Stupied network - Why can't it be friendly?

[Perra]

Hi,

If I boot my laptop without the network cable attached I have to wait 
almost a minute before "bringing up network" times out. Can't it just 
detect that link is down? (When I remove/plugin my network cable 
serveral times I can se lots of link up/down messages while doing dmesg)

Then when I attach the cable I want it to startup the network without 
me suing to root and running "service network restart"?

With howl, I thought it would be possible to connect two linux machines 
with a crossover cable and have howl automagically setup 10.0.0.{1,2} 
correctly in each end. 

Other from that FC3t2 is really slick!

  Perra