Cutting out this means flat out declaring the central figure of islam to be an inhuman moronic, cruel paedophilic bastard.
Of course, that's exactly what he was.
Exactly! - He was a pedophile who founded a death cult with the purpose of promoting his twisted and deranged views.
Until we face this reality, and force muslims to accept people saying this everywhere on this world, this won't end.
Again you're absolutely right. Islam needs several major reformations in order to be even slightly acceptable as a religion. Lose the rules, lose the death and destruction part, include some tolerance, love and understanding, not to mention decent views on homosexuality and women's rights, and it's getting there.
Of course, I'd rather that we discard it like all the other grand delusions we call religions.
"This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it!" -- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
Actually you have to set a limit somewhere. Moving from the file outwards, the first steps are now clear:
1) Hosting the file: BAD 2) Linking to the file: BAD 3) Running a portal with links to files: BAD 4) Linking to a portal with links to files: BAD 5) Running a portal with links to trackers that links to pieces of the files: BAD (mostly) 6) Linking to a portal with links to trackers that links to pieces of the files: Still okay 7) Running a portal with links to a hash values (magnet links): Still okay 8) Linking to a portal with links to a hash values (magnet links): Still okay
The magnet links are a in a grey zone. You can argue that a link to a hash value is useless without third party resources, and thus that it in itself in no way can be said to be illegal in itself.
This does not refute my point. Yes, you _can_ block e-mail without blocking web traffic. No, it wasn't a spam bot. But network administrators do not generally waste a lot of time investigating the sources of things that look like spam. They just drop in a total block on the IP address and forget about it.
If a network administrator doesn't know (or care) about the the difference between inbound port 25 traffic and outbound port 80 traffic he doesn't belong in that job!
You don't fix things with a mallet... you'll break things like that, usually more than you intended or expected.
Islam is so toxic that, like Communism, anyone advocating it deserves to be liquidated.
I don't think you know anything about Islam, Communism, or history.
Why am I equally convinced that you don't either?
Any ideology (religious or political) that wants to strip people of human rights and/or property is inherently evil and should be fought with any means necessary. Both Islam and Communism fits this bill, both in theory and practice.
Want examples?
- Draconian punishments for blasphemy, dissidence, apostasy etc. - "Nationalization" and similar. - Discrimination based on gender, sexuality, ethnic background etc. - Not one of 'us' => status as subhuman with less or no rights.
Just look around in any country or region where either are dominant and you'll see what I mean.
Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat.
Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content
And Google's lawyers will fight them every step of the way. The argument basically is this: If the content is illegal is the country where it's hosted, have them remove it from the servers. If it's illegal where you browse it, have a local filter deny access to it. If it's online and wants to be indexed, it's indexed.
This is of course the right stance. A search engine cannot and should not be be policing the net. Laws differ and it would quickly become an unsolvable problem to have the search engine sort data both at indexing time and a result presentation time according to more or less clear local laws and precedence around the world.
That sounds like a complete Kangaroo Court. Some high-up politicians must have been paid off for this.
They were. The Swedish attorney general was treated to a 14-day all-expenses-paid 'study-tour' to the US, paid for by... the MAFIAA. This was less than a week before the highly illegal raid was performed.
It was illegal because the attorney general signed the search warrant herself, which she could because she was also a judge (not active during her tenure as attorney general but still formally a judge). But this was a violation of the constitution (as it would be in most civilized countries) because you can't be both law giving (executive) and law interpreting (judiciary) according to the separation of powers and if it wasn't for a change in government following an election, it would likely have resulted in the forced termination of the attorney general.
Besides, the raid violated the warrant itself as it only covered servers affiliated with The Pirate Bay but hundreds of totally unrelated servers was also seized.
Last (but not least), it is important to know that NOTHING was found on the servers seized. No kiddie porn, no wares, no infringing files.
I think it's a basic case of 'information overload', a common problem when humans need to access data. By providing more data you assume that you are doing the human a service, but it's just the other way around. Too much information drown the relevant information. You can do some things to enhance important stuff (blinking, bold etc.) but quickly a lot of data becomes important in some way or another and then they're all blinking, again causing the truly relevant bits to drown.
This is taken from the field of human-computer interaction but it comes straight from cognitive psychology, and that is exactly relevant for any and all perception we have of the world around us, including the bits making up science.
I think we often end up having way too many facts (MRI images, blood tests, subjective patient statements, claims by drug companies, recently published research and so on) and then we get to solve the problem of an aching back. Way too much information - some might be incorrect, irrelevant or misleading - and there's no clear path and you get completely confused and possibly end up making things worse, despite the best of intentions.
Actually most dist-upgrade's on Debian run flawlessly - except for the very broken upgrade from woody to sarge... Broke a busy webhosting box completely. Apache broken (both apache and apache2 installed at the same time, both active but both with broken configuration files). PHP no longer installed (but apache thinking that it was). MySQL broken beyond repair. All pear and cpan libraries/packages uninstalled. Dozens of configuration files overwritten. Horrible mess!
The modern 'aptitude upgrade' is nothing short of amazing. I once tried to upgrade - in one jump - from the aforementioned sarge to squeeze (skipping etch and lenny completely), which is a massive step as everything has changed significantly, and it did it in about 3 minutes plus *one* reboot.
When I first gave it the command it 'thought' about it for a few seconds before it presented an unbelievable solution with multiple screens of steps. I let it do it and it chucked away. As the kernel was upgraded significantly and some of the new stuff incompatible with the old kernel it actually scheduled a reboot a little over half way through. At the end it was now a squeeze box that worked almost flawlessly. It defaulted to keeping the locally configured configuration files so a few things needed a reconfiguration (postfix for instance) so that couldn't help to cause a few hiccups. But overall it worked like a charm. Compare this to upgrading a box from Windows 98 to Windows 7 (disregarding the fact that a box current for Windows 98 most likely can't run Windows 7)... I can't see that working as flawlessly.
I'm pretty sure it's a central qualification point when they're hiring staff. That and a total lack of people skills. If you've got even a shred of either of those you're out! - and probably added to a watchlist for being subversive.
Seriously, why in the world are they monitoring tweets for terrorist threats? - Okay, I know they're actually thinking that terrorists and criminals are happy to self-incriminate; after all for decades there have been a question on the immigration form asking "Are you traveling to the US to commit a crime?" which now have been join by "Are you traveling to the US to commit terror?". Yes, they actually ask that. They obviously expect both criminals to and terrorists to be stupid enough to self-incriminate because if you answer yes to either you're bound to get deported pretty fast - because they have no sense of humor, remember?
If publishers (and authors, and musicians, and labels) want to end piracy, it's really simple!. Clue bat: (a) make your material available, (b) DRM-free, (c) at reasonable prices. Start with step (a). The stuff I have pirated is all material that I cannot otherwise get. As long as these idiots continue to shoot themselves in their collective foot, piracy will thrive.
Exactly! - Well said.
I'm sure they know this... and chose to ignore it. Perhaps they're really, really, really stupid... but I think it's all about admitting the huge hole in their now seriously obsolete business model. They know they could make a lot more money and reduce the piracy to the freeloaders who's always been around with cassette tapes, VCR tapes and whatever it took to make a copy of someone elses stuff for free. It didn't hurt anything in the past decades and it still won't. Besides, back then they were already circumventing the geo-discrimination already rampant back then so it could have been even less.
Here's an example from real life that shows how stupid release rules kills the business. A few years back I wanted a certain title by a certain french artist. I'm in Denmark so it has to be imported, but both Denmark and France is in the EU with the internal market and everything so that should be a piece of cake... Nope. Turns out the artist is distributed by a label here that owns the rights to all the titles by this artist but chooses to release only two (there's like 25-30) here. So, my local shop (who I'm eager to support) can just import it themselves, right? Nope. The label ACTIVELY blocks 'parallel import' so the shop cannot import it. I can import it myself quite easily by doing it online, but that would mean cutting my local shop out of the loop, thus costing it a sale. I don't want that. I can also give up having already waited and returned several times etc. Both options hurts my local shop who already invested time in researching this. There's no way they can turn this into a sale.
I did get the title online (and my local shop died) but the stupid policy of not releasing all the titles and blocking attempts at importing them moved the sale from Denmark to France (a loss to the danish distributor) but could easily have lost the sale altogether because of the hassle. Some countries actually also block private import (Denmark didn't ratify that part of the Info-Soc directive which controls all this) which means I'd have been shit out of luck and had to go to the pirate market to get it. That would mean that nobody got paid at all (except perhaps a pirate) and that hurts both the label and the artist. Just how stupid is that policy?!?!
Wouldn't it be better if the countries in question had to block Twitter altogether to get rid of dissent? - That would cause more frustration and more anger towards the authorities, thus hopefully resulting in a revolution. Greyed out tweets won't have the same effect, and the goal here must be freedom from any form of censorship, right?
If your work is artistically original enough, you might even be allowed to use exact copying as a technique without a license.
Yes, that's fairly common. An example would be artists that either recompose an iconic images ("The Scream" by Edvard Munch for instance or cut them up to produce collages and similar.
On the other hand, if your work has no originality, even changing the medium doesn't shield you from copyright claims.
Perhaps, but that doesn't make it right. Sometimes the original has so much 'weight' that it severely limits similar artistic expression. Try making any movie or ad campaign where the lead is a tramp with a bowler hat, big shoes and a came... no matter if you make the tramp a 7 feet tall black heavyweight wrestler/boxer or similar variations - you're still infringing on Charlie Chaplins many trademarks and you *will* lose in court.
Actually... There's a bunch of cases pending where people have been prevented from taking pictures from public ground of a public (or semi-private) location like an elevated subway station or a mall. The rent-a-cops prevents people from snapping pics to the extent of confiscating cameras and having people arrested. The reason given is that XXX owns the right to all pictures of YYY and if you don't have an explicit written permission, you're infringing on their rights.
Also the fear of terrorists are often mentioned. Usually extremely ridiculous as a simple Google search usually reveals a lot of pictures, often much more detailed, not to mention street view and Google maps.
The two photos are *very* different. Sure, they're both a picture of a classic red London double decker bus crossing the same bridge in front of Whitehall and Big Ben, and both have all colors of everything except the red bus reduced to monochrome, but the viewpoint and framing are very different.
So what is unique about the original? - Nothing really.
The idea of using monochrome with a rare splash of color (often red actually) has been used many times, both in countless stills and in motion pictures, most obvious and iconic being "Schindler's List" from 1993 (long before the original picture in this case), so that process and effect cannot be said to be unique.
The idea of combining an iconic red double decker bus and Big Ben has also been used billions of times in everything from adverts, over tourist photos to postcards and souvenir prints on mugs, t-shirts etc.
Combining these two are not in any way a unique creative leap. It's just applying a specific concept to a classic scene. Nothing more.
If this is allowed to stand it would instantly make a trillions of pictures infringing because someone, somewhere most likely have snapped a comparable photo and thus using the Bern Accord have copyright on 'the idea' of taking a picture of the scene in question. This consequence is of course absurd but the direct result of such a ruling.
Now, someone claimed that the second photo was made specifically to avoid licensing the original, and that should make the case more obvious in favor of the original, but it's just the other way around. It is *normal* to do just that, i.e. make a similar but different product in order to avoid patents and licensing fees. This is a good thing because it creates variation; the alternative being a static and sparse selection, usually at a very high price because of lack of competition. Imagine if the concept of a pen was interpreted as loosely as in this case - there would be exactly one brand on the market and it would be expensive. Competitors would have to pay a licensing fee that would make their version more expensive than the original and thus a failure before they even are made.
How about a system where you need to enter the password within a certain time frame (within xx hours of the last time you entered it). If not then no password will work ever, no matter what you do. Any attempt at power-on will result in the wipe of the system.
No judge can expect you to figure out a technical bypass and there's no password to reveal.
Sure, all data is lost but that would be better than self-incrimination and whatever else could happen if outsiders got access.
They were all out of $2,000 wrenches... So they bought a used one from NASA... Original price: $26,000 - Now at the bargain price: $13,000 - That's half price!
Everybody - myself included - signed up for file sharing not online storage and if they stop providing this service I want my money back! - As do 99% of their other (former) customers so that will put a massive dent in their finances... probably fatally massive.
And MegaUpload was in Hong Kong... This protection of operating outside the US only works if both servers and actual people (CEO etc.) are in countries not in the pocket of US law enforcement.
From MegaUpload we can learn that some countries are puppets of the US authorities doing their beck and call. If you're Rapidshare or any of the others, you better find out if your country is one of them - and move if necessary!
Slashdot Mirror
Cutting out this means flat out declaring the central figure of islam to be an inhuman moronic, cruel paedophilic bastard.
Of course, that's exactly what he was.
Exactly! - He was a pedophile who founded a death cult with the purpose of promoting his twisted and deranged views.
Until we face this reality, and force muslims to accept people saying this everywhere on this world, this won't end.
Again you're absolutely right. Islam needs several major reformations in order to be even slightly acceptable as a religion. Lose the rules, lose the death and destruction part, include some tolerance, love and understanding, not to mention decent views on homosexuality and women's rights, and it's getting there.
Of course, I'd rather that we discard it like all the other grand delusions we call religions.
"This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it!"
-- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
Actually you have to set a limit somewhere. Moving from the file outwards, the first steps are now clear:
1) Hosting the file: BAD
2) Linking to the file: BAD
3) Running a portal with links to files: BAD
4) Linking to a portal with links to files: BAD
5) Running a portal with links to trackers that links to pieces of the files: BAD (mostly)
6) Linking to a portal with links to trackers that links to pieces of the files: Still okay
7) Running a portal with links to a hash values (magnet links): Still okay
8) Linking to a portal with links to a hash values (magnet links): Still okay
The magnet links are a in a grey zone. You can argue that a link to a hash value is useless without third party resources, and thus that it in itself in no way can be said to be illegal in itself.
This does not refute my point. Yes, you _can_ block e-mail without blocking web traffic. No, it wasn't a spam bot. But network administrators do not generally waste a lot of time investigating the sources of things that look like spam. They just drop in a total block on the IP address and forget about it.
If a network administrator doesn't know (or care) about the the difference between inbound port 25 traffic and outbound port 80 traffic he doesn't belong in that job!
You don't fix things with a mallet... you'll break things like that, usually more than you intended or expected.
Islam is so toxic that, like Communism, anyone advocating it deserves to be liquidated.
I don't think you know anything about Islam, Communism, or history.
Why am I equally convinced that you don't either?
Any ideology (religious or political) that wants to strip people of human rights and/or property is inherently evil and should be fought with any means necessary. Both Islam and Communism fits this bill, both in theory and practice.
Want examples?
- Draconian punishments for blasphemy, dissidence, apostasy etc.
- "Nationalization" and similar.
- Discrimination based on gender, sexuality, ethnic background etc.
- Not one of 'us' => status as subhuman with less or no rights.
Just look around in any country or region where either are dominant and you'll see what I mean.
Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat.
HA! - Good one!
Gotta remember that!
Exactly.
When one person suffers from it, it's a delusion. When a group does it, it's a cult. When a lot do it, it's called religion.
Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content
And Google's lawyers will fight them every step of the way. The argument basically is this: If the content is illegal is the country where it's hosted, have them remove it from the servers. If it's illegal where you browse it, have a local filter deny access to it. If it's online and wants to be indexed, it's indexed.
This is of course the right stance. A search engine cannot and should not be be policing the net. Laws differ and it would quickly become an unsolvable problem to have the search engine sort data both at indexing time and a result presentation time according to more or less clear local laws and precedence around the world.
I refuse to be part of such a censorship scheme so it's time to move.
What alternatives are recommended? - It is a must that a backup made on blogspot can be restored on the new service.
That sounds like a complete Kangaroo Court. Some high-up politicians must have been paid off for this.
They were. The Swedish attorney general was treated to a 14-day all-expenses-paid 'study-tour' to the US, paid for by... the MAFIAA. This was less than a week before the highly illegal raid was performed.
It was illegal because the attorney general signed the search warrant herself, which she could because she was also a judge (not active during her tenure as attorney general but still formally a judge). But this was a violation of the constitution (as it would be in most civilized countries) because you can't be both law giving (executive) and law interpreting (judiciary) according to the separation of powers and if it wasn't for a change in government following an election, it would likely have resulted in the forced termination of the attorney general.
Besides, the raid violated the warrant itself as it only covered servers affiliated with The Pirate Bay but hundreds of totally unrelated servers was also seized.
Last (but not least), it is important to know that NOTHING was found on the servers seized. No kiddie porn, no wares, no infringing files.
Totally agree.
I think it's a basic case of 'information overload', a common problem when humans need to access data. By providing more data you assume that you are doing the human a service, but it's just the other way around. Too much information drown the relevant information. You can do some things to enhance important stuff (blinking, bold etc.) but quickly a lot of data becomes important in some way or another and then they're all blinking, again causing the truly relevant bits to drown.
This is taken from the field of human-computer interaction but it comes straight from cognitive psychology, and that is exactly relevant for any and all perception we have of the world around us, including the bits making up science.
I think we often end up having way too many facts (MRI images, blood tests, subjective patient statements, claims by drug companies, recently published research and so on) and then we get to solve the problem of an aching back. Way too much information - some might be incorrect, irrelevant or misleading - and there's no clear path and you get completely confused and possibly end up making things worse, despite the best of intentions.
Actually most dist-upgrade's on Debian run flawlessly - except for the very broken upgrade from woody to sarge... Broke a busy webhosting box completely. Apache broken (both apache and apache2 installed at the same time, both active but both with broken configuration files). PHP no longer installed (but apache thinking that it was). MySQL broken beyond repair. All pear and cpan libraries/packages uninstalled. Dozens of configuration files overwritten. Horrible mess!
The modern 'aptitude upgrade' is nothing short of amazing. I once tried to upgrade - in one jump - from the aforementioned sarge to squeeze (skipping etch and lenny completely), which is a massive step as everything has changed significantly, and it did it in about 3 minutes plus *one* reboot.
When I first gave it the command it 'thought' about it for a few seconds before it presented an unbelievable solution with multiple screens of steps. I let it do it and it chucked away. As the kernel was upgraded significantly and some of the new stuff incompatible with the old kernel it actually scheduled a reboot a little over half way through. At the end it was now a squeeze box that worked almost flawlessly. It defaulted to keeping the locally configured configuration files so a few things needed a reconfiguration (postfix for instance) so that couldn't help to cause a few hiccups. But overall it worked like a charm. Compare this to upgrading a box from Windows 98 to Windows 7 (disregarding the fact that a box current for Windows 98 most likely can't run Windows 7)... I can't see that working as flawlessly.
Good point. Don't feed the trolls.
I'm pretty sure it's a central qualification point when they're hiring staff. That and a total lack of people skills. If you've got even a shred of either of those you're out! - and probably added to a watchlist for being subversive.
Seriously, why in the world are they monitoring tweets for terrorist threats? - Okay, I know they're actually thinking that terrorists and criminals are happy to self-incriminate; after all for decades there have been a question on the immigration form asking "Are you traveling to the US to commit a crime?" which now have been join by "Are you traveling to the US to commit terror?". Yes, they actually ask that. They obviously expect both criminals to and terrorists to be stupid enough to self-incriminate because if you answer yes to either you're bound to get deported pretty fast - because they have no sense of humor, remember?
If publishers (and authors, and musicians, and labels) want to end piracy, it's really simple!. Clue bat: (a) make your material available, (b) DRM-free, (c) at reasonable prices. Start with step (a). The stuff I have pirated is all material that I cannot otherwise get. As long as these idiots continue to shoot themselves in their collective foot, piracy will thrive.
Exactly! - Well said.
I'm sure they know this... and chose to ignore it. Perhaps they're really, really, really stupid... but I think it's all about admitting the huge hole in their now seriously obsolete business model. They know they could make a lot more money and reduce the piracy to the freeloaders who's always been around with cassette tapes, VCR tapes and whatever it took to make a copy of someone elses stuff for free. It didn't hurt anything in the past decades and it still won't. Besides, back then they were already circumventing the geo-discrimination already rampant back then so it could have been even less.
Here's an example from real life that shows how stupid release rules kills the business. A few years back I wanted a certain title by a certain french artist. I'm in Denmark so it has to be imported, but both Denmark and France is in the EU with the internal market and everything so that should be a piece of cake... Nope. Turns out the artist is distributed by a label here that owns the rights to all the titles by this artist but chooses to release only two (there's like 25-30) here. So, my local shop (who I'm eager to support) can just import it themselves, right? Nope. The label ACTIVELY blocks 'parallel import' so the shop cannot import it. I can import it myself quite easily by doing it online, but that would mean cutting my local shop out of the loop, thus costing it a sale. I don't want that. I can also give up having already waited and returned several times etc. Both options hurts my local shop who already invested time in researching this. There's no way they can turn this into a sale.
I did get the title online (and my local shop died) but the stupid policy of not releasing all the titles and blocking attempts at importing them moved the sale from Denmark to France (a loss to the danish distributor) but could easily have lost the sale altogether because of the hassle. Some countries actually also block private import (Denmark didn't ratify that part of the Info-Soc directive which controls all this) which means I'd have been shit out of luck and had to go to the pirate market to get it. That would mean that nobody got paid at all (except perhaps a pirate) and that hurts both the label and the artist. Just how stupid is that policy?!?!
Wouldn't it be better if the countries in question had to block Twitter altogether to get rid of dissent? - That would cause more frustration and more anger towards the authorities, thus hopefully resulting in a revolution. Greyed out tweets won't have the same effect, and the goal here must be freedom from any form of censorship, right?
If your work is artistically original enough, you might even be allowed to use exact copying as a technique without a license.
Yes, that's fairly common. An example would be artists that either recompose an iconic images ("The Scream" by Edvard Munch for instance or cut them up to produce collages and similar.
On the other hand, if your work has no originality, even changing the medium doesn't shield you from copyright claims.
Perhaps, but that doesn't make it right. Sometimes the original has so much 'weight' that it severely limits similar artistic expression. Try making any movie or ad campaign where the lead is a tramp with a bowler hat, big shoes and a came... no matter if you make the tramp a 7 feet tall black heavyweight wrestler/boxer or similar variations - you're still infringing on Charlie Chaplins many trademarks and you *will* lose in court.
Yes! - I'm sure someone, somewhere have used both Big Ben and a Louboutin shoe in the same picture do there's no doubt here! :)
Actually... There's a bunch of cases pending where people have been prevented from taking pictures from public ground of a public (or semi-private) location like an elevated subway station or a mall. The rent-a-cops prevents people from snapping pics to the extent of confiscating cameras and having people arrested. The reason given is that XXX owns the right to all pictures of YYY and if you don't have an explicit written permission, you're infringing on their rights.
Also the fear of terrorists are often mentioned. Usually extremely ridiculous as a simple Google search usually reveals a lot of pictures, often much more detailed, not to mention street view and Google maps.
I most certainly disagree with the judge.
The two photos are *very* different. Sure, they're both a picture of a classic red London double decker bus crossing the same bridge in front of Whitehall and Big Ben, and both have all colors of everything except the red bus reduced to monochrome, but the viewpoint and framing are very different.
So what is unique about the original? - Nothing really.
The idea of using monochrome with a rare splash of color (often red actually) has been used many times, both in countless stills and in motion pictures, most obvious and iconic being "Schindler's List" from 1993 (long before the original picture in this case), so that process and effect cannot be said to be unique.
The idea of combining an iconic red double decker bus and Big Ben has also been used billions of times in everything from adverts, over tourist photos to postcards and souvenir prints on mugs, t-shirts etc.
Combining these two are not in any way a unique creative leap. It's just applying a specific concept to a classic scene. Nothing more.
If this is allowed to stand it would instantly make a trillions of pictures infringing because someone, somewhere most likely have snapped a comparable photo and thus using the Bern Accord have copyright on 'the idea' of taking a picture of the scene in question. This consequence is of course absurd but the direct result of such a ruling.
Now, someone claimed that the second photo was made specifically to avoid licensing the original, and that should make the case more obvious in favor of the original, but it's just the other way around. It is *normal* to do just that, i.e. make a similar but different product in order to avoid patents and licensing fees. This is a good thing because it creates variation; the alternative being a static and sparse selection, usually at a very high price because of lack of competition. Imagine if the concept of a pen was interpreted as loosely as in this case - there would be exactly one brand on the market and it would be expensive. Competitors would have to pay a licensing fee that would make their version more expensive than the original and thus a failure before they even are made.
How about a system where you need to enter the password within a certain time frame (within xx hours of the last time you entered it). If not then no password will work ever, no matter what you do. Any attempt at power-on will result in the wipe of the system.
No judge can expect you to figure out a technical bypass and there's no password to reveal.
Sure, all data is lost but that would be better than self-incrimination and whatever else could happen if outsiders got access.
They were all out of $2,000 wrenches... So they bought a used one from NASA... Original price: $26,000 - Now at the bargain price: $13,000 - That's half price!
I am pro-abortion... abortion of all offspring of those bible-thumping morons in the misnamed pro-life movement.
The guy was and is right: God does not exist. Never did either.
What's the problem? - Who cares if you believe in the Flying Teapot or the Spaghetti Monster? Or Budda? Or Xenu? Or God?
Keep your beliefs private and let others do the same. The world would be a much better place instantly.
Bankruptcy!
Everybody - myself included - signed up for file sharing not online storage and if they stop providing this service I want my money back! - As do 99% of their other (former) customers so that will put a massive dent in their finances... probably fatally massive.
And MegaUpload was in Hong Kong... This protection of operating outside the US only works if both servers and actual people (CEO etc.) are in countries not in the pocket of US law enforcement.
From MegaUpload we can learn that some countries are puppets of the US authorities doing their beck and call. If you're Rapidshare or any of the others, you better find out if your country is one of them - and move if necessary!