> There's no point if you think bittorrent's impact has been creating value rather than giving people the means to acquire value without giving. Ah, sorry, I s

> There's no point if you think bittorrent's impact has been creating value rather than giving people the means to acquire value without giving. Ah, sorry, I should have been more clear above. When I speak of the value that BitTorrent created I don't mean piracy, I mean all the saved bandwidth and resources from having a more efficient protocol for transferring large files (for legitimate uses.) Maybe it was a bad example, instead think of John Cristy and ImageMagick, or Linus and Linux, the idea is that one contribution by one talented and skilled programmer can have huge, open-ended value, but that it's very hard to actually get paid even a minuscule fraction of that value. To me, back in the day, in my fiery youth, it seemed much easier to reprogram economics itself by developing and releasing technology (Bucky's "Design Science Revolution") than to try to go the Jobs/Gates route and cash in. A quarter of a century or so later, it seems to me that the Free Software movement has pretty much failed, and I should have paid more attention when Etsy was handing out stock options... > Please do not interpret this as me saying economies are a good thing. It beats banging rocks together, but yeah. I'm in the "It was a bad idea to come down out of the trees." camp most days. > The system is biased and new technologies put power into the hands of smart individuals springing up around the world. We do live in interesting times, eh? I should take this opportunity to tell you that it's great fun watching you become a legend in your own time. Cheers! and well met.