"Holy crap we don't have a clue how we are going to make money out of this.... errr what about Games?.... err yes Games make lots of money and there are lots of people playing games and lots of people on Facebook.... Therefore we can CLEARLY make money from Games on Facebook"
Its brilliantly undermined by the slight statement, just after saying "We've got more people that WoW" it then adds "errr but they don't pay". Later on it talks about monetisation and the wonderful "there will be new revenue streams" which as we all know really means "errr haven't worked that bit out yet.
So lets all be clear, yes social connections (err where was the mention of the Wii attempt at this in the article?) will be important in a lot of future social gaming. Whether the social network is on Facebook or not doesn't matter as that network is just a graph, the key question is how you actually write games that make money out of it with Facebook (at best) becoming a utility, a SNSP (Social Network Service Provider), and unable to charge a large "tax" as the interop is getting higher.
John Bolton repeatedly demonstrates exactly why he was a rubbish choice for the UN. From accusing presenters on the BBC Today programme of being "left wing" just because they wanted him to answer a question to his complete and utter inability to view the world through anything other than jaundiced eyes.
The man is so far out of touch with normal reality and the norms of society as to be scary. Basically if John Bolton doesn't like it then 99.99% of the world's population will almost certainly think its a good idea. Hell he even fell out with Bush and Cheney.
Come on do they really think we'll fall for printing solar cells on aluminium so we use them as tin-foil hats? We all know that in reality this is just a government plot to subvert the tin-foil hat movement and convert the hats into powerful mind-reading devices powered by the rays of the sun.
Okay so the fastest engine is using Lucerne, a Java search engine, and this is neither tuned nor horizontally scaled (which it can do very well).
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on... does this mean that for complex applications the most important performance piece is normally actually the efficiency of the code rather than the efficiency of the base platform and therefore having a language in which it is easier to write efficient code is better than just having the one that is fastest to execute a for loop?
But hell this is Slashdot and Java is Slooooooow...
Its hardly surprising that this sort of code is highly valuable but the challenge is surely going to be proving that it was actually stolen. If they have a bash history that doesn't include the IP addresses but just shows that he created a tar ball then where is the proof that he actually stole anything at all?
The original is of course still there, what he took is a copy, so you can't show something is missing.
They currently don't know where it has gone, so they can't prove that a copy was moved outside the firewall successfully
If he hasn't yet sold the stuff on they can't prove there was a financial benefit linked to the theft
So how will they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that some actual theft has gone on?
Its not like he has just lobbed it on Bit-torrent or posted it to Wikileaks. What he has done is taken a copy of the code, which means its Intellectual Property and copyright issues rather than "simple" theft and therefore they really need to prove (surely) that he has done something with the code.
Should be interesting to see how the police "generate" and prove the evidence on this one.
"NASA investigates other options and doesn't look at problem in blinkered and myopic way" - News at 11.
NASA always looks at these ideas and then normally decides that either the risk profile is too high (the most impressive thing about the first moon landings were the LACK of deaths) or that it just doesn't stack up as something that will deliver the overall objectives.
Hell in theory a great big Trebuchet could get someone to the moon, pretty one way mission though. The challenge here is to get someone to the moon, return them safely to earth and to establish a base on the moon. This is a HUGE challenge and one where a government agency has to do so at levels of safety that a commercial organisation wouldn't bother to meet.
When people bitch and moan about the price then that is fair enough, but please lets be honest here. Getting to the moon remains a HARD problem, the Chinese are going to take a long bunch of years to get there, and you can't solve hard problems with CostCo models. Either the aim is to go to the moon or not. The price comes from the aim and ambition not because NASA act like congress after pork.
The problem they have here is that as with last time when they lost, its basically a Dick Cheney move. They might be stomping all over people's rights, it might have no real justification and the method via which they obtain evidence are horrifically flawed, but they "believe" that this is protecting artist's rights and so the ends justifies the means.
The RIAA is just playing a series of Dick moves in the hope that if they create enough fear then people will accept it. The problem is that while Dick had some real terrorists to scare people about (and made up others) the RIAA are trying to turn Soccer Mom's into terrorists and it just doesn't work.
Surely their only hope is to get Dick "madder than a sack full of badgers" Cheney to claim its a national security issue and that Obama is just supporting terrorists by allowing this. This will pull in Fox News and suddenly the RIAA might have a chance.
The rise of zero personality manufacturer bands (The Jonas Brothers... like the Monkees but with out the hard cutting edge) and their cult of multiple product selling surely also has to be responsible. Its not just Games and DVDs its the fact that for a given "star" you can get pens, pencils, school bags, DVDs, 3D Movies and all manner of other crap. Their objective almost isn't to sell the music its just to sell the image and then have people buy lots of things with that image.
Dora the Explorer has as much credibility as these bands and is focused on a similar financial plan.
Meanwhile good bands seem to be going into the live tour set up more and more and being less worried about CDs. So what is killing CDs is that at the crap end people are flogging pens and school bags and at the good end its about the live gigs. Meaning that if you want entertainment at home you go for DVDs (because the Cinema is a rip-off) or Games (where you get to do more of what you want).
The music industry has killed the CD by focusing on bag sales and forcing decent artists to focus (thank god) on live gigs.
BT have a TV over the internet offer called "BT Vision" its suffering (and just lost its CEO) in competition with Rupert "any view that pays" Murdoch's Sky. Now if BT could get a richer experience out of iPlayer and access to a longer back catalogue than simply the last 7 days then this would help them in competition with Sky.
So I'd expect this to end up with BT agreeing to support iPlayer in the same way but an "interesting" tie-up between BT and the BBC around the delivery of iPlayer+ features to its BT Vision customers.
The last leader of the US had a religious driven morality and talked of "faith" and "belief" when he made his "moral" decisions. Osama Bin Laden has a belief in a higher power and talks of faith and belief when he talks about what he is doing.
And you find it scary that some people think they should be accountable to themselves and humanity?
Isn't it rather scary that while scientists are getting excited over this 47 million year old fossil that there are fossils in Congress who will swear on a stack of Bibles that the earth is only 6000 years old and that evolution is bunk.
That people can get elected without having basic modern ape like intelligence is the scary bit, this primate was probably more self-aware than many of those elected officials.
I did read it and the bit you keep saying is FLASH and FLASH players. That is the bit that if you had used an iPhone you would notice that it is using a QUICKTIME player (i.e. not Flash).
Having done video for the iPhone myself I have to say that it really is phenomenally trivial and just requires HTML skills and no clever stuff at all. So nope, I'll keep that grump hat on I'm afraid.
Seriously the standard of developers these days seems to have plummeted. If you want to provision for a device go and get the manual for that device, find out that H264 is what you need for the iPhone and that YouTube most certainly does NOT stream flash to iPhones.
I'm going to put my grumpy old bloke hat on here, but its the same hat I wore when I was 25 and someone asked me how to run Windows apps on an IBM RS6000. That person's excuse was that they just "thought it would work" which was a woeful statement from someone who had a degree in IT. This AskSlashdot is at the same level in that the question boldly states something that ISN'T TRUE (YouTube stream flash) and thinks there is some magic secret.
There is no magic secret, there is something that shouldn't be considered a secret at all. That thing is called RESEARCH, hell I'm not even asking you to hit the books in a library but just Google YouTube iPhone to find a FREE converter that talks about the video differences or YouTube iPhone video codec. It really is trivial. And if you can't do that then have a thought about just giving up and using Google Apps Premier Edition for your business and using the commercial version of YouTube that it supplies.
FoxNews and its ilk such as the Sun newspaper in the UK represent where news is headed. The likes of Rush Limberger Cheese of an argument are at the vanguard of this trend.
Put simply people want their bigotry and opinions confirmed by the "news" not to get the facts and have to make up their own mind.
This is what is killing decent journalism WAY more than the internet. Its the rise of individualised news which presents opinions as facts and anyone who disagrees as a terrorist. The internet has aided this explosion by enabling people to create ever more extreme opinions and to move further and further away from the facts.
Will this trend stop? God I hope so, but given that the primary drivers of this shift to "truthiness" are the politicians then its hard to see how.
How can we resolve the money issue without breaking this? I feel people around the world have never had a chance like today to bridge misunderstandings. Up until 2 years ago the only understanding of Western world one could have far away was:
- Hollywood (or other typically fictional) movies
- Expensive imported books (sometimes requiring a language skill level not easily attained abroad)
You really have this arse about face. The issue is not the inability of people in the developing world to understand Western culture, they get it all the time. With CNN and the BBC broadcasting globally its easy to get "Western" news and the BBC in particular has very strong cultural link communications with the world service. Then you get the propaganda stations like Voice of America
In addition governments spend loads on organisations to spread the cultural message (e.g. the British Council) to these countries.
These countries are voracious consumers of western media and fashions and have been for 50 years, this is why they are massive users of this content.
The real issue is that in the Western World, especially the US, there is bugger all going the other way and bugger all knowledge of non-Western cultures (or even countries).
The questions to stump IBM here (beyond the "A Computer Company who supplied calculating equipment to Nazi Germany" A: Who are IBM) are those in which the language is against them.
Looking up from ANSWER keywords and then having a choice of "Who is" or "What is" to put in front of the key word isn't that hard. (This is Google's take on the Nazi/Computing challege).
This is a clear brute force rather than AI challenge as you are looking at filtering potentials based on the ANSWER to a question in which the answer is normally a specific noun or short phrase, remembering to put "Who is" or "What is".
What would make it harder would be the use of descriptions that are made famous by a third party (e.g. Marcus Brigstock v David Blane and the term "Git Wizard") which would require actual inference on the data sets to determine against whom it is applied.
This isn't AI, its keyword matching back to a noun and Google already does a decent job of that.
What is amazing is that despite coming up with the theoretical basis behind the big bang and a whole bunch of other stuff he is still yet to win the Nobel Prize. Hopefully this is just Professor Hawking's way of making a VERY big hint to the awards committee.
Yes I know its about theoretical pieces that must be proven by experimentation, but surely the big bang is worth it on its own.
So sure the US has overall about 1/3 of the population density of France, but then the US does have Texas and Alaska bumping up those figures quite a bit and the point about rail travel is that it is POINT-2-POINT its not about all the stopping places on the way. The Paris->Marseilles high speed train stops at very few places.
The main issues on cost are normally those of geography but fortunately you have a big load of flat stuff in the middle of the US which is pretty much ideal for high-speed rail travel.
Yes this means that when you get to your end-point you tend to hire a car to get to the next bit (or take a cab) or of course drive your car onto the train and then off at the other end.
Population density isn't the problem as its fundamentally a hub and spoke model (like the airlines) with people feeding into hubs.
So let's say I build a bar: - Knowing that killing people is illegal. - Call it "Killers Bar". - Publicly say that I'm in favour of killing every single human being on earth as long as it's for money and that I don't care if contract killers use my bar to make their deals. - Keep saying "nah, nah, nah, can't catch me".
I should be accused of promoting murder and sent to jail?
If as a result of your bar there are several hundred deaths then yes you should indeed be done for promoting and facilitating murder. The cases of assisting terrorists for instance are a real world example of exactly the sort of mentality you are talking about and the defences of "I didn't know about that specific act of murder" haven't done well in court at all.
You, my friend, live in a pretty strange world.
It is strange indeed, unfortunately it is also reality.
A couple of responses here have said things like "this could impact legitimate businesses" or "what about legitimate filesharing".
The first rule surely here to learn is naming it "Pirate Bay" did tend to indicate exactly what the intention was of the site, it wasn't to enable legitimate business, it wasn't to enable legitimate file sharing it was to enable video/music piracy... the fairly unsubtle clue was in their freaking name.
For those who talk about them "not hosting content but just storing lists" lets shift to the real world. Lets say that someone "just" has a house into which all drug dealers can go and buy stuff off all the drug smugglers but the actual exchanges are done down the road in a car park... are the people with the house completely and utterly innocent of setting up "The Drug Exchange" because no drugs actually enter their house? Hitting the supply chain is one of the easiest ways to disrupt drug distribution and this is the equivalent for copyright "piracy".
As much as people like to dress it up in complexity as to why these folks are innocent it does come down to a rather easy thing
1) Sharing copyright material is not allowed 2) They set up a site to PROMOTE and SUPPORT the piracy of copyright material 3) They named the site after the "crime" of piracy 4) They kept saying "nah, nah, na, na, nah, can't catch us"
This has nothing to do with a legitimate business and no impact on legitimate businesses or file-sharing, this was a site set up explicitly to promote the sharing of copyright materials.
Are they getting a bit delusional? Calling it theatre after being sent to prison for a year doesn't sound like theatre it sounds like hard time and the $2.4m fine doesn't look too much like theatre.
Whether you agree or not with the judgement its very hard to describe imprisonment and multi-million dollar fines as theatre for the media. I worry that they've drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid.
Bush was pretty much relentlessly attacked by the media, Hollywood elites and blogosphere for all eight years.
Ahhh while Rush Limbaugh is going easy on Obama along with FoxNews, must have missed that.
World summary on Bush: An dumb asshole, right from the moment he threatened China (pre-9-11) and said that knowing the leader of Pakistan wouldn't be important (during his campaign).
And to the question of "if he was stupid how did he do so many things" the answer is the most aggressively active vice-president in the history of the US Mr Dick Cheney a man who claimed to part of both the executive and legislative while also being accountable to the rules of neither.
Please don't limit the abuse of Bush to a limited set of people, there are around 6.5 billion people in the world and 6.4 billion thought he was an asshole.
Slashdot Mirror
"Holy crap we don't have a clue how we are going to make money out of this.... errr what about Games?.... err yes Games make lots of money and there are lots of people playing games and lots of people on Facebook.... Therefore we can CLEARLY make money from Games on Facebook"
Its brilliantly undermined by the slight statement, just after saying "We've got more people that WoW" it then adds "errr but they don't pay". Later on it talks about monetisation and the wonderful "there will be new revenue streams" which as we all know really means "errr haven't worked that bit out yet.
So lets all be clear, yes social connections (err where was the mention of the Wii attempt at this in the article?) will be important in a lot of future social gaming. Whether the social network is on Facebook or not doesn't matter as that network is just a graph, the key question is how you actually write games that make money out of it with Facebook (at best) becoming a utility, a SNSP (Social Network Service Provider), and unable to charge a large "tax" as the interop is getting higher.
John Bolton repeatedly demonstrates exactly why he was a rubbish choice for the UN. From accusing presenters on the BBC Today programme of being "left wing" just because they wanted him to answer a question to his complete and utter inability to view the world through anything other than jaundiced eyes.
The man is so far out of touch with normal reality and the norms of society as to be scary. Basically if John Bolton doesn't like it then 99.99% of the world's population will almost certainly think its a good idea. Hell he even fell out with Bush and Cheney.
Come on do they really think we'll fall for printing solar cells on aluminium so we use them as tin-foil hats? We all know that in reality this is just a government plot to subvert the tin-foil hat movement and convert the hats into powerful mind-reading devices powered by the rays of the sun.
Evil I tell you, evil.
Okay so the fastest engine is using Lucerne, a Java search engine, and this is neither tuned nor horizontally scaled (which it can do very well).
C++ and C both fail to deliver the same level of performance as the Java virtual machine.
Oh wait hang on... does this mean that for complex applications the most important performance piece is normally actually the efficiency of the code rather than the efficiency of the base platform and therefore having a language in which it is easier to write efficient code is better than just having the one that is fastest to execute a for loop?
But hell this is Slashdot and Java is Slooooooow...
Its hardly surprising that this sort of code is highly valuable but the challenge is surely going to be proving that it was actually stolen. If they have a bash history that doesn't include the IP addresses but just shows that he created a tar ball then where is the proof that he actually stole anything at all?
The original is of course still there, what he took is a copy, so you can't show something is missing.
They currently don't know where it has gone, so they can't prove that a copy was moved outside the firewall successfully
If he hasn't yet sold the stuff on they can't prove there was a financial benefit linked to the theft
So how will they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that some actual theft has gone on?
Its not like he has just lobbed it on Bit-torrent or posted it to Wikileaks. What he has done is taken a copy of the code, which means its Intellectual Property and copyright issues rather than "simple" theft and therefore they really need to prove (surely) that he has done something with the code.
Should be interesting to see how the police "generate" and prove the evidence on this one.
I love the idea that this is some how shocking.
"NASA investigates other options and doesn't look at problem in blinkered and myopic way" - News at 11.
NASA always looks at these ideas and then normally decides that either the risk profile is too high (the most impressive thing about the first moon landings were the LACK of deaths) or that it just doesn't stack up as something that will deliver the overall objectives.
Hell in theory a great big Trebuchet could get someone to the moon, pretty one way mission though. The challenge here is to get someone to the moon, return them safely to earth and to establish a base on the moon. This is a HUGE challenge and one where a government agency has to do so at levels of safety that a commercial organisation wouldn't bother to meet.
When people bitch and moan about the price then that is fair enough, but please lets be honest here. Getting to the moon remains a HARD problem, the Chinese are going to take a long bunch of years to get there, and you can't solve hard problems with CostCo models. Either the aim is to go to the moon or not. The price comes from the aim and ambition not because NASA act like congress after pork.
The problem they have here is that as with last time when they lost, its basically a Dick Cheney move. They might be stomping all over people's rights, it might have no real justification and the method via which they obtain evidence are horrifically flawed, but they "believe" that this is protecting artist's rights and so the ends justifies the means.
The RIAA is just playing a series of Dick moves in the hope that if they create enough fear then people will accept it. The problem is that while Dick had some real terrorists to scare people about (and made up others) the RIAA are trying to turn Soccer Mom's into terrorists and it just doesn't work.
Surely their only hope is to get Dick "madder than a sack full of badgers" Cheney to claim its a national security issue and that Obama is just supporting terrorists by allowing this. This will pull in Fox News and suddenly the RIAA might have a chance.
The rise of zero personality manufacturer bands (The Jonas Brothers... like the Monkees but with out the hard cutting edge) and their cult of multiple product selling surely also has to be responsible. Its not just Games and DVDs its the fact that for a given "star" you can get pens, pencils, school bags, DVDs, 3D Movies and all manner of other crap. Their objective almost isn't to sell the music its just to sell the image and then have people buy lots of things with that image.
Dora the Explorer has as much credibility as these bands and is focused on a similar financial plan.
Meanwhile good bands seem to be going into the live tour set up more and more and being less worried about CDs. So what is killing CDs is that at the crap end people are flogging pens and school bags and at the good end its about the live gigs. Meaning that if you want entertainment at home you go for DVDs (because the Cinema is a rip-off) or Games (where you get to do more of what you want).
The music industry has killed the CD by focusing on bag sales and forcing decent artists to focus (thank god) on live gigs.
BT have a TV over the internet offer called "BT Vision" its suffering (and just lost its CEO) in competition with Rupert "any view that pays" Murdoch's Sky. Now if BT could get a richer experience out of iPlayer and access to a longer back catalogue than simply the last 7 days then this would help them in competition with Sky.
So I'd expect this to end up with BT agreeing to support iPlayer in the same way but an "interesting" tie-up between BT and the BBC around the delivery of iPlayer+ features to its BT Vision customers.
The last leader of the US had a religious driven morality and talked of "faith" and "belief" when he made his "moral" decisions. Osama Bin Laden has a belief in a higher power and talks of faith and belief when he talks about what he is doing.
And you find it scary that some people think they should be accountable to themselves and humanity?
Isn't it rather scary that while scientists are getting excited over this 47 million year old fossil that there are fossils in Congress who will swear on a stack of Bibles that the earth is only 6000 years old and that evolution is bunk.
That people can get elected without having basic modern ape like intelligence is the scary bit, this primate was probably more self-aware than many of those elected officials.
I did read it and the bit you keep saying is FLASH and FLASH players. That is the bit that if you had used an iPhone you would notice that it is using a QUICKTIME player (i.e. not Flash).
Having done video for the iPhone myself I have to say that it really is phenomenally trivial and just requires HTML skills and no clever stuff at all. So nope, I'll keep that grump hat on I'm afraid.
Seriously the standard of developers these days seems to have plummeted. If you want to provision for a device go and get the manual for that device, find out that H264 is what you need for the iPhone and that YouTube most certainly does NOT stream flash to iPhones.
I'm going to put my grumpy old bloke hat on here, but its the same hat I wore when I was 25 and someone asked me how to run Windows apps on an IBM RS6000. That person's excuse was that they just "thought it would work" which was a woeful statement from someone who had a degree in IT. This AskSlashdot is at the same level in that the question boldly states something that ISN'T TRUE (YouTube stream flash) and thinks there is some magic secret.
There is no magic secret, there is something that shouldn't be considered a secret at all. That thing is called RESEARCH, hell I'm not even asking you to hit the books in a library but just Google YouTube iPhone to find a FREE converter that talks about the video differences or YouTube iPhone video codec. It really is trivial. And if you can't do that then have a thought about just giving up and using Google Apps Premier Edition for your business and using the commercial version of YouTube that it supplies.
FoxNews and its ilk such as the Sun newspaper in the UK represent where news is headed. The likes of Rush Limberger Cheese of an argument are at the vanguard of this trend.
Put simply people want their bigotry and opinions confirmed by the "news" not to get the facts and have to make up their own mind.
This is what is killing decent journalism WAY more than the internet. Its the rise of individualised news which presents opinions as facts and anyone who disagrees as a terrorist. The internet has aided this explosion by enabling people to create ever more extreme opinions and to move further and further away from the facts.
Will this trend stop? God I hope so, but given that the primary drivers of this shift to "truthiness" are the politicians then its hard to see how.
Full Regexp would be very hard but Google does have basic abilities to do exact matching and conditional matching. Just hit the "advanced" button.
Hardly something that is tough to find out.
How can we resolve the money issue without breaking this? I feel people around the world have never had a chance like today to bridge misunderstandings. Up until 2 years ago the only understanding of Western world one could have far away was:
- Hollywood (or other typically fictional) movies
- Expensive imported books (sometimes requiring a language skill level not easily attained abroad)
You really have this arse about face. The issue is not the inability of people in the developing world to understand Western culture, they get it all the time. With CNN and the BBC broadcasting globally its easy to get "Western" news and the BBC in particular has very strong cultural link communications with the world service. Then you get the propaganda stations like Voice of America
In addition governments spend loads on organisations to spread the cultural message (e.g. the British Council) to these countries.
These countries are voracious consumers of western media and fashions and have been for 50 years, this is why they are massive users of this content.
The real issue is that in the Western World, especially the US, there is bugger all going the other way and bugger all knowledge of non-Western cultures (or even countries).
The questions to stump IBM here (beyond the "A Computer Company who supplied calculating equipment to Nazi Germany" A: Who are IBM) are those in which the language is against them.
Looking up from ANSWER keywords and then having a choice of "Who is" or "What is" to put in front of the key word isn't that hard. (This is Google's take on the Nazi/Computing challege).
This is a clear brute force rather than AI challenge as you are looking at filtering potentials based on the ANSWER to a question in which the answer is normally a specific noun or short phrase, remembering to put "Who is" or "What is".
What would make it harder would be the use of descriptions that are made famous by a third party (e.g. Marcus Brigstock v David Blane and the term "Git Wizard") which would require actual inference on the data sets to determine against whom it is applied.
This isn't AI, its keyword matching back to a noun and Google already does a decent job of that.
Nice marketing though
What is amazing is that despite coming up with the theoretical basis behind the big bang and a whole bunch of other stuff he is still yet to win the Nobel Prize. Hopefully this is just Professor Hawking's way of making a VERY big hint to the awards committee.
Yes I know its about theoretical pieces that must be proven by experimentation, but surely the big bang is worth it on its own.
Really? Seriously?
Population density? Is the issue.
So sure the US has overall about 1/3 of the population density of France, but then the US does have Texas and Alaska bumping up those figures quite a bit and the point about rail travel is that it is POINT-2-POINT its not about all the stopping places on the way. The Paris->Marseilles high speed train stops at very few places.
The main issues on cost are normally those of geography but fortunately you have a big load of flat stuff in the middle of the US which is pretty much ideal for high-speed rail travel.
Yes this means that when you get to your end-point you tend to hire a car to get to the next bit (or take a cab) or of course drive your car onto the train and then off at the other end.
Population density isn't the problem as its fundamentally a hub and spoke model (like the airlines) with people feeding into hubs.
1) US loves cars people won't commute by train...
Okay accept for in the North East where its pretty normal and that line from Boston down to Washington that people use.
2) America is really big
What do you mean you can get across Spain, France and Germany at speed (a pretty large area).
3) People will prefer to fly
Go to London, think about going to Paris, think about checking in at the airport... take the train
4) Trains are imperialist as they always drive on the left
Got me there, its true they do indeed always effectively drive on the left on a 2 track system.
So the real reason it won't work is because of 1776.
So let's say I build a bar:
- Knowing that killing people is illegal.
- Call it "Killers Bar".
- Publicly say that I'm in favour of killing every single human being on earth as long as it's for money and that I don't care if contract killers use my bar to make their deals.
- Keep saying "nah, nah, nah, can't catch me".
I should be accused of promoting murder and sent to jail?
If as a result of your bar there are several hundred deaths then yes you should indeed be done for promoting and facilitating murder. The cases of assisting terrorists for instance are a real world example of exactly the sort of mentality you are talking about and the defences of "I didn't know about that specific act of murder" haven't done well in court at all.
You, my friend, live in a pretty strange world.
It is strange indeed, unfortunately it is also reality.
A couple of responses here have said things like "this could impact legitimate businesses" or "what about legitimate filesharing".
The first rule surely here to learn is naming it "Pirate Bay" did tend to indicate exactly what the intention was of the site, it wasn't to enable legitimate business, it wasn't to enable legitimate file sharing it was to enable video/music piracy... the fairly unsubtle clue was in their freaking name.
For those who talk about them "not hosting content but just storing lists" lets shift to the real world. Lets say that someone "just" has a house into which all drug dealers can go and buy stuff off all the drug smugglers but the actual exchanges are done down the road in a car park... are the people with the house completely and utterly innocent of setting up "The Drug Exchange" because no drugs actually enter their house? Hitting the supply chain is one of the easiest ways to disrupt drug distribution and this is the equivalent for copyright "piracy".
As much as people like to dress it up in complexity as to why these folks are innocent it does come down to a rather easy thing
1) Sharing copyright material is not allowed
2) They set up a site to PROMOTE and SUPPORT the piracy of copyright material
3) They named the site after the "crime" of piracy
4) They kept saying "nah, nah, na, na, nah, can't catch us"
This has nothing to do with a legitimate business and no impact on legitimate businesses or file-sharing, this was a site set up explicitly to promote the sharing of copyright materials.
Stop bloody dressing it up as anything else
Are they getting a bit delusional? Calling it theatre after being sent to prison for a year doesn't sound like theatre it sounds like hard time and the $2.4m fine doesn't look too much like theatre.
Whether you agree or not with the judgement its very hard to describe imprisonment and multi-million dollar fines as theatre for the media. I worry that they've drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid.
Judean People's Front?
Splitter
Bush was pretty much relentlessly attacked by the media, Hollywood elites and blogosphere for all eight years.
Ahhh while Rush Limbaugh is going easy on Obama along with FoxNews, must have missed that.
World summary on Bush: An dumb asshole, right from the moment he threatened China (pre-9-11) and said that knowing the leader of Pakistan wouldn't be important (during his campaign).
And to the question of "if he was stupid how did he do so many things" the answer is the most aggressively active vice-president in the history of the US Mr Dick Cheney a man who claimed to part of both the executive and legislative while also being accountable to the rules of neither.
Please don't limit the abuse of Bush to a limited set of people, there are around 6.5 billion people in the world and 6.4 billion thought he was an asshole.