College classes free, for anyone

If you'd like to attend college classes over the Internet at a wide variety of prestigious colleges, consider visiting Academic Earth. According to the about page,

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.
The participating universities include Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. I just finished watching an informative lecture on "The Origins of the Financial Mess." I'm wondering what I'm going to view next. Maybe I'll watch some more of Shelly Kagan's 26-part series on the topic of "Death."

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Add your voice: Keep the Internet open and free.

The context for this post is provided by Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures, who recently stated:

I'm a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period."

Now, in light of that bizarre, politically motivated statement, what's going on at the FCC? FreePress advises:

At this very minute, the Federal Communications Commission is crafting America's first national broadband plan. Whether the plan will give more control over our Internet to the likes of Sony Pictures, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon depends on what we do right now.

These companies' well-heeled lobbyists are flooding the FCC's public docket with comments in support of policies that let them:

  • Tilt the Web’s level playing field to favor the Web sites of corporate partners;
  • Deploy content-sniffing devices that would randomly open and sift through our private Web communications;
  • Impose usage penalties on people who use the Web for more than simple e-mail and Web surfing;
  • Block innovative Web services that compete against their phone, cable and entertainment products; and
  • Disconnect users for any reason or without justification
What can you do to keep things on track at the FCC? Write a comment to the FCC. It will only take a minute. Let your voice counter-balance the monied corporate interests that are trying to grab hold of the Internet for the sole purpose of squeezing out profits, just as they grabbed hold of all other electronic media during prior decades. Note that we now have a president who is committed to keeping the Internet open and free:

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How to download a youtube video and play that flv file.

How can you download a youtube video and then play that flv file on your desktop? I've been wondering how to do this, because I sometimes find compelling videos where I wonder whether they will be available in the future. Here's one answer. It's a site by "applian technologies" (not affiliated with youtube) that advises you to insert "pwn" after "www." and before "youtube . . . " It's all free and it does give you an option to NOT download applian's propriety browser toolbar. The site also offers a stand-alone .flv player for youtube videos that you download. I tried the downloader and the player and they both worked perfectly. These might come in handy someday soon.

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The long convoluted path to sanity, then celebration.

Today I am celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States.   I know that most of you already think of Obama's inauguration as old news, even though it only happened a few short hours ago.   Nonetheless, I am still celebrating and I'm proudly linking to a…

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Would you like to go to a good college for free?

You can now attend lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, for free. Here's the site to visit to attend the courses. "UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life: academics, events and athletics," said vice provost for undergraduate education Christina Maslach. The University plans to continually add…

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