Slashdot Mirror
Q&A With MIT's Nicholas Negroponte
Lisa Langsdorf writes "Thought you might be interested in this interview between Nicholas Negroponte and BusinessWeek Online's Steven Baker.
In it, Nicholas says that peer-to-peer is his prediction as to which new products or services are likely to make the biggest splash, he says:
Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc. Furthermore, you will see micro-wireless networks, where everyday devices become routers of messages that have nothing to do with themselves.
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
"
"Honestly mom, that pr0n was just going THROUGH my device. I think it just got stuck!"
Well blow me, this guy is obviously a genious. I mean after all this time that several million people have been using P2P, somebody thinks it might be used a lot in the future..
Come one, did we really need some computer geek to tell us that?
There's nothing more to see here, next story please.
Now my work computer will tell me I'm out of milk at home.
"Your home liquid calcium levels are low. Please pause at the grocers and aquire more."
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Almost like...The Internet!?!?!
let's hear it for a better way to spread viruses. As we all know bluetooth is now starting to spread viruses from phone to phone...this is the wave of the future.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
You should realize that this Nick Negroponte is the SAME GUY that whored himself to Swatch to promote their ridiculous "Internet Time" initiative.
exactly how can peer-to-peer networks come into our lives so easily. I mean how do you trust totally unknown people to transfer your data/food/whatever between any two points?
As a matter of fact, who would trust their credit card number to travel through a peer-to-peer network to get to the company he/she's ordering from? And this is just money... how about food as mentioned in the article?
A: Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc
Is it just me or is his answer devoid of reasons why "peer-to-peer is key"?Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Ok... so, why is "peer-to-peer key"?
Key to what?
I do not agree with some of what he says.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
The last person to want real change is not the customer, these days it seems to be the companies making that decision for the customer.
Think of any area, there are millions of customers who want a change for the better -- however the companies are just not letting the change happen and say that it's for the good of the customer, or that what the customer wants is illegal (and if it isn't illegal, they'll just pass a couple of laws and make it illegal).
And to be honest, small companies that bring about great innovations are being stifled, especially because they are shit scared of law suits. I'm surprised that Nicholas did not mention this in his interview.
True, they hold the key. But it does not take much to crush them down, either.
I mean how do you trust totally unknown people to transfer your data/food/whatever between any two points?
This happens every day when I drop mail into the postbox. Or when I buy a banana in the local market.
Da Blog
Wont it take a lot longer for a message to work its way threw a massive network of wireless devices than it would otherwise take for the message to travel threw a conventional backbone? Has anyone come up with a method to reduce the impact the additional routing will create?
..typical Negroponte - jumping on the bandwagon way after everyone else has a seat - look how long it took the MIT media lab to get a website.
What happened to Negroponte? He used to be everywhere, then he disappeared as the web seemed to totally subsume the Media Lab's vision of the future.
Yes, and here we have the most depressing economic forecast ever. Don't forget "fighting over petrol" and "driving really fast cars".
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Kids, back in the olden days of the 1990's, there was a whole magazine that consisted of repeating "Atoms are heavy; bits are weightless." over and over again, interspersed with pictures of stuff they said you had to buy. Strange times.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
so if everything is connected, then what happens when the machines realize they no longer need us to bring them together because they are already one?
JasonBlogs
His law I guess from the early 90's said that everything that was airborne would become fixed conduits and the reverse.
Example: Television is mostly fixed and stationary so cable will take over. Telephones is for people that is moving so they will switch to Wireless.
Help fight continental drift.
Saying that organization and order can only come from centralism sounds a little, well, ideologically loaded coming from the brother of John Negroponte, the former US Ambassador to Honduras who seems to have formed the opinion that the best way to establish order in fractious Latin countries was to tacitly allow strong men and dictators to terrorise, torture and kill the populace.
And now John Negroponte is Bush's choice for next Ambassador to Iraq, where it seems the current US administration obviously feels a little torture and a few disappeared people is one way to restore "order". How convenient!
Da Blog
Unless you could do it by distributing it over a new wireless network supported by thousands of regular people, then no.
Actually, that'd be kind of interesting, being able to defecate via wireless ethernet. Bosses would love it a bit too much though since they wouldn't have to pay for our bathroom breaks. Of course, if we somehow get around to the point that we could do such things, at least maybe P2P would stop being such a sticking point with the government, since they'd have bigger things to worry about, like regulation of bathroom dropoff locations, making sure they aren't, banks and such. Or making sure we don't wirelessly transfer ourselves into bank vaults or.... What?
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
Yeah, but if peer to peer really DOES take over, everything would be more equitable, we would be free of all the lock-ins and inefficient bottlenecks the big companies and governments have worked so hard to force on us, and worst of all, with the destruction of the "Overlord" social class, it would basically be the end of the "I, for one, welcome our alien overlords" jokes! Therefore, peer to peer MUST be stopped, if only for the sake of all those Slashdot trolls who don't have the brainpower to write something original.
You can take away the "alien overlord" jokes, but we'll always have Soviet Russ--
Oh.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Who run barter-town?
Geesh, if that's where P2P leads us, maybe the RIAA is right. Hmmmm.
I agree with you, but I don't want to blow you... ever.
I read "Being Digital"... there was absolutely no insight in that book. So Bits are replacing Atoms... brilliant. Maybe someday we'll get email to replace paper-mail... Wow. Where do I sign up to be a guru too.
I can hardly wait for the $50 toaster that can pass along all the messages it recieves.
Now that same magazine mostly consists of pictures of things you are supposed to buy interspersed with pictures of Sergei Brin and Steve Jobs. Its still mostly toilet paper though.
isn't this news as of 2000?
the killer apps that proved the model: im ala icq, music sharing ala napster, are already dust in the wind, taken over by aim, kazaa, etc.
and we know what the concerns are with those apps: patent infringement, viruses, spam, etc.
what we need is a wireless killer app without these concerns thwarting it
we also need a user base: enough infratstructure and people with bluetooth or whatever wireless protocol enabled gadgets to make a critical mass for the rest of the world to notice
and then we can start talking about p2p again the way negroponte is
i don't know what this killer app is, i'm no futurist, but some of you out there closer to the ground with some wacky ideas may be, and i say, to you goes the spoils of the future of computing/ the internet/ media itself
roll up your sleeves and get programming
the internet is still a very young place, we are still on the upside of the bell curve of innovation yet to come, so even though what negroponte says is dubious and/ or obvious and therefore useless, the basic observation of the youth of the internet and its promising future remains unchallenged
that's why futurists like negroponte sound interesting, because they get that (no matter if their predictions are crapola)
one of you out there reading this is going to become very rich/ influential/ famous
that is for sure
but how you are going to do that probably has very little to do with what negorponte is talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Whats interesting is how wrong he got some parts. He totally missed the web...he seemed to be stuck on some vision of uber-TV.
P2P has already proven its effectiveness, whether you look at programs like KaZaA, Mercora, etc. But it works on wired systems because there is established infrastructure that makes the rest of the system work. For his system to work, it would be like taking out the router/server farms from the ISPs and turning every desktop computer into both a router and a server. It adds complexity, and while it ensures redundancy and would keep outages like the earlier one at Akamai from happening, it would require lots of overhead.
There is a reason that we assume that centralised systems work better; they are easier to establish, coordinate and control. This outlook only works if you are going for a fully anarchist system, which you will never get everyone to buy into, barring a massive sociological paradigm shift; something has to happen that convinces everyone that a truly open society is more beneficial than the current model.
#define CLUE 0
i don't often believe in you, but i'll make an exception in this case.
please don't let necroponte build a media lab of the world. i mean, look, india was smart. they shut theirs down. you know, because media lab india didn't *do* anything. ireland has not caught on yet, and the united states, well, we started the damn thing.
the world should not be full of cat toys that think, and refridgerators that share your leftovers. and the governments of the world should not be putting tax dollars to create such things.
thanks, peace out,
-ninjaneer
Because historically, smaller groups of very poweful people will always do everything to control the masses. Sure, P2P is great and all, and nature's self-organization is a good model, but human society works like that only in certain limited ways. Free market is supposed to work like that in theory, but in practice, it's obvious the market is not really free.
Those with money and power will continue to control and influence the masses while giving the masses the illusion of lack of centralized control.
RIAA, MPAA, governments, banking and financing industries, are all out to centralize control of flow of things. They are not going to give up that power easily. This is partly why we have social classes, and that in the world, the wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer, why government's agricultural subsidy create farmers who are not wealthy, but become addicts to subsidy, and why certain companies make so much money from them.
Did Darl refer to cattle rustling when he asked for the code comparison? And what happened to the other two MIT scientists... are they _sleeping with the fishes_?
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I'm genuinely impressed. That's the cleverest disguise for an offtopic post I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Of course, I am new here.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I like anarchy and P2P is the best example of anarchy in the technology world. The basic principle of which is the individual is king and all matters are between individuals only.
/.?
So it might be great that my blender can forward my VoIP traffic but what happens when the guy who owns the router I use wants to mod how I use bandwidth to get to
Anarchy, gotta love it.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
Nicholas Negroponte is f a r being from a geek. He is a suit that pretends to be one. I have not read a single piece written by this person having anything resembling substance. He embodies the prototypical techological-determinist, quite ill read or prepared for anything besides business-talk. For this, amongst many other reasons, I'd rather read a publication like "Scientific American" than "Wired" any day. This guy is seriously brain-damaged.
Now what would an interview with this guy be doing in Slashdot?
HAD
Exactly, the people who will lose most will be those with new devices. Take, for example, the idea that people may share their computer time with each other so that lots of computers can be used to do the work of one. Whoever has the fastest computer helps others the most but gains the least!
I wish to remain anomalous
When you drop your mail into the mailbox, it enters a highly regulated, automated, centralized system that collects fees
Any mutually inter-dependent system can become self-organising and regulated according to custom and expectations. The key issue is the "centralisation". That's the central point.
I argue that the centralisation in this case stems from the State monopoly on money. In their recent history States have generally monopolized the right to issue fiat money for settlement of all debts, public and private, throughout their territory. For this monopoly to prevail they rely on consent, coercion, and the implicit threat of judicial or police violence.
Privatised money that removed this monopoly would also invalidate your counter-argument. There have been cases of non-State delivery networks for private citizens. Today we are in fact living through another periodic renaissance of non-State delivery companies (Fedex, UPS, etc). I think private money is just a matter of time and when and if that happens then a lot of formerly "centralised" economic networks will be reshaped.
Da Blog
But really, what would be wrong with an approach similar to that of lightning: probe routes quickly, caching along the way, then using the shortest-path algorithm (or some such) to choose which path to "solidify" for a bursted data transfer?
;-)
Yeah, i'm half talkin out of my ass there, but ya know, sometimes good ideas show up that way
Oh yeah, the other prob with that, wouldn't it need lots of network traffic and ram just to maintain a network of path/nodes/phones/whatever?
sharing leftover food
Page me your chalupa...
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical,
I always thought that society was a direct result of nature, as exemplified by the complex relationships of wolf pack, a lion pride or a troop of macaques, but seemingly the geniuses at media lab have discovered that social systems are not from nature.
Skype is remarkable (I know them well) and will change the landscape radically.
Yet another "breakthrough" prediction from the people at Media Lab. They were richly endowed, with ready access to MIT students and living right at the time of the PC/Internet revolution. Yet, nothing has come out of them. It surely takes some talent to miss the boat this much.
So this leaves universities somewhat alone. This isn't meant to be self-serving,
Of course not. The MIT Media Lab would never hype a technology or situation for their own benefit (</sarcasm>).
The biggest impact will be affordable 100 megabit broadband . This can only happen with government help.
When this happens then the phone companys and the cable companies could be put out of business.
HDTV and distributed computing will be big. Home theatre operating systems with networking throughout the the house with wifi/wired.
who knows nothing.
... ." He goes on
From 1998:
Nicholas Negroponte predicts "You're going to see within the next year an
extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayment
to predict micropayment revenues in the Billions of dollars.
I can see this being applied with great success in actual peer to peer networks.
Before the 'digital / internet' era people traded 'physical / analogue' objects like books, taps, records, pictures. Today they do trade mp3s, pdfs, jpegs, etc.
Right now peer to peer networks scale globally, which is really cool, but i'm trading stuff with strangers, what about my friends? With the proliferation of wireless and bluetooth type networks we will have the ability to create local p2p networks. I want to be able to share music, pics, video, data, etc seemlessly with my friends without having to connect to the internet. Why should i have to if he's standing right next to me? Why cant my device just talk directly to his?
The next killer app will meerly leverage peer to peer technology. Peer to Peer networks will just be a means to end end. What we will be sharing is way more important than how will will be sharing it...
Why do you hate America so much?
Why do you hate Honduras so much?
When someone from MIT says peer-to-peer is a good thing, he's talking about peer-to-peer as an architecture. He does not mean "KaZaA 0wnz!! fr33 pr0n = 1337!!!!111oneoneone." People are interested in peer-to-peer for reasons other than file-sharing because they're scalable architectures that can handle load balancing very well, and have no central point of failure.
Most peer-to-peer research in universities regards creating better, faster Distributed Hash Tables, or DHTs for short. Typically, for N nodes on an overlay network connected by a DHT, insertion and queries come at log(N) cost. MIT has one of the best, called Chord. Some DHTs are very fragile and their routing topology can "break" when under extreme churn (when a flash of nodes suddenly join or leave the network), or malicious nodes attempt to manipulate other nodes' routing tables by creating fake identities (see the Sybil attack) -- Chord has been shown to be very resistant to both. Other notables are Kademlia from NYU (which is under the hood of eMule), and Pastry from Rice (Microsoft collaborated).
MIT has done some pioneering research in DHTs, and they have a lot of great minds on it. I'm making my own peer-to-peer program (hopefully it will be ready in a few months) and it will incorporate quite a few of the ideas they've developed. One of their ideas that I find particularly interesting (and I think should be incorporated into BitTorrent, because it seems like the perfect application) is called Vivaldi. You can read for yourself on how it works, but when applying it to BitTorrent, basicially the tracker would give you peers it thinks you have a low ping time to, as opposed to a random list which may be sub-optimal.
They're also involved in Project IRIS, which aims to develop a decentralized Internet infrastructure using all the latest DHT technology. It's funded indirectly through -- gasp -- the government via the NSF.
So yeah, don't just think that MIT is jumping on the bandwagon. They've been on the bleeding edge for some time.
- shadowmatter
Why do you hate Slashdot so much?
Why do you hate?
By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
This is a fallacy you don't even need to be a PhD to figure out (which is lucky for me). To each person, their social network might appear to be a hierarchical system with them at the top, but that is only because of their rather limited scope, and some helping of selfishness that all of us carry at least a bit of. However all these little social networks are just pieces of the real "Social Network" sitting out there.
If you know no one, it's really hard to get anything done in this world. The old saw of, "It's not what you know, it's who you know," is truer than many people would like to believe. I route my friends to people and places I know that have what they want or need, exactly like a node on a p2p network does. Me and the people I know are just a small chunk of the Social Network that humanity has built and made itself a part of for the last...gods how long has humanity been around? It's so big it's hard to get a grasp on it. Most people just see themselves and those they know and ignore everything and everyone else, most of the time out of necessity. It's hard enough to cope with the immediate for the vast majority of people out there. Taking the time to look at all the connections and build the big picture is just not something that's worthwhile to most people, but that doesn't mean it's not there if they're not aware of it.
Central control is not the way humanity, left to it's own devices, organizes itself. Centralized systems try to limit the natural peering we do to focus people for some particular end (closed countries and economies, corporate officers determining the company direction, jobs period limit us and what we do and who we talk to) and it's neither good or bad. Unrestricted peering is an unfocused haze of not much getting done. People spend a lot of time dealing with things that don't further any specific agenda. Focus requires limits on what we do, and not much good has happened in this world without a lot of people focused on it.
However, even then the most it can do is limit it. Sometimes to a very strong degree (like North Korea) but even then the peering happens and communication and commerce happens outside that central control. People get smuggled out of North Korea to freedom in South Korea despite the efforts of the most draconian regime on the planet. People get smuggled into Western nations as slaves (for sex, sweatshop work, or whatnot) despite the abolishment of slavery, tough laws, and seemingly almost universal abhorrence of the practice. If centralized control was the way people actually worked, this kind of stuff would be pretty much impossible.
We all hate you.
I love you!
The point Negroponte was making was that p2p
has not yet achieved its potential. You must
admit that after the boom in filesharing,
new applications of peer-oriented network
protocols dropped off dramatically. But the
economies and liberties enabled by p2p have
not yet begun to emerge in many areas where
they can be applied to good effect.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I kiss you!
I spork you!
I kvetch you!
Why do I hate you so much?
I hate Microsoft.
And torture.
Is there a difference?
In Soviet BushAmerika Negroponte TORTURES YOU!
Why can't this fscker wear his glasses properly. You'd think he'd pull enough coin to buy proper reading glasses. Jeez.
Who do you love?
And the dream of any hacker who is also a marxist :-). I may like the Catholic Church for a lot of stuff- but the worst influence it's had on society is giving us hierarchial command structures. That influence goes to everything we've ever done in western society- and it's the one thing that the Gospel of Luke (which I call the Communist Gospel, since in it's second part it has some examples of early communism springing up as the social model for early Catholicism) preaches the most against- and yet as soon as Christ died, it's the first thing the Apostles implemented. "The Last shall be First, and the First, Last". P2P is just a new version of that.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Negroponte is a windbag. Every one of his "endpaper" essays for Wired mag in the bubble was wrong, or superfluously obvious. Then his cashin _Being Digital_, retreading the most obvious. So maybe he's right about P2P - but by the time he's praising it, it's no longer "News" to nerds.
--
make install -not war
By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
That's a simplification.
Like nature, social systems can come in a variety of kinds, whether strictly hierarchal or peer-to-peer.
Sufficient organization and order to get the job done is demonstrated in swarms and flocks.
Likewise, in my own human body there are a variety of cells that interact in different degrees of hierarchy depending on the functionality. Brains and the central nervous system control muscles almost exclusively, but white cells go clean up anywhere they're needed.
Likewise, human societies ought to adapt the degree of central authority to the task at hand.
Doing otherwise limits our flexibility and increases the probability of non-optimal solutions.
[Some might suggest that local optimum solutions that are very good for a limited number of people in society are in evidence in many highly centralized social systems. An interesting medical commentary once suggested that the role of government in societal bodies is akin to the role of parasites in biological organisms. No value judgements, just looking at functionality...]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Do you do you do you love?
Maybe he's not much of an outdoorsman, but almost all animals have a hierarchy of sorts. Look at wolf packs, whale pods, caribou herds, ant and bee colonies, etc. They have "leaders", "workers", "nuturers" of the young, etc, if I can use those human equivalents. And they aren't as much self organising so much as instinctual, it is about half and half actually, and an important part is that they ARE centralised. A beehive without a queen doesn't last long, they become frantic to create a new queen, they lose their organisation, even though they could get by with another way, say if the worker bees were fertile and all reproduced. Self-organising as he states implies they would be dis-organized without conscious effort, and being able to contemplate any alternatives, and for the most part they don't do that, near as scientists can tell, they just "do it" via hard coded DNA.. That's about as centralised and hierarchial as you can get.
Now I'm not saying I totally disagree with this guy, as it applies to the advancing wireless and wired computerised world, I think he makes some observations which are easily accurate to make, but I think he misses a point in that, IMO, we need *all kinds* of organisational structures in order to have a complete civilisation, it is not one or the other.
And when someone comes up with the self organizing desk, please let me know.....
It is better to marry than to burn.
All these planets are yours, save Europa. Attempt no landings there.
Central control is not the way humanity, left to it's own devices, organizes itself. Centralized systems try to limit the natural peering we do to focus people for some particular end (closed countries and economies, corporate officers determining the company direction, jobs period limit us and what we do and who we talk to)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense". Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Da Blog
I have not read a single piece written by this person having anything resembling substance. He embodies the prototypical techological-determinist.
He wears his ideology close to his chest. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense". Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Da Blog
RIAA, MPAA, governments, banking and financing industries, are all out to centralize control of flow of things. They are not going to give up that power easily.
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense". Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Da Blog
There is a reason that we assume that centralised systems work better; they are easier to establish, coordinate and control. This outlook only works if you are going for a fully anarchist system, which you will never get everyone to buy into, barring a massive sociological paradigm shift
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense". Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Da Blog
if peer to peer really DOES take over, everything would be more equitable, we would be free of all the lock-ins and inefficient bottlenecks the big companies and governments have worked so hard to force on us
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense". Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Da Blog
Think of any area, there are millions of customers who want a change for the better -- however the companies are just not letting the change happen and say that it's for the good of the customer, or that what the customer wants is illegal (and if it isn't illegal, they'll just pass a couple of laws and make it illegal).
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense". Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Da Blog
Please do not be alarmed, remain calm. Do not attempt to leave the dancefloor. The DJ booth is conducting a troubleshoot test of the entire system. Somehow, while the party was in progress, an unidentified frequency has been existing in the system for some time. And while many of you have been made too brainwashed to comprehend, this frequency is, and has become a threat to our society as we know it.
This frequency has been used by a secret society in conjunction with Lucifer to lure and prey on innocent partygoers. With hypnotism, syncroprism, tricknology, lies, scandal, and pornography. While the party is still in progress we will keep you updated on our current status.
We repeat, this is only a test, this is only a test. This station in conjunction with other airwave announcements will conduct this exact test without prejudice, under the juricepurdence of the soul, the mind, the body, the positive, the negitive, the ground, the proton, the neutron, the electron, the ying, the yang, the young, the sun, the moon, the star.
This is only a test.
This station in conjunction with other airwave announcements will conduct this exact test without prejudice, under the juriseprudence of the soul, the mind, the body, the positive, the negitive, the ground, the proton, the neutron, the electron, the ying, the yang, the young, the sun, the moon, the star, the man, the woman, the child, the plaintiff, the defendant, the judgement, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the past, the present, the future.
This is only a test.
Wow. Great link, man. Thanks.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Kill all the leftist rabble rousers. That sounds like a good way to establish order to me.
I wish they would try that strategy in the US. I'd even help out if asked.
This is a New FAQ, and starting next week will be featured ats tions for this FAQ may be submitted to ihatespam@iname.com
/^Newsgroups: .*alt.flame.*/h:j:= /^Newsgroups: .*alt.fan.karl-malden.nose.*/h:j:= /^Newsgroups: .*,.*,.*,.*,.*/h:j:=
http://www.chocobo.org/~Delete/mrfaq.htm
Que
Q1: What is a Meower?
A1: Meowers are a group of lusers who hang out at alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
They are Flame Troll Wanna-Bees, and are 'Mostly Harmless'
Q2: Why is there a Meower resistance?
A2: Because up to this point people have continually fallen for the Meowers
Trolls, without using standardized bonehead reply forms. ie: [X] This post was
so stupid that it could be a troll [X] Except it is too stupid to even be
that.
Q3: What does this 'Meower resistance' do?
A3: We help people learn to use killfiles, since Meowers can't succeed if
nobody reads their pathetic Trolls.
Q4: What is a killfile?
A4: A killfile is like a 'NOT' statement in a search. So when you retrieve
new headers is 'Skips' any threads posted to by any meower you have in your
killfile.
Q5: How do I use a Kill file?
A5: Control+K is the shortcut command for any newsreader that supports a
Killfile. If your Newsreader does not have a Killfile you can either get
a Windows compiled UNIX NG reader (they are free and support Kill files)
such as TRN which will make it very easy to killfile all meower posts.
or else you can get Free Agent. Free Agent does not have a full featured
Kill File. That is a feature found only in the Registered version. However,
Free Agent can ignore threads by pressing the 'i' key. You can get Free
Agent, order Agent, or get a list of mirror sites for Agent at
http://www.forteinc.com/
Setting up kill filters are fairly simple. Just choose the 'kill thread'
or 'ignore thread' for each True Meower. That way you are less likely
to see any meower activity that occurs on this NG.
In TRN you can killfile all meower/flame troll posts by adding these lines
in your kill file.
The first two are recommended, the last one eliminates all cross-posting
and is an extreme measure.
(Nick Holmes provided TRN killfile lines)
Actually, they don't have any more credibility. They just have a lot more elitism and money. Money doesn't equal wisdom and common sense.
Read the FAQ
So he works at MIT and he plays with his toys in the media lab. Big deal. Can someone name any interesting research that has recently come out of the media labs? Yet people continue to be in awe of it. Anyhow, I don't think a single one of his predictions have come true except perhaps in the most trivial ways. Thank god/fate/whatever he doesn't get as much print, bits, etc as he did at one time. We waste less resources that way.
The biggest gaff during John's N. series of columns in Wired and the Being Digital book is that he missed predicting the explosive rise the World Wide Web, browser technology, and e-commerce. It was happening right under his nose, but he was too wrapped up in own pet ideas.
p2p like, say, DNS? or email? or usenet? they're ALL p2p, just not used necessarily for swapping music (apart from usenet, maybe).
why not use UTC? it's there, it works, hell we've been using it for years. this is a solution looking for a problem - and it's a frigging DUMB SOLUTION, too.
Today's distribution methods are far from centralized. Amazon doesn't have one warehouse. Dell doesn't assemble PCs in one location. If you mean centrally coordinated, then yes, they are.
BitTorrent is centralized. Everyone has to point to the same torrent file, which has to be stored somewhere.
P2P is about redundancy. However unecessary redundancy is waste, which is why networks centralize in the first place.
Napster centralized search because search works best as a centralized function. Only when legal troubles cropped up did it become worth it to decentralize search. Napster never centralized storage because storage was hard(legally, economically, bandwidthwise) to centralize.
Cellphone networks are distributed because the problem of Coverage is best handled in that manner. However the problem of Continuous Connectivity requires a central coordinator. In the absense of a central coordinator, the individual devices must have, and maintain, the intellect to route their own messages.
Decentralization is inevitable, as the economics of information change. P2P, however, is not inevitable. In fact it is usually only the answer when there are legal,economic, or physical constraints to control.
A cynical friend of mine came up with this gem a long while back:
http://meejalab.tripod.com/
P.