And there will be more room to teach thinking and creativity and not all the same answer, which is not even their own answer, but out of a book. It's a brave step, but right.

I learned the capital cities of all 50 states. How could anyone in life ever need to know such a worthless thing. The only worth is to show you can memorize it. But today it gets turned into a grade and a determination of what intelligence is. We have to break from that paradigm but can't with today's 30-student classes. Or should I say "day care?"

Schools are short of money because students don't get a vote and votes turn into money. It's a bad consequence of finding education to be a right and that means it has to be supplied by government. Government money follows votes. A family of 5 gets no more votes than a family of 2. Which wants the better school? But the votes by families of 2 are against more money for schools.