Silke finished her last exam today, earning a perfect 1.0 once again. After years and years of hard work, she’s earned the title of Diplom Psychologist. It’s been a very stressful six months of exams for her, and I’m very proud of all she’s done. I sure as hell don’t have that kind of self-discipline.
Now on to the PhD program…
Recently, the US House of Representatives rejected
Net Neutrality.
I’m not going to go on about the dangers of this, because
there are already plenty of good resources on the web that
cover that. Instead, I’m going to talk about the
the free
market, and why it doesn’t apply here. From the linked-to
post:
Good thing this idiocy was rejected. Let the market decide. That works every time it’s tried.
The would be a fine sentiment in a true free market, but we
don’t have one of those. To explain why, I want to talk a bit
about smoking.
Recently, the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana, IL, passed
an ordinance to
ban
smoking in pretty much all indoor public establishments.
Among other effects, this will shut down the two hookah bars
in town, which were not exempted.
Now, if there are really a sufficient number of non-smokers
(or even smokers who like smoke-free bars, like me), then market
forces should be able to handle this. There were a lot
of people behind the C-U
Smokefree Alliance. Not a majority by any means, but a lot.
Enough people that, if all of the vocal members were to regularly
patronize non-smoking bars, their business could support at least
three bars that are voluntarily smoke-free.
In Champaign/Urbana right now, there are very few restaurants
that allow smoking. This is without a ban. Restaurants have become
smoke-free because the market has demanded it. Travel back to the
70s and early 80s and look at the coffee house phenomenon. You
couldn’t find a smoke-free coffee house in those days. Today,
there is exactly one (to my knowledge) coffee house in
Champaign/Urbana that allows smoking, leaving at least 20 or so
that don’t. No laws, just the market at work for you.
Last Fall, I was driving up I-294 to visit my girlfriend Silke
in the Chicago area. I-294 is a toll road, and at the time, they
had massive construction going on to implement the new Open
Road Tolling. I waited over half an hour to pay a toll, because
there were no automatic lanes anymore, and they only had two manual
lanes open.
I asked the toll booth attendant why they hadn’t left a couple
of automatic lanes open. Sure, that’s not her job, and my voice
probably had an annoyed edge to it. But she told me to “shut the
fuck up”. Seriously. If she were a waitress at a restaurant,
I can guarantee that restaurant would never see my dollar again.
But it wasn’t a restaurant. It was a toll booth on the only
road that could get me where I wanted to be in a reasonable amount
of time, even with the congestion. Two weeks later, when I went
to see Silke again, I took the same road, and went through the
same toll booth. The invisible hand of the free market was
nowhere to be found.
Net Neutrality is, to be sure, the government interfering with
the market for the benefit of the consumer. But when people argue
against government interference, they seem to fail to realize how
much the government already interferes for the benefit of
business. Four salient points:
I am not saying we should abolish all of these things. I can’t
even imagine a modern world without publically-traded corporations,
for instance. What I am saying is that, as long as the government
interferes with the market to benefit business, it must also
interfere to benefit consumers. We need balance.
In the case of broadband Internet providers, we absolutely do
not have a free market. Most areas are served by no more than
three or four broadband providers, and many areas see an absolute
monopoly. Telcos and cable companies are granted, by the government,
the right to dig in my back yard to lay infrastructure. That’s a
pretty strong market advantage.
The free market is not going to fix this, exactly because the
government has interfered on the side of big business. We need
consumer protection laws. We need balance.
Strasbourg is beautiful:
Silke and I kiss in Heidelberg:
Silke and I also dance:
Dance, Shaun. Dance:
Also, Fred is cute:
I’m inviting all web and graphic designers to send me mockups for our help pages. I have generally good knowledge of proper page layout, but that doesn’t always translate to good-looking web pages. I’m certainly not the best person to be selecting colors, as I have red-green color deficiency.
Use my BeanStalk mockups as a starting point. These contain most of the block-level components that we really care about, although they don’t have any tables or figures. Feel free to work tables and figures into your mockups, bearing in mind DocBook’s model for them.
There’s an about page, which Yelp/gdu makes for every DocBook document. The contents of these pages are mostly generated on the fly from informational markup in the Docbook.
Introduction to BeanStalk shows a block quote. Purchasing Beans shows an admonition. Bean Storage and Care shows a program listing.
Some things to keep in mind:
Send your submissions to gnome-doc-devel-list.
So I got to play with Mugshot. It doesn’t seem to do a whole lot yet, but I know there are a lot of smart people behind it. I like that it’s trying to really work with the stuff people actually do, rather than just provide another collection of forums where teenagers can write in some incomprehensible bastardization of English.
That said, I have two gripes. First up is a color gripe, which people are used to getting from me anyway. Observe:
I think even non-color-blind people can’t read that text, and I’m certain that I can’t.
And then there’s this:
For the record, the name of the song is Русская Любовь. (I hope that however many parsers and manglers are sitting between me and the Planet don’t screw up that text.)
[Edit] Any chance of some Epiphany love?
