bad news for fans of UK shows that aren't available for purchase anywhere
So evidently many of you folks believe this is reason enough to pirate the content.
I do for one.
Oh, and there's actually indirect legal precedent for this one - in several trademark, copyright and patent infringement cases a right holder has been denied compensation because they previously didn't actively pursue parties that infringed, thus effectively losing the rights. One of these is somewhat personal by the way; a close friend and her husband has both the trademark and the patent of several metal 'spinners' (metal artwork what spins in the wind, sometimes making bell-like noises when they do) but didn't have the money to go after several early infringers and when they finally did have the means, it was more or less thrown out of court because the failed to pursue the early infringers thus making the market appear unrestricted.
So you can argue that by not providing the protected content for sale, you're effectively losing the right to maintain your monopoly control over sales. In other words, if you fail to prove a legal alternative you have no right to pursue pirates just filling the void.
Why isn't anyone asking the question: Why is the British authorities so fixated on extraditing Assange to Sweden when he's only wanted in connection with an accusation concerning two counts of the mildest form of rape (consensual sex under false pretenses - without condom) ? - If convicted he can't even get jail time for a first time offense!
If you want me to read the ad - Don't make it move Don't make it flash Don't make it obnoxious and obvious Don't play a sound Don't make it a clickthru Don't Block Content until the ad is done Allow a video choice Allow a bypass choice Do not open pop ups, Pop unders Do not stay frozen on a page while you scroll
(list goes on for another 1000 things advertisers have done to force me to adblock)
Exactly why I started using adblockers. I actually started a long time ago, back when Netscape was the new hot thing. There was no plugin architecture in the browser so the best way to filter content was to use a local proxy that did the house cleaning on the pages you loaded. There was several options but I used The Proxomitron which had a powerful regular expression tool and a lot of shared rules that other had made. It worked wonders and was able to block almost everything, which was mostly banner ads and a little bit of javascript.
I didn't mind text ads or static banner ads, but then they started to use animated banners (using.gif animations) and we had blinking and jumping ads. Those things stole my attention so I decided to 'steal' the site by removing their ads. Searched for what others did and found The Proxomitron. Never looked back since.
It happens that I accidentally surf from a non-adblocked browser and what a nightmare! - Ads are everywhere and they are extremely aggressive! - Stuff jump and blinks, makes noise and block the page either until I click something or some timer expires. How does people live with this mess?!
No, I'll keep on adblocking and never ever let any ads that I can stop be displayed. If I hear that by some miracle they all started to behave I might try to disable adblocking again, but don't hold your breath. Hell will locked in a total ice age before that happens.
Try finding a file on RapidShare directly from Google -- you can't. For pirates to use RapidShare to spread warez, they've got to link to it from some external site. There's a whole pile of video streaming sites that are little more than a catalogue of links to RapidShare, MegaUpload (RIP) and the like. Those sites are the ones that are actively spreading the material even though they don't host it themselves. They are the ones that the law should be set up to chase
But that's just it - Linking is the bread & butter of the Internet. Without links it stops working.
Proposing tougher legislation to fight those linking to pirated stuff, you enter a very slippery slope. You need to make the law so clear that anyone setting up a link will know exactly whether he's doing something illegal or not. Making it fuzzy will make people play it safe and thus we lose some links - a lot actually.
So, now we know that linking to a.mp3 is illegal. We also know that linking to a page with links to.mp3's most likely is illegal. But how about linking to a page that links to a page with links to.mp3's? Or linking to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to a page with.mp3's? Or linking to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to a page with.mp3's?
Or linking to Google? - Where you easily can find direct links to.mp3's following a simple query?
Remember that as soon as you link to a page that you do not control, it can be altered. It's impossible to say what was on it when the link was established, so what was clearly legal can quickly become clearly illegal. Are we at the morale of "War Games" here? - "The only way to win is not to play"?
Piracy. Using the hosts file to block calls from installers out to verification servers is pretty common. This would effectively end that method for circumvention.
No it wouldn't. People that are using cracks would know how to stop Defender (or not use it altogether).
Besides, it is widely known that you cannot stop piracy using dumb technical means. No DRM or Copy Protection truly works and all have been cracked, broken or circumvented.
Why wouldn't they build the feature to prompt the user? "Your hosts file has been modified to add xyz/delete xyz. Windows Defender can restore the file to its previous state. If you would like Windows Defender to restore the file, click OK, otherwise click CANCEL to keep the changes."
People are stupid! - They don't read the popup and just blindly click OK, CANCEL or whatever the option is.
I remember a test where a bunch of people were 'infected' with a small program that basically just randomly displayed a popup with a huge warning in bold letters and lots of red NOT to click the OK button but to press to make the dialog go away. Almost 70% clicked the button anyway. Go figure.
So, after reading the article this can be summarized as "Microsoft gives you one more reason to disable Windows Defender and use a third party AV app."
Both AVG and Avast default 'protects' the hosts file by preventing you (or some malware) from editing it.
However, it can be turned off specifically without disabling the entire AV package.
Cell phones aren't allowed on school premises, and will be confiscated if a student is caught in possession of one.
Really? - What if a parent needs to contact a student?
The old method of calling the administration office and have them page the student is both costly, disruptive to both class and administration, and often involves the student talking while standing right next to an administration employee, which is an obvious invasion of privacy.
The correct way to do it is to allow cell phones set to a silent ring, and ban from making outgoing calls and texts during school hours (students must comply with inspection requests). This way they can be reached and are able to go somewhere private to take a call, which obviously should be of a certain importance to be allowed.
Confiscation is an epic Bad Idea (tm) which makes the school liable both for damages relating to missed calls and for the cost of a new phone. If you need to take away a cell phone, make a parent come pick it up after school and let him/her/them handle the situation from there. A school should not steal student property, no matter what the excuse.
Exactly. It's what you could call "rape after the fact". We're talking fully consensual sex where the women days later got cold feet, supposedly due to the fact that Assange didn't use a condom during the acts or something to that effect. Yes, extremely lame and hardly any kind of misdemeanor crime at all, let alone something worth causing a major diplomatic incident over.
It is obvious to anybody with a shred of common sense that there's much more to this story!
After all, Assange isn't just anybody, and Sweden has a recent history of being the lapdog of the US. The matter of the highly illegal (and fruitless) raid against The Pirate Bay is what I am referring to here. It was based on an illegal search warrant (both illegally issued by the attorney general and issued without proper basis and procedure) which on top of that was violated as it only allowed search and seizure of servers belonging to The Pirate Bay, but hundreds of servers belonging to other customers was seized as well, despite everything being clearly labeled.
The infamous raid on The Pirate Bay shows just how much power the US has over Sweden... They even got the Swedish Attorney General (Justitsminister) to break the constitution and sign a search warrant for the raid, a clear violation of the fundamental separation of powers. She would have been prosecuted for it, but an election changed the government and now suddenly nobody wanted to prosecute?
That it had zero effect on the operation of The Pirate Bay, both short and long term, is another story and shows just how pathetic that action was.
How about very specific knowledge of where you're going and when? Because, that's what we're really talking about here.
Since when does a license plate advertise exactly who's inside the car?
It's just like the "1 IP != 1 person" issue - An IP doesn't say anything about who exactly used that IP, and while you can fairly easily find our who owns the connection using the IP, you cannot with any certainty find out which person used it for specific connections in the past.
Similar with license plates - you can find out who owns the car but not who's driving it. It could be the owner, someone who's borrowed the car, a car thief or maybe it's a fake plate like often used in connection with gasoline theft.
license plates have light for illumination so they can be read. those light just might some how start imitating more energy in the IR part of the spectrum than before.
As far as I know there are rules requiring certain lights on a car, and often also ban certain lights that can cause misunderstandings or similar, but lights that emit invisible light cannot cause any problems as they are - invisible. I cannot see how a ring of strong infrared lights around a license plate can be a problem as this light is completely invisible to humans. That most cameras doesn't filter it out isn't a problem traffic-wise; but recordings and pictures may be useless due to light flooding.
I've always wondered - most digital cameras have a built-in UV-filter (make people don't know this and still buy an external UV-filter to put on the lens of their DSLR camera) but no IR-filter? - Why?
For fun, go to a dark room with a standard remote and first take a picture in the darkness, then again while you press something on the remote. If the batteries aren't run down you'll see light as from a flashlight illuminating stuff in front of the remote in the last picture. You saw nothing but the camera picks up the IR-light from the remote and translates it into 'light'.
Similar for UV-light. Use a 'darklight' like often used in clubs which will make 'optical white' glow intensely, and if you take a picture of a dark room illuminated with UV-light, you'll most likely see only the optical white illuminated (it can actually be any color, like seen in UV-paint), but if you see everything somewhat illuminated you have no UV-filter and then you'll need an external filter if you want to take decent pictures outside or just in sunlit rooms.
With all that interest in the make-believe of religions, it's no wonder the country is filled with make-believe princes with make-believe fortunes needing help...
They are talking about Copyright INFRINGEMENT, not THEFT. Stealing copyright would entail the illegal transference of rights from the legitimate owner to the thief, and that's not the case here. How can an organization mainly composed of lawyers not know this?
Now, I expect them to prosecute Google next. Regardless of rankings, you can still find every bit of publicly accessible pirate content using Google's search engine, just a single click away. That must be a much, much worse violation and thus ripe for a massive trial because it just doesn't get any bigger than this. Oh, Google has almost bottomless pockets and a building full of lawyers while Anton Vickerman here does not. Big difference.
An ISP can with certainty tell exactly which customer was using a specific IP at a specific time, but not who was using this customers connection. As countless verdicts around the civilized world has ruled, the owner of the connection is not defakto responsible or liable for abuse. The exact user must be determined in order to prosecute, and thus if this isn't possible no prosecution can occur.
There are multiple vectors available for abuse at any connection, from unsecured wifi, over hacked wifi to various form of unauthorized cabled access where the physical traces later was removed.
Now, as it is impossible to determine if a connection was abused by someone unauthorized at some point in the past, it is always impossible to rule out outside abuse and thus it is futile to persue the owner of the connection.
So please stop wasting the time of both the ISP, the customer and the courts. There's nothing to gain at all.
Unless you have been living in a cave for the past 100 years you're wilfully ignoring facts... The communist countries wasted most of their money on preventing free speech and free thought, as well as free movement of its people. The rest was wasted on a stupid arms race they couldn't win. That was one of the primary reasons they failed.
For some reason Islamic countries are even more afraid of free speech, as well as free expression. The middle east almost melted down just because a local newspaper in the small country of Denmark (far, far away from the middle east) published some drawings of Muhammad. It's a very poor and insecure religion that fears open discussion about its premises and prophets, and this is usually due to real issues with these. I mean it is raised above any discussion that Muhammad was a pedophile when he married a 6-year old and consumated the marriage when she (Aisha) was 9 years old, but try mentioning this to a Muslim and you just might not survive the reaction.
Islam is a very violent religion, and any insult, no matter how insignificant, results in demands for blood, beheadings and worse, which of course explains the need for strong censorship in order to prevent roits and revolutions. But the issue is not the insults (which the censorship should prevent) but the mentality and reactions, and those are guided by the clergy (Imams). So they need to re-educate the Imams instead of imposing more censorship. That would solve many problems in addition to those relating to perceived insults, and open up for freedom of speech.
I have a friend that was born in the U.S. to a Serbian father and a Danish mother, both legal residents in the U.S. at the time of birth. This yields him THREE nationalities and THREE passports, as children born to both a Serbian parent and a Danish parent automatically gets citizenship in those respective countries, and as he was born on U.S. soil to legal residents, he also gets U.S. citizenship.
It's fun for him to travel between the U.S. and Denmark (where he lives) - both places he can enter the country as a citizen, bypassing a lot of the stupid security theater and excessive long queues.
England is a far more pure police state and also much more surreptitiously so.
Seeing as how the younger part of the population tends to behave, this is a necessity. You have to be hard and omnipresent if you want to deal with rioters and hooligans in an efficient manner.
Personally I love CCTV monitoring; I think it's perfectly okay that the police watch what people do and if they step out of line significantly enough, they'll step in and do their job. Without CCTV anarchy quickly rules the show as bad behavior is inversely proportional with the chance of getting caught.
Here in Denmark the politicians love bicycles and are afraid to step in when it comes to bad behavior. It's pure anachy out there. In major cities at major intersections 10% will attempt to run the red light, zig-zagging between crossing cars. At smaller intersections upwards of 80% will run the red light oblivious to the crossing traffic. At major pedestrian crossings you will need to be extremely vigilant even when you've got a green light because most of the crossing bicyclists will not respect their red light and continue to ride straight into the crowd of people crossing. It' unlikely to get caught doing this so they continue and things get worse every day.
Now, if the bicycles had license plates and CCTV monitored the major crossings, people would get fined each and every time, and that would quickly bring an end to the bad bahavior.
In England, the riots caused major destruction and loss of property, but a lot were caught on CCTV. Even masked rioters had to put on the mask at some point, so it was simply a matter of backtracking from each incident until you caught the individual putting on his mask - or exiting his home masked. Once identified, each got a wake-up call from the police, and later either a huge bill or jail time - or both. It's justice and those hoodlums deserved everything they got.
Even though a simple grope might seem fairly innocent (to men), it isn't.
Not only can it be very traumatic for the victim, it is also the beginning of the slope leading to worse sexual offenses for the perpetrator; the lack of respect for women combined with a sexual urge that goes beyond the norm is a clear indicator of worse things to come.
These violators need to be caught as fast as possible and prosecuted so they can get their 'certification' - the brand as a sexual offender. Then we'll have them under control when they're out and give them 'the time of their life' when they're behind bars. The experience of being in jail as a sexual offender are usually so awful that they'll do anything to avoid going back and that will keep them in check as the fear of jail will overrule the sexual urge and keep them from re-offending.
One thing is plants built in the wrong places or run by incompetent people... there's room for improvement there.
The waste is really a non-issue if you just get a bit creative about it.
The safest way to get rid of nuclear waste is to hurl it into the Sun. Of course current launch methods are still far too unreliable to make this a safe option. A waste rocket blowing up will be a truly bad thing...
A very safe alternative would be to drill a very deep hole (20-30 miles or more) and dump it in there, then plug the hole with concrete and rocks, possibly using explosives to collapse the hole at one or more points. Doesn't matter if the waste melts down or even goes nuclear down there. It will never affect or reach the surface in anything but geological time, and on that time scale the stuff is harmless if it ever works its way to the surface.
Well - it works doesn't it? A lot of file locker services shut down after the raid.
I know of NONE that shut down. A few disabled sharing, and several dozen new appeared on the scene...
As to the effect on the pirate scene it was negligible; I doubt many had issues finding alternatives to MegaUpload and I for one was perfectly able to find the stuff I wanted just as easily as when MegaUpload was around.
To tally the score: Hugely expensive raid and now legal proceedings. Might end up in an acquittal and and counter-suit for damages and loss of business, plus legal precedent that allows for file lockers like this, Practically zero effect on piracy in the short run and an increase in the options available to pirates later (now).
As something like 95% of the worlds supply of illegal opiates comes from Afghanistan, and the opium trade the primary source of income by far for the Taliban, dump the Agent Orange and the other herbicides on the opium fields in Afghanistan. Give the farmers a chance to switch, but if they don't - kill their fields.
When Doctor Who started up again Demonoid torrents were the only way us USAians could see it *at all*.
I got all my Doctor Who needs adequately satisfied by www.thebox.bz who specializes in British TV. That they were proud of Doctor Who was evident in the fact that for a long time their main logo was the TARDIS and the name itself is also a reference to the TARDIS Police Box. These days, it's a slang reference to a tv set and both the main logo and favicon is a pictogram of a classic tv with a rabbit ear antenna. It's fast and the rips are always flawless (and often exclusive), and they treat their users decently and don't delete them or reset their ratio if they are away for a while. Yes, it's a private tracker, just like Demonoid was.
PS: Of course I bought the blu-rays (and deleted the downloads) when they came out, and BBC is fairly fast when it comes to releasing shows on consumer media, so we're talking a month or two where I borrowed the shows before being able to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
bad news for fans of UK shows that aren't available for purchase anywhere
So evidently many of you folks believe this is reason enough to pirate the content.
I do for one.
Oh, and there's actually indirect legal precedent for this one - in several trademark, copyright and patent infringement cases a right holder has been denied compensation because they previously didn't actively pursue parties that infringed, thus effectively losing the rights. One of these is somewhat personal by the way; a close friend and her husband has both the trademark and the patent of several metal 'spinners' (metal artwork what spins in the wind, sometimes making bell-like noises when they do) but didn't have the money to go after several early infringers and when they finally did have the means, it was more or less thrown out of court because the failed to pursue the early infringers thus making the market appear unrestricted.
So you can argue that by not providing the protected content for sale, you're effectively losing the right to maintain your monopoly control over sales. In other words, if you fail to prove a legal alternative you have no right to pursue pirates just filling the void.
Why isn't anyone asking the question: Why is the British authorities so fixated on extraditing Assange to Sweden when he's only wanted in connection with an accusation concerning two counts of the mildest form of rape (consensual sex under false pretenses - without condom) ? - If convicted he can't even get jail time for a first time offense!
If you want me to read the ad -
Don't make it move
Don't make it flash
Don't make it obnoxious and obvious
Don't play a sound
Don't make it a clickthru
Don't Block Content until the ad is done
Allow a video choice
Allow a bypass choice
Do not open pop ups, Pop unders
Do not stay frozen on a page while you scroll
(list goes on for another 1000 things advertisers have done to force me to adblock)
Exactly why I started using adblockers. I actually started a long time ago, back when Netscape was the new hot thing. There was no plugin architecture in the browser so the best way to filter content was to use a local proxy that did the house cleaning on the pages you loaded. There was several options but I used The Proxomitron which had a powerful regular expression tool and a lot of shared rules that other had made. It worked wonders and was able to block almost everything, which was mostly banner ads and a little bit of javascript.
I didn't mind text ads or static banner ads, but then they started to use animated banners (using .gif animations) and we had blinking and jumping ads. Those things stole my attention so I decided to 'steal' the site by removing their ads. Searched for what others did and found The Proxomitron. Never looked back since.
It happens that I accidentally surf from a non-adblocked browser and what a nightmare! - Ads are everywhere and they are extremely aggressive! - Stuff jump and blinks, makes noise and block the page either until I click something or some timer expires. How does people live with this mess?!
No, I'll keep on adblocking and never ever let any ads that I can stop be displayed. If I hear that by some miracle they all started to behave I might try to disable adblocking again, but don't hold your breath. Hell will locked in a total ice age before that happens.
Try finding a file on RapidShare directly from Google -- you can't. For pirates to use RapidShare to spread warez, they've got to link to it from some external site. There's a whole pile of video streaming sites that are little more than a catalogue of links to RapidShare, MegaUpload (RIP) and the like. Those sites are the ones that are actively spreading the material even though they don't host it themselves. They are the ones that the law should be set up to chase
But that's just it - Linking is the bread & butter of the Internet. Without links it stops working.
Proposing tougher legislation to fight those linking to pirated stuff, you enter a very slippery slope. You need to make the law so clear that anyone setting up a link will know exactly whether he's doing something illegal or not. Making it fuzzy will make people play it safe and thus we lose some links - a lot actually.
So, now we know that linking to a .mp3 is illegal. .mp3's most likely is illegal. .mp3's? .mp3's? .mp3's?
We also know that linking to a page with links to
But how about linking to a page that links to a page with links to
Or linking to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to a page with
Or linking to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to a page that links to a page with
Or linking to Google? - Where you easily can find direct links to .mp3's following a simple query?
Remember that as soon as you link to a page that you do not control, it can be altered. It's impossible to say what was on it when the link was established, so what was clearly legal can quickly become clearly illegal. Are we at the morale of "War Games" here? - "The only way to win is not to play"?
Piracy. Using the hosts file to block calls from installers out to verification servers is pretty common. This would effectively end that method for circumvention.
No it wouldn't. People that are using cracks would know how to stop Defender (or not use it altogether).
Besides, it is widely known that you cannot stop piracy using dumb technical means. No DRM or Copy Protection truly works and all have been cracked, broken or circumvented.
Why wouldn't they build the feature to prompt the user? "Your hosts file has been modified to add xyz/delete xyz. Windows Defender can restore the file to its previous state. If you would like Windows Defender to restore the file, click OK, otherwise click CANCEL to keep the changes."
People are stupid! - They don't read the popup and just blindly click OK, CANCEL or whatever the option is.
I remember a test where a bunch of people were 'infected' with a small program that basically just randomly displayed a popup with a huge warning in bold letters and lots of red NOT to click the OK button but to press to make the dialog go away. Almost 70% clicked the button anyway. Go figure.
So, after reading the article this can be summarized as "Microsoft gives you one more reason to disable Windows Defender and use a third party AV app."
Both AVG and Avast default 'protects' the hosts file by preventing you (or some malware) from editing it.
However, it can be turned off specifically without disabling the entire AV package.
Cell phones aren't allowed on school premises, and will be confiscated if a student is caught in possession of one.
Really? - What if a parent needs to contact a student?
The old method of calling the administration office and have them page the student is both costly, disruptive to both class and administration, and often involves the student talking while standing right next to an administration employee, which is an obvious invasion of privacy.
The correct way to do it is to allow cell phones set to a silent ring, and ban from making outgoing calls and texts during school hours (students must comply with inspection requests). This way they can be reached and are able to go somewhere private to take a call, which obviously should be of a certain importance to be allowed.
Confiscation is an epic Bad Idea (tm) which makes the school liable both for damages relating to missed calls and for the cost of a new phone. If you need to take away a cell phone, make a parent come pick it up after school and let him/her/them handle the situation from there. A school should not steal student property, no matter what the excuse.
Exactly. It's what you could call "rape after the fact". We're talking fully consensual sex where the women days later got cold feet, supposedly due to the fact that Assange didn't use a condom during the acts or something to that effect. Yes, extremely lame and hardly any kind of misdemeanor crime at all, let alone something worth causing a major diplomatic incident over.
It is obvious to anybody with a shred of common sense that there's much more to this story!
After all, Assange isn't just anybody, and Sweden has a recent history of being the lapdog of the US. The matter of the highly illegal (and fruitless) raid against The Pirate Bay is what I am referring to here. It was based on an illegal search warrant (both illegally issued by the attorney general and issued without proper basis and procedure) which on top of that was violated as it only allowed search and seizure of servers belonging to The Pirate Bay, but hundreds of servers belonging to other customers was seized as well, despite everything being clearly labeled.
The infamous raid on The Pirate Bay shows just how much power the US has over Sweden... They even got the Swedish Attorney General (Justitsminister) to break the constitution and sign a search warrant for the raid, a clear violation of the fundamental separation of powers. She would have been prosecuted for it, but an election changed the government and now suddenly nobody wanted to prosecute?
That it had zero effect on the operation of The Pirate Bay, both short and long term, is another story and shows just how pathetic that action was.
How about very specific knowledge of where you're going and when? Because, that's what we're really talking about here.
Since when does a license plate advertise exactly who's inside the car?
It's just like the "1 IP != 1 person" issue - An IP doesn't say anything about who exactly used that IP, and while you can fairly easily find our who owns the connection using the IP, you cannot with any certainty find out which person used it for specific connections in the past.
Similar with license plates - you can find out who owns the car but not who's driving it. It could be the owner, someone who's borrowed the car, a car thief or maybe it's a fake plate like often used in connection with gasoline theft.
Don't like being tracked? Don't have a face. No, wait....
Just put on glasses... it worked for Superman/Clark Kent!
license plates have light for illumination so they can be read. those light just might some how start imitating more energy in the IR part of the spectrum than before.
As far as I know there are rules requiring certain lights on a car, and often also ban certain lights that can cause misunderstandings or similar, but lights that emit invisible light cannot cause any problems as they are - invisible. I cannot see how a ring of strong infrared lights around a license plate can be a problem as this light is completely invisible to humans. That most cameras doesn't filter it out isn't a problem traffic-wise; but recordings and pictures may be useless due to light flooding.
I've always wondered - most digital cameras have a built-in UV-filter (make people don't know this and still buy an external UV-filter to put on the lens of their DSLR camera) but no IR-filter? - Why?
For fun, go to a dark room with a standard remote and first take a picture in the darkness, then again while you press something on the remote. If the batteries aren't run down you'll see light as from a flashlight illuminating stuff in front of the remote in the last picture. You saw nothing but the camera picks up the IR-light from the remote and translates it into 'light'.
Similar for UV-light. Use a 'darklight' like often used in clubs which will make 'optical white' glow intensely, and if you take a picture of a dark room illuminated with UV-light, you'll most likely see only the optical white illuminated (it can actually be any color, like seen in UV-paint), but if you see everything somewhat illuminated you have no UV-filter and then you'll need an external filter if you want to take decent pictures outside or just in sunlit rooms.
With all that interest in the make-believe of religions, it's no wonder the country is filled with make-believe princes with make-believe fortunes needing help...
They are talking about Copyright INFRINGEMENT, not THEFT. Stealing copyright would entail the illegal transference of rights from the legitimate owner to the thief, and that's not the case here. How can an organization mainly composed of lawyers not know this?
Now, I expect them to prosecute Google next. Regardless of rankings, you can still find every bit of publicly accessible pirate content using Google's search engine, just a single click away. That must be a much, much worse violation and thus ripe for a massive trial because it just doesn't get any bigger than this. Oh, Google has almost bottomless pockets and a building full of lawyers while Anton Vickerman here does not. Big difference.
An ISP can with certainty tell exactly which customer was using a specific IP at a specific time, but not who was using this customers connection. As countless verdicts around the civilized world has ruled, the owner of the connection is not defakto responsible or liable for abuse. The exact user must be determined in order to prosecute, and thus if this isn't possible no prosecution can occur.
There are multiple vectors available for abuse at any connection, from unsecured wifi, over hacked wifi to various form of unauthorized cabled access where the physical traces later was removed.
Now, as it is impossible to determine if a connection was abused by someone unauthorized at some point in the past, it is always impossible to rule out outside abuse and thus it is futile to persue the owner of the connection.
So please stop wasting the time of both the ISP, the customer and the courts. There's nothing to gain at all.
Troll alert...
Unless you have been living in a cave for the past 100 years you're wilfully ignoring facts... The communist countries wasted most of their money on preventing free speech and free thought, as well as free movement of its people. The rest was wasted on a stupid arms race they couldn't win. That was one of the primary reasons they failed.
For some reason Islamic countries are even more afraid of free speech, as well as free expression. The middle east almost melted down just because a local newspaper in the small country of Denmark (far, far away from the middle east) published some drawings of Muhammad. It's a very poor and insecure religion that fears open discussion about its premises and prophets, and this is usually due to real issues with these. I mean it is raised above any discussion that Muhammad was a pedophile when he married a 6-year old and consumated the marriage when she (Aisha) was 9 years old, but try mentioning this to a Muslim and you just might not survive the reaction.
Islam is a very violent religion, and any insult, no matter how insignificant, results in demands for blood, beheadings and worse, which of course explains the need for strong censorship in order to prevent roits and revolutions. But the issue is not the insults (which the censorship should prevent) but the mentality and reactions, and those are guided by the clergy (Imams). So they need to re-educate the Imams instead of imposing more censorship. That would solve many problems in addition to those relating to perceived insults, and open up for freedom of speech.
I have a friend that was born in the U.S. to a Serbian father and a Danish mother, both legal residents in the U.S. at the time of birth. This yields him THREE nationalities and THREE passports, as children born to both a Serbian parent and a Danish parent automatically gets citizenship in those respective countries, and as he was born on U.S. soil to legal residents, he also gets U.S. citizenship.
It's fun for him to travel between the U.S. and Denmark (where he lives) - both places he can enter the country as a citizen, bypassing a lot of the stupid security theater and excessive long queues.
"England isn't Nazi Germany"
Correct.
England is a far more pure police state and also much more surreptitiously so.
Seeing as how the younger part of the population tends to behave, this is a necessity. You have to be hard and omnipresent if you want to deal with rioters and hooligans in an efficient manner.
Personally I love CCTV monitoring; I think it's perfectly okay that the police watch what people do and if they step out of line significantly enough, they'll step in and do their job. Without CCTV anarchy quickly rules the show as bad behavior is inversely proportional with the chance of getting caught.
Here in Denmark the politicians love bicycles and are afraid to step in when it comes to bad behavior. It's pure anachy out there. In major cities at major intersections 10% will attempt to run the red light, zig-zagging between crossing cars. At smaller intersections upwards of 80% will run the red light oblivious to the crossing traffic. At major pedestrian crossings you will need to be extremely vigilant even when you've got a green light because most of the crossing bicyclists will not respect their red light and continue to ride straight into the crowd of people crossing. It' unlikely to get caught doing this so they continue and things get worse every day.
Now, if the bicycles had license plates and CCTV monitored the major crossings, people would get fined each and every time, and that would quickly bring an end to the bad bahavior.
In England, the riots caused major destruction and loss of property, but a lot were caught on CCTV. Even masked rioters had to put on the mask at some point, so it was simply a matter of backtracking from each incident until you caught the individual putting on his mask - or exiting his home masked. Once identified, each got a wake-up call from the police, and later either a huge bill or jail time - or both. It's justice and those hoodlums deserved everything they got.
Even though a simple grope might seem fairly innocent (to men), it isn't.
Not only can it be very traumatic for the victim, it is also the beginning of the slope leading to worse sexual offenses for the perpetrator; the lack of respect for women combined with a sexual urge that goes beyond the norm is a clear indicator of worse things to come.
These violators need to be caught as fast as possible and prosecuted so they can get their 'certification' - the brand as a sexual offender. Then we'll have them under control when they're out and give them 'the time of their life' when they're behind bars. The experience of being in jail as a sexual offender are usually so awful that they'll do anything to avoid going back and that will keep them in check as the fear of jail will overrule the sexual urge and keep them from re-offending.
One thing is plants built in the wrong places or run by incompetent people... there's room for improvement there.
The waste is really a non-issue if you just get a bit creative about it.
The safest way to get rid of nuclear waste is to hurl it into the Sun. Of course current launch methods are still far too unreliable to make this a safe option. A waste rocket blowing up will be a truly bad thing...
A very safe alternative would be to drill a very deep hole (20-30 miles or more) and dump it in there, then plug the hole with concrete and rocks, possibly using explosives to collapse the hole at one or more points. Doesn't matter if the waste melts down or even goes nuclear down there. It will never affect or reach the surface in anything but geological time, and on that time scale the stuff is harmless if it ever works its way to the surface.
Well - it works doesn't it? A lot of file locker services shut down after the raid.
I know of NONE that shut down. A few disabled sharing, and several dozen new appeared on the scene...
As to the effect on the pirate scene it was negligible; I doubt many had issues finding alternatives to MegaUpload and I for one was perfectly able to find the stuff I wanted just as easily as when MegaUpload was around.
To tally the score:
Hugely expensive raid and now legal proceedings. Might end up in an acquittal and and counter-suit for damages and loss of business, plus legal precedent that allows for file lockers like this, Practically zero effect on piracy in the short run and an increase in the options available to pirates later (now).
In other words: MegaFail.
As something like 95% of the worlds supply of illegal opiates comes from Afghanistan, and the opium trade the primary source of income by far for the Taliban, dump the Agent Orange and the other herbicides on the opium fields in Afghanistan. Give the farmers a chance to switch, but if they don't - kill their fields.
I'm sure they have to justify their action to their corporate owners come next election.
The premise of the SyFy channels new show "Continuum" seems more and more real...
When Doctor Who started up again Demonoid torrents were the only way us USAians could see it *at all*.
I got all my Doctor Who needs adequately satisfied by www.thebox.bz who specializes in British TV. That they were proud of Doctor Who was evident in the fact that for a long time their main logo was the TARDIS and the name itself is also a reference to the TARDIS Police Box. These days, it's a slang reference to a tv set and both the main logo and favicon is a pictogram of a classic tv with a rabbit ear antenna. It's fast and the rips are always flawless (and often exclusive), and they treat their users decently and don't delete them or reset their ratio if they are away for a while. Yes, it's a private tracker, just like Demonoid was.
PS: Of course I bought the blu-rays (and deleted the downloads) when they came out, and BBC is fairly fast when it comes to releasing shows on consumer media, so we're talking a month or two where I borrowed the shows before being able to pay for it.