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I've booted up the good old XBox 360 over the past couple nights to play some more Oblivion. I downloaded a dashboard upgrade that was waiting there for me. I'm not really sure what the hooplah is. I mean, I'm glad for background downloads of content, but those downloads are just about as difficult to get to as they were before.

I watched this whole video last week about what the improvements were going to be, and background downloading is really the only one that struck me. Not that the whole thing needed an overhaul, it's just when they produce a 20 minute video about changes to Live, I expect -well- changes.

While I was poking around in the dashboard, I noticed that there were some new content downloads available for Oblivion. I bought two of them, and will probably return for the third. The first is an armor pack for horses.

Horse armor doesn't seem like a big deal at this point. I've completed the Dark Brotherhood quests and am now a Listener, so I've acquired the horse Shadowmere. I don't know if you've noticed this, but Shadowmere can't be killed. He goes unconscious like all story-important NPCs in the game. Shadowmere is also cool because he is a black horse with red eyes. If they glowed it would be more cool, but their metallic look is still pretty neat.

The trick is that Shadowmere is always getting in the way when I'm trying to kill things outdoors, and always getting clobbered. Just last night I took him out with a Storm Atronach familiar I had summoned, and the two of them wandered around some ruins killing all sorts of things summoned by some lich that was floating nearby. Silly horse. So the armor was handy, even if a little impractical.

The other thing I bought was Frostcrag Spire. It's a tower up in the mountains that when added to the game becomes part of an inheritance left to you. Once the property of some kind of wizard, the tower has many obvious treats that wizards might enjoy. You can re-furnish the place to enable these features by buying packs of things from a woman in a specific shop in the Imperial City.

I spent all of the gold I had refitting the place. What's really ironic is that I can carry around 15,000 gold pieces wherever I go, but I can't carry a 2000gp cuirass out of a dungeon, and end up ditching it just so I can walk. Bah!

Anyway, with these extra enhancements to the tower I can now enchant items, create new spells, and summon familiars all within my own "home". The vault in teh basement now has chests for storage, and there is a complete alchemy lab and garden of all sorts of plants (including a nirnroot!) ready for use. Also, there is a platform with teleport pads that zap you off to any mage's guild in the game.

So that was fun to do after having the tedium of paying my price for killing a member of the mage's guild on a thieve's guild errand. What a hefty price, too: 20 piles of vampire dust and 18 daedra hearts. Those things are not easy to come by. Do you know how many vampire nests and Oblivion gates I had to raid to get that stuff?

Yesterday I stopped at the store to get a copy of Big Brain Academy for the Gameboy DS. It's not as good as Brain Age.

Particularly, the characters in Big Brain Academy are pretty sad. There's this sock-like "professor" thing. He just twitches a lot as an animation. I would have preferred they used a disembodied voice.

Some of the tests are a little odd, too. For example, one of the tests wants you to identify objects based on their silhouettes. You get a certain amount of time to identify as many sets of these as you can. The game uses only one stationary object on the first set, and then gradually adds more, and gradually makes them move in different complicated patterns.

Eventually you get to a set where four objects that all look vaguely similar to each other are all spinning very fast on the same point on the screen. I don't see how it's possible to accurately tell which one is which!

I also do not like the coin-value game, in which you have to compute which side of the screen has more money in change. The size difference between quarters and nickels in real life is much more substantial, and I'm always confusing the little graphics on the tiny DS screen. Note that the screen is about four quarters across, and the game could display about 7 quarters across. That's quite a size difference.

Other games are pretty crafty. The weighing games are enjoyable. You need to select the item that weighs the most based on its appearance on balances with other items. This game requires math and logic.

I haven't played the whole thing through, so maybe it improves, but it just doesn't seem as enjoyable as Brain Age. Brain Age also graphs your progress over time and compare it to other users on the same cartridge, which I didn't see in Big Brain Academy. This is a really nice feature of Brain Age, because it really gives a sense of accomplishing something.

All of these games are keeping me busy while I should be rebuilding my computer. I've got the OS on there, and not much more. Right now, I'm held up with what antivirus I want to install. Should I go with Avast, which I was using before but seemed to be slow, or go with NOD32, which is said to be fast and thorough but has a yearly fee? Pat would likely suggest OneCare, and I would use it, but I don't think it will work with my firewall, and I'm not willing to give up Outpost, which is the only thing installed on the computer right now apart from the OS, drivers, OS patches, and EAZ-Fix.

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I preface this piece with the warning that my political rants are usually uninformed screeds of little value, but I hope that you at least find enough value in what I've written here to become interested enough to search out and find more information on your own.

What is Net Neutrality?

I use Vonage for phone service at home, even though Verizon provides my broadband internet connection.

Verizon obviously could provide my phone service, but I choose to use Vonage, which provides very good phone service using my existing internet connection at a cheaper rate than what Verizon would.

Network Neutrality is what prevents Verizon from restricting my access to Vonage's service based on the kind of data that we exchange.

Without net neutrality, Verizon could dial back the amount of bandwidth that Vonage's service usually uses to complete my calls, making my calls garbled and unintelligible. Technically, they wouldn't place a restriction on my use of Vonage, they would simply reserve their best service for their own phone service, relegating services like Vonage to use what's left over.

This is just the beginning of bad things that could happen as a result of letting service providers select who gets the best bandwidth. An example of a more globally-affecting change might be helpful...

If anyone could pay an ISP to provide better access to their content, then a news company like CNN could pay an ISP to make the broadband content of other news networks undesireable.

This would be like making all channels on TV fuzzy except for CNN. Sure, you could still see the other channels, but if you wanted the best quality (of picture, not necessarily of content) you would tune to CNN.

Imagine if some news agency slanted toward promotion of certain propaganda took over broadcasting. We already have a significant problem in this country regarding the reliability of news sources and the bias they provide. The internet is often talked about as our last bastion of potential truth in news - where enough people can write the news that you can filter for the truth and belief from the sum of what's available online.

Internet news is not perfect my any means, but at least you get access to the whole view. Ending network neutrality will allow censorship on the internet to be dictated by whoever spends the most money. It allows ISPs to hold ransom the segments of the internet that people want most until someone with content to offer pays their extortion fees.

The opponents of network neutrality are the people who stand to benefit most from its disintegration. They are the companies that provide your network, the ISPs and the equipment manufacturers. They cry a sob story of how innovation on the internet will be lost unless they can charge more of the providers that use more of the network. This is bogus, an I can explain why.

All of these companies already pay for the access that they have. If the telecoms wanted more money for infrastructure, they could increase their prices for general access to the internet. And they do: Just like we would pay more for DSL than dialup, the major content providers already pay more for their OC3s (really big pipes) than their T1s (smaller big pipes).

Instead of considering the overall bandwidth that these content providers pay for and consume, the ISPs want to charge more for premium bandwidth for the services provided by those companies. They want to be able to charge Google more for video content because it's video content. Nevermind that they're already paying for the bandwidth that would transfer it to you.

I've heard the analogy that paying extra for that premium bandwidth is like how trucks pay extra taxes for use of highways. That's nonesense. The internet is not a physical structure, and the parts of the internet that are physical require no additional money to maintain if all content producers are provided equal access.

I've heard the first-to-fire idea, where the ISPs remain in a stand-off waiting for the first of them to throttle bandwidth and bear the ill-will of the people. There are flaws in this argument. First, many people only have access to one or two ISPs, so the choice between a network neutral ISP and a non-neutral ISP could mean a significant change in infrastructure and behavior for the consumer. Second, most people wouldn't even know that sites were being throttled, they'd just switch to the ones that weren't (which is the real evil hidden in this policy change). Third, Assuming one ISP does do the stupid thing, that breaks the "cold war" and suddenly everyone's doing it!

I've heard this FedEx analogy, which is also bogus. Yes, you should be able to pay more for a package to be delivered overnight than with the delay of standard ground shipping. But your non-neutral internet isn't paid for by you. That is, the consumers don't tell their ISPs, "I want to pay for improved perfromance of Site X." Site X pays for that performance. So this creates two problems: If you really wanted Site Y instead, but they don't pay, you're hosed. When you finally get tired of the lag of Site Y, Site X charges you for access to compensate for their upgrade.

I've heard folks argue that telecoms would not do such a thing because it's bad for business. But they already are! You've heard of Craigslist, right? Blocked by Cox. Craigslist is not some small site, either. This is an instance of an ISP blocking other content for its own self-interest.

To say that telecoms will sit idly by not making more money from something over which the restrictions have been lifted is to assume that all of those companies are incredible consumer advocates, which if you read the same proposed legislation, obviously is untrue. Other parts of the proposed legislation could lower consumer bandwidth fees by $30 - $40. If that weren't true, I would tend more toward belief that I wasn't already being fleeced.

Some folks don't want the government to regulate the internet. I'm not suggesting that the government regulate content. I'm suggesting that the government specifically disallow the regulation of content. How is ensuring that the price is fair among consumers and publishers of internet content much different from the regulation the government already imposes on telephone service?

To bloggers, network neutrality is the idea that makes your opinion on any topic just as easy to obtain as the paid authors from the media and industry.

Imagine if access to your blog was throttled back in favor of some other person who had "paid" for better distribution of their higher opinions of the policies or opinions of an ISP. That's just part of what we're talking about.

Obviously, there are opinions contrary to mine. I enourage you to read them and try to discover their flaws, if they exist. In fact, ZDNet has some info on why you should oppose net neutrality. Truth in Tech makes some very interesting arguments against net neutrality. Many on which I would disagree.

Of course, we're already too late to do anything in the house. Read more about what Google thinks about net neutrality and how to make your opinions heard. Read more about net neutrality on the net, while you can still hear both sides.

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