Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay is Here to Stay?
vitaly.friedman wrote to mention a Wired article about The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing crewe out of Sweden that thumbs its nose at the MPAA just for kicks and has yet to be shut down. From the article: "The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers. That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment."
I always love when people think that writing or calling their elected official makes a hill of beans of difference. For me, all it generally did was give me a nice elated feeling when I received a signed letter in the mail thanking me for my opinion, and then writing a paragraph about why their decisions would never change.
I've lately become a firm believer in wasting the time of the company that has used the power of government against me -- in this case, the content and distribution cartels (RIAA, MPAA). Instead of calling your elected official, call the companies themselves and keep moving up the ladder with the fact that you have a general complaint about their products. Don't accept the underlings and don't tell them exactly what it is you're mad about. If that doesn't work, call up their sales department and work your way up the ladder there requesting information about their services.
The slashdot effect is great on the Internet, but it is even more powerful on the phones. Each and every server request you make costs any one company very little. Each and every phone call you make gets heard, at least in the bottom line.
I'm not telling people to do anything illegal -- don't hassle, don't spam, don't swear, don't threaten -- just call. Call and tell them you don't appreciate their actions, you don't appreciate their products, and you don't appreciate their lobbying to creatre a more powerful Congress.
I know my phone calls don't make a difference -- yet. But over time, as more people realize that voting with their dollars and voting with how they spend their time, we'll see change being made through a free market of motivations.
To stay a bit on topic: I recently spent quite a bit of time researching the Swedes, and I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist. I think they'd be a dream country for most Progressives (which means it would be a nightmare for me), but it surprises me how many rights they still retain that we gave up in the US a long, long time ago. The freedom to do what you want with products you physically own is a great freedom, in fact I believe it is the basis for freedom. The freedom to do what you want with your labor and your mind is included in that freedom, and that is why I am against intellectual property rights in every way.
Go TPB!
The only thing these guys will get done, is Draconian copyright DCMA-like laws to be passed in Schweden.
So they shoot normal people in the foot, even if they use OpenBSD.
it's great to see someone that is anti esteblishment stay strong and alive in the face of big business and big government. Power to the People!
No, I'm already convinced. It's good.
For all the damage these industries cause honest and would-be honest customers, they deserve a true thorn in their sides. For all the monopolistic and oligopolistic crap they pull; For all the price-fixing and other dirty tricks; For all the innocent people they have attacked with their lawsuit crusades. We have no effective weapon against their activities since they have already bought all the politicians that are for sale. All we have is our defiance.
It's good even if it's not good enough.
There is nothing stopping the ??AA from connecting to the tracker, logging the U.S. based IP addresses, then sending out subopenas to the ISPs of said IPs. And haven't they been doing that already?
My favorite was when they moved the servers to a new location across town. They even put up a GPS map showing their exact location so everyone would know how soon the site would be back up.
They must believe their country will protect them instead of hunting them down and arresting them.
I wonder if their government will still protect them when the US threatens to impose trade sanctions if they do not get rid of The Pirate Bay. Janet Reno did that with Australia and they caved soon after. Now Australia has some of the toughest copyright laws in the world. I think they are even harsher than the US equivalents.
If there were no movies and no t.v. due to piracy? I would cheer that the world had taken a shift for the better. I on occasion watch movies, however our entertainment options are used to placate us as a people. This way we don't think about our own failings. Nor do we strive to improve ourselves educationally and compete against the wealthy for the better jobs. We stand by as companies institute 401ks and do away with defined benefits plans. As we are sold out to big business and big government. As we're told that we don't need unions. That gold and silver are things we don't want to invest in. That we should buy buy buy but you better not go bankrupt! If we could get rid of movies and T.V. then perhaps people would think for themselves a little more and be more conserned with quality education. Keeping our jobs here and not outsourced. Concerned about invasion of privacy by the NSA, FBI and whomever else wishes to use the power that they were entrusted with in a corrupt and manipulative manner. If Piracy could bring down our now traditional big businesses then let piracy reign. I understand that many people would suffer but this would only bring about a greater good. We need to teach big business and big government that the people as a whole still make and break and rewrite the rules for the greater good.
*sigh* Yes, there is. If I have a hammer and you also want a hammer so you copy my hammer by manufacturing one yourself, just like mine, have you just stolen my hammer then? Even though I still have my hammer, right here? Because that's actually what you're saying.
You cannot make a big budget action movie by 'touring', 'selling merchandise' or any of the self-satisfied rationalizations people have suggested that musicians turn to.
No, but you can't realistically build a real movie theater at home either. Any way value is added, it can be exploited to drive sales of a good or a service. In Singapore, movie theaters have luxury seats and serve meals as an added value to the movie. Economically, there is no longer any added value in making a copy so it should not be used as the basis for value. Economics 101.
References:
Mindjack - Piracy is good?
International Herald Tribune - Imagine a world without copyright
A History And Possible Future Of Cinema
First Monday - Piercing the myths of p2p
TV Week - NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time
Stealing Music
Roderick T. Long - The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
Money for nothing, pix for free
The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft.
Copyright infringement. If you're complaining about people playing mind games, you can at least have the decency to avoid doing the same thing yourself in the same sentence.
It costs $200 million to make some movies. If people stop paying to make the movies then that type of movie will not get made in the future.
This is the real issue. Not whether something is "right" or "wrong" -- those are just social norms that have been instilled in people -- but the pragmatic issues.
Currently, the fact that people pay to see movies allows the funding of the creation of said movies. If you endorse infringement, you need one of a couple of justifications:
(a) It's going to happen anyway -- in the presence of a worldwide system (the Internet) designed to cheaply replicate and distribute data, content funded on the predicate that duplication is hard and expensive cannot exist. That means an end is going to come to this funding system, at least for movies in the $200 million scale. Regardless of the methods used, social pressure to not infringe is not going to be effective. We will not be able to make movies that require $200 million in resources in the future -- movie prices will have to drop far enough that the convenience is worth the purchase. Future movies will have to be more thrift-oriented -- if this causes a drop in the enjoyment factor of movies, then that drop will occur. I know some people that dislike those "big budget action movies" that would probably fall into (a).
(b) Infringing movie usage does not damage movie sales. People will continue to go to theaters as the same level as before (well, sans the bite taken away by home theaters), but just spend a larger amount of time viewing movies, as they will infringe on some additional movies.
(c) Movies will continue to make as much money, but by using alternate approaches (like product placement or commercials) that are not affected by redistribution.
(d) Movies can be sold on a viable non-redistributable medium, but some type of DRM-enabled device will be used and this one will actually work.
Remember that, as technologies change, policies we use have adapted to fit the times. I'm quite certain that, in one form or another, the movie-making industry will be around in fifty years. The printing press, the cassette recorder, the VHS tape, home entertainment systems -- all have had significant impact on how content was provided, but content continued to be provided via one mechanism or another.
For example, the drive-in theater is pretty much dead today because of TVs and movie-playing systems at home. People rent tapes, which was a mechanism that really wasn't expected by anyone to make a lot of money at one point (and, in fact, was expected to kill the movie industry at one point).
It may be by simply instituting policy capable of fighting off all infringement; my personal guess is that the movie industry will instead morph and twist and adapt in one way or another. It may even be one that we haven't dreamed of yet. History supports this idea.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Would they be prosecuted? And if so, then that would be a bad thing.
I'm just curious in case they ever in their life times ever want to visit the U.S. for whatever reason, and then they end up being on some terrorist watch list because of their involvement with the Pirate Bay.
From the pdf announcement:
Recent years? Try over 10 years ago. (from my knowledge anyway, probably closer to 15-20)
... why would a web site trying to avoid being shut down by the MPAA/RIAA/etc. give itself a name called "The PIRATE Bay"??? Isn't this just a case of "Waving a red flag at the bull"?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I see a future where computer skill and military experience merge to form - corporate mercenaries. A quick, forced entry, a small shaped charge and thier servers are toast. In and out in 10 minutes before the local authorities can react. Cash into the swiss account. ok.. too much Shadowrun as a teenager, but hey it could happen.
The problem is choice..
I'm an Australian who has just returned to Australia from a 1.5-month long trip to Sweden. Sweden is doing so many things right and it's really unfortunate that Australia isn't a bit more like Sweden.
First of all, there's not nearly as much crime in Sweden as there is in Australia. The Swedish government takes proper care of their people, so no one feels a need to commit crime. There's no homeless people sleeping in parks at night. People are much, much friendlier.
They also don't have any terrorist panic. There's no "terrorism alert levels", and there isn't much security. There's not even nearly as many police around as there is in Australia. The Swedes haven't made enemies for themselves by invading other countries, so they don't need to be afraid of any terrorists attacking them. The Swedes are more "free" than Americans are, which proves that terrorists don't hate America because they "hate freedom", as George Bush wants everyone to think. They attack America because America attacked them and is occupying their countries.
Sweden will probably also now lead the way in having free culture. They will soon show that money can be made even from creating free culture. Hopefully the rest of the world will follow their lead. Unfortunately, the rest of the world seems to be going crazy.
I just hope everyone who reads this post can imagine what life would be like to live in a country where you don't need to be afraid of terrorism or crime, a country where almost all of the population gets a good education, and all this despite alcohol (and probably other drugs) being more easily accessible in this country. Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that such a country can't exist, but it's important that everyone knows it does, for that is how other countries can follow the Swedes' lead in being a more peaceful, calmer, and better educated population.
Thats sophistry. Without that information it would not be possible for people to steal the content. The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft.
That's the law. In the eyes of Swedish law, TPB is not facilitating theft, they are a library of text files. TPB has mentioned that as soon as storing text files becomes illegal they will provide hyperlinks to the text files. And when hyperlinks become illegal they will provide hyperlinks to the hyperlinks. They are committed to bogging down copyright more than providing a specific service to the people.
I, for one, am glad to see the beaurocracy of law choke on its own bulk. Despite what some mega corporations are whining for these days, many countries allow their citizens to share culture openly. To share and to be shared with, not to give or take and remove from the source.
Technology is granting great freedoms to the populace, and some countries feel the public needn't put a nickel in the jar every time they whistle a tune.
Thats sophistry. Without that information it would not be possible for people to steal the content.
What makes you say that? More difficult, sure. Impossible? Don't think so. Its a bit of text, and it can move at supersonic speeds in several directions and forms at once. A real bitch to pin down, Pirate Bay or no.
The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft.
Well, see, that's a tricky thing. The problem with that line of thinking is again a practical one, it is very hard to hang a crime on a person who is simply indicating an easy crime opportunity. If I point out to someone in the library that the photocopier on the right is malfunctioning and does not require money to operate, am I committing a crime? So of course you are right when you say the idea is to let people download movies and software, but the facilitating of that is not a crime in and of itself.
Seems like you were not here for the Napster affair then. During the Napster affair there was no shortage of people flaming about how the service was obviously 100% legal. After the company folded it turned out that they had never received even an internal opinion to the effect that the service was legal.
Sure, that was a new ruling basically. And the original poster did say "until that changes in Sweden"; you always have the possibility of the winds of law shifting on you, no matter what the case.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Money is nothing more than units of exchange issued and maintained by the government of the state in which you reside. For historical reasons it has generaly been made clear that granting people a certain share of these units in recompense for their work is a good way of ensuring that society continues functioning - that's your pay.
Similarly it has also become clear that the "obvious" way of doing this - which would be to have everybody work for an organ of the government and be payed a reasonable amount by them doesn't work much of the time (although as a research student it's notable that this is how I get paid - so it can work under certain circumstances). The alternative which seams to work is to have quasi-independent organs called "bussinesses" which overpay their workers, and then have government organs remove the excess (that's your taxes).
So your pay and taxes are realy just an organisational thing - no one is "taking things away from you" they just give you too much and then take it back.
James P. Barrett
It is more like, "Here is a list of music stores that are easy to steal music from."
Bittorrent trackers don't host any data, just links - so they could theoretically be ok under Sweedish Law. However, hosting Bittorrent data isn't so innocent, and easy to track if you get the locations from the tracker.
:)
However - what if you "improved" the bit-torrent protocol so that when a file is split up and distributed amongst hosts, that some of the files are NOT part of the original data. When recombining the pieces, they're discarded. If encrypted, you couldn't tell which were real, and which were not... making it difficult to prove that someone was hosting copyrighted data. It's sort of like a firing squad - one rifle is loaded with a blank so you don't know if you're the one that killed they guy or not.
Just a thought (un-informed, but inspired.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
It's important to realize that The Pirate Bay does not host any infringing content on its servers.
The Pirate Bay is identical in nature to Google:
Both sites allow users to enter searches from a web page, and both return a list of links to (sometimes infringing) content.
If The Pirate Bay can be shut down, then Google can be shut down.
Uh-oh, now you're going to jail. And me to, I guess. Oh well.
In an interesting twist of English interpretation, couldn't it be said that acknowledging and abiding by the sentence in whole or in part would be a violation of the 'or use' statement, thus nullifying the whole thing?
Unpleasantries.
How can you have freedom of religion if you don't have enough money to donate to your church?
How can you have freedom of press if you can't buy printing presses, web servers, etc.
Freedom doesn't exist without personal property. If the government owns everything, you can only operate inside its sandbox, which is a pretty infantile version of freedom.
If you have enough people, this type of DOS attack could be devastating. Everybody goes around picking out non-perishable items in large quantities and putting them into their carts. Go for the cat food cans (50 varieties!), the spice aisle, maybe the Jello aisle, and top off your cart with a few large 50-lb bags of kitty litter or something. At a predetermined time, everybody drives their loaded carts up to the front, parks them randomly in the way, and exits the store. It takes them forever to put everything back correctly. And if your group has a message, the management gets it because you can leave flyers everywhere on the shelves or at the bottom of the carts. Fun fun fun.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Why should wealth be inheritable any more than any other form of power? Unearned wealth from inheritance should be taxed heavily.
Great question -- the reason is that this gives opportunity to the poor as well as the rich. I have MANY experiences with ultra rich familes and ultra poor families. The rich families often find themselves bankrupt in 3 generations because they just pass on money without teaching responsibility. The poor families who pass on responsibility and some money to their kids often see their kids succeeding because they learned how to work, save and invest in themselves. I believe the cliche is "Blue Collar to Blue Collar in 3 generations" but I could be wrong.
I can buy cheap things and not go into debt or expensive things and go into debt, whether I'm buying from my neighbor or from a guy on the other side of the planet. I don't understand your point here.
By having positive trade balances and not owing anyone anything, you give your own societal group the benefit of maximizing their own skills. When a society can buy something cheaper from another society (as long as its not debt bought), the first society can focus on new skills where they are most productive. In a society of 5 people, it is very hard for everyone to find wealth. But once that society of 5 people mixes with 10000 societies of 5 people, everyone can maximize their wealth by opening up their market to new places to sell to and new places to buy from.
1. China and the USSR were not Communist nations. They were facist dictatorships that borrowed communist rhetoric to justify the horrible things they did.
2. Globalism breaks Capitalism. Adam Smith envisioned a world where capitalists would act responsible because they lived right next to the squalor they create. Capitilism was layed out in an era before global transportation and telecommunications, not to mention before modern militaries eclipsed what a civilian militia could stand up aganst and modern propaganda/populace management techniques existed. These things combined mean a modern capitalist can live detached from the hellhole he creates, pit labor in one country aganst another to lower everyone's standard of living, and use the military and gov't propaganda engines to put down any serious challenge to his power.
3. The US became the most powerful country because we're on a continent with two really weak countries at either end. We have no serious rivals, and could prosper as such. While the rest of the world was reeling from WWII, we just kept on growing. It has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with Geography and dumb luck.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
A few days a go a swedish reality series (on public service TV) called "toppkandidaterna" (top candidates) with young people with political ideas competed was finished. The winner was a leftist guy who will give 50000 SEK (US$6270) of the cash prize (250000 SEK in total, the rest will go elsewhere) to the pirate bay. The money is to be used for new hardware (the site has been running a bit slow lately and the search function has frequently been unavailable). That's public service money well spent!
It'd be nice if you at least understood and acknowledged the parent's conscious choice to be less rich in order to be more wealthy.
As it is, I don't think you understand wealth and you don't appreciate the choice that parent post speaks of. See, you measure everything in money, and that's not the right way to measure true wealth.
Point by point, 1 is money, 2 is money (unless you mean wisdom passing on to descendants, which I really doubt, having read quite a few of your posts), 3 money again.
I see wealth as having a happy life -- the kind of life where the person feels at ease and social relations are free from strain. When people focus on making money, they make all other goals half-assed. Or spoken in different words, a person who performs some art, such as healing (like a surgeon), constructions, etc., when doing so for money, is bringing ulterior motive into their art/craft, thus invariable and necessarily degrading it. And this is what we see happening all around! Look how crappy the fruits and vegetables are in your supermarket. Shit, you may not even have seen a good looking tomato in your entire life, if you grew up in USA. What they sell in supermarkets across America is CRAP. Why? Because it's efficient -- the fruits are not tasty enough for worms, they don't rot, they last long. The main priority is quantity and lastingness. That's what happens when you do it for money. If you did it in any other way, then you'd make less money. So we have tomatoes that taste like leather, green bananas, mushy and blackened potatoes and so on. Some things you can't even buy, because they're not profitable (but damn, they are tasty). I once had to fight with the store ordering guy to get him to order some beets for the store. His argument, "No one buys beets, so we don't carry it." So what if the majority of culture is happy with just fucken' ramen? And that's likely to happen because they sell crap vegetables. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: you sell crap produce and drive people to rely more on canned goods and cereal (5 dollars for a box of air) and pasta, etc... People buy fewer vegetables, so you have to carry a less diverse stock and less more expensive cereal. Profit. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
This is not what I'd call wealth. Lots of money flows thru a supermarket store. But everything on its shelves is CRAP and every fuckin supermarket employee I've seen has been a very SICK and unhappy person. Why is that? Because the store treats them like crap. That's why. But they don't have to be treated like that. They could be paid more (and yes, I know... I KNOW the store will make less money if they pay their clerks more, or GOD FORBID, give them part ownership of the store, so they feel responsible for what they do and they feel part of the success of their own work). The result: very very strained human relations. The result of strained relations is segregations of society into layers. The result of layering of society is formations of elites at the top and gangs who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for at the bottom.
Greed and the focus on money as exclusive measure of wealth turns everything into crap. You end up with booming economy, with lots of dollars, but all the people are pissed off, the government is bloated (YES, because, for corps to keep pumping more and more money out of public, they need to get government on board, and this is just a natural extention of doing it for money and seeing money as wealth), and all the products are of bare-minimum quality that the market will bear, and there is no point in excellence if a mediocre thing will sell too.
dada, it is people like YOU who bloat our government. You just don't see how it happens. It's a guy like you who ends up, in luckier circumstances with owning a corporation. And it's a guy like you that at the end of the day goes to the government and asks for laws that protect and ensure your business. You only talk trash when you're a small fry, but once you get more
Once you're dead, it's not your property anymore.
Your relationship with your body is much more intimate than "property".
Your house is your property only because of a government deed; those funny green pieces of paper in your wallet are government creations too.
Capitalism requires all sorts to the government involvement; contrary to the concept of "liberatrian capitalism", capitalism is not a ground state that occurs in the absence of state action. That's why anarchy is a form of socialism.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
There are several key arguments for an estate tax. * Continued concentrate of power in the elite. In any democracy, wealth can be translated into political power. Well, then you're fixing the wrong problem aren't you? * Limit Innovation. A society full of undeserving rich kids travelling around collecting art work for their private collections does not induce innovation. First off, it would induce innovation in the field of art that appeals to undeserving rich kids. Second, I think you are greatly overestimating the number of undeserving rich kids that would result from the permanent abolition of the estate tax. * Govt research and investments Good. Surprisingly very wealthy people such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett support the death tax. Surprisingly, middle class people such as EatHam could give a fuck what Bill Gates and Warren Buffet support in the way of taxation. Middle class people such as EatHam also realize that the problem isn't the tax rate, the problem is with the method of collection. If people paid their tax bill in full and didn't evade, we would still have a surplus. Don't blame Bush for that, blame your criminal tax evading neighbors.
I cannot explain how much much i dislike and hate the content comming out currently. Movies, Mucis, TV, Blah blah blah. It's all crap. I don't spend my money on the latest boy band or some teen whore. I don't spend my money watching crap movies that get fluff reviews just so the reviewers can keep thier job. I spend my money procurring acess to the interent. I spend my money on imported CD's because PEOPLE, not instruments and soundboards, make music. Today's america is full of one problem: Too much. There is simply too much to do, too many bills to pay, too many debts to correct, too many cars in the traffic jam, too many people in your department. People are so sidetracked with their wordly shit that they spend their hard earned money on crap that makes them feel better for 20 minutes. That being said, i'm all for piracy. Not only do i support TFSM (The flying spaggehti monser) i'm all for mass digital content delivery. Since studios and content makers feel it is their right to demand my money for crap i don't even want, I go out of my way to avoid paying for the content I do want. Movies, TV Shows, it's all about what the CONSUMER wants, not what they think we want. Instead of handling this technology like mature people, they have chosen to sit on their Copy Rights like the fat kid hoarding his cake. Instead of being smart and offering their own way of digital converstion and distrobution, they choose to stick to old methods that are simply obsolete in today's world. TPB is not just a piracy site, it's a community. Real people have real opinions and are making it known in real ways. They are executing their powers under their laws, and I think it's fantastic.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
If that's your company's official opinion, and not only yours, congratulations! It's the first time I've heard of a company holding this view. Most people are law-abiding - when they can afford it.
Most people I know that run businesses use warezed copies of new versions of $favourite_software, and buy it if they feel the need to use it instead of their current (bought) version. While trying the warezed copy, they also make sure no commercial works are created with it - it's purely "in-house" testing.
Granted, many softwares have a two-week "pre-activation" test period after you bought it (like WinXP), but try and get your money back if you decide you don't want it. It's meant to be a grace period for phone/fax registrations, not evaluation. And no true eval copies exist.
I have spent 13 years of my life in the US and moved back to Moscow, Russia recently. The reason was that from day one in the US I felt like I'm "back in the USSR" in some strange way - capitalizm, sure, but also lack of freedom,and there was much more freedom in Russia in 1992, and it is still lots left, although the constant anti-freedom pressure from the West and US on these topics is felt: :-) conscenting adults. There are so many reasons why people might want to have sex, I don't see why govt. should be involved at all. And the girls are very good IMHO. Just look up on the Web.
:) for $3 each. And most latest software for evil OS (MS-Windows).
:-)
:-) "Those that trade freedom for some security end up with neither"
a) copyright (although, my economical and political beliefs are Linux/GNU/FSF, and repressive law against Windows lusers benefits me economically). And prohibiting hollywood movies and music would only benefit (any) country.
b) war on (some) drugs - overall policy that results in black market prices grouth for said products, with strong govt. corruption and consumption grow, accoppanied by constant media hypocrasy.
c) human rights erosion under the pretext of "war on terror" - like x-raying my boots and stealing my nail-clippers at the airports, phone and internet surveillance. Although - right now in Moscow you can buy 1) anonymous GSM phone card 2) anonymous internet access card 3) anonumous electronic cash cards 4) cannabis seeds selling and buying is legal
d) prostitution - at least it's still not a criminal offense in Russia, for private, individual relation between two (or more
e) erosion of state/church separation - but at least in Russian schools children are not forced to pledge submission to Govt. and GOD on a daily basis
f) untill now complete databases for all private information from phone numbers, to passport, drivers license, property, taxes paid were available for no more then $30 complete set. Unfortunately lately FSB(KGB) got upset that such complete information discosure was available to anybody, not just them. But, Westen position on this is such - give that wealth of information only to Govt. agencies. Whereas, if there is no choice, better everybody has it, rather then only Govt.
Speaking of "Pirate Bay" - well, firstly, I prefer eMule. Secondly, I never bother to download movies since on every metro station there are kiosks that sell DVDs with up to 8-6 latest Holywood shit movies on a two sided disk (russian creativity!
p.s. my wife delivers a baby in 10 days and althouth I can't say it was not without a hassle to get all paperwork and state medical insurance papers - it's free. We probably feel obligated to tip doctor with $200-$300 for delivery, but that's our choice and in case we were broke it would still be the same hospital and doctor. And Govt. gives a $250 bonus for a newborn baby. Of course it costs a hell more to rise a child, but
Now, I do hate socializm
Vassili Leonov
No, it's no one's property after you die. It becomes your family's property only through government action.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I can date numerous good looking women, take them out...etc. You just can't do that with 'wealth that is not money'.
This is completely untrue. I'm an average/below-average looking short guy who has always dated very attractive women, including some models. The one I chose for the rest of my life is hot AND intelligent. I never once offered that I had money, and I rarely even paid for their share of the dates. Of course I've been writing about how to date amazing women for 10 years (and now I offer the advice freely).
Also, you don't need to be rich to travel -- I've been traveling internationally on a regular basis for almost 17 years and I earn 40-60% less than the average slashdot IT reader here. You don't need to be rich for a nice home, or to eat well. I firmly believe a single guy can do VERY well on $20,000 a year in 2006.
Today, it is money. Just a fact of nature, and I don't know anyone that doesn't like getting laid by a great looking lady. It sure makes me happy.
This is wrong, completely wrong. Money can be a very big attraction for any gal initially, but the money wears off if the guy isn't able to offer the woman what she really wants -- mystery, intrigue and the chase. This continues through marriage and retirement, women want to chase. If you're rich and you have an attractive girl on your arm for your money, the marriage won't last -- look at Donald Trump for proof there. Yet I believe that a fat, bald and poor geek can still land an amazing girl -- attractive, smart, even one that earns much more than him. All they need to do is ignore what they thought the rules were and start acting like a real man.