We are all an anonymoos cow herd.

You're right (and your troll mod is unfair). I miss communicated. When I said "distributed" and "peer to peer" I meant the acts of news gathering and creation. Facebook and twitter are not peer-to-peer networking utilities, either, but they are web services whereby peers create and distribute content to each other, and that's what the NYT wishes they invented.

I meant the content itself would be provided by peers. As in, people are getting news from facebook and twitter, where the content is provided by distributed peers instead of a centralized newspaper, which is the manner whereby the NYT's lunch got ate.

What would a "real engineer" have said?

No.

They could have had every engineer who wound up working for FaceTubeTwitSpace on the NYT staff in 1999 (assuming timewarp so they're not 12 at the time) and they would still have failed, because the management would never have listened to the engineers. Because the engineers would have said, "Hmmm, this business model is going to fail because of distributed peer-to-peer information and content delivery. We should build a peer-to-peer information and content delivery instead, cannibalize and eventually abandon print advertising."

Would. Not. Happen.

To complete the /. analogy, this would be like in 1890, an engineer at a buggy whip manufacturer saying "Yeah, we're making tons of money off buggy whips, but this won't last. We need to retool our leather workers to make steering wheel covers for these new automojiggers instead, or I guarantee, in a little over a hundred years, people on futuristic electrically connected typewriters will write each other personal letters in which they use our industry as an example of failed business processes!"

That's a great answer to a ridiculous question asked in jest.

Yes, but not in a way that promotes growth. The BSD license is a trap for the grumpy kids who don't want to share their toys at recess.

BSD: You can do whatever you want with your modifications to this code, including close them.
GPL: You can do whatever you want with your modifications to this code, except close them.

One of these creates a positive feedback loop in which small, incremental improvements from coders who share increase exponentially. The other creates a negative feedback loop in which the improvements from those who don't share are locked away and lost. I'll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

He's still waiting for confirmation from netcraft.

Your mistake is you assume that in this game Congress is ignorant and not complicit.

Congressmen make $174k/year, and yet after just a few terms they wind up multimillionaires. How do you suppose that happens?

I've considered moving to Iceland, since they're the only country who put their bankers in jail after the crash.

And if I recall, Iceland only has something like 130 people in prison, total.

Well, since they're not lending it, small businesses can't get loans to expand and thereby hire more people to reduce unemployment and prospective home buyers can't get financed and thereby can't help the housing recovery.

Instead, the banks get loans from the Fed at .25%, then buy treasury notes. Right now a 2 year treasury note is only like .5%, but in recent years they've been upwards of 1%. Inflation doesn't matter when it's all risk-free interest profits off somebody else's money.

Since the taxes to pay off those notes come from income earning Americans, it's basically a perpetual motion slavery machine.

1) Fed loans to banks.
2) Banks ignore individuals and loan to government.
3) Government taxes labor to repay banks.
4) Banks repay Fed.
5) Profit!
6) Goto 1

It's just a straight-up evil system to enrich the banking cartel off the backs of workers.

At what point can we end the delusion that fiat currencies are worth anything at all?

Let's just go back to bartering. How many chickens do I need to give my Cox Cable for my internet access?

To so much as imply otherwise means you must be a communist.

But it has been. Slowly and inexorably for 2000 years. The world is getting more peaceful every day, despite what the news would have you believe.

One can certainly attribute humanity's progress to science and learning, but we wouldn't have western science and learning if it weren't for Christianity. That concept of the separation of religion, government, and economics that allows scientific investigation to proceed is only born of an outsider religion like Christianity. For all the talk about the Arab world being the center of learning in the early part of the last millennium, they didn't practice "science," and their concept of learning was more like "knowledge" than experiment. Asian cultures produced some marvelous engineering, yes, but not the scientific method by which we understand the world. The God-emperors of eastern religions and the bureaucrat generals of Islam do not allow for experimentation.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of stumbles and falls along the way, but the fact that the western world corrects mistakes and has reformations and social revolutions is what fuels the march of progress. But it's because of the christian concepts of the fall, the fallibility of man, the imperfectability of man, and the great, great value placed on forgiveness, redemption, and the resultant progress that forms the foundation of scientific, moral and ethical progress towards a peaceful and enlightened society. Christianity, science, and democracy go hand in hand.

"Subsequently, the patent troll crouched on his hands and knees behind O'Conner's legs. The attorney then shoved Mr. O'Conner, who fell backwards over the patent troll. Then the attorney climbed atop Mr. O'Conner's chest, took hold of each of his wrists and forced Mr. O'Conner to strike himself about the head and shoulders, all the while screaming, "Stop hittin' yourself, O'Conner! Stop hittin' yourself!""