Bush's jaw twitch

Harry Shearer has pointed out (via video samples) that Bush seems to have developed an unusual jaw twitch. TMJ? A reaction to medication?

Cops on bad behavior

This first-hand account of a person in a wheelchair (Preston Craig) being abused by cops (Atlanta PD) shows why some people don't like the police. He saw a police cruiser parked in a handicapped space and blocking the handicapped ramp for a coffee place, confronted the officer about it, and took photos with his camera phone. He ended up getting arrested, and the group of cops present agreed to lie about what happened (which included taking his cell phone and deleting the pictures).

The Tucson anarchist magazine The Match! has a regular feature each issue called "Who the Police Beat" that contains multiple stories that are at least as outrageous as this one. Although I'm sure the bad cops who engage in such behavior are a minority, it's a minority that is almost always allowed to get away with it. (Via Catallarchy.)

Student's Bill of Rights project gets investigated by Secret Service

A student of Selina Jarvis in North Carolina took a photograph of George W. Bush from a magazine, tacked it to a wall (through his head), and photographed his hand giving a thumbs-down gesture next to the Bush photo.

Someone at the Kitty Hawk, NC Wal-Mart thought this was suspicious, and the student got a visit from the U.S. Secret Service, which confiscated his project. The above story doesn't say whether it was returned, but at least they decided not to indict him.

Southwest Airlines kicks off passenger for anti-Bush T-shirt

CNN's story says that Lorrie Heasley's shirt featured pictures of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice along with "a phrase similar to the popular film title 'Meet the Fockers.'" I'm guessing that it said "Meet the Fuckers," similar to this shirt (which doesn't have the same people on it). She was made to leave the Los Angeles-to-Portland flight during a stop in Reno, Nevada.

She says she will sue for reimbursement for her hotel, rental car, and gasoline costs for the last leg of her trip.

Southwest claims they are obligated under FAA rules to deny boarding to any passenger "whose conduct is offensive, abusive, disorderly or violent or for clothing that is 'lewd, obscene, or patently offensive.'" An FAA spokesperson says there are no such federal rules. Historically the FAA has required airlines to operate by rules which the airlines are not allowed to publicly reveal, such as those about requiring identification that were at issue in John Gilmore's lawsuit.

If Southwest's claim about an FAA rule is correct, they had already violated it since they allowed her to board and fly half of the journey. Unless she was creating some kind of a new disturbance, putting her off half way through the flight seems pretty outrageous.

Level 3 depeers Cogent

InfoWorld:

A financial dispute between two major Internet backbones has led to dropped traffic between their networks, a high-stakes game of chicken that's angering customers affected by the network disruptions.

Early Wednesday morning Level 3 Communications Inc. terminated its "peering" agreement with Cogent Communications Inc., a step Level 3 says it took after months of fruitless negotiations.

This has had no effect on customers of any tier-1 providers other than Level 3. It only affects customers (and customers of customers, ad infinitum) who purchase service only from Level 3 or Cogent, without purchasing transit service from someone who has reachability to the other.

Tier-1 providers are those that connect to each other (to all other tier-1's) with settlement-free interconnections (SFI); these include MCI, AT&T, Sprint, Qwest, Verio, and Global Crossing. Part of the agreement is usually that the amount of traffic passed in each direction is on a par--the reason for entering into such an arrangement without exchanging money is that the connectivity is considered of equal value to both parties. To quote a paper by Geoff Huston,

The bottom line is that a true peer relationship is based on the supposition that either party can terminate the interconnection relationship and that the other party does not consider such an action a competitively hostile act. If one party has a high reliance on the interconnection arrangement and the other does not, then the most stable business outcome is that this reliance is expressed in terms of a service contract with the other party, and a provider/client relationship is established. If a balance of mutual requirement exists between both parties, then a stable basis for a peer interconnection relationship also exists. Such a statement has no intrinsic metrics that allow the requirements to be quantified. Peering in such an environment is best expressed as the balance of perceptions, in which each party perceives an acceptable approximation of equal benefit in the interconnection relationship in their own terms.

Cogent, unlike Level 3, is not a tier-1 provider; they purchase transit from Verio in order to get to Sprint and AOL, among other places. Cogent has applied filters to announcements of their routes to their transit providers for all of its peers, so that traffic to those peers can only go over the links where they don't pay for traffic (the peering links) rather than the ones where they do have to pay (the transit links).

Level 3 has apparently decided that it is not getting as much as it's giving from the peer relationship with Cogent, and so has ended it, with 75 days notice. This is a situation which Cogent could rectify by entering into a customer relationship with Level 3 or by removing their filters on Level 3 to use a transit provider such as Verio to reach Level 3.

This is a scenario that either party has the power to resolve--Level 3 by allowing peering from Cogent (which they have already clearly indicated is not a high priority for them); Cogent by purchasing service from Level 3 or reaching Level 3 by purchasing IP transit from someone else.

Cogent has been caught in this situation at least three times previously--it was depeered by OpenTransit (France Telecom) on April 14, 2005. Cogent gave in on April 17 by removing its filters that prevented traffic to OpenTransit from going across transit links. Teleglobe apparently attempted a similar move, but after paying Savvis for transit to resolve the issue, decided the peering was worthwhile. Back in 2002, AOL ended its peering with Cogent. So of these three peering battles, Cogent lost two and won one.

It's possible that Cogent generates more outbound than inbound traffic on its peering connection with Level 3; that kind of imbalance can be caused by, say, Cogent having more websites than individual customers on its network. Websites receive very small requests for pages, and send back very large amounts of data (web pages, images, streaming audio and video). Individual customers typically send out small requests (for web pages or files to download) and receive back large amounts of data. Peer-to-peer traffic can have high volume in either direction, but tends to cancel out since it's usually between individual customers. (UPDATE: Cogent denies that this is the case, saying that their inbound and outbound traffic with Level 3 was balanced.)

Cogent has been aggressive in price reductions on IP transit costs, allowing them to take customers from providers that they peer with; this is also being attributed as a reason for Level 3 to want to depeer with them.

It remains to be seen who will blink first this time. We may see calls for government regulation to address this issue, but those who have lost connectivity should complain to their upstream providers; those complaints will pass up to either Level 3 or Cogent. (And, if you are one of those affected, that means your provider is not purchasing sufficient connectivity to be able to withstand an issue like this.)

UPDATE (July 25, 2008): It was Level 3 that blinked first (back in 2005; I neglected to update this post), and as of June 2008, Cogent is no longer buying transit from anyone, joining the ranks of tier-1 providers.

Harriet Miers' church supports the crankiest of young-earth creationists

Harriet Miers attends Valley View Christian Church. Their website's "links" page links to Carl Baugh's Creation Evidence Museum. Baugh, a cranky young-earth creationist with diploma mill credentials, is notorious for making claims so bogus that his fellow young-earth creationists debunk them.

Harriet Miers thinks Bush is an intellectual giant

David Frum of the National Review, who has personal experience with Miers, says: "In a White House that hero-worshiped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met."

She's clearly unqualified for the Supreme Court, as she's either deluded or dishonest.

French fry vending machine

Patatas Chef is a device ("like a clean and small sophisticated factory") that makes and sells french fries. Expect late-night TV ads on how to make millions from the comfort of your home, along with your WiFi hotspot and Internet kiosk.

Neurological evidence for the placebo effect

Research by Jon-Kar Zubieta at the University of Michigan published in The Journal of Neuroscience shows that subjects told they were receiving pain medication produced more "opioid" activity in the brain, as measured by PET scans showing activation of "mu-opioid receptors." Subjects given the placebo showed higher such receptor activation and reported greater pain relief, and had to be given higher levels of pain stimulus to maintain the same reported level of pain.

So it's not just mind over matter magic.

Bush to consider using military to enforce quarantines if Avian flu epidemic breaks out

The Seattle Times reports:

President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed today that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it.

"The best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins," he said during a wide-ranging Rose Garden news conference.