One of Dick's books, sorry I cannot remember the title, concerns an arms race involving entirely fictitious weapons. The financial industry seems to be approaching this level, where the activity in no way concerns real-life financial instruments.

from an intersting book: Cities in Flight

To make usage-base charging fair to all content providers, all content providers must be included, including Comcast TV, Comcast On-Demand, etc. If the cable owners content is getting a free ride, the pure internet providers will have a major problem.

running your application as a windows service (I think Linux has similar) solves this problem. Perhaps all applications should be 'services'

Would this help? First, create unchecked exceptions to match each checked exception. Then, allow applications to somehow provide a list of checked exceptions that should be unchecked (which would carry the checked exception as a chained exception. Perhaps only checked exceptions returned by 'external' routines would be affected...

I agree... I've seen much of the 'Free Keene' folk who are supposedly anarchists, and they all seem to be society drop-outs, who expect to be allowed to do as they please. And yes, drugs seem to be a big part of their movement.

As an old DEC-hand from the beginning of the VAX era, I still consider VMS superior in many ways to modern O/Ss. Certainly better designed, and in a more coherent fashion than Linux, and Windows NT is simply a pale imitation/copy of VMS. I could say more... but what's the point.

sort of talking to myself... if such DOS attacks are possible, but not yet implemented, does that imply that the governments don't want to shut these down? Perhaps this is a good tool for finding all terrorist supporter; I'm sure the NSA could figure out all those browsing those sites.

Why doesn't the nations, police, etc simply do massive denial-of-service attacks at all such web sites? I'm sure the US or French governments could gather a few thousand special computers just for that purpose. Very quickly those who are hosting such sites would remove them.

I was in the nuclear field in the Navy many years ago, and if one of us (highly trained, expensively trained, hard to hire otherwise, etc) received too much exposure, we became normal enlisted men, of no use to the nuclear area. So when any task with high radiation exposure, 'normals' were assigned. The assumption was that these men would never get this expose again. Really, there is no other way.