Do the mainstream ISPs (AT&T, TimeWarner, Charter, etc) consider Tribler traffic to fall under Six Strikes content? If so, then that will be a limiting factor in the adoption of Tribler.

(Serious question, because I've been considering trying it out, replacing Miro. www.getmiro.com )

Now maybe if it had a built-in VPN client and a network of proxies, with turnkey setup for ID10T layer 8 components, then it might become more widely adopted.

It's about what the market will bear. If the content owners would offer it to us at a fair price, people wouldn't bootleg it.

For instance, me personally:

I WILL pay to see a movie in a theater, and I very rarely download feature films mostly because I don't have an urge to own a copy - paid or free.

I WILL pay Netflix $22/mo (or whatever it is this month) for service that includes all I can stream to multiple devices in my home.

I WILL NOT pay Charter $150/mo for the level of service that's required to get HBO, Lifetime, FX, etc just so I can watch 12 episodes a year of the four or five series that are worth watching. Therefore, I WILL bittorrent bootleg copies of Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, etc that are often superior to the level of service I get from my own cable company. (And the wife gets whatever she wants to make her happy; "You want all five seasons of Boardwalk Empire, sweetie? No problem, you'll be watching the first episode in half an hour.") Offer me a cafeteria plan, and you'll get paid what the content's worth.

Furthermore, if they can't be bothered to supply me with reliable equipment and/or a signal level that won't befuddle said equipment, then I won't have to download programs that I had intended to DVR, but your POS set top box got confused because I tried to tune it to channel 4 so now I have to bootleg that, too.

Finally, I WILL pay $250 once a season for a pair of tickets to see my favorite NFL team play against my hometown team, plus spend money at your concessions. It's a whole day's entertainment and the experience of a live game is worth it, even if I have to put up with asshole Chargers fans.

But I WILL NOT pay the $400 per season that DirecTV and NFL conspire to charge me to watch live games if I am a fan who lives outside of a team's primary market area. Therefore, I WILL watch bootleg live streams even if they are only 175kbps 12fps lagfests rather than be extorted by corporations. Offer me an option to subscribe to one team's games and I might pay $100 a season, maybe even $150. Offer me a standalone VOIP option at an affordable price and you'll get paid what the content's worth.

Otherwise, I have other options. And I always will. Even if it's paying nothing and viewing nothing.

Chicago and NYC (and SF) have useable mass transit systems.

LA doesn't. It has a light rail system, but the sprawl is so bad you still have no reliable, timely way to get from your closest train stop to your home or office.

I worked in Simi Valley with a young engineer who lived in South Central. Great inspirational story of someone bootstrapping themselves. But he spent two and a half hours commuting by a combination of bus, train and bike to get to work.

Each way. Not very many people will tolerate it. But he did. Because he didn't want to move his mama from South Central to Simi Valley. He supported her, and the culture shock would have been too much for her.

Then he was killed when a [train] engineer missed a signal and collided with his commuter train coming the other way on the same track.

Most people would rather drive.

I've been using Waze for almost two years now, and I learned early on, never rely on it for navigation. I mostly use it for commuting anyway, and I know my way to work and back. It's there mostly for accident and speed trap intelligence.

It will run in the background with Apple Maps or Google Maps in Nav mode, so you get reasonable turn by turn directions when you're road-tripping it and still get a heads up for "police reported ahead."

Real world city planning is not the same as playing Sim City.

Sorry.

They don't replace old sidewalks in LA either. They just let the roots turn them into minor mountain ranges.

And then die on the guillotine as soon as people get tired of y'all's BS, revolt, and start collecting heads in baskets.

I was about to add this.

Even experienced players can learn a lot by watching others play high level characters.

Yea I agree. It's those damn continuous ads that get me. Nobody likes those.

It was the flashing and blinking and traveling ads that made me install AdBlock Plus (now use AB Edge). They were doing everything possible to distract your eye from the content.

And like the author of the MondayNote article said, another reason that drove me to install it as standard kit on every computer I use was the CPU utilization of all of these animations and ads and crap. The CAD engineers get the souped up graphics and CPUs -- us project managers get aging, crippled POSes... it's not until you get to the VP level where you can sign a Purchase Req for the value of a high-end laptop.

Finally, it's a huge security risk to let all of this code from the wild run on your machine. It's a fricken jungle out there, code wise, and the last thing I'm prepared to do is to give every page permission to run any code it wants. Thus, not just adblocker but scriptblockers and cross-site scripting is blocked, too. Plus I have Remove It Permently on browsers that the whole family uses so of one of us sees an image, ad or not, that's inappropriate on one of the pages our kid visits, we can block that, too.

These days, you're either clueless, careless, or crazy to run up a stock browser on a Windows box and go surf the internet, even if you're not surfing pr0n and warez.

And the entire time my stomach would be churning from me worrying about all the additional failure modes offered by such an arrangement. Even with humans handling the luggage, about a third of my recent family trips (necessarily involving two checked items per person) have seen one or more bags get lost or delayed.

I'm not a luddite, but I'm not an early adopter either. Until the bugs are worked out of a robotic valet-slash-chauffeur, I'll still be most relaxed when I can just put a carry-on in the overhead bin.

If it could do that, why even get on the airplane?

Just opaque the windows and sleep or work or otherwise entertain yourself privately the entire trip... If I could buy a car that could do that for my twice daily, 45 minute commute, I would.

You know, sex robots have been a prominent trope in SF and geekdom practically since the word was coined, but the idea doesn't do anything for me.

I require the other participant to express honest desire, act on it, and receive real pleasure. I prefer a photo or video recording of such behavior over a machine, or even a real person who's just faking it.

I dunno, maybe that makes me weird or something...

British commandos' desert kit is pink. A dull greyish carnation color. It melds into the sand better at a distance.

And you didn't have them warn your 2007 self to sell all your stock and real estate?

You're an idiot!