interesting that none of those things by themselves would generate much money

would you pay to do a google search or would you just use a free alternative instead?

Except this isn't one person saying that 1 bitcoin == 1 dollar, this is lots of people trading with each other.

So you are suggesting that search engines indexing other search engines is unfair, this is not as a clear cut as you think.

Google does not own the content they return when you search, you could argue they don't even own the algorithm they use. Page rank (in it's most basic form) looks at relationships between pages, they don't own that data, they just use it.

You could argue that Bing are doing the same thing, collecting data and using it to rank pages in relation to search terms.

The way google presented this does make Bing look bad, but basically they are collecting data from users who have opted in to send it to them. If Google wants to lay blame it should be on those users, however users just want to get the most relevant page back from their search, they don't care about how that happens.

Rupert Murdoch says similar things about google news.

The real world and academic evaluation are not the same thing.

a lot of people make a lot of money from the volatility of oil prices

it is an inelastic commodity, in the oil shocks of the 70s, the price of oil had to rise 400% before demand started to drop

then why can't the free market take care of this?, if there really is such a demand for ISP level filtering.

The only effective way to filter is to locally whitelist sites you allow your kids to visit, if this is too much hassle then you are not a very good parent.

rsync (plus a git repo) can give you the basic features of Dropbox

Open source software is not know for good user friendly UI's though (there are exceptions) which is why Dropbox is so popular

$100 a month for an ipv4 address?, try this on residential customers and they will just start to hate their isp and the internet

try it on businesses and they will shop around for price that is close the market value of an ipv4 address, at the same time they may consider implementing ipv6

ipv4 trading will happen and you will have to pay for it but i doubt prices will ever get that high

no, ordinary residential routers will not be upgraded to support ipv6 in a short timespan

the bulk of the migration to ipv6 might take as little as 5 years, but i predict there will still be multiple users natted behind a single ip address for 20 years

much easier to nat them and make them pay the cost (+ margin) for an ipv4 address if they want one

From the PeerBlock FAQ

7. Does this mean my P2P downloading is completely safe now?

Not necessarily. While many people do use IP Filtering software like PeerBlock to help "protect" themselves from being sued for copyright infringement, it is not 100% protection. In fact some people believe that using blocklists like this are completely useless. Others disagree, and believe that even if it's not 100% safe, it still lets them download files more safely. Sometimes they invoke the "Bear Principle": when running away from an angry bear you don't need to be faster than that bear . . . you only need to be faster than the guy next to you. However, as I seem to remember seeing on the old Peer Guardian site at one point:

                The only way to be "safe" with P2P downloading is to not share copyrighted content!

PeerBlock is good at what it does - keeping your computer from "talking" with ip addresses on your configured blocklists. Everything else is up to those blocklists themselves. And heck, even if the blocklists provided 100% coverage of "bad" ip-addresses, and if blocklists were 100% proven to work, there could still be some bugs in the PeerBlock software that may prevent it from working correctly on your machine; we offer no guarantees that it works, and disclaim any and all responsibility for the consequences of your own actions online. If you're sharing copyrighted music/video files and get sued by the relevant organizations, it's not our fault. If you're stuck in a country with an oppressive government and are trying to get out your plans regarding the upcoming revolution, and those in power break down your door and haul you away, it's not our fault. If you're sharing some secret footage of Area 51 and the "Men in Black" come knocking on your door, it's not our fault!

If you choose to download copyrighted material from the Internet, be aware that you may be breaking the law.

yes broadband bandwidth and availability has to increase and improve before physical media can be written off.

How long do you think this is going to take?

This guy from the article thinks it will get to that point soon.

yep this explains why i can no longer use bitlbee or twirssi to follow twitter timeline

yeah they both become unusable really quickly