Problem is, the list is secret, so it's hard to tell if your ISP is blocking a page
According to the summary, "users who attempt to access the... site are met with a 'content blocked' message."
This isn't like the regular IWF blacklist of child porn, which is kept secret for good reasons; this is about blocking sites that are perfectly legal, so there's no reason to be covert about it.
It's in the ISPs' best interest to be honest about what they're doing here; people who can't reach legal content have a legitimate complaint, which obviously doesn't apply in the case of child porn, so BT is going to have to convince paying customers that this is a good plan, and they aren't going to do that by mysteriously 404-ing pages that used to work fine.
No, he's smoking ignorance. Youth is excusable; inexperience is excusable; failing to perform even cursory fact-checking is not, unless you wrote the book other people check facts in.
No he isn't. There is in fact a popular school of thought that classifies C as weakly typed. Static, but weak. (On account of the fact that e.g. pointers, numbers, characters, constants, and enumeration elements are all completely interchangeable.)
Yes, yes, we know those options exist. But you're missing the point.
The whole point of this article is that the available legal options are all vastly less convenient than the illegal option. Either they don't have the movie you want to see, or they don't let you choose when to see it, or they force you to go out and drive to a store, or they force you to wait for the post... and all the while, if you just break the law, you can get anything you want instantly.
Nobody's trying to justify this. Pretty much every adult who does it realises they're doing something wrong. We're just explaining why people do it, even people with plenty of disposable income who are perfectly happy to pay for stuff.
Apparently some recent movies have started to include something called a "sound track". Bad idea, if you ask me, taking away jobs from hard-working organists.
I can see TPB morphing into the Google of torrents.
Only if torrents move entirely to a trackerless model. Till then, TPB and its ilk will always be directly facilitating content transfer, rather than merely indexing links.
So what percentage of legal/illegal content should there be that tips you from completely innocent to doing jail time?
There shouldn't be any such simplistic thing, or it would be possible to frame innocent people by adding illegal content to their tracker faster than they can remove it.
Instead, it should be a question of intent. If people are wilfully refusing to remove links to content that is obviously illegal, even after they have been formally notified of this, then they clearly intend to facilitate copyright infringement. If the vast majority of material they are indexing is illegal, and they are proudly bragging about the fact that they have no intention of doing nothing to alter that situation, then they clearly intend to facilitate copyright infringement. Note that TPB fails both these tests, and Google passes both.
TPB is quite under its rights to refuse US take-down notices and understandable to be rude to US companies trying to bully it with false legal threats.
Impressive that you can almost make out TPB to be the victim here! Poor pirates, being "bullied" by the nasty big corporations. But fear not, here comes Friar Tuck!
Back in the real world: it is true that TPB does not face sanctions under the DMCA if they ignore DMCA takedown notices. That does not alter the fact that publicly boasting about their refusal to remove links, even after the copyright holder has formally notified them that the link is being used to infringe copyright, demonstrates a clear intent on their part to assist the violation of copyright. And only the most deliberately obtuse of pro-theft Slashbots could possibly believe that such behaviour has anything in common with Google's.
Seriously, though, while guns are inherently weapons in the technical sense, they aren't inherently aggressive; they have plenty of valid sporting uses, many of which don't even involve killing things. Contrast with something like an RPG (in the weapon sense), for which I'm struggling to think of a non-violent use. Apart from as an ornament, if you're into mujahideen chic.
In fact, American English sounds more like Old English than British English does
Not true. Neither language sounds remotely like Old English, so far as anyone can tell; of course, Old English stopped being spoken around a thousand years ago, so we don't really know what it sounded like anyway.
In any case, you're probably thinking of Early Modern English, i.e. the language as spoken when the first colonists set sail.
It is true that American English preserves some features of Early Modern English that have been lost in some southern dialects of British English. But that still doesn't mean it sounds like Early Modern English. It doesn't. It has evolved in a different way, and it has of course also lost features that have been preserved in British English, such as certain vowel distinctions.
People then confuse that modern meaning with its older constitutional meaning of 1787 (pre-copyright)
The problem with your argument is that it is founded on an assumption that is unfortunately not true.
1787 was not "pre-copyright". Copyright in a recognisably modern form -- an exclusive right to publish a work and prevent others from making copies -- had existed in British law since 1710.
US law is based on the British law that had been in force in the colonies before independence, and when the framers wrote about the rights of writers, it is highly implausible that they were talking about anything other than the existing copyright laws that they went on to mimic in the first American copyright regime.
Observe as I effortlessly refute your unsubstantiated and wooly claim with some of my own:
Oh no it doesn't.
OR
All the worthwhile free software that runs on Windows also runs on Linux.
OR
Yeah, but it's (faster/better integrated/easier to install/more up-to-date) on Linux.
Pick your favourite; they're all as good as each other.
(There's no point arguing sensibly; even if I picked out an example of a free app that doesn't run on Windows, you'd just say that that wasn't a "worthwhile" program.)
Seriously. More people are currently running Vista than have ever used Linux. Hell, more people have pirated Vista than have ever used Linux.
You really, really need to qualify that as "used Linux on the desktop".
There are more people with Linux-based routers and Linux-based satnavs than you think. And I doubt there's a single person on the Internet who doesn't connect to many Linux servers every day.
That line of thinking is all fine and good in a perfect world. Sadly, none of us live there. With the increases in domestic spying, dragnets to catch "pirates" and whatnot, this is a VERY bad thing.
You've been reading the more sensationalist corners of the net again, haven't you? Let's not get things blown out of proportion.
Domestic spying is (so far as anyone has managed to prove) not significantly more common or intrusive than it ever has been; the Feds have always been able to tap your phone, and the only people claiming that things are regularly going beyond that are the usual conspiracy theorists and a couple of disgruntled ex-NSA employees, who have plenty of reasons they might feel like stretching the truth.
And of all the millions of people involved in non-commercial online copyright infringement, only a tiny proportion have even been threatened with legal action. Not one has faced criminal charges in the USA.
Sure, you're doing nothing illegal NOW. But whatabout when they change the definition of what is legal and what is not?
Classic slippery-slope fallacy. Come back when you actually have a compelling argument to support the view that the US government is likely to tear up their constitution, and that if that happens then all those military folks who have sworn to give their lives to defend it are just going to sit back and watch it be destroyed.
How long before unpopular political ideas are illegal in this country?
Going by current trends, I expect this to happen shortly after the heat death of the universe.
If 100 people loot a store and one poor sap gets caught, I honestly can't imagine why the cops' (or feds' or whatever) inability to catch the other 99 should have anything to do with what sentence to give the one.
Indeed not. But if that one poor sap turned himself in and confessed, then he could well expect a lighter sentence, and it could be made even lighter if he also helped the police track some of the others down.
So we do already have it well established that sentences can be reduced where a criminal takes certain actions that reduce the burden on the legal system. Conversely, certain actions that make the work of the police more difficult, such as resisting arrest, will often quite reasonably lead to a tougher sentence.
I think therefore that it isn't entirely illogical to extend the principle to cover other behaviours that force the state to use more resources in identifying and prosecuting criminals. Though I fear this measure will, in practice, just become another tool used to rack up sentences to even more draconian extremes, probably against people who didn't even know they were going through a proxy.
I swear I was embarrassed that I could not find the Save As option.
All the old keybindings still work. If you wilfully insist on doing things inefficiently...
Clicking that 'button' on the top left of the screen (I didn't originally think it was a button from first looking at it) was not intuitive.
They did their best. It even lights up the first time you launch an Office 2007 app, in a desperate attempt to draw your attention to it. And it looks basically the same as Vista's new-look start button. Not sure what more they could have done, short of an annoying Win95-style "Click here to begin!" animation.
Selling Linux is a bit easier, as there are no licensing costs
That's the hobbyist perspective. From the enterprise perspective, Linux is definitely not free-as-in-beer, because they're looking at things like RHEL, not Ubuntu.
Oh and you dont _HAVE_ to work anywhere, its a choice you make, shut up and put up.
Good old Slashdot, full of intolerant posters who have apparently never had families to feed.
Newsflash: most people don't get jobs just for fun, and these days you can't just walk out of any job you don't like. Unless you enjoy the dramatic tension of not knowing if you're going to be able to keep your home.
Hey, he said "maintain". Perl's fine for writing. It's trying to read other people's Perl that's often problematic.
Not that that's unique to Perl. I've seen C code that made me want to claw my eyes out (to be fair, the programmer had previously only known FORTRAN, and I don't mean the modern sort). I've seen spaghetti written in Python of all things.
And you haven't seen true horror until you've tried to make sense of a major software system built on a custom hand-rolled database and implemented largely in ksh. That one would have been made more readable by a rewrite in Perl.
Right. ssh passphrases are a PITA, so people don't use them.
But that doesn't have to matter, since anyone with any sense is storing their.ssh directory in an encrypted partition anyway. Along with their browser history, local copies of their email, and so forth. Why password-protect just one type of sensitive data, when you could protect everything at once?
And even 140 bytes is not the limit, since you can use multipart SMS to send longer messages transparently. Though I suppose that might be undesirable on US carriers that double-dip by charging to receive as well as to send.
I have to disagree with you on the Wing Commander and Civilization fronts; in both series, iterations 3 and 4 were not particularly hard to beat at all, at least on the low difficulty settings. And I say this as a fairly casual gamer.
Wing Commander 2, now, that was hard to beat. Or the Wing Commander Secret Operations packs. Never got through those without cheating.
speaking from my own knowledge (from conversations with other gamers), each of the games I have listed lost a large part of their audience, with only the hard core fans of the franchise claiming to like them.
I think you're partly wrong here, too.
In the case of Thief 3, at least, it's the hardcore fans who hate it the most; they know what Thief could be like with big levels and rope arrows. Quite a lot of the people who played it first like it.
Wing Commmander, as well: 3 and 4 sold bucketloads compared to 1 and 2. 5 didn't do so well, I guess.
Valve did what they needed to. They made a fun game, planned it to be one game, and balanced it well.
Have you listened to the commentaries? There are plenty of references to plans for further Portal games. Sure, no such thing has appeared yet, but nor has HL2 ep3...
In FFX they simplified the weapon and armor system so radically I felt cheated.
Wow. I stopped playing after FF8, but even there I'm having trouble thinking how it could have been simplified any further, given that FF8 doesn't have armour.
Slashdot Mirror
Ying-tong-fucking-iddle-i-po.
According to the summary, "users who attempt to access the ... site are met with a 'content blocked' message."
This isn't like the regular IWF blacklist of child porn, which is kept secret for good reasons; this is about blocking sites that are perfectly legal, so there's no reason to be covert about it.
It's in the ISPs' best interest to be honest about what they're doing here; people who can't reach legal content have a legitimate complaint, which obviously doesn't apply in the case of child porn, so BT is going to have to convince paying customers that this is a good plan, and they aren't going to do that by mysteriously 404-ing pages that used to work fine.
No, he's smoking ignorance. Youth is excusable; inexperience is excusable; failing to perform even cursory fact-checking is not, unless you wrote the book other people check facts in.
No he isn't. There is in fact a popular school of thought that classifies C as weakly typed. Static, but weak. (On account of the fact that e.g. pointers, numbers, characters, constants, and enumeration elements are all completely interchangeable.)
Yes, yes, we know those options exist. But you're missing the point.
The whole point of this article is that the available legal options are all vastly less convenient than the illegal option. Either they don't have the movie you want to see, or they don't let you choose when to see it, or they force you to go out and drive to a store, or they force you to wait for the post ... and all the while, if you just break the law, you can get anything you want instantly.
Nobody's trying to justify this. Pretty much every adult who does it realises they're doing something wrong. We're just explaining why people do it, even people with plenty of disposable income who are perfectly happy to pay for stuff.
Apparently some recent movies have started to include something called a "sound track". Bad idea, if you ask me, taking away jobs from hard-working organists.
Only if torrents move entirely to a trackerless model. Till then, TPB and its ilk will always be directly facilitating content transfer, rather than merely indexing links.
There shouldn't be any such simplistic thing, or it would be possible to frame innocent people by adding illegal content to their tracker faster than they can remove it.
Instead, it should be a question of intent. If people are wilfully refusing to remove links to content that is obviously illegal, even after they have been formally notified of this, then they clearly intend to facilitate copyright infringement. If the vast majority of material they are indexing is illegal, and they are proudly bragging about the fact that they have no intention of doing nothing to alter that situation, then they clearly intend to facilitate copyright infringement. Note that TPB fails both these tests, and Google passes both.
Impressive that you can almost make out TPB to be the victim here! Poor pirates, being "bullied" by the nasty big corporations. But fear not, here comes Friar Tuck!
Back in the real world: it is true that TPB does not face sanctions under the DMCA if they ignore DMCA takedown notices. That does not alter the fact that publicly boasting about their refusal to remove links, even after the copyright holder has formally notified them that the link is being used to infringe copyright, demonstrates a clear intent on their part to assist the violation of copyright. And only the most deliberately obtuse of pro-theft Slashbots could possibly believe that such behaviour has anything in common with Google's.
Tell that to the headcrabs. :P
Seriously, though, while guns are inherently weapons in the technical sense, they aren't inherently aggressive; they have plenty of valid sporting uses, many of which don't even involve killing things. Contrast with something like an RPG (in the weapon sense), for which I'm struggling to think of a non-violent use. Apart from as an ornament, if you're into mujahideen chic.
Or, you know, maybe they could have waited for the fucking release date?
This is the voice of America: "Me, me, me! Now, now, now!" Makes you proud, doesn't it?
Not true. Neither language sounds remotely like Old English, so far as anyone can tell; of course, Old English stopped being spoken around a thousand years ago, so we don't really know what it sounded like anyway.
In any case, you're probably thinking of Early Modern English, i.e. the language as spoken when the first colonists set sail.
It is true that American English preserves some features of Early Modern English that have been lost in some southern dialects of British English. But that still doesn't mean it sounds like Early Modern English. It doesn't. It has evolved in a different way, and it has of course also lost features that have been preserved in British English, such as certain vowel distinctions.
The problem with your argument is that it is founded on an assumption that is unfortunately not true.
1787 was not "pre-copyright". Copyright in a recognisably modern form -- an exclusive right to publish a work and prevent others from making copies -- had existed in British law since 1710.
US law is based on the British law that had been in force in the colonies before independence, and when the framers wrote about the rights of writers, it is highly implausible that they were talking about anything other than the existing copyright laws that they went on to mimic in the first American copyright regime.
Observe as I effortlessly refute your unsubstantiated and wooly claim with some of my own:
Oh no it doesn't.
OR
All the worthwhile free software that runs on Windows also runs on Linux.
OR
Yeah, but it's (faster/better integrated/easier to install/more up-to-date) on Linux.
Pick your favourite; they're all as good as each other.
(There's no point arguing sensibly; even if I picked out an example of a free app that doesn't run on Windows, you'd just say that that wasn't a "worthwhile" program.)
You really, really need to qualify that as "used Linux on the desktop".
There are more people with Linux-based routers and Linux-based satnavs than you think. And I doubt there's a single person on the Internet who doesn't connect to many Linux servers every day.
You've been reading the more sensationalist corners of the net again, haven't you? Let's not get things blown out of proportion.
Domestic spying is (so far as anyone has managed to prove) not significantly more common or intrusive than it ever has been; the Feds have always been able to tap your phone, and the only people claiming that things are regularly going beyond that are the usual conspiracy theorists and a couple of disgruntled ex-NSA employees, who have plenty of reasons they might feel like stretching the truth.
And of all the millions of people involved in non-commercial online copyright infringement, only a tiny proportion have even been threatened with legal action. Not one has faced criminal charges in the USA.
Classic slippery-slope fallacy. Come back when you actually have a compelling argument to support the view that the US government is likely to tear up their constitution, and that if that happens then all those military folks who have sworn to give their lives to defend it are just going to sit back and watch it be destroyed.
Going by current trends, I expect this to happen shortly after the heat death of the universe.
Indeed not. But if that one poor sap turned himself in and confessed, then he could well expect a lighter sentence, and it could be made even lighter if he also helped the police track some of the others down.
So we do already have it well established that sentences can be reduced where a criminal takes certain actions that reduce the burden on the legal system. Conversely, certain actions that make the work of the police more difficult, such as resisting arrest, will often quite reasonably lead to a tougher sentence.
I think therefore that it isn't entirely illogical to extend the principle to cover other behaviours that force the state to use more resources in identifying and prosecuting criminals. Though I fear this measure will, in practice, just become another tool used to rack up sentences to even more draconian extremes, probably against people who didn't even know they were going through a proxy.
And people said Vista added nothing significantly new to XP, and people said XP added nothing significantly new to Win2k.
So why the hell is Windows 7 so different from Win2k? By Slashdot logic, they should be practically indistinguishable.
All the old keybindings still work. If you wilfully insist on doing things inefficiently ...
They did their best. It even lights up the first time you launch an Office 2007 app, in a desperate attempt to draw your attention to it. And it looks basically the same as Vista's new-look start button. Not sure what more they could have done, short of an annoying Win95-style "Click here to begin!" animation.
That's the hobbyist perspective. From the enterprise perspective, Linux is definitely not free-as-in-beer, because they're looking at things like RHEL, not Ubuntu.
Good old Slashdot, full of intolerant posters who have apparently never had families to feed.
Newsflash: most people don't get jobs just for fun, and these days you can't just walk out of any job you don't like. Unless you enjoy the dramatic tension of not knowing if you're going to be able to keep your home.
Hey, he said "maintain". Perl's fine for writing. It's trying to read other people's Perl that's often problematic.
Not that that's unique to Perl. I've seen C code that made me want to claw my eyes out (to be fair, the programmer had previously only known FORTRAN, and I don't mean the modern sort). I've seen spaghetti written in Python of all things.
And you haven't seen true horror until you've tried to make sense of a major software system built on a custom hand-rolled database and implemented largely in ksh. That one would have been made more readable by a rewrite in Perl.
Right. ssh passphrases are a PITA, so people don't use them.
But that doesn't have to matter, since anyone with any sense is storing their .ssh directory in an encrypted partition anyway. Along with their browser history, local copies of their email, and so forth. Why password-protect just one type of sensitive data, when you could protect everything at once?
And even 140 bytes is not the limit, since you can use multipart SMS to send longer messages transparently. Though I suppose that might be undesirable on US carriers that double-dip by charging to receive as well as to send.
I have to disagree with you on the Wing Commander and Civilization fronts; in both series, iterations 3 and 4 were not particularly hard to beat at all, at least on the low difficulty settings. And I say this as a fairly casual gamer.
Wing Commander 2, now, that was hard to beat. Or the Wing Commander Secret Operations packs. Never got through those without cheating.
I think you're partly wrong here, too.
In the case of Thief 3, at least, it's the hardcore fans who hate it the most; they know what Thief could be like with big levels and rope arrows. Quite a lot of the people who played it first like it.
Wing Commmander, as well: 3 and 4 sold bucketloads compared to 1 and 2. 5 didn't do so well, I guess.
Have you listened to the commentaries? There are plenty of references to plans for further Portal games. Sure, no such thing has appeared yet, but nor has HL2 ep3 ...
Wow. I stopped playing after FF8, but even there I'm having trouble thinking how it could have been simplified any further, given that FF8 doesn't have armour.