Yah, apparently /. was choosing not to post the comments for a while. It just said 0 comments, and the story seemed old enough that it should've had a bunch. Worked out the obvious explanation after I made that post and /. continued to say there 0 comments.

Presumably (hopefully?) involving Natalie Portman and hot grits..?

There's also Stardock's Impulse platform and Gamer's Gate. I think Steam took off because they were riding on the coattails of an already very-popular game. It's all about getting enough marketshare to start with that your platform becomes convenient, rather than annoying.

Does that actually give you 4gbit throughput to any host across a single data stream, or is like most link aggregation schemes in that it just spreads concurrent sessions across multiple physical links, but each session is limited by the bandwidth of a single physical link?

OT, but congrats... your post is currently scored at -1, Insightful.

A far cry from the coveted +5 Troll but still pretty cool!

The problem with our current video game rating system is that MA15+ is the highest we have. The only other option the classification board has is to refuse the game classification altogether, thereby preventing it from being sold in Australia. This results in things that shouldn't pass a MA15+ rating getting one, because they're not so bad they should be refused classification altogether.

It's also why the idiotic "gotta protect the children!" crowd who oppose a higher rating for video games are showing themselves to be unthinking hypocrites who have zero interest in actually reducing the ease of access to violent or 'harmful' games by minors, and are instead interested only in shoving their own particular moralities down the throat of every adult in the country.

Why not? How would putting a geosync comms satellite above them change their income level or cost of the communal equipment?

There was, but you missed it. Here you go.

Apparently the price has increased. Probably inflation.

Wasn't that precisely the idea that "The protocol could be tested via a website that allows users to create, retrieve and decrypt sample messages that conform to the protocol - which also demonstrates communication across human cultural boundaries" was addressing?

Pretty easily, at least in this case. The root servers provide these name servers for .kp:

kp. 172800 IN NS ns2.kptc.kp.
kp. 172800 IN NS ns1.kptc.kp.

which are both located on the same class C:

ns1.kptc.kp. 86400 IN A 175.45.176.15
ns2.kptc.kp. 86400 IN A 175.45.176.16

Which generally is indicative of the same network segment. I guess North Korea doesn't have a need for a particularly robust internet infrastructure, so there's a good chance there's just some servers listening on those addresses and no fancy load-balancing or anycast routing going on, and very likely they're at the same physical location.

If either of those stop responding to queries, then resolution of anything under .kp will fail.

Umm... I think I get the point you're trying to make, but you basically implied that this congresswoman deserved to be shot because she didn't answer a question.

That's pretty sick.

Specific questions are difficult to scale though. It works well against normal users (who only have their own resources at their disposal), but if you're running a captcha-breaking business, you have a lot of people with the ability to access a centralised database and customised software. They probably can't make a program smart enough to 'watch' an advert and answer arbitrary questions about it or correctly interpret an idiomatic expression, but once one of their employees has worked out the answer, the question/answer pair gets added to the database and that particular question can be answered by everyone else without thought - or even by software without any human interaction.

The only solution to that is to increase the number of questions so the database hit-ratio becomes very low, but that's quite hard to do. Most such questions will need to be written by a human rather than machine-generated, so it quickly becomes more expensive than just deleting the spam. Plus, there's typically a limited number of questions you can ask, especially if you consider that the questions need to be simple enough for legitimate users to be able to answer.

This page lists major donors to the state Government's flood relief appeal. There are some resources amongst the list.

Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, what he's basically saying is that brick and mortar stores are a very inefficient and expensive way to provide goods to people. Rather than improve their efficiency or allow the market to kill off the old and no longer useful ways, we should artificially inflate the cost of more efficient methods of providing goods to people, so that all the methods we have available are equally inefficient.

From a short-term perspective, keeping the jobs etc. sounds good. Long-term though, this sounds a bit like the broken window fallacy.