I'm extremely curious as to why they're using what seems like DANISH PIs in SWEDEN? - Doesn't make any sense at all. The danish PI license isn't valid in Sweden, and as there's a supertax on danish car registrations more than tripling the price of the car, it absolutely doesn't make sense that swedish PI's would have car with danish registrations (license plates)... very strange story.
But the whole thing Price's got going here... it's stupid and bound to be a massive loser. Even if he wins he'll lose because I'm certain that there'll be no more Mr. Nice Pirate when it comes to his stuff. Everything will be ripped and spread so massively that his sales will plummet to zero. I mean he asked for it and so he'll get it - and he deserves every bit of damage. I'm also sure his website(s) will be wiped out and his email will probably also be hacked and stolen.
Yes, I am on standby for a datacenter, and no - ignoring a call isn't an option. We have these things called contracts, and I for one do not want to spend my standby shifts sitting in front of a computer just because a few assholes gets annoyed by me talking on a cellphone. The cellphone was invented in order not to be tied down to a static location and it's not like we're talking full support calls when we're on standby - it's simple message calls that usually lasts less than a minute.
What we need are not cellphone-free zones but a bit of common sense (which isn't very common actually). People that need to talk on the cellphone needs to take it somewhere private, not in the middle of a full bus or similar. Also, people that are next to someone on a cellphone needs to chill and stop being 'allergic' to only hearing one side of a conversation. After all, nobody complains about being exposed to the very same conversation between two people physically next to you, probably because they now get all the juicy details and don't have to guess all the time... rather pathetic actually.
In Denmark, selling the tracking would also be criminal, because they newer was the car owners.
That's actually not entirely correct. Legally a device left in your car intentionally is considered a gift unless it is clearly marked as being owned by someone else. Unless a court order exists you'll have the right to remove the device and return it to the owner. You also have the right to publish the story and expose the police as violators of the constitution ("Grundloven") which mandates a court order either prior to placing the device or shortly afterwards if there wasn't time to obtain one before the device had to be put in place.
So, if the device isn't marked and clearly was put there intentionally (not left by accident) and the police refuses to acknowledge the device being there, it's yours to do with as you please - which includes sending it around the world or simply destroying it.
He was convicted according to the ACT act which even at its title equates filesharing with theft, which is fundamentally wrong. He should plead not guilty on the basis that 0's and 1's cannot be owned and that the copyright owners so far has failed to prove conclusively that an illegal download costs revenue in any way, shape or form. As this never can be proven beyond any doubt, filesharing will be legal from then on.
The important distinction is that, in this case, censorship adds value for some consumers, while DRM does not.
How can you ADD value by REMOVING something that was intentionally included in the product by its creators?
A product that's missing some part is defective by any definition and an artistic creation is all or nothing. It's completely unbelievable that they've gotten away with selling vandalized stuff like this for so long. It should be illegal to sell something like this without a HUGE label informing the user that THIS PRODUCT HAS BEEN MODIFIED FROM ITS INTENDED FORM BY REMOVING CERTAIN LYRICS AND/OR PIECES OF ARTWORK IN ORDER TO SATISFY A MORALLY CHALLENGED CENSORSHIP BOARD.
>./advf4-31 PAUSE INIT DONE statement executed To resume execution, type go. Other input will terminate the job. go Execution resumes after PAUSE.
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?
yes
SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND
FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED
THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID
TO WORK IN THE CAVE. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT
ME WITH COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS.
(ERRORS, SUGGESTIONS, COMPLAINTS TO CROWTHER)
(IF STUCK TYPE HELP FOR SOME HINTS)
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK
BUILDING . AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL
STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
enter
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
This is absolutely NOT a crime. If they can't afford it, they can't afford it. People can't afford cars, software, etc, should they then be allowed to just take those? RIAA music is not a life necessity.
There it is again! - Copying music is NOT stealing!!! - If you take a car you cannot afford, you're removing it from the owners possession so he/she cannot use it. Making a copy of music you cannot afford does not prevent the owner of the original from still using his property. Huge difference!
Just to make something clear on my behalf - I support sharing of music and I support actions against those MAFIAA organisations that make insane profits (60%-80% of the price you pay for a new CD goes to pure profit) and try to control distribution and access to their products in order to manipulate isolated markets and make even more money. It's an obsolete business model and they know it, but their greed is greater than their common sense.
They download files suspected of violating their clients rights, but they have no idea whether the file really is what it claims to be, nor whether the copyright owner actually has licensed the work to be shared by P2P networks but only to be used for personal enjoyment, not for law enforcement purposes and similar. Remember, the copyright owner can make such limitations, which actually are tame compared to some of the limitations RIAA routinely puts on their 'property'.
In my opinion just one file illegally downloaded by RIAA invalidates their entire legal process. In civilian law there are no loopholes that allow for breaking some laws in order to enforce others - and that's a very good thing.
Long jail time isn't so interesting here... Make him pay all his victims expenses due to his spams... And make him work off any debt he cannot pay through chain gang labour while wearing a pink overall with the word "SPAMMER" in huge capital letters both front and back. While working in public it should be allowed to spit or pee on him, throw things at him (even from moving cars) and so on.
It's only a matter of setting up shop outside the US and offer Halo 3 and similar to the kids via the net. If it is illegal the demand is going to be high.
The very idea that people are turned into serial killers by a game is so insane that it is beyond words. So there was no serial killers before videogames were invented? - I think not.
It is only matter of entertainment, i.e. people that later become serial killers also play games, just like the rest of the population. There is no cause and effect here, only random similarity.
If there is a probable cause for the insanity that creates serial killers, it is being raised by parents with fanatic views on certain aspects of life, like Jack Thompson here(!). Often parental abuse enters the picture as well.
Experienced GPS navigators telling us to make U-turns in the middle of freeways, to turn right where there's no sign of any road on the right hand side and so on?
One thing is that people are stupid enough to follow such directions, another is that the map technology clearly isn't up to par. Imagine a car with 'auto-drive' that blindly follows directions just like people do, but without the little bit of sanity that made those ambulance drivers stop after 200 miles and realize that they were a bit off course... A computerized driver would just have kept on going, possibly attempting to reach the goal going 'the other way', i.e. around the globe, which includes a fair amount of undersea driving...
Exactly how long did they expect it to take before their takedowns were rumoured on the net, for instance here on/. ?
Exactly how long after that did they expect it to take before a gazillion nerds made sure that 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 were everywhere on the net - and then some?
Exactly how stupid are the MPAA?
Let me quote the old cyberpunk mantra: "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE". What part of that don't they understand?
My motto has always been: "If you can do the crime, you can do the time". Sure, children shouldn't be locked up with adults but the penalties should be the same when the crime is the same, and if the punishment is the death penalty so be it, even for the retarded.
Why? - Because the crime was the same. If you kill someone, that someone is dead regardless of the age and mental maturity of the murderer.
It might be that we need to discuss the responsibilities of the guardians - should the parents be punished instead when their children commit crimes? - Doesn't matter to me as long as there are consequences to committing a crime and that they are the same regardless of who the victim or the perpetrator is.
And no, I'm not part of the "Christian Right" - I'm actually an atheist.
But back on the topic - not only do I loathe RIAA, MPAA and all similar organisations and what they stand for, I also feel that their crusade against piracy isn't about piracy or even money - it's all a matter of retaining control in a market that got obsolete about a decade ago when recording facilities came within reach of regular people. Now people can record, mix and distribute their music without anyone else profiting from it because they don't need the services the labels used to provide. They don't need to hire a studio and producers and so on, just to realize a recording and thus the ability to share your music.
But what about MPAA? - Well, their model became obsolete when the home video recorder came out. They use stupid release rules to ensure that people first have to go to the cinemas to see a movie, later they can watch it on pay-per-view tv-channels and later again they can buy a copy to watch at home. And if you live outside the USA you'll have to wait even longer for everything, if the movie comes out at all that is.
What we need is global releases to all media forms. This way the cinemas have to survive on something different than a monopoly; they would need to offer something special to make people go there instead of watching a movie at home. The facilities need to be much, much better and offer something not easily available at home. After all, people still go out to eat despite it being more expensive and everybody having a kitchen and food at home. A similar model is needed for the cinemas, not a stupid monopoly.
...to download music and movies... The courts have settled on the matter long ago and if you pay the levy on digital media, you have paid for everything you download.
But you don't really think that copyright infringement and mugging share a common moral space, do you? Death penalty for speeders while we're at it?
Exactly what I was going to write!:)
As we all know (or should know): Copyright infringement is NOT theft! - It's about making a copy of someone elses property, not removing it. The only loss involved is the potential (but unlikely) loss of a sale to the person obtaining a copy for free.
So, comparing something less than theft (copyright infringement) with something way above theft (armed robbery) is just incredibly stupid and very much off the point.
No, YouTube shouldn't have complied at all here. Let Fox find out who had access to the shows a week in advance (it can't be that many people) and grill them. After all, they've signed some kind of contract with Fox in order to have that access, so in case of a security breach one of them has to be the one responsible and thus the one Fox wants. No need to involve outside parties at all.
Actually they cannot refuse providing the new key to all licensed software players... the producers of these have a contract that - if broken by the MPAA - guarantees a major lawsuit for damages and loss of income. MPAA will be financially wiped out by just denying a new key to one major software player, let alone all of them.
But then, hardware players can also be debugged just like a software player - it's a bit more cumbersome but it can be done or there would be no hardware players.
It's actually pretty simple: If you're going to use something copyrighted to create something new that you use for educational or non-profit purposes, you can do that - and your creation becomes copyrighted itself so any commercial use still requires both your and the original copyright owners' permission.
A teacher can use clippings from newspapers and textbooks to create his own teaching materials. As long as he doesn't sell it, and all the sources are paid for, this is fair use.
A fan can create a free fansite for his idol featuring copyrighted pics and audio/video clips. As long as it is run not for profit or official promotion, this is fair use. This means that ads on the site isn't allowed by the way.
The first example is constructed but the second example comes from real life, backed up by $1.500/hour entertainment lawyers.
Explaining why making a digital is theft as the MPAA/RIAA claims (which is legally isn't) is rather hard.
"But when I make a copy, the original doesn't go away! - It isn't lost to the owner! - When I steal a car, the owner loses it and that's an obvious problem."
"No, it's the artist that loses the income from what you should have paid for your copy."
"But if I couldn't get the free copy I wouldn't have it. I wouldn't have paid anything. So where's the loss?"
Calling the treatment of the prisoners at Gitmo torture (Webster: to punish or coerce by inflicting excruciating pain) is an abuse of the word that calls for a much stronger word to describe true torture. What's been done at Gitmo - if anything - is what's called "moderate physical pressure" and it's mostly annoying and not truly painful, not does it leave permanent physical physical damages. You cannot compare that to medival torture that featured cuts, burns and stretching that most definately resulted in permanent physical damage.
A completely different issue is whether the prisoners at Gitmo actually is entitled to human rights protection. One can argue that sufficient inhuman behaviour can result in the loss of ones human rights. Personally I feel that terrorism qualify for that as the terrorists certainly abuses everybody elses human rights grossly. If it was up to me, the punishment for terrorism should be death by prolonged torture (with medical support to extend the amount of survivable pain).
As to whether the prisoners are terrorists or not, it's mostly op to themselves to have that settled. Most are extremely uncooperative 24/7. It's a fact that most were captured in non-uniform clothing armed (and often engaging allied forces) in Iraq and Afghanistan and as that falls outside the Geneva conventions, they're either spies or terrorists and thus with absolutely no rights (according to that set of conventions).
Mine were CP/M formatted with dual-side storage of 400KB on each side, totalling a whopping 800KB!:)
The ones I still have holds (held?) a customized version (made by your truly) of CP/M featuring dual session (actually able to run two programs simultanously), a 26th line status bar with clock, printer status etc. and up to 58KB of available memory (out of the 64KB hardware maximum) that could be fully shared between the two programs. There were also source code for my asm86 versions of the block-graphic games PACMAN, GALAXIANS (space invaders), DONKEY KONG, LABYRINTH (find your way of a maze shown in a 3D view) and a few other things which I forget now. All ran on the Z80-based RC702 Piccolo our schools hade back in the early 1980's. A few of these were initially coded in COMPAS Pascal and ported to asm86 later (re-written, not cross-compiled).
I still have the sources in paper hardcopy somewhere...
All torrents are legal to share! - because as far as I know no studio or record label has yet copyrighted the torrent hash of their movies (kinda stupid as it differs for each rip, but still).
It has been repeated so many times now that torrents themselves contain absolutely no data from the possibly copyrighted work they refer to, nor is there any way to recreate any part of the copyrighted work from the torrent data. A torrent is nothing more than a sophisticated pointer to data provided by someone else, and this site is just a search engine with pointers to these pointers. There is no way for the engine to determine the legality of the materials it indexes (like any search engine) thus it cannot be held responsible for any infraction committed by someone linked through a torrent that's linked on the site. There is no legal difference between a google search featuring "ext:torrent" and this site.
So please, stop the witch hunt now and accept that short of banning all search engines and all portal pages there is no way to stop sites like this. We basically have to shut down the net, and while that would also make sharing of illegal copies of music and movie somewhat harder, it would also cause infinitely more harm than good.
...that it hurts the only people that in a sane world should profit from music and movies: The people creating it. It was never about the money men (taking chances on new artists with hit potential) or the distribution chain. They are just middle men that should profit a little bit from their niche.
Today artists don't need a professional studio, nor do they need a huge upfront loan. Many new artists finance their own albums (usually because the big labels never take chances anymore) and they only need retail distribution (unless they intend to sell exclusively from their website). This model leaves no room for the big labels and they know it.
Same thing in the movie business. Most of the better movies are made as independent productions, usually with a fairly limited budget and they only need some form of distribution. Why the major studios pour hundreds of millions into huge productions with overrated stars and too many special effects - and no story - remain a mystery. But they want a return on those investments and as the sales usually don't match the expectations, they need to squeeze the consumer even more, and DRM is great at that.
1) The problem is discovered. 2) The problem is reported to the vendor, the report including a fixed resonable date for either a fix or the date for the final fix (to allow for tough fixes). The time alotted reflects the severity of the problem - more severe results in less time. 3) When this fixed date or the vendor date (if given) is reached, the problem is disclosed regardless, complete with POC exploit if available.
This method forces vendors to take security reports seriously and it makes it THEIR problem if the the issue is disclosed before a fix is available. Aften all, if a security researcher can find the problem, so can the really bad guys and they will most certainly not advise the vendor, leaving a free avenue of intrusion that may last a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm extremely curious as to why they're using what seems like DANISH PIs in SWEDEN? - Doesn't make any sense at all. The danish PI license isn't valid in Sweden, and as there's a supertax on danish car registrations more than tripling the price of the car, it absolutely doesn't make sense that swedish PI's would have car with danish registrations (license plates)... very strange story.
But the whole thing Price's got going here... it's stupid and bound to be a massive loser. Even if he wins he'll lose because I'm certain that there'll be no more Mr. Nice Pirate when it comes to his stuff. Everything will be ripped and spread so massively that his sales will plummet to zero. I mean he asked for it and so he'll get it - and he deserves every bit of damage. I'm also sure his website(s) will be wiped out and his email will probably also be hacked and stolen.
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
- Calvin (& Hobbes)
Yes, I am on standby for a datacenter, and no - ignoring a call isn't an option. We have these things called contracts, and I for one do not want to spend my standby shifts sitting in front of a computer just because a few assholes gets annoyed by me talking on a cellphone. The cellphone was invented in order not to be tied down to a static location and it's not like we're talking full support calls when we're on standby - it's simple message calls that usually lasts less than a minute.
What we need are not cellphone-free zones but a bit of common sense (which isn't very common actually). People that need to talk on the cellphone needs to take it somewhere private, not in the middle of a full bus or similar. Also, people that are next to someone on a cellphone needs to chill and stop being 'allergic' to only hearing one side of a conversation. After all, nobody complains about being exposed to the very same conversation between two people physically next to you, probably because they now get all the juicy details and don't have to guess all the time... rather pathetic actually.
That's actually not entirely correct. Legally a device left in your car intentionally is considered a gift unless it is clearly marked as being owned by someone else. Unless a court order exists you'll have the right to remove the device and return it to the owner. You also have the right to publish the story and expose the police as violators of the constitution ("Grundloven") which mandates a court order either prior to placing the device or shortly afterwards if there wasn't time to obtain one before the device had to be put in place.
So, if the device isn't marked and clearly was put there intentionally (not left by accident) and the police refuses to acknowledge the device being there, it's yours to do with as you please - which includes sending it around the world or simply destroying it.
Why did this guy plead guilty in the first place?
He was convicted according to the ACT act which even at its title equates filesharing with theft, which is fundamentally wrong. He should plead not guilty on the basis that 0's and 1's cannot be owned and that the copyright owners so far has failed to prove conclusively that an illegal download costs revenue in any way, shape or form. As this never can be proven beyond any doubt, filesharing will be legal from then on.
How can you ADD value by REMOVING something that was intentionally included in the product by its creators?
A product that's missing some part is defective by any definition and an artistic creation is all or nothing. It's completely unbelievable that they've gotten away with selling vandalized stuff like this for so long. It should be illegal to sell something like this without a HUGE label informing the user that THIS PRODUCT HAS BEEN MODIFIED FROM ITS INTENDED FORM BY REMOVING CERTAIN LYRICS AND/OR PIECES OF ARTWORK IN ORDER TO SATISFY A MORALLY CHALLENGED CENSORSHIP BOARD.
Let's try it out...
Just to make something clear on my behalf - I support sharing of music and I support actions against those MAFIAA organisations that make insane profits (60%-80% of the price you pay for a new CD goes to pure profit) and try to control distribution and access to their products in order to manipulate isolated markets and make even more money. It's an obsolete business model and they know it, but their greed is greater than their common sense.
They download files suspected of violating their clients rights, but they have no idea whether the file really is what it claims to be, nor whether the copyright owner actually has licensed the work to be shared by P2P networks but only to be used for personal enjoyment, not for law enforcement purposes and similar. Remember, the copyright owner can make such limitations, which actually are tame compared to some of the limitations RIAA routinely puts on their 'property'.
In my opinion just one file illegally downloaded by RIAA invalidates their entire legal process. In civilian law there are no loopholes that allow for breaking some laws in order to enforce others - and that's a very good thing.
Long jail time isn't so interesting here... Make him pay all his victims expenses due to his spams... And make him work off any debt he cannot pay through chain gang labour while wearing a pink overall with the word "SPAMMER" in huge capital letters both front and back. While working in public it should be allowed to spit or pee on him, throw things at him (even from moving cars) and so on.
It's only a matter of setting up shop outside the US and offer Halo 3 and similar to the kids via the net. If it is illegal the demand is going to be high.
The very idea that people are turned into serial killers by a game is so insane that it is beyond words. So there was no serial killers before videogames were invented? - I think not.
It is only matter of entertainment, i.e. people that later become serial killers also play games, just like the rest of the population. There is no cause and effect here, only random similarity.
If there is a probable cause for the insanity that creates serial killers, it is being raised by parents with fanatic views on certain aspects of life, like Jack Thompson here(!). Often parental abuse enters the picture as well.
Experienced GPS navigators telling us to make U-turns in the middle of freeways, to turn right where there's no sign of any road on the right hand side and so on?
One thing is that people are stupid enough to follow such directions, another is that the map technology clearly isn't up to par. Imagine a car with 'auto-drive' that blindly follows directions just like people do, but without the little bit of sanity that made those ambulance drivers stop after 200 miles and realize that they were a bit off course... A computerized driver would just have kept on going, possibly attempting to reach the goal going 'the other way', i.e. around the globe, which includes a fair amount of undersea driving...
Exactly how long did they expect it to take before their takedowns were rumoured on the net, for instance here on /. ?
Exactly how long after that did they expect it to take before a gazillion nerds made sure that 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 were everywhere on the net - and then some?
Exactly how stupid are the MPAA?
Let me quote the old cyberpunk mantra: "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE". What part of that don't they understand?
Hmmm... The first page works but if you click for a larger view...
CafePress.com Product Not Found
We are sorry, but the product you requested could not be found. The page you are looking for may have been renamed, moved, or deleted.
Eh... Have to jump in here...
My motto has always been: "If you can do the crime, you can do the time". Sure, children shouldn't be locked up with adults but the penalties should be the same when the crime is the same, and if the punishment is the death penalty so be it, even for the retarded.
Why? - Because the crime was the same. If you kill someone, that someone is dead regardless of the age and mental maturity of the murderer.
It might be that we need to discuss the responsibilities of the guardians - should the parents be punished instead when their children commit crimes? - Doesn't matter to me as long as there are consequences to committing a crime and that they are the same regardless of who the victim or the perpetrator is.
And no, I'm not part of the "Christian Right" - I'm actually an atheist.
But back on the topic - not only do I loathe RIAA, MPAA and all similar organisations and what they stand for, I also feel that their crusade against piracy isn't about piracy or even money - it's all a matter of retaining control in a market that got obsolete about a decade ago when recording facilities came within reach of regular people. Now people can record, mix and distribute their music without anyone else profiting from it because they don't need the services the labels used to provide. They don't need to hire a studio and producers and so on, just to realize a recording and thus the ability to share your music.
But what about MPAA? - Well, their model became obsolete when the home video recorder came out. They use stupid release rules to ensure that people first have to go to the cinemas to see a movie, later they can watch it on pay-per-view tv-channels and later again they can buy a copy to watch at home. And if you live outside the USA you'll have to wait even longer for everything, if the movie comes out at all that is.
What we need is global releases to all media forms. This way the cinemas have to survive on something different than a monopoly; they would need to offer something special to make people go there instead of watching a movie at home. The facilities need to be much, much better and offer something not easily available at home. After all, people still go out to eat despite it being more expensive and everybody having a kitchen and food at home. A similar model is needed for the cinemas, not a stupid monopoly.
...to download music and movies... The courts have settled on the matter long ago and if you pay the levy on digital media, you have paid for everything you download.
Yes, it's really that simple.
But you don't really think that copyright infringement and mugging share a common moral space, do you? Death penalty for speeders while we're at it?
:)
Exactly what I was going to write!
As we all know (or should know): Copyright infringement is NOT theft! - It's about making a copy of someone elses property, not removing it. The only loss involved is the potential (but unlikely) loss of a sale to the person obtaining a copy for free.
So, comparing something less than theft (copyright infringement) with something way above theft (armed robbery) is just incredibly stupid and very much off the point.
No, YouTube shouldn't have complied at all here. Let Fox find out who had access to the shows a week in advance (it can't be that many people) and grill them. After all, they've signed some kind of contract with Fox in order to have that access, so in case of a security breach one of them has to be the one responsible and thus the one Fox wants. No need to involve outside parties at all.
Actually they cannot refuse providing the new key to all licensed software players... the producers of these have a contract that - if broken by the MPAA - guarantees a major lawsuit for damages and loss of income. MPAA will be financially wiped out by just denying a new key to one major software player, let alone all of them.
But then, hardware players can also be debugged just like a software player - it's a bit more cumbersome but it can be done or there would be no hardware players.
It's actually pretty simple: If you're going to use something copyrighted to create something new that you use for educational or non-profit purposes, you can do that - and your creation becomes copyrighted itself so any commercial use still requires both your and the original copyright owners' permission.
A teacher can use clippings from newspapers and textbooks to create his own teaching materials. As long as he doesn't sell it, and all the sources are paid for, this is fair use.
A fan can create a free fansite for his idol featuring copyrighted pics and audio/video clips. As long as it is run not for profit or official promotion, this is fair use. This means that ads on the site isn't allowed by the way.
The first example is constructed but the second example comes from real life, backed up by $1.500/hour entertainment lawyers.
Explaining why making a digital is theft as the MPAA/RIAA claims (which is legally isn't) is rather hard.
"But when I make a copy, the original doesn't go away! - It isn't lost to the owner! - When I steal a car, the owner loses it and that's an obvious problem."
"No, it's the artist that loses the income from what you should have paid for your copy."
"But if I couldn't get the free copy I wouldn't have it. I wouldn't have paid anything. So where's the loss?"
"???"
Calling the treatment of the prisoners at Gitmo torture (Webster: to punish or coerce by inflicting excruciating pain) is an abuse of the word that calls for a much stronger word to describe true torture. What's been done at Gitmo - if anything - is what's called "moderate physical pressure" and it's mostly annoying and not truly painful, not does it leave permanent physical physical damages. You cannot compare that to medival torture that featured cuts, burns and stretching that most definately resulted in permanent physical damage.
A completely different issue is whether the prisoners at Gitmo actually is entitled to human rights protection. One can argue that sufficient inhuman behaviour can result in the loss of ones human rights. Personally I feel that terrorism qualify for that as the terrorists certainly abuses everybody elses human rights grossly. If it was up to me, the punishment for terrorism should be death by prolonged torture (with medical support to extend the amount of survivable pain).
As to whether the prisoners are terrorists or not, it's mostly op to themselves to have that settled. Most are extremely uncooperative 24/7. It's a fact that most were captured in non-uniform clothing armed (and often engaging allied forces) in Iraq and Afghanistan and as that falls outside the Geneva conventions, they're either spies or terrorists and thus with absolutely no rights (according to that set of conventions).
still have a stash of 8" floppies
:)
Me too!
Mine were CP/M formatted with dual-side storage of 400KB on each side, totalling a whopping 800KB!
The ones I still have holds (held?) a customized version (made by your truly) of CP/M featuring dual session (actually able to run two programs simultanously), a 26th line status bar with clock, printer status etc. and up to 58KB of available memory (out of the 64KB hardware maximum) that could be fully shared between the two programs. There were also source code for my asm86 versions of the block-graphic games PACMAN, GALAXIANS (space invaders), DONKEY KONG, LABYRINTH (find your way of a maze shown in a 3D view) and a few other things which I forget now. All ran on the Z80-based RC702 Piccolo our schools hade back in the early 1980's. A few of these were initially coded in COMPAS Pascal and ported to asm86 later (re-written, not cross-compiled).
I still have the sources in paper hardcopy somewhere...
All torrents are legal to share! - because as far as I know no studio or record label has yet copyrighted the torrent hash of their movies (kinda stupid as it differs for each rip, but still).
It has been repeated so many times now that torrents themselves contain absolutely no data from the possibly copyrighted work they refer to, nor is there any way to recreate any part of the copyrighted work from the torrent data. A torrent is nothing more than a sophisticated pointer to data provided by someone else, and this site is just a search engine with pointers to these pointers. There is no way for the engine to determine the legality of the materials it indexes (like any search engine) thus it cannot be held responsible for any infraction committed by someone linked through a torrent that's linked on the site. There is no legal difference between a google search featuring "ext:torrent" and this site.
So please, stop the witch hunt now and accept that short of banning all search engines and all portal pages there is no way to stop sites like this. We basically have to shut down the net, and while that would also make sharing of illegal copies of music and movie somewhat harder, it would also cause infinitely more harm than good.
...that it hurts the only people that in a sane world should profit from music and movies: The people creating it. It was never about the money men (taking chances on new artists with hit potential) or the distribution chain. They are just middle men that should profit a little bit from their niche.
Today artists don't need a professional studio, nor do they need a huge upfront loan. Many new artists finance their own albums (usually because the big labels never take chances anymore) and they only need retail distribution (unless they intend to sell exclusively from their website). This model leaves no room for the big labels and they know it.
Same thing in the movie business. Most of the better movies are made as independent productions, usually with a fairly limited budget and they only need some form of distribution. Why the major studios pour hundreds of millions into huge productions with overrated stars and too many special effects - and no story - remain a mystery. But they want a return on those investments and as the sales usually don't match the expectations, they need to squeeze the consumer even more, and DRM is great at that.
I've always believed in this simple procedure:
1) The problem is discovered.
2) The problem is reported to the vendor, the report including a fixed resonable date for either a fix or the date for the final fix (to allow for tough fixes). The time alotted reflects the severity of the problem - more severe results in less time.
3) When this fixed date or the vendor date (if given) is reached, the problem is disclosed regardless, complete with POC exploit if available.
This method forces vendors to take security reports seriously and it makes it THEIR problem if the the issue is disclosed before a fix is available. Aften all, if a security researcher can find the problem, so can the really bad guys and they will most certainly not advise the vendor, leaving a free avenue of intrusion that may last a long time.