Here is an excellent BitTorrent FAQ and Guide, mostly focused on Windows clients. Recommended for anyone getting started with BitTorrent or those who need to fine-tune their homenets for best performance.

This is all over the news by now, but in case you haven’t heard: Attorney General Ashcroft, Commerce Secretary Evans Resign

President Bush accepted the resignations of Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans late Tuesday in what is expected to be a series of Cabinet changes prior to the Jan. 20 start of his second term.

Both have held their posts since President Bush took office in 2001 and are the first two Cabinet-level officials to announce their departure since the president’s reelection.

My feeling is pretty much what’s being expressed on Slashdot: Yay, Ashcroft’s gone. Uh-oh, who could be next? Uh-oh, we have a Supreme Court opening any day now and a prime candidate.

In other words, this is not necessarily “good news”.

5minutestolive.com is featuring a Wendy’s training video. It’s an 8.5MB QuickTime clip, and the site may well have heavy load, so I’ve mirrored the video here.

Warning: Unsuitable for those with an aversion to bad 80s corporate training videos

The Register has posted an open letter, purportedly written by the “New Democrat Outreach Program”, to the states who voted for Bush. Here’s a sample, but be warned: there is language unfit for kiddies or anyone wearing blinders.

With hard work and superb organization, you have triumphed over John Kerry and the forces of Blue-state paternalism. Congratulations. The multinational corporations that hold you in bondage remain free to profit off your sweat nearly tax free, while their overpaid senior execs continue to pay a pittance in personal income tax.

Your primary and secondary schools will continue to turn out third-rate pupils with limited opportunities, while you enjoy the satisfaction of making it on your own without health care when a catastrophic illness bankrupts your family.

Your agricultural universities will continue issuing Ph.D.s in football, and bogus Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist theology, and how to jerk off a bull safely. Your children will learn to borrow enough money to erect chicken houses so that they, like you, can take custody — not possession, but custody — of Tyson’s chicks, feed them, rear them, assume losses from those that fail to thrive, and in the end earn just enough money to service their endless debt, and realize a profit of perhaps $12K a year. Your bank thanks you; Tyson thanks you; George W. Bush thanks you; and I thank you.

There’s much more at the link above, and I strongly recommend reading it.

On a similar note, Randi Rhodes (of Air America Radio) has a very interesting graphic linked off her main page, showing a puzzling statistic: the exit polls showing Kerry leading matched the final result almost exactly in states with primarily non-electronic balloting, but were almost completely wrong in states with primarily electronic balloting. Remember, of course, that the CEO of Diebold–the company who manufactured, supplied, and supported the voting machines–promised Ohio’s votes to Bush.

Next week on “LAX”: Naked man hides in plane wheel well at LA airport

A naked man climbed a fence at Los Angeles International Airport, ran across the tarmac and climbed into the wheel well of a departing plane before firefighters talked him out, airport officials said.

The 31-year-old Canadian man, who was described as mentally unstable, had been turned away hours earlier when he tried to buy a ticket on a Qantas Airways flight to Australia with only a credit card receipt.

Let’s see Heather and Blair deal with this one…