Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality
June 09, 2006

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…

Video Game Antics
June 08, 2006

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?