Okay, so everyone has been talking about net neutrality–particularly with the upcoming election and Comcast’s recent antics–as if the Internet is about to suffer some impending doom. But it seems like most people don’t really have a clue what net neutrality is, and everyone just takes the word of a few activists who insist that it’s necessary to prevent telecommunications companies from exerting their will on the entire Internet.

Now, I don’t disagree that a “tiered Internet” is a bad thing, but I think that calling for legislation necessitating complete net neutrality is an overreaction, and is very likely in fact a bad idea. There are reasons why some degree of non-neutrality might be necessary or even preferable, but these points seem to get lost in a big “you vs. The Man” war in which, if you don’t stop The Man, he might severely restrict your Internet!

But maybe we should educate ourselves before we engage in this debate. The concept of net neutrality seems straightforward–essentially, that all Internet communications should be “treated equally”–but gets complicated once we start discussing what exactly that entails. So I figured that I would devote a few posts in here to explaining what net neutrality is, why people think it’s good, and why other people think it’s bad. It’s not a simple debate, but it’s irresponsible to support net neutrality as a savior of the Internet without realizing how harmful it might actually be.

“As we move to a broadband environment and eliminate century-old non-discrimination requirements, a lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive.” -Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol underlying the Internet, and net neutrality proponent

“I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net.” -Bob Kahn, co-creator of TCP/IP and net neutrality opponent

(Hey, by the way, you definitely ought to leave comments on my blog all the time!)

Hey guys, I’ve released my acfdb project to categorize collegiate quizbowl tossups. Here’s some information about it:

You can use the database at http://www.carloangiuli.com/acfdb. It currently has all the ACF tossups since 1999 Regionals in it, for a total of 10,703 questions, all of which have been categorized. (Many thanks to everyone who helped out, especially Jonah Greenthal and Ben Cohen, who apparently have nothing better to do than categorize thousands of tossups.)

The idea here is to allow people to more effectively study particular subjects. You can search for tossups by text, but you can also find all tossups on a certain category. Tossups are all labeled by their year, level, author, and number, so you can easily find them in the original packets if you’re interested. I haven’t added bonuses, because this isn’t meant as a place to read packets from — it’s just meant as a study tool, and tossups are much more uniform and easier to study off of. ACFDB features a powerful Boolean search tool and can export the results to a text file.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

I have completely redesigned my website! It’s much more functional now, and it looks pretty good too (albeit simple).

I did have to give up my old front page, which I liked a lot, but maybe that design will appear somewhere else eventually… I did keep the general color scheme, except I toned it down a lot. And more importantly, I got rid of all the useless content, and significantly reworked everything else. Soon I’m going to change my blog layout to match the rest of the website, but that’s a big project in and of itself, so I decided to worry about it separately.

I also ended up making my acfdb project public in the process, though I’m not quite ready to officially announce it. That comes soon.

So, what do you think?

Yesterday was pretty interesting…at 11:30 AM, I was going about my business, when suddenly, I heard a very loud electrical ZAP outside my window. I turned back to my laptop, and noticed that my wireless was out. And that I was on battery power. Looking around, it didn’t take long to realize that the power had just gone out.

It sounded kind of like an animal getting a dose of high voltage, but whatever the cause, we were out of power for an hour. Oh well, just a random act of nature, right?

Then it’s 7:30 and we’re eating dinner, and we look outside, and Jaimie says, “It looks like it’s going to rain…” A few minutes later, it suddenly starts pouring. Not just raining, but Bloomington monsoon style. The rain has been going on for about two minutes when there’s a very bright flash of light outside the window, and an extremely loud CRACK of thunder. A car alarm starts going off. And the power goes out.

It appears that lightning struck the electrical pole right by our house, or somewhere near there, because the transformer on it looked somewhat broken, and the power company had to bring a guy on a cherry-picker up there to work his electrical magic. We got our power back two hours later.

I guess it wasn’t a good day for the power company. The worst part was when the power went out the second time, and I said, “Hmm…we do have a gas stove. We should bake cookies.” But alas, it has an electric starter! No cookies for us until the power came back.