I don't know why so many Australians are complaining about this network. I've seen many countries waste money in much worse ways. Just look at the USA spending hundreds of billions of dollars for things half the people don't agree with and not batting an eye (wars, military bases, foreign aid, social security). Just a few years ago with this bailout thing, whoops, a few trillion dollars spent in bailouts and QE. Take a look at Indonesia and the Philippines, just a random example, where tons of tax dollars just go to politicians pockets through corruption and ridiculous useless programs.

Adding a high speed network for your country sounds not so bad. Australia's networks suck as it is - expensive, slow and tiny bandwidth caps all over the place. Why not? Now you just need to attract companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Akamai to setup large installations in Australia to make good use of that network!

Use something like the Meraki MR16 - It sounds like you aren't the most technically savvy in this regard, and even if you were this makes life easy. There are other ways to do this, but this is probably the easiest I've seen. www.meraki.com

What "cloud" do you use where it costs $750/year to store 1TB? S3 RRD would cost you $1120 - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24.093+per+GB+*+1TB+*+12 Azure costs more. Rackspace costs more. Who do you use?

Why do I never have mod points anymore? Mod up, +1.

Oh please... I live in Indonesia. A 5.9 earthquake barely even makes the news. A 5.9 is like, "Uhhh, hrmm, something feels strange, am I feeling a bit dizzy? Oh no, it's just a small earthquake."

Seriously though, the depth of the earthquake makes a big difference and this one seemed to be shallow, so I can imagine most people clearly felt it. However, the shake map looks pretty tame. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/global/shake/c0005ild/

Assuming most of these DDOS attacks come from from botnets; I wonder what percent of these DDOS attacks are made up of computers that were infected/compromised because they were left unpatched out in the open verses computers that were compromised because the user installed a pirated copy of some software that contained a virus or rootkit.

Given the reports I've heard of China and many other countries pirating 90% of their software http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/21/2217248/Ballmer-Says-90-of-Chinese-Users-Pirate-Software, I'd imagine there's got to be botnet makers who make software piracy the foundations of some big botnets. Anyone know?

Ok, sorry, I guess I just misunderstood it. They are only asking to verify the account you're sending from. Whoops.

From their website:
http://aws.amazon.com/ses/#functionality

"Verify Email Addresses: Before you can send email via Amazon SES, you need to verify that you own the email address from which you’ll be sending email. To verify an email address, make an API call with the email address as a parameter. This API call will trigger a verification email, which will contain a link that you can click on to complete the verification process."

So, what's all this talk about Amazon needing great content filters etc? Sounds to me if anyone is getting an email through this service, they approved it and they can unsubscribe anytime. Am I missing something?