The simple fact is that the P2P networks are so full of garbage as to make hem not worth the effort.
Wrong.
You just don't know how to use p2p effectively. What most people learn to do is combine p2p with a trustable source (of file "fingerprints"). You've never really been able to trust random search results. e.g. Searching for "paris hilton sex tape" turns up a LOT of renamed fakes, unless you know who to trust for verified file hashes.
Now, eventually trust networks will be built into the p2p protocols, but until then there are central and not-so-central websites that serve as very trustworthy indexes of p2p content.
What will be the 21st century's analogue of the atom bomb?
I don't want to know.
I'm going to tell you anyway:
It will be an engineered plague - part bio, part nanotech - which seeks out and gruesomely kills any disadvantaged human without an artificial immune system.
Just hope that the good guys infest the planet with a "smart active shield" before the bad guys let loose.
I often muse that if I was evil enough to fleece gullible people of their money, that I'd open an herbal/magnetic/psychic/everything superstore and name it PLACEBO, INC.
With every purchase, my ido^H^H^Hcustomers would recieve a FREE scientific study of the placebo and/or real harmful effects they can expect.
Books:Amazon, despite its evils (patents/privacy), is a very nice filter (with a few shills and idiot-reviewers). I [ab]use amazon as a filter, and then buy them cheaper new or used.
Music:iRATE radio, and word of mouth. Need more Collaborative Filtering in this area to root out the Clearchannels/RIAAs function as a giant pusher of "cool"
Ads (aka: mental engineering): I use PopFile to filter SPAM, and Privoxy to filter out slow-loading, privacy-invading, all-around-annoying ADS. I'm still missing a proxy for my eyeballs in the real world. Soooon.:)
Flying cars for the masses will always be vaporware as long as:
They can't, without fail, fly themselves on autopilot from point A to B (NO WAY can millions of morons be allowed to fly "offroad" in 3 dimensions; enforced skylanes are a must).
NIMBY eye-pollution.
VTOL flight consumes more energy than rolling along roads.
They're mechanically more complicated and expensive (despite economies of scale).
Birds splats are more dangerous than mosquitos:)
My main beef against flying cars would be the eye-pollution, with fear-of-morons falling out of the sky coming in a close second.
Your pro-yak righteousness is just as irritating the anti-yak/cellphone view.
IMO, anonymous cellphone jamming will probably become commonplace, but not coincidentally, it will be mostly in areas where people want peace and quiet.
You know those segregated cigarette Smoking Boxes at the airport? Maybe we'll see those in various locations for cellphone users - a box which is shielded and where the cell signal is amplified enough to overcome any jamming.
I wish all companies were like this. It's too easy for them to slip behind the mask of anonymity.
I know the meme has been retired, but the cluetrain manifesto is still relevant. People don't want to deal with bland, PR-washed, faceless megacorps that pander to the lowest common denominator, they want humanity.
The saddest thing to see is small businesses who act like these megacorps early on because it's deemed "professional" soulless behavior.
It's this centuries version of the heavier-than-air flight debate, but with much, much greater implications.
In any case, we'll know who's right very soon, because "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom." - Feynman
Does it get rid of the lame bunny hopping physics? God that's annoying! "Look at me everyone! I'm strafe jumping like a retard so I can move a little faster. I've got l33t skillz!"
I've been using iRATE for quite a while now (despite its horrible user interface), mostly because the collaborative filtering is much, much more convenient than buying CDs offline/online, or downloading random tunes off p2p networks, or DLing from iTunes, or even listening to free broadcast radio/netradio.
iRATE automatically adapts to *YOUR* tastes in music, with very little initial effort required (you rate tunes UP/DOWN). This is the most valuable service that I could ever ask for, and that no middleman could hope to charge for.
Besides an improved GUI, I'd like to see payment options added so that the artists I end up listening to the most get a proportional chunk of my change so that they can continue making *NEW* music, instead of sitting on decades OLD copyrights.
Speaking of realestate and the game SecondLife, that's one of the main reasons I didn't end up paying for a subscription after my 7-day trial was up: Almost all of the good "land" was already claimed and/or too expensive. The frontier seemed to be closed.
In a virtual world there IS NO SCARCITY, so why immitate it? Because it's what people are used to? There's room for multiple planes of existence along side the common "consensus" reality.
Anyway, back to Earth (sortof): In a nanotech future, there's still the fundamental scarcity of the following:
Time
Space
Energy
Matter
Intelligence (limited by the above)
However, the sun is abundant free energy, and there's more than enough living space on Earth (underground, and on & under the oceans), in outerspace (Mars, orbitals, rings, etc.), and in innerspace (the transhuman "matrix").
The other reasons I didn't keep playing SL was the crappy physics (esp. most vehicles), low graphics detail compared to what I'm used to, and no linux client (unlike "A Tale in the Desert", which is most similar to Secondlife).
MIT would not have put food on the table of any CS grad in the US.
Maybe some of those CS undergrads should consider switching majors to nanoscale science & engineering so that no matter what the market realities are in the future they can eventually just manufacture their own "free" food and material objects (for only the energy costs).
At some point in the near future, even the notion of owning physical objects will change a bit. Once we're able to manipulate matter precisely on the atomic level, what is "your car" really worth if you can make ultra-cheap copies using only sunlight for energy and abundant raw molecular materials right beneath your feet?
Ultimately what's scarce/rivalrous? 5 things: Time, Energy, Space, Matter, Intelligence. All are ownable to the extent that the next guy respects your ownership.
It's well known that NewWorldOrder Industries, Illuminati, Inc., and ShadowGov, LLC. are the major backers of this bill, albeit behind the scenes, the sneaky little bastards.
The megacorps can try and legally grab all the "IP realestate" they want, but in the end it's the people that have to respect that "ownership" for it to be recognized. The balance between the benefit of the private few and the public good has been way out of whack for way too long, and claiming ownership of simple facts is yet another backwards step!
Information wants to be free, but there's still big bucks to be made from plundering the commons and attempting to enforce more artificial scarcity.
The last time I posted about OLED I was informed that the holdup on this LCD-killer is the fact that the blue component fades out very quickly; within a year or so.
Once that problem's solved, it's only a matter of time before I'll be able to cover my walls, and ceiling with the stuff for a year round aquarium/planetarium/landscape/cloudscape/harem.:)
The end will come not because the technologists can't reduce feature sizes any further, but because no one will be willing to sink an investment equal to the GDP of a mid-sized country into a fab.
It's a funny coincidence that Moore's Law will hit the wall (S-curve actually) at about the same time that nanotechnology is maturing, allowing for the next paradigm in computing to continue our exponential progress.
Molecular manufacturing -- while still 10 to 20 years away -- means that billion-dollar factories won't be needed to manufacture ANYTHING anymore. Everything, from food to clothing to genetically evolved open source 3D chip designs, will be built bottom-up for the same lowcost as growing a potatoe.
Life is probably very common, but, IMO, most technologically advanced civilizations don't make it past The Great Filter.
Those that *do* make it past that mass extinction filter (nuclear? bio? nano?), to Singularity, are probably so far advanced as to be unrecognizable and uninterested in us primitive biological ants.
It's a pity humans still have all their eggs in one basket; until we've got self-sustaining offworld populations, we're a ticking time bomb.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong.
You just don't know how to use p2p effectively. What most people learn to do is combine p2p with a trustable source (of file "fingerprints"). You've never really been able to trust random search results. e.g. Searching for "paris hilton sex tape" turns up a LOT of renamed fakes, unless you know who to trust for verified file hashes.
Now, eventually trust networks will be built into the p2p protocols, but until then there are central and not-so-central websites that serve as very trustworthy indexes of p2p content.
A few of the more popular ones:
--
I don't want to know.
I'm going to tell you anyway:
It will be an engineered plague - part bio, part nanotech - which seeks out and gruesomely kills any disadvantaged human without an artificial immune system.
Just hope that the good guys infest the planet with a "smart active shield" before the bad guys let loose.
--
With every purchase, my ido^H^H^Hcustomers would recieve a FREE scientific study of the placebo and/or real harmful effects they can expect.
--
Do you also get your shoes resoled and your TV repaired? What century are you living in?
--
And even though I despise spammers just as much, I would never seriously cheer on barbaric execution (or even painless execution for that matter).
Spammers belong to the mutant class of humans with no conscience and a selfish-gene stuck in overdrive, but they don't deserve death for it.
--
Yeah, most people are expected to shed their personality and their idealism after a certain point, hence the saying: "never trust anyone over 30."
People who don't "sell out" are often called man-children, or homeless, (or democrats :)
--
How would that work? Flying cars with fricking laserbeams on their hoods?
--
Movies: RottenTomatoes, imdb, and MetaCritic have saved me dozens of hours of time I might have wasted on crap (like Matrix Revolutions, or TimeLine).
Books: Amazon, despite its evils (patents/privacy), is a very nice filter (with a few shills and idiot-reviewers). I [ab]use amazon as a filter, and then buy them cheaper new or used.
News: Popular Daily News Tidbits, Blogdex, Daypop, and slashdot.
Music: iRATE radio, and word of mouth. Need more Collaborative Filtering in this area to root out the Clearchannels/RIAAs function as a giant pusher of "cool"
Ads (aka: mental engineering): I use PopFile to filter SPAM, and Privoxy to filter out slow-loading, privacy-invading, all-around-annoying ADS. I'm still missing a proxy for my eyeballs in the real world. Soooon. :)
Cheap Products: Not a quality filter exactly, but a quantity filter: PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, Froogle, Anand's Hot Deals ...
Phew, that's a lot of linkage. Anyway, I couldn't function without these and other filters; I'd really be info overloaded.
Collaborative filtering in general has a very bright future IMO.
--
My main beef against flying cars would be the eye-pollution, with fear-of-morons falling out of the sky coming in a close second.
--
IMO, anonymous cellphone jamming will probably become commonplace, but not coincidentally, it will be mostly in areas where people want peace and quiet.
You know those segregated cigarette Smoking Boxes at the airport? Maybe we'll see those in various locations for cellphone users - a box which is shielded and where the cell signal is amplified enough to overcome any jamming.
--
Next up: camera eyepatches with the storage hidden in the included stuffed parrot. Arrrrrr mateys!
--
I know the meme has been retired, but the cluetrain manifesto is still relevant. People don't want to deal with bland, PR-washed, faceless megacorps that pander to the lowest common denominator, they want humanity.
The saddest thing to see is small businesses who act like these megacorps early on because it's deemed "professional" soulless behavior.
--
It's this centuries version of the heavier-than-air flight debate, but with much, much greater implications.
In any case, we'll know who's right very soon, because "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom." - Feynman
--
Does it get rid of the lame bunny hopping physics? God that's annoying! "Look at me everyone! I'm strafe jumping like a retard so I can move a little faster. I've got l33t skillz!"
--
iRATE automatically adapts to *YOUR* tastes in music, with very little initial effort required (you rate tunes UP/DOWN). This is the most valuable service that I could ever ask for, and that no middleman could hope to charge for.
Besides an improved GUI, I'd like to see payment options added so that the artists I end up listening to the most get a proportional chunk of my change so that they can continue making *NEW* music, instead of sitting on decades OLD copyrights.
--
In a virtual world there IS NO SCARCITY, so why immitate it? Because it's what people are used to? There's room for multiple planes of existence along side the common "consensus" reality.
Anyway, back to Earth (sortof): In a nanotech future, there's still the fundamental scarcity of the following:
However, the sun is abundant free energy, and there's more than enough living space on Earth (underground, and on & under the oceans), in outerspace (Mars, orbitals, rings, etc.), and in innerspace (the transhuman "matrix").
The other reasons I didn't keep playing SL was the crappy physics (esp. most vehicles), low graphics detail compared to what I'm used to, and no linux client (unlike "A Tale in the Desert", which is most similar to Secondlife).
--
Java -> Molasses.
JavaScript -> Popups JavaDesktop -> SlowDesktop
--
Maybe some of those CS undergrads should consider switching majors to nanoscale science & engineering so that no matter what the market realities are in the future they can eventually just manufacture their own "free" food and material objects (for only the energy costs).
Disruptive self-sufficiency is a worthy goal.
--
At some point in the near future, even the notion of owning physical objects will change a bit. Once we're able to manipulate matter precisely on the atomic level, what is "your car" really worth if you can make ultra-cheap copies using only sunlight for energy and abundant raw molecular materials right beneath your feet?
Ultimately what's scarce/rivalrous? 5 things: Time, Energy, Space, Matter, Intelligence. All are ownable to the extent that the next guy respects your ownership.
--
--
Information wants to be free, but there's still big bucks to be made from plundering the commons and attempting to enforce more artificial scarcity.
--
Once that problem's solved, it's only a matter of time before I'll be able to cover my walls, and ceiling with the stuff for a year round aquarium/planetarium/landscape/cloudscape/harem. :)
--
It's a funny coincidence that Moore's Law will hit the wall (S-curve actually) at about the same time that nanotechnology is maturing, allowing for the next paradigm in computing to continue our exponential progress.
Molecular manufacturing -- while still 10 to 20 years away -- means that billion-dollar factories won't be needed to manufacture ANYTHING anymore. Everything, from food to clothing to genetically evolved open source 3D chip designs, will be built bottom-up for the same lowcost as growing a potatoe.
--
Those that *do* make it past that mass extinction filter (nuclear? bio? nano?), to Singularity, are probably so far advanced as to be unrecognizable and uninterested in us primitive biological ants.
It's a pity humans still have all their eggs in one basket; until we've got self-sustaining offworld populations, we're a ticking time bomb.
--
The multitracker spec has already been implemented in many of the better bittorrent clients.
--