The plan so far, as I see it, is something like this.

First, we should make participation in the market economy voluntary so that its ebb and flow does not put people into destitution or worse. Proposals to do this in countries with effective social security generally involve deconstructing the old and clunky "for those who deserve it" structure and replacing it with a universal citizen's wage, two or three of which (say in a communal setting) permits one to live in reasonable minimal comfort without being employed. This makes workers far more competitive in the job market, insofar as they choose to become involved in it: being ruthlessly exploited as a call-center servitor would no longer be a life-or-death question.

The money for citizen's wage comes from the dismantled social security systems, which are invariably far more expensive than the benefit they provide to their users... often due to market inefficiencies (chiefly profit and dividends) leading to prices going up whenever funding is increased, thus killing any progress before the sperm it would've been born of has exited it's father's dick. Obviously this would require price controls (either through legislation, or more likely state competition) on basic things such as rent, food, water, heating, etc modern infrastructure -- otherwise the proprietors would simply increase their prices to gouge whatever they can take.

Second, cut all subsidies to the market economy. They want to play free market? Let them play free market. The chickens will come back when the ground freezes over. No more socialized costs and privatized profits: if the market is so efficient then it can bloody well take care of itself. If it can.

Third, make the economic system subservient to the political system rather than the other way around (as it is today). Otherwise the will of the people, as communicated through a (future ideal of, or a near-term approximation of) decentralized system of planning combined with effective democracy, cannot be effectively implemented if it goes against what Capital wants. For examples of effective democracy, look at Switzerland's citizen proposal mechanism where anyone who collects 50k verified signatures can put a piece of their own legislation to popular vote.

The central bit here is that the market aspect of society isn't eliminated outright. That'd represent a harsh transition and most people wouldn't be able to go along with it. Rather, it's cut down piece by piece so that it becomes less critical in the everyday lives of John Smith and Janine Random.

Having a market aspect should also be useful in that it is quite efficient at exploring new and unforeseen things, even if in the long run it tends to abusive monopolies (such as in the case of AT&T Bell, Microsoft and so forth). The market's natural boom-bust cycle, once the people are shielded from it, will also provide great opportunities for the state to jump in and purchase, as an equal player in the marketplace, the resources and business of tanked companies and put them to use in serving interests other than private profit.

Communism today works via small, well-defined steps rather than Grand, Ill-Defined Revolutions that everyone supports but no one understands. This way, if we know where we are, where we're going (a reasonably small distance away, but in the right direction nonetheless) and above all how to determine if we've got there, we can make larger changes using a series of smaller changes.

It's not unlike iterative models of software or systems development, really. Of course this model of communism isn't at all popular with the old guard stalinist types... but they'll grow old and die eventually, even if they do not accept that it's the current younger generations' turn to define what Communism means now.

Enjoy your Threat Level ORANGE.

Your current shit's not looking too hot either is it. How long's it been since the last economic bust? 15 years? And now we've got another. Woo hoo.

And freedom? Well take a look at the UK. That's your capitalist freedom right there.

It's capitalism whose history is riddled with spectacular failure. In these failures, people end up homeless and dying of exposure on the streets. Middle-class people living out of their cars in all-night parking lots. And these failures have occurred all by themselves, not aided by any external enemy as in the case of the USSR et cetera. Indeed, Cuba is still alive and kicking, as are several south-east asian countries.

In my opinion, this free market stuff is just handwaving and faith in the Invisible Hand that's indistinguishable from the religious sort. It's best suited for ignorant people who don't want to think about how things should work, people who'd rather leave it to the Almighty... and now that it has been, everything is going in the shitter.

Economic planning works. Take a look at any Fortune 500 company: all of those implement a system of economic planning inside them. That nearly a century-old state-level (and a freaking huge state it was, geographically) version failed to last eternally despite bringing Russia out of agrarian society and into the industrial era says absolutely nothing about communism's overall workability!

How do you know that? Children are always around. Anyone can always make the "it's for the children" argument. There's never been anything else, as far as authoritarian regimes are concerned.

A communications disruption can only mean one thing.

It's good shit man.

I tagged this article "fourtwenty". Hoping others follow the example.

Standing side by side I meant. Damn. It's not my first language, don't blame me, blame society. Also there needs to be racial minorities or other stereotypes in there somewhere, like a hot black woman or a rural hick-town stereotype redneck or something. Because it needs to be inclusive.

And in the finishing shot, everyone says their lines again to drill the point home: it's not a monolithic corporation but a community that's made of people, actual humans rather than the teflon-coated, chromed corporate sheen of Microsoft et al.

[Start with a semi-closeup of a hairy stoner type, you know, facial hair like alan cox and rms]

Hi man, I'm Linux.

[Move quickly to the right to a similar shot of a tie-wearing IBM type]

Hi, I'm also Linux.

[Move to a series of government types standing in a line behind one another, so that it's obvious there's many of them even if the face of only one is visible]

(all of them speak loudly) Hi, we're also Linux.

[Move to an obvious university student, make him a transfer student from abroad, japanese or chinese or italian or something, with an accent]

Herro, I Linux arso.

[Two or three similar shots follow, including just a Joe Random type and a blue-collar office secretary or beancounter type. All say something to the effect of their also being Linux.]

[Finishing shot: zoom out to show all of those featured before, standing in a row, and eventually fade them to black. Voiceover: GNU/Linux, it's for all of us.]

Licensed under CC-BY-SA, free to film or print out and shove up own eyehole or something. If you want to, send adulations somehow using Slashdot, I can't honestly be arsed to have a proper e-mail address.

What the fuck are you smoking, and where can I find some of that shit?

BitTorrent has had integrity verification from the very start. In like, 2002. Per-chunk SHA1 hashing. "Very poor data integrity", my eye.

The signing bit happens like this: you sign the commit object that's at the "tip". This references the log object and the tree object, which in turn references other tree objects and file objects and so forth. All referencing happens via SHA1 hashes, which guarantees as good a level of security as the initial OpenPGP-compatible hash of the tip commit. It's not hard to understand. All hashes can be checked, and the tip commit's signature can be verified using an OpenPGP-compatible tool such as GnuPG.

This is incorrect. While it is true that at any given moment a torrent client has connections to a few tens of peers, which peers among the swarm these are changes constantly. The sample size may be small, and typically is by design, but the sampling frequency is quite high.

Over time (typically a hour or two), combined with the "random unchoke" feature of the tit-for-tat algorithm, this tends to optimize to prefer peers who have demonstrated a high upload bandwidth.

Introducing a complication such as geolocation data to this can only lead to swarm bisection and other nasty misfeatures that aren't generally foreseen by people enamoured with the Latest, Hottest Thing... Such as the Azureus developers, by how their Java code is structured.

It's not explicit, but the tit-for-tat algorithm which is at the core of the self-organization mechanism of BitTorrent already favours fast connections. These generally translate to geographical closeness, but they also end up preferring links that are otherwise quick: for instance, in Finland I get quite a bit of stuff from Sweden thanks to the interconnections and the swedish Bredbandsbolaget.

Adding a GeoIP style thing to BitTorrent can only make the algorithm perform worse, as it would prefer addresses by geographical locality rather than locality as defined by network topology.