I will say one thing about the war in Iraq: opportunity cost. Costofwar.com calculates the opportunity cost of this specific war, and What the World Wants does the same for war in general, in sickening detail. It looks like Gulf War II will cost well in excess of $100bn. That’s about the cost of NASA’s Mars Reference Mission. A prison colony couldn’t cost that much more, and then you have a place to send people when they get voted off the planet in Big Brother International.

Is Iraq’s oil worth $100 billion?, and what could be done with that $100bn? asks Philip Greenspun. I wonder. You could pay off Dr. Evil. You could buy ten trillion penny chews. You could buy enough ammo to shoot every last god damn person in the world. Oh wait, that’s what they actually did spend it on.

I’ve just switched broadband providers from Virtua to Velox. Here is some data:

• Velox is faster, even at the same speed rating.
• Velox is slightly cheaper.
• The Velox DSL modem is smaller and prettier than the Virtua cable modem
• Velox uses a telephone line, but doesn’t interfere with voice calls, providing you put a filter on every socket you want to use voice on. How inelegant.
• Velox doesn’t involve giving cash to Globo, the evil Brazillian publishing monopoly. They’re bad. Very bad. You might think you don’t care, but every centavo you give them can be guaranteed to go to a bad cause.
• For some reason, Velox and Virtua just provide the connectivity, and you are required to have an “ISP” as well. This costs extra, and you can’t access the internet without one. They don’t appear to do anything except provide peripheral services such as email and some minor bits of content. I think it’s meant to be a way of stopping lock-in by the connectivity provider.
• To access the internet with Virtua, you just plug the ethernet cable into your computer and everything behaves as if you’re on a DHCP local network. With Velox, there is an extra step involved. After plugging the hardware in, you must log into their website with the username and password of the ISP before you can access any other website. This is the most ridiculously braindead technical decision I have ever been the victim of. You have to do this every time you want to use any net service (web, email, ssh… anything), and to top it all off, it times out after 5 or so minutes of inactivity.
• To complete the horror, the login webpage has Big Graphics and Lots of Javascript and No Content.
• Fortunately, non-idiots have written autologin scripts for Linux, and a similar program for Windows, which I can’t make work entirely automatically, but that’s just one of the atonements Windows users pay for their sins with.

Conclusion: Velox wins, but thank god I’m going back to university in a couple of weeks.

Update: If you can’t be arsed with the login tools, just keep some net radio playing in the background. You can always turn it down if it gets annoying. If you need the bandwidth for downloads, that will keep the connection alive too.