RATE LIMITING

A few months ago I wrote about the Slowloris attack on web servers, the short version of which is: Attackers connect and hold connections open, using very few resources on their end, but soaking up all your available sockets and preventing any legitimate users from connecting. Since then, a number of other denial-of-service types of attack have been announced against web servers, web applications, and other services. This got me thinking: How can programmers deal with these issues in a generic way to reduce their impact?