Hey...I had a great idea today. So great that all will be forced to bow at the feet of Tyler Durden. Of course, I have a decent amount beer in me, and there are unresolved issues, but right now it's lookin' pretty "obvious" so here goes. Kids who currently share files via P2P should instead "earn" song download credits by making their computers available for grid computing. Comments? First let me state what I don't give a crap about... 1) Market for grid computing. For argument sake, let's assume it's there, and that there will increasingly exist compaines that need supercomputing-like capabilities but don't want to buy a Cray or whatever. 2) Kids won't bother. Bullshit. There will certainly exist a % of teenagers that would rather "legitimately" earn song downloads, and who have an "always on" broadband pipe. As for CPUs, those will otherwise be wasted at night. And in case I gotta explain it for the dim-witted, I'm talking about a big company wishing to purchase grid-computing facilities who come to the "P2P Grid Corp", and pay some $$$. These $$$ are then actually paid in part to entertainment companies for the rights to allow subscribers to download files in exchange for making their CPUs available for grid computing. Of course there are open questions. Like, how to value a CPU? (Hettinga?) Also, it would seem to me this system needs to be centralized, in order to control the file sharing. But it also occurs to me that a "song" might actually in itself act as a digibuck of sorts within the system (imagine...the 'gold' doesn't sit in a bank, it's actually encoded into the digibuck itself!) (There's also the issue of how to value the pipe-size into that PC's home...a big FAT-ASS computer within a tiny little 56K pipe might not be super valuable)... -TD _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus