Net neutrality upside down

Today the Republican-dominated House voted to keep the government's hands off of the Internet or, at least, that is the story that is being widely promulgated. For example see here: House Republicans adamant that the government keep its hands off the Internet passed a bill Friday to repeal federal rules…

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Net neutrality threatened by U.S. House Resolution of Disapproval

From Free Press press release issued March 9, 2011: Today, the U.S. House passed a “Resolution of Disapproval” that would strip the FCC of any authority to protect our right to free speech online. This resolution will bar the FCC from enforcing its already weak Net Neutrality rule and from acting in any way to protect Internet users against corporate abuses. Following the vote, S. Derek Turner, research director of the Free Press Action Fund made the following statement:

“We are deeply disappointed that Congress has chosen to move forward with this dangerous overreach that would hamstring the FCC and leave Internet users unprotected from discrimination online. If this resolution becomes law, companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon will have free rein to censor free speech or block access to any website. “There may be much to dislike about what this FCC did and how it did it, but the fundamental point here is we cannot simply set up a false choice between what the FCC did and no policy at all.”
It is possible for the Senate to kill the resolution by getting 51 members to stand up for online freedom. Go here to take action. Note that this "take action" was first published when there was a danger that the "Resolution of Disapproval" would pass the House. Today, however, the Republican dominated House has actually passed the Resolution of Disapproval.

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Faith is Evolving, but Toward What?

As Darwin Day approaches (February 12), it is obvious that times are changing. America may be getting ready to face the Enlightenment, only a few centuries after our founders tried to encapsulate its principles in our government. On HuffPo, Paul Pardi recently wrote Religion is Evolving Before Our Eyes, about how American Fundamentalism and even Protestantism in general is suffering from ubiquitous communication. Few kids are exposed to only one point of view any more, so they are more likely to spot the discomforting inconsistencies of any given dogma. Small churches are closing their doors for lack of parishioners, and mega-churches pander to the basest prejudices just to pay the bills. But on NPR, in the wake of Obama's "Sputnik Moment" comment, Ursula Goodenough wrote It's Time For A New Narrative; It's Time For 'Big History' as a plea to create a more evocative narrative for science, to better win hearts to engage their minds. This is a real problem, as those best trained to understand an issue are rarely well equipped to explain it from the ground up. We need Sagans and Tysons for every school district; those who can evoke the excitement of understanding the universe. More and more people are turning away from their ancestral religions. Too many toward New Age woo, and some toward rationality. So the marketing arms of the churches work feverishly. They know that rational families tend to stay that way, but woo begets woo, and can be won back to the fold. They tirelessly try to pass laws to insert a religious wedge in science and history classes. Several states currently have bills pending to make it harder to teach 19th and 20th century biology or geology by inserting stories from ancient texts that contradict every discovery of the last 200 years. Here is a link with a list of current bills to establish anti-evolution state laws. Missouri, Kentucky, New Mexico, and other states all have at-risk public school syllabi. This may be a desperate last gasp of Fundamentalist anti-intellectualism. Or their fast grasp of schools could succeed, and leave America behind as other nations quickly accept the progressive mantle we are letting slide from our shoulders. One could see this as the epic battle of the end times. But it is not the world ending, but an ancient and arguably obsolete world view. But the battle may be a messy one. The forces of ignorance are tireless and prolific. After all, an unreasoning populace is easier to lead.

Continue ReadingFaith is Evolving, but Toward What?

The Day the Routers Died

This cute song is about a serious issue.

The Web is technically part of the Internet, descended from Arpanet. Way back when the addressing protocol was established, they figured that 4 bytes were sufficient. After all, there were about 10,000 computers in the world, and 4 bytes is over 4 billion addresses. It was the standard. But as personal computers emerged, and then the web grew, it soon became clear that this legacy would be a problem. So in the 1990's, they set up a new standard, IPv6. But there are already more websites than available addresses. This is done by clumsily sub-networking most websites. But even with this, we are running out of addresses. So, why don't Internet providers simply switch? Much like why we are still using the clumsy QWERTY keyboard standard, designed to patch around a technical problem that was fixed over 100 years ago. The routers are used to the old standard, and are expensive to change. Part of the pain is that the new protocol is completely different, so a router has to handle both and be able to translate between. But change they must. As of this month (February 3, 2011), every old IPv4 address has been assigned. There are no more. And networks that have not yet upgraded to the 1998 IPv6 standard will not be able to see new websites. Thus the old routers must die. Most of us are protected in a subnet, as on a home or office network re-routed from a T1, cable, or DSL connection. But your computer still needs to be able to handle the new addresses to let you see external sites that are no longer using the older protocol.

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Surviving the Blue Screen of Death

The BSoD, to those who may not know the term, is an epithetic reference to Microsoft's simple message that your computer has been hosed, so to speak. The infamous blue screen has been the incitement of many a sincere and profane invective, since it was first seen in MS-DOS. As a software developer, I have seen my share of BSoD's. They were relatively common in the DOS versions of Windows, that includes Win3.x, Win95, 98, and ME. The Win2k and XP versions were built on a more stable platform, called NT for "New Technology". I had never seen a BSoD in Win2K or XP until this week. I tried to install a webcam driver for an older camera.

At first, I was not overly concerned. In previous versions of DOS and Windows, a simple reboot let me go in and fix things.

Reboot failed to BSoD. So I tried booting to Safe Mode. Fail. I tried several other things, including Googling the exact message from my laptop. I spent a couple of hours tinkering with BIOS settings and running tests from a bootable CD. I removed the "new" old driver files. No luck.

In XP, the BSoD apparently means SOL. I had a dead system.

But, I do make regular backups. All my data files were copied to a USB hard disk a week earlier. And I had a complete clone of my drive from 7 months ago; full O/S bootable.

Now I had to make a decision. My 2005 machine has since been upgraded to the max RAM, and I've quadrupled the hard drive as pictures and videos required it. But if I have to go through all the work of updating an old disk and installing missing newer programs and grooming my newer preferences, maybe it is time to get a significantly faster new machine and do that work on it. I almost went to go buy one.

But in the name of parsimony, I first got my clone from the bank (safe deposit boxes survive house fires and burglaries much better than local backups), swapped the drive in, and booted. It worked fine. So I spent a whole day updating it. Windows, browsers, program updates, anti-virus program and updates, Quicken, Turbo Tax, et cetera, ad nauseum.

I have a USB adapter that converts any SATA or EIDE drive into a USB drive. But I could not use it directly on my desktop, because Windows "helpfully" finds system data from all bootable drives, corrupting the desktop. Wisdom is what you learn the hard way.

So I connected the BSoD drive using USB on my laptop via my home network, and copied all newer files using an XCOPY batch file . It took several hours.

Then I used my usual xcopy batch to make sure I had all the newest data on my regular USB drive. Then a day of testing to see if I can find anything I missed.

When I was confident that the drive pulled from the bank (bottom edge in the picture) was good, I had to clone it back to my newer drive (in the drive bay upper right). I used the EaseUS free disk copy utility. Another few hours. And much worrying about having maybe missed files, or (worst case) cloning the wrong way.

I had some real worries, because my older disk (the one that now worked) had 8 unreadable sectors. But after cloning, I ran a CHKDSK on the clone, and everything was actually okay. EaseUS copies all sectors, including those known as bad to BIOS. So after two days of work, I now have my 6 year old computer back to where it was 2 days ago.

Yay?

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