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... more
I asked on Ask Metafilter where I can find a good review site for TVs. Nobody has come up with a great answer yet.
I think this is a real problem with review sites these days. I'm getting fed up with the choice of information they do or don't provide, and the quality of the information that they offer. For example, nearly every site seems to value the consumer review. Why?
Consumers are a picky lot. I have been a technology advocate for may of my friends. They'll ask me what hardware I like for a specific function, and I tell them. But I've learned to add that tag line on the end: "That's what I would do, which is not necessarily the best for you." Often I'll tell them what would work for them, if I know, which I often don't because I'm not shopping for them. Likewise, there are two problems with sites that provide only consumer-based reviews.
First, I have no idea of the technical knowledge of the reviewer. If the reviewer is a 70-year-old book author, she might really enjoy her TV, but when it comes down to actual performance, it might really stink.
Second, most consumer reviews are typically "I liked X, I didn't like Y, you should [not] buy this." They don't detail the item itself so I can make my own determinations or search for answers in the review. So if I wanted to know how many HDMI inputs a particular HDTV provided, I'd usually be at a loss with consumer-only review sites. Finding specs for a class of electronics from differenct manufacturers is a pain.
So consumer-only review sites aren't complete. What else? more
You've had a digital camera for a long time, and you're savvy enough to experiment with your digital photos online. You've got a Flickr account or a Zooomr account, and you've been sharing your photos with distant friends and family for quite some time. Mom and Dad have no trouble using the web these days, so they can easily peruse your photos to see what you've been up to.
Last year, your parents got digital cameras as a gift, and they've really enjoyed the savings compared to film-based cameras. You can just take the camera's memory card to Walmart (or wherever) to print out only the pictures that you want to keep.
Well that's great, but there's a problem. Mom and Dad, wouldn't it be nice if you could share your photos with your friends and family just like your kids do? How do we do that, anyway? Here it is, plain and simple. more
I wrote a linklog post a while back that pointed to this "instruction manual" for being an assassin. I thought it was an interesting idea, even if the manual itself is lacking quite a bit. (And rightly so, because it shouldn't be so easy to learn these things over the web.)
After a while, I started getting comments of people looking to become assassins. They were looking for training or something, I'm not exactly sure. I played along in my comments, telling them that they needed to find an "admission counselor" to get into our program. Obviously, they would not actually find such a counselor here, but they might spin their wheels trying to get into our exclusive (and reclusive) club.
Whether these folks have started taking this thing seriously, or are just playing along, I can't say. It's disturbing that there are so many reputed young people that have interest in this line of work. It's disturbing that so many other folks seem to think they know anything about assassination. The comments both on the post and still in the moderation queue are replete with messages of, "It's not like you see in the movies, fools." As if those people even know. But why are these people even coming to my site based on a one-sentence link? more
Waking up is often terrible for me. I'm not sure why our mattress is doing this to me, but I occasionally wake up with really crisp back pain, and headaches that last all day.
I'm sure that whatever causes these things is something that happens while I'm sleeping. Whether the headaches are related to the mattress I can't say for sure, but I know that the back pain is.
Recently, Berta and I went shopping for a new mattress. Partially because of these issues, and partially because of our house planning. Our new bedroom is much too small for our Queen-sized bed (yeah, but if you saw it, you'd think it was a twin compared to the room size), and we needed a guest bed anyway. To this end, we visited the Sleep Number store in the Exton Mall and chose some beds that we could blow up. more
