The Pirate Bay has managed to make Sweden, normally the most law abiding of EU countries, look like a piracy haven with intellectual property laws on a par with Russia.
Thanks for the honorable mention. **AA has managed to coerce governments of both countries to take unlawful action. In Sweden, it has caused public protests, and the case is now in the court of law. In Russia, after a while, the government action bypassing the law just silently worked (remember allofmp3? I, for one, still had $10 on my account. Putin, refund it to me!). So, which of the two countries is more thoroughly piratish?
It's a good move, but... as with almost any bureaucracy, the reaction has come slowly. Lots of "profitable" domain names have already been permanently snatched from the namespace, and many more will surely be taken in the remaining days until the policy comes into effect. The change will protect any future lookups. However, I wonder what percentage of all currently registered domain names is registered thanks to this loophole. No such estimate?
I'm not familiar with the way you live in Spain, but wouldn't be reporting this to the police be the right course of action?
Consider this: even if what he does is not on the surface illegal, getting reported to the police more than once by different people will surely draw their attention.
Please, please, please, studios, set up credit card accounts or PayPal accounts where I can send payments for the movies I have viewed. (The same plea would apply to music groups, but I personally don't listen to music too much). Disney/Pixar, please, where I can enter my CC number for Ratatoulle, Fantasia 2000 i have enjoyed, and your other recent films I will probably watch. You can have my $2-$6 per title, or whatever average revenue per viewer the studio expects to get after it has been released on discs and TV. Major Hollywood studios, please, where I can send you payment for the recent flicks I have watched on my computer last year?
I do not need fucking distribution channels, retailers, middlemen, factories, hardware manufacturers, web services. I do not often go to the cinema. I do not want you to deliver me the movie. I can download it myself from peer-to-peer, in the format I want, with the language options I want, whenever I want without a long waiting time, all at my convenience and a couple mouse clicks, sitting in the armchair, using the standard office PC with no special hardware. Your administrative and distribution costs with me as a customer are essentially zero. I just want to pay those who create the movie, OK? You have 10 (ten) minutes of my time after the end of the movie. This is plenty to accept the CC payment. It would be helpful of course if you include the reminder and URL in the closing movie titles, but ultimately I can live without this if the payment place is well known (a single payment-accepting web site administered by the MPAA, perhaps?).
And, while we are at it, stop harassing The Pirate Bay. This is the single best place to find interesting video content and get it, period. It is head and shoulders above all the previous inventions.
I think everyone in the field agrees that teleportation as the name of the physical effect is just wonderful. The name relates to the modern fairy tales. This, as a consequence, gets people and media talking about it. It excites students, too, which may be no less important.
Compare to how dull it could have been if it were called a "transfer of quantum state" or something like that.
As a publisher I can tell you the breakdown is roughly something like the 25% for printing, 25% for the author/publisher, 50% for the distributor.
Here is the dilemma. I want to pay for creative work but not for dead obsolete technology. Right now I'm trying to decide whether to buy Clarke-Baxter's Firstborn or wait until I can pirate it. The hardcover from Amazon costs $17 plus $10 for international shipping. Now thanks to you I can estimate that less than 1/7 of the price I pay would go to the authors and their editor, the remaining 6/7 supporting businesses I do not want to support (postal system, retailer, printing house, brick and mortar logistics).
Do you have the same estimate regarding e-books? If I pay $17 for an e-book, how much of that do the authors and their editor get?
I've onece asked a Russian researcher working with superconductors where they get their helium from. They obtained it from air using a machine the size of a conference hall that produced several liters of liquid helium per day. So apparently it is possible and even economical at some locations, even though it might be expensive (he did complain about the price, $10 per liter if I recall).
The music industry finds a file originally sold to me roaming on peer-to-peer networks. How do they prove I'm the one who let it out there?
If I am aware of the consequences, I would be careful to put it on peer-to-peer anonymously (the tools will be available, that's one thing for sure). Or, it can indeed be not me who took my file and put it in the wild. In either case, it should be impossible to charge me. The worst they can do is stop selling me files (yeah, that would be a big deterrent).
Wasn't space denial one of the design objectives for the Energia booster? It would deliver to LEO and dissipate several 100+ ton loads of steel balls, or so I heard, making it impossible for everyone to use ICBMs, not to mention launch longer-living vessels.
P.S. Namely I am dying for track 13 on this album (which I haven't found as a torrent). I collect recordings of Soviet and Russian national anthems, this is why I want to get it. Online music stores other than now-squashed allofmp3.com have never been a big help in getting records for the collection: there is always some pesky restriction that doesn't let me use them, either geographic or file format or payment method... I always ended up forced to use P2P for actual downloads (or mailorder the CD, but this quickly gets expensive for a project like this when you need only one track from the album and there are hundreds of tracks on my website).
Thanks for the info. Maybe you can hint how the country is determined, so I can cheat the system to get that track? IP? Credit card issuing bank? Last shipping address? (By the way for me all three point to different countries right now... no system is ideal, I know.)
Okay, I have overlooked another crucial difference between Santa and religion. Both Santa and religion may use the same arguments, but the difference lies in the phenomena they explain.
Santa explains the phenomenon of gift appearance according to child's wishes. Later in the life, the child learns where the gifts come from, and there goes Santa. (Or, on a nostalgic note, as it was in my case, I learned where the plastic New Year tree was stored all year long. It was stored in a communal woodshed, and who was bringing it home in late December was not the Father Frost but my grandpa. I was shown around the woodshed about age five.)
Religion explains larger questions about nature and life. (Amongst real things religion also claims to "explain" many phenomena that are, to our best scientific understanding, random, and "gives purpose" while there seems to be no such thing as purpose in nature.) Science explains the nature and life, but -- here comes the difference -- many people do NOT learn science in adult life deep enough to convince them it does explain everything way better than religion. Well, maybe in the future that will be the case, but right now deep scientific understanding of nature is not needed in most people's lives.
So, one difference (which I've missed) is that gift shopping is ubiquitous in adult life while deep scientific understanding of nature is not. Another crucial difference is that the theory of gift shopping is simpler than science. Both differences make for a different amount of intellectual effort required.
Admittedly, one can also be, independently of the above argument, sceptical towards religion based on the number of incompatible different religions on the globe and on the known history of religions. I assume that this also requires an extra intellectual effort to learn.
And plenty of people critically evaluate their beliefs with a great amount of intellectual effort and still believe in God.
Well, human intellectual abilities are limited. Unfortunately, in our time, at the present state of civilization development, issues leading to understanding of religion still pose a real challenge to the mind. It's challenging enough that a good fraction of people fail to understand despite the effort.
Ask a five-years old whether he thinks Santa is real, and why. A few children of this age will say he is, and offer explanations, which may be based on a critical evaluation according to their present level of understanding the world (e.g., Christmas gifts do appear below the tree in the night, NORAD tracks Santa's flight, you can go to Finland and meet Santa, I've seen a Santa in the shopping mall).
Regarding religion, some people never mature their understanding of the world to the point of cracking it -- even though the information is available.
To get nearly everyone in adult population believe something, that something should be present in daily life and be absolutely impossible to ignore. To give an example, two millennia ago nearly everyone believed the earth was flat. It was flat, according to all people's daily life. They didn't travel far enough to notice earth roundness, they didn't have accurate maps, they didn't use clocks accurate enough and didn't travel fast enough to notice difference between "time zones" (sundials don't count, as they are tied to sun's position in the sky). Poeple didn't have instant communication between different locations of earth. To sum up, the flatness of earth was a fact of daily life. Some sailors surely noticed that the masts of an approaching ship appeared in sight before the hull, but -- who knew for sure why this was. Some did look at Sun elevation angles. Some did astronomy. But those were few.
Fast forward to the present day. You get reminded that Earth is round literally every day. Travel, news, politics, global issues, communication, business, culture. It's in your daily thoughts. You CANNOT miss this -- this is a part of your life. Aside of a few aboriginal people and a few retards, nobody misses the fact.
Now, what would it take to make religion such obvious a fact as the flatness of earth is today? I'm speculating, but perhaps one possibility is that in the future brains get scanned, converted into digital information and run on another hardware in virtual reality, thus becoming the state of intelligent life. It may come with realities of life that make religion obvious. Or something else enters our daily life that makes religion obvious. Things sufficient to understand religion have to be ever-present in everyone's life if this understanding is to happen.
Cheer, this is the progress of civilization.
As a side note, it seems to me that today the only near-guaranteed recipe to understand religion is to be a top-notch physicist. Any other occupation does not necessarily make it obvious.
Critically evaluating one's beliefs takes a certain amount of intellectual effort. Some beliefs require less of it, some more. The difference between Santa Claus and religion is that the latter requires a much larger amount of personal work to sort it out than the former. Many people never get that far, or lack the motivation to get far enough to understand religion.
Frankly, I don't understand what the fuss is about. I download hi-def movied that have either "HD" or "blu-ray" as a part of the filename. Both formats play just fine. I don't see any difference. Who ever needs to buy a drive and optical disks when we have fast internet, large hard drives and thepiratebay.org?
Thank you, maybe this will be helpful for somebody else. I am quite happy to contribute unused CPU cycles, but I don't have time to configure and debug the install for a better part of the night... and this will take a better part of my night, compounded by the fact that the config options I've looked through were too numerous.
I'll forget about donating CPU cycles until they fix the usability of the software, make it slick and dead simple to install. Then maybe I'll give it one last shot, in a year or two from now.
Installing as a service option asks for a username and password. The problem is, it does not accept a blank password. I have a single user account with no password on this machine (under Vista). Entering something into the password field in BOINC installer fails the initialization of the service a bit later in the install process.
I tried to install BOINC and could not find a way to hide the tray icon. It seems to be not running unless it displays the said icon. When I tried to install it as a service, I could not figure what username and password to supply so it doesn't fail to initialize the service (yup, I'm not a geek).
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
That reminds me of the opening of a large IKEA store in Moscow. All was set for a high-profile opening ceremony, officials of both Russia and Sweden (like the ambassador) invited. Then, the event was cancelled two days before the date, because IKEA said it could not pass the "safety inspection of the parking lot" with a district official, or something like this. It made to the news, raised questions, the "safety approval of the parking lot" was then granted promptly. I hope IKEA doesn't pay any bribes in Mopscow after that.
P.S. No format and region restrictions, and no quality crippling, please. Yes I know a model that would get people pay for that would be difficult, if not impossible, to invent. Maybe it is indeed impossible, I just don't know for sure. Hopefully time will show.
I think this is a good movement. I do not believe that not paying the film company or the music producer is right. They should get paid. However I do wholeheartedly believe the RETAILER, together with the associated overhead expenses and the stupid restrictions that come with this method of distribution, should die.
Come up with a model where I can more or less directly pay to the studio/publisher after playing past the first quarter of the album or movie or reading past the first quarter of a book, and I will happily follow it. Yes I have my credit card ready -- to pay the creators only, and only for what I consume (not just download).
Do courts in the US admit "investigation experiments" as evidence? Whi not give the actual green laser discovered in the house to a person and instruct him to point it at the suspect (with his consent) as steady as he can from a given distance. You can also have the suspect perform some task that requres visual orientation all the time. If he doesn't fail at the task and shows no external signs of eye pain, dismiss pilot's claims.
Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals
Your analogy is not valid. Ants, bees and termites in the same colony share the same genes. An ant colony is a single organism split into many parts rather than a society. It functions as a single organism, determined by bettering the changes for gene survival, not survival of individual ants (most of whom are incapable of producing offspring, anyway). In a human society, unlike the ant colony, individuals bearing different genes compete. This is explained well in The Sevfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Bay has managed to make Sweden, normally the most law abiding of EU countries, look like a piracy haven with intellectual property laws on a par with Russia.
Thanks for the honorable mention. **AA has managed to coerce governments of both countries to take unlawful action. In Sweden, it has caused public protests, and the case is now in the court of law. In Russia, after a while, the government action bypassing the law just silently worked (remember allofmp3? I, for one, still had $10 on my account. Putin, refund it to me!). So, which of the two countries is more thoroughly piratish?
It's a good move, but... as with almost any bureaucracy, the reaction has come slowly. Lots of "profitable" domain names have already been permanently snatched from the namespace, and many more will surely be taken in the remaining days until the policy comes into effect. The change will protect any future lookups. However, I wonder what percentage of all currently registered domain names is registered thanks to this loophole. No such estimate?
I'm not familiar with the way you live in Spain, but wouldn't be reporting this to the police be the right course of action?
Consider this: even if what he does is not on the surface illegal, getting reported to the police more than once by different people will surely draw their attention.
Please, please, please, studios, set up credit card accounts or PayPal accounts where I can send payments for the movies I have viewed. (The same plea would apply to music groups, but I personally don't listen to music too much). Disney/Pixar, please, where I can enter my CC number for Ratatoulle, Fantasia 2000 i have enjoyed, and your other recent films I will probably watch. You can have my $2-$6 per title, or whatever average revenue per viewer the studio expects to get after it has been released on discs and TV. Major Hollywood studios, please, where I can send you payment for the recent flicks I have watched on my computer last year?
I do not need fucking distribution channels, retailers, middlemen, factories, hardware manufacturers, web services. I do not often go to the cinema. I do not want you to deliver me the movie. I can download it myself from peer-to-peer, in the format I want, with the language options I want, whenever I want without a long waiting time, all at my convenience and a couple mouse clicks, sitting in the armchair, using the standard office PC with no special hardware. Your administrative and distribution costs with me as a customer are essentially zero. I just want to pay those who create the movie, OK? You have 10 (ten) minutes of my time after the end of the movie. This is plenty to accept the CC payment. It would be helpful of course if you include the reminder and URL in the closing movie titles, but ultimately I can live without this if the payment place is well known (a single payment-accepting web site administered by the MPAA, perhaps?).
And, while we are at it, stop harassing The Pirate Bay. This is the single best place to find interesting video content and get it, period. It is head and shoulders above all the previous inventions.
I think everyone in the field agrees that teleportation as the name of the physical effect is just wonderful. The name relates to the modern fairy tales. This, as a consequence, gets people and media talking about it. It excites students, too, which may be no less important.
Compare to how dull it could have been if it were called a "transfer of quantum state" or something like that.
As a publisher I can tell you the breakdown is roughly something like the 25% for printing, 25% for the author/publisher, 50% for the distributor.
Here is the dilemma. I want to pay for creative work but not for dead obsolete technology. Right now I'm trying to decide whether to buy Clarke-Baxter's Firstborn or wait until I can pirate it. The hardcover from Amazon costs $17 plus $10 for international shipping. Now thanks to you I can estimate that less than 1/7 of the price I pay would go to the authors and their editor, the remaining 6/7 supporting businesses I do not want to support (postal system, retailer, printing house, brick and mortar logistics).
Do you have the same estimate regarding e-books? If I pay $17 for an e-book, how much of that do the authors and their editor get?
I've onece asked a Russian researcher working with superconductors where they get their helium from. They obtained it from air using a machine the size of a conference hall that produced several liters of liquid helium per day. So apparently it is possible and even economical at some locations, even though it might be expensive (he did complain about the price, $10 per liter if I recall).
The music industry finds a file originally sold to me roaming on peer-to-peer networks. How do they prove I'm the one who let it out there?
If I am aware of the consequences, I would be careful to put it on peer-to-peer anonymously (the tools will be available, that's one thing for sure). Or, it can indeed be not me who took my file and put it in the wild. In either case, it should be impossible to charge me. The worst they can do is stop selling me files (yeah, that would be a big deterrent).
Wasn't space denial one of the design objectives for the Energia booster? It would deliver to LEO and dissipate several 100+ ton loads of steel balls, or so I heard, making it impossible for everyone to use ICBMs, not to mention launch longer-living vessels.
P.S. Namely I am dying for track 13 on this album (which I haven't found as a torrent). I collect recordings of Soviet and Russian national anthems, this is why I want to get it. Online music stores other than now-squashed allofmp3.com have never been a big help in getting records for the collection: there is always some pesky restriction that doesn't let me use them, either geographic or file format or payment method... I always ended up forced to use P2P for actual downloads (or mailorder the CD, but this quickly gets expensive for a project like this when you need only one track from the album and there are hundreds of tracks on my website).
Thanks for the info. Maybe you can hint how the country is determined, so I can cheat the system to get that track? IP? Credit card issuing bank? Last shipping address? (By the way for me all three point to different countries right now... no system is ideal, I know.)
U.S. only.
I've tried to purchase a track at Amazon already two weeks ago. I was turned down. They only sell to buyers located in North America.
Okay, I have overlooked another crucial difference between Santa and religion. Both Santa and religion may use the same arguments, but the difference lies in the phenomena they explain.
Santa explains the phenomenon of gift appearance according to child's wishes. Later in the life, the child learns where the gifts come from, and there goes Santa. (Or, on a nostalgic note, as it was in my case, I learned where the plastic New Year tree was stored all year long. It was stored in a communal woodshed, and who was bringing it home in late December was not the Father Frost but my grandpa. I was shown around the woodshed about age five.)
Religion explains larger questions about nature and life. (Amongst real things religion also claims to "explain" many phenomena that are, to our best scientific understanding, random, and "gives purpose" while there seems to be no such thing as purpose in nature.) Science explains the nature and life, but -- here comes the difference -- many people do NOT learn science in adult life deep enough to convince them it does explain everything way better than religion. Well, maybe in the future that will be the case, but right now deep scientific understanding of nature is not needed in most people's lives.
So, one difference (which I've missed) is that gift shopping is ubiquitous in adult life while deep scientific understanding of nature is not. Another crucial difference is that the theory of gift shopping is simpler than science. Both differences make for a different amount of intellectual effort required.
Admittedly, one can also be, independently of the above argument, sceptical towards religion based on the number of incompatible different religions on the globe and on the known history of religions. I assume that this also requires an extra intellectual effort to learn.
And plenty of people critically evaluate their beliefs with a great amount of intellectual effort and still believe in God.
Well, human intellectual abilities are limited. Unfortunately, in our time, at the present state of civilization development, issues leading to understanding of religion still pose a real challenge to the mind. It's challenging enough that a good fraction of people fail to understand despite the effort.
Ask a five-years old whether he thinks Santa is real, and why. A few children of this age will say he is, and offer explanations, which may be based on a critical evaluation according to their present level of understanding the world (e.g., Christmas gifts do appear below the tree in the night, NORAD tracks Santa's flight, you can go to Finland and meet Santa, I've seen a Santa in the shopping mall).
Regarding religion, some people never mature their understanding of the world to the point of cracking it -- even though the information is available.
To get nearly everyone in adult population believe something, that something should be present in daily life and be absolutely impossible to ignore. To give an example, two millennia ago nearly everyone believed the earth was flat. It was flat, according to all people's daily life. They didn't travel far enough to notice earth roundness, they didn't have accurate maps, they didn't use clocks accurate enough and didn't travel fast enough to notice difference between "time zones" (sundials don't count, as they are tied to sun's position in the sky). Poeple didn't have instant communication between different locations of earth. To sum up, the flatness of earth was a fact of daily life. Some sailors surely noticed that the masts of an approaching ship appeared in sight before the hull, but -- who knew for sure why this was. Some did look at Sun elevation angles. Some did astronomy. But those were few.
Fast forward to the present day. You get reminded that Earth is round literally every day. Travel, news, politics, global issues, communication, business, culture. It's in your daily thoughts. You CANNOT miss this -- this is a part of your life. Aside of a few aboriginal people and a few retards, nobody misses the fact.
Now, what would it take to make religion such obvious a fact as the flatness of earth is today? I'm speculating, but perhaps one possibility is that in the future brains get scanned, converted into digital information and run on another hardware in virtual reality, thus becoming the state of intelligent life. It may come with realities of life that make religion obvious. Or something else enters our daily life that makes religion obvious. Things sufficient to understand religion have to be ever-present in everyone's life if this understanding is to happen.
Cheer, this is the progress of civilization.
As a side note, it seems to me that today the only near-guaranteed recipe to understand religion is to be a top-notch physicist. Any other occupation does not necessarily make it obvious.
Critically evaluating one's beliefs takes a certain amount of intellectual effort. Some beliefs require less of it, some more. The difference between Santa Claus and religion is that the latter requires a much larger amount of personal work to sort it out than the former. Many people never get that far, or lack the motivation to get far enough to understand religion.
Frankly, I don't understand what the fuss is about. I download hi-def movied that have either "HD" or "blu-ray" as a part of the filename. Both formats play just fine. I don't see any difference. Who ever needs to buy a drive and optical disks when we have fast internet, large hard drives and thepiratebay.org?
Thank you, maybe this will be helpful for somebody else. I am quite happy to contribute unused CPU cycles, but I don't have time to configure and debug the install for a better part of the night... and this will take a better part of my night, compounded by the fact that the config options I've looked through were too numerous.
I'll forget about donating CPU cycles until they fix the usability of the software, make it slick and dead simple to install. Then maybe I'll give it one last shot, in a year or two from now.
Installing as a service option asks for a username and password. The problem is, it does not accept a blank password. I have a single user account with no password on this machine (under Vista). Entering something into the password field in BOINC installer fails the initialization of the service a bit later in the install process.
I tried to install BOINC and could not find a way to hide the tray icon. It seems to be not running unless it displays the said icon. When I tried to install it as a service, I could not figure what username and password to supply so it doesn't fail to initialize the service (yup, I'm not a geek).
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
That reminds me of the opening of a large IKEA store in Moscow. All was set for a high-profile opening ceremony, officials of both Russia and Sweden (like the ambassador) invited. Then, the event was cancelled two days before the date, because IKEA said it could not pass the "safety inspection of the parking lot" with a district official, or something like this. It made to the news, raised questions, the "safety approval of the parking lot" was then granted promptly. I hope IKEA doesn't pay any bribes in Mopscow after that.
I do visit libraries often. I've read a couple dozen books last year. Of those, only two were on dead trees.
P.S. No format and region restrictions, and no quality crippling, please. Yes I know a model that would get people pay for that would be difficult, if not impossible, to invent. Maybe it is indeed impossible, I just don't know for sure. Hopefully time will show.
I think this is a good movement. I do not believe that not paying the film company or the music producer is right. They should get paid. However I do wholeheartedly believe the RETAILER, together with the associated overhead expenses and the stupid restrictions that come with this method of distribution, should die.
Come up with a model where I can more or less directly pay to the studio/publisher after playing past the first quarter of the album or movie or reading past the first quarter of a book, and I will happily follow it. Yes I have my credit card ready -- to pay the creators only, and only for what I consume (not just download).
Do courts in the US admit "investigation experiments" as evidence? Whi not give the actual green laser discovered in the house to a person and instruct him to point it at the suspect (with his consent) as steady as he can from a given distance. You can also have the suspect perform some task that requres visual orientation all the time. If he doesn't fail at the task and shows no external signs of eye pain, dismiss pilot's claims.
Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals
Your analogy is not valid. Ants, bees and termites in the same colony share the same genes. An ant colony is a single organism split into many parts rather than a society. It functions as a single organism, determined by bettering the changes for gene survival, not survival of individual ants (most of whom are incapable of producing offspring, anyway). In a human society, unlike the ant colony, individuals bearing different genes compete. This is explained well in The Sevfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.