I can't help but wonder that the cost of "800 actions in 16 countries" isn't somehow costing Nintendo more in attorney's fees and court costs than they ever likely originally lost in the piracy in the first place. From all the cases I've read about in piracy proceedings, the person the company goes after never has the kind of cash the company would need to pay back the lawyers. If they wouldn't charge so much for the games (movies/TV/etc.) in the first place, people would probably be more inclined to purchase legitimately. Apple's about to break the 10 billion mark in the ITMS, so clearly there's a willingness to pay for content.

Virginia made texting illegal as well. So I can't text on my iPhone while driving, but I can still update my location with Loopt, send Tweets on whatever comes to mind, update my Facebook status and check on my friends, check the weather, look at Salesforce.com, etc. In other words, specific laws aren't going to solve the problem. And what about all the drivers on the Beltway and surrounding roads in the DC area, for example, who are also applying makeup, reading the newspaper, etc.? If you're going to make a law, you should probably get it right...

If high availability is your concern, then you need redundancy from end-to-end, not just in the servers. A cost-effective way to do that is use Stonesoft's firewall/VPN solution. It can load balance DSL, cable modem and other Internet connections, clusters the devices themselves, and perform back end server load balancing of your Web servers. The centralized management is very powerful as well. 30 day evaluations available off their Web site.

[full disclosure: I own no monkeys, but I do work for Stonesoft]