Nobody's putting more money back into 'cool' technology anymore, and bandwidth hasn't gotten any cheaper - necessity is the mother of not only invention, but apparently fashion, too.

It's a pity that the ISPs are all clamping down on servers more and more these days - what's needed more than ever at the moment is a whole new WWW that's completely run off a BitTorrentesque concept (this is after 24 hours sans sleep, no technical details outside of a vague 'Freenet?').

Of course, what the ISPs are doing would cease to be relevant at all if there was some way we could pull off long-distance trunks for free. I mean, as of all the new hyper-802.11 nextgen standards, we've got the last mile problem licked solid, don't we? Just have a few hundred hackers setup a few hundred of those as open nodes in every city, then connect each city via trunks. You know, the only reason I even bother reading slashdot anymore is that I keep hoping that I've missed out on some idea (outside of quantum entanglement aka particle spin theorem) for conquering the trunks. Makes you beat your head against the wall, doesn't it? If the trunks were free and user run there'd be no way to tame the Net *AT ALL*, hackers would reign as gods and copyright infringement would make today's worst excesses look like droplets in the bucket. Ideas would flourish wild again and corporatism would be dead if only there was a way to setup free intercity trunks.