Dear JWZ: That's why to use Ghostscript. Because it actually gets it right.

Followup: I just ran some hard numbers; using a current "petrol price finder" website I find an average price in the UK of 110p/L ($8.28/gal after tax). Working backwards from a published fuel tax rate of 53.6p/L and GST of 17.5% I compute a pre-tax price of 40p/L ($3.01/gal). The last time I got gas here it was $3.75/gal at the pump; working backwards from published state, local and federal sales and fuel taxes (37.4 cents/gal total fuel tax; 8.5% total sales tax) I compute a pre-tax price of $3.08/gal. I'm tempted to say that's higher but it's probably fairer to say the difference is negligible. Currency and unit conversions are courtesy of Google; math is mine.

Our gas prices really aren't all that far out of line with Europe's -- it's just that Europeans are taxed on fuel at an average rate of about 75%, with the UK taxed at an incredible rate of something like 300%-400% (that is to say, 3/4 - 4/5 of the pump price goes to fuel tax and GST while 1/5 - 1/4 of what you pay goes to station owners, oil producers, and refiners). This has risen since the last time I looked, when the UK rate was "only" approximately 250%. In any case, the tax rates on fuel in the US vary by state but are generally in the area of 10-20% total against a price of $4/gal.

Anyone for tennis? Wouldn't that be nice?

If Obama is elected, I don't care if he's completely ineffective, or if he drags us one step closer to world socialism. I've given up on the premise that people have any effect in politics, anyway. But if he can simply act respectably for four or eight years, he'll be raising the bar several notches. And it's something that Clinton (who over the course of her campaign has eliminated all doubt that she's a bitch) or McCain (who's left his former honesty behind) could never do.

I hope you meant over-regulated drug companies reaping massive profits. After all, they wouldn't be where they were if not for the blessings handed down to them by the patent system and the FDA.

Maybe they can get Debian to sponsor it...

Zuzu @1:

1) No, you can't block this with packet filtering. Lots of people have posted "HOWTOs" purporting to show you how to do just that, but they're completely ineffective. First, because you can't tell a spoofed RST from a real one, and second because the monitoring appliance sends an RST to the remote party as well, terminating the connection on their end, and you can't block that.

2) I2P is cool, and fostering interest in it is good, but it would completely fall over if a significant number of users hopped on and started torrenting. BitTorrent already does something that ISPs' asymmetric bandwidth allocation schemes don't like: it blurs the distinction between servers and "users" by getting everyone invovled in uploading files. Every byte received by someone has to be sent by someone. I2P's mix-routing only magnifies the effect; now everyone is a router as well, and every packet has to go through several users' slow uplinks. Every byte received by someone has to be sent by several someones before it reaches its destination, so the average download rate across the network is, at best, a fraction of the average available upstream of all the users. And that's before you even get into padding or encapsulation overhead.

I've also seen Comcast breaking ED2K through RST spoofing, on and off for several months -- it's pretty much unmistakable. For more details, the magic word to google is "Sandvine".