Hey there's the answer to the housing issue. A lot like cash for clunkers, just no cash. "Sorry man you only have coax, and see this, this is that dreadful catnothing red/green/yellow/black untwisted stuff. This house is totally obsolete, you need to scrap it and start over."

No problem, put a cmts head end in your garage and a cable modem in every room, fire up DOCSIS and start charging your kids for network service. "Uh, yeah, you can get unlimited bandwidth for $99, oh and bundles, we have bundles too.." Bundle up, cough up, it beuuutiful. "Sorry we spontaneously reset Bit Torrents..."

BPFH (bastard parent from hello operator, give me number nine)

Yeah, but my bionic eye (I bought it on the down low from Steve Austin a while back after his show was cancelled) will be able to glaze over and jack all the data from a mile away if they have a window.

And I see this as one. It does possess the potential and near certainty of improving the results of CDN targeting for users who use non-local DNS servers for resolution. Many of these third party non local DNS providers are thriving because so many 'service providers' are so utterly inept at delivering the net keystone component, DNS resolution. I don't now, and have not for many years rely on provider DNS servers for exactly this reason. This will help the third party DNS providers enable CDNs to do a better job. It will allow a better hit rate for sites that try to geotarget (we do). It has some very interesting potential side effects in the war on spam, botnets, hijacked IP blocks, etc which I won't get into or forget. Does it reduce fundamental anonymity somewhere? Maybe, but really I think that impact is lost if you actually make the connection to the A record you are given, I mean really, if your DNS request was tagged from 172.16.254.0/24, and then you connect to my server from 172.16.254.5, ah where is the foul? (RFC 1918 example IP addresses used to protect the innocent IP addresses). It does mean that I can tell you 'piss off mate' at the DNS level rather that doing it at the network service level which has some potential usefulness/humor value/abuseability but really only if you actually use a DNS server that has the extensions. Could some genius ISP think, "oh, we will railroad you into using this" ? Perhaps, but that will only captivate those who choose to be captivated, PAT, vpns, tunneling, anybody who wants to will drill a walk right through sized hole in that in short order. So, at the end of the day, personally, while I am a bit miffed about some of Google's other recent activity (the broken on off switch on the toolbar tracking and other BigBroMo activity comes to mind) I think this does have some strong technical merits and it's ability to be used in an evil manner is very limited in my opinion.

>North American car owners prefer automatics because you can't eat a cheeseburger and talk on the >phone while applying makeup & reading the newspaper if you're driving stick.

Sure I can, and with Verizon I can use my second phone to send text messages and read Slashdot.

Coordination dude, git some ;)

This really depends on the ambient temperature and the vehicle type. The stress of engaging a drive train that is still at -30 degrees or colder well exceeds the stress of allowing it to idle and rise to a viable operating temperature. For a diesel powered vehicle the stress of operating in extreme cold without warming up is magnified significantly.

There is threshold of what is reasonable, and waiting an hour or more to let the heater melt the ice for you is beyond that threshold but there is a reasonable amount of warming up that is prudent to decrease the stress on the vehicle.

Tom and Ray need to spend a couple of winters in Duluth, MN or better yet, International Falls.

My solution was to move to Florida, it works well and often my truck does not even ask me to wait for the glow plugs to warm up.
 

If I read your map correctly, it indicates that you see a series of worldwide traffic surges at various times. My first guess is that botnets are being triggered to perform orchestrated attacks. A while back we had the ssh slow scan attack vector arrive, but since that time I have observed that the slow scan aspect has dissolved and now they are using what appears to be a highly distributed methodology running at a very high rate of speed. I have seen peaks of several megabits coming from highly diverse sources. In short, I think you are seeing how bad the botnet problem really is.

(clueless?)Experts Exchange free trial seo optimized suck-you-for-some-cash-ware would be my leading web annoyance.

WAFJ.

Heh, I would view it as an opportunity to fail to comply with management. Historically I have always been on the lookout for such opportunities. I still remember the cool bit of code some joker wrote...first it displayed "Press any key to begin formatting C:", then it waited about 5 seconds, after which it displayed "Just kidding...Formatting...n/n/n" and it cycled through some fake head numbers while making a nice ominous clicking sound through the speaker. I think it would make a comeback if somebody ordered me to wear an IT droid shirt.

Bailiff, remove everyone from the courtroom, I want some peace and quiet so I can think of some politically correct way to respond to this in order to get re-elected.

Sure, if it could surf I could use it to monitor my nms while driving down the road or while sitting at the bar. It would be cool if it was more than a toy, (as in has an SSH client, etc) but even if it didn't I could cope with it. If it starts uncontrollably spewing Rollax, Vialis, Shrinx ads I will just have the bartender put it in the beer cooler for a while so it can cool down. I could take it to wally world and scan random barcodes for no apparent reason other than to confuse the ad targeting bot. I still have a USB cuecat around somewhere...I think it's filed under b for barcode, c for cool, s for stuff, or worst case, l for lost.

I think the fact that so many road warriors have retired from travel is good evidence that they won. Personally, I quit taking road warrior jobs not out of fear of terrorists, but simply because I am tired of pathetic TSA bullshit making me throw away my shampoo and mouthwash every week.

The TSA theatrical security is far more pathetic than security through obscurity ever was.

The real terrorists are the TSA themselves.

Actually, I did not previously know the origin of that line.

I thus acknowledge Cool Hand Luke, Rosenberg, Pearce and Pierson for the original work as well. ;)