Huh? Wha? 301's are magical beasts of ancient lore that i can't control? Last time i checked, a 301-response gave me full control to redirect from any url on the domains i control to anywhere else, so i control EXACTLY what the url is. And you can be damn sure I'm in control to where it points.

Your system is flawed, on the simple premise that it's just a different way of doing exactly what's already available, but ass-backwards.

A couple of years ago i sketched out something like this for a project at work.
It was with a known cloud of clients though, so security could easily be beefed out with no concerns to "compatiblity" on the client side.

Basically, a big ol tracker running in position X.
A number of headless clients connected to storage systems, spread across the world, potentially divided into a hierarchy based on connectivity.
Each client uses a unique key-pair to communicate with the tracker (phase 1 of security, for a 3rd party it'd be a bitch to sniff, not even another client could sniff and make sense of any of the data related to the first client).

In client communications, a random (weaker) cipher is used, to obscure the data transfer slightly more.

So basically, heavily encrypted tracker communication, weaker encrypted client communication.
All client->client communication apart from the actual data channel also went via the tracker in question, so the only client->client happenings would be a port opening on client A and a connection request from client B, handshake and then the data transfer.

At the time of new files, a "Hello. Wake up now omgplz"-kind of request would be made available to the clients, starting with the innermost ones first (to facilitate a relatively speedy distribution of the files across the entire network, while attempting to not completely clog the intarweb tube of the "master client"), and when deemed appropriate (x% completion among y% of tier-z clients), move on to tier-(z+1).

This, of course, won't scale to something the size of pirate bay without some serious hardware from the future, but i find it an interesting sidetracking :p

Doom didn't have reloading, now did it?
I recall Doom 2's double barreled shotgun having some "chug two more cartridges in there"-animation, but apart from that there was nothing keeping you from holding down the fire button and spewing sprites until your ammo counter read 000, was there?

I'm going to counter that with (-1 Fact Nazi), and rate you (-1 Overly Eloquent).

/. comments need the google mail 5-second rule.

Always annoying when writing a big post and forgetting to select "Plain Old Text". Bleh. Incomprehensible mess is the end-result.

Oh how I want to mod you +5 ForTheWin. But that might be because I share the same predicament. I can't buy, I can't catch it on TV. I suppose the only way to catch show X is to buy a satellite receiver and subscribe the the channel show X is on, which is what they want me/you/everyone to do. Apparently they haven't realized that the time when people paid for 24h/day programming when they want 1h/week is over. Either they give me the ability to see the show I want, in the Late Night/South Park/Colbert Report way, or they give me the ability to buy and download the episodes after (or at) air-time - no matter where I'm located, or I'm going to pirate the hell out of their stuff and they'll never see a dime in either sales or ad-spots coming from me. Time to freshen up on Big Bang Theory. It's not here in spain, and if it by some miracle happened to be, it would surely be dubbed into incomprehensible jibberish.

If you can google from the machine, you can SSH to the machine, so no 80x25 terminal there :p
Servers shall display "$SERVER login: _" and nothing more ;)

True true, that's what I was _thinking_ ;)

Yes, if all evidence found and all experiments, theoretical and practical, points to - yes, you CAN jump off a cliff without harm.
The instant someone jumps off a cliff and dies, a thousand people will go back to their desks, do the math again and figure out where the calculations went wrong.

That's, in an abstract nutshell, how science works. Theory -> Counter-Evidence -> Revision -> Back to #1.
As opposed to religion, which is Theory.

Dynamic vs Rigid. Proven vs Unprovable. Debated vs No-ears-but-a-big-mouth.

The only Jesus to ever produce fish and bread was the one in South Park, and in the words of Stan: "That's lame".

People still use Norton? Why on earth would anyone do that?

Oh, and I completely forgot:

Spending most of the time trying to discredit the personal and political opinions of the prosecuted and the witnesses they called, instead of trying to prove that crimes had been committed.

It is not due to TorrentFreak-bias, they were exactly that inept in swedish as well.

Three years of investigation, and they understand less about bittorrent than 10 minutes on wikipedia teaches you.

They had no statistics, no _actual_ evidence (messed up downloads, screenshots of cut urls to torrents, vague and repeated accusations of child pronography, a few random looks at top 100-lists with nothing to back it except "i looked at it, you should trust me", ridiculous claims "99% of the files on pirate bay are copyright protected" and "100% of the people downloading from pirate bay would have bought the album if tpb wasn't there"), the witnesses they called were all media-moguls with absolutely no grasp of internet or technology, and generally a case built on "we sell less CDs, therefore the pirate bay is to blame" instead of realizing that "people don't want CDs anymore, that's why the sales are declining".

Add to this the COMPLETE inability to understand the "cluster mentality" that the internet has brought to a more visible level, where there are no leaders, no decision-makers, no controlling people. People do what needs to be done, and that's the end of that. They spent half the trial trying to pinpoint someone as "the leader", something that in the case of TPB simply doesn't exist. There is a core group, but what makes them more important than the people outside that is simply server-access. Remove that from the equation and no matter who you are, you can do things without asking for permission.

Not to mention that after these 3 years, half of the charge is dropped during the 2nd day because they completely misunderstood the nature of bittorrent, and HOW the file-sharing actually happened.

"Botched", is the word that comes to mind.

But I think this is because of who's behind them. The media-companies, who have never had any problems going forward brute force, waving money and ludicrous demands for more money, who are used to the other party bowing their heads and going "yes massa". When actually faced with _opposition_, their lack of preparation and knowledge shines through like the headlights of an 18-wheeler at 2 am (see, a car-analogy).

And that's the end of this rant.

Well, since the couple in question live in an apartment building for the elderly, giving the flowers to their neighbors is actually not a bad idea at all :)

Okay, that _is_ a lot, question withdrawn :p

Define "large mailbox" please. But yes, the lack of calendar-support can be a bitch. One would think some thunderbird-developer would find it useful to implement support for outlook and mail.app-styled calendar invites, instead of relying on human parsing :)