Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Yesterday I spent seven and a half hours in a clean room, working on some wafers. Kyle and I were doing sputtering, which is basically where you take a disk of the material you want to coat you wafer with in a chamber that has Argon in it, run about a thousand volts through it to make plasma, then watch the pretty colors for about 20 minutes. It sounds like a pretty painless process, but before you can pump the Argon in, you have to pump it down to near vacuum (on the order of 10^-6 torr... which doesn't mean that much I suppose, but for comparison, normal atmospheric pressure is 730 torr). The pump down process ideally is supposed to take about 2 hours. BUT, that two hours is assuming you use a heat lamp, have a very clean chamber that you're pumping down, have a working pump, and plenty of liquid nitrogen. Of those four things, all we had was the liquid nitrogen. The lamp was inoperative, the chamber has been used a lot recently and wasn't especially clean, and the pump had a "high vac fail" which basically means you have to start the pump down from scratch. Kind of annoying, but I can't really complain about the 75 bucks I got paid for it.

So that evening, I didn't have much to do. Cortni is away on a short vacation before heading back to Pullman, and nobody else was online to talk to. I'd beaten all the games I have, and the netflix movies were still in transit. . . Basically I was casting around the internet for something to do. In my random wanderings I ended up coming across a short article about the recently failed "net neutrality" act, and I got to reading. It turns out that the guys who are running our country are a bunch of lame-brained idiots who have their heads so far up their own backsides that they can't see which end is up anymore. Basically, the deal with net neutrality is Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to be able to charge more for certain service than for other services. They claim that there is going to be a bandwidth shortage with so many people using bit torrent and watching internet TV and such, that it will cause the internet to slow down for everyone. Also, they claim that they have put a sizable investment into upgrading phone lines to support DSL and laying high speed cable lines, and they want to be able to recoup their investment based on what users are using the connection for.

Information is sent over the internet in little chunks of data called packets. Currently, ISPs don't check what a packet contains before sending it to where its going. Several large ISPs have decided that they want to be able to give higher priority to packets that contain certain kinds of data over others, based on both the end user and the website owner paying a fee.

The only problem with that, is that the whole idea is FLAMING RETARDED! First of all, claiming that there's going to be a bandwidth shortage strikes me a lot like oil companies claiming there's instability in the Middle East, and raising gas prices. Secondly, the ISP companies that are trying to make these changes are big telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T. The government (read, US taxpayers) subsidized the laying of new cable for internet and DLS lines in order to bring the internet to more rural areas. Letting these companies choose what packets get sent is a lot like the government contracting the building of a new freeway to General Motors, then restricting the fast lanes to cars that are built by General Motors. Further, one of the new internet applications that uses high bandwidth is Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services such as Skype. These applications let people make long distance and international phone calls completely free of charge. You can bet that companies like Verizon and AT&T aren’t very happy about this. Without any government intervention, there is absolutely nothing stopping these companies from giving packets used for Skype such a low priority that the data for all intents and purposes never gets sent.

Another problem with prioritizing packets is that there are hundreds of individual ISPs at the local level. AT&T and Verizon and those guys are affiliated with most of them, but they are still individual companies. Even if someone did pay the fee to prioritize their packets, when the packet moves from one companies zone of control to another, it would be downgraded to low priority anyway.

When there were murmurings that some telecom companies were starting to lobby the government to allow them to start prioritizing packets, a bunch of grassroots organizations popped up to try and stop them. The telecoms responded by funding a bunch of psudo-grassroots groups to try and argue their side which soon became known as "Astroturf" organizations.

Anyway, even with all the problems with having a non neutral internet, our great and wise senators and representatives sided with the telecoms. Idiots.

It makes me angry.

Oh, I also got a haircut. It looks good.