Does it bring all the boys to the yard?
I don't know where the yard is, so I'm unable to determine if all the boys were brought there.
I had a limited quantity and was not reluctant to consume it.
I fear Peter's milkshake would send the boys away from the yard. It could be quite useful under certain circumstances.
It could be decentralised and would actually be more secure if it was. I don't think Pete's wrong about this. Freenet did it (it failed, because it required a critical mass of users before it was usable (and never got them), but the tech was sound, I think a lot of it got rolled into what is now TOR).
Stuff is moving that way anyway. I mean all this 'cloud' stuff is virtualised on-demand servers with resources allocated on the fly. That's a step towards complete decentralisation.
There's a legal angle too. In the US people are starting to make home cloud servers - i.e. something very much like a NAS but with webmail, photo sharing etc. etc. - all the social stuff built in to the server. The reason for this is that if the authorities want access to all your online stuff they can get it pretty easily. If they want something from your home it's a lot tougher - they need more warrants and they need more justification.
As that kinda thing starts to become more common (and I think it will, eventually) decentralising gets a lot easier.
And as Pete says, all you'd need then is a chain of central hubs/database servers which glue all this together. You wouldn't even strictly /need/ that. It'd just be a good way to start it off.
I'm not sure Dan's trying to argue against that, more that he's got a fairly good idea of how much hardware costs and that Pete's rough budget isn't anywhere near enough. I'm inclined to agree with him.