In a two person problem, the solution to ask one side where to draw the "fair" dividing line and ask the other person which "half" they want.

A three or more person solution could be achieved by asking one person to draw a three+ way dividing line and asking the others if to choose a piece (or veto). If there are are veto's and no pieces have been chosen twice, then the divider gets the remaining piece. Else the lines are undrawn and the next person in the circle gets to redraw the lines from scratch, and asks the others to choose. The game repeats until all players have accepted a non-conflicting choice. However if the parties are belligerent, or known to be adamant about specific items, then this game is not guaranteed to complete.

The judgement of King Solomon also provided an alternative solution to this problem by offering to split the baby in half in order to determine who the real mother was, and giving the baby to the one who would rather give the object away rather than see it destroyed. However this only works if the rules of the game are not known about in advance.

P2P is optimized for low cost distribution of large files without a centralized point of failure.

GitHub, Google Code, Youtube or plain old commercial hosting all have significant operating expenses in terms of servers, bandwidth and people power, thus they all require a business model to derive revenue from their content, either directly or indirectly (such as advertising). If youtube where to suddenly go bankrupt, that content would suddenly disappear from the internet. With P2P the costs of hosting are equally distributed among the userbase and in practice will soak up any spare capacity in network (which ISPs don't like as it doesn't fit in with their all-you-can-eat business model).

The inherent assumption is that anything worth sharing online is capable of generating a business model capable of covering its hosting expenses, or is deemed important enough to have a philanthropic donor to pay for it. Also a single point of failure assumes that you want to exert a high level of control over your content and are not subject to attacks from entities (governments, corporations) who do not wish you to share specific content.

So what remains is mostly content that is unable to generate a business model through its online distribution (Linux ISOs) and content that others are actively seeking to remove from the internet (Copyrighted Music and Videos + Wikileaks backups).

What would be the operating, server and bandwidth costs of hosting the full contents of The Pirate Bay on a centralized server? Maybe the internet giants like Apple or Google would have the modern day resources to physically achieve this, it would require a global CDN (like Youtube has), a multi-million pound operating budget, thus requiring either subscription charges or huge quantities of advertising, and would subject its owners to a huge multitude of legal issues, and the business interests of big media would ensure that it would be almost impossible to create such a service. With P2P we bypass all these restrictions and remove our dependance on the good-will of large corporations.

Without Napster pushing the boundaries and showing what was technically possible, big media would never have been forced to agree to iTunes (which tries to play by the rules, but at a cost)

Depends on the game: http://xkcd.com/53/

$50,000,000 / $80,000 * 0.98 USD/CAD = 612 MP3s
612 MP3s * 6Mb = 3.675 Gb

In other words, this is the price of a single pirated iPod shuffle.

Shit.. where is Mario when you need him!

Have parrots successfully passed the Turing test... this seems like very much the same approach as cleverbot... robottically repeating sounds and phrases that it once heard without any read understanding of meaning

Chaos and Order... Chaos contains the seeds of infinite possibility yet Order only contains the seeds of incremental change... It is through Chaos that we are forced to evolve but it through evolution that we have establish Order... it is the Tao of Order and Chaos defines our reality...

Well price goes down to a penny and they both cover their costs via the £2.75 postage and packaging. It does happen reasonably often with certain books.

It could also be on the assumption that the competitor only has limited stock of each "used" book, combined with the preference to maximize profit per book rather than turnover. Mark my price a little higher than my competitor and once he has sold out, I will then become the cheapest and also know that my price is still "market rates" and thus I will make slightly more profit than my competitor.

This ain't rocket science!