You do realize that Clinton and Obama both give Halliburton no-bid contracts right? In fact, Halliburton even lost a bid once, but Clinton gave them the contract anyways. I don't see any indication at all that they were treated any differently under Dubya than anybody else.
IIRC Bain sold off Staples in the 90s when they became public, so at present those two companies have no association.
However, even if they did, it wouldn't be because of Bain. A lot of brick and mortar stores are having trouble right now, particularly ones that deal in technology. I think they just need to learn to compete with online retailers, which it seems most refuse to do so. A notable exception is fry's electronics, who will price match any legit online retailer (the sales desks have a thick book of websites that they match) and I think it is working well for them. I bring my android phone in there and fire up shop savvy, and I usually get a good deal.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it in this thread, but I have mentioned in the past that I really don't believe presidents have as much influence on unemployment as most people think they do. I always chuckle a bit when I hear a president say "I created x jobs" or some pundit says "y president cost us x jobs."
I remember attending some event in early 2003 where people representing candidates for the democratic primary (one of John Kerry's daughters was there) were speaking about their candidate at my college. Many of them kept repeating that Dubya cost us 3 million jobs. I was wondering to myself "how did he do that?" They never really said why, or how it could be fixed, just that he had to go. It occurred to me later though that this was much more likely the result of a combination of the tech bubble and 9/11. Even if Bush did break something, he wasn't yet in office long enough to see any result of that. Anyways, those jobs (and more) had already recovered by the next election. Some democrats say that Kerry was just a throw away candidate because they didn't expect Dubya to lose.
That slogan was being used extensively just prior to the 2008 election, long after the recession began.
I don't remember where I found it, but there was a video of Larry Lessig talking about how him and many others were under the impression that Obama would take money out of politics, but he bowed to Hollywood contributors when he signed ACTA into law without even allowing the senate (or anybody at all) to review it, which is completely against the constitution by the way.
That, and with all of the talk about restoring the right to privacy, he willingly signs NDAA into law (which the republicans are also partially guilty of.)
I really don't see what has changed, so again, it's just a talking point.
I don't really get the complaints about the capital gains rate anyways. The taxes on that income were paid before it reached your hands at a higher rate to begin with. That's like saying we should tax businesses based on revenue.
Perhaps they would have, however whoever else would have done it would have wanted a return on investment the same as Bain, so I don't really see what you're getting at. How many venture capitalists do you know who wouldn't?
As far as factcheck, they are often accused of being left biased, especially considering that several of their founders were involved in left wing publications. In light of that, I think it is a stretch to say that they would push favor towards Romney.
I'm a libertarian and I want small government. I would really like social security to go away. To me it has all of the hallmarks of a ponzi scheme; the initial investors make bank, and the people at the end get screwed. I'm being forced to "invest" into it, and unless I live to be 80 (doubtful given a medical issue I have) I won't see a dime of that back. Even if I did live that long, I wouldn't get back anything near what I put into it. A ponzi scheme would be better in comparison, because at least if I did get something, I could pass it to my next of kin.
I don't know about the 47% figure, but I know that the number of people on disability has increased over 50% over the last decade, which is much faster than the growth of the population. You can't tell me that more people are becoming sick and disablfed; SOMETHING is wrong, and the system IS being abused.
If it takes a few million to get started, you have to secure that money from somewhere. Opening one staples store costs more than three million dollars today. If they couldn't open that first store due to a lack of funds, then there'd be no jobs at all. Nobody anywhere is going to loan money to a for profit business without expecting a return on investment.
Would those jobs have been there without the initial investment? The answer is quite decidedly no. It takes a skilled businessman, or more likely a team of them, to truly be able to tell the good investments from the bad ones.
All of that applies universally btw, this isn't just Romney I am talking about.
As for the debate itself, factcheck did an analysis and found that one didn't lie or at least misstate the facts more than the other.
I'm not sure what there is to rationalize. Tax avoidance is a legal practice that I've yet to see anybody not do. I don't know whether he has done tax evasion, but I'm think that with the big microscope he is under, if he has broken the law, somebody would know it by now. Meanwhile, any suggestion that he has is just hearsay.
Honestly I get tired of hearing that such and such politician has some secret agenda with some evil plans, it's just petty and stupid.
Regarding taxes, I think you know the tax system is broken when there is a whole industry dedicated to figuring the damn thing out. It's one thing if it's a process you only have to go through when something goes wrong (e.g. the legal system) but its another thing when you have to repeat it like clockwork until you die.
Really I've not been interested in voting this next election as the POTUS in particular seems to be elected not much differently than people would vote for their favorite sports team, or vote for the high school prom king. I've heard everything from "because he's a cool guy" to "because my friends are voting for him" and the scary thing is that this seems like the majority of those I've run into. So I wonder, why bother?
Well, in trying to convince me to get out and vote for Obama, a liberal pointed out to me that Romney is has ripped off the poor and killed jobs at Bain Capital, namely through selling companies and pilfering their pensions. I looked this up, and found that Bain Capital was actually responsible for the success of many companies that have tons of employees (Staples and Domino's among them.) While some have faltered, it seems to be a slight minority of them (as in somewhere less than half.) As for the raiding of their pensions, it appears that there was only one incident that could remotely be interpreted as that, however it wasn't what you could call raiding it. Apparently, Bain Capital owned a company called GS something, but took no part in their management. Somebody within that company wasn't properly funding the pension, and when they went bust, they couldn't pay the employees their full pension, reducing $400 a month from it. I'm not sure how you pin that on Romney.
Another one was that Romney's campaign was being funded by banks, and therefore he must be in bed with them. I looked at his source, and it included a disclaimer that said it wasn't the banks themselves, but their employees. Even if they did support him, I'm not sure what that is supposed to prove. The argument was that he was in favor of TARP, so the banks want him in. That didn't make sense to me because no politician has been a bigger supporter of TARP than Obama. On that same token, I noticed that Hugo Chavez endorses Obama, but I somehow doubt that will make Obama sympathize with him.
Although I did find out (from seeing excerpts of the debate) that Obama gave very large government loans to several corporations who contributed to his campaign (the actual corporations, not the employees,) and then went bust, effectively pilfering government money. When Romney threw that argument out there (albeit in far less harsh words) you could see the expression of "yeah, that wasn't one of my best moments" in Obama's face.
I also heard the argument that Romney will make the rich richer. Looking back though, that is exactly what has been happening over the last four years under Obama's watch, but I'm supposed to believe that giving him another four years will make that go away? I've also heard the standard argument of "If X gets elected, he'll sell out our country," which is the same argument I've heard every election.
So far, Obama's supporters have only convinced me that voting for him would be a bad idea. Especially his running mate Joe Biden who effectively announced that we're worse off now than we were four years ago.
Still though, I don't see any convincing reason to vote for that particular office at all. The only person I'm thinking of voting for is Jeff Flake who came out against SOPA/PIPA, and actually does have a record of reducing spending, which I as a libertarian do find attractive.
And how does that differ from a properly configured port not allowing VLAN hopping?
You are making it sound harder than it is.
I'm approaching this from the angle that you don't learn much about layer 2, as you suggested earlier. If you don't learn much about it, how are you supposed to know to watch for this (among other layer 2 security issues) to begin with? And if you don't know to watch for this, then how are you supposed to learn go configure it as well?
Fuck you. I'm done. You are wrong. And you are lying. I never said someone should ignore layer 2. If you are going to lie to make your points, I can't think of any response short of "fuck you".
Well the parent post to yours said "don't worry about layer 2," and you seemed to agree with it. Sorry if you don't like that interpretation, but "don't worry about it" and "ignore it" aren't that different from one another.
The reality is that, unless you quote a post where I said "You should ignore layer 2" then you are a lying troll who is lying to be rude to prove some point that nobody but you cares about. Layer 2 is easy. 802.1x solved everything you are talking about, and I first deployed that 15+ years ago, long before it was turned into a wireless security mechanism (I pointed out that the reception area was unsecured and anyone could walk up and plug into the LAN to justify the cost to secure it). I'm sure you do a good job of making money inflating the risks of layer 2 issues. But the simple reality is that you generally trust your ports enough that none of it matters. If they have access to a port, they are an employee. VLAN hopping is so much harder than the other ways a trusted employee could cause trouble. It's like robbing the cashier at the police station. You'd have to be a dumbass to bother when you are already a valid user, and if you aren't, then you don't have physical security, so someone could compromise your networks in lots of other ways.
No, they don't have to be employees. Try a passenger being able to bring down a 747 through a mix of vlan hopping and IP spoofing:
That just goes to show you how important looking at every aspect of the network is. There was also an incident where a bank's network systems were broken into, and VLAN hopping was one of the exploits they used, with no employees involved.
And honestly I am not going to inflate anything to make money off of it. If I was doing that, I would be more interested in keeping that knowledge to myself, and then offering a fix when somebody desperately needs it that only I (and few others) can provide. Instead though I am telling people like you about the importance of learning about layer 2.
I don't think I would want to learn Huawei anyways, from what I gather (both on slashdot and elsewhere) they are notoriously insecure and lack competent troubleshooting and debugging features.
No, not really, in fact I would say not even close.
IP spoofing doesn't give access to portions of the network that are blocked by layer 3 filters, and I mean properly done IP filters that will block address ranges that couldn't have come from the source interface (be it a physical one or SVI.) Even in the rare circumstances that this can be done, often times the routing tables won't handle the return traffic. Not only that, but IP spoofing can't give you access to networks that are logically isolated entirely, nor can it enter isolated PVLANs. Say for example, unauthorized traffic migrating from a DMZ to the trusted network.
Unlike IP spoofing, VLAN hopping can do all of the above, unless of course you wanted to go back to pre 2001 technology and do away with layer 3 switches, and even do away with VLAN's entirely. Or you could be smarter and learn how to handle that sort of problem by learning about layer 2.
There was a slashdot article recently about how people have been getting data stolen on hotel networks. Layer 3 will not solve that problem without putting ehttp://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3168727&cid=41579715#ach computer on its own subnet, which complicates the hell out of configuring DHCP, not to mention creating a bunch of SVI's (and if you have over 4095 ethernet ports in your building, regardless of the number of switches, you're SOL unless you want to make the configuration and management even more complicated.) Layer 2 PVLANs will solve that problem in a much simpler manner, which of course you wouldn't know how to configure if you didn't know anything about layer 2.
No matter how you slice it, you should NOT ignore layer 2. Given how you made the above statement about IP spoofing being like VLAN hopping, it's pretty obvious that you don't know layer 2 that well. In light of that, you really shouldn't be advising people on whether or not they should learn layer 2 when you yourself know nothing about it. I'm not trolling or trying to be rude, that's just reality.
Part of the class grade was that you had to document very well everything you did in the class labs. Not just physical and logical topology diagrams, but also a writeup of what configuration choices you made and why.
I've heard from some people who I've shown what I've done that say that what I learned was formerly only CCNP and even some CCIE material, meanwhile CCNP and CCIE have advanced much further.
Supposedly back in 2007 there was a major revision to the CCNA course material, and before that another one in 2004, and before that another one in 2001 or so, though the 2007 revision was supposedly the biggest.
I canceled my sub to wow a year and a half ago, good riddance too. Though I always did enjoy trolling people in that game by ganking them before blizzard made doing so nearly impossible in cities in early cata, so its fun to see somebody continuing that spirit.
Actually I've taken the Cisco courses (which are cheap by the way if you take them at a community college like I did - I've spent less for three years worth of classes than the typical university student will spend on one semester) and they cover a lot of theory.
And contrary to the opinion of some, the Cisco courses aren't very vendor specific. Yes they target Cisco's IOS and some of their proprietary protocols (e.g. EIGRP) they are remarkably vendor agnostic. From knowing only what I learned from Cisco courses, I was able to start working on Brocade and HP networking equipment with no trouble at all, as they make their CLI remarkably similar to Cisco's, and from what I've heard, Huawei does as well. Also it may (or may not) interest you and the rest of slashdot to know that Cisco's NX-OS (for their datacenter equipment) runs on the Linux kernel.
I've had a lot of experience using Linux before taking the Cisco courses, but after learning the Cisco courses, now I actually understand very well how the networking side of Linux works (I remember before, looking at the manual for ifconfig made no sense to me whatsoever, and I just followed "here's how to configure your IP address" guides on the net.)
I don't think that's what this would be aimed at. Most of your time as a network engineer will be focused mainly on layers 2 and 3, with a bit of 4 and even less as you go up to 7. From reading the description page, it looks like they are going into layers 6 and 7 rather extensively, (namely talking about HTTP and bittorrent) though I couldn't say for certain without actually going through the course.
I disagree. If you don't learn much of the layer 2 concepts, then you'll probably never learn anything about layer 2 troubleshooting. One time I had to work on a network where they had separate discontiguous VLANs that couldn't talk to one another. I remember a while back hearing about a major hospital whose network failed because their engineers didn't understand some of the more advanced layer 2 concepts. There are also issues such as implementing measures preventing some idiot from creating switching loops that STP can't detect, e.g. cascading some $10 switches they found at wal-mart which are creating a layer 2 broadcast storm that is bringing down an entire VLAN.
Troubleshooting isn't the only thing, you also won't understand layer 2 security, which has been exploited quite a bit lately. Some easy examples would be MAC flooding and MAC spoofing, to the more severe problems like VLAN hopping, and much more that I can't think of off of the top of my head.
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You do realize that Clinton and Obama both give Halliburton no-bid contracts right? In fact, Halliburton even lost a bid once, but Clinton gave them the contract anyways. I don't see any indication at all that they were treated any differently under Dubya than anybody else.
IIRC Bain sold off Staples in the 90s when they became public, so at present those two companies have no association.
However, even if they did, it wouldn't be because of Bain. A lot of brick and mortar stores are having trouble right now, particularly ones that deal in technology. I think they just need to learn to compete with online retailers, which it seems most refuse to do so. A notable exception is fry's electronics, who will price match any legit online retailer (the sales desks have a thick book of websites that they match) and I think it is working well for them. I bring my android phone in there and fire up shop savvy, and I usually get a good deal.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it in this thread, but I have mentioned in the past that I really don't believe presidents have as much influence on unemployment as most people think they do. I always chuckle a bit when I hear a president say "I created x jobs" or some pundit says "y president cost us x jobs."
I remember attending some event in early 2003 where people representing candidates for the democratic primary (one of John Kerry's daughters was there) were speaking about their candidate at my college. Many of them kept repeating that Dubya cost us 3 million jobs. I was wondering to myself "how did he do that?" They never really said why, or how it could be fixed, just that he had to go. It occurred to me later though that this was much more likely the result of a combination of the tech bubble and 9/11. Even if Bush did break something, he wasn't yet in office long enough to see any result of that. Anyways, those jobs (and more) had already recovered by the next election. Some democrats say that Kerry was just a throw away candidate because they didn't expect Dubya to lose.
That slogan was being used extensively just prior to the 2008 election, long after the recession began.
I don't remember where I found it, but there was a video of Larry Lessig talking about how him and many others were under the impression that Obama would take money out of politics, but he bowed to Hollywood contributors when he signed ACTA into law without even allowing the senate (or anybody at all) to review it, which is completely against the constitution by the way.
That, and with all of the talk about restoring the right to privacy, he willingly signs NDAA into law (which the republicans are also partially guilty of.)
I really don't see what has changed, so again, it's just a talking point.
Probably because it is my money to begin with, being taken away by force, or "by the sword" as the old saying goes.
That's like saying its ok to take away your cell phone, because you can be happy with a landline (and indeed you can) therefore you don't need it.
Without investors like Bain, there's no capital to begin with, and thus no jobs.
The goal behind any business does not include making jobs, the goal is to make a profit. Even Obama admits that and said it is fine.
Rasmussen has been pretty accurate in the last few elections, and their numbers pretty much show a deadlock.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll
I don't really get the complaints about the capital gains rate anyways. The taxes on that income were paid before it reached your hands at a higher rate to begin with. That's like saying we should tax businesses based on revenue.
Perhaps they would have, however whoever else would have done it would have wanted a return on investment the same as Bain, so I don't really see what you're getting at. How many venture capitalists do you know who wouldn't?
As far as factcheck, they are often accused of being left biased, especially considering that several of their founders were involved in left wing publications. In light of that, I think it is a stretch to say that they would push favor towards Romney.
If I were British, I would be annoyed that my country doesn't have the sovereignty to handle its own internal affairs, but that's just me.
Change we can believe in is a talking point. What has changed? How come he doesn't use that any more?
Anyways, I am sincere. I will leave POTUS blank on the ballot this november.
I'm a libertarian and I want small government. I would really like social security to go away. To me it has all of the hallmarks of a ponzi scheme; the initial investors make bank, and the people at the end get screwed. I'm being forced to "invest" into it, and unless I live to be 80 (doubtful given a medical issue I have) I won't see a dime of that back. Even if I did live that long, I wouldn't get back anything near what I put into it. A ponzi scheme would be better in comparison, because at least if I did get something, I could pass it to my next of kin.
I don't know about the 47% figure, but I know that the number of people on disability has increased over 50% over the last decade, which is much faster than the growth of the population. You can't tell me that more people are becoming sick and disablfed; SOMETHING is wrong, and the system IS being abused.
If it takes a few million to get started, you have to secure that money from somewhere. Opening one staples store costs more than three million dollars today. If they couldn't open that first store due to a lack of funds, then there'd be no jobs at all. Nobody anywhere is going to loan money to a for profit business without expecting a return on investment.
Would those jobs have been there without the initial investment? The answer is quite decidedly no. It takes a skilled businessman, or more likely a team of them, to truly be able to tell the good investments from the bad ones.
All of that applies universally btw, this isn't just Romney I am talking about.
As for the debate itself, factcheck did an analysis and found that one didn't lie or at least misstate the facts more than the other.
I'm not sure what there is to rationalize. Tax avoidance is a legal practice that I've yet to see anybody not do. I don't know whether he has done tax evasion, but I'm think that with the big microscope he is under, if he has broken the law, somebody would know it by now. Meanwhile, any suggestion that he has is just hearsay.
Honestly I get tired of hearing that such and such politician has some secret agenda with some evil plans, it's just petty and stupid.
Regarding taxes, I think you know the tax system is broken when there is a whole industry dedicated to figuring the damn thing out. It's one thing if it's a process you only have to go through when something goes wrong (e.g. the legal system) but its another thing when you have to repeat it like clockwork until you die.
This is pretty much what I think about the presidential election:
http://jaypgreene.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/alien_vs_predator_quad_movie_poster_l.jpg
And of course:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAT_BuJAI70
Really I've not been interested in voting this next election as the POTUS in particular seems to be elected not much differently than people would vote for their favorite sports team, or vote for the high school prom king. I've heard everything from "because he's a cool guy" to "because my friends are voting for him" and the scary thing is that this seems like the majority of those I've run into. So I wonder, why bother?
Well, in trying to convince me to get out and vote for Obama, a liberal pointed out to me that Romney is has ripped off the poor and killed jobs at Bain Capital, namely through selling companies and pilfering their pensions. I looked this up, and found that Bain Capital was actually responsible for the success of many companies that have tons of employees (Staples and Domino's among them.) While some have faltered, it seems to be a slight minority of them (as in somewhere less than half.) As for the raiding of their pensions, it appears that there was only one incident that could remotely be interpreted as that, however it wasn't what you could call raiding it. Apparently, Bain Capital owned a company called GS something, but took no part in their management. Somebody within that company wasn't properly funding the pension, and when they went bust, they couldn't pay the employees their full pension, reducing $400 a month from it. I'm not sure how you pin that on Romney.
Another one was that Romney's campaign was being funded by banks, and therefore he must be in bed with them. I looked at his source, and it included a disclaimer that said it wasn't the banks themselves, but their employees. Even if they did support him, I'm not sure what that is supposed to prove. The argument was that he was in favor of TARP, so the banks want him in. That didn't make sense to me because no politician has been a bigger supporter of TARP than Obama. On that same token, I noticed that Hugo Chavez endorses Obama, but I somehow doubt that will make Obama sympathize with him.
Although I did find out (from seeing excerpts of the debate) that Obama gave very large government loans to several corporations who contributed to his campaign (the actual corporations, not the employees,) and then went bust, effectively pilfering government money. When Romney threw that argument out there (albeit in far less harsh words) you could see the expression of "yeah, that wasn't one of my best moments" in Obama's face.
I also heard the argument that Romney will make the rich richer. Looking back though, that is exactly what has been happening over the last four years under Obama's watch, but I'm supposed to believe that giving him another four years will make that go away? I've also heard the standard argument of "If X gets elected, he'll sell out our country," which is the same argument I've heard every election.
So far, Obama's supporters have only convinced me that voting for him would be a bad idea. Especially his running mate Joe Biden who effectively announced that we're worse off now than we were four years ago.
Still though, I don't see any convincing reason to vote for that particular office at all. The only person I'm thinking of voting for is Jeff Flake who came out against SOPA/PIPA, and actually does have a record of reducing spending, which I as a libertarian do find attractive.
And how does that differ from a properly configured port not allowing VLAN hopping?
You are making it sound harder than it is.
I'm approaching this from the angle that you don't learn much about layer 2, as you suggested earlier. If you don't learn much about it, how are you supposed to know to watch for this (among other layer 2 security issues) to begin with? And if you don't know to watch for this, then how are you supposed to learn go configure it as well?
Fuck you. I'm done. You are wrong. And you are lying. I never said someone should ignore layer 2. If you are going to lie to make your points, I can't think of any response short of "fuck you".
Well the parent post to yours said "don't worry about layer 2," and you seemed to agree with it. Sorry if you don't like that interpretation, but "don't worry about it" and "ignore it" aren't that different from one another.
The reality is that, unless you quote a post where I said "You should ignore layer 2" then you are a lying troll who is lying to be rude to prove some point that nobody but you cares about. Layer 2 is easy. 802.1x solved everything you are talking about, and I first deployed that 15+ years ago, long before it was turned into a wireless security mechanism (I pointed out that the reception area was unsecured and anyone could walk up and plug into the LAN to justify the cost to secure it). I'm sure you do a good job of making money inflating the risks of layer 2 issues. But the simple reality is that you generally trust your ports enough that none of it matters. If they have access to a port, they are an employee. VLAN hopping is so much harder than the other ways a trusted employee could cause trouble. It's like robbing the cashier at the police station. You'd have to be a dumbass to bother when you are already a valid user, and if you aren't, then you don't have physical security, so someone could compromise your networks in lots of other ways.
No, they don't have to be employees. Try a passenger being able to bring down a 747 through a mix of vlan hopping and IP spoofing:
http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/16696-FACT-CHECK-SCADA-Systems-Are-Online-Now.html
That just goes to show you how important looking at every aspect of the network is. There was also an incident where a bank's network systems were broken into, and VLAN hopping was one of the exploits they used, with no employees involved.
And honestly I am not going to inflate anything to make money off of it. If I was doing that, I would be more interested in keeping that knowledge to myself, and then offering a fix when somebody desperately needs it that only I (and few others) can provide. Instead though I am telling people like you about the importance of learning about layer 2.
I don't think I would want to learn Huawei anyways, from what I gather (both on slashdot and elsewhere) they are notoriously insecure and lack competent troubleshooting and debugging features.
No, not really, in fact I would say not even close.
IP spoofing doesn't give access to portions of the network that are blocked by layer 3 filters, and I mean properly done IP filters that will block address ranges that couldn't have come from the source interface (be it a physical one or SVI.) Even in the rare circumstances that this can be done, often times the routing tables won't handle the return traffic. Not only that, but IP spoofing can't give you access to networks that are logically isolated entirely, nor can it enter isolated PVLANs. Say for example, unauthorized traffic migrating from a DMZ to the trusted network.
Unlike IP spoofing, VLAN hopping can do all of the above, unless of course you wanted to go back to pre 2001 technology and do away with layer 3 switches, and even do away with VLAN's entirely. Or you could be smarter and learn how to handle that sort of problem by learning about layer 2.
There was a slashdot article recently about how people have been getting data stolen on hotel networks. Layer 3 will not solve that problem without putting ehttp://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3168727&cid=41579715#ach computer on its own subnet, which complicates the hell out of configuring DHCP, not to mention creating a bunch of SVI's (and if you have over 4095 ethernet ports in your building, regardless of the number of switches, you're SOL unless you want to make the configuration and management even more complicated.) Layer 2 PVLANs will solve that problem in a much simpler manner, which of course you wouldn't know how to configure if you didn't know anything about layer 2.
No matter how you slice it, you should NOT ignore layer 2. Given how you made the above statement about IP spoofing being like VLAN hopping, it's pretty obvious that you don't know layer 2 that well. In light of that, you really shouldn't be advising people on whether or not they should learn layer 2 when you yourself know nothing about it. I'm not trolling or trying to be rude, that's just reality.
Part of the class grade was that you had to document very well everything you did in the class labs. Not just physical and logical topology diagrams, but also a writeup of what configuration choices you made and why.
I've heard from some people who I've shown what I've done that say that what I learned was formerly only CCNP and even some CCIE material, meanwhile CCNP and CCIE have advanced much further.
Supposedly back in 2007 there was a major revision to the CCNA course material, and before that another one in 2004, and before that another one in 2001 or so, though the 2007 revision was supposedly the biggest.
Here's a video of the lifeless one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=B_vCFKuXrQo#!
I canceled my sub to wow a year and a half ago, good riddance too. Though I always did enjoy trolling people in that game by ganking them before blizzard made doing so nearly impossible in cities in early cata, so its fun to see somebody continuing that spirit.
Actually I've taken the Cisco courses (which are cheap by the way if you take them at a community college like I did - I've spent less for three years worth of classes than the typical university student will spend on one semester) and they cover a lot of theory.
And contrary to the opinion of some, the Cisco courses aren't very vendor specific. Yes they target Cisco's IOS and some of their proprietary protocols (e.g. EIGRP) they are remarkably vendor agnostic. From knowing only what I learned from Cisco courses, I was able to start working on Brocade and HP networking equipment with no trouble at all, as they make their CLI remarkably similar to Cisco's, and from what I've heard, Huawei does as well. Also it may (or may not) interest you and the rest of slashdot to know that Cisco's NX-OS (for their datacenter equipment) runs on the Linux kernel.
I've had a lot of experience using Linux before taking the Cisco courses, but after learning the Cisco courses, now I actually understand very well how the networking side of Linux works (I remember before, looking at the manual for ifconfig made no sense to me whatsoever, and I just followed "here's how to configure your IP address" guides on the net.)
I don't think that's what this would be aimed at. Most of your time as a network engineer will be focused mainly on layers 2 and 3, with a bit of 4 and even less as you go up to 7. From reading the description page, it looks like they are going into layers 6 and 7 rather extensively, (namely talking about HTTP and bittorrent) though I couldn't say for certain without actually going through the course.
I disagree. If you don't learn much of the layer 2 concepts, then you'll probably never learn anything about layer 2 troubleshooting. One time I had to work on a network where they had separate discontiguous VLANs that couldn't talk to one another. I remember a while back hearing about a major hospital whose network failed because their engineers didn't understand some of the more advanced layer 2 concepts. There are also issues such as implementing measures preventing some idiot from creating switching loops that STP can't detect, e.g. cascading some $10 switches they found at wal-mart which are creating a layer 2 broadcast storm that is bringing down an entire VLAN.
Troubleshooting isn't the only thing, you also won't understand layer 2 security, which has been exploited quite a bit lately. Some easy examples would be MAC flooding and MAC spoofing, to the more severe problems like VLAN hopping, and much more that I can't think of off of the top of my head.