> maybe TCP needs an equivalent of SMTP's "421 please come back later"
> response so it can say I'm here, and I'm listening, but I'm too damn
> busy right now....

Hm, this sounds pretty close to accepting the connection and
advertising a zero window.  With a little effort, I would expect the
overhead to get down to the order of half-open connections (ie, the
table maintained by the SYN-flood defenses).

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