I just watched 'True Grit', the promotional video put together by the Western States Montessori Conference. Though set in the late 19th century, somewhat before Dr. Maria Montessori's elevation to Saint, the role of an early Montessori education in the development of protagonist Mattie Ross is clear.
I highly recommend this film if you are on the fence about a Montessori education for your child. As the WSMC explains in their literature, fence sitting and fences generally remain divisive topics in the American West.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Saturday, October 20, 2012
proposal
I'm neither journalist nor lawyer nor public policy scholar but I do have a prime lens on my camera and I drink a prosumer gin. So that's something.
I'm a gadget blogger. I have never used marijuana and I don't hold any patents. Now that I have established my bona fides, let me say that our present intellectual property dysfunction has been on my mind for some time. I think I have figured out a way that our system could actually do someone some good and invite reform simultaneously.
Marijuana initiatives will be appearing down ballot on a lot of rickety folding tables in just over two weeks' time. The Commerce Clause (Santa's evil alter ego) and Preemption make these present initiatives irrelevant. The next ones need not be and the answer might be patents and exhaustion doctrine.
No state can avoid the federal Controlled Substances Act that appears to preempt any effort to legalize marijuana. Neither California nor South Dakota could alter their state markets for existing cultivars without an almost immediate effect on interstate markets far beyond these new, local markets. If Maine or Oklahoma had the power to project their laws beyond their borders, they might be able to define the interstate market as null and limit the applicability of the CSA.
Here's my quick and easy path to marijuana legalization and the Supreme Court:
0. License the Monsanto Roundup-Ready patents.
1. Genetically engineer a visually distinctive, Roundup-Ready strain of marijuana.
2. Patent the strain.
3. Assign the patent to the state.
4. The state makes a limited patent license grant to growers, distributors, and buyers in exchange for royalty payments. The terms of this license prohibit use or possession outside the state and impose every manner of post-sale limitation available. The state has every tool necessary to eliminate any effect on the inter-state market.
5. The state and Monsanto vigorously enforce their respective patent rights.
6. The state and Monsanto profit!
One of the apparent weaknesses of this plan is its dependence on post-sale limitations but we live in exciting times. The Supreme Court announced earlier this month that they would hear the appeal of Bowman v. Monsanto (thanks kanebiolaw). If the Court finds that a sale of a self-propagating entity need not exhaust patent rights, then a state could be off to the races.
Monsanto, you know where to send the check. I'm still at the same address.
States, remember to thank ERCOT and its predecessor organizations for artfully dodging the Commerce Clause since 1935.
Feds, go do patent reform or you'll wind up on the wrong side of this absurd marijuana legalization scheme. The core dispute in Bowman v. Monsanto is not rooted in biology. It's rooted in self-reproducibility. The very idea that software patents not subject to exhaustion could become the law of the land is completely insane. Our current copyright and patent system shows that policymakers have been smoking something for a long time.
I'm a gadget blogger. I have never used marijuana and I don't hold any patents. Now that I have established my bona fides, let me say that our present intellectual property dysfunction has been on my mind for some time. I think I have figured out a way that our system could actually do someone some good and invite reform simultaneously.
Marijuana initiatives will be appearing down ballot on a lot of rickety folding tables in just over two weeks' time. The Commerce Clause (Santa's evil alter ego) and Preemption make these present initiatives irrelevant. The next ones need not be and the answer might be patents and exhaustion doctrine.
No state can avoid the federal Controlled Substances Act that appears to preempt any effort to legalize marijuana. Neither California nor South Dakota could alter their state markets for existing cultivars without an almost immediate effect on interstate markets far beyond these new, local markets. If Maine or Oklahoma had the power to project their laws beyond their borders, they might be able to define the interstate market as null and limit the applicability of the CSA.
Here's my quick and easy path to marijuana legalization and the Supreme Court:
0. License the Monsanto Roundup-Ready patents.
1. Genetically engineer a visually distinctive, Roundup-Ready strain of marijuana.
2. Patent the strain.
3. Assign the patent to the state.
4. The state makes a limited patent license grant to growers, distributors, and buyers in exchange for royalty payments. The terms of this license prohibit use or possession outside the state and impose every manner of post-sale limitation available. The state has every tool necessary to eliminate any effect on the inter-state market.
5. The state and Monsanto vigorously enforce their respective patent rights.
6. The state and Monsanto profit!
One of the apparent weaknesses of this plan is its dependence on post-sale limitations but we live in exciting times. The Supreme Court announced earlier this month that they would hear the appeal of Bowman v. Monsanto (thanks kanebiolaw). If the Court finds that a sale of a self-propagating entity need not exhaust patent rights, then a state could be off to the races.
Monsanto, you know where to send the check. I'm still at the same address.
States, remember to thank ERCOT and its predecessor organizations for artfully dodging the Commerce Clause since 1935.
Feds, go do patent reform or you'll wind up on the wrong side of this absurd marijuana legalization scheme. The core dispute in Bowman v. Monsanto is not rooted in biology. It's rooted in self-reproducibility. The very idea that software patents not subject to exhaustion could become the law of the land is completely insane. Our current copyright and patent system shows that policymakers have been smoking something for a long time.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
update now
I travelled last week to give a talk about the role of Vaudeville in consumer electronic keynote adresses in the early twenty-first century. I normally take a straight man with me for these addresses, both for the classic comic role and to flip powerpoint lantern slides for me.
I travelled light this time and used Keynote on my iPad to deliver slides. I connected a third-generation AppleTV to the conference room projector and used AirPlay mirroring to beam the slides from iPad to projector.
This approach actually worked and I learned a few things in the doing. The first thing I learned came a week or so before I arrived. My hosts at the Center for Neo-Victorian Studies have projection equipment that sits at the leading edge of 1987 interconnect technology. Their VGA cables are thinner than a human wrist but somehow deliver resolutions that rival the pricey IBM 8514.
My AppleTV sadly does not support this visual beast. The second- and third-generation boxes drive only wimpy HDMI digital signals. My third-generation box drives 1080p. I solved this problem with a brilliant little box from Kanex that takes HDMI from the AppleTV and converts it to VGA. The box is really no more than a bulky cable. It is powered from the HDMI port. It works. Slides from Keynote wound up sidebar-ed and letterboxed. I started to fight it and instead found a zoom button on the projector remote that got me close enough to an answer. I suspect that a better answer exists. As far as I can tell, my scenario is the intended use case for the Kanex adapter.
I got the signal from iPad to AppleTV by using the Personal Hotspot feature on my LTE iPad. I pre-associated the AppleTV with the iPad's SSID before I left home. I didn't want to put any of my devices on my host's network and my personal experience with AirPlay or any other mDNS technology on public networks is spotty at best.
I found the iPad much more comfortable than many dedicated (and much lighter) presentation remotes. I appreciated the simultaneous display of speaker notes, though it's just not my mode to look at them.
Every presentation remote I have ever used has ultimately led to Presenter Induced Oscillation -- a phenomenon related to Pilot Induced Oscillation -- where a remote or key click is somehow missed by the presentation machine and the presenter spends five or six clicks back and forth to regain control of the talk. Many pilots have successfully ejected from uncontrollable PIO situations. Many have not. Presenters rarely choose to bail out. Most just ride that talk down into the ground.
The iPad was perfectly controllable. My talk was not embarrassment free. I got everything booted and associated. I got an image on the projector. It was not the image of my first slide. It was a dialog box from the AppleTV telling me that a software update was available. It asked if I wanted to update now or update later. It did not go away. I realized too late that I had left the Apple IR remote in my hotel room. Fortunately, someone among my hosts had an Apple IR remote and the episode cost me only five uncool minutes.
Apple has prided themselves for years on the visual unobtrusiveness of their products. My Apple monitors have an LED to indicate that the monitor is OFF, not ON, so that I'll never catch a stray eyefull of distracting indicator while working. Do the consumption classes not deserve the attention lavished on the creatives? My Airport base stations subtly change their indicator color to indicate new firmware versions. My iPhone puts a little badge on the settings icon to do the same. Why a faceful of unavoidable dialog from this little box?
I consider the experiment a success but I do not recommend it. Even if your software is up to date and you have your remote stuffed in your pocket, the best case for the Apple TV AirPlay streamer is that it will blast your audience with movie posters for whatever adolescent flicks are at the top of the iTunes payola chart for a few moments before your slides come up. I think it looks about as professional as pulling foils from a My Little Pony Trapper Keeper.
I travelled light this time and used Keynote on my iPad to deliver slides. I connected a third-generation AppleTV to the conference room projector and used AirPlay mirroring to beam the slides from iPad to projector.
This approach actually worked and I learned a few things in the doing. The first thing I learned came a week or so before I arrived. My hosts at the Center for Neo-Victorian Studies have projection equipment that sits at the leading edge of 1987 interconnect technology. Their VGA cables are thinner than a human wrist but somehow deliver resolutions that rival the pricey IBM 8514.
My AppleTV sadly does not support this visual beast. The second- and third-generation boxes drive only wimpy HDMI digital signals. My third-generation box drives 1080p. I solved this problem with a brilliant little box from Kanex that takes HDMI from the AppleTV and converts it to VGA. The box is really no more than a bulky cable. It is powered from the HDMI port. It works. Slides from Keynote wound up sidebar-ed and letterboxed. I started to fight it and instead found a zoom button on the projector remote that got me close enough to an answer. I suspect that a better answer exists. As far as I can tell, my scenario is the intended use case for the Kanex adapter.
 |
| The AppleTV is about the size of six walnuts (pictured with Betty O'Shannon for scale) Photo courtesy your correspondent |
I got the signal from iPad to AppleTV by using the Personal Hotspot feature on my LTE iPad. I pre-associated the AppleTV with the iPad's SSID before I left home. I didn't want to put any of my devices on my host's network and my personal experience with AirPlay or any other mDNS technology on public networks is spotty at best.
I found the iPad much more comfortable than many dedicated (and much lighter) presentation remotes. I appreciated the simultaneous display of speaker notes, though it's just not my mode to look at them.
Every presentation remote I have ever used has ultimately led to Presenter Induced Oscillation -- a phenomenon related to Pilot Induced Oscillation -- where a remote or key click is somehow missed by the presentation machine and the presenter spends five or six clicks back and forth to regain control of the talk. Many pilots have successfully ejected from uncontrollable PIO situations. Many have not. Presenters rarely choose to bail out. Most just ride that talk down into the ground.
The iPad was perfectly controllable. My talk was not embarrassment free. I got everything booted and associated. I got an image on the projector. It was not the image of my first slide. It was a dialog box from the AppleTV telling me that a software update was available. It asked if I wanted to update now or update later. It did not go away. I realized too late that I had left the Apple IR remote in my hotel room. Fortunately, someone among my hosts had an Apple IR remote and the episode cost me only five uncool minutes.
Apple has prided themselves for years on the visual unobtrusiveness of their products. My Apple monitors have an LED to indicate that the monitor is OFF, not ON, so that I'll never catch a stray eyefull of distracting indicator while working. Do the consumption classes not deserve the attention lavished on the creatives? My Airport base stations subtly change their indicator color to indicate new firmware versions. My iPhone puts a little badge on the settings icon to do the same. Why a faceful of unavoidable dialog from this little box?
I consider the experiment a success but I do not recommend it. Even if your software is up to date and you have your remote stuffed in your pocket, the best case for the Apple TV AirPlay streamer is that it will blast your audience with movie posters for whatever adolescent flicks are at the top of the iTunes payola chart for a few moments before your slides come up. I think it looks about as professional as pulling foils from a My Little Pony Trapper Keeper.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
deep funk
The memory of beating an Apple wireless keyboard to death (see ewaste) was still in my mind two weeks ago as I worked on an epic ewaste manifesto dedicated to my outgoing Novatel MiFi 2200. That memory was somehow on the mind of my replacement Apple wireless keyboard as well. Bluetooth promised gadgets that could talk to each other. Apparently they do. Word spreads.
After weeks of good behavior from my bluetooth gadgets, my replacement keyboard decided to avenge its cousin. It switched itself on inside my laptop bag and, together with a co-conspiring Incase Origami Workstation, pinned its backspace key down.
The entire post disappeared. I spun into a deep funk that is only now ending.
The Origami is otherwise quite neat. The Apple keyboard snaps inside securely. The case switches easily from keyboard cover to iPad stand. Amazon reviewers complain that the little Velcro patches are glued poorly to the plastic case. This is also my experience. The patches secure the Origami in either mode. I have glued them back on twice.
This post (may it last long enough to be read) was composed on the iPad using the on-screen keyboard. The best keyboard is the one you have with you.
After weeks of good behavior from my bluetooth gadgets, my replacement keyboard decided to avenge its cousin. It switched itself on inside my laptop bag and, together with a co-conspiring Incase Origami Workstation, pinned its backspace key down.
The entire post disappeared. I spun into a deep funk that is only now ending.
The Origami is otherwise quite neat. The Apple keyboard snaps inside securely. The case switches easily from keyboard cover to iPad stand. Amazon reviewers complain that the little Velcro patches are glued poorly to the plastic case. This is also my experience. The patches secure the Origami in either mode. I have glued them back on twice.
This post (may it last long enough to be read) was composed on the iPad using the on-screen keyboard. The best keyboard is the one you have with you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)