"You're better off just renting a car"

I think this pretty much hits the nail on the head. Why own a car that sits unused for 90%-99% of the time? When all cars drive themselves (as seems not only possible but entirely practical in the early 21st century), I can foresee the ability to book a car online, have it pick you up and then deposit you at you destination for a fraction of today's cab fare. The economics appear to make so much sense. Also, with self-driving, possibly networked cars, you'd go a long way towards eliminating traffic problems that plague most car commuters on a daily basis.

May be the cars won't be rented, maybe they'll be shared between people or something, but as soon as people realise they don't have to pay to a fortune to buy, then maintain and fuel their vehicle, I think the economics will speak for themselves.

Ah well, I can dream...

Recent versions of the popular systemimager software (used to replicate Linux installs over many nodes, often in HPC clusters), allow bittorrent to be used to accomplish this, rather than rsync, which is standard.

The documentation states that "SystemImager has been used to image a cluster of 1190 clients (IBM Blade LS21) over a 1Gb/s interconnect link: a 2.7GB RHEL5.1 x86_64 OS image has been delivered to all the clients in only 15min!!! (Note: this means that after 15 minutes we were able to ssh and submit jobs to the nodes)"

Pretty amazing, I'd say...

This is correct, however, Slashdot being an American website, I clocked the "7m" and automatically took it to mean "7 miles". After a serious case of the cold sweats, and reading TFS, however, I calmly carried on with my breakfast.

FWIW, being a Brit, I use metric on paper, but Imperial units in real life.

I guess so that you can take your hi-def movie /TV series that you've just erm...acquired round to a mate's house and plug it directly into his telly/AV receiver.

There are obviously other uses...

I could be wrong, but I believe this has been the case since Win2k, and possibly NT4 before that. IIRC, it was only the DOS-based monstrosities that demanded reboots with everything..