Do you know where I can find the "DFG" gifs from the early days of the interpornnet?

I was just logging in to ask the same question. Is there any difference as far as the website owners are concerned? All they can know, unless they're looking for patterns generated by automated scripts, is their site is down (or just very unresponsive.) What would the difference be between a truly evil DDoS of www.mastercard.com, and someone posting a 'get $100 free from MC' link on facebook.com? As far as the network and servers are concerned, NOTHING, their admins can only know that they're at 100% saturation. Try hitting www.irs.gov after 10pm on April 15th. Should everyone trying to do their taxes during the last hour be charged with participating a DDoS attack? So, what IS the difference between the Slashdot effect and a DDoS?

Qute. If they function properly. There are no injured to assist, there are dead to bury.

goatdaddy.com is parked at godaddy.com.

I'll just comment on one point. NCLB presumes that all children are the same, with the same inate ability, motivation, etc. They aren't. Since they aren't, NCLB is simply a joke, unless you're an Atlanta teacher, and then it is the headsman's axe.

Actually, the only reason that Google has market share is that it is easier to type into a browser. Back-in-the-day, the only search engine i used was AltaVista, but then Google came along and save me time typing.

Read "Lost in Transmission" by Wil McCarthy.

Read "Saturn's Race" by Larry Niven. One of the characters has an implanted bomb... Sorry sir, we're going to have to break your leg to prove it isn't a bomb.

Does this concept also apply to wishing wells? Do we need to arrest people for dropping change in a wishing well?

If you're good, that happens anyway, even if you pretend to be invisible...and deaf.

Your statement is mostly true. Unfortunately, management will remove your budget if it goes too well. And production engineers will only comment on your networks' stability after it starts going to hell again.

Actually, your are incorrect on at least one point. If your upstream ISP (or whatever you'd like to call it) stops advertising a route to your /24 (etc) and blocks your outbound traffic, then, you are effectivly off of the net. This takes about 2 minutes for a single peering relationship.

Another peeve of mine are the front-page ads on www.ajc.com. they are always 4inches high and the width of the screen. That's not what I have a problem with, my problem is that the 'close this damn ad now' button is NEVER IN THE SAME PLACE TWICE.

You must be better at this than I. I always find myself watching part 1 of show A, part 2 of show B and part 3 of show C, I can never remember to flip back to show A after 4 minutes of commercials have passed.

Google is working on this, and high-end load balancers already make asynchronous calls to the back-end webservers to retrieve content on your behalf.