phone contracts are a joke. I bought my motorola phone outright for £80. I have a contract that charges me per second for calls, at a low rate, with zero monthly fees. My phone bill is maybe £2-3 a month, and that's for 2 phones. Phone companies HATE it when you buy a handset, because they then can't sting you for call charges under the guise of a subsidised handset. Unless you are a fashion victim, buy a handset you like and get a super cheap contract. the iphone is the pinnacle of consumer capitalism. 30 years ago the mobile phone didn't exist, and we all managed fine. Now people are paying maybe £600 a year in contract, call charges and handset costs just to own whichever one is most fashionable. madness.
until a big media company finally sues an ISP for allowing access to copyrighted content. That is inevitable, its the most sensible way for them to force a cut-off of access to such content.
its not used ONLY for that, but the VAST majority of it is copyrighted material. you would have to be delusional to pretend otherwise. look at the top 100 lists at the popular torrent sites, how many linux distros do you see there? Millions of people are using torrents to take copyrighted content for free. the only surprise is that major ISPs have not yet started blacklisting the major torrent sites entirely.
and the idiot who tagged it as such needs to read some history. This is BAD DRM, and sucks, and the people responsible are idiots and should be sued. but to equate not being able to watch sports videos with fascism is just immature bullshit that makes you look foolish. Don't cry wolf.
Indeed, this is the common view on slashdot. its fine according to groupthink here to download copyrighted material, because the people who try to earn a living creating the movies, music and games we all love are 'teh evil mafiaaaaa' and you are sticking it to the man by stealing their stuff. I love the dig at me 'falling for teh mafiaaaa PR!!!!11!!'. believe it or not, I believe in paying people for their work. Its called being honest and not trying to rip off my fellow man. Alien concepts to most of the posters here and on digg.
Then the university needs to take steps to prevent it happening. if that means banning certain p2p protocols or certain websites then so be it. Sorry to burst everyone's bubble but universities are places where you go to further your education, not to shield yourself from prosecution when you knowingly and repeatedly download copyrighted music that you do not pay for, and for which you know payment is required. You may not believe in copyright, or the rights of the IP holders, fine, then you should fight to change the law, or happily be prosecuted so you can have your day in court and make your spec about the injustice. But to hide behind university lawyers and IT people who frankly have better things to do than stick up for the illegal activities of the students, is just lame.
And shows how stupid the US legal system is. I don't care if your last years internet usage was totally blocked of bit-torrent sue, to claim that you deserve that amount of compensation is just juvenile and silly, and the whole case should be thrown out as a result. It's no good complaining that the RIAA pushes for huge payments when a single song is downloaded, if the same people turn around and act just as stupidly over a few faked TCP packets.
that's true, some cars here have great mileage, but there is a growth in recent years of people driving big SUVS and jeeps, especially on the school run. The problem is that such items are seen (insanely) as some kind of status symbol, despite the fact that they are impractical in every possible way. parking them is hell, navigating them through narrow streets is hell, and filling them with fuel can go over £80 (approx $160). Their safety record is also appalling, but people are such sheep, they continue to buy them because they are cynically marketed as manly, butch and safe. There are some moves to reduce their numbers though, one London council is charging 4x4 drivers more for parking, there is talk of a higher London congestion charge for them, and they already pay slightly more in Car Tax.
if you lose your status through economic means, trust me, that's the good way. I'm from England, and we fought a lot of wars as we lost ours, so did the French, the Italian/Romans, the Greeks and pretty much everyone that was a major world power. Empires don't last, their fall is inevitable. if you can let go of yours without losing thousands or even millions of lives, you did well. Sensible nations act like the swiss, they stay out of wars, and trundle along happily as other peoples empires come and go.
did you seriously just suggest there is 'little science' to back up the need to reduce C02 emissions? holy fuck, where have you been? with that attitude, your country is fucked, in terms of being anywhere but last to market with efficient vehicle designs and renewable energy industries. Don't expect the rest of the world to wait for you to catch up.
well said. how many times does a slashdot headline take aim at Microsoft or the RIAA, even when the topic in hand applies to tons of companies. Slashdot is very selective who it targets, based on its own preconceptions. That's like the majority of journalism sadly, and amazingly, this is not greenpeaces fault.
I think you are getting this way wrong. Lets say Greenpeace taregt 5 companies: NobdyTech TinyComp NowhereTech Apple! ZeroTech
Which press release do you think the newspaper magazines print? You are assuming that the fact that claims against 'look at us we are perfect and innocent' apple becomes the headline is greenpeaces fault, whereas in fact its probably just as likely to be editorial, and done so because people want tor ead about companies they have heard of. Blame the editors, blame the readers, or blame apple, but blaming greenpeace for releasing information about a public company just seems petty.
agreed. having recently gone from london to venice by train, with the eurostar from london to paris, and an overnight sleeper, i have to say its the ONLY way to travel. i have NEVER slept on a plane, even with noise canceling headphones, but on a train in a proper bed, its another story. European sleeper trains rock, and the eurostar is awesome.
It sounds like you think that people running one man businesses should be immune to prosecution by larger ones. you clearly think that in any struggle between any multi million dollar company and a guy running a site in his bedroom, the one guy MUST be innocent right? because its 'teh evil company' right? What would you do if you ran a large company? refuse to prosecute anyone earning under X a year? regardless what impact they had on your company? what bullshit.
well said. so this website had 'mostly' copyright-free material, and it got shut down. Talk about major spin. how about this as a title:
"Site that infringed copyright gets prosecuted for infringing copyright"
not so scandalous now is it? If the website was really keen to provide copyright-free music, why didn't they just stick to doing that. They could always have set up a second site for music that was still copyrighted in some territories.
so? is this a tin foil hat argument? or you think that people who only use their cars once a week should subsidise the costs of people who are on the roads 24/7? your post assumes everyone agrees with you that this is an 'evil government plot', yet you have not explained whats so bad about it.
what problem are monsanto pretending to solve? apart from improving their bottom live, what is the point? is this corn cheaper / tastier / healthier? faster growing? it seems to be a very dodgy experiment in fucking around with the basic genetic structure of one of our most vital foods just to make a certain dodgy company richer. so, speaking as a consumer, I'm not impressed.
you mean like the 'gathering of developers' which was a similar thing in the game publishing world, it would be a new style publisher that would support the developers directly, and give them a far better deal, instead of ripping them off like the other publishers.
GOD were bought up by Take 2, and now don't exist.
I doubt anything different would happen in the music industry. there is a natural economic trend towards large publishers controlling entertainment markets. take a look at the casual games industry to see it happening right now.
and if everyone takes that attitude, they all pirate the content, and the content providers implode. maybe there are a few anarchist idiots here that reckon that would be a good thing, but as those same people are the ones constantly downloading the very TV shows that would no longer be made (heroes and lost and 24 are not made by amateurs) then I suspect they are wrong.
If what you advocate (taking content and not paying) does not scale up to everyone in the market doing what you do, then basically you are advocating leeching off the goodwill of honest people. not something I can support.
oh will you listen to yourself. this isnt teaching someone to drive without any idea what they will drive for, the site was called TVLINKs and is apparently the most popular website to get copyrighted TV show torrents, they didn't exactly hide the stuff. you might as well put a big sign outside your house saying "ASK ME ABOUT STOLEN GOODS!".
Its frankly pathetic for anyone to try and pretend that this site is ok just because they aren't hosting the content. if the same site linked to torrents of child porn or videos of people being tortured and raped, would you still be whining about how technically they aren't breaking the law, and congratulating them on how they have developed a 'new business model' ??
Hang on to your tinfoil hat there a minute. Don't big this up into being some fascist state bullshit. this was not 'the organizers of people' it was not a radical anti-government organization encouraging political debate, or suggesting political change. it was a way for geeks to download copyrighted tv and movies. don't try and pretend it was anything more intellectual.
So you think its OK for (in my example) someone to make a living acting as the local phone directory for drug dealers? what has fair use got to do with linking to torrents of full tv series?
well i reckon if i ran a business where people knocked on my door and asked me where to buy some cocaine, and i told them which address and what time to go to, and they gave me $1 for my time, then I'd be in a cell right away, despite not physically having any cocaine or selling it. No doubt this site made money from ads, and to pretend the business model of the site was not designed around leeching money indirectly from copyrighted material is just naive. People are always so keen to argue the finer points and wording of the law if it lets them carry on taking other peoples stuff for free, but when your house gets burgled, and the guy gets off with a technicality, are you equally anal about defining guilt? It seems obvious to me that if you run a site that provides easy access to copyrighted content, you are breaking the law, especially if you do not remove that content when the copyright holder alerts you to it.
Slashdot Mirror
phone contracts are a joke. I bought my motorola phone outright for £80. I have a contract that charges me per second for calls, at a low rate, with zero monthly fees. My phone bill is maybe £2-3 a month, and that's for 2 phones.
Phone companies HATE it when you buy a handset, because they then can't sting you for call charges under the guise of a subsidised handset. Unless you are a fashion victim, buy a handset you like and get a super cheap contract.
the iphone is the pinnacle of consumer capitalism. 30 years ago the mobile phone didn't exist, and we all managed fine. Now people are paying maybe £600 a year in contract, call charges and handset costs just to own whichever one is most fashionable.
madness.
until a big media company finally sues an ISP for allowing access to copyrighted content. That is inevitable, its the most sensible way for them to force a cut-off of access to such content.
its not used ONLY for that, but the VAST majority of it is copyrighted material. you would have to be delusional to pretend otherwise. look at the top 100 lists at the popular torrent sites, how many linux distros do you see there?
Millions of people are using torrents to take copyrighted content for free. the only surprise is that major ISPs have not yet started blacklisting the major torrent sites entirely.
and the idiot who tagged it as such needs to read some history. This is BAD DRM, and sucks, and the people responsible are idiots and should be sued. but to equate not being able to watch sports videos with fascism is just immature bullshit that makes you look foolish. Don't cry wolf.
Indeed, this is the common view on slashdot. its fine according to groupthink here to download copyrighted material, because the people who try to earn a living creating the movies, music and games we all love are 'teh evil mafiaaaaa' and you are sticking it to the man by stealing their stuff.
I love the dig at me 'falling for teh mafiaaaa PR!!!!11!!'. believe it or not, I believe in paying people for their work. Its called being honest and not trying to rip off my fellow man. Alien concepts to most of the posters here and on digg.
Then the university needs to take steps to prevent it happening. if that means banning certain p2p protocols or certain websites then so be it. Sorry to burst everyone's bubble but universities are places where you go to further your education, not to shield yourself from prosecution when you knowingly and repeatedly download copyrighted music that you do not pay for, and for which you know payment is required.
You may not believe in copyright, or the rights of the IP holders, fine, then you should fight to change the law, or happily be prosecuted so you can have your day in court and make your spec about the injustice. But to hide behind university lawyers and IT people who frankly have better things to do than stick up for the illegal activities of the students, is just lame.
And shows how stupid the US legal system is. I don't care if your last years internet usage was totally blocked of bit-torrent sue, to claim that you deserve that amount of compensation is just juvenile and silly, and the whole case should be thrown out as a result. It's no good complaining that the RIAA pushes for huge payments when a single song is downloaded, if the same people turn around and act just as stupidly over a few faked TCP packets.
"Rockstar has some of the most brilliant people working for them. Are they really run by a bunch of idiots? I find that hard to believe."
having dealt with their parent company on several occasions, I would postulate you put way too much faith in their abilities.
that's true, some cars here have great mileage, but there is a growth in recent years of people driving big SUVS and jeeps, especially on the school run. The problem is that such items are seen (insanely) as some kind of status symbol, despite the fact that they are impractical in every possible way. parking them is hell, navigating them through narrow streets is hell, and filling them with fuel can go over £80 (approx $160).
Their safety record is also appalling, but people are such sheep, they continue to buy them because they are cynically marketed as manly, butch and safe. There are some moves to reduce their numbers though, one London council is charging 4x4 drivers more for parking, there is talk of a higher London congestion charge for them, and they already pay slightly more in Car Tax.
"which is the end of our superpower status"
if you lose your status through economic means, trust me, that's the good way. I'm from England, and we fought a lot of wars as we lost ours, so did the French, the Italian/Romans, the Greeks and pretty much everyone that was a major world power.
Empires don't last, their fall is inevitable. if you can let go of yours without losing thousands or even millions of lives, you did well.
Sensible nations act like the swiss, they stay out of wars, and trundle along happily as other peoples empires come and go.
did you seriously just suggest there is 'little science' to back up the need to reduce C02 emissions?
holy fuck, where have you been?
with that attitude, your country is fucked, in terms of being anywhere but last to market with efficient vehicle designs and renewable energy industries. Don't expect the rest of the world to wait for you to catch up.
well said. how many times does a slashdot headline take aim at Microsoft or the RIAA, even when the topic in hand applies to tons of companies. Slashdot is very selective who it targets, based on its own preconceptions. That's like the majority of journalism sadly, and amazingly, this is not greenpeaces fault.
I think you are getting this way wrong. Lets say Greenpeace taregt 5 companies:
NobdyTech
TinyComp
NowhereTech
Apple!
ZeroTech
Which press release do you think the newspaper magazines print?
You are assuming that the fact that claims against 'look at us we are perfect and innocent' apple becomes the headline is greenpeaces fault, whereas in fact its probably just as likely to be editorial, and done so because people want tor ead about companies they have heard of.
Blame the editors, blame the readers, or blame apple, but blaming greenpeace for releasing information about a public company just seems petty.
"We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed.... if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful"
outside of hollywood movies, nobody talks like this. this is all the ramblings of some deranged kid.
agreed. having recently gone from london to venice by train, with the eurostar from london to paris, and an overnight sleeper, i have to say its the ONLY way to travel. i have NEVER slept on a plane, even with noise canceling headphones, but on a train in a proper bed, its another story. European sleeper trains rock, and the eurostar is awesome.
It sounds like you think that people running one man businesses should be immune to prosecution by larger ones. you clearly think that in any struggle between any multi million dollar company and a guy running a site in his bedroom, the one guy MUST be innocent right? because its 'teh evil company' right?
What would you do if you ran a large company? refuse to prosecute anyone earning under X a year? regardless what impact they had on your company?
what bullshit.
well said. so this website had 'mostly' copyright-free material, and it got shut down. Talk about major spin. how about this as a title:
"Site that infringed copyright gets prosecuted for infringing copyright"
not so scandalous now is it? If the website was really keen to provide copyright-free music, why didn't they just stick to doing that. They could always have set up a second site for music that was still copyrighted in some territories.
so?
is this a tin foil hat argument? or you think that people who only use their cars once a week should subsidise the costs of people who are on the roads 24/7?
your post assumes everyone agrees with you that this is an 'evil government plot', yet you have not explained whats so bad about it.
what problem are monsanto pretending to solve? apart from improving their bottom live, what is the point? is this corn cheaper / tastier / healthier? faster growing?
it seems to be a very dodgy experiment in fucking around with the basic genetic structure of one of our most vital foods just to make a certain dodgy company richer.
so, speaking as a consumer, I'm not impressed.
you mean like the 'gathering of developers' which was a similar thing in the game publishing world, it would be a new style publisher that would support the developers directly, and give them a far better deal, instead of ripping them off like the other publishers.
GOD were bought up by Take 2, and now don't exist.
I doubt anything different would happen in the music industry. there is a natural economic trend towards large publishers controlling entertainment markets. take a look at the casual games industry to see it happening right now.
and if everyone takes that attitude, they all pirate the content, and the content providers implode. maybe there are a few anarchist idiots here that reckon that would be a good thing, but as those same people are the ones constantly downloading the very TV shows that would no longer be made (heroes and lost and 24 are not made by amateurs) then I suspect they are wrong.
If what you advocate (taking content and not paying) does not scale up to everyone in the market doing what you do, then basically you are advocating leeching off the goodwill of honest people. not something I can support.
oh will you listen to yourself. this isnt teaching someone to drive without any idea what they will drive for, the site was called TVLINKs and is apparently the most popular website to get copyrighted TV show torrents, they didn't exactly hide the stuff. you might as well put a big sign outside your house saying "ASK ME ABOUT STOLEN GOODS!".
Its frankly pathetic for anyone to try and pretend that this site is ok just because they aren't hosting the content. if the same site linked to torrents of child porn or videos of people being tortured and raped, would you still be whining about how technically they aren't breaking the law, and congratulating them on how they have developed a 'new business model' ??
Hang on to your tinfoil hat there a minute. Don't big this up into being some fascist state bullshit. this was not 'the organizers of people' it was not a radical anti-government organization encouraging political debate, or suggesting political change. it was a way for geeks to download copyrighted tv and movies. don't try and pretend it was anything more intellectual.
So you think its OK for (in my example) someone to make a living acting as the local phone directory for drug dealers?
what has fair use got to do with linking to torrents of full tv series?
well i reckon if i ran a business where people knocked on my door and asked me where to buy some cocaine, and i told them which address and what time to go to, and they gave me $1 for my time, then I'd be in a cell right away, despite not physically having any cocaine or selling it.
No doubt this site made money from ads, and to pretend the business model of the site was not designed around leeching money indirectly from copyrighted material is just naive.
People are always so keen to argue the finer points and wording of the law if it lets them carry on taking other peoples stuff for free, but when your house gets burgled, and the guy gets off with a technicality, are you equally anal about defining guilt?
It seems obvious to me that if you run a site that provides easy access to copyrighted content, you are breaking the law, especially if you do not remove that content when the copyright holder alerts you to it.