Penny Arcade Holiday Strip Series #1
While normally we don't do this sort of thing, recent charity work with Child's Play has substantially increased
the bandwidth demands over at Penny Arcade. To assist Gabe & Tycho, and keep their site running slightly faster than a snails-pace, we're co-hosting their seasonal holiday strip series "The Last Christmas". The cover and the first page are attached to this story (future pages in coming days), so read on and enjoy until we hit our bandwidth limits! (Warning: Comic may contain Cthulhu)
It doesn't sound like they're paying for bandwidth with it, it sounds like they drive is causing more bandwidth USAGE that they can't afford.
You got modded off topic for mentioning Cthulthu in a story not only about a Cthulthu comic, but containing a picture of Cthulthu on the same page. My hat goes off to you, sir.
Slashdot could conceivably get into legal trouble by mirroring everything that they link to. If the editors had to take the time to contact content owners before linking, it could significantly slow down the flow of stories on Slashdot. I'm guessing that in this instance, the editors contacted Gabe and Tycho or vice versa and made an agreement to do this.
Unfortunately, Slashdot cannot be taken down by the Slashdot effect.
It's a negative feedback system. When the load increases on Slashdot's servers, the number of people who can access the site decreases, decreasing the load on the servers. Eventually, there will be an point where the inflow of new readers equals the outflow of `old' readers.
During this period the throughput will be maximum. Whether throughput==bandwidth depends on the content. The images are hopefully coming from a caching server away from the nonsense that is comment thresholds.
BB