Brutal and ignorant that the Christian kings of Spain were, the collapse of Moorish Al-Andalus wasn't really down to them. Rather, it was the collapse of the Cordoba caliphate in the 11th century, and its disintegration into warring states (using deals with Christian kings and mercenaries) that allowed the Christians to eventually take over.
The split between the private sector profit motive and directed research into cures doesn't need to be as drastic as you've suggested. One approach that shows promise is for governments - or NGOs - to offer 'pull funding', similar to the X-Prize scheme. The state, or whoever, says "here's a big pile of money, we'll give it to anyone who can come up with a cure for AIDS/H5N1/toe gunk and give us the patent". That way, you get all the benefits of a free market - anyone can compete to come up with a solution - combined with an element of directed, central, planning.
Problem is, without sites like SN, there's no-one to verify the content of the torrents. You can distribute torrents any way you like, but if there's no reference point for the quality of the content, it'll just end up like Kazaa.
Well you can use multi-tracker torrents, and you can (in Azureus at least) add trackers to an existing torrent.
When the main tracker goes down, the torrent switches to a new tracker, and gradually everyone moves over. Someone a bit more techy than me can probably explain how...
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Brutal and ignorant that the Christian kings of Spain were, the collapse of Moorish Al-Andalus wasn't really down to them. Rather, it was the collapse of the Cordoba caliphate in the 11th century, and its disintegration into warring states (using deals with Christian kings and mercenaries) that allowed the Christians to eventually take over.
The split between the private sector profit motive and directed research into cures doesn't need to be as drastic as you've suggested. One approach that shows promise is for governments - or NGOs - to offer 'pull funding', similar to the X-Prize scheme. The state, or whoever, says "here's a big pile of money, we'll give it to anyone who can come up with a cure for AIDS/H5N1/toe gunk and give us the patent". That way, you get all the benefits of a free market - anyone can compete to come up with a solution - combined with an element of directed, central, planning.
Problem is, without sites like SN, there's no-one to verify the content of the torrents. You can distribute torrents any way you like, but if there's no reference point for the quality of the content, it'll just end up like Kazaa.
Well you can use multi-tracker torrents, and you can (in Azureus at least) add trackers to an existing torrent. When the main tracker goes down, the torrent switches to a new tracker, and gradually everyone moves over. Someone a bit more techy than me can probably explain how...