Amen! I've seen a non-English professors have a language dispute with a native English professor; the non-English one (having the ego problem) couldn't admit to the fact that the English one knew better than he did how to write a certain English word (don't remember which).
In the end, as these ego-matter go, the word in the published article was the (incorrect) word suggested by the ego-prof.
Sickening. And the worst part is: it really seems that these profs don't only convince other that they must be right, they really seem to believe this themselves. Unbelievable; I'm doing a Ph.D. now, and the more I learn, the more I realise how much there is that I don't know!
The Bertelsman Music Group (BMG is now starting to get it: in Hollland, they will start selling "budget" CDs, that cost only EUR 10,- per copy. On the other hand, they have no nice booklet; the contents are just printed on the disk.
The above only goes for Dutch music in Holland (and German music in Germany). International CDs will go down to EUR 13,-.
The Bertelsman Music Group (BMG is now starting to get it: in Hollland, they will start selling "budget" CDs, that cost only EUR 10,- per copy. On the other hand, they have no nice booklet; the contents are just printed on the disk.
The above only goes for Dutch music in Holland (and German music in Germany). International CDs will go down to EUR 13,-.
When your screen doesn't reflect so much of the ambient light anymore, you can use a projector that outputs less power. For one, this can lead to less hot projector lamps, thus a longer life for them.
It might also enable the use of lower-power technologies (LED-lasers anyone?), that might in turn make the projectors much cheaper.
Nice work by Sony
Now, is there a physicist in da house who knows how wide the reflection-band (in wavelength-terms) for R, G and B is?
a DNS-based network could provide a high-latency high-bandwidth madium. Just think about where you heard those two properties before: Freenet! A DNS based freenet might be very hard to stop indeed!
Amen! I'm from Holland. And before anyone starts shouting about the drug-policy in my country, please make sure you have read a bit about it.
Basically, "soft drugs" (drugs that are mentally, but not physically, addicting) are allowed for personal use. Now what happens?
The amount of adolescents (w.r.t. the population) that tries soft-drugs like Mariuana one or a couple of times is significantly higher than the US average. However, the amount of adolescents that actually uses soft-drugs regularly is much lower.
Adolescents are adolescents: they will piss off the world around them by doing things that are not allowed. And guess what: If you allow soft-drugs, it's not exciting for them to use them anymore. So most won't.
A second advantage of a liberal soft-drugs policy is that there actually is a certain quality-control out there. So if your kids will try Mariuana once, you as a parent can rest assured that it's a good quality, and doesn't contain any crap.
I'm not saying that a liberal drug policy is "the answer", but I do say that the American dogmatic "o-my-god-it's-bad-so-we-should-wage-war-on-it" attitude doesn't work at all. Try to see beyond the dogma, and be pragmatic, it works!
In The Netherlands, you can report spam on-line as well at the Spam Klacht (lit.: "spam complaint") website. This is an official website of the OPTA organization, which monitors and control telecommication in The Netherlands.
Note that the link to the Spam Klacht website is even an SSL link.
While this person commited a "crime against science" that cannot be justified in any way, I think two comments are in order.
First, there is an enormous pressure to publish in the academic world: the phrase publish or perish is heard a lot. The main reason for this is, that at a certain moment, people higher up in the management and funding chain wanted to know whether their money is spent well (or, equivalently: whom to give the money to).
So, what people do to grade the quality or research, is to count publications. Generally, this count is weighted by the "impact factor" of the journal you publish in (if you publish in Science or Nature, the impact is much higher than when publishing in the Local Journal on BlaBla). Now, counting publications is of course a hideous way to grade science. But it gets worse: a whole new field of research (that is not worthy of the name) has been founded: Citation Analysis. Basically, a database is made of who references whom, and the quality-estimate for your research is based on that.
Now, since the amount of money a professor gets depends on the publication-"score", he will put pressure on his people to publish. Again: publish or perish. This has given rise to the practice in which to try to smear one or two ideas over two or three publications: two or three low-impact pubs score higher than one medium-impact one. This, in turn, has given rise to a many many (very) low-pact journal that, frankly, contain mostly rubish; only to satisfy the bean/pub-counters and the funders.
All this, is in no way whatsoever, reason enough to falsify data. But to all the people that started shouting about "hey, this guy broke the scientific rules so he's a piece of shit", I'd like to say: This publication pressure, rather than the person's ethics, likely is the problem.
The second point I'd like to make is about the stripping of the doctoral degree: Even though it might be just, it's not necessary whatsoever; This guy is not getting a job in science anymore, degree or not. There are two things that spell doom on any scientific career: Faking, and Plagiarism. That's the end of your career, regardsless of the number of degrees you hold.
Freenet is an encrypted P2P network where information is not stored at fixed locations: nodes exchange "keys" (information bits) all the time, and in this way "popular" information stays alive while non-used information gradually fades away.
Since every connection between a different pair of nodes is encrypted using different keys, it would be very hard to use traffic-analysis to find out what somebody is sending. To make matters even better: even you don't know what your node stores; it's all encrypted. This makes legal defense rather easy: it seems the only thing they can charge you with is participation in a P2P network or something alike.
Now, when using Freenet, you download the node-software (see my original post) and run it. This spawns the communication software, and a "virtual web proxy" at port 8888. This proxy interfaces you webbrowser to the Freenet. Browsing thus is a matter of directing your browser to your local host at port 8888.
As for searching: Now this is still a bit of a problem; since information is decentral, there also cannot be a Google-like central database that you can search. However, there are many "spider"-sites (remember the web in the beginning, especially Yahoo before they implemented a real search-database?) that you can use to find info. The most important ones for starting are The Freedom Engine (TFE) and Find Is Not Dolphin (FIND). Links to both are hardcoded into your local freenet proxy.
On the other hand, things are becoming better: The I2P project will be providing fully anonymous IP (IP over ann I2P interface!). Once that's done, you can run anything you like on I2P, even central search engines and the like.
Everytime somebody mentions the word Freenet, somebody else mentions the C-word (Child-pornography), and the stuff gets modded up to +4 or +5. Let me make clear from the start that I also do not support child pornography, but I think a few comments are in order here.
As some of the other posters already said, Freenet now is mainly used for political statements and software that's morally ok but not legally. I suggest you have a look at The Freedom Engine (SSK@rBjVda8pC-Kq04jUurIAb8IzAGcPAgM/TFE//) and looks what's available there. I ranges from anti-Scientology stuff to Bush-critical stuff and just personal Freenet-blogs ("flogs").
Now, even though I started my previous post with a rant against black-and-white thinking, you complete made that same mistake here. Let me introduce you to some statistics. I we call information that can morally "be allowed to be shared" (this is a fuzzy definition, not a hard one) "positive", and other information "negative", then, when publishing to a medium, you always get four cases:
For the regular internet:
True positive: Information that can morally be allowed, and that can be published without a problem. This means most of the info available on the 'net. Think Slashdot, and most other sites.
True negative: Information that is morally very shaky or perceived as "downright wrong" by the majority, and for which indeed you get into trouble for posting it. Think state secrets, child pornography, etc.
False positive: Information that is "wrong", but which you can post without real problems. For some people, this includes porn, for others, software and warez, etc.
False negative: Information that is "morally ok", but gets you into trouble when publishing it. Think Chinese people that post critics on their government, the late PlayFair project, all those critical sites that are bullied off the net by big companies.
Repeat after me: You can, however much you would like it, NEVER build a system without false positives and false negatives. That's the way it works.
Now, for Freenet, another trade-off is made: the number of false negatives is reduced, at the cost of somewhat more false positives. I'm sure that there might still be information that could get pulled of a part of freenet, by using enough "cancer nodes" (false negatives, again), which would only be possible with very sensitive state information and it would require an investment only possible by world governments. And, alas, there are false positives: (child/animal) pornography, warez (arguably).
Now, remember the PlayFair story? Thanks to Freenet, you can get it:SSK@Qv3D1xm646Sat6DpmCt7BCyOGiQPAgM,S91vuF3XDSR OK6GSiWp9Xw/PlayFair//
And there we go again... Apart from the fact that I find the influence that big industries have on the justice system in the US nauseating, the music industry seems to think that it can "stop" swapping in any way. This is typical black and white thinking
What is actually happening here is that the "system" (in this case the swappers and the music industry together) shift to a new equilibrium location, where the trade-off between speed and ease-of-use on the one hand, and speed on the other hand, is optimal for the given situation on the legal battle-field.
First we had Napster: very easy to use, but having the flaw of a single point of failure. Then we had the FastTrack and Gnutella networks (think KaZaa and LimeWire here): good bandwidth, but no anonymity at all, but at least without the need for a single point of failure. Then came eDonkey and his friends: less bandwidth, more obfuscation.
A step further along the line lies FreeNet: anonimity beyond reasonable doubt, but a slow network and it's hard to find things. In the future, the balance might shift even further to the side of obfuscation, encryption and low bandwidth.
Now before you start yelling: "But FreeNet doesn't work!". Think again: Since about mid-May, it works well again! Try it!
So: go to their website and download that client! Happy browsing!
However, a lawyer-firm in Holland has done preliminary research (paid for by some pro-sharing websites in Holland, no less) that indicates that puchasing music from allofmp3 is legal here if it is for personal use.
But if you're worried about video, I'd put temporal search constraints in first.
Very true. However, my work doesn't focus on video; it focusses on still images, in which of course you don't have a temporal context. A nice side-effect of using the context-proprocessing is that I could do photos at a couple of frames per second, which enables a real-time demo.But like I said, performance is likely worse that in those systems using temporal context.
Most real-time applications of the Viola and Jones classifier use a shortcut: in fact the OpenCV code first downsizes the image by a factor of 2, which effectively cuts your search-space by a factor much more than 4 (since especially for the smaller faces, you have a lot of points to search). In my method I don't do that: I can find faces from 24x24 pixels and up (as opposed to 48x48 pixels for the OpenCV default classifier).
Re:An online-DEMO of some NEWER stuff
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 1
Interesting! Do you have any detection-results on a dataset, and/or a ROC-curve (detection rate vs. false-positive rate)?
Did you use the pretrained classifier as well? And what window-size do you use?
Re:An online-DEMO of some NEWER stuff
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 1
Good! It's good to have as much of this stuff as possible in Open-Source form. I think it should be possible to make the Viola-Jones framework much faster by using a number of tricks:
First, don't program this stuff in C++ with all kinds of function calls: do it inline, and in C.
Use SSE(2) instructions to speed up wavelet calculation, and REUSE wavelets for adjacent windows. (SSE(2) could be used to calculate multiple wavelets in one go).
Use some kind of cache-optimization, like ATLAS does for LAPACK.
I didn't implement any of this, as I'm working on context-based detection, which in my case is just a proof of concept. That means actual speed is not so much of a concern. However, I'd be very interested in seeing some code;)
An online-DEMO of some NEWER stuff
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Seriously, that's old. I'm a computer vision Ph.D. student, and there now are much faster methods. I'll just refer to my old comment.
A demo can be found here.
You can contact me for more details...
Current really fast methods use cascades of very simple classifier that are very weak themselves, but very strong when combined. The work of Viola & Jones is what most of the stuff is centered around nowadays.
I'm a researcher in AI, and I can do nothing but backup the parent's claim (sad as it is). When we use AI, we would expect a robot to be able to perceive its surroundings (analyzing sensory inputs), make decisions (reasoning) and act (generating actuator outputs).
I can only comment on the first, since I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Vision. And the general picture is, to be quite honest, depressing. Forget all you've seen in e.g. Terminator (e.g. the robot analyzing its visual input, and all the nice text in the image): it ain't gonna happen for a long time! Although space missions are (presumably) less complex in terms of sensory inputs, the state of affairs in dealing with normal natural images gives a nice idea of what's currently (im)possible:
I'll provide an example here. I'm doing Computer Vision (face-detections), and the current state of affairs is about this: When finding faces in 800x600 images, this can be done in about 1 second (yes: 1 full second), at about a 90% detection rate and a couple of false detections per image. For more complex object classes that are not so nicely symmetric (think cars, houses, landscapes, etc.), the performance is dramatically worse.
You can look at the BitTorrent link. And ONLY if that doesn't work, use this.
As for reasoning: this is still in it's infancy, but I'm not working in that field, so I cannot comment on that well. Any takers?;)
It should be possible to start a free/ad-supported/paid service (1$/film) offering these films. Would piss Disney and might also become sustainable/profitable - who knows...
I don't think there is any question about whether it would piss off Disney et al., the question is how severe their reaction will be.
Now, as long as the server is physically hosted in Russia, and the back-accounts are also in Russia, who is going to stop them? Would being a (say) American citizen that participates in this hypothetical Russian firm be reason enough to be prosecuted? After all: you're not breaking the law in the country where the firm is established.
BTW: How is the state of the net in Russia (I'm just informing here)? Good fast backbones and good international connections (directly to Europe, I suppose?)
Did I say that I was supporting illegal trading in the first place? I was also not saying that I would support so-called "evil" countries or organizations (like Al Q) earning money by this. I was just thinking about the possibility of them doing that, regardsless of whether I (or any else for that matter) would agree to them doing that.
My question (are there any decent hosters in Afghanistan et al.) was more related to copyright-wise illegal, but morally correct, programs like PlayFair.
Remember: "against the law" and "morally wrong" are not necessarily the same thing, even though that's often claimed by many people!
...that then can earn by welcoming piracy into their countries: do you seriously think that the new government of (say) Afghanistan gives one flying fuck about the profits of American companies?
The same might go for recently "deceased" projects like PlayFair.
Are there any decent hosting services available in Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, (insert any other country without decent copyright laws)?
Slashdot Mirror
Amen! I've seen a non-English professors have a language dispute with a native English professor; the non-English one (having the ego problem) couldn't admit to the fact that the English one knew better than he did how to write a certain English word (don't remember which).
In the end, as these ego-matter go, the word in the published article was the (incorrect) word suggested by the ego-prof.
Sickening. And the worst part is: it really seems that these profs don't only convince other that they must be right, they really seem to believe this themselves. Unbelievable; I'm doing a Ph.D. now, and the more I learn, the more I realise how much there is that I don't know!
The Bertelsman Music Group (BMG is now starting to get it: in Hollland, they will start selling "budget" CDs, that cost only EUR 10,- per copy. On the other hand, they have no nice booklet; the contents are just printed on the disk.
The above only goes for Dutch music in Holland (and German music in Germany). International CDs will go down to EUR 13,-.
Slowly, they are starting to get it. Just wait...
The Bertelsman Music Group (BMG is now starting to get it: in Hollland, they will start selling "budget" CDs, that cost only EUR 10,- per copy. On the other hand, they have no nice booklet; the contents are just printed on the disk.
The above only goes for Dutch music in Holland (and German music in Germany). International CDs will go down to EUR 13,-.
Slowly, they are starting to get it. Just wait...
When your screen doesn't reflect so much of the ambient light anymore, you can use a projector that outputs less power. For one, this can lead to less hot projector lamps, thus a longer life for them.
It might also enable the use of lower-power technologies (LED-lasers anyone?), that might in turn make the projectors much cheaper.
Nice work by Sony
Now, is there a physicist in da house who knows how wide the reflection-band (in wavelength-terms) for R, G and B is?
a DNS-based network could provide a high-latency high-bandwidth madium. Just think about where you heard those two properties before: Freenet! A DNS based freenet might be very hard to stop indeed!
I of course meant this link.
Amen! I'm from Holland. And before anyone starts shouting about the drug-policy in my country, please make sure you have read a bit about it.
Basically, "soft drugs" (drugs that are mentally, but not physically, addicting) are allowed for personal use. Now what happens?
The amount of adolescents (w.r.t. the population) that tries soft-drugs like Mariuana one or a couple of times is significantly higher than the US average. However, the amount of adolescents that actually uses soft-drugs regularly is much lower.
Adolescents are adolescents: they will piss off the world around them by doing things that are not allowed. And guess what: If you allow soft-drugs, it's not exciting for them to use them anymore. So most won't.
A second advantage of a liberal soft-drugs policy is that there actually is a certain quality-control out there. So if your kids will try Mariuana once, you as a parent can rest assured that it's a good quality, and doesn't contain any crap.
I'm not saying that a liberal drug policy is "the answer", but I do say that the American dogmatic "o-my-god-it's-bad-so-we-should-wage-war-on-it" attitude doesn't work at all. Try to see beyond the dogma, and be pragmatic, it works!
In The Netherlands, you can report spam on-line as well at the Spam Klacht (lit.: "spam complaint") website. This is an official website of the OPTA organization, which monitors and control telecommication in The Netherlands. Note that the link to the Spam Klacht website is even an SSL link.
While this person commited a "crime against science" that cannot be justified in any way, I think two comments are in order.
First, there is an enormous pressure to publish in the academic world: the phrase publish or perish is heard a lot. The main reason for this is, that at a certain moment, people higher up in the management and funding chain wanted to know whether their money is spent well (or, equivalently: whom to give the money to).
So, what people do to grade the quality or research, is to count publications. Generally, this count is weighted by the "impact factor" of the journal you publish in (if you publish in Science or Nature, the impact is much higher than when publishing in the Local Journal on BlaBla). Now, counting publications is of course a hideous way to grade science. But it gets worse: a whole new field of research (that is not worthy of the name) has been founded: Citation Analysis. Basically, a database is made of who references whom, and the quality-estimate for your research is based on that.
Now, since the amount of money a professor gets depends on the publication-"score", he will put pressure on his people to publish. Again: publish or perish. This has given rise to the practice in which to try to smear one or two ideas over two or three publications: two or three low-impact pubs score higher than one medium-impact one. This, in turn, has given rise to a many many (very) low-pact journal that, frankly, contain mostly rubish; only to satisfy the bean/pub-counters and the funders.
All this, is in no way whatsoever, reason enough to falsify data. But to all the people that started shouting about "hey, this guy broke the scientific rules so he's a piece of shit", I'd like to say: This publication pressure, rather than the person's ethics, likely is the problem.
The second point I'd like to make is about the stripping of the doctoral degree: Even though it might be just, it's not necessary whatsoever; This guy is not getting a job in science anymore, degree or not. There are two things that spell doom on any scientific career: Faking, and Plagiarism. That's the end of your career, regardsless of the number of degrees you hold.
Because we have this: freenet:SSK@Qv3D1xm646Sat6DpmCt7BCyOGiQPAgM,S91vuF 3XDSROK6GSiWp9Xw/PlayFair//
Wow, that was fast, also for me! :)
Of course, do remember to leave the client open until you've uploaded at least at much as you've downloaded.
I killed mine after 120 or so MB of upload
BYU Project to Silence Computer Fans
We as /. computer fans have been discriminated for so long, that
you'd think that we, as computer enthousiasts, have had quite enough....
An NOW, these people that have been bullying us all along have invented a system that makes us keep our mouths shut... Just great...
Pills... must... take... pills...
Link it to map quest. Driving directions could be visual.
Ah, so now even female drivers can find their way around a strange city! ;)
(ducks)
Freenet is an encrypted P2P network where information is not stored at fixed locations: nodes exchange "keys" (information bits) all the time, and in this way "popular" information stays alive while non-used information gradually fades away.
Since every connection between a different pair of nodes is encrypted using different keys, it would be very hard to use traffic-analysis to find out what somebody is sending. To make matters even better: even you don't know what your node stores; it's all encrypted. This makes legal defense rather easy: it seems the only thing they can charge you with is participation in a P2P network or something alike.
Now, when using Freenet, you download the node-software (see my original post) and run it. This spawns the communication software, and a "virtual web proxy" at port 8888. This proxy interfaces you webbrowser to the Freenet. Browsing thus is a matter of directing your browser to your local host at port 8888.
As for searching: Now this is still a bit of a problem; since information is decentral, there also cannot be a Google-like central database that you can search. However, there are many "spider"-sites (remember the web in the beginning, especially Yahoo before they implemented a real search-database?) that you can use to find info. The most important ones for starting are The Freedom Engine (TFE) and Find Is Not Dolphin (FIND). Links to both are hardcoded into your local freenet proxy.
On the other hand, things are becoming better: The I2P project will be providing fully anonymous IP (IP over ann I2P interface!). Once that's done, you can run anything you like on I2P, even central search engines and the like.
Everytime somebody mentions the word Freenet, somebody else mentions the C-word (Child-pornography), and the stuff gets modded up to +4 or +5. Let me make clear from the start that I also do not support child pornography, but I think a few comments are in order here.
As some of the other posters already said, Freenet now is mainly used for political statements and software that's morally ok but not legally. I suggest you have a look at The Freedom Engine (SSK@rBjVda8pC-Kq04jUurIAb8IzAGcPAgM/TFE//) and looks what's available there. I ranges from anti-Scientology stuff to Bush-critical stuff and just personal Freenet-blogs ("flogs").
Now, even though I started my previous post with a rant against black-and-white thinking, you complete made that same mistake here. Let me introduce you to some statistics. I we call information that can morally "be allowed to be shared" (this is a fuzzy definition, not a hard one) "positive", and other information "negative", then, when publishing to a medium, you always get four cases:
For the regular internet:
Repeat after me: You can, however much you would like it, NEVER build a system without false positives and false negatives. That's the way it works.
Now, for Freenet, another trade-off is made: the number of false negatives is reduced, at the cost of somewhat more false positives. I'm sure that there might still be information that could get pulled of a part of freenet, by using enough "cancer nodes" (false negatives, again), which would only be possible with very sensitive state information and it would require an investment only possible by world governments. And, alas, there are false positives: (child/animal) pornography, warez (arguably).
Now, remember the PlayFair story? Thanks to Freenet, you can get it:SSK@Qv3D1xm646Sat6DpmCt7BCyOGiQPAgM,S91vuF3XDSR OK6GSiWp9Xw/PlayFair//
And there we go again... Apart from the fact that I find the influence that big industries have on the justice system in the US nauseating, the music industry seems to think that it can "stop" swapping in any way. This is typical black and white thinking
What is actually happening here is that the "system" (in this case the swappers and the music industry together) shift to a new equilibrium location, where the trade-off between speed and ease-of-use on the one hand, and speed on the other hand, is optimal for the given situation on the legal battle-field.
First we had Napster: very easy to use, but having the flaw of a single point of failure. Then we had the FastTrack and Gnutella networks (think KaZaa and LimeWire here): good bandwidth, but no anonymity at all, but at least without the need for a single point of failure. Then came eDonkey and his friends: less bandwidth, more obfuscation. A step further along the line lies FreeNet: anonimity beyond reasonable doubt, but a slow network and it's hard to find things. In the future, the balance might shift even further to the side of obfuscation, encryption and low bandwidth.
Now before you start yelling: "But FreeNet doesn't work!". Think again: Since about mid-May, it works well again! Try it!
So: go to their website and download that client! Happy browsing!
That might be true. I don't know
However, a lawyer-firm in Holland has done preliminary research (paid for by some pro-sharing websites in Holland, no less) that indicates that puchasing music from allofmp3 is legal here if it is for personal use.
Working on that; I'll let you know.
But if you're worried about video, I'd put temporal search constraints in first.
Very true. However, my work doesn't focus on video; it focusses on still images, in which of course you don't have a temporal context. A nice side-effect of using the context-proprocessing is that I could do photos at a couple of frames per second, which enables a real-time demo.But like I said, performance is likely worse that in those systems using temporal context.
Most real-time applications of the Viola and Jones classifier use a shortcut: in fact the OpenCV code first downsizes the image by a factor of 2, which effectively cuts your search-space by a factor much more than 4 (since especially for the smaller faces, you have a lot of points to search). In my method I don't do that: I can find faces from 24x24 pixels and up (as opposed to 48x48 pixels for the OpenCV default classifier).
Interesting! Do you have any detection-results on a dataset, and/or a ROC-curve (detection rate vs. false-positive rate)?
Did you use the pretrained classifier as well? And what window-size do you use?
Good! It's good to have as much of this stuff as possible in Open-Source form. I think it should be possible to make the Viola-Jones framework much faster by using a number of tricks:
I didn't implement any of this, as I'm working on context-based detection, which in my case is just a proof of concept. That means actual speed is not so much of a concern. However, I'd be very interested in seeing some code ;)
Seriously, that's old. I'm a computer vision Ph.D. student, and there now are much faster methods. I'll just refer to my old comment.
A demo can be found here. You can contact me for more details...
Current really fast methods use cascades of very simple classifier that are very weak themselves, but very strong when combined. The work of Viola & Jones is what most of the stuff is centered around nowadays.
Do your own here:
http://argus.cs.unimaas.nl/fddemo
Parent: +6 Insightful
I'm a researcher in AI, and I can do nothing but backup the parent's claim (sad as it is). When we use AI, we would expect a robot to be able to perceive its surroundings (analyzing sensory inputs), make decisions (reasoning) and act (generating actuator outputs).
I can only comment on the first, since I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Vision. And the general picture is, to be quite honest, depressing. Forget all you've seen in e.g. Terminator (e.g. the robot analyzing its visual input, and all the nice text in the image): it ain't gonna happen for a long time! Although space missions are (presumably) less complex in terms of sensory inputs, the state of affairs in dealing with normal natural images gives a nice idea of what's currently (im)possible:
I'll provide an example here. I'm doing Computer Vision (face-detections), and the current state of affairs is about this: When finding faces in 800x600 images, this can be done in about 1 second (yes: 1 full second), at about a 90% detection rate and a couple of false detections per image. For more complex object classes that are not so nicely symmetric (think cars, houses, landscapes, etc.), the performance is dramatically worse.
You can look at the BitTorrent link. And ONLY if that doesn't work, use this. As for reasoning: this is still in it's infancy, but I'm not working in that field, so I cannot comment on that well. Any takers? ;)
I don't think there is any question about whether it would piss off Disney et al., the question is how severe their reaction will be.
Now, as long as the server is physically hosted in Russia, and the back-accounts are also in Russia, who is going to stop them? Would being a (say) American citizen that participates in this hypothetical Russian firm be reason enough to be prosecuted? After all: you're not breaking the law in the country where the firm is established.
BTW: How is the state of the net in Russia (I'm just informing here)? Good fast backbones and good international connections (directly to Europe, I suppose?)
Did I say that I was supporting illegal trading in the first place? I was also not saying that I would support so-called "evil" countries or organizations (like Al Q) earning money by this. I was just thinking about the possibility of them doing that, regardsless of whether I (or any else for that matter) would agree to them doing that.
My question (are there any decent hosters in Afghanistan et al.) was more related to copyright-wise illegal, but morally correct, programs like PlayFair.
Remember: "against the law" and "morally wrong" are not necessarily the same thing, even though that's often claimed by many people!
...that then can earn by welcoming piracy into their countries: do you seriously think that the new government of (say) Afghanistan gives one flying fuck about the profits of American companies?
The same might go for recently "deceased" projects like PlayFair.
Are there any decent hosting services available in Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, (insert any other country without decent copyright laws)?
Anyone have information?