This week, we:

• got 13,047 messages from 274 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,786 sessions from 1,500 different IP addresses.
• received 255,420 connections from at least 71,636 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 12 connections being checked at once.

The volume is down compared to last week andprobably down overall, although not by much. The count of different IPaddresses is up a

Slashdot's comment moderation system is one of those wisdom of crowds thingsthat are periodically held up as exemplars; community feedback, allowing thebest to bubble to the top and so on. People who actually read Slashdotcomments, even only showing high scoring ones, may be aware that it doesn'tnecessarily work this way.

One of the reasons for this is that Slashdot's '+1 Funny' moderationoption tacitly encourages off-topic comments, because it encouragespeople to be funny even if there is

I hate firewalls because every firewall between two machines trying totalk to each other is another place for things to go wrong, which meansanother place to check (somehow) when things do go wrong.

Stateless firewalls at least have the grace to have consistent andpredictable behavior; if something is wrong, it is going to be wrong allthe time. Stateful firewalls make your life exciting by varying theirbehavior based on an ever-changing flux of generally unpredictable andinaccessible information, so things can go wrong now and right