Everything in your article is correct, except the pricing. The cost is about SEK 300 per month for 10 Mbit, about $35.
Also, 26 Mbit symmetrical is getting common for about $50/month, and there are rollouts of 100 Mbit (although still in test areas).
Additionally, I think that people in the US are very narrow-minded in terms of last-mile delivery of Internet access ("DSL or cable?"). My apartment is wired to the local switch into the municipal network; I have 10 megabits to my apartment, Ethernet all the way. No cable, no DSL. There is simply an RJ-45 jack on the wall, next to the phone jack.
(That's 10 Mbit symmetrical. Public, static IPs. No silly no-server clauses; the only limitation is that I can't use the connection for commercial purposes.)
I honestly don't know why the US is lagging so much in connectivity. It's just not "broadband" vs. "not broadband", but the bandwidth you do get even when labeled as "broadband" is inferior, too. Surely the business case can't be THAT different from SE Asia or Europe?
so just why haven't you gone out of business yet and found a more profitable line of work? From the sound of the story, either option is imminent, and should have happened shortly after it was first posted.
Alternately, why haven't you taken the effort to update the story to reflect that at least SOMETHING has happened in the six months since I saw it first?
Option 1: If you want to invest billions of dollars and hope that the necessity never arises to destroy it, be our guest.
This option seems to assume that the US can destroy several billions worth of EU's civilian infrastructural hardware without the act of destruction being taken as a hands-down declaration of full scale war.
The US doesn't get to say "we feels this installation's existence is threatening to us, so we are going to destroy it" without some sort of consequence with the people who built the stuff, you know. It seems that (some) Americans actually believe they can and should do actions like this and not have to answer for it.
Which brings us back to one of the first points; the EU has nukes too. Just how hard ball do you want to play?
Except that those 3 CDs are released by Fairlight, who distribute games and never movies.
Odd also that most people appear to have a file named "Return of the King - Crack" in the same directory as the three CD images. If I remember correctly, media files don't need cracks. Yet, at least.
For those of you unfamiliar with the scene: This is not a DVD screener, it's some game based on whatever people wanting to make money off the franchise decided. Save your bandwidth.
This is exactly what I - as a media pirate by habit, mind you - want to see.
In Europe, people pay a small yearly fee for media already. They pay a fee for access to public service television. I see a parallel here...
There has been much talk of compulsory licensing being the only sensible answer to the current situation.
This kind of response is what I want: a blanket scheme where you can choose to pay (to a trusted government entity (1)) a blanket fee, in exchange for the right to download any works for personal noncommercial use during a specific time period. Needless to say, the fee needs to be reasonable. I believe $100-$200 per year is in the appropriate range.
(1) Yeah yeah, I know, "trusted government entity" is an oxymoron. But I trust a government-controlled entity a lot more on this issue than I do the industry's self-interest groups.
Is this comment really from the same breed of people that take enormous pride in pluralizing "box" to "boxen", and use other jargon terms that tend to be playful about language rules ("coolitude" etc) - but that are clearly deviant English - just to make a point of knowing how to talk the talk, to make a point of being one in the group?
"Virii" is a niche pluralization, but one that is defacto used, and - more importantly - one that conveys belongingness to a group. I believe the writers use this pluralization; I haven't seen others use it in daily speak.
Again: this is a form that is defacto used. I don't care if you think it's ugly (I sure do, but that doesn't matter).
From what I remember from my college studies (seem to have flushed most of it out by now), any book where the title started with "Introduction to..." or "Elementary" was a warning you'd better sit down and brace yourself before opening the cover.
Except engagement rings in Sweden don't look like American engagement rings.
In Sweden, the telltale sign of an engagement ring is an _absence_ of any stone. It's a nondescript gold ring. It looks pretty much like The One Ring but without the elvish runes. On the inside of the ring, though, date and names are engraved.
I'd say this particular ring is either a family heirloom, or that she's extremely Americanized. My guess at odds for the two options would be about 90/10.
You mention WMA and WMV; these were already counted under audio and video, respectively. Warez are usually under CD Images (ISOs), Executables (EXE, MSI) or Archives (RAR, R01, R02, etc).
To give an example of what "the rest" is, HTML and HTM files are about 5% of the total. DLL and BGL files both come in as slightly more common than ZIPs.
In the "less than 5000 files" category, you find.h,.c,.ini,.dat,.doc,.ddl,...
Overall, there is a huge number of odd files out there. Actually, almost half of them. Looks like most people are sharing installed stuff (to boost their shared-bytes numbers?).
To highlight the odd-files claim, over half of the identified extensions are found on five or fewer files.
Just in case somebody gets a knee jerk reaction here about those suspicious files: The twelve files in question were not on my hard drive, and never will be, either.
I am talking about files spotted on peer-to-peer networks, where I had an automated process store the file name, size, and some other data in a large database. It was in this database that I later discovered odd-looking file names.
I've been running a mapper on P2P networks for some while now, in order to know where to look for stuff when I want it. (And for the sake of the automated P2P client I'm writing.)
The breakdown by common file type is roughly:
Movies (AVI, MPEG, MOV etc): 1%
Graphics (JPEG, GIF, PNG): 15%
Audio (mostly MP3): 30%
Binaries and Archives: 4%
CD Images (ISO, NRG): 1%
Text files: 2%
Other: the rest
The basis for this is about one petabyte's worth of indexed files, so it's not some out-of-thin-air numbers.
Just from this, saying that 42% is porn, much less CHILD porn, is way out. We already knew this, but I thought it interesting to back up the statement with some numbers.
To give more real numbers on child porn, when I did check for it at one time, I found 12 suspicious-looking file names from a database of several million files. That's a LITTLE bit lower than 42%.
Re:Best Management Book ever written?
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
True, but if someone didn't understand "attack the enemy where he is weak" before reading Art of War, they're not going to understand it either.
So let me tell you one thing I did learn from The Art Of War, or rather, its preface. It is about the greatness of generals, in their roles of peacekeepers of the people.
It makes an analogy to a family of three healers (practicioners of medicine, whatever). It says, that the oldest and greatest of the three brothers sees sickness before it takes shape, and banishes its spirit from the victim, and therefore, his name does not get out of the house.
The middle brother sees and cures disease when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood.
As for me, the story ends, with the youngest brother speaking, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and mix cures, so from time to time, my name is heard amongst the Lords.
The lesson in this is not "A stitch in time", it's a far more fundamental one: that for more professions than are apparent at first, visibility of a skill can be inversely proportional to the actual skill level.
The preface goes on to explain how this relates to peacekeeping, that true generals and military leaders never need to fire a single shot.
(It is easy to bash various contemporary leaders here, which I won't do; the lesson is far too important to score cheap points.)
I mean, stuff like "Attack everywhere is attack nowhere."
How many times have your PHB told you that all of your work items are the most important one? Seriously? I've heard it so many times I'm getting grey hairs.
They may be platitudes, but as long as I don't see our leadership UNDERSTANDING these damn obvious lessons, I'm going to keep pointing to it in my bookshelf, next to PeopleWare and Debugging the Development Process.
They should just say: "Tell your lawmakers that you want free copyrighted material or you won't vote for them."
That's just not a very tasteful way to promote your service, IMHO.
You seem to believe that copyright is a God-given impeccable right.
It isn't. It is a man-made construct that can and should be changed if society as a whole benefits from another model.
Of course, with any change of order comes fierce resistance from those who will lose from the new order. That has always been the case; already Machiavelli knew this.
Isn't this like the "guns are not made for killing people" argument?
P2P networks were designed to a) distribute files, b) without a central authority that could limit what gets distributed. It is a given that people will distribute things they otherwise can't.
So even if guns have theoretical uses besides killing or hurting people, it is their primary function. Just like the primary function of P2P networks are to allow sharing of digital content, regardless of copyright. Good people want to share what they enjoy; it's the same basic psychology as inviting somebody over for a dinner you've spent hours cooking. You are proud of it, and you want other people to experience what you liked to experience, to make them feel as good as you did. Humans are not alone about this; the same behavior can be seen in all primate species - especially with regards to sharing food in a community.
However, in the specific case of P2P networks, you still get to keep what you are sharing. Therefore, the cost of sharing - to the sharer - is close to zero. Hence the effortlessness of sharing gigs and gigs of movies, games, you name it. Myself, I share about 350G of unnamed media, and that puts me in the lesser ranks of my P2P communities.
Note here: I personally believe that the concept of copyright needs some serious overhaul; when 50 million people believe something is right and some 10,000 believe it is wrong, then by the laws of most countries, it cannot be wrong for a long time more. But that is another issue; I just wanted to point out that "P2P has legitimate uses" is a rather weak argument.
I have a moon base on the far side of the moon that contains a vast supply of real 24k gold tacks, and they are for sale. It is a safe investment - gold has always been the safest investment.
Unfortunately, you can only get the certificate, as the gold stays on the moon. You cannot exchange the certificate for gold. But the certificate rightly says you own as many tacks as you buy. Pure and simple capitalism.
I sell these prime gold tacks for just $1,000 each. That's well below market value. Get yours today, invest in your comfortable retirement!
(Just to be uber-clear: this is a meta-post, I'm trying to make a point here...)
Slashdot Mirror
Everything in your article is correct, except the pricing. The cost is about SEK 300 per month for 10 Mbit, about $35.
Also, 26 Mbit symmetrical is getting common for about $50/month, and there are rollouts of 100 Mbit (although still in test areas).
Additionally, I think that people in the US are very narrow-minded in terms of last-mile delivery of Internet access ("DSL or cable?"). My apartment is wired to the local switch into the municipal network; I have 10 megabits to my apartment, Ethernet all the way. No cable, no DSL. There is simply an RJ-45 jack on the wall, next to the phone jack.
(That's 10 Mbit symmetrical. Public, static IPs. No silly no-server clauses; the only limitation is that I can't use the connection for commercial purposes.)
I honestly don't know why the US is lagging so much in connectivity. It's just not "broadband" vs. "not broadband", but the bandwidth you do get even when labeled as "broadband" is inferior, too. Surely the business case can't be THAT different from SE Asia or Europe?
so just why haven't you gone out of business yet and found a more profitable line of work? From the sound of the story, either option is imminent, and should have happened shortly after it was first posted.
Alternately, why haven't you taken the effort to update the story to reflect that at least SOMETHING has happened in the six months since I saw it first?
There is a vast difference between murdering millions of innocent people, and damaging someone else's property out of necessity.
That depends entirely on the "someone else" and "necessity", apparently.
I jumped right at it, but somebody had beaten me to the task already. Looking forward to the results...
Option 1: If you want to invest billions of dollars and hope that the necessity never arises to destroy it, be our guest.
This option seems to assume that the US can destroy several billions worth of EU's civilian infrastructural hardware without the act of destruction being taken as a hands-down declaration of full scale war.
The US doesn't get to say "we feels this installation's existence is threatening to us, so we are going to destroy it" without some sort of consequence with the people who built the stuff, you know. It seems that (some) Americans actually believe they can and should do actions like this and not have to answer for it.
Which brings us back to one of the first points; the EU has nukes too. Just how hard ball do you want to play?
US and EU interests usually coincide...
You, sir, are obviously American.
Except that those 3 CDs are released by Fairlight, who distribute games and never movies.
Odd also that most people appear to have a file named "Return of the King - Crack" in the same directory as the three CD images. If I remember correctly, media files don't need cracks. Yet, at least.
For those of you unfamiliar with the scene: This is not a DVD screener, it's some game based on whatever people wanting to make money off the franchise decided. Save your bandwidth.
Maybe it was running on a Pentium.
This is exactly what I - as a media pirate by habit, mind you - want to see.
In Europe, people pay a small yearly fee for media already. They pay a fee for access to public service television. I see a parallel here...
There has been much talk of compulsory licensing being the only sensible answer to the current situation.
This kind of response is what I want: a blanket scheme where you can choose to pay (to a trusted government entity (1)) a blanket fee, in exchange for the right to download any works for personal noncommercial use during a specific time period. Needless to say, the fee needs to be reasonable. I believe $100-$200 per year is in the appropriate range.
(1) Yeah yeah, I know, "trusted government entity" is an oxymoron. But I trust a government-controlled entity a lot more on this issue than I do the industry's self-interest groups.
Is this comment really from the same breed of people that take enormous pride in pluralizing "box" to "boxen", and use other jargon terms that tend to be playful about language rules ("coolitude" etc) - but that are clearly deviant English - just to make a point of knowing how to talk the talk, to make a point of being one in the group?
"Virii" is a niche pluralization, but one that is defacto used, and - more importantly - one that conveys belongingness to a group. I believe the writers use this pluralization; I haven't seen others use it in daily speak.
Again: this is a form that is defacto used. I don't care if you think it's ugly (I sure do, but that doesn't matter).
From what I remember from my college studies (seem to have flushed most of it out by now), any book where the title started with "Introduction to..." or "Elementary" was a warning you'd better sit down and brace yourself before opening the cover.
Those books were, as you say, nightmares.
Seriously, Norwegians don't understand Danes either? :-) I've always regarded Norwegian as being sort of halfway in-between Swedish and Danish...
Except engagement rings in Sweden don't look like American engagement rings.
In Sweden, the telltale sign of an engagement ring is an _absence_ of any stone. It's a nondescript gold ring. It looks pretty much like The One Ring but without the elvish runes. On the inside of the ring, though, date and names are engraved.
I'd say this particular ring is either a family heirloom, or that she's extremely Americanized. My guess at odds for the two options would be about 90/10.
This has been moderated 5, Funny.
I think we need a +1, Scary moderation. It would be more appropriate here.
TCP/IP over electricity lines is all so backwards and 90's. It's electricity over TCP/IP lines that is interesting today.
There's even a spec out (RFC3251) for public interoperability.
When will these people learn to keep up with the time around them?
All sorts of junk.
.h, .c, .ini, .dat, .doc, .ddl, ...
You mention WMA and WMV; these were already counted under audio and video, respectively. Warez are usually under CD Images (ISOs), Executables (EXE, MSI) or Archives (RAR, R01, R02, etc).
To give an example of what "the rest" is, HTML and HTM files are about 5% of the total. DLL and BGL files both come in as slightly more common than ZIPs.
In the "less than 5000 files" category, you find
Overall, there is a huge number of odd files out there. Actually, almost half of them. Looks like most people are sharing installed stuff (to boost their shared-bytes numbers?).
To highlight the odd-files claim, over half of the identified extensions are found on five or fewer files.
Just in case somebody gets a knee jerk reaction here about those suspicious files: The twelve files in question were not on my hard drive, and never will be, either.
I am talking about files spotted on peer-to-peer networks, where I had an automated process store the file name, size, and some other data in a large database. It was in this database that I later discovered odd-looking file names.
Again, I am not in possession of those files.
The breakdown by common file type is roughly:
The basis for this is about one petabyte's worth of indexed files, so it's not some out-of-thin-air numbers.
Just from this, saying that 42% is porn, much less CHILD porn, is way out. We already knew this, but I thought it interesting to back up the statement with some numbers.
To give more real numbers on child porn, when I did check for it at one time, I found 12 suspicious-looking file names from a database of several million files. That's a LITTLE bit lower than 42%.
So let me tell you one thing I did learn from The Art Of War, or rather, its preface. It is about the greatness of generals, in their roles of peacekeepers of the people.
The lesson in this is not "A stitch in time", it's a far more fundamental one: that for more professions than are apparent at first, visibility of a skill can be inversely proportional to the actual skill level.
The preface goes on to explain how this relates to peacekeeping, that true generals and military leaders never need to fire a single shot.
(It is easy to bash various contemporary leaders here, which I won't do; the lesson is far too important to score cheap points.)
I mean, stuff like "Attack everywhere is attack nowhere."
How many times have your PHB told you that all of your work items are the most important one? Seriously? I've heard it so many times I'm getting grey hairs.
They may be platitudes, but as long as I don't see our leadership UNDERSTANDING these damn obvious lessons, I'm going to keep pointing to it in my bookshelf, next to PeopleWare and Debugging the Development Process.
And liquid metal at that. One of the primary components is mercury, one of the most toxic substances known to man.
It's banned for every conceivable use, except for embedding it in your food intake four inches from your brain.
Now don't you feel better?
They should just say:
"Tell your lawmakers that you want free copyrighted material or you won't vote for them."
That's just not a very tasteful way to promote your service, IMHO.
You seem to believe that copyright is a God-given impeccable right.
It isn't. It is a man-made construct that can and should be changed if society as a whole benefits from another model.
Of course, with any change of order comes fierce resistance from those who will lose from the new order. That has always been the case; already Machiavelli knew this.
Isn't this like the "guns are not made for killing people" argument?
P2P networks were designed to a) distribute files, b) without a central authority that could limit what gets distributed. It is a given that people will distribute things they otherwise can't.
So even if guns have theoretical uses besides killing or hurting people, it is their primary function. Just like the primary function of P2P networks are to allow sharing of digital content, regardless of copyright. Good people want to share what they enjoy; it's the same basic psychology as inviting somebody over for a dinner you've spent hours cooking. You are proud of it, and you want other people to experience what you liked to experience, to make them feel as good as you did. Humans are not alone about this; the same behavior can be seen in all primate species - especially with regards to sharing food in a community.
However, in the specific case of P2P networks, you still get to keep what you are sharing. Therefore, the cost of sharing - to the sharer - is close to zero. Hence the effortlessness of sharing gigs and gigs of movies, games, you name it. Myself, I share about 350G of unnamed media, and that puts me in the lesser ranks of my P2P communities.
Note here: I personally believe that the concept of copyright needs some serious overhaul; when 50 million people believe something is right and some 10,000 believe it is wrong, then by the laws of most countries, it cannot be wrong for a long time more. But that is another issue; I just wanted to point out that "P2P has legitimate uses" is a rather weak argument.
Can I download it off Kazaa? What is the file name?
I have a moon base on the far side of the moon that contains a vast supply of real 24k gold tacks, and they are for sale. It is a safe investment - gold has always been the safest investment.
Unfortunately, you can only get the certificate, as the gold stays on the moon. You cannot exchange the certificate for gold. But the certificate rightly says you own as many tacks as you buy. Pure and simple capitalism.
I sell these prime gold tacks for just $1,000 each. That's well below market value. Get yours today, invest in your comfortable retirement!
(Just to be uber-clear: this is a meta-post, I'm trying to make a point here...)