Ah, another person who's seen through the rationalizations of the Free Stuff Brigade. Good look talking about it here, though -- trying seems to trigger an in-group/out-group barrier that drowns out all rational argument.
[Moderators: please don't bother modding this up or down; it's just a personal response]
It's gone on a lot longer than the other two I've paid attention to (2004 and 2000), largely due to the tight contest in the Democratic primary season. There's also some excitement over having black and female nominees from the major parties (although the Democrats had a female VP candidate back in '84). Our standard of living may be seriously threatened by economic problems. Global warming is getting to be a bigger issue. Don't let people tell you that every election is the same, because a lot of important decisions are made based on the outcome.
That being said, the rhetoric in all televised elections is basically the same due to the limitations of sound bite-based reporting. You can see this at the Living Room Candidate site, which has campaign ads going back to the 1950s.
Most U.S. high schools divide a semester up into six or nine week periods, each with its own average, and possibly a final whose weight is equal to a grading period. Each grading period would contain two tests, not each semester. Hence, you don't get as many chances to raise your semester average, and the semester average is what determines your GPA. It's a different level of grade consolidation, which you would know if you read the summary.
It's not a stupid policy, just a bad implementation. The idea is to keep temporary disruptions in students' lives (like their parents getting divorced or something) from turning into a longer-term handicap. If you don't do any work for a grading period, you still fail -- despite the hand-wringing in the other comments, this does not help the mediocre. But that one failure (six weeks) doesn't screw up your whole semester (18 weeks). Students aren't stupid -- they can do enough math to figure out that if they normally get Bs (80-89) and score a 20 in their first period, getting three 85s after that still leaves them with a failing semester grade of 68. Who's going to do a semester's worth of work for a failing grade when you'll just have to retake the class anyway?
Remember, the purpose of grades is to make an accurate assessment of students' learning. If you let an outlier dominate your assessment, your assessment is broken. All that being said, a better version of this policy would be to cap the grading period average rather than the individual grades, which is IMHO way too fine-grained.
TI's also starting up a new R&D lab in honor of the occasion. The sent out an email inviting employees to apply for positions, but I'm just a product engineer so I don't get to do research.:-(
As an engineering graduate I think it's a great idea. There are plenty of skills that come along with a well-rounded education which many engineers sorely lack. The most important one is communication. It drives me up the wall when I have to work with people who can't write their way out of a paper bag. Plus, in a large organization being good at explaining things is *very* useful, because there's a constant need to talk with management, customers, and other groups. Think about people like Einstein or Feynman and one of the first things that comes to mind is their communications skills.
It's especially important to teach such things in college because in the working world you're surrounded by bad habits, and it's only getting worse. Powerpoint is increasingly used as a substitute for real documentation, despite its horrible flaws. Few people provide context in their presentations or know how to address audiences larger than their current meeting. Most (almost all?) businesses rely on oral history instead of a written record. IMHO, we should go even farther and educate people in how to show information graphically, too. Read Edward Tufte's books to see how good (and bad) it can get.
If you're paying to become an engineer, then you want this stuff. Trust me, it's more than worth the time.
Yeah, it's surprising how many people want to put on a false persona in public. It's like people think that they have a right to control whether other people like them. The funny thing is that if everyone stopped doing it the need for it would probably decrease. My policy is to not do anything that I'd be ashamed to have other people find out about. This has two parts -- first, personal restraint, and second, having enough pride to shrug it off when other people don't like what I do. (The fact that I don't use mind-altering substances probably helps with this).
Then again, large organization can have some pretty silly policies, and it is possible for one person's biases to unfairly influence an interview process. So when it specifically comes to job hunting, I can understand where they're coming from.
I think you have this backwards. The Dark Knight isn't popular in spite of bootlegs, it's bootlegged because it's popular. The same goes for apps. Of course the most-downloaded apps have the highest sales -- they're the ones everybody wants!
You're giving a whole lot of excuses and what-ifs, but they're pretty far-fetched. How do I know that the people on those sites haven't bought what they're downloading? Partly because of the nature of the content (e.g. pre-release rips and other things they can't possibly have bought). Partly because of the language used (the word "warez" pops up frequently, for instance). Partly because many of the downloaders are college students on high-speed connections who don't have $50 to spend on a game (I was one a few years ago). Partly because of human nature. Plus, if you already own the content, why download an extra full-copy? Why not just get a crack? It's not like you can't use the same tools as the rippers themselves. In fact, usually when you download an app you get a plain old copy of the CD with an an extra file inserted that contains the crack. You even have to apply it yourself.
I think you're also getting confused about who I'm talking about. I think the vast majority of *file-sharers* are after free stuff. The majority of the *general population*, on the other hand, doesn't have the expertise to go hunting through torrents and deal with codecs and whatnot.
You are correct that there are many reasons for people to download files. However, if it were true that most people are motivated by something other than getting stuff for free, the bootleg scene itself would be vastly different than it is today. At the very least, there would be much less emphasis on full copies of new and unreleased content.
I'm not being bombarded by any messages about copyright because I don't seek them out. I never heard about what Michael Eisnor said until you mentioned it. I don't buy a lot of blank CDs, and when I do I don't notice a few extra cents (although I agree that those levies are silly). I don't use Vista. I don't care about a broadcast flag because I don't watch broadcast TV. I can live without their media. It's not a right or a necessity. Not even close. And again, if you don't like what they're doing, why are you supporting them by popularizing their product?
You claim that content providers have helped create unjust laws that hurt the public (which I agree with). You then claim that file-sharing seems to help publishers more than it hurts. I find this inconsistent. If you want copyright laws to change, helping content providers acquire more money with which to lobby Congress is not the way to go.
You also say that copyright terms are unreasonable, and that 20 year terms would be better (which I also agree with). But the site under discussion is hosting movies that were just release in the last month or two. Even under your ideal scenario, it would still be illegitimate. The most popular torrents are the ones with the newest content.
The medical/financial record argument is absolutely relevant, because privacy is just as much a fuzzy and arbitrary construct as IP. Your medical records are published as part of service transactions, and part of that agreement is that the recipients respect your control of the information. Hey, that sounds familiar... and no, there isn't necessarily any harm involved. Giving a copy of my records to advertisers might slightly increase my junk mail but doesn't otherwise harm me materially.
I don't like DRM either. And of course there are legitimate uses for BT -- it's a great protocol and is widely used outside of the file-sharing community. But I still think the file-sharing movement is about free stuff. I base this on the visible content of the popular torrent search sites, which curiously nobody else seems to be mentioning. Abstract arguments and anecdotes are not very convincing. Look at the isoHunt site. Actually go there and look at it. Do you think the people downloading zero-day cam rips of The Dark Knight are motivated by ideology? There's no DRM on a movie screen, and it's easy to wait a couple months until you can see the movie in a cheaper theater or a matinee showing.
I sympathize with your problems, but you haven't answered my main question: if you don't like the terms of a sale, why should you get the item for free instead of just not buying it? If you've already bought the product and it doesn't work and you can't return it, that's one thing, but none of the movies on isoHunt are even out on DVD yet. Nor have most of the people downloading games or apps bought them.
And as for content providers calling us thieves, the only place I hear that is Slashdot and other copyright-obsessed news sites. I'd be just as happy to see those stories go as well. By the way, industry profits don't tell us anything, especially since most users probably *don't* know how to download a bootleg copy, especially on consoles (doesn't that require a modchip?).
Oh, okay. If you're advocating socialism then that's a whole different matter. I don't have enough information to know whether I agree with you or not, but it's at least consistent.
I think some form of IP is necessary in a capitalist system, not for media, but for research and development. For example, there's a company called ARM that designs CPUs (you may have heard of them, they're really popular in the embedded space). They don't manufacture anything -- they license their designs to other companies, who then incorporate them into microcontrollers. This works because designing high-end CPUs is a very difficult and expensive thing to do, and many companies would rather not bother with it (at least not all the time). It's nice to be able to have a company like ARM, but without IP it's completely impossible -- nobody would pay them.
Yes, it is about free stuff. Why did you need (note: *need*) to go to the effort to watch Ironman without paying? Oh wait, you didn't. And what's to say that someone who has my medical records is going to use them for identity theft? What if they just use them for advertising purposes?
If you want to talk about an interconnected world, then file sharing and the security of your medical records do boil down to the same thing -- the rule of law. You can't demand that other people obey laws that protect you if you're not willing to obey laws that protect them, no matter what trivial inconvenience it creates for you. If you don't like the laws, we have processes for changing them. Those processes do not include "getting their stuff anyway just because I feel like it".
How do you know for sure they're searching for industry copyrighted content?
Because I'm not a complete moron? I have a BT client too, and I do know how to use torrent trackers, thank you very much. Remember, their *top two searches* are for groups that only distribute copyrighted content. Also, you're welcome to click on the links yourself and see what comes up. You can sort by number of leechers to see what people are actually downloading (hint: it's full-length movies). I'm not just making this up, you know.
I don't care whether it's illegal or whether they can get off on a technicality. Just admit that a technicality is all that it is.
No, that's not all it is. They organize the torrents into categories. They also let users post torrents. And finally, they have a choice of which trackers they index. They have some legitimate trackers and some that are specifically for certain kinds of illegitimate content (e.g. XBox games). The site does not work in a purely algorithmic way. It's not spidering or accepting arbitrary tags. There is human decision-making behind what shows up in those search results. And again, even if they were totally innocent and only wanted legitimate content, wouldn't the fact that 95% of their traffic is completely illegitimate be an obvious sign of complete failure?
But when you expect something in return, without trusting people to make that determination themselves, you end up pissing people off and forcing them to act against you.
Again, these sorts of arguments apply to far more than IP. The way any sort of trade or barter works is that the buyer and seller both have prices they're willing to pay. If they can agree on a price, they trade, otherwise, they walk away. Those are the valid choices. Following your logic, every paycheck on Earth should be optional. If you're saying you want pure socialism, that's okay, but you should say so up front.
How exactly are media companies "forcing" people to do anything? If you think the transaction is unfair, then *don't participate*. Content holders have zero responsibility for downloaders' actions. Could they have taken other courses of action that might have resulted in less file sharing? Probably. Were they obligated to offer services on your terms at your price? No.
Your argument might work in situations where vital goods and services are at stake -- if someone price gouges while selling water during a natural disaster, for instance. But it doesn't work here. Content providers are offering luxury goods. Nobody needs pop music or Hollywood movies.
When you decide to "fuck with" someone just to satisfy yourself, you have abandoned all claims to victimhood. Again, this is my complaint -- I don't care what you do, but how you justify it. There's nothing justified about being a jerk just because you don't like how somebody deals.
I don't really care what the content industry does. I don't really care who shares what, either. What does bother me is two things. The first is that people try to claim some sort of moral high ground for downloading DVD rips. The second is that they use such shallow, hypocritical, and transparent excuses to justify it.
Content industry's evil? Then why are you making their product more popular? Why not just not spread it at all? Don't like DRM? Why help push it into existence? Want to support indie artists? Why not make more room for them in the torrent search results?
And then come the excuses. "What about people downloading Linux ISOs?". Yeah, I'm sure there are *tons* of people downloading Linux ISOs 24/7/365, because *none* of those distributions have auto-updating package managers. "The tracker search sites don't know what people are downloading!". And since they have no idea, they can't possibly organize the torrents into categories, right? Besides, who would actually, you know, *look* at their own web site? "How dare they cap my bandwidth, they advertised unlimited usage!". Except that no resource is unlimited in practice, and a site full of IT people suggesting ISPs design their networks for 24/7/365 full-throttle illegal usage is laughable. "File-sharing increases sales for content-producers!". Do you really think iTMS would ever have gotten off the ground if Napster had spent the last decade alive and at full strength?
File-sharers will argue every technicality to their last breath, but the moment someone else does so, it's pure evil. What if a company wants to spread your medical records around? Aren't those just "imaginary property"? Why should you get a say in what happens to those bits? What about Russian crackers stealing credit card numbers? Where are the cries of "that's not stealing, nothing was physically lost"? There's no consistency, no compromise, just selfishness. Anyone who can tell their ass from a hole in the ground can see that this silly file-sharing "movement" is really about getting as much free stuff as possible. I'm sick of hearing about it. Bring back the Slashdot that was really about tech news, not ridiculous crusades and libertarian frippery.
Go the web site. Look at the list on the right labeled "top searches". At the moment, it reads:
1. axxo
2. fxg
3. spore
4. the dark knight
5. iron man
6. prison break
7. bangkok dangerous
8. psp
9. tropic thunder
10. stargate atlantis
11. pineapple express
12. pc games
13. mamma mia
14. 2008
15. metallica
16. disaster movie
17. death race
18. wanted
19. french
20. mummy tomb dragon emperor
The first two items, Axxo and FXG, are DVD rippers who distribute copyrighted content. The next 14 out of 18 are direct searches for copyrighted content. Linux ISOs don't even make the top 20. By the way, each one of those links goes to torrents that are obviously holding copyrighted content (unless "cam rip" has some new meaning I'm not aware of).
According to the site itself, its main purpose is helping people violate copyrights. The only way its owners can be unaware of this is if they've never visited their own homepage. Now really, I don't care if you engage in filesharing, but don't you think claiming ignorance is a little ridiculous here? Clicking on their most searched-for item gives you a list of *nothing but copyrighted content*!
Mod parent up -- the real story behind Bristol Palin's pregnancy is that in an era where 95% of Americans have premarital sex, we still have high-ranking politicians who think that abstinence-only sex ed is a good way to address teen pregnancy and the spread of STDs. That level of disconnection from reality *is* a good argument against electing her and McCain.
Rebuilding from the ground up sounds good, but there are a lot of problems with it -- the main one being that, while you throw away all your mistakes, you also throw away all your bugfixes. Joel Spolsky has a great article on how this applies to software development, but it's true in other areas too.
Basing the right to vote solely on monetary output makes no sense. Retired people are also affected by criminal laws, trade regulations, foreign policy, and other non-welfare aspects of government. Disenfranchising people who disagree with you is convenient, but not very democratic (or libertarian, since that's what you seem to be).
Nonsense. In five years their upstream connections will have improved too. People like to make a fuss over how "easy" it is to go over a huge limit, but the reality is that the only way 99.9% of people do it through non-business-related means is file sharing. And if a few people can't feed their free blu-ray addiction five years from now, it's no skin of my back. Why should I subsidize their luxuries?
Slashdot Mirror
I pirate stuff all the time. I'm just not deluded enough to try to claim it's some grand moral crusade.
Ah, another person who's seen through the rationalizations of the Free Stuff Brigade. Good look talking about it here, though -- trying seems to trigger an in-group/out-group barrier that drowns out all rational argument.
[Moderators: please don't bother modding this up or down; it's just a personal response]
It's gone on a lot longer than the other two I've paid attention to (2004 and 2000), largely due to the tight contest in the Democratic primary season. There's also some excitement over having black and female nominees from the major parties (although the Democrats had a female VP candidate back in '84). Our standard of living may be seriously threatened by economic problems. Global warming is getting to be a bigger issue. Don't let people tell you that every election is the same, because a lot of important decisions are made based on the outcome.
That being said, the rhetoric in all televised elections is basically the same due to the limitations of sound bite-based reporting. You can see this at the Living Room Candidate site, which has campaign ads going back to the 1950s.
Total Annihilation was better!
(Sorry, still a little bitter over that one :-p)
Most U.S. high schools divide a semester up into six or nine week periods, each with its own average, and possibly a final whose weight is equal to a grading period. Each grading period would contain two tests, not each semester. Hence, you don't get as many chances to raise your semester average, and the semester average is what determines your GPA. It's a different level of grade consolidation, which you would know if you read the summary.
It's not a stupid policy, just a bad implementation. The idea is to keep temporary disruptions in students' lives (like their parents getting divorced or something) from turning into a longer-term handicap. If you don't do any work for a grading period, you still fail -- despite the hand-wringing in the other comments, this does not help the mediocre. But that one failure (six weeks) doesn't screw up your whole semester (18 weeks). Students aren't stupid -- they can do enough math to figure out that if they normally get Bs (80-89) and score a 20 in their first period, getting three 85s after that still leaves them with a failing semester grade of 68. Who's going to do a semester's worth of work for a failing grade when you'll just have to retake the class anyway?
Remember, the purpose of grades is to make an accurate assessment of students' learning. If you let an outlier dominate your assessment, your assessment is broken. All that being said, a better version of this policy would be to cap the grading period average rather than the individual grades, which is IMHO way too fine-grained.
TI's also starting up a new R&D lab in honor of the occasion. The sent out an email inviting employees to apply for positions, but I'm just a product engineer so I don't get to do research. :-(
As an engineering graduate I think it's a great idea. There are plenty of skills that come along with a well-rounded education which many engineers sorely lack. The most important one is communication. It drives me up the wall when I have to work with people who can't write their way out of a paper bag. Plus, in a large organization being good at explaining things is *very* useful, because there's a constant need to talk with management, customers, and other groups. Think about people like Einstein or Feynman and one of the first things that comes to mind is their communications skills.
It's especially important to teach such things in college because in the working world you're surrounded by bad habits, and it's only getting worse. Powerpoint is increasingly used as a substitute for real documentation, despite its horrible flaws. Few people provide context in their presentations or know how to address audiences larger than their current meeting. Most (almost all?) businesses rely on oral history instead of a written record. IMHO, we should go even farther and educate people in how to show information graphically, too. Read Edward Tufte's books to see how good (and bad) it can get.
If you're paying to become an engineer, then you want this stuff. Trust me, it's more than worth the time.
Yeah, it's surprising how many people want to put on a false persona in public. It's like people think that they have a right to control whether other people like them. The funny thing is that if everyone stopped doing it the need for it would probably decrease. My policy is to not do anything that I'd be ashamed to have other people find out about. This has two parts -- first, personal restraint, and second, having enough pride to shrug it off when other people don't like what I do. (The fact that I don't use mind-altering substances probably helps with this).
Then again, large organization can have some pretty silly policies, and it is possible for one person's biases to unfairly influence an interview process. So when it specifically comes to job hunting, I can understand where they're coming from.
I think you have this backwards. The Dark Knight isn't popular in spite of bootlegs, it's bootlegged because it's popular. The same goes for apps. Of course the most-downloaded apps have the highest sales -- they're the ones everybody wants!
You're giving a whole lot of excuses and what-ifs, but they're pretty far-fetched. How do I know that the people on those sites haven't bought what they're downloading? Partly because of the nature of the content (e.g. pre-release rips and other things they can't possibly have bought). Partly because of the language used (the word "warez" pops up frequently, for instance). Partly because many of the downloaders are college students on high-speed connections who don't have $50 to spend on a game (I was one a few years ago). Partly because of human nature. Plus, if you already own the content, why download an extra full-copy? Why not just get a crack? It's not like you can't use the same tools as the rippers themselves. In fact, usually when you download an app you get a plain old copy of the CD with an an extra file inserted that contains the crack. You even have to apply it yourself.
I think you're also getting confused about who I'm talking about. I think the vast majority of *file-sharers* are after free stuff. The majority of the *general population*, on the other hand, doesn't have the expertise to go hunting through torrents and deal with codecs and whatnot.
You are correct that there are many reasons for people to download files. However, if it were true that most people are motivated by something other than getting stuff for free, the bootleg scene itself would be vastly different than it is today. At the very least, there would be much less emphasis on full copies of new and unreleased content.
I'm not being bombarded by any messages about copyright because I don't seek them out. I never heard about what Michael Eisnor said until you mentioned it. I don't buy a lot of blank CDs, and when I do I don't notice a few extra cents (although I agree that those levies are silly). I don't use Vista. I don't care about a broadcast flag because I don't watch broadcast TV. I can live without their media. It's not a right or a necessity. Not even close. And again, if you don't like what they're doing, why are you supporting them by popularizing their product?
You claim that content providers have helped create unjust laws that hurt the public (which I agree with). You then claim that file-sharing seems to help publishers more than it hurts. I find this inconsistent. If you want copyright laws to change, helping content providers acquire more money with which to lobby Congress is not the way to go.
You also say that copyright terms are unreasonable, and that 20 year terms would be better (which I also agree with). But the site under discussion is hosting movies that were just release in the last month or two. Even under your ideal scenario, it would still be illegitimate. The most popular torrents are the ones with the newest content.
The medical/financial record argument is absolutely relevant, because privacy is just as much a fuzzy and arbitrary construct as IP. Your medical records are published as part of service transactions, and part of that agreement is that the recipients respect your control of the information. Hey, that sounds familiar... and no, there isn't necessarily any harm involved. Giving a copy of my records to advertisers might slightly increase my junk mail but doesn't otherwise harm me materially.
I don't like DRM either. And of course there are legitimate uses for BT -- it's a great protocol and is widely used outside of the file-sharing community. But I still think the file-sharing movement is about free stuff. I base this on the visible content of the popular torrent search sites, which curiously nobody else seems to be mentioning. Abstract arguments and anecdotes are not very convincing. Look at the isoHunt site. Actually go there and look at it. Do you think the people downloading zero-day cam rips of The Dark Knight are motivated by ideology? There's no DRM on a movie screen, and it's easy to wait a couple months until you can see the movie in a cheaper theater or a matinee showing.
I sympathize with your problems, but you haven't answered my main question: if you don't like the terms of a sale, why should you get the item for free instead of just not buying it? If you've already bought the product and it doesn't work and you can't return it, that's one thing, but none of the movies on isoHunt are even out on DVD yet. Nor have most of the people downloading games or apps bought them.
And as for content providers calling us thieves, the only place I hear that is Slashdot and other copyright-obsessed news sites. I'd be just as happy to see those stories go as well. By the way, industry profits don't tell us anything, especially since most users probably *don't* know how to download a bootleg copy, especially on consoles (doesn't that require a modchip?).
Oh, okay. If you're advocating socialism then that's a whole different matter. I don't have enough information to know whether I agree with you or not, but it's at least consistent.
I think some form of IP is necessary in a capitalist system, not for media, but for research and development. For example, there's a company called ARM that designs CPUs (you may have heard of them, they're really popular in the embedded space). They don't manufacture anything -- they license their designs to other companies, who then incorporate them into microcontrollers. This works because designing high-end CPUs is a very difficult and expensive thing to do, and many companies would rather not bother with it (at least not all the time). It's nice to be able to have a company like ARM, but without IP it's completely impossible -- nobody would pay them.
Yes, it is about free stuff. Why did you need (note: *need*) to go to the effort to watch Ironman without paying? Oh wait, you didn't. And what's to say that someone who has my medical records is going to use them for identity theft? What if they just use them for advertising purposes?
If you want to talk about an interconnected world, then file sharing and the security of your medical records do boil down to the same thing -- the rule of law. You can't demand that other people obey laws that protect you if you're not willing to obey laws that protect them, no matter what trivial inconvenience it creates for you. If you don't like the laws, we have processes for changing them. Those processes do not include "getting their stuff anyway just because I feel like it".
How do you know for sure they're searching for industry copyrighted content?
Because I'm not a complete moron? I have a BT client too, and I do know how to use torrent trackers, thank you very much. Remember, their *top two searches* are for groups that only distribute copyrighted content. Also, you're welcome to click on the links yourself and see what comes up. You can sort by number of leechers to see what people are actually downloading (hint: it's full-length movies). I'm not just making this up, you know.
I don't care whether it's illegal or whether they can get off on a technicality. Just admit that a technicality is all that it is.
No, that's not all it is. They organize the torrents into categories. They also let users post torrents. And finally, they have a choice of which trackers they index. They have some legitimate trackers and some that are specifically for certain kinds of illegitimate content (e.g. XBox games). The site does not work in a purely algorithmic way. It's not spidering or accepting arbitrary tags. There is human decision-making behind what shows up in those search results. And again, even if they were totally innocent and only wanted legitimate content, wouldn't the fact that 95% of their traffic is completely illegitimate be an obvious sign of complete failure?
But when you expect something in return, without trusting people to make that determination themselves, you end up pissing people off and forcing them to act against you.
Again, these sorts of arguments apply to far more than IP. The way any sort of trade or barter works is that the buyer and seller both have prices they're willing to pay. If they can agree on a price, they trade, otherwise, they walk away. Those are the valid choices. Following your logic, every paycheck on Earth should be optional. If you're saying you want pure socialism, that's okay, but you should say so up front.
How exactly are media companies "forcing" people to do anything? If you think the transaction is unfair, then *don't participate*. Content holders have zero responsibility for downloaders' actions. Could they have taken other courses of action that might have resulted in less file sharing? Probably. Were they obligated to offer services on your terms at your price? No.
Your argument might work in situations where vital goods and services are at stake -- if someone price gouges while selling water during a natural disaster, for instance. But it doesn't work here. Content providers are offering luxury goods. Nobody needs pop music or Hollywood movies.
When you decide to "fuck with" someone just to satisfy yourself, you have abandoned all claims to victimhood. Again, this is my complaint -- I don't care what you do, but how you justify it. There's nothing justified about being a jerk just because you don't like how somebody deals.
I don't really care what the content industry does. I don't really care who shares what, either. What does bother me is two things. The first is that people try to claim some sort of moral high ground for downloading DVD rips. The second is that they use such shallow, hypocritical, and transparent excuses to justify it.
Content industry's evil? Then why are you making their product more popular? Why not just not spread it at all? Don't like DRM? Why help push it into existence? Want to support indie artists? Why not make more room for them in the torrent search results?
And then come the excuses. "What about people downloading Linux ISOs?". Yeah, I'm sure there are *tons* of people downloading Linux ISOs 24/7/365, because *none* of those distributions have auto-updating package managers. "The tracker search sites don't know what people are downloading!". And since they have no idea, they can't possibly organize the torrents into categories, right? Besides, who would actually, you know, *look* at their own web site? "How dare they cap my bandwidth, they advertised unlimited usage!". Except that no resource is unlimited in practice, and a site full of IT people suggesting ISPs design their networks for 24/7/365 full-throttle illegal usage is laughable. "File-sharing increases sales for content-producers!". Do you really think iTMS would ever have gotten off the ground if Napster had spent the last decade alive and at full strength?
File-sharers will argue every technicality to their last breath, but the moment someone else does so, it's pure evil. What if a company wants to spread your medical records around? Aren't those just "imaginary property"? Why should you get a say in what happens to those bits? What about Russian crackers stealing credit card numbers? Where are the cries of "that's not stealing, nothing was physically lost"? There's no consistency, no compromise, just selfishness. Anyone who can tell their ass from a hole in the ground can see that this silly file-sharing "movement" is really about getting as much free stuff as possible. I'm sick of hearing about it. Bring back the Slashdot that was really about tech news, not ridiculous crusades and libertarian frippery.
Look at the search results. That's not what the overwhelming majority of that site's users are doing.
Go the web site. Look at the list on the right labeled "top searches". At the moment, it reads:
1. axxo
2. fxg
3. spore
4. the dark knight
5. iron man
6. prison break
7. bangkok dangerous
8. psp
9. tropic thunder
10. stargate atlantis
11. pineapple express
12. pc games
13. mamma mia
14. 2008
15. metallica
16. disaster movie
17. death race
18. wanted
19. french
20. mummy tomb dragon emperor
The first two items, Axxo and FXG, are DVD rippers who distribute copyrighted content. The next 14 out of 18 are direct searches for copyrighted content. Linux ISOs don't even make the top 20. By the way, each one of those links goes to torrents that are obviously holding copyrighted content (unless "cam rip" has some new meaning I'm not aware of).
According to the site itself, its main purpose is helping people violate copyrights. The only way its owners can be unaware of this is if they've never visited their own homepage. Now really, I don't care if you engage in filesharing, but don't you think claiming ignorance is a little ridiculous here? Clicking on their most searched-for item gives you a list of *nothing but copyrighted content*!
Mod parent up -- the real story behind Bristol Palin's pregnancy is that in an era where 95% of Americans have premarital sex, we still have high-ranking politicians who think that abstinence-only sex ed is a good way to address teen pregnancy and the spread of STDs. That level of disconnection from reality *is* a good argument against electing her and McCain.
Memory is notoriously unreliable. It's not too hard to implant false memories in unwitting subjects.
Rebuilding from the ground up sounds good, but there are a lot of problems with it -- the main one being that, while you throw away all your mistakes, you also throw away all your bugfixes. Joel Spolsky has a great article on how this applies to software development, but it's true in other areas too.
Basing the right to vote solely on monetary output makes no sense. Retired people are also affected by criminal laws, trade regulations, foreign policy, and other non-welfare aspects of government. Disenfranchising people who disagree with you is convenient, but not very democratic (or libertarian, since that's what you seem to be).
That's an older version of the page that doesn't have the questionnaire answers.
Nonsense. In five years their upstream connections will have improved too. People like to make a fuss over how "easy" it is to go over a huge limit, but the reality is that the only way 99.9% of people do it through non-business-related means is file sharing. And if a few people can't feed their free blu-ray addiction five years from now, it's no skin of my back. Why should I subsidize their luxuries?