I was actually approaching it from the other side - companies that legitimately want to clean up their web pages. Legitimate people who do that for you aren't going to call themselves SEOs, not only because SEOs are scum, but because people with actually skills are going to promote themselves as having those skills.
Humans may not be as fast as robots, but they can be surprisingly cheap. There's enough of the world where $1/hour* is an attractive wage that speak some English, and if the people there can solve a CAPTCHA in 9 seconds, that's at the $0.0025 price level that Nick was referring to. (Hi, Nick!)
If you're a scammer and there's a website that you want to crack, but it's not big enough to pay somebody to develop an algorithm for (either because the CAPTCHA's too hard or changes too often etc.), you can find some corrupt Nigerian generals' orphaned children who'll do it, or some Chinese guys who are tired of beating up monsters to get gold pieces or magic swords.
I don't know the going price of zombies or mail relay accounts, and it's probably dropping at faster than Moore's Law, but some sites are probably worth attacking.
* "Make good money $5 a day... Made any more I might move away..."
Search Engines help humans find web pages that the humans might find interesting, and they do this by having robots spider the web looking for patterns. Search Engine Optimizers try to get humans to read their customers' web pages in three ways:
Making it easy for the robots to find the content. Google's how-to page tells you pretty much everything you need to know, and it's not hard, but I guess there are companies who want to hire somebody to clean up their web page structure for them instead of doing the work themselves, or to tell their graphic designers to stop using complex Flash-based mouseover gesture interactions instead of simpler links and good indexing. Usually people who do that call themselves "consultants" or "web designers" instead of "SEOs", but not always.
Helping their customers write more interesting web pages instead of boring ones. Usually people who do that call themselves "editors" or "content consultants" or whatever instead of "SEOs", but not always.
Lying to the search engines' robots so that the customers' uninteresting-to-humans web pages match patterns that the robots identify as "interesting", so the robots will lie to humans about the interestingness of those pages. Sometimes this includes building link farms or generating vast reams of uninteresting content with popular keywords and ad banners or kiting millions of domain names. Usually people who do this call themselves "SEOs" or "Search Engine Optimization Consultants" instead of "lying scum polluting the Internet". But sometimes they pretend to be something else, like "Advertising specialists" or whatever.
The article recommends using a NAT firewall and a correctly configured personal firewall, and of course that's a good start (NAT is evil, but is generally a good starting place for devices that aren't running servers, and until you've got your system running the current patches, you don't want to be running servers at all, and even after that many client-like things work adequately behind NAT.)
But does anybody have any estimates of how long an unpatched machine will last behind a dumb NAT firewall? Are you ok at least until you've installed the standard patches for Windows (or your favorite Linux) and your favorite applications?
I've had an old Linksys running long enough I don't remember the model number; I think it's the BEXS41, but maybe it's the BEFSR41 or something. Behind it I've got a 3Com wireless router that runs in bridge mode rather than routing. Every couple of years something goes wrong, so I unplug/replug/reboot the DSL model, Linksys, and (if the desktop doesn't work either, also the 3Com) in order, and the problem has never obviously been the Linksys. A couple of times it's been the DSL service, once it was the DSL modem, and maybe once or twice it was a power hit that rebooting the router was actually useful, or a loose cable under the desk.
On the other hand, I haven't tried running two VPNs over it, or uPNP, or other things people complain about.
Before I got the 3Com, I had a Netgear 802.11b router - I'll probably never buy another Layer 3 product from them, since it was a totally ill-designed piece of junk (as opposed to their dumb Ethernet hubs and switches, which I've always been happy with.)
Nixon wasn't really in charge of anything here - this was Hoover and his boys, who predated Nixon, plus the Phone Company guys who were using apparently-illegal wiretaps to detect phone fraud rather than going through proper procedures. I'm not saying that Nixon was too moral to do illegal wiretapping (:-); just that this target wasn't interesting enough to his level of the Administration.
And I'm not saying that Nixon shouldn't have fired Hoover on his first day in office, either, because of course he should have, but probably Hoover knew things about Nixon that were more embarrassing or incriminating than anything Nixon had on Hoover (even the pictures of Hoover in that frilly little dress.) So Nixon's indirectly responsible, but it wasn't really his problem here.
You're correct that's it's not the right way to do it. The problem is *why* it's not the right way to do it. It's not the right way to do it because the arg mechanism chokes on it due to arbitrary limits, and/or because your favorite shell chokes on it first, forcing you to use workarounds. Choking on arbitrary limits is a bad behaviour, leading to buggy results and occasional security holes. That's separate from the question of whether it's more efficient to feed a list of names to xargs or use ugly syntax with find.
Now, if you were running v7 on a PDP-11, there wasn't really enough memory around to do everything without arbitrary limits, so documenting them and raising error conditions when they get exceeded is excusable, and if you were running on a VAX 11/780 which had per-process memory limits around 6MB for some early operating systems, or small-model Xenix or Venix on a 286, it's similarly excusable to have some well-documented arbitrary limits. But certainly this stuff should have been fixed by around 1990.
Hitler wasn't a vegetarian because of ethics about killing animals or the ecological effects of grain-fed meat - he was a vegetarian because he had trouble digesting meat and it gave him gas. He'd make exceptions if he was in the mood for dead flesh.
Hitler was also an unsuccessful painter, so if you haven't filled your Godwin's Law quota for the day, do you know who else was an unsuccessful painter?....
If you're tracking several of these things, I'm assuming they belong to a company you work for or support. Usually the two main concerns with stolen company-owned computers aren't the hardware, they're recovering the data on the machine (if it's not backed up) and making sure the thieves can't use it. So do a remote backup if that makes sense, and wipe the files you don't want a thief accessing.
Of course, if the thief sold the hardware to some unsuspecting kid on eBay, he may have already deleted anything proprietary (to make it less obvious) and just left the software installed. So you may not want to send Dog the Bounty Hunter out to collect the machine with extreme prejudice. On the other hand, you could easily set up the machine to have popups about "[MachineBrandName] Warranty Repair Department 1-800-blah-blah - Hardware Problem 31337 detected, send in for preventative maintenance" and maybe they'll fall for that.
Powell had to make that speech out of loyalty to Bush, who was his boss. And IMHO Bush had to have Powell do it, because otherwise there'd be a guy running around the administration who had a reputation for ethics and competence and didn't always agree with Bush, and that simply couldn't be tolerated. (Also, of course, the public would believe it, because Powell had a lot of reputation capital left from the Gulf War I, as well as a voice like James Earl Jones.)
Oh come on, didn't you know that Lon\\\Dick Cheney is really Darth Vader without the mask?
One of my friends has one positive thing to say about Cheney, which was that back in the 80s when Cheney was either SecDef or a promotion or two before that and my friend worked on computer technology planning for DoD, Cheney saw a report that my friend had written on using Internet-style email technology for DoD use instead of some of the alternatives that were around, clearly got the concept (unlike my friends' managers) and pushed some organizational buttons. On the other hand, that was back when he was still Anakin Cheney.
I was really disappointed when I saw Powell loyally say what his master wanted said; before that I'd had some respect for the man. And as Secretary of State, he should have been seriously using diplomacy to build negotiations and prevent a war, instead of using his position as Bush's representative to prevent diplomacy from breaking out.
I was less bothered by Condi Rice doing much the same - she was always Bush's protege, and while she was clearly very bright and opinionated on her own, it was also pretty clear that she was using Bush to get power just as much as he was using her to exercise power.
It would have taken a lot of work and courage for the Democrats to follow up their 2006 win with telling the country what's really gone on during the Bush administration and to stop the war (or even start stopping the war), but they haven't done much of it out of fear that the Bush League would successfully smear them as anti-patriotic soft-on-terrorist troops-hating UnAmericans, and they'd lose the little bit of progress they'd made. They absolutely wimped out and wasted the opportunity they had, and while they haven't been the kind of appallingly aggressive activist opponents of core American (and Republican) values that the post-2000 Republican Congresscritters have been, they didn't slow down the Bush League that much compared to the ongoing war and the Administration's abject failure to provide strong leadership in the Hurricane Katrina fiasco..
Now, having said that, it's not like their hands were necessarily clean enough to have gotten away with doing that, or that they would have necessarily succeeded - we may be better off with a bunch of wimpy do-nearly-nothing Democrats leading us into 1-20-09 and then starting to clean up the mess than if they'd tried to do the job for the last year and a half and gotten shot down in flames leading to a Republican and neocon victory this fall.
As a Libertarian, I'd be in a better position to criticize the Democrats' failures, Republicans' failures, and Bush League's activist evil if my own party hadn't been taken over by lizard-like aliens trying to steal our water.... Even so, Bob Barr, who'd been one of Newt's culture-war supporters as a Republican congresscritter, before leaving the GOP in disgust, joining the LP without particularly sharing our values, and getting our nomination, is one of the few politicians who's talking seriously about the damage Bush has done to America's civil liberties and privacy through their aggressive surveillance and intrusiveness and the need to not only stop doing more of it but actually dismantle the structures Bush built to do that. .
This war _has_ had a major amount of financial sacrifice associated with it, in addition to all of the lives of Americans and Iraqis - but Bush doesn't officially believe that actions have consequences, or at least consequences that should be pinned on him. By funding it with deficit spending, Bush was able to put off the visibility of the cost, since taxes are more obviously related to the war they're paying for than a deficit, which looks like it'll be Somebody Else's Problem (especially a deficit that's not revealed in the up-front budget, but shows up as a bunch of emergency supplemental spending bills because the war unexpectedly kept costing money after then initial Shock&Awe phase.)
So this credit crunch that we're in, and much of the stock market decline, and part of the housing market decline, all of which are tied into the trillion or so dollars Bush has spent on his wars, and the loss of US productivity that have come from having young men sent off to Iraq instead of working, and the loss of quality of life that comes from having the US industrial base used to build weapons and military infrastructure that get shipped overseas and blown up instead of making things like refrigerators and houses that are useful for civilians at home, and the trade deficit that comes from US consumers buying products from China because we're no longer manufacturing them in the US - all of those things aren't part of the financial sacrifice the US has made for this war, because nobody could have possibly foreseen them and they're not Bush's fault.
I can see Powell as a McCain VP. And I can see Obama supporters preferring Powell to Condoleeza Rice, and I can see people having some remaining personal respect for him.
But for most of the Obama supporters I know, I can't see them wanting him as VP - rather than being the change we want to see in the world, he was somebody who as Secretary of State let Bush and the military neocons get away with starting a war without any semblance of diplomacy first and helped Bush sell his dishonest WMD case to the UN, Congress, and the US public, because he was loyal to his boss and that's what his boss wanted done.
The US Public values independence, and a common publicity ploy for politicians is to claim to be independent outsiders as opposed to corrupt insiders - it often works. McCain's popularity in 2000 (when he was competing with Bush for the Republican presidential nomination) was partly from his military record, and largely from his reputation as an honest straight-talking fearless independent. And Bush is hated by such a large fraction of the US population right now that distancing yourself from him is typically a good thing to do, and while his values are radically different from the traditional values of the Republican party, he's dragged a bunch of them to follow whatever he and his cronies say as if they were.
But that's not what McCain has been doing in the last four years, because he's been trying to get the support of Bush's electoral base, the loose coalition of pro-military right-wing religious-fundamentalist anti-foreigner pro-empire pro-patriotism afraid-of-terrorism types (who IMHO have been hoodwinked into thinking Bush shares their values, and who've had their hot buttons pushed so many times the paint's wearing off), and also the support of his big-money military-industrial-complex backers. To do this, he's been toadying up to Bush and Cheney and their policies, and refraining from attacking Bush too loudly on anything significant, as well as strongly supporting a war that he knows Bush brought us into dishonestly. Sure, he's starting to say occasional things about Global Warming being bad, because it's a way to create some distance and some image of being forward-thinking without being a real threat to core Bush interests.
As other people have commented, the US system is radically different from a parliamentary-style party system - parties here are loose coalitions with vastly disparate interests, there is no central leadership in charge, candidates have much less dependence on party approval than in, say, Britain, and the Administration is generally very separate from the leadership of its party in Congress and the Senate. Bush is a bit of an exception - he and the neo-conservative political machine who helped get him into power have been exerting far more party discipline than any administration in decades since at least the 1860s, or possibly ever. (There have been _local_ political machines in areas such as New York or Chicago that had that much discipline, but not nationally, and they've usually been corrupt organizations that kept power by giving out lots of public money and jobs to their friends.) Bush's view of the President's power as the "Unitary Executive" is also pretty rare - much of the Executive Branch has typically been influenced as much by Congress and the civil service as by the political-level executives.
Let's start at the bottom of the OSI stack - physical layer. The wires from your house to the telco office are usually physically separate until they hit the first active device, which might be a Subscriber Loop Carrier in a big green box down the road, but is more likely to be copper all the way to the telco office. They're bundled into bigger and bigger cables (e.g. 24-pair, 50-pair, etc.) There are common-mode failures here - backhoes, wet cables, cars crashing into the telco box - but one of the most common failure modes is "technician mistakes", which usually only take out one wire pair at a time.
At the telco office, your wires get connected to a DSLAM which provides Layer 2 service (DSL is usually ATM underneath.) If both ISPs are using telco DSLAMs, then it'll probably be the same DSLAM box, but if one of your ISPs is using Covad and the other one's using telco, then you're on different DSLAMs. Some DSLAMs have integrated routers, but back when I was working more directly with this stuff there'd typically be an ATM network connecting the DSLAM to some regional concentrator network. The ATM network might have common-mode failures such as port cards, but it's mostly carrier-grade equipment with diverse physical routing.
Eventually you get to a router for Layer 3 service. If your DSL provider uses a telco DSLAM and forces you to use PPPoE, there's a good chance that you're tunneled through a telco router, but eventually you'll hit a router actually managed by your DSL provider. And from there on out to the Internet backbone, everything's basically diverse.
I don't know how Verizon does FIOS - the fiber system's obviously diverse from the copper+DSLAM system, but there might be more common infrastructure upstream or they may use different tools to concentrate it (e.g. FIOS might be using routers while DSL might be on ATM.) If you're using Verizon DSL as opposed to a third-party ISP or an ISP using Covad, you'll probably hit the same Internet peering points, so you could be susceptible to problems like "Cogent decides to have a peering fight with Verizon this time", but on the other hand your ISP might have Verizon as their upstream provider so it's a bit hard to tell. That layer's certainly much more reliable than 10 years ago.
Ok, technically I didn't ask first:-) But I can usually see 3-4 unlocked wireless systems from home, and while not all of them do everything I need (e.g. they block port 25), I've been able to borrow them the couple of times my DSL wasn't working.
I'm much more likely to borrow them by accident when something warps the local 2.4GHz wavelength or the electricity blips for a minute and my laptop gloms onto a neighbor's system instead of mine; I typically don't notice until I try to send mail from Eudora or can't get my work VPN to connect. I don't bother logging to find out if they've been borrowing mine; the only time I've been sure of it is when a neighbor's laptop got virused and started sending spam which my ISP blocked and called me about.
Technician misconfigures something, either in a phone connector box or router/switch/DSLAM or billing system.
I've had DSL fail four times in the last 10 years. One was my DSL router. Two were when phone company installers working on boxes down the street disconnected me by accident. One was a billing problem (but that was when my ISP was providing beta service, and they mixed up things between my home account and work lab, and I was customers #1 and #2 in the western half of the country:-) Some of these can cause both circuits to fail, some can't - and backhoe events are pretty rare. On the other hand, cable's more likely to have common failures than DSL is, unless you're one of those rare people with two cable providers, because there's more shared infrastructure between the two circuits.
Even so, I'd recommend going with two different providers because they're going to have different performance issues and probably different policies. If it won't interfere with your cable TV service, I'd recommend cable and DSL - cable's usually faster, though more likely to be flaky, and more likely to have obnoxious limitations on your service like not letting you run a web server at home or giving you 20 Mbps of download speed with a monthly download cap that limits you to an average of 50kbps if you use it 7x24. DSL is more likely to be reliable (because infrastructure gets fixed along with lifely telephone service as opposed to television), probably slower depending on your distance from the telco, and you usually have a choice of dozens or hundreds of ISPs if you don't like the policies or pricing your telco offers.
One obvious way to mix the two services is to have a DSL with a static IP address, and do most of your own downloading from the cable modem. You'll need some kind of router to deal with keeping track of the two services, and some kind of firewalling, so you probably want to use an OpenBSD to do that and whatever your favorite Linux, Mac, Windows, or game boxes behind it. (I'm picking OpenBSD because it's usually the best at security and firewalling and at least OK at routing, and you probably won't be putting anything requiring fancy hardware drivers on your firewall.)
There are a few ISPs that have blocked VOIP, mostly (ex-) monopoly telcos in various countries that want to charge you by the minute for voice. But most ISPs, and especially non-telco ISPs, don't care, because voice doesn't use that much bandwidth (especially if you're using compression.) BitTorrent's a different game - it's using something in excess of 1/3 of the bandwidth on the internet, so there are reasons for some ISPs to care about it other than just greed and spite:-)
The real problem is that ISPs don't put VOIP on high priority, and applications like BitTorrent, ftp, and to some extent http want to suck down all the bandwidth they can get and fill up any network queues they can to keep the data flowing. ISP backbones are fat enough that it doesn't matter that they don't prioritize VOIP, but the link from their last switch or router to your house is a finite size, and BitTorrent can not only crowd out the downstream link, but can queue up enough packets that your VOIP traffic needs to wait a while for its packets to get through, and the gaps kill your audio quality.
Also, the most critical thing for your router to control is prioritizing VOIP packets on the upstream, but apparently that wasn't enough to keep the article poster's calls working well.
don't know if you were serious or trolling anyway...
VOIP traffic needs to get good bandwidth in both directions - inbound and outbound. Your router can prioritize outbound traffic so that VOIP packets always go first (assuming it can recognize VOIP), but there's it can't control inbound traffic because the bottleneck in that direction is the DSL/cable link from your broadband provider to your router, not the Ethernet from the router to your PC. In theory, your ISP could offer QoS features and if the people you're talking with sent you properly marked packets it could do the same, but it practice that never happens with consumer-priced services.
So how can you restrict the speed of incoming BitTorrent traffic or other kinds of high-volume traffic? You're basically trying to get your router or your computers to tell the far end to slow down.
Some link-level protocols like Frame Relay have mechanisms for this, but DSL generally doesn't, and that's not end-to-end anyway.
ICMP Source Quench can theoretically help at an IP level, but it's very crude and everybody blocks ICMP anyway.
TCP has two mechanisms - Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and windowing/acknowledgments. ECN isn't universally supported, but sometimes works, by sending slow-down messages to the senders. Alternatively, your router could get fancy by messing with queuing and TCP ACKs as a much cruder way to get distant senders to slow down. I don't think I've seen any routers that have implemented that, but I've seen some host-based applications that can sort of do that from a per-host level, which doesn't quite match what you want.
If you're only running one BT system, you can use a BT client that throttles traffic, and set it to a level that'll usually leave your voice usable. It's not perfect - BT is typically sending requests for blocks to a bunch of different peers, and the peers are sending those blocks when they get around to it, and if you're talking to four peers they might all transmit the same millisecond, but at least on average you can get some control that'll help.
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I was actually approaching it from the other side - companies that legitimately want to clean up their web pages. Legitimate people who do that for you aren't going to call themselves SEOs, not only because SEOs are scum, but because people with actually skills are going to promote themselves as having those skills.
Humans may not be as fast as robots, but they can be surprisingly cheap. There's enough of the world where $1/hour* is an attractive wage that speak some English, and if the people there can solve a CAPTCHA in 9 seconds, that's at the $0.0025 price level that Nick was referring to. (Hi, Nick!)
If you're a scammer and there's a website that you want to crack, but it's not big enough to pay somebody to develop an algorithm for (either because the CAPTCHA's too hard or changes too often etc.), you can find some corrupt Nigerian generals' orphaned children who'll do it, or some Chinese guys who are tired of beating up monsters to get gold pieces or magic swords.
I don't know the going price of zombies or mail relay accounts, and it's probably dropping at faster than Moore's Law, but some sites are probably worth attacking.
* "Make good money $5 a day... Made any more I might move away..."
Search Engines help humans find web pages that the humans might find interesting, and they do this by having robots spider the web looking for patterns. Search Engine Optimizers try to get humans to read their customers' web pages in three ways:
Chuck Norris doesn't type in IP addresses by hand. He just whistles the modem tones.
But doesn't he use broadband instead of dialup? When Chuck Norris whistles for a modem, it does what he wants real fast.
The article recommends using a NAT firewall and a correctly configured personal firewall, and of course that's a good start (NAT is evil, but is generally a good starting place for devices that aren't running servers, and until you've got your system running the current patches, you don't want to be running servers at all, and even after that many client-like things work adequately behind NAT.)
But does anybody have any estimates of how long an unpatched machine will last behind a dumb NAT firewall? Are you ok at least until you've installed the standard patches for Windows (or your favorite Linux) and your favorite applications?
("What Never?" "Hardly ever....")
I've had an old Linksys running long enough I don't remember the model number; I think it's the BEXS41, but maybe it's the BEFSR41 or something. Behind it I've got a 3Com wireless router that runs in bridge mode rather than routing. Every couple of years something goes wrong, so I unplug/replug/reboot the DSL model, Linksys, and (if the desktop doesn't work either, also the 3Com) in order, and the problem has never obviously been the Linksys. A couple of times it's been the DSL service, once it was the DSL modem, and maybe once or twice it was a power hit that rebooting the router was actually useful, or a loose cable under the desk.
On the other hand, I haven't tried running two VPNs over it, or uPNP, or other things people complain about.
Before I got the 3Com, I had a Netgear 802.11b router - I'll probably never buy another Layer 3 product from them, since it was a totally ill-designed piece of junk (as opposed to their dumb Ethernet hubs and switches, which I've always been happy with.)
Nixon wasn't really in charge of anything here - this was Hoover and his boys, who predated Nixon, plus the Phone Company guys who were using apparently-illegal wiretaps to detect phone fraud rather than going through proper procedures. I'm not saying that Nixon was too moral to do illegal wiretapping (:-); just that this target wasn't interesting enough to his level of the Administration.
And I'm not saying that Nixon shouldn't have fired Hoover on his first day in office, either, because of course he should have, but probably Hoover knew things about Nixon that were more embarrassing or incriminating than anything Nixon had on Hoover (even the pictures of Hoover in that frilly little dress.) So Nixon's indirectly responsible, but it wasn't really his problem here.
You're correct that's it's not the right way to do it. The problem is *why* it's not the right way to do it. It's not the right way to do it because the arg mechanism chokes on it due to arbitrary limits, and/or because your favorite shell chokes on it first, forcing you to use workarounds. Choking on arbitrary limits is a bad behaviour, leading to buggy results and occasional security holes. That's separate from the question of whether it's more efficient to feed a list of names to xargs or use ugly syntax with find.
Now, if you were running v7 on a PDP-11, there wasn't really enough memory around to do everything without arbitrary limits, so documenting them and raising error conditions when they get exceeded is excusable, and if you were running on a VAX 11/780 which had per-process memory limits around 6MB for some early operating systems, or small-model Xenix or Venix on a 286, it's similarly excusable to have some well-documented arbitrary limits. But certainly this stuff should have been fixed by around 1990.
Hitler wasn't a vegetarian because of ethics about killing animals or the ecological effects of grain-fed meat - he was a vegetarian because he had trouble digesting meat and it gave him gas. He'd make exceptions if he was in the mood for dead flesh.
Hitler was also an unsuccessful painter, so if you haven't filled your Godwin's Law quota for the day, do you know who else was an unsuccessful painter?....
If you're tracking several of these things, I'm assuming they belong to a company you work for or support. Usually the two main concerns with stolen company-owned computers aren't the hardware, they're recovering the data on the machine (if it's not backed up) and making sure the thieves can't use it. So do a remote backup if that makes sense, and wipe the files you don't want a thief accessing.
Of course, if the thief sold the hardware to some unsuspecting kid on eBay, he may have already deleted anything proprietary (to make it less obvious) and just left the software installed. So you may not want to send Dog the Bounty Hunter out to collect the machine with extreme prejudice. On the other hand, you could easily set up the machine to have popups about "[MachineBrandName] Warranty Repair Department 1-800-blah-blah - Hardware Problem 31337 detected, send in for preventative maintenance" and maybe they'll fall for that.
Powell had to make that speech out of loyalty to Bush, who was his boss. And IMHO Bush had to have Powell do it, because otherwise there'd be a guy running around the administration who had a reputation for ethics and competence and didn't always agree with Bush, and that simply couldn't be tolerated. (Also, of course, the public would believe it, because Powell had a lot of reputation capital left from the Gulf War I, as well as a voice like James Earl Jones.)
Oh come on, didn't you know that Lon\\\Dick Cheney is really Darth Vader without the mask?
One of my friends has one positive thing to say about Cheney, which was that back in the 80s when Cheney was either SecDef or a promotion or two before that and my friend worked on computer technology planning for DoD, Cheney saw a report that my friend had written on using Internet-style email technology for DoD use instead of some of the alternatives that were around, clearly got the concept (unlike my friends' managers) and pushed some organizational buttons. On the other hand, that was back when he was still Anakin Cheney.
Sure, it definitely deserves a Flamebait moderation too, but I'd call it a +1 Flamebait rather than -1 Flamebait - he hits the nail right on the head.
I was really disappointed when I saw Powell loyally say what his master wanted said; before that I'd had some respect for the man. And as Secretary of State, he should have been seriously using diplomacy to build negotiations and prevent a war, instead of using his position as Bush's representative to prevent diplomacy from breaking out.
I was less bothered by Condi Rice doing much the same - she was always Bush's protege, and while she was clearly very bright and opinionated on her own, it was also pretty clear that she was using Bush to get power just as much as he was using her to exercise power.
What he said, definitely!
It would have taken a lot of work and courage for the Democrats to follow up their 2006 win with telling the country what's really gone on during the Bush administration and to stop the war (or even start stopping the war), but they haven't done much of it out of fear that the Bush League would successfully smear them as anti-patriotic soft-on-terrorist troops-hating UnAmericans, and they'd lose the little bit of progress they'd made. They absolutely wimped out and wasted the opportunity they had, and while they haven't been the kind of appallingly aggressive activist opponents of core American (and Republican) values that the post-2000 Republican Congresscritters have been, they didn't slow down the Bush League that much compared to the ongoing war and the Administration's abject failure to provide strong leadership in the Hurricane Katrina fiasco..
Now, having said that, it's not like their hands were necessarily clean enough to have gotten away with doing that, or that they would have necessarily succeeded - we may be better off with a bunch of wimpy do-nearly-nothing Democrats leading us into 1-20-09 and then starting to clean up the mess than if they'd tried to do the job for the last year and a half and gotten shot down in flames leading to a Republican and neocon victory this fall.
As a Libertarian, I'd be in a better position to criticize the Democrats' failures, Republicans' failures, and Bush League's activist evil if my own party hadn't been taken over by lizard-like aliens trying to steal our water.... Even so, Bob Barr, who'd been one of Newt's culture-war supporters as a Republican congresscritter, before leaving the GOP in disgust, joining the LP without particularly sharing our values, and getting our nomination, is one of the few politicians who's talking seriously about the damage Bush has done to America's civil liberties and privacy through their aggressive surveillance and intrusiveness and the need to not only stop doing more of it but actually dismantle the structures Bush built to do that. .
This war _has_ had a major amount of financial sacrifice associated with it, in addition to all of the lives of Americans and Iraqis - but Bush doesn't officially believe that actions have consequences, or at least consequences that should be pinned on him. By funding it with deficit spending, Bush was able to put off the visibility of the cost, since taxes are more obviously related to the war they're paying for than a deficit, which looks like it'll be Somebody Else's Problem (especially a deficit that's not revealed in the up-front budget, but shows up as a bunch of emergency supplemental spending bills because the war unexpectedly kept costing money after then initial Shock&Awe phase.)
So this credit crunch that we're in, and much of the stock market decline, and part of the housing market decline, all of which are tied into the trillion or so dollars Bush has spent on his wars, and the loss of US productivity that have come from having young men sent off to Iraq instead of working, and the loss of quality of life that comes from having the US industrial base used to build weapons and military infrastructure that get shipped overseas and blown up instead of making things like refrigerators and houses that are useful for civilians at home, and the trade deficit that comes from US consumers buying products from China because we're no longer manufacturing them in the US - all of those things aren't part of the financial sacrifice the US has made for this war, because nobody could have possibly foreseen them and they're not Bush's fault.
I can see Powell as a McCain VP. And I can see Obama supporters preferring Powell to Condoleeza Rice, and I can see people having some remaining personal respect for him.
But for most of the Obama supporters I know, I can't see them wanting him as VP - rather than being the change we want to see in the world, he was somebody who as Secretary of State let Bush and the military neocons get away with starting a war without any semblance of diplomacy first and helped Bush sell his dishonest WMD case to the UN, Congress, and the US public, because he was loyal to his boss and that's what his boss wanted done.
The US Public values independence, and a common publicity ploy for politicians is to claim to be independent outsiders as opposed to corrupt insiders - it often works. McCain's popularity in 2000 (when he was competing with Bush for the Republican presidential nomination) was partly from his military record, and largely from his reputation as an honest straight-talking fearless independent. And Bush is hated by such a large fraction of the US population right now that distancing yourself from him is typically a good thing to do, and while his values are radically different from the traditional values of the Republican party, he's dragged a bunch of them to follow whatever he and his cronies say as if they were.
But that's not what McCain has been doing in the last four years, because he's been trying to get the support of Bush's electoral base, the loose coalition of pro-military right-wing religious-fundamentalist anti-foreigner pro-empire pro-patriotism afraid-of-terrorism types (who IMHO have been hoodwinked into thinking Bush shares their values, and who've had their hot buttons pushed so many times the paint's wearing off), and also the support of his big-money military-industrial-complex backers. To do this, he's been toadying up to Bush and Cheney and their policies, and refraining from attacking Bush too loudly on anything significant, as well as strongly supporting a war that he knows Bush brought us into dishonestly. Sure, he's starting to say occasional things about Global Warming being bad, because it's a way to create some distance and some image of being forward-thinking without being a real threat to core Bush interests.
As other people have commented, the US system is radically different from a parliamentary-style party system - parties here are loose coalitions with vastly disparate interests, there is no central leadership in charge, candidates have much less dependence on party approval than in, say, Britain, and the Administration is generally very separate from the leadership of its party in Congress and the Senate. Bush is a bit of an exception - he and the neo-conservative political machine who helped get him into power have been exerting far more party discipline than any administration in decades since at least the 1860s, or possibly ever. (There have been _local_ political machines in areas such as New York or Chicago that had that much discipline, but not nationally, and they've usually been corrupt organizations that kept power by giving out lots of public money and jobs to their friends.) Bush's view of the President's power as the "Unitary Executive" is also pretty rare - much of the Executive Branch has typically been influenced as much by Congress and the civil service as by the political-level executives.
Let's start at the bottom of the OSI stack - physical layer. The wires from your house to the telco office are usually physically separate until they hit the first active device, which might be a Subscriber Loop Carrier in a big green box down the road, but is more likely to be copper all the way to the telco office. They're bundled into bigger and bigger cables (e.g. 24-pair, 50-pair, etc.) There are common-mode failures here - backhoes, wet cables, cars crashing into the telco box - but one of the most common failure modes is "technician mistakes", which usually only take out one wire pair at a time.
At the telco office, your wires get connected to a DSLAM which provides Layer 2 service (DSL is usually ATM underneath.) If both ISPs are using telco DSLAMs, then it'll probably be the same DSLAM box, but if one of your ISPs is using Covad and the other one's using telco, then you're on different DSLAMs. Some DSLAMs have integrated routers, but back when I was working more directly with this stuff there'd typically be an ATM network connecting the DSLAM to some regional concentrator network. The ATM network might have common-mode failures such as port cards, but it's mostly carrier-grade equipment with diverse physical routing.
Eventually you get to a router for Layer 3 service. If your DSL provider uses a telco DSLAM and forces you to use PPPoE, there's a good chance that you're tunneled through a telco router, but eventually you'll hit a router actually managed by your DSL provider. And from there on out to the Internet backbone, everything's basically diverse.
I don't know how Verizon does FIOS - the fiber system's obviously diverse from the copper+DSLAM system, but there might be more common infrastructure upstream or they may use different tools to concentrate it (e.g. FIOS might be using routers while DSL might be on ATM.) If you're using Verizon DSL as opposed to a third-party ISP or an ISP using Covad, you'll probably hit the same Internet peering points, so you could be susceptible to problems like "Cogent decides to have a peering fight with Verizon this time", but on the other hand your ISP might have Verizon as their upstream provider so it's a bit hard to tell. That layer's certainly much more reliable than 10 years ago.
Ok, technically I didn't ask first :-) But I can usually see 3-4 unlocked wireless systems from home, and while not all of them do everything I need (e.g. they block port 25), I've been able to borrow them the couple of times my DSL wasn't working.
I'm much more likely to borrow them by accident when something warps the local 2.4GHz wavelength or the electricity blips for a minute and my laptop gloms onto a neighbor's system instead of mine; I typically don't notice until I try to send mail from Eudora or can't get my work VPN to connect. I don't bother logging to find out if they've been borrowing mine; the only time I've been sure of it is when a neighbor's laptop got virused and started sending spam which my ISP blocked and called me about.
There are four main reasons that DSL goes down
I've had DSL fail four times in the last 10 years. One was my DSL router. Two were when phone company installers working on boxes down the street disconnected me by accident. One was a billing problem (but that was when my ISP was providing beta service, and they mixed up things between my home account and work lab, and I was customers #1 and #2 in the western half of the country :-) Some of these can cause both circuits to fail, some can't - and backhoe events are pretty rare. On the other hand, cable's more likely to have common failures than DSL is, unless you're one of those rare people with two cable providers, because there's more shared infrastructure between the two circuits.
Even so, I'd recommend going with two different providers because they're going to have different performance issues and probably different policies. If it won't interfere with your cable TV service, I'd recommend cable and DSL - cable's usually faster, though more likely to be flaky, and more likely to have obnoxious limitations on your service like not letting you run a web server at home or giving you 20 Mbps of download speed with a monthly download cap that limits you to an average of 50kbps if you use it 7x24. DSL is more likely to be reliable (because infrastructure gets fixed along with lifely telephone service as opposed to television), probably slower depending on your distance from the telco, and you usually have a choice of dozens or hundreds of ISPs if you don't like the policies or pricing your telco offers.
One obvious way to mix the two services is to have a DSL with a static IP address, and do most of your own downloading from the cable modem. You'll need some kind of router to deal with keeping track of the two services, and some kind of firewalling, so you probably want to use an OpenBSD to do that and whatever your favorite Linux, Mac, Windows, or game boxes behind it. (I'm picking OpenBSD because it's usually the best at security and firewalling and at least OK at routing, and you probably won't be putting anything requiring fancy hardware drivers on your firewall.)
There are a few ISPs that have blocked VOIP, mostly (ex-) monopoly telcos in various countries that want to charge you by the minute for voice. But most ISPs, and especially non-telco ISPs, don't care, because voice doesn't use that much bandwidth (especially if you're using compression.) BitTorrent's a different game - it's using something in excess of 1/3 of the bandwidth on the internet, so there are reasons for some ISPs to care about it other than just greed and spite :-)
The real problem is that ISPs don't put VOIP on high priority, and applications like BitTorrent, ftp, and to some extent http want to suck down all the bandwidth they can get and fill up any network queues they can to keep the data flowing. ISP backbones are fat enough that it doesn't matter that they don't prioritize VOIP, but the link from their last switch or router to your house is a finite size, and BitTorrent can not only crowd out the downstream link, but can queue up enough packets that your VOIP traffic needs to wait a while for its packets to get through, and the gaps kill your audio quality.
Also, the most critical thing for your router to control is prioritizing VOIP packets on the upstream, but apparently that wasn't enough to keep the article poster's calls working well.
don't know if you were serious or trolling anyway...
VOIP traffic needs to get good bandwidth in both directions - inbound and outbound. Your router can prioritize outbound traffic so that VOIP packets always go first (assuming it can recognize VOIP), but there's it can't control inbound traffic because the bottleneck in that direction is the DSL/cable link from your broadband provider to your router, not the Ethernet from the router to your PC. In theory, your ISP could offer QoS features and if the people you're talking with sent you properly marked packets it could do the same, but it practice that never happens with consumer-priced services.
So how can you restrict the speed of incoming BitTorrent traffic or other kinds of high-volume traffic? You're basically trying to get your router or your computers to tell the far end to slow down.
If you're only running one BT system, you can use a BT client that throttles traffic, and set it to a level that'll usually leave your voice usable. It's not perfect - BT is typically sending requests for blocks to a bunch of different peers, and the peers are sending those blocks when they get around to it, and if you're talking to four peers they might all transmit the same millisecond, but at least on average you can get some control that'll help.
The Parrot? He's dead, Jim...
The fly flew into her mouth when she was riding her motorcycle without a helmet?