Tag Archives: internet
Why SOPA And PIPA Are Bad
If you tried to visit our site yesterday, you may have noticed that we were not our normal, cheery selves. Like a lot of the Internet, we chose to protest legislation that is currently being kicked around Congress. Remember that nice pop-up the first time you visited the site? Yeah, that’s what that was about. If you hadn’t heard of SOPA or PIPA before yesterday, hopefully you have heard of them now. These laws will basically break the Internet as we know it and take us back to 1994. I’m all for time travel, but not like this.
This is important because it affects everyone. Yes, I’m talking to you, and you, and you. Do you like visiting our site? Too bad. If either of these laws pass, there is a good chance that this very site will be taken down. Do you like visiting any site on the Internet? Yeah, they’ll probably be gone too. See what I’m talking about? Big-time bad… Under this law, if you post video of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video on the Web, you can go to prison for five years. That’s longer than the guy who killed him will be locked up for.
If you listen to our podcast, then you’ve heard me say that the Internet is like the Wild West. Imagine if there were no Wild West in American history. Just think of all of the John Wayne movies that would have never been made. No tales of Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, or Wyatt Earp. But more importantly, think of all of the innovation that would have never happened. Would we have a trans-continental railroad? Possibly not since there would be nothing west of the Mississippi River. Would we have discovered the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone? Who knows?
If you are still in the dark about what SOPA and PIPA are and what their effects on your life will be, here are some articles that I strongly suggest you take the time to read. The people who wrote the articles are far more eloquent that I am and have a much better understanding of these laws than I do so take a minute and click on the links.
- Why SOPA Is Dangerous
- SOPA Will Take Us Back to the Dark Ages
- Today the US Senate is considering legislation that would destroy the free and open Internet.
And since I understand that sometimes it’s easier to watch the movie than it is to read the book, here is a very well done cinematic production courtesy of YouTube. (Which, I should mention, would be destroyed should SOPA or PIPA become law.)
If you haven’t done so already, please take a moment to call call those who allegedly represent you in Washington and let them know that you oppose what they are trying to do. Unless, of course, you hate free speech and innovation. Then, by all means, continue to do nothing as your rights are stripped away by greedy politicians.
You Have Options
We’ve all experienced it. You go to a webpage and it fails to load. You check another site which also fails to load. After 20 minutes of troubleshooting, you come to the conclusion that the internet is down. What do you do? Well, thanks to the folks over at Geeks are Sexy, we now know how to fill the void in our lives until our ISP gets their crap together and restores our connection to the World Wide Web.
Such A Tease
The Avengers teaser trailer that was shown at Comic Con has leaked onto the internet. You may want to hurry and watch it before Marvel notices and starts cleaning it up. If you happen to miss it though, you’re not missing much, it’s basically Samuel L. Jackson just talking with the Avengers logo on the screen. Not nearly as awesome as that Thor footage from last week.
Help Out the FCC!!
I cannot live without broadband. I’d rather have no internet at all, than have no broadband. If my area were to suddenly have NO broadband connection to the internet I would either have to move or sell all my computers. The simple fact of the matter is that computers are incredibly limited in their functionality if they don’t have a good internet connection. And as online services continue to grow at the rate they are now, it won’t be long before ALL of our electronics follow the same path.
Already, people go nuts if their Xbox Live or Playstation Home service gets interrupted. Subscribers went ballistic when the Sidekick service went offline. If mobile broadband were suddenly gone from existence, outright riots would ensue!
So why is it then, that it’s so hard to get broadband in many places in the United States?
The simple answer is this: Money.
The big telecom companies don’t see much profit from going out and wiring remote areas with broadband. As they see it, the millions of dollars it takes to wire an area for internet can’t be recouped by the few subscribers who live out there. And from a business standpoint, they’re absolutely right. Thing is, internet access is becoming less of a “oh, nice toy” kind of service and more of a “life doesn’t carry on without it” one instead. For people who think I’m making too big a deal about it, let me point out that I’m not just talking about your Facebook access, or playing FarmVille. The world won’t end tomorrow if you can’t see YouTube. What I am talking about is general data access; phone services that travel over fiber instead of copper, television service that is sent by IP, monetary transactions that happen millions of times a day . . . all over the internet. In many cases, people’s internet connections are replacing their phone and tv connections.
Can you imagine a school that has no data connection to the outside world? Student records are sent by mail. Health notices are never received. Important district updates never get to your child because no one at the school knows they are even there.
Way back in the day, this same issue was faced with telephone service. Not everyone had a phone line in their home or sometimes even in their town. To fix this, Congress passed a bill that created a special government fund that was used specifically to wire the whole country with phone lines. Phone service was deemed something that no one should be without. Times have changed, and we have a new service we can’t do without.
With this in mind, the FCC is launching a new plan to get the United States fully wired for broadband internet. Without knowing the how’s or who’s or where’s, the basic idea is to get some kind of interconnected broadband service to every American population center for an affordable cost. Before everyone starts to get worried about the cost of such a project, let me point out that the same budget/fund the was used to wire us for telephone service is still around . . . and not being used! Probably hasn’t been for years!
Not everyone is happy with this idea of “broadband for everyone”. Namely, the big telecom companies that have already spent so much on their own systems. The reason you might pay $19 for your phone service but $49 for your internet is not because the internet is more expensive; it’s because your service provider is trying to make back the money they spent getting the high-speed data lines to your home. If the government does that for them instead, they can’t charge you those fees anymore!
To prove that broadband access and costs are really an issue, the FCC has launched a new speed test at Broadband.gov. They also have an iPhone app that is free to download for you to use if you’d like. Your results will be paired with your address and your ISP (which it pulls automatically) and compiled for a nationwide assessment. The FCC is presenting their plan to Congress soon (like, tomorrow) so be sure to send everyone you know there today!
It doesn’t matter which political party you side with or how you feel about government spending, this is something that this country needs. Letting things continue as they are now would be a great disservice to the American people.
How Does Free Sound?
Years ago, it used to be that when I needed a program, I’d either buy it or find somebody who could give me a copy. With the internet the way that it is now, nearly every application you could want can be found online. However, downloading copyrighted software poses its own set of problems that may not be worth the money you’d be saving by downloading the latest version of Adobe Photoshop. Therefore, I propose an alternative: freeware.
Over the past few years, freeware has taken a giant leap forward. Most people are familiar with applications such as Open Office and Linux that have taken a piece of Microsoft’s pie. Whether these people have used these applications is beside the point. My point is that there are viable alternatives to expensive programs out there that don’t cost a dime. On this note, I thought that it would be fun to share some other free applications that I have fallen in love with over the years.
Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier
This is a great program that I just discovered a week or two ago. Have you ever tried to copy a file and received a stupid prompt that you could have done without? Or maybe you failed when trying to copy a file that was larger than 4GB to a FAT32 partition. I’ve done both and this little app took care of all of my issues. It’s great for backing up data to an external hard drive before a reformat.
Amic Email Backup
This is a handy application for Windows users that will back up your mail databases. As those who have worked tech support know, email is generally a big deal, especially to stuffy executives. It’s no less important to my wife who freaks out every time that just restoring her Outlook files doesn’t make everything “like it was”. This is a great tool that is easy to use and I highly recommend it.
DriverMax
I hate trying to keep my drivers current but it’s something that most geeks would recommend doing. DriverMax makes it easy by scanning your system and then telling you what needs to be updated. It will also export your current drivers for those times when you want to reinstall everything but don’t want to spend days looking for that rare driver.
I have a lot more freeware that I’d like to introduce you to but since I’m busy at work, I’m going to have to save it for a part two. Stay tuned…
A tangled web of tubes
The interweb is a funny place. There are a lot of people who use it everyday and have no clue as to how it works. There are people (myself included) who know exactly how it works, but also know that someone else knows more. Then there are the scary people who REALLY know how it works, how to get around it without being seen, and how to get whatever they want from it (they are usually tagged by the FBI . . . not kidding).
The problem with so many people being on the web and not knowing what is going on behind the scenes is that they leave rather large wakes in their path; all the crappy poems they wrote when they were mad at their ex, all the embarrassing photos you didn’t think would get out, that one video (yeah, that one). It’s all on there forever! And it’s traceable.
I’ve been on the web now since about 2000. I was using it before then, sure, but I wasn’t on it. Are you on it? Try typing your name within quotation marks into Google and hit search. What do you get? If you use my full name, I’m the first eight pages. If you use my nickname, I’m the first 10. It’s been that way for years.
That can be a scary thought, if you aren’t careful. With very little effort you can have my location, my email address, and my thoughts on most anything I’ve ever written about (and it’s been a lot). If you know how to search Google’s cache, you can see my forum posts for now defunct websites from seven years ago!
I’m not particularly worried, however, since I’ve always made it a point to be at least somewhat cordial to the online community. If you wouldn’t say it to your neighbor, you shouldn’t say it online.
This is where that first group I mentioned has really messed things up, I feel. Senator Stevens may have been horribly wrong in his explanation of the internet, however he did have one analogy right; you can’t just dump stuff on it. All those whiny rants about your parents/teachers/friends/ex’s that just don’t understand you, those pictures you’re so “embarrassed” about, the video you thought your boyfriend wouldn’t share; they are all up there forever. And just because you don’t think people know who you are, doesn’t mean you can just go off and dump whatever happens to be on your mind!! It’s not like the internet has any hidden corners you can just tuck away into!
Like Picasa? So do I. They are owned by Google, which means every picture you’ve ever uploaded to them has been indexed and cached for the world to see. How about Blogger? Same story. It’s not that I’m ragging on Google either; I use it for everything! I use it for my email, for my online documents, even for managing the back end of this very site! Using Google’s powerful tools, I can see every single person that comes and views the site, what page they were looking at beforehand, where they went afterwards, what ISP they used, their browser, their operating system, their city, their connection speed, and if they are a returning or a new visitor. It doesn’t matter if you are browsing through an anonymous proxy, it doesn’t matter if you’ve made your IP private, or your site private; if you’ve linked, clicked, or browsed through Stolen Droids, I know!
I don’t want to sound like I’m Big Brother, and you shouldn’t enjoy the web (or repeatedly visit our site and tell all your friends!). But like all things you do in public (and yes, the web IS public), you should practice restraint and civility. You can’t just assume that you can say whatever you want, and no one will know! The guys at Penny Arcade put it perfectly in a classic strip.
Just as an example on how interlinked the web is; I’ve now linked to Penny Arcade enough times that one of the authors tracked me down and I’m now his friend on Facebook. Imagine if I had been ranting about it and calling them horrible things instead! He’d probably have found me faster!
If I had to leave people with this post in the most concise way I can think of, let’s try this: Imagine that tomorrow the human race is wiped from the face of the Earth. Another civilization comes along and is able to recover the data centers that form the internet. What kind of person would they think YOU were?
Lego + Geeks = True Love
A fully functional PC built out of Lego
I have a question that has been plaguing me recently: why is it that geeks love Lego? One of my earliest memories is of receiving a Lego space set. It set me on a multi-year journey to accumulate as many of those bricks as possible. To this day, I am still drawn to Lego sets but, much to my wife’s relief, finances keep me from filling my house with them. I honestly don’t get it though. Why do I love them so?
I have a few theories about why we as geeks are drawn to Lego sets. The first is that we love to build things. Whether it’s building a computer or a model of the USS Enterprise, we like the process of assembling. I’m not saying that geeks would all like to be working on construction sites, our hands are far too delicate from years of typing on a keyboard for that, but our desire to build seems pretty obvious. Since we aren’t out working construction, we need to somehow appease our inner engineer. Enter the Lego.
My second theory is somewhat tied to the first. Beginning in 1911, geeks were playing with Erector Sets. In 1949, the Denmarkians began production on a plastic interlocking brick. Although I have no proof, I’m sure that in the minds of children, this brick was far superior to the collection of small metal beams found in Erector Sets. When the company that manufactured the Erector Set went bankrupt in 1967, a giant void was left that opened the door for Lego to thrive. Without the Erector Set readily available, how else would geeks satisfy their urge to build if it wasn’t for Lego?
Today there are numerous websites dedicated to the interlocking brick that Lego created and people from all over the world assemble at conventions to show their creations and to find out what new sets Lego has in store. When you add geek-friendly franchises such as Star Wars and Harry Potter to the internet and convention aspects of this hobby, it appears to create the perfect storm that allows geeks to be sucked into its vortex. Maybe that’s part of why geeks love Lego?
I think that I have answered my question. I believe that this can all be summed up in one simple mathematical formula: Internet + Conventions + Geek Properties + Assembling = True Love
I have the enthusiast’s remorse
I am an absolute technophile. I love seeing all the new gadgets that come out and what they can do for me. I love to think about how I can then modify those gadgets to do even more for me without me having to pay anything more. I’m a cheapskate, and an enthusiast.
The term “enthusiast” is not one I’ve used all that often to describe myself. If there were a scale to describe how much of an enthusiast a person could be, I’d imagine I’d be rather low on the scale. But the fact is, I’m still ON the scale. There is a very sad down side to being an enthusiast (well, there are probably a few); those same devices that you find you can’t live without aren’t usually everywhere you might need them.
Case in point (and most relatable example I can think of): you have standard, run of the mill broadband internet. It doesn’t need to be the fastest thing on the planet for this example to work, but it’s better than a 256k ISDN. You use it at home to browse, do email, read blogs, whatever. You then go over to your parents/friends house, and while there you try to show them something you found online (like our awesome website here) . . . only they are on dial-up. And slow dial-up at that.
That’s the downside I’m talking about here. To point back to Schmidty’s announcement of Chrome; it’s so fast and nice that it’s all I use . . . except at work where I have to use IE to work with Oracle and I nearly scream every time it takes 5 minutes to load a page simply because the browser is so bloated.
Well, there’s another device that’s in this category; the DVR. Call it a TiVo, an HTPC, a DVR, or whatever else you want, these little babies will change your life. Anyone who owns and regularly uses them will testify to you just how much they will change your life in regards to TV. I’m not trying to make them out to be like a religious experience or anything, but they really are that pivotal.
Your spouse wants to talk to you during the game? Just pause the show. Your show is only on at 1:00 AM? Set it to record! There’s an interesting documentary on squid that you know you’d be interested in but just don’t feel like watching it right now? Record it for later! Kids are killing each other? Dinner is on the table NOW? Don’t like commercials? Guests come over unannounced? You get the idea. Our favorite use is to record a whole bunch of shows the kids like and have them at our fingertips whenever we want to reward them.
Screenshot of Vista Media Center from MSDN blog
The down side is that not everything is hooked into a DVR. We don’t have one in our bedroom, so when I miss something important that was said I can’t jump back to hear it again. If there’s something interesting I want my wife to see, I can’t pause it and wait for her to get in the room. I find myself listening to the radio on my way to work in the morning and habitually reaching for a remote that doesn’t exist to jump back 15 seconds or so to re listen to something that was said! That’s how messed up I’ve become.
If your computer can barely run Windows XP SP2, I don’t want to touch it (sadly, that’s my computer at work). If you have a whole 5 channels on your TV, please don’t ask me if I want to watch anything (everything I’d want to watch is already recorded at home anyway). I know this makes me look like a snob, and to a degree I am one. But the secret fact of the matter is it’s just painful for myself and other enthusiasts at times.
Sure, we’re in a 1st world nation, with access to some of the best technology in the world (not counting cell phones where we seem to be permanently stuck in 2002), but I’m not interested in what technology could do for me five years ago; I’m interested in what it can do for me tomorrow.
