As someone who's actively fighting this type of traffic, let me share my perspective.

I have been running a small-ish website with user peaks at around 50 requests per second. Over the last couple of months, my site is getting hit with loads of up to 300 requests per second by these kinds of bots. They're using distributed IPs, and random user agents making it hard to block.

My site has a lot of data and pages to scan, and despite an appropriate robots.txt, these things ignore that and just scan endlessly. My website isn't designed to be for profit, and I do this more or less as a hobby and therefore has trouble handling a nearly 10x increase in traffic. My DNS costs have gone up significantly, with 150 or so million DNS requests being done this month.

The net effect is that my website slows down and gets unresponsive by these scans, and I am looking at spending more money just to manage this excess traffic.

Is it destroying my site? No, not really. But it absolutely increases costs and forces me to spend more money and hours on infrastructure than I would have needed to. These things are hurting smaller communities generating significant cost increases onto those who may have difficulties covering those costs, so calling it bullshit isn't exactly accurate.

That's based on the assumption that they are in this for the money. Replace the word "customers" with "targets", and think about it again. :)

Iceland banned beef spiced with salt & pepper? Because that's the content of the meat. That's how they advertise it, and that's what it is. There's no way they could have gotten away with sneaking in extra preservatives and crap in it for this long, specially with these ridiculous and meaningless "experiments" popping up.

Hard disks don't die from dust. They *do* die from too loud noises, though.

Seen that first hand after an incident just like this one.

...and other commin deities.

Why oh why

Just because a company has released some games doesn't necessarily mean they released *all* the games they've worked on.

But taking a huge lot of peoples money and then run hurts alot more (in reputation) than just taking some publishers', so chances are this game will see the light of day in some form. :)

a) It is a prototype. Perfect fit is not expected.
b) People tend to stay in refugee camps not because of the comfort of the facilities, but due to the fact that WAR still is raging.

Sounds like "theory" to me. What's with science and ambiguous words? :)

Can't use ogoogelbar? Ok, we'll use obingbar then, it rolls off the tounge better anyway.

The why is blindingly obvious to me.... Because with the trend of phones being 5"+, a watch is a HUGE lot handier to manage than having to pull out the phone unlock it, read some sms or email which likely doesn't require an immediate response anyway, or hang up a call from someone you don't have time to talk to at the moment. Add to that some other on-a-glance features, like... *the time*, a stopwatch, countdown timer etc, and hey presto, a whole package of quite useful stuff which may come in handy.

The problem isn't that they got sued. If they hadn't played the patent card things would never have gone out of proportion like this. They should have just sued and said "this phone looks too much like ours" and be done with it. Instead they said "this phone looks like ours" AND included the alleged "theft" of all kinds of things they lie about having invented. The only reason they played the patent card is because if they win, it will put the *entire* smartphone industry years behind because it would mean all their baloney patents would be validated. What better way than to hide it within a obvious case. I'm almost ready to put on a tin foil hat and consider this whole thing a made up plot by Samsung and Apple. Apple builds the smartphones, Samsung builds the components. All competition are ridiculously gimped by idiotic, and because of this obvious "simple case", now legally valid patents. Seems like a good deal for both Apple *and* Samsung in the end, right?

...and IKEA would become Swedish again very quickly if it was cheaper to run it from there.
The (Swedish) Kamprad family still controls the various companies and fondations making up IKEA...

you actually found a collision?

*please* post the password that produces the same hash as "swordfish"

Seriously, if someone tells me that I have to go through a whipping session to get a job, I'd decline. The same goes here.