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Web-browsing used to being up a plethora of intelligent, well-written, interesting pages back in the day

I'm sorry, but can we give the "Golden Era" meme a rest after several thousand years of constant use? I was here when the web was invented, I remember what it was like. I don't think the quality of the ideas, or the writing, or the visual presentation, has changed a whole heck of a lot either way since then. There's a lot of crap now, but there was a lot of crap then too. Maybe it used to be geekier crap, more to fellow geeks' liking, but it was still crap.

only us "old timers" bother with things like netiquette

Here you do touch on the one thing that seems to be different: the prevalence of trolls. Trolls are, by and large, a lazy lot. Even the smallest barrier to entry - even free registration - is often enough that they'll seek easier targets, so in the early days of the web trolls weren't a problem. Now, of course...well, you know.

I don't see it as a "newbie" vs. "oldbie" thing, though. Oldbies might know netiquette, but that doesn't mean they follow it. In fact, the net tends to train trolls. Think about the stage each young troll goes through when they first learn about these things called logical fallacies. Do they use this knowledge to clean up their act? No, they use it to club other people over the head. Over time, trolls get better at what they do, and the most annoying trolls are usually the ones who've had the most years of practice.

For more on "us old timers" and newbie-bashing, you might find this article from last February interesting.

Nobody can really be dumb enough to think that companies will pass savings back to the consumer. Hell, even if they did, it'd make much more of a difference to shop at a discount store like Costco

Why would shopping at Costco be so great? After all, nobody could really be dumb enough to believe that Costco will pass savings back to the consumer. Right? Oh wait. There seems to be at least one person dumb enough to believe that the laws of economics work differently for Costco than for everyone else. I stand corrected.

BTW, it's amusing how you opened your post with an insult after opening the previous one with a complaint about insults. I wrote this article about people like you who believe they're above the standards they set for others.

Stores want your buying habits linked to your identity so that they can sell them to more unscrupulous marketers who'll do things that even poor Joe Average Consumer and his friend Mr Sixpack would care about.

Your last paragraph embodied the fallacy of inconsistency. This time you appear to've decided on the complex-question fallacy instead. Yes, stores can use purchase-trail information in unsavory ways. That has never been in dispute here, and "proving" it achieves nothing. What has been in dispute here is your continuing denial that the same information can also be used in ways that benefit the consumer. It's not about "is X greater than Y" but about "is Y non-zero"; check this post, and particularly the last paragraph, if you don't believe me. When all of your evasions are stripped away, you're still losing the real debate by default.

Finally, you haven't shown anything. You obviously don't understand what a proof is.

As I said to another person here on Slashdot quite recently, someone in this discussion obviously flunked Logic 101 but it's not me. Your claim is that detailed purchase-trail information is unnecessary because it provides no benefit to consumers over raw sales numbers. I described just such a benefit, thereby disproving your claim. Instead of admitting your error, you've managed a hat-trick of fallacies by moving the goalposts back to a discussion of the possible abuses of such information (which were never in dispute to begin with).

You simply obnoxiously stated your opinion and demanded that I accept it.

That's a picture-perfect description of what you have done. You're the one with the unfulfilled burden of proof.

Been there, discussed that, your side lost. Here's the link.

Nice to know that I have so much of your attention, but that wasn't me. I'm not afraid to sign my criticisms of Freenet. BTW, you never did get back to me regarding my Freenet FIQ like you said you would. Guess you got "too busy" eh?

Frankly, "high latencies and frequent failures" are why such an idea is impractical, regardless of whether or not the theoretical problems can be solved (and i argue that they already have been solved).

Hm. So we have a set of "theoretical" problems, for which it's doubtful that solutions exist. Except that you say they've already been solved...and apparently they're not just theoretical either. Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Local disk space is far, far cheaper and more robust than network storage!

Cheaper, yes. More robust? For what value of "robust"? Are we talking about data that only exists in one place, or in multiple places? Which one's more resistant to the type of failure that takes out a whole site? Please provide a definition by which something that exists only on your machine (whose mere existence is only known locally) is more robust than something that exists in multiple places.

How long will it take to transmit a few dozen gig via DSL?

Irrelevant. In any but the most stupidly designed distributed data stores, most data would be served out of a local cache under most conditions. In many, the next step would be to serve it out of another geographically-local machine over a fast LAN connection. Just because you personally can't think of a distributed-storage architecture any better than traversing the globe for every datum doesn't mean that better architectures don't exist.

there is no reason to not use a user-level process to manage the data exchange

Really? Ever try to do mmap-style I/O over Napster? How about plain old open/read/write over Gnutella? Byte-range locking within a Freenet file? Hmmm. If you want to talk about solved problems, how about ideas like VFS layers and network-protocol abstractions? To provide generalized, transparent access to data, on a par semantically with the sort of access that you get with a local filesystem, your "user-level process" isn't going to cut it. Not by a long shot. That's like going back to the days when every application needed its own library just to get keyboard input or draw stuff on the screen. This kind of thing belongs, at least partially, inside the operating system so that all applications can use all equivalent protocols without special linkage; see my file-sharing manifesto for a fuller explanation.

For what it's worth, I've written my own review. It's oriented toward those familiar with the book, and contains some "spoilers" (for those who, unlike me, think a film adaptation of a well-known work can contain spoilers). Enjoy!

Also, with respect to data loss, the only data Freenet loses is that which is unrequested. If the author wants to ensure that unpopular data is available in Freenet then all they have to do is reinsert it.

That's just not good enough, for reasons that have already been discussed in this article and elsewhere. Reinserting data is not only horribly inefficient but also unreliable. How often do you need to reinsert? You can't know that unless you know what else is going on that will cause old copies to drop off the end of everyone's cache, so you make a pessimistic assumption and spam the network with reinsertions...and it seems to work until someone else starts doing the same things and the caches start turning over faster and IT JUST REALLY SUCKS. Freenet is useful as a data transmission method but not as a data store, and some people want a data store. Get over it.

Perhaps you should educate yourself before you expose your ignorance.

I'm on freenet-tech, Ian. I see how people respond when someone asks when Freenet will be finished. I know about the near-total restart when a lot of the original grand plans were found to be fatally flawed. I can almost predict the next one. You're the one who's ignorant, Ian - about what constitutes a useful system and how to provide it.