What Cheer, Netop?

I happened across this little quotation from the head of NASA a little while ago:

In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep airing May 31, 2007 on NPR News' Morning Edition, Griffin said the following: "I have no doubt that global -- that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change.

"First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

The attitude displayed here reminds me of one I have seen elsewhere, too. For instance, a member of a university department consisting almost entirely of white men reacted to the suggestion that, among her other good qualities, a female candidate might bring some balance to the department with, "Yes, because gender is the only important thing to consider in hiring" -- the unintended implication being that you can tell which departments don't have sexist hiring practices, because they're the ones that are entirely male.

In other words, there are processes in place which have as (sometimes intentional but often unintended) unfortunate byproducts -- global warming is at least in part due to human activity, and the continued dominance of men in positions of power is because of various societal biases (not all of which are explicitly sexist). Measures to counterbalance these forces are then criticized because they explicitly are taking steps in the opposite direction -- we want to change human activity so that global warming slows down, and we want to enact policies explicitly to give women easier access to positions of power -- but the people who criticize these practices don't seem to spend much time worrying about the existing institutional problems. (Usually the people in question benefit from the existing institutional biases, of course. This may or may not be something that they explicitly consider in coming to their conclusion, though; I think a lot of people just have never noticed the institutional problems because they aren't adversely affected by them, and they seem like the natural order of things.)

So causing or reinforcing the original problem is basically OK as long as it's not intentional (or if the intention can be plausibly denied), but trying to fix it is problematic.

I don't say that various solutions to global warming, or to bias in the workplace and elsewhere, aren't problematic, or that discussions of their possible problems is bad, but it would be nice if people who oppose, say, global warming solutions because they try to change the environment would acknowledge that human activity is already changing the environment and that that, also, is a bad thing.

I figure the recent spate of cute kitten pictures going around means that this is finally time to give djswifty the recognition that is rightfully his: http://djswifty.livejournal.com/139135.html

By the time they read this people will have already heard the results somewhere else, so this is a little pointless, but anyway.

I'm getting this from http://www.beloblog.com/ProJo_Blogs/politics/ .

Whitehouse (D) wins over Chaffee (R) in the Senate. Current vote count: 205,275 to 178,550.

Carcieri (R; incumbent) barely beats Fogarty (D) 197,016 to 189,099 for Governor. Wonder if there will be a recount?

The casino proposal went down, 136,406 to 231,982.

Proposal 2, restoring voting rights to felons, looks like it will pass, 181,885 to 172,758.

Looks like most of the budget questions passed, with the exception of Question 7, the Fort Adams State Park bonds (which katrinkles convinced me to vote for).

There were a bunch of local Providence initiatives on the ballot also. Looks like they all passed except for question 12. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find out which question that was, so I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to find out what that means.

Letters to Rhode Island's U.S. senators and representatives have been written, addressed, and stamped. (I included Patrick Kennedy for the heck of it, although he technically represents Rhode Island's other district.)

Now is the time on Livejournal when I talk about things I know nothing about.

There's been lots of discussion of network neutrality regarding Internet access lately. I have heard a lot of rhetoric about this, most of which seems to rely on things I know not to be true, so I wanted to write down my own current thoughts on the issues. Hopefully people can correct me when I make my inevitable errors.

One point that seems obvious but which might bear repeating is that everyone with a network connection pays for it. An obvious example is that I pay my cable company every month for my ability to access the Internet, but what seems to not necessarily be understood is that any organization out there with a website is itself either directly or indirectly paying for its access also. Since I'm just me and only need enough Internet connectivity to send my email, do my web browsing, and take care of my other fairly basic needs, I don't need that much bandwidth; Cox lets me download information at a rate of up to 4-5 megabits per second. On the other hand a really big site might have multiple 155.52 Mbit/sec connections to handle all the incoming and outgoing network traffic, and they would pay a pretty penny to their own Internet service provider for that service.

Network neutrality means that when I try to access a site, or use a particular service (like instant messaging, or sending email, or using an Internet telephony service like Skype) my ISP handles my requests like any other request. That doesn't mean that I'll be able to access all websites equally quickly -- there may be network problems, or the sites may have purchased different amounts of bandwidth from their own ISPs -- but my ISP is supposed to do the best it can and not give preference to network connections to one site over another.

Why would it want to discriminate? It is pretty easy to think of some nefarious reasons for doing so -- for instance many ISPs also provide phone service and may have reason to wish that Internet telephony would die a quiet death -- but there are also more legitimate reasons.

The argument I've heard from the ISPs is that they have been giving big, popular websites like Google and Amazon a free ride. In a way that's not true -- Google and Amazon are, as I said before, paying for their Internet access just like anyone else. But there's also a grain of truth of it.

Think of spam. Ignoring for a moment the more nefarious kinds of spamming, which involve sending mail using hacked computers, spammers send mail using bandwidth they've paid for. But they also inflict additional costs on the recipient servers -- the vast majority of mail received by American On Line's mail servers is spam, for instance, and they have had to invest in additional mail servers and, quite possibly, additional bandwidth to accommodate that huge influx of spam. (Some of the antispam schemes involve trying to get the spammers to pay part or all of the money required to handle their traffic.) AOL can't get the money for this additional infrastructure from the spammers, so it has to get it from its users. Ultimately this could result in lost business for them.

There's an obvious difference between a spamhouse and Google in that users actually want Google's services whereas most would be just as happy if all spammers fell into a hole in the ground and disappeared, but in terms of the cost to the ISP on the receiving end of the data and the potential consequences thereof the analogy is still there -- Google and Amazon are paying to send their information, but it's up to the consumer (or the consumer's ISP) to pay to receive it. The ISPs see all the money that Google and Amazon are making and think, hey, they're making that money using our bandwidth! Some of that money is rightfully ours! And further they say: if we could charge sites like that extra money, that would give us incentives to make some really kickass high-bandwidth pipes to access them! That would be good for everyone!

That's more or less the case for doing away from network neutrality as I understand it.

OK. The logical question is why, then, I am opposed to getting rid of network neutrality.

It seems wrong that my ability to access Livejournal (say) would depend on some side-deal made between Cox and Six Apart. I feel like I've already paid Cox to give me access to Livejournal (among other sites obviously), and I've paid Six Apart to let me do stuff on Livejournal, and so what else should be needed, really? Perhaps this is too much of a knee-jerk reaction to be taken seriously, though.

It seems like the system would be complicated. Would a content provider have to make a separate deal with every little ISP to give its content the desired kind of priority? If not, wouldn't that result in a bandwidth cartel that is able to set prices to get premium access to its users as it liked?

There is already a problem with websites that are destroyed by their own success; you've got your cute little site that sells whatever, and people start to notice your site and think it's cool, and more and more people start to visit it until -- boom! -- you run out of bandwidth and either have to shut down or find the money somewhere to pay for more. Getting rid of network neutrality seems like it would just exacerbate that problem -- it would be another barrier to entry for small sites just starting out.

Your comments, as always, are welcomed.

Everyone respond with your own ironic, cynical, jaded bumper sticker about voting! C'mon, it'll be fun! In an ironic, cynical, and jaded sort of way!

You can use the following template if you want (be sure to check off the 'Don't auto-format' button if you do, though, and use the 'Preview' option until you've got it looking just right) or something of your own devising.

<table border="1" align="center">
<tr align="center" bgcolor="#993333">
<td>
<big><b style="color: #DFF">I'M AN UNDECIDED REGISTERED VOTER</b></big>
</td>
</tr>
<tr align="center" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<td>
<small><b>AND</b></small>
</td>
</tr>
<tr align="center" bgcolor="#333399">
<td>
<big><big><big><b style="color: #FFD">I MIGHT VOTE</b></big></big></big>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

which gives you:

I'M AN UNDECIDED REGISTERED VOTER

AND

I MIGHT VOTE

There you have it.

( other examples )

Conventional liberal wisdom four years ago:

The two eldest members, Justice Stevens, 80 and Chief Justice Rehnquist, 75, are expected to retire over the next four years. Court-watchers have predicted that Chief Justice Rehnquist will retire if George W. Bush, Jr. is elected president in November.

And in 2002 speculation continued:

For Rehnquist and O'Connor, the story is different. Both have signaled, although subtly, that they were each waiting for a Republican administration to resign. Rehnquist—who is 78—famously told Charlie Rose last year that "traditionally, Republican appointees have tended to retire during Republican administrations." Now while this comment could portend nothing more than the observation that "traditionally, Republican appointees tend to wear burgundy loafers" might have, folks in the Supreme Court tea-leaf racket have tended to interpret this as his promise to depart the court when the conditions for replacement with a like-minded conservative were best.

Justice O'Connor, who is 72, has similarly been making noises that rhyme with "retire" for some time, although the also famous election-night 2000 suggestion that she'd step down if Bush gained office was made by O'Connor's husband, John, not her. The other piece of O'Connor gossip, since the days of Bush v. Gore, has been that she would rethink retiring if the chief justice's stripes were offered to her.

And this was supposedly written in 2003:

Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra O'Connor both expressed a desire to retire and be replaced by a conservative judge within the 2000 to 2004 timeframe prior to the time when they presided over the case of Bush vs. Gore.

At a party on the night of the election Justice O'Connor expressed dismay when she heard the news that Florida was initially called for Al Gore.  Her comments that night were "This is terrible!"

I figured that someone would have retired by now. It's good to be wrong about some things.

(I should note that the Slate piece I quoted above [the second quotation] ends up being very skeptical that any of the Justices would retire any time soon.)