Summer is always so…summery. Not much happening. Little reason to blog every day. Of course, there is a whole lot of NYSDCA stuff to talk about, some MHL stuff to talk about, some Pups stuff to talk about, some Bump stuff to talk about, etc., etc., etc., but I just can’t get myself to talk about of it. I need a couple more weeks to get my brain back on track.
Meanwhile, this whole thing about the news from Camp WTF-a-Mucka being the number one most visited site in the US is, I have to admit, really staggering. Why anyone wants to know who chose which module or who’s falling asleep in what lab is beyond me, even if you’re the person who chose the module or fell asleep during the lab, much less the world at large. But what do I know? I obviously don’t have my finger on the pulse of what people want. Here’s the article from the Huffington Post that talks about the site’s incredible popularity: link.
I was going to write something up on net neutrality as a possible resolution, but my heart isn’t in it. The internet changes nature very rapidly, and today we have a lot of users transmitting or receiving an awful lot of data, and the issue of neutrality arises when service providers want to offer tiers of service in light of usage. It’s one thing to read your mail online, in other words, and another thing altogether to stream Lawrence of Arabia to your MacBook. Service providers tend to be either in competition with television/cable people, or to actually be television/cable people, all of whom have a vested interest of some sort on what content is actually delivered to whom. Net neutrality means they don’t look, but somewhere along the line it is pretty bizarre not to want to pay attention to content that you’re delivering blindly that is competing with other content. That is, there’s a lot of money behind this one way or another. And I guess you can find arguments on both sides, if you want to clash democratic versus capitalistic principles (have fun with that), but it really isn’t at the core a free speech issue as much as it’s a commercial issue. Service providers aren’t trying to stop you from speaking out, they’re trying to stop you from getting your episodes of “The Office” cheaply when they have a way of getting them to you less cheaply. So while this may be important, it doesn’t have much in the way of philosophical/ethical underpinnings. It’s just some popular issue that people argue about, but LD should be more than that. So, I don’t think I’ll be voting for this one, even though it is debatable. It’s just not all that deep.
Meanwhile, I have begun to start thinking about maybe doing some debate stuff real soon now. If I do, you'll be the first to know.
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