You get that with any first level tech support. Almost all of them are tracked on the number of calls that are sent on to second level support, and penalized if that number goes too high. I've managed to talk my way through to a third-level tech, who was able to diagnose the problem at the time to an issue at the cable plant, and while she waited for diagnostics to run, we chatted very casually about the cable infrastructure. Within 30 minutes, my signal was much better.
That was with Adelphia before the Time-Warner buyout. Time-Warner's quality seems to vary depending on the call center that one gets. The SoCal folks really don't know much, it seems, but I've talked to a call center where the first person to pick up the phone was able to provide a quick diagnosis and get a field tech scheduled (I know he was out of the area because he had to call the SoCal facility to get it scheduled). The field tech pinned it down to old cabling coming into the apartment, and three days later, a crew came out to dig a trench and run new cable, this time in a conduit (the previous had been laid directly in the earth). Total time to complete fix was six days, including the weekend.
Related to your point, the bombs have been getting a lot smaller over time. It used to be that we'd carpet bomb a city to hit a factory. Then we'd send in a dozen bombers to hit a dam. Soon, it was a couple of 2000-pound bombs to take out a bridge. We now are to the point of taking out a house with a 250-pound bomb which does little damage to the neighborhood. In some cases, we're using Hellfire missiles with warheads around 20 pounds each to take out a single house. If we can get it down to a simple directed-energy weapon -- a good possibility with the ongoing work on the laser for the F-35 -- collateral damage on single-person targets may be limited to laundering the blood out of the clothes of bystanders.
You didn't fix it. You just used an arrogant method of pointing out that your view is that the current needs are higher than you believe they should be.
I kind of expected that someone of a libertarian (or possible strongly liberal) viewpoint would respond. The liberal viewpoint is usually pretty insular, but the libertarian viewpoint believes that there would be vast prosperity for the nation. That vast prosperity would lead to numerous overseas ventures, which would either be protected by private armies or by a need for increased military presence, leading to greater military spending.
And if there were private armies, and an overseas war involving one or more of them escalated to a military confrontation on our shores, would you have the country merely repel the attack, or take the battle all the way back to the home of the aggressor? Taking the battle back would involve a much stronger military than is required simply to prevent insurrection.
Total annual value of all imports and exports is in the $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion range. Even at a rate of 10% , it wouldn't pay for half of the current military needs.
The summons is sent weeks ahead of the actual time when one is supposed to appear. This is to provide enough time to fit it into one's schedule, as well as to notify the clerk of the court if there is something conflicting. The suggestion that it is "with no regard for their ability to appear or for the problems that may be caused" is patently false. Small business owners who are the sole employee and whose appearance on a jury would stop all business for the duration are often exempted. Those with vacation or medical plans may defer the appearance. Those on economic hardship, including those who would have to arrange expensive childcare, are also often exempted. Extenuating circumstances such as odd job times that would make it difficult to appear for or stay awake through a trial may also allow for deferral or even exemption for that summons. The courts have become unsympathetic to some excuses, but as long as one has proof of the issue, the judges are usually willing to listen.
A significant portion of the court systems now use on-call jury pools for the most part. California's courts use a one day or one trial system, where if they are called in (which can be checked online or via an automated phone system), they are there for at most one day if not called, or if they are called, they are excused as soon as the judge excuses them, whether due to voir dire or trial completion. There is the option, for those that do go in, of not accepting the check.
No judge for any jury for which I've been called has ever given the idea that the time and situation are meaningless. On the contrary, they seem to go out of their way to express appreciation for it. But there is the fairness of the system, not to mention the costs associated with compensating everyone at their normal daily rate, to consider when arguing that point.
BTW, it's "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!" Gotta get that last syllable right.:)
There is no explicitly written law that states that jury nullification is possible. It is an implied right based on the ability of the juror to vote as he or she sees fit. The law and courtroom rules often make clear that juries are finders of fact. If the judge provides instructions based on this letter of the law, no lies have taken place.
There's a difference between a civic duty and the duties carried out as part of a job. A civic duty is one that a person is expected to do as part of the social contract that binds together a people, and may include, depending on where one lives, jury duty, voting, and/or volunteer service. One should not expect compensation for any of these.
There have been suggestions on amending the rules about dismissing jurors, particularly in regards to highly technical trials, and I agree with some of them. I have been through voir dire where I was dismissed under peremptory challenge while a woman who said that she never held her own opinion and always went with the group was kept.
Jury nullification is a touchy subject. A number of murders during the Civil Rights Era went unpunished through jury nullification, something that is still strong in the minds of many. And yet there's some evidence that many more minor cases are resulting in hung juries than before, possibly in part because one or more jurors sees the application of the law as unjust.
If you want onto a jury just to nullify a guilty verdict, you should be excluded. You've already made up your mind about guilt or innocence. If you're only willing to do it, then be prepared to accept the consequences if you say as much during voir dire. But I do support the judge's right to not bring it up, and to limit its mention in front of the jury. People should know that they cannot be held accountable for what they decide in a jury room, and make the jump that nullification is possible from there. They don't have to (and maybe should not) be explicitly told that it is an option. Too much chaos may result from such instructions.
The judge and lawyers are doing it as a job, not a duty. There have been suggestions to employ professional jurors, particularly in highly technical cases, in which case they would draw a salary. However, these have not gotten anywhere as yet, because they would lead to a significant change in how juries are run, and may well require a constitutional amendment.
Since you brought it up, the oath taken by judges is as follows: "I, ________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as ________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."
By and large, they do a good job at this, keeping in mind not only the letter of the law, but also the precedent that has shaped its interpretation. Jurors do not have such training, and in many cases could not reasonably hope to get up to speed on it in any sort of time-frame reasonable to the duration or timing of the case at hand.
You're not there for the money. You're there because it's part of your civic duty, much like voting. It irritates me how many people duck jury duty over the pay issue. For some people, I can understand it -- if you're working two jobs and still barely making your bills (or not even that much), even a couple of days off can be ruinous. But I know of people who live quite comfortably well into the low six digits who complain about not getting paid for the time.
I've been called for jury duty about six or seven times in my life. Of those, I've gone through jury selection three times. I've not been selected any of the times, but while waiting for the attorneys to dismiss me, I've heard some extraordinarily lame reasons to be excused. I wanted to smack a few of them, but I figured that might not go over well with the judge.:)
If Obama can even ease the rate of which the US borrows money and make the US public aware that this is a serious issue, he will have done a fine job.
The $3.83 trillion budget unveiled today has a built-in deficit of $1.27 trillion (33% of the overall budget, 10.6% of the GNP), and that's without whatever extra jobs/stimulus/war bills are passed afterward. With a gap of only $300 billion between this year and that plan, there's still a good chance of meeting or surpassing the $1.56 trillion deficit of this year. His savings through discretionary spending freezes and cuts total a mere $20 billion, or about one half of one percent of the total budget.
Physical exhaustion can set in quickly during CPR, especially with the new advice to just keep performing chest compressions instead of alternating compressions and mouth-to-mouth. If you simply are physically unable to continue, that would, I believe, be a mitigating circumstance. But at the same time, if you're doing chest compressions for that long, odds are that the person wasn't going to make it anyway. The rate of survival once the heart stops is very low even with professional assistance.
In California, presence of training does not obligate helping. However, once one does begin to intercede, that person cannot stop helping until relieved by emergency personnel. (At least this is how two first aid trainers have explained it to me.)
The need for revision to California's Good Samaritan law comes as a result of a successful lawsuit against a woman who pulled another woman out of a wrecked car, and in doing so, managed to paralyze the victim. The rescuer is generally agreed to have over-reacted, but was acting with good intention. The court ruled narrowly in that case, but by the letter of the law, it ruled correctly. However, the precedent was set.
BTW, it was the California Assembly that passed the bill. California does not have a portion of the legislature called the House. The Assembly basically fills that role, however.
Depending on the kind of EKG results this can produce, it may become a useful replacement for some of the chest-band EKGs used for 24-hour monitoring. I have a very occasional palpitation that usually only comes about in stressful times, and then only two or three times a day. It's very unpredictable, and even wearing one of the chest bands wouldn't necessarily catch it. This would be unobtrusive enough to wear for long periods to hopefully catch it.
Hell, it could even be used for games/challenges, like scoring more points the higher and more persistent the exercising heart rate. Tie it into an online system, and one might be able to get some couch potatoes moving.
It'll never happen. The Tomcats are all scheduled to be either scrapped, mothballed, or go to museums. Given the perceived risk of an F-14 in private ownership going to Iran, the US will never sell them to private citizens. For that matter, the US has almost never sold its military aircraft to private citizens even when the aircraft is no longer combat viable, and aircraft sold to other nations include requirements as to final disposition at end of service, which may include authorized resale, sale back to the US, or verified destruction. Venezuela ran into this recently when it wanted to sell its F-16s to another country that the US didn't want in possession of them.
In my pilot weather briefings, I routinely get notice that one of the satellites (GPS-25, I think) is out of service, and I think GPS-30 showed up in a briefing recently, too.
We're I to torrent my favorite artists discography (uploading it in the process, and thereby infringing copyright on several tracks), I would be fined... $675,000. Say what now?
Technically, you're not being fined. Statutory damages are being assigned. I'm not debating the reasonableness of scale, but fines are intended to act as a deterrent mechanism, whereas statutory damages are intended to remunerate the damaged party for loss of sales, profit, usability, etc. Statutory damages are frequently much larger than fines, which are often in the range of $1,000 to $10,000 depending on the offense, while statutory damages may be based on presumptions of loss.
There is a definite disconnect between the damages that could be done over a network and those done by professional pirates. I'm all in favor of non-commercial penalties. Even a penalty of $20 per work available for sharing would probably deter me. Then again, I go on so rarely these days that the odds of me being found to share are about the same as running into Elvis at the mall.
Re:I would really like to find copies of the
on
OMNI Magazine Remembered
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Most people don't fly on a regular basis. They simply presume that everything that they see is there because each step will absolutely stop a would-be terrorist. They often didn't fly enough before 9/11 to understand the relatively simple way airport security was handled before. Some of those that fly a little more and think things are a bit over the top are afraid to speak up for fear that they will end up on a watch list. Most of those that don't fly don't care, because it doesn't affect them.
I fly often enough that I can incorporate most changes without much of a thought. I make a point of watching as I go through for opportunities where something could fail, and then consider how I would handle such a breach. Someone could bring an awfully big bomb in a backpack or carry-on suitcase to the security lines on a busy day and detonate it. A bottle containing a powerful explosive could be dropped into the trash can just before the metal detectors, set to go off 30 minutes or an hour later. The presence of a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs would probably make that much more difficult, and remove much of the need to do things like remove shoes or notebook computers for individual scanning.
The problem is that people are afraid that they will be proven wrong when a measure is taken away. Stop requiring shoes to come off, and another bomber might try to blow up his feet. Then whoever said that this should end is blamed (or feels like he's being blamed) for the attempt (or worse). And no one -- especially not those getting a paycheck from the government -- wants to be in that position, because it means at least loss of his job, and if it's a politician, losses in the next election for both him and his party.
They can protect in situations involving unpatched vulnerabilities, actually. In many cases, once a vulnerability is publicized, a signature can go out within a few hours, sometimes even within minutes. Whether you add that in, being new, is something for you to decide based on policy. But IDS/IPS is, as you mention, reactive in part, but anomaly engines are getting better.
I come from an environment where we moved from simple port-based firewalls to Sidewinders, which are application proxy firewalls. They check to ensure that the traffic coming through is valid HTTP. But that doesn't mean that they're all that good at spotting SQL injections, which shouldn't be there, but sometimes these things slip through.
And while you may have enough bandwidth to handle a DoS or DDoS, your server may not be able to handle that much on its own, and an IPS capable of noticing and dropping the traffic before it hits your server may keep you online.
It's part of defense in depth. Write the libraries properly to not have vulnerabilities. Write the web apps to not accept invalid input that could find missed vulnerabilities. Filter your traffic to not let odd input get to your web apps. It's kind of a pain, sometimes, but it does keep things interesting.
You are. Your IDS was incredibly poorly-tuned, a very common problem in IT. First guideline: turn off signatures for anything that you're not running. It makes no sense to watch your inbound traffic for Windows signatures if you run Apache on RHEL. If all you have are web servers and they do only HTTP, there's no reason to watch for SMTP.
Making the move to IPS is always tricky. You have to figure out what level of false positives you're willing to accept. If it's zero, well, you don't need an IPS. But odds are that you will come across some strange but innocuous traffic that the IPS doesn't like, and it trips a rule and blocks the traffic.
In addition, you need to get the hardware for the solution. A server-based Snort solution works well for low-bandwidth scenarios, but at most hosting providers, you need a dedicated appliance solution built on ASICs. If you like Snort, you go to Sourcefire. Otherwise, you find solutions from McAfee (Intrushield), Tipping Point, IBM, etc. They have boxes that scale into the gigabit-per-second range, with latencies under 1ms in most cases, and there are a few true-10Gbps solutions out there now. Yes, they can be quite expensive, but the low-end systems (essentially highly-tuned servers) can start at as low as a few thousand dollars.
But in any case, rule tuning is an ongoing item, and anyone that tells you that an IDS/IPS will reduce your time requirements is probably trying to get you to sign a contract. It can reduce overall time requirements by alerting you early in the attempt to compromise a system and save you all the time of recovery, but that is not a certain thing.
Slashdot Mirror
You get that with any first level tech support. Almost all of them are tracked on the number of calls that are sent on to second level support, and penalized if that number goes too high. I've managed to talk my way through to a third-level tech, who was able to diagnose the problem at the time to an issue at the cable plant, and while she waited for diagnostics to run, we chatted very casually about the cable infrastructure. Within 30 minutes, my signal was much better.
That was with Adelphia before the Time-Warner buyout. Time-Warner's quality seems to vary depending on the call center that one gets. The SoCal folks really don't know much, it seems, but I've talked to a call center where the first person to pick up the phone was able to provide a quick diagnosis and get a field tech scheduled (I know he was out of the area because he had to call the SoCal facility to get it scheduled). The field tech pinned it down to old cabling coming into the apartment, and three days later, a crew came out to dig a trench and run new cable, this time in a conduit (the previous had been laid directly in the earth). Total time to complete fix was six days, including the weekend.
Related to your point, the bombs have been getting a lot smaller over time. It used to be that we'd carpet bomb a city to hit a factory. Then we'd send in a dozen bombers to hit a dam. Soon, it was a couple of 2000-pound bombs to take out a bridge. We now are to the point of taking out a house with a 250-pound bomb which does little damage to the neighborhood. In some cases, we're using Hellfire missiles with warheads around 20 pounds each to take out a single house. If we can get it down to a simple directed-energy weapon -- a good possibility with the ongoing work on the laser for the F-35 -- collateral damage on single-person targets may be limited to laundering the blood out of the clothes of bystanders.
The humor in that kind of response, if there ever was any, was gone long ago.
And your overall response shows that it's not just libertarians who can avoid valid arguments in response to others.
You didn't fix it. You just used an arrogant method of pointing out that your view is that the current needs are higher than you believe they should be.
I kind of expected that someone of a libertarian (or possible strongly liberal) viewpoint would respond. The liberal viewpoint is usually pretty insular, but the libertarian viewpoint believes that there would be vast prosperity for the nation. That vast prosperity would lead to numerous overseas ventures, which would either be protected by private armies or by a need for increased military presence, leading to greater military spending.
And if there were private armies, and an overseas war involving one or more of them escalated to a military confrontation on our shores, would you have the country merely repel the attack, or take the battle all the way back to the home of the aggressor? Taking the battle back would involve a much stronger military than is required simply to prevent insurrection.
Total value, not taxes on the value.
Total annual value of all imports and exports is in the $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion range. Even at a rate of 10% , it wouldn't pay for half of the current military needs.
The summons is sent weeks ahead of the actual time when one is supposed to appear. This is to provide enough time to fit it into one's schedule, as well as to notify the clerk of the court if there is something conflicting. The suggestion that it is "with no regard for their ability to appear or for the problems that may be caused" is patently false. Small business owners who are the sole employee and whose appearance on a jury would stop all business for the duration are often exempted. Those with vacation or medical plans may defer the appearance. Those on economic hardship, including those who would have to arrange expensive childcare, are also often exempted. Extenuating circumstances such as odd job times that would make it difficult to appear for or stay awake through a trial may also allow for deferral or even exemption for that summons. The courts have become unsympathetic to some excuses, but as long as one has proof of the issue, the judges are usually willing to listen.
A significant portion of the court systems now use on-call jury pools for the most part. California's courts use a one day or one trial system, where if they are called in (which can be checked online or via an automated phone system), they are there for at most one day if not called, or if they are called, they are excused as soon as the judge excuses them, whether due to voir dire or trial completion. There is the option, for those that do go in, of not accepting the check.
No judge for any jury for which I've been called has ever given the idea that the time and situation are meaningless. On the contrary, they seem to go out of their way to express appreciation for it. But there is the fairness of the system, not to mention the costs associated with compensating everyone at their normal daily rate, to consider when arguing that point.
BTW, it's "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!" Gotta get that last syllable right. :)
There is no explicitly written law that states that jury nullification is possible. It is an implied right based on the ability of the juror to vote as he or she sees fit. The law and courtroom rules often make clear that juries are finders of fact. If the judge provides instructions based on this letter of the law, no lies have taken place.
You seem to be deliberately argumentative.
There's a difference between a civic duty and the duties carried out as part of a job. A civic duty is one that a person is expected to do as part of the social contract that binds together a people, and may include, depending on where one lives, jury duty, voting, and/or volunteer service. One should not expect compensation for any of these.
There have been suggestions on amending the rules about dismissing jurors, particularly in regards to highly technical trials, and I agree with some of them. I have been through voir dire where I was dismissed under peremptory challenge while a woman who said that she never held her own opinion and always went with the group was kept.
Jury nullification is a touchy subject. A number of murders during the Civil Rights Era went unpunished through jury nullification, something that is still strong in the minds of many. And yet there's some evidence that many more minor cases are resulting in hung juries than before, possibly in part because one or more jurors sees the application of the law as unjust.
If you want onto a jury just to nullify a guilty verdict, you should be excluded. You've already made up your mind about guilt or innocence. If you're only willing to do it, then be prepared to accept the consequences if you say as much during voir dire. But I do support the judge's right to not bring it up, and to limit its mention in front of the jury. People should know that they cannot be held accountable for what they decide in a jury room, and make the jump that nullification is possible from there. They don't have to (and maybe should not) be explicitly told that it is an option. Too much chaos may result from such instructions.
The judge and lawyers are doing it as a job, not a duty. There have been suggestions to employ professional jurors, particularly in highly technical cases, in which case they would draw a salary. However, these have not gotten anywhere as yet, because they would lead to a significant change in how juries are run, and may well require a constitutional amendment.
Since you brought it up, the oath taken by judges is as follows: "I, ________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as ________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."
By and large, they do a good job at this, keeping in mind not only the letter of the law, but also the precedent that has shaped its interpretation. Jurors do not have such training, and in many cases could not reasonably hope to get up to speed on it in any sort of time-frame reasonable to the duration or timing of the case at hand.
You're not there for the money. You're there because it's part of your civic duty, much like voting. It irritates me how many people duck jury duty over the pay issue. For some people, I can understand it -- if you're working two jobs and still barely making your bills (or not even that much), even a couple of days off can be ruinous. But I know of people who live quite comfortably well into the low six digits who complain about not getting paid for the time.
I've been called for jury duty about six or seven times in my life. Of those, I've gone through jury selection three times. I've not been selected any of the times, but while waiting for the attorneys to dismiss me, I've heard some extraordinarily lame reasons to be excused. I wanted to smack a few of them, but I figured that might not go over well with the judge. :)
Considering the fuss that is made by fans whenever Zippy the Pinhead is nixed by some paper, Garfield is set to continue for eternity.
If Obama can even ease the rate of which the US borrows money and make the US public aware that this is a serious issue, he will have done a fine job.
The $3.83 trillion budget unveiled today has a built-in deficit of $1.27 trillion (33% of the overall budget, 10.6% of the GNP), and that's without whatever extra jobs/stimulus/war bills are passed afterward. With a gap of only $300 billion between this year and that plan, there's still a good chance of meeting or surpassing the $1.56 trillion deficit of this year. His savings through discretionary spending freezes and cuts total a mere $20 billion, or about one half of one percent of the total budget.
Physical exhaustion can set in quickly during CPR, especially with the new advice to just keep performing chest compressions instead of alternating compressions and mouth-to-mouth. If you simply are physically unable to continue, that would, I believe, be a mitigating circumstance. But at the same time, if you're doing chest compressions for that long, odds are that the person wasn't going to make it anyway. The rate of survival once the heart stops is very low even with professional assistance.
In California, presence of training does not obligate helping. However, once one does begin to intercede, that person cannot stop helping until relieved by emergency personnel. (At least this is how two first aid trainers have explained it to me.)
The need for revision to California's Good Samaritan law comes as a result of a successful lawsuit against a woman who pulled another woman out of a wrecked car, and in doing so, managed to paralyze the victim. The rescuer is generally agreed to have over-reacted, but was acting with good intention. The court ruled narrowly in that case, but by the letter of the law, it ruled correctly. However, the precedent was set.
BTW, it was the California Assembly that passed the bill. California does not have a portion of the legislature called the House. The Assembly basically fills that role, however.
Depending on the kind of EKG results this can produce, it may become a useful replacement for some of the chest-band EKGs used for 24-hour monitoring. I have a very occasional palpitation that usually only comes about in stressful times, and then only two or three times a day. It's very unpredictable, and even wearing one of the chest bands wouldn't necessarily catch it. This would be unobtrusive enough to wear for long periods to hopefully catch it.
Hell, it could even be used for games/challenges, like scoring more points the higher and more persistent the exercising heart rate. Tie it into an online system, and one might be able to get some couch potatoes moving.
Or put it more succinctly as was done in The Usual Suspects:
"They realized that to be in power you didn't need guns, or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't."
It'll never happen. The Tomcats are all scheduled to be either scrapped, mothballed, or go to museums. Given the perceived risk of an F-14 in private ownership going to Iran, the US will never sell them to private citizens. For that matter, the US has almost never sold its military aircraft to private citizens even when the aircraft is no longer combat viable, and aircraft sold to other nations include requirements as to final disposition at end of service, which may include authorized resale, sale back to the US, or verified destruction. Venezuela ran into this recently when it wanted to sell its F-16s to another country that the US didn't want in possession of them.
In my pilot weather briefings, I routinely get notice that one of the satellites (GPS-25, I think) is out of service, and I think GPS-30 showed up in a briefing recently, too.
Technically, you're not being fined. Statutory damages are being assigned. I'm not debating the reasonableness of scale, but fines are intended to act as a deterrent mechanism, whereas statutory damages are intended to remunerate the damaged party for loss of sales, profit, usability, etc. Statutory damages are frequently much larger than fines, which are often in the range of $1,000 to $10,000 depending on the offense, while statutory damages may be based on presumptions of loss.
There is a definite disconnect between the damages that could be done over a network and those done by professional pirates. I'm all in favor of non-commercial penalties. Even a penalty of $20 per work available for sharing would probably deter me. Then again, I go on so rarely these days that the odds of me being found to share are about the same as running into Elvis at the mall.
Terry Bisson's They're Made of Meat
One of my all-time favorites for what it makes you think of the end, somewhat like some of Asimov's stories that were only two or three pages.
Most people don't fly on a regular basis. They simply presume that everything that they see is there because each step will absolutely stop a would-be terrorist. They often didn't fly enough before 9/11 to understand the relatively simple way airport security was handled before. Some of those that fly a little more and think things are a bit over the top are afraid to speak up for fear that they will end up on a watch list. Most of those that don't fly don't care, because it doesn't affect them.
I fly often enough that I can incorporate most changes without much of a thought. I make a point of watching as I go through for opportunities where something could fail, and then consider how I would handle such a breach. Someone could bring an awfully big bomb in a backpack or carry-on suitcase to the security lines on a busy day and detonate it. A bottle containing a powerful explosive could be dropped into the trash can just before the metal detectors, set to go off 30 minutes or an hour later. The presence of a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs would probably make that much more difficult, and remove much of the need to do things like remove shoes or notebook computers for individual scanning.
The problem is that people are afraid that they will be proven wrong when a measure is taken away. Stop requiring shoes to come off, and another bomber might try to blow up his feet. Then whoever said that this should end is blamed (or feels like he's being blamed) for the attempt (or worse). And no one -- especially not those getting a paycheck from the government -- wants to be in that position, because it means at least loss of his job, and if it's a politician, losses in the next election for both him and his party.
They can protect in situations involving unpatched vulnerabilities, actually. In many cases, once a vulnerability is publicized, a signature can go out within a few hours, sometimes even within minutes. Whether you add that in, being new, is something for you to decide based on policy. But IDS/IPS is, as you mention, reactive in part, but anomaly engines are getting better.
I come from an environment where we moved from simple port-based firewalls to Sidewinders, which are application proxy firewalls. They check to ensure that the traffic coming through is valid HTTP. But that doesn't mean that they're all that good at spotting SQL injections, which shouldn't be there, but sometimes these things slip through.
And while you may have enough bandwidth to handle a DoS or DDoS, your server may not be able to handle that much on its own, and an IPS capable of noticing and dropping the traffic before it hits your server may keep you online.
It's part of defense in depth. Write the libraries properly to not have vulnerabilities. Write the web apps to not accept invalid input that could find missed vulnerabilities. Filter your traffic to not let odd input get to your web apps. It's kind of a pain, sometimes, but it does keep things interesting.
You are. Your IDS was incredibly poorly-tuned, a very common problem in IT. First guideline: turn off signatures for anything that you're not running. It makes no sense to watch your inbound traffic for Windows signatures if you run Apache on RHEL. If all you have are web servers and they do only HTTP, there's no reason to watch for SMTP.
Making the move to IPS is always tricky. You have to figure out what level of false positives you're willing to accept. If it's zero, well, you don't need an IPS. But odds are that you will come across some strange but innocuous traffic that the IPS doesn't like, and it trips a rule and blocks the traffic.
In addition, you need to get the hardware for the solution. A server-based Snort solution works well for low-bandwidth scenarios, but at most hosting providers, you need a dedicated appliance solution built on ASICs. If you like Snort, you go to Sourcefire. Otherwise, you find solutions from McAfee (Intrushield), Tipping Point, IBM, etc. They have boxes that scale into the gigabit-per-second range, with latencies under 1ms in most cases, and there are a few true-10Gbps solutions out there now. Yes, they can be quite expensive, but the low-end systems (essentially highly-tuned servers) can start at as low as a few thousand dollars.
But in any case, rule tuning is an ongoing item, and anyone that tells you that an IDS/IPS will reduce your time requirements is probably trying to get you to sign a contract. It can reduce overall time requirements by alerting you early in the attempt to compromise a system and save you all the time of recovery, but that is not a certain thing.