Uhhhh... dotcom, anyone? Plenty of twenty-something "executives" hyping ridiculous/unsustainable business models. Clearly the people giving out the money (VC's, et al) were generally somewhat older, but a healthy portion of the abject failures that typified the period can be laid at the feet of the (then) under-30 crowd. Incidentally, how old do you think those energy traders at Enron were? Naive or not, they certainly played their role. Stupidity, incompetence and corruption are well-represented at all age levels.

So... Income distribution in the US is such that 35% of net worth resides with the top 1% of the population and ~86% resides with the top 20%. How would the other 80% of the country, which holds the remaining 14% of total wealth / net income (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html) even theoretically be -able- to contribute an equivalent amount?

I work hard and make decent money - likely many times what a teacher, fireman or construction worker earns. Likewise, the amount I pay in taxes is also several times the average gross income in this country. I'm reaping a somewhat higher reward from an economy that is underpinned by infrastructure that's paid for by my taxes and supported/protected/defended by individuals that are also paid from my taxes. Without roads, telecom, cops / law enforcement, firemen, teachers and, yes, the occasional bureaucrat to help keep it all together then my company is going to have a hell of a time selling its wares and, thus, will likely have proportionately less need for my services.

The notion of "poor" is a pretty variable term. Lots and lots of folks live in that bottom 14% - especially including the civil servants I mentioned above and lots of folks who are loudest to condemn the so-called "socialist" nature of our government. This, of course, is notwithstanding of the fact that lots of these folks couldn't accurately describe the distinctions between socialism, communism and fascism - at least judging by the way such terms are lightly thrown around.

Then die. You paid - at best - a tiny share of the cost of the roads and bridges you likely use every day, the medicines that keep you and your family alive. I'm personally a big fan of antibiotics when I have an infection. What paid for the development of mass production of Penicillin? Oh, right... the military, which is paid for by who, again?

Yeah - those damned government workers... just flaunting their lazy, socialist lifestyles and living off of the hard work and industry of others. I've always felt that cops and firemen were just drains on society. Hell, government subsidies of modern hospitals in rural areas (...where many of the supposedly self-sufficient people live and work) are just a drain on your independently earned dollar. Same idea for schools - screw people in rural areas! They shouldn't have modern, competitive schools! Don't even get me started about all the hard-earned cash that's wasted in taxes and regulations to compel telecom and electric utilities to provide service to sparsely populated areas.

While we're at it - what about all of those contractors that are building things for government agencies? Clearly all pork. Shut 'em down! Why bother with helicopters for the Coast Guard? If someone's ship capsizes then it was clearly their fault! And if they can't swim to shore when 10 miles out? Screw 'em.

Oh - and your job? Hopefully whatever goods or services you're involved with selling/producing/distributing/etc aren't ever procured by people who work for those contractors building those helicopters, tanks, ships, planes, etc - 'cause then your livelihood is, at least partially, tied to precisely the same tax-mooching lazy bastards you're sick of supporting.

Take a look at how much money is spent of AFDC or Medicaid. It's a lot of money. Now compare that to the cost of the defense department budget, Social Security, Medicare or the cost of infrastructure. Guess what? It's a *LOT* more money.

Face it, all of the self-sufficient hard work you're putting out there to make money from the open market is utterly and completely reliant on lots of shared services and, yes, regulations that are administered by local, state and federal government. Short of folks living in tribes in the furthest corners of the Earth, *everyone* is reliant on some amount of so-called welfare.

So what's the right hardware if I'm a service provider with thousands of routers and lots and lots of OC192's and OC768's floating around? Do you deploy a firewall (PC based or otherwise) in-line in a framed SONET link between carriers? How many 10GE flows can I switch at line rate on an interrupt driven platform? There's a reason beyond corporate greed that big, fast, reliable high-end network devices cost a lot of money.

Anyhow - even in smaller commercial networks the final demarcation between networks is rarely a firewall. I've yet to see any sort of firewall in-line for BGP sessions between an enterprise and an SP, for example. If there's a back door in an infrastructure device (and I'm not especially suggesting that Huawei in particular has one) it can be far more subtle and far more difficult to mitigate than trying to block the latest flavor of windows malware.

Here's an example - if some weird mixture of BGP community values on an arbitrary route caused a given router to begin to execute an arbitrary bit of code there's just about nothing that -any- firewall is going to do, especially if the goal is some kind of DoS attack. Until someone manually steps in from the network side with a device from another vendor, this malicious information could happily propagate through thousands upon thousands of networks across the planet. If the underlying network device is compromised, the utility and effectiveness of -any- firewall decreases rapidly. The knowledge that your firewall's code is open, audited and pristine is utterly irrelevant if that firewall has been bypassed.

Neither does a FC ISL. Any time we're using multiple links in parallel there needs to be a mechanism to deterministically map sessions or hosts to a particular element of the channel. Failing this, we end up with out-of-sequence packets, weird loss conditions, etc... Per-packet load balancing in LAN's (or FC, for that matter) died out a *long* time ago for this reason.