Interesting Stuff

Sorry the last entry was so long; there’s a lot of good points to be made on both sides of the issue. I shall endeavor to keep my entries shorter in the future. Despite its length, I believe that the previous entry is still worth reading.

There seems to be a whole lot of talk all of a sudden about net neutrality recently, with editorials from both sides as well as grassroots websites on both sides. The basic debate is whether or not ISPs should give priority to certain packets of data getting to/from your computer, based on certain characteristics of the data (its source/destination, the type of application that is sending/receiving it, etc). A bit of an anti-regulation overview can be found here, including a quote from the head of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Alan Davidson. I’m tentatively leaning towards the pro-net neutrality side, but I think there are good arguments on both sides of the debate here.

On the anti-neutrality side,

• It would be nice if VoIP and streaming video were given priority over, say, email, since they need to be received in realtime, while my email can arrive half a second late and I won’t really notice. This would make realtime applications run better on hardware that can barely support them, and shouldn’t make a significant difference on hardware that can easily support them or hardware that can’t do it at all.
• This sounds silly, but it is the ISPs’ hardware that delivers the internet to you. They can really do anything they want with it. If you don’t like what they’re doing, switch ISPs. I can’t think of any legal argument that really prevents ISPs from doing this kind of thing.
• Tiers of service have worked in many other businesses: airline tickets have first class, coach, economy, etc. Shipping has 2-day delivery, 3-day delivery, ground delivery, etc. This would be a similar system, and is likely to operate at a similarly useful level.
• As a general rule, free markets work better than ones that have been regulated by the government. If ISPs want to start partnering with certain websites to deliver their content faster than their competitors, I suspect a lot of business could grow around such a concept, and lots of people would make lots of money. This isn’t necessarily good for the consumer (it has the potential to not be bad for the consumer, however), but it’s great for lots of businesses, and probably good for the economy.

On the pro-neutrality side,

• There have already been past incidents (most notably in Canada) of abuse of this system, in which things like VoIP service from the ISPs’ competitors had its quality intentionally degraded.
• We’re already paying ISPs for broadband internet access; we shouldn’t have to pay them again for the same broadband internet access to websites that aren’t affiliated with them. Such tiering would divide the internet into many different clusters and make inter-cluster communication more difficult.
• Giving preference to packets of one sort of application over another will likely discriminate against any new form of application that tries to run over the internet, making innovation harder.
• The internet is sort of like a public good, and from an economic standpoint, government regulation (in the form of a regulated monopoly) often is best for the consumer.

This next is a very weak argument and should not be persuasive at all, but a lot of people I would consider “good,” including Google and the creators of TCP/IP are in favor of net neutrality regulation. A lot of groups I would consider “bad,” such as large telecom companies, are against net neutrality. The one exception is that Jim Sensenbrenner, creator of the PATRIOT Act and general foe of civil liberties and privacy, is pro-net neutrality and even introduced the legislation about it (though it was voted down for the moment).

What do other people think of the issue? I imagine I’ve missed some important points in the debate somewhere, and if you know which ones, I’d like to hear about them. Other opinions are always welcomed.

First off, Fema’s hurricane relief fund has had about a billion dollars in fraudulent expenses charged to it. Not only can this organization not put in good safety precautions given adequate warning, it can’t even seem to give out aid after disasters strike. I hope they get a good overhaul and turn into a useful and capable Agency.

Also, the Bush administration has finally acknowledged that Guantanamo Bay might hurt the US’s image abroad, and expressed a desire to shut it down. However, it won’t be shut down in the foreseeable future, because there isn’t another place to send the prisoners (they’re not related to the US in any tangible way, so they shouldn’t be tried in US courts, but if they’re shipped to their original countries, they will likely be tortured. This is what you get when you hold people from other countries for several years without charging them with a crime, let alone giving them a trial.). However, the Supreme Court is going to rule on the constitutionality of holding these people at Guantanamo Bay later this month, and they will hopefully aver that it is unconstitutional. We shall see.

After three years of investigation, Carl Rove will not be indicted for leaking Valerie Plame’s CIA status to the press (a more leftist article can be found at the LA Times). I predicted this a little less than a year ago: the laws are defined too narrowly to really be applicable to such cases, for the most part. This also brings the hopeful trend of indictments to a close.

It’s strange—the Republicans are celebrating because one of their own didn’t land in jail (I personally don’t think this should be cause for a celebration). The Democrats are making a lot of noise because even though Rove is not going to be charged, such an action was considered, and this somehow makes him disreputable (which is the opposite of the way the legal system is supposed to work, what with the presumption of innocence and all). The way I see it, I don’t think anyone has a good cause for making a big deal of any of this. and yet I’d be quite disappointed if this story, like so many other denouements, just went quietly into the night without anyone noticing. Ideally, I’d like the reaction to such news to be everyone going “huh,” and then returning to whatever they were doing, but this will never happen for any story of which I catch wind (I hear about them precisely because people make such a big fuss). I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting to contrast my reaction and the rest of the country’s.

Tom DeLay has resigned from Congress with a very divisive speech about the merits of partisanism and idealism. True to his topic, the speech elicited a standing ovation from the Republicans but hisses and walk-outs from the Democrats. His resignation comes amid a series of legal investigations about campaign money laundering and corruption as well as ethics violations.

Perhaps I simply hadn’t noticed before, but there seem to be a lot of politicians getting into corruption scandals and other legal quagmires lately (Tom DeLay and two of his aides, Jack Abramoff, I. “Scooter” Libby, etc). Perhaps people are finally getting fed up with all the crap that politicians keep trying to pull, and are finally doing something about it.

Today the Senate voted down a gay marriage amendment, 49-48 (it needed 60 votes) (thanks to mikasaur2000 for the link to the article, which is a rather good one). I watched the Daily Show yesterday, in which John Stewart debated the topic with Bill Bennett and made some excellent points. For instance, Mr. Bennett claimed that marriage was threatened by this, and gave a slippery slope argument that if we allow gay marriage, we might eventually need to allow polygamy and other commonly disliked practices (he also noted that in every religion and culture, marriage is between men and women). Stewart turned this around and made the opposite slippery slope: if the government can ban gay marriage, they could then go further and ban interracial marriages (which are also looked down upon in almost every religion and culture).

The thing that bugs me about this issue is that proponents of such an amendment say it’s necessary because otherwise judges will strike down the current laws banning gay marriage as unconstitutional. If such laws are unconstitutional, my first impulse is not to change the constitution to fit my whims, but to question my viewpoint and wonder if it could be incorrect. Imagine what would have happened if, instead of fighting a civil war, the government had simply made a constitutional amendment to allow slavery, since the majority of the country at the time was for slavery but could see a vocal and growing number of people opposing it? If we can make constitutional amendments for laws that would otherwise be unconstitutional, what keeps us from making constitutional amendments for all laws? It seems like the proponents of the ban are attempting to keep the courts out of the battle because they know the courts will strike down any such law, and that by making a constitutional ban, they can circumvent the courts entirely.

On an interesting but less significant note, China seems to be blocking Google and a number of other websites from the outside world. Although this in itself is not new, this time they’re causing a lot of inconvenience and people are starting to complain. In particular, Google has been censoring the results on www.google.com.cn but not on www.google.com (which until now could still be accessed from China). This is certainly not a surprise, but it’s interesting to note that this is starting to stir up a lot of discontent.

With any luck, there will be more news posts now that summer is in full swing.

Jim and I have played in two big bridge games recently, and even though I haven’t had a lot of practice this semester, we didn’t take last place either time! For those of you who didn’t know, the HMC bridge club kinda dissolved last semester, and I barely played at all. I only played one sanctioned game the whole semester, and Whitney and I had an atrocious 27% (typically, I don’t think people score less than 35%. Ouch! At least part of this was that Whitney was nervous about her first sanctioned game, and this threw off her rhythm. and I made a bunch of really stupid mistakes). Jim and I started off the summer with a disappointing 42% at a Sectional game, but still beat one of the 9 pairs. I don’t feel bad about that, because Sectionals bring out pretty tough competitors. This past weekend was the Worldwide Bridge Contest, where people all across the country play the same hands and are ranked nationally. Of the 14 tables playing in Minneapolis, Jim and I finished with a 48% game (just below average), which I’m quite content with. You can tell we’re not used to playing as partners: for the first half of the afternoon, Jim was sending me Rightside-Up Attitude Signals (we play them Upside-Down), and I was giving him Odd/Even Discards (we use Lavinthal Discards instead). Oops! Except for missing one loser-on-loser play that gave us a second-from-bottom board, I don’t think I made too many mistakes (though I had a few others). The neat thing about this particular tournament is that the committee that made the hands also made little booklets discussing how they should be bid and played, so you can learn what you were supposed to do from the experts.

At least the summer is starting off with an upward trend! Perhaps next game I’ll be above average. Also, I think I’m going to start looking for a second regular partner. Although Jim is a fantastic guy and I like playing bridge with him, he’s quite busy with work right now, and doesn’t have much time to play. Also, it seems like many people at the club (including Jim) have 2 or 3 regular partners, so they can play even when one of their partners is busy/sick/etc. I have no idea how to find a compatible one, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

Yes, I’m a big computer nerd. Feel free to skip this post if you’re not interested in (La)TeX.
The TeXbook is incredibly neat! →

Behold! It turns out that if you start with the proper background knowledge, this sort of thing is trivial, but no one seems to know where to begin learning about stuff like this.

Also, I’m going to be mentoring a high school robotics team this summer! Whee! I’m apparently going to be doing stuff on the software/vision side of things. They have really nice equipment, including a CMUCam2. It turns out that a $30,000 budget can buy a lot of neat toys.