To put myself to sleep the other night, I was thinking about the recent discussions about core memory, and I remembered a wire delay line memory I'd once disassembled as a teen, and thought about the old mercury delay line memories, and then moved it to the Internet. Sure, it would be abusive of the Net's resources. You'd need to contend with the possibility of dropped packets, which might invalidate the entire experience. But like the "unused" CPU cycles on your PC, there is a great deal of unused bandwidth. Not everyone's pipe is full, and these pipes are a form of transient memory. Imagine a chain of machines or routers or whatever that would simply pass a special kind of packet to another machine, echoing and mirroring packets back to my machine. By taking advantage of the delays in transmitting packets around the world, across fiber lines, under the sea, up to satellites, etc. wouldn't we create a long delay line with large data capacity? Obviously the speed of access is nothing like a hard drive or RAM, but it would be a neat hack, no? - John