The term “net neutrality” has been defined and redefined and undefined and double-defined so many times that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.  Half the people using it mean one thing, and half the people using it mean exactly the opposite.  As a result, politicians are doing more harm than good by calling something “pro-net-neutrality” or “anti-net-neutrality”, because no matter which label is chosen people will interpret it the wrong way.

So, let me define what I mean when I say “net neutrality”, so there’s no confusion for the rest of this post:  “net neutrality” is the idea that the internet should be treated as an impartial communication medium, just like a telephone network.  ISPs should not be able to prioritize one type of traffic over another for any reason other than traffic management (which I’ll get back to in a moment).

(more…)

I just read a few articles, and thought I’d share them with you, and some brief thoughts.  Feel free to comment on one or all of them.  Some of them are fairly old, but that’s ok

• Orson Scott Card finally came back from a hiatus writing his WorldWatch column.  I no longer agree with his political views.  He’s gone from “I don’t like Obama for his policies” to “I don’t like Obama because I’m accusing him of breaking every single promise he’s ever made, and some he hasn’t.”  OSC used to provide support for his arguments.  Now he makes unsubstantiated claims.  One quote that shows OSC’s viewpoint (which I disagree with):

Now [Obama has] shown us that he’s a radical leftist at heart and all his promises — every one of them – were lies. But he’s still relatively harmless domestically because he’s such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or persuade even his followers.

• This opinion column in the Wall Street Journal compares global warming to a religion – and I agree completely.  Supporters of the idea of global warming don’t seem to care about the evidence; to them, any and all climate changes are evidence of global warming, even if that evidence is global cooling.  One choice quote:

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

• A commentary in the LA Times on the continual Democratic accusations that the Bush administration lied about Iraq.  The summary?  Democrats conveniently forget that the word lie implies intentional deception; nobody has ever shown that to be true of the Bush administration (and in fact, in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found the claim to be false, as did the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report a year later).  One choice quote:

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

• A blog post about moral consequences.  Politicians of all colors seem to claim that if they were in charge, things would be better, but they all forget that the things they don’t do carry their own consequences.  Personally, I think (my) religion drives that into us fairly well.  This blog post is not inherently political in nature (that is, the poster does not claim any particular political viewpoint), but is instead simply an examination of moral consequences, and uses various real-world examples.  One choice quote:

If you adopt the notion of “doing no harm”, aren’t you then responsible for harm that comes because of what was left undone, or done some other way?

For the last few weeks the news has been telling us over and over again to make sure we have flood insurance, to make sure we’re “prepared”, and to make sure we have an emergency plan.  That’s because near a dam on the Green River, there’s (apparently) an earth embankment that’s likely to (somehow) fail this coming winter, resulting in a flood anywhere between three and ten feet deep.  (Update: Some news stories predict the dam over-topping; others predict the embankment failing.  It’s hard to know which is actually the official prediction.)

A few days ago, my wife commented that the news mentioned the National Guard preparing accomodations for 5,000 displaced people in the event of a flood.  Five thousand?  There are probably five thousand people in my apartment complex.  The flood zone is much, much bigger than my apartment complex.  Where are all these people supposed to go?

It gets even better, though.  Yesterday evening, the news played some comments by some woman high up in the local (city or county) government.  Her comments went something like this:

We need to learn from Hurricane Katrina.  After Katrina, the city ran out of body bags, and families were stuck with bodies for weeks and weeks.  We want to make sure that no families here are stuck with a body for weeks.

So much concern over body bags proves to me that they’re expecting a lot of deaths.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to tell everyone to leave the area?  That way, nobody dies! Gee, what a novel idea.

I feel like the local government is completely clueless about what to do about this flood.  Nobody has ever explained why they aren’t fixing the levy.  If money’s the issue, I’m sure the tens of thousands of people in the flood zone could all pitch in and fund repairs – I know I would be willing.

Update: I found a local news station’s story on the King County Council meeting.  This was the actual quote:

KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reporter Chris Egert said one council member asked about body bags while others made comparisons to Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to know what we have in the supply of body bags if somebody gets killed,” asked Kathy Lambert of the King County Council. “Do we have a supply of body bags so families will be able to deal with that?”

Update 2: Another news story on the same station’s site informs us that

Engineers are working 24 hours a day on a temporary fix at the dam, but they don’t know how well it will work.

Someone said earlier today, “I wouldn’t vote for a Republican in a million years.”  He later clarified that he wouldn’t vote for a member of any party, be they Republican, Democratic, or Libertarian.

My response-question was this: “So you wouldn’t vote for someone that represents your views almost perfectly, simply because they associate themselves with a party?”

harryandthehenderson’s answer? “Yep, because those political parties are just lackeys of special interests that I have none of my interests at heart.”

harryandthehenderson appears to have a very different understanding of the phrase “represents your views” than I do. You see, when I say John represents some particular set of views, I mean he actively works to put those views into action. harryandthehenderson appears to mean that John might hold those views himself but ignores them in favor of some special interest or other. If harryandthehenderson is correct, John can hardly be said to represent those views, can he?

My use of the phrase mirrors closely the meaning of the words, while harryandthehenderson’s apparent understanding of the phrase removes its meaning and replaces it with useless drivel.

This is why our political system is so messed up.  There are citizens out there who actively refuse to vote for people who represent their views, simply because those politicians have chosen to associate themselves with a party.  That refusal essentially ensures that those citizens’ views will never be represented in our government.

Vote based on your views, people!  If you refuse to vote for people who believe as you do, then you’re ensuring that people who don’t will get elected, and your complaints about politicians ignoring your views will be your own fault.

A bill was introduced last week to both the House and Senate that would require all operators of wireless internet access points to maintain access logs for no less than two years to aid in law enforcement.

This would be extremely difficult for me to comply with; if it would be hard for me, how hard will it be for my non-tech-savvy parents?

There are several problems with this bill.  First is the cost – storing two years’ worth of access log files uses a lot of space.  Some families could conceivably spend more storing access logs than they spent on their computer.

Second is that most people simply don’t have the expertise required to comply with this legislation, meaning most families would be required to hire an IT professional to maintain their network.  How are working-class families supposed to pay for that?

Third is that the legislation will utterly fail at what it is designed to do – access logs only record MAC addresses, which are easily forged and (even if they’re not forged) are often not unique.  In other words, they want access logs to be able to show if someone used a particular access point to do something illegal – but the logs don’t prove anything, because the data they record can be forged.

There is an article on Slashdot discussing the problems with this proposed legislation:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/131224

I urge you to contact your Senators and House Representatives and ask them to vote against this proposed legislation.