So what can you do on the Moon that would make it so fabulously valuable? Beats me.
Well, you may have answered that question yourself: speculative investment. There are companies (and even individuals) who can afford to throw a billion dollars away on pure speculation. Let's say there's a 50% chance the land will never be worth anything; a 49% chance you'll eventually at least recover the costs and maybe make a small profit (e.g. in a century or two when moon tourism is viable); and a 1% chance that some discovery makes the land incredibly worth valuable. It might well be worth dumping some otherwise idle capital into securing a piece of the land at dirt cheap prices just in case it turns out to be a goldmine.
The real question is, who assigns property rights? What makes them meaningful? Maybe the UN should allocate a bunch of land to each country with a reasonable claim (i.e. viable spam programme) with the caveat that they actually have to stake out their lands for their claim to be cemented. Something like placing solar powered beacons every few hundred square kilometres, and after a certain deadline other countries can start beaconing "your" land (inaction would be an indication you don't want the land). While this won't be particularly appealing to most countries due to the enormous cost involved, if someone decides to go for it (e.g. Russia) then are the US and China and anyone else interested going to sit back while other countries get internationally-recognised moon real estate?
Realistically the US would probably just block the resolution before it left Earth, but it's an interesting idea: essentially forcing a space race with a real concrete, complicated mission.
You make an excellent point: As for the corvette, it's not any more of a compliment than the tractor is an insult. Corvettes go fast and look pretty, but aren't good for much else. Not exactly what we generally look for in code. Cool code isn't necessarily good code, and clever code is generally worst of all.
But that's not how the GGP described their use of the corvette, which was:
The Corvette went to the coolest idea|algorithm of the week.
Now, they didn't go into enough detail about the culture for me to be certain, but this does give me the impression that people would want to be awarded the corvette. If this is the case, then you have people competing to try to be clever and come up with "cool" ideas/algorithms, which as you say isn't necessarily what you want out of your programmers.
As for the tractor, ugly code isn't pretty. Ugly code is going to be a burden to the project, because if it "works" it still needs to be maintainable. Ugly problems can be solved with pretty code, but ugly code doesn't become pretty just because the problem it's trying to solve is even uglier. I got the impression that the tractor was something the coders wanted to avoid receiving. If it's not, then it's even more problematic because the last thing you want is your developers trying to compete with each other to write the ugliest, but working, code.
Also note that they said both toys often ended up on the same desk for the same project: this suggests the corvette isn't used to reward good code, merely good ideas, and it's no surprise that people trying to come up with cool ideas and algorithms wind up writing ugly code.
So what's the problem?
The problem was I was trying to make a joke, which obviously didn't work. This is what troubles me. I don't particularly care about and didn't give much thought to the practice itself, but now that I have it does seem like a silly idea with questionable benefits.
I haven't RTFA or really know much about this, but I thought the point of pair programming was that one did the typing while the other was free to really think about the problem and their solution to it. If you're both editing different parts of the 'document' (which would in this case mean code, right?) then isn't this the same as just splitting it into two files and having two people editing two different, but related, files? What's the benefit, aside from not having to compartmentalize your code as much (if that's even a benefit)?
I think using a tractor and a corvette is a bit silly. They're nothing alike. Tractors are excellent for the jobs they're intended to perform, while the corvette would be utterly useless. Giving a programmer a tractor for their code is, at best, sending a mixed message.
What I think would be better is if the cool coder got the corvette, and took a huge steaming dump on the desk of the bad coder. Now that's motivation, and it also makes it clear exactly what you think of their work.
Hmm. A blog is usually authored by one person, while a wiki is usually authored by many people. That seems like an important enough difference to be worth making a distinction. Also, a forum is authored by many people, but that fact is immediately obvious to even a cursory glance - not so on a wiki.
The terms annoy me too, but I think that's just because they're so overused. If you try to think of them as just words like any other, I think they do provide worthwhile meta-information about a site's content.
Uh, they weren't saying the Nevermind cover was "obviously meant to be a suggestive pose" - they were referring to the topic of discussion, the Virgin Killer cover.
It's hard to decide where to draw the line, but I can easily imagine the latter picture being posted to a porn site. The Nevermind one not so much.
Your superiority only matters if you can use it to accomplish goals that actually further your purposes. If it came down to an all-out war between the US and anyone else, then the US would win hands down, no question. But this doesn't serve any purpose of the US -- the local and international political ramifications of obliterating another country are unacceptable, even for the most gun-ho president. And no other country is going to start an all-out war with the US, because they know they'll lose. Being able to obliterate any country in the world doesn't matter if there's no way you'd ever do that.
Being able to kick the "bad people" out of a country like Iraq while allowing the rest of the population to enjoy the economic and social benefits of capitalist democracies is absolutely something the US wants to be able to do. It appears that, as mighty and all-powerful as your military is, they're unable to achieve the actual objectives required of them.
Also, what makes you think you'd only have to kill 150 million Chinese to destroy the country? I think you're grossly underestimating either the lengths people will go to to protect their country, or the population of China.
Well and good, but this particular conclusion was not based on masses of software. It was based only on the operating system kernels, which are likely to be of a higher overall quality than half completed, unpolished software.
Well, it protects you from the code execution problem (but is apparently still vulnerable to an "information disclosure" as a result, but I don't know the details) for this particular flaw. But using Firefox or Opera or IE6 also protects you from this particular flaw.
So when you said When a Microsoft programmer makes a mistake, they risk losing their job. you meant they risk misplacing their job, and not being able to find it again? Okay...:)
I said you get to hold them accountable
Yes, and any kind of meaningful accountability is going to have negative consequences for the person or people involved. If a lowly programmer makes a mistake, their manager and their manager's manager are going to held accountable as well, because it's their responsibility to ensure there's procedures in place to prevent mistakes being released and ensure the procedures are always followed.
So either the accountability is such that there's going to be a strong incentive for those involved to hide mistakes whenever possible; or the accountability is going to be on the same level as for open source software and therefore, according to you, either meaningless or non-existent.
Furthermore, you're assuming the person responsible still works at the company. 2 years is a long time for a programmer to spend in one job, and there's plenty of stupid security flaws and other bugs that are way more than two years old.
Here's the things you suggested:
Bonusses, vacations,
It's likely people will be very keen on retaining both of these, and not many people are going to be keen on signing contracts that say the company might deny your vacations on a whim.
required to stick-around and fix things late,
This assumes there's some kind of punishment for not staying 'til late, and can apply just as much to open source software -- so long as you're actually willing to follow through with a meaningful punishment. "Fix it or you're off the project."
reference letters,
A lot of open source coders will use their open source work in their CVs. I'm sure the Debian openssl maintainer used to have that on his CV. Do you think he'll be so keen now, knowing that when any potential employer searches the 'net for info on his involvement they're going to find out he introduced a bug which rendered all Debian-generated keys compromised for 2 years?
Also it's worth noting that this information is public and easy to find. Employers providing reference checks will usually limit themselves to confirming that the individual worked their in a particular position, and not make any comments on their job performance. It's just too dangerous, and the company doesn't benefit from doing so. Even if Microsoft does fire a programmer for writing really bad code, all anyone else will know is that they did in fact work at Microsoft on such-and-such a project for a period of time. Most employers would see that as a good thing. If the person involved thinks the people at Microsoft will actually warn people not to hire them - as unlikely as that is - then they can simply leave their time at Microsoft off their resume. Say they took time off to find themselves, or whatever. Or simply make sure the reference they provide likes them and will say nice things.
So in terms of accountability for future positions, there's virtually none in the commercial world because your blunders aren't going to be publicised for the world to see. You screw up in free software and it's going to be all over mailing lists and tech sites. Any time you apply for a job or contribute to another project, you have to be prepared to be asked "wtf happened with such-and-such a project". For the rest of your life. If anything, there's too much accountability for mistakes in free software.
Using this particular case as an example, the Debian maintainer made a pretty innocent mistake. This could happen to anyone. However, it was both a) in a very important package and b) not noticed for a very long time. Tiny innocent mistake is now a big black mark against his name for the rest of his life. If the
Possibly... unless they believe that a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo is inevitable, in which case they might simply be trying to make it as much of a pain for Microsoft as possible, just because they can. They might even be trying to drive Microsoft's bid even higher. After all, this offer is huge even by Microsoft's standards, and the higher Google (and others) can drive the bid before Yahoo accepts it, the more it'll hurt if it doesn't pan out for Microsoft.
They'd actually tell him what version of CS he'll be using, because they'll (most likely) have either a site or floating license
That's BS, unless he goes to work for some huge design shop. Most places have at best a handful of graphics people, and managing licenses for Photoshop and so forth is a pain in the arse for IT. I know, because it is for us. If we hired a graphics person and they said "I don't know Photoshop, I'd rather use <insert free software here>" we'd be fucking overjoyed.
As it is, half the people who have CS licenses have it because they think that's what you need to crop and resize images. Just like half the people who have Acrobat licenses have it because they think that's the only way to make PDFs. And it's an uphill battle to convince anyone to learn anything, unless they for some reason think it's the latest greatest shiniest toy ever. So we say "screw it, it's not my money".
I don't think 3D UIs will be useful until we have 3D displays and 3D input devices. Even then, I think working with a 3D input device all day will be too tiring. We'll also probably thought-controlled computers before we have usable 3D I/O, anyway.
If people are using too much bandwidth, then restrict their bandwidth usage or charge them for it. It's just that simple.
Well, in effect they are. If you make the assumption that anyone using bittorrent heavily enough to actually affect the network performance is not going to be happy with a bandwidth cap below what they want to use and would just change ISP anyway, then it more or less amounts to the same thing.
Simply disconnecting people without warning seems a bit harsh, even if they do get their money back, but I imagine they would receive a warning or two that their usage is too high. think I'd prefer to refund them the unused part of their month's service fee, and throttle their connection to 256Kbit or so for e.g. a week while they find another provider. Just seems like it reduce the likelihood of really annoying a customer who uses their internet connection for things other than P2P and would be greatly inconvenienced by being suddenly cut off completely; and you want your former customers to still recommend you to others whose needs you might meet.
Anyway, in more general terms this seems like a valid economic input. If the ISP is able to less for a high quality connection because they don't cater for heavy downloaders/uploaders, then they'll be more attractive to the non-downloaders. It's simply a way of offering a better product by tailoring it to fill a specific niche.
You should be able to set the maximum rate your bittorrent client will upload at. If you set it to 80-90% of your maximum upload speed you should be able to surf and download without problems while it uploads. Experiment and see the performance you get.
You can also do more general traffic shaping, which will maintain a queue at your router and insert 'interactive' traffic before bulk uploads. A bit more complicated to set up but more robust. If you're the only one using your connection though and BT is the only thing you have uploading, using the client's throttle setting is good enough.
The reason it slows down your connection is that as you're downloading anything (e.g. a web page) you need to send acknowledgement packets to the sender before it'll send the next packets containing the content. Since you're uploading at full pelt, those acknowledgement packets have to wait behind the larger file upload packets before they get sent. Traffic shaping / prioritization lets them skip to the head of the queue.
As others have said, this might be due to your cable modem not being able to handle many simultaneous NAT connections. As an easier alternative to trying a different modem, you could try configuring your BT client to connect to only a small number of peers. Maybe start really small e.g. 10, and it should have no problem with that.
If it still pukes it's probably not the modem. If it's fine, start increasing it until it does break and you'll know its limit. Or you could try searching the web for any information on the particular model - someone might have already found out its limits and posted the info somewhere.
If their business model relies on them explicitly charging people $X/MB for hosting packages and yet they give their internet customers unlimited uploads, then that's their own dumb fault. They need to either explicitly put limits on what customers can upload from their non-business connection, or better promote their hosting solution (faster speeds, higher availability, etc.) to make it worth the price.
On the other hand, if they're getting paid by their downstream customers for distributing content to them (i.e. other ISPs buying bandwidth off of them), then it doesn't matter whether it's their web servers doing the uploading or the cable/ADSL customers.
I think the only reason ISPs are livid is because a) they want to keep advertising high speeds and unlimited usage and b) they don't want to provide the infrastructure necessary to support people actually using their high speed connections as much as they please. Or, they may simply be getting paid by the cartels to be "tough on P2P" in order to help keep it marginalized.
Maybe he's trying to start a new AC meme. Imagine a world where all the posts about chowing down on a jock's stool are followed up by a post apologising for contributing nothing. What an improvement that would be!
This also restarts sshd at the end. Note that you can do this on remote systems, as restarting (or even stopping) sshd does not interrupt existing sessions.
And don't forget to clean up your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys if you have any compromised keys in there -- that's where the real threat lies!
I can be absolutely certain that any malicious code in Windows is from someone who works for Microsoft.
Really? Absolutely certain is a very strong phrase! You're absolutely certain that every single line of code that winds up in a released product out of Microsoft has been peer reviewed by someone with a good understanding of the software, and a manager or someone has personally verified that the developer whose name is against that code in their source control system did in fact make the change? For every single bit of code in every single product, every single time any kind of release is made? And that the code in source control is in fact the code that was used to compile the release build, and no nasty hacker with knowledge of the processes got into any of the systems involved to plant their own code?
I'm sure they have stringent checks and plenty of security in various forms in place, but I'm not absolutely certain that they will always work 100% of the time.
Besides, I'm not sure that really matters. The change was made by a Debian developer, not some random Joe, and so is equivalent to someone at Microsoft deciding to make the change. Given it was a "simple fix" to make the valgrind output look nice, I don't see any particular reason why this kind of mistake couldn't happen at a commercial shop, even Microsoft. In fact, I'd suggest that a place like Microsoft would have very strict requirements that every build passes a variety of automated tests of the valgrind variety, as they release a crapload of software and it's essential they maintain same base level of code quality. That would increase the likelihood of a seemingly innocuous change in order to comply with code auditing programs resulting in problems, which may not be identified by the user test scripts.
Besides which, as others have pointed out in related threads, firing a talented and productive developer because they made a mistake will eventually result in you having very few talented and productive developers left. Also, all of this "accountability" is an effective way of rewarding those who cover up their mistakes, and punishing those who admit them. Both on an individual level (blame shifting etc.), and on a corporate level (not announcing critical security fixes if the flaw isn't already generating a lot of bad publicity).
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops. Well, I got most of the letters right.
Well, you may have answered that question yourself: speculative investment. There are companies (and even individuals) who can afford to throw a billion dollars away on pure speculation. Let's say there's a 50% chance the land will never be worth anything; a 49% chance you'll eventually at least recover the costs and maybe make a small profit (e.g. in a century or two when moon tourism is viable); and a 1% chance that some discovery makes the land incredibly worth valuable. It might well be worth dumping some otherwise idle capital into securing a piece of the land at dirt cheap prices just in case it turns out to be a goldmine.
The real question is, who assigns property rights? What makes them meaningful? Maybe the UN should allocate a bunch of land to each country with a reasonable claim (i.e. viable spam programme) with the caveat that they actually have to stake out their lands for their claim to be cemented. Something like placing solar powered beacons every few hundred square kilometres, and after a certain deadline other countries can start beaconing "your" land (inaction would be an indication you don't want the land). While this won't be particularly appealing to most countries due to the enormous cost involved, if someone decides to go for it (e.g. Russia) then are the US and China and anyone else interested going to sit back while other countries get internationally-recognised moon real estate?
Realistically the US would probably just block the resolution before it left Earth, but it's an interesting idea: essentially forcing a space race with a real concrete, complicated mission.
That'd make the first one a shameful link, yes?
You make an excellent point: As for the corvette, it's not any more of a compliment than the tractor is an insult. Corvettes go fast and look pretty, but aren't good for much else. Not exactly what we generally look for in code. Cool code isn't necessarily good code, and clever code is generally worst of all.
But that's not how the GGP described their use of the corvette, which was:
The Corvette went to the coolest idea|algorithm of the week.Now, they didn't go into enough detail about the culture for me to be certain, but this does give me the impression that people would want to be awarded the corvette. If this is the case, then you have people competing to try to be clever and come up with "cool" ideas/algorithms, which as you say isn't necessarily what you want out of your programmers.
As for the tractor, ugly code isn't pretty. Ugly code is going to be a burden to the project, because if it "works" it still needs to be maintainable. Ugly problems can be solved with pretty code, but ugly code doesn't become pretty just because the problem it's trying to solve is even uglier. I got the impression that the tractor was something the coders wanted to avoid receiving. If it's not, then it's even more problematic because the last thing you want is your developers trying to compete with each other to write the ugliest, but working, code.
Also note that they said both toys often ended up on the same desk for the same project: this suggests the corvette isn't used to reward good code, merely good ideas, and it's no surprise that people trying to come up with cool ideas and algorithms wind up writing ugly code.
So what's the problem?The problem was I was trying to make a joke, which obviously didn't work. This is what troubles me. I don't particularly care about and didn't give much thought to the practice itself, but now that I have it does seem like a silly idea with questionable benefits.
I haven't RTFA or really know much about this, but I thought the point of pair programming was that one did the typing while the other was free to really think about the problem and their solution to it. If you're both editing different parts of the 'document' (which would in this case mean code, right?) then isn't this the same as just splitting it into two files and having two people editing two different, but related, files? What's the benefit, aside from not having to compartmentalize your code as much (if that's even a benefit)?
I think using a tractor and a corvette is a bit silly. They're nothing alike. Tractors are excellent for the jobs they're intended to perform, while the corvette would be utterly useless. Giving a programmer a tractor for their code is, at best, sending a mixed message.
What I think would be better is if the cool coder got the corvette, and took a huge steaming dump on the desk of the bad coder. Now that's motivation, and it also makes it clear exactly what you think of their work.
Not me. I'll see him as "that guy from Fawlty Towers"!
Hmm. A blog is usually authored by one person, while a wiki is usually authored by many people. That seems like an important enough difference to be worth making a distinction. Also, a forum is authored by many people, but that fact is immediately obvious to even a cursory glance - not so on a wiki.
The terms annoy me too, but I think that's just because they're so overused. If you try to think of them as just words like any other, I think they do provide worthwhile meta-information about a site's content.
Uh, they weren't saying the Nevermind cover was "obviously meant to be a suggestive pose" - they were referring to the topic of discussion, the Virgin Killer cover.
It's hard to decide where to draw the line, but I can easily imagine the latter picture being posted to a porn site. The Nevermind one not so much.
Your superiority only matters if you can use it to accomplish goals that actually further your purposes. If it came down to an all-out war between the US and anyone else, then the US would win hands down, no question. But this doesn't serve any purpose of the US -- the local and international political ramifications of obliterating another country are unacceptable, even for the most gun-ho president. And no other country is going to start an all-out war with the US, because they know they'll lose. Being able to obliterate any country in the world doesn't matter if there's no way you'd ever do that.
Being able to kick the "bad people" out of a country like Iraq while allowing the rest of the population to enjoy the economic and social benefits of capitalist democracies is absolutely something the US wants to be able to do. It appears that, as mighty and all-powerful as your military is, they're unable to achieve the actual objectives required of them.
Also, what makes you think you'd only have to kill 150 million Chinese to destroy the country? I think you're grossly underestimating either the lengths people will go to to protect their country, or the population of China.
Well and good, but this particular conclusion was not based on masses of software. It was based only on the operating system kernels, which are likely to be of a higher overall quality than half completed, unpolished software.
Well, it protects you from the code execution problem (but is apparently still vulnerable to an "information disclosure" as a result, but I don't know the details) for this particular flaw. But using Firefox or Opera or IE6 also protects you from this particular flaw.
I never said you have to fire the person
So when you said When a Microsoft programmer makes a mistake, they risk losing their job. you meant they risk misplacing their job, and not being able to find it again? Okay... :)
I said you get to hold them accountable
Yes, and any kind of meaningful accountability is going to have negative consequences for the person or people involved. If a lowly programmer makes a mistake, their manager and their manager's manager are going to held accountable as well, because it's their responsibility to ensure there's procedures in place to prevent mistakes being released and ensure the procedures are always followed.
So either the accountability is such that there's going to be a strong incentive for those involved to hide mistakes whenever possible; or the accountability is going to be on the same level as for open source software and therefore, according to you, either meaningless or non-existent.
Furthermore, you're assuming the person responsible still works at the company. 2 years is a long time for a programmer to spend in one job, and there's plenty of stupid security flaws and other bugs that are way more than two years old.
Here's the things you suggested:
Bonusses, vacations,
It's likely people will be very keen on retaining both of these, and not many people are going to be keen on signing contracts that say the company might deny your vacations on a whim.
required to stick-around and fix things late,
This assumes there's some kind of punishment for not staying 'til late, and can apply just as much to open source software -- so long as you're actually willing to follow through with a meaningful punishment. "Fix it or you're off the project."
reference letters,
A lot of open source coders will use their open source work in their CVs. I'm sure the Debian openssl maintainer used to have that on his CV. Do you think he'll be so keen now, knowing that when any potential employer searches the 'net for info on his involvement they're going to find out he introduced a bug which rendered all Debian-generated keys compromised for 2 years?
Also it's worth noting that this information is public and easy to find. Employers providing reference checks will usually limit themselves to confirming that the individual worked their in a particular position, and not make any comments on their job performance. It's just too dangerous, and the company doesn't benefit from doing so. Even if Microsoft does fire a programmer for writing really bad code, all anyone else will know is that they did in fact work at Microsoft on such-and-such a project for a period of time. Most employers would see that as a good thing. If the person involved thinks the people at Microsoft will actually warn people not to hire them - as unlikely as that is - then they can simply leave their time at Microsoft off their resume. Say they took time off to find themselves, or whatever. Or simply make sure the reference they provide likes them and will say nice things.
So in terms of accountability for future positions, there's virtually none in the commercial world because your blunders aren't going to be publicised for the world to see. You screw up in free software and it's going to be all over mailing lists and tech sites. Any time you apply for a job or contribute to another project, you have to be prepared to be asked "wtf happened with such-and-such a project". For the rest of your life. If anything, there's too much accountability for mistakes in free software.
Using this particular case as an example, the Debian maintainer made a pretty innocent mistake. This could happen to anyone. However, it was both a) in a very important package and b) not noticed for a very long time. Tiny innocent mistake is now a big black mark against his name for the rest of his life. If the
Possibly... unless they believe that a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo is inevitable, in which case they might simply be trying to make it as much of a pain for Microsoft as possible, just because they can. They might even be trying to drive Microsoft's bid even higher. After all, this offer is huge even by Microsoft's standards, and the higher Google (and others) can drive the bid before Yahoo accepts it, the more it'll hurt if it doesn't pan out for Microsoft.
True, but there's no reason to suspect that SerpentMage and Rakeris were talking about the same thing. ;)
That's BS, unless he goes to work for some huge design shop. Most places have at best a handful of graphics people, and managing licenses for Photoshop and so forth is a pain in the arse for IT. I know, because it is for us. If we hired a graphics person and they said "I don't know Photoshop, I'd rather use <insert free software here>" we'd be fucking overjoyed.
As it is, half the people who have CS licenses have it because they think that's what you need to crop and resize images. Just like half the people who have Acrobat licenses have it because they think that's the only way to make PDFs. And it's an uphill battle to convince anyone to learn anything, unless they for some reason think it's the latest greatest shiniest toy ever. So we say "screw it, it's not my money".
I suspect they're using a wireless broadband provider, not cellular. More 802.11 something, only designed for long distance usage.
I don't think 3D UIs will be useful until we have 3D displays and 3D input devices. Even then, I think working with a 3D input device all day will be too tiring. We'll also probably thought-controlled computers before we have usable 3D I/O, anyway.
Well, in effect they are. If you make the assumption that anyone using bittorrent heavily enough to actually affect the network performance is not going to be happy with a bandwidth cap below what they want to use and would just change ISP anyway, then it more or less amounts to the same thing.
Simply disconnecting people without warning seems a bit harsh, even if they do get their money back, but I imagine they would receive a warning or two that their usage is too high. think I'd prefer to refund them the unused part of their month's service fee, and throttle their connection to 256Kbit or so for e.g. a week while they find another provider. Just seems like it reduce the likelihood of really annoying a customer who uses their internet connection for things other than P2P and would be greatly inconvenienced by being suddenly cut off completely; and you want your former customers to still recommend you to others whose needs you might meet.
Anyway, in more general terms this seems like a valid economic input. If the ISP is able to less for a high quality connection because they don't cater for heavy downloaders/uploaders, then they'll be more attractive to the non-downloaders. It's simply a way of offering a better product by tailoring it to fill a specific niche.
You should be able to set the maximum rate your bittorrent client will upload at. If you set it to 80-90% of your maximum upload speed you should be able to surf and download without problems while it uploads. Experiment and see the performance you get.
You can also do more general traffic shaping, which will maintain a queue at your router and insert 'interactive' traffic before bulk uploads. A bit more complicated to set up but more robust. If you're the only one using your connection though and BT is the only thing you have uploading, using the client's throttle setting is good enough.
The reason it slows down your connection is that as you're downloading anything (e.g. a web page) you need to send acknowledgement packets to the sender before it'll send the next packets containing the content. Since you're uploading at full pelt, those acknowledgement packets have to wait behind the larger file upload packets before they get sent. Traffic shaping / prioritization lets them skip to the head of the queue.
As others have said, this might be due to your cable modem not being able to handle many simultaneous NAT connections. As an easier alternative to trying a different modem, you could try configuring your BT client to connect to only a small number of peers. Maybe start really small e.g. 10, and it should have no problem with that.
If it still pukes it's probably not the modem. If it's fine, start increasing it until it does break and you'll know its limit. Or you could try searching the web for any information on the particular model - someone might have already found out its limits and posted the info somewhere.
If their business model relies on them explicitly charging people $X/MB for hosting packages and yet they give their internet customers unlimited uploads, then that's their own dumb fault. They need to either explicitly put limits on what customers can upload from their non-business connection, or better promote their hosting solution (faster speeds, higher availability, etc.) to make it worth the price.
On the other hand, if they're getting paid by their downstream customers for distributing content to them (i.e. other ISPs buying bandwidth off of them), then it doesn't matter whether it's their web servers doing the uploading or the cable/ADSL customers.
I think the only reason ISPs are livid is because a) they want to keep advertising high speeds and unlimited usage and b) they don't want to provide the infrastructure necessary to support people actually using their high speed connections as much as they please. Or, they may simply be getting paid by the cartels to be "tough on P2P" in order to help keep it marginalized.
Maybe he's trying to start a new AC meme. Imagine a world where all the posts about chowing down on a jock's stool are followed up by a post apologising for contributing nothing. What an improvement that would be!
The configuration scripts for the openssh-server package regenerates the keys if they've been removed as well, which makes it slightly quicker:
rm -fdpkg-reconfigure openssh-server
This also restarts sshd at the end. Note that you can do this on remote systems, as restarting (or even stopping) sshd does not interrupt existing sessions.
And don't forget to clean up your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys if you have any compromised keys in there -- that's where the real threat lies!
Really? Absolutely certain is a very strong phrase! You're absolutely certain that every single line of code that winds up in a released product out of Microsoft has been peer reviewed by someone with a good understanding of the software, and a manager or someone has personally verified that the developer whose name is against that code in their source control system did in fact make the change? For every single bit of code in every single product, every single time any kind of release is made? And that the code in source control is in fact the code that was used to compile the release build, and no nasty hacker with knowledge of the processes got into any of the systems involved to plant their own code?
I'm sure they have stringent checks and plenty of security in various forms in place, but I'm not absolutely certain that they will always work 100% of the time.
Besides, I'm not sure that really matters. The change was made by a Debian developer, not some random Joe, and so is equivalent to someone at Microsoft deciding to make the change. Given it was a "simple fix" to make the valgrind output look nice, I don't see any particular reason why this kind of mistake couldn't happen at a commercial shop, even Microsoft. In fact, I'd suggest that a place like Microsoft would have very strict requirements that every build passes a variety of automated tests of the valgrind variety, as they release a crapload of software and it's essential they maintain same base level of code quality. That would increase the likelihood of a seemingly innocuous change in order to comply with code auditing programs resulting in problems, which may not be identified by the user test scripts.
Besides which, as others have pointed out in related threads, firing a talented and productive developer because they made a mistake will eventually result in you having very few talented and productive developers left. Also, all of this "accountability" is an effective way of rewarding those who cover up their mistakes, and punishing those who admit them. Both on an individual level (blame shifting etc.), and on a corporate level (not announcing critical security fixes if the flaw isn't already generating a lot of bad publicity).