You Are the Product

One thing I learned from my Dummies book is, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." What this means is that, when many cyber products are "free" and "ad free", it's because they can make more money "harvesting" data about you and selling it to other sites that do  have ads. I knew that Google invented this technique some time ago, but I didn't know that there was money to be made just by selling the data instead of using it to target ads on your own site. Apparently there is nothing illegal or even unethical about this practice. It's not intrusive of your privacy because you are giving them this data voluntarily. You don't get any more ads, you just get different ads that are targeted to your personal interests. This explains why, when we were talking about guns on the Institute awhile back, we started seeing gun related ads when we went on Face Book.

I'm not sure why Windows 10 has the reputation of being "infested" with ads. The system contains a pop-up blocker that seems to prevent pop-up ads from appearing on web pages, but apparently doesn't block pop-ups on your own desktop display. These pop-ups seem to originate from internal programs (apps) and, if you can figure out where they're coming from, you can uninstall the program unless you really need it for something, which you usually don't. There is another feature called "notifications", which acts a little like pop-up ads. You can disable notifications, but many of them are useful, especially when you're new to the system. For instance, you get a notification when it's time to do a virus scan or when new Windows 10 updates are available for downloading. On the other hand, you also get periodic notifications from Cortana, trying to worm her way into your real life. (No good can come of that.) Notifications appear in their own sidebar and a brief pop-up notifies you that you that there is a notification waiting for you there. The pop-up disappears in a few seconds and you can call up the sidebar at your convenience, read whatever notifications it contains, and click "clear all", which makes them go away.

One particular notification still puzzles me: "You have items waiting to be burned to a disk." The only things I have ever burned to a disk are photos and, even after I have burned them, the notification still appears the next time I turn on my computer. I had the same thing in my Windows 7 OS, but not in my Vista. I never was able to make it go away in Windows 7, and maybe I won't be able to in Windows 10 either. It's no big deal, it disappears after a few seconds, but I still wonder about it.

Other than that, the Outlook Mail program has ads on it, but I have not been able to get that thing to work for me anyway, so I'm resigned to just using my Gmail account, which I already had. Gmail used to have ads on it, but not anymore. It has all the features that I will ever use, and then some.

"Woodchuck" is just another name for "groundhog". It is indeed a real animal, but it doesn't really predict the weather, that's just a myth. The Junior Woodchuck's Manual that Huey, Dewy, and Louie frequently consult is published by the Junior Woodchuck's organization, which is the Disney version of the Boy Scouts.

I read somewhere that the Cain and Abel myth is believed to symbolize the way sedentary agriculture displaced the nomadic herdsman economy. In Biblical times, though, there was still a lot of nomadic herding going on, so I don't know how accurate that interpretation could be.