Net Neutrality

More than anything else, I voted for Barack Obama because of his support for Net Neutrality. I wanted Healthcare reform too, but Net Neutrality was the big issue for me, and I’d have simply stayed home on election day, had he not openly supported that issue. The FCC, as a result of Obama’s new appointments, is now trying to implement Net Neutrality regulations. It’s no surprise that there are many on the political right now getting up on their soap box to bash Net Neutrality.

During his campaign for president, I criticized John McCain for his computer illiteracy. It’s really too bad that the anti-Net Neutrality advocates (they would call themselves “free market” advocates, but that would be ignoring markets that exist almost exclusively within the Internet, like Google and Facebook) are being represented by someone like John McCain. Even though I think the anti-reform advocates are wrong, I also think some have worthwhile points to make, and deserve to be heard. Unfortunately, it seems the people standing on the tallest soap box in opposition, are the people who clearly don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about.

There’s an argument to be made that the FCC shouldn’t be allowed to make up regulations on their own, and then implement them without congressional approval. Even members of the EFF are making that argument. I think it’s a valid point, and I would prefer to see binding legislation on this issue, rather than just FCC regulations that could easily be repealed at any time when the next administration comes in. However, this isn’t an argument against Net Neutrality; just against the FCC doing things unilaterally.

The few worthwhile arguments against Net Neutrality itself almost all revolve around the idea that the infrastructure was built by private companies, and thus those companies should be able to do what they like with that infrastructure. It’s a good ideological argument, but it ignores the issue of private monopoly, and the government subsidies taxpayers gave to those private companies to help them build that infrastructure. But even though that argument is flawed, it’s still immeasurably better than the “new fairness doctrine” malarkey coming out of some people. Net Neutrality is about forbidding the regulation of speech on the Internet (particularly by ISPs), which is the exact opposite of what the fairness doctrine was all about.

I believe the United States has been the most innovative country in terms of Internet start ups. Without Net Neutrality, companies like DIGG.com, mint.com, and people just looking to make a little money with their blog through advertising, simply wouldn’t have anything like the opportunities they have had in the past. Most of the websites we go to regularly wouldn’t have been viable businesses if we allowed the ISPs to run the Internet the way many of those same companies run cable television.  We need to ensure America’s continued dominance in this space, and I don’t think we’ll be able to do that without Net Neutrality.

CFW, PSN, And DRM

Sony has recently blocked PSP users using the 5.50 GEN custom firmware from accessing the Playstation Store. This affects me, because I recently updated my firmware from GEN-B to GEN-D, which has resulted in all my PSN games no longer being recognized as legitimate, because I can’t log on to the PSN and re-authenticate my system.

I used to really like buying PSX games from the Playstation Store. Why buy a PSP game for $20 and have it locked to just the PSP, when I can buy a PS1 game for $10, and play it on both my PSP and PS3. The Playstation One section of the Playstation Store was a place for great deals, in my opinion, and I spent a lot of money there. For that reason, I’m rather disappointed that I can no longer play any of the PSN versions of those games on the PSP.

However, this would have been a much bigger problem had I not already owned most of those games in other forms. A few hours of experimentation, and I was able to rip a lot of those games from the UMDs and PS1 discs I already had. I bought those games from the Playstation Store for convenience. I didn’t know how to rip games before, but now that I do, I have more games on my PSP’s flash drive than I ever did when I could buy them from the PSN.

John Gilmore has said that the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The same principle behind that statement can be applied to tech geeks and DRM. So long as DRM doesn’t get in my way, I have no problem with it. But if it tries to stop me from doing what I want to do with my own property, I’m going to find a way around it.

Sony has every right to block people who use custom firmware from accessing the PSN. In fact, I think ensuring security on their systems is probably a very good idea (better late than never). But for people like me, the cat is too far out of the bag at this point; I can’t go back to the official firmware anymore. They need to offer more applications and retro games on the store, so people aren’t tempted by the homebrew apps in the first place. Emulators and e-book readers are the gateway to CFW, and if people find out how to rip games themselves (which isn’t all that hard), they won’t have any need for the PSN anymore.

Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize

I’ve come to the conclusion that the most interesting thing about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is how much people have lost their heads over it. I was confused by Obama’s win at first, but then I actually thought about it. The Nobel Committee votes for who they want to win. It’s not a math equation, it’s a gut-check/wishful-thinking/popularity-contest type of decision, and it always has been. That’s why I don’t think it aught to be taken as seriously as people seem to be taking it now.

Was Obama most deserving of the prize this year? Probably not, but if we were to go by the standards of history, I think it’s pretty clear that he is more deserving than Al Gore was back in 2007 (if Global Warming has anything more than an extremely tangential relationship to peace, I’ve yet to be convinced of it). I think people tend to forget how bad international relations were under George W Bush. It’s not in the media much, but our relationship with Russia was in very bad shape under Bush. So bad, that if things continued the way they were going, it might have actually come to military action. Obama comes in, nixes the military instillation (the “missile defence shield” which couldn’t do anything like defend against missiles) we were building on Russia’s door step under Bush, and suddenly Obama gets Russia to decrease it’s nuclear arsenal. Obama hasn’t done much to change our relationship with the nations in the “axis of evil”, but there’s a lot more to international relations than Iran and North Korea.

People rightly question the validity of the Nobel Peace Prize every year. The only real difference this year is that it comes on the heel of a popular Saturday Night Live skit claiming the person hasn’t done anything. Given how much people in this country take comedy as gospel truth, we’ve ended up with a lot of people being confused and angry that the rest of the world doesn’t do the same.

All I Am Saying, Is Give Healthcare Reform A Chance

It’s time I addressed the US Healthcare issue.

Improving the healthcare system in the United States aught to be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. We pay more per person than any other country in the world, despite the fact that we’re the only western nation in the world that doesn’t treat healthcare as a right. Put simply: We cover less people, yet pay twice as much. It is literally less expensive for me to import three bottles of Flonase from New Zealand than to go down the street and buy one bottle from Walgreens.

The problem is that, since we do spend so much more on healthcare than anyone else, it’s a massive part of our economy. Scraping what we have and starting over isn’t an option, when what we’d be scraping equates to a full sixth of the US economy. As a result, Barack Obama and congress have decided to come up with a lot of little proposals, roll them all into one big bill, and hope that solves the majority of our healthcare problems. The Insurance Exchange program, the various tax credits/subsidies/handouts, the various regulations being imposed on insurance companies, private employers, individuals…etc… The list is almost unending. But I think it’s worth a shot.

Libertarians insist that the reason healthcare is so bad is due to all the government intervention we already have. Republicans think it’s because of people exercising their legal right to seek retribution for perceived wrongs/damages. On any sort of macro level, neither of these assertions are backed up by either the states that have implemented tort reform already, or by the countries that have less government involvement in healthcare. The few specific benefits we have in our system over other countries (mostly involving drug research, and coverage for the wealthy) are outweighed by our inferior results on the macro level.

Many opponents of the various bills being proposed argue that these plans will eventually lead to a socialized single payer healthcare system. Lord, I wish it were true. Unfortunately, as proposed, even the “public option” would only be available through the Insurance Exchange (which most people wouldn’t have access to at all), and it wouldn’t be paid for with tax dollars. It would be far more akin to the US Postal Service than to Medicare, if the US Postal Service were only available to people physically incapable of delivering their own mail. I see no compelling evidence that the public options being proposed would come anywhere close to putting every other insurer out of business. Lord knows, I think that would be a good way of going about it: gradually expand a program like Medicare to eventually cover everyone, while slowly phasing out the necessity of private insurance companies.

There are a lot of things about the current plans that I don’t like. I don’t like the individual mandate. I don’t like the limitations placed on the public option (which may not even end up in the final bill at all). I don’t like how the Senate Finance committee has limited the Insurance Exchanges to be set up separately for each state (I think we aught to be able to choose from a national list of insurers, not just a state list)… I could go on.

But at the end of the day, I’m willing to give this a shot. The plan isn’t my ideal, and they’re mucking up the good ideas they originally had, but as things stand now, I have to import my Flonase from New Zealand, and that’s just retarded beyond anything congress has yet put forth on this issue.

Americans Don’t Understand The Facts, and Polls Aren’t Helping

A Pew Research poll from February of 2008 showed that 21% of American Atheists believe in God. I want you to take half a second to absorb the absurdity of that fact…

I’ve been watching the heath care reform debate with as much interest as I had during the last presidential election, and I’ve come to this conclusion: our government needs to completely ignore the opinion polls on this issue.

21% of Atheists believe in God. No matter what the issue, and no matter how seemingly simple the question, there is going to be a significant portion of the people polled that simply don’t understand the question well enough to provide a valid answer. Add to that the websites, TV ads, chain e-mails, and even congress people spreading complete falsehoods about what is and is not being proposed that it’s no wonder the American people are confused, scared, angry, and ignorant. Most of this stuff is easily debunked (FactCheck.org), but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s toxic to any opinion sampling.

You’ll probably have noticed that both sides of this issue like to quote various polls that support their position. The problem is that people don’t understand the issues to begin with, which means any poll about that issue will be complete crap. Add on top of that the fact that even the pollsters themselves can’t always be trusted to understand the issue, and that even the slightest word choices could skew poll results wildly, and we’re left with the conclusion that there’s no way to validly sample public opinion about the current reform bill.

Thus, the government should ignore opinion polls on the health care issue.

Thoughts On How Memories Work

To this day, I’m baffled by the number of people (I’m looking at you JK Rowling) who actually believe that the human mind is even capable of remembering an event perfectly.  That’s simply not how the mind works.  It’s all a series of connections, relations, and correlation.  No one memory stands alone fully intact.  They’re all, to some extent, connected to other strands of memory.  This reduces memory redundancy with similar events and situations, so it saves space.  In CS terms, it’s a form of data compression. Unfortunately, this type of compression is susceptible to false connections.  A dream is little more than a series of free floating memory strands.  When said strands get mixed up when we’re awake, it results in us remembering things happening in ways they didn’t.  A conversation you had yesterday being remembered as something that happened a week ago…  Something in a fan fic that later you remember as having actually happened in the real book/s…  Something happening in a dream that you later recall as something someone told you…

Or, in the case of this clip, something that didn’t happen at all, but was put together from other memories that actually did happen…

Put Squaresoft Up On PSN

Before Square Enix, there was Squaresoft, and the way I see it, with the notable exception of Final Fantasy X and the first Kingdom Hearts, all of Squaresoft’s best games came out on the original PlayStation at some point. Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, nearly all the Final Fantasy games up to FF9…among others. Seems to me that the fastest way to make PlayStation an RPG powerhouse again would be as simple as putting all the old PS1 Squaresoft games up on PSN. Forget about Xbox 360’s Infinite Undiscovery; Sony has nearly all of Final Fantasy at its fingertips just begging to be ripped and put up for digital download.

For a system that had so many great Squaresoft games, it’s criminal that that legacy is only being represented by Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation Network. I’m still very happy that FF7 is there, but I want more.

Finally, Final Fantasy VII on PSN.

American consumers can now download the PSX version of Final Fantasy VII off the PSN store. I highly suggest that everyone get it.

People have been modding their PSPs to play Final Fantasy VII since the system came out, and now you can finally play it on the PSP natively without any need for mods. Truth be told, I already have a PSP with custom firmware that lags behind the official firmware, but with a little howto I found here that wasn’t a problem.

In one of my earliest posts, I pleaded with people not to play Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core before playing the original Final Fantasy VII first. Well, here’s the best opportunity to do that. All downloaded PSX titles from the PSN store can be played on both the PSP and PS3, and you can even share save files between the two systems, so you never need to redo a section of game you already played through on one system.

I was slightly disappointed that this version of FFVII doesn’t have the PC version’s translation of the dialogue (the Cloud and Aeris conversation outside the Honey Bee Inn still makes no sense), and at 1,349 megabytes, it’s a little big for any PSP memory stick 4 gigs or under. That being said, I still think this is a great thing. I already own FFVII on disc, but it’s great to have a version I can carry with me in my PSP, and play on my PS3 regardless of what disc I have in the system.

Hopefully, Sony and Square get enough positive response from this that they’ll want to do this with all the old popular Square titles. We might even get some PSP remakes like what the Nintendo DS got with FF IV. Just imagine Final Fantasy VI remade with the Crisis Core engine for the PSP. Of course, I’d also just be happy with a Chrono Trigger port.

Mandriva 2009 Spring and Windows 7 RC

I’ve been toying around with both the Windows 7 RC and Mandiva 2009 Spring and I’ve come to one unavoidable conclusion: as long as the OS and applications are stable, my user experience doesn’t change much between different operating systems. Firefox runs on any OS I’m inclined to install on my computer, and that’s the application I spend the vast majority of my time in.

I miss comix on Windows (comical just isn’t as good), and I really miss the program repositories and updates I get in any decent Linux distro, but otherwise Windows 7 is pretty good. I like the Windows 7 dock a lot better than even the OSX dock, and I’m already wishing Linux had an equivalent. Windows 7 is also notably snappier than Vista, and as with all modern Windows versions, the video drivers put the Linux video drivers to shame. The OS is also rock solid; I never needed to restart as a result of a bug. All things considered, this is probably the best operating system Microsoft has put out since Windows 2000.

I also liked Mandriva 2009 Spring a lot. I installed it because I wanted to try out a more recent build of KDE 4 on an OS that was designed for it. I think KDE 4 is finally ready for prime time. They still need to fix the clock so you can change the default settings from military time to am/pm time with a right click menu (it shocks me that they haven’t done this yet), but it’s a lot more stable than it used to be, and I get fewer graphical bugs than I did before (though I’ve also started using a different video card, so that might be part of it too). Madriva itself seems to be a nice OS. Overall the experience didn’t seem as stable to me as Ubuntu, but that could just be that I’m no longer accustom to the quirks of the Red Hat derived branch of Linux distros the way I used to be. I recall rebooting more than I would with Ubuntu (and certainly more than I did with Windows 7), but I honestly can’t recall any one reason that occurred more than once.

Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that Windows has a giant “infect me” sign painted on it’s butt, I think Windows 7 would be a phenomenal OS (generally better than Mandriva, at least). I could get over the lack of program repositories and an inferior comic book reader without much trouble. The problem is that without trusted repositories, it’s hard to trust the programs you’re forced to surf the web to get knowing that you do have that “infect me” sign painted all over your OS. It’s ironic that the OS that most needs a trusted program repository built into the OS is one of the few that doesn’t have one.

Vi (Vim) and Eclipse

It’s been a while since I posted last, and a lot of stuff has happened. The most important thing that’s happened, though, is that I’m back at collage, and starting on a computer science degree.

The school I’m going to teaches Java as it’s introductory programming language, and uses Eclipse as the IDE for the class. I don’t have anything negative to say about Eclipse. It’s a great open source IDE if you don’t mind long load times and code completion pop-up windows. However, the teacher I have expresses frustration about said pop-ups all the time. I wonder if listening to him complain is as annoying to me as the various quirks of Eclipse are to him? Last class I decided to ask him what he preferred to code Java in. It turns out that he does pretty much all his programming in Vi (or Vim).

Assuming my instructor was a bit of a masochist, but also realizing that there was going to be future classes at my school that required the use of Vim, I decided to give coding in that command line editor a try. I spent an entire night working on the third CS project for the class in Vim, and only used Eclipse if I got stuck. As it turned out, I didn’t need to use Eclipse much at all. It took some time to get used to the lack of automatic code completion (which lead to a lot of errors early on), but after a short time, I stopped copying little bits of code over to Eclipse for debugging, because everything seemed to work fine in Vim. I must say that, for a command line utility, Vim is really useful.

But, I was still right about my teacher being a bit of a masochist. The project had us writing five separate class files, two or three of which we would need to edit simultaneously to get the program to run properly. That’s not something I enjoyed dealing with in Vim. It wasn’t too hard, but I really missed my GUI file tabs. Even gedit has GUI file tabs for multiple documents. Vim might be a better editor for programming languages that are less likely to require you to edit multiple files simultaneously, but Java doesn’t seem like a good fit.

My basic conclusion is that, if all you have is the command line, Vim is great (don’t talk to me about emacs; I haven’t coded anything interesting in emacs yet), but if you’re coding in Java and have a desktop GUI of any kind running, there are probably better options available, and if you like IDEs with lots of bells and whistles, Eclipse seems great.