Google would argue that the fade in speeds up user interaction in the vast majority of cases by not distracting users from the search box. Actually, they did argue that. And their justification did not come from a marketing VP like you imagine but from benchmarking real users. It's as if they consider actual results a better metric than childish rants posted on a forum somewhere.
Except, of course, that this entire "study" is utter horse shit. Most corporate users do not use Google home page for searches (they usually have a corporate intranet home page and use the search browser box - present in all browsers today - instead). They use the Google home page as a switchboard to News, Maps, Gmail etc, which is precisely where the useless "feature" gets in the way. I should know, I have watched hundreds of them do so. Personally. It got so bad that we now push a standard set of bookmarks to desktops for News, Maps etc that allow people to bypass Google home page.
So Google can stick these kind of transparent face-saving and "we are right even when we are wrong" studies and stick'em whey they belong. Up theirs.
Furthermore, this entire discussion would not be taking place if Google actually stood behind the fake "studies" and allowed an opt-out to the older, simpler (and thus easier on bandwidth and what-not, Ajax-free, page). That alone would prove if they are right or wrong. They however know quite well what would happen and thus no choice will ever be offered to the users (save switching to Bing - with its own litany of issues - and the like).
As I said, you are completely out of touch with reality if you think that a majority of users have any interest in things like that. Making the claim that management somehow snuck an almost-universally hated feature in is absurd and only harms your credibility. You do not represent the majority of users. Slashdot does not represent the majority of users.
Right... and all the people begging me (and any other IT professional I work with) for help in turning these "features" off also do not represent the majority of users. In fact the majority of users I managed to meet in my 30 and some year career apparently does not represent the "majority of users".... only you do. Congratulations. Probably that is because of your self-awarded "credibility". I fully expect that you were in the "majority of users" who positively loved "Clippy" and had him turned on permanently.
If you don't, then why are you arguing? I'm not arguing that fade-in is worth it; only that the majority of users wouldn't care and/or be aware enough to opt-out.
There is a major difference between "not caring" and not knowing what to do about it. Thus what usually happens is that the issue becomes a low-key nuisance about which users cannot do anything or about which they are afraid to ask (because it seems like they are somehow supposed to adjust to it and they do not want to appear stupid or "behind the times") and after a while they become so accustomed to it that they learn to tune it out, like rheumatics learn to live with their pain. Only when reminded, usually during some unrelated conversation with IT personnel they suddenly exclaim: "and would someone do something about this fucking xyz thing that drives me crazy for months now!!!". That is the standard pattern which I have witnessed countless times.
Google likely included it because of the positive reaction users had toward Bing's related searches in their sidebar
Correction: they included it because some bozo at Google panicked about Bing doing something that they did not have, regardless of any advantage, usefulness or other factors. This is a standard pattern of behaviour of incompetent management who is faced with a possibility of somewhat viable competition. They simply attempt to emulate all and any features of the competitors in hopes that a "shotgun" approach of "and we have that feature of theirs too!" will save their market position.... somehow.
A situation all the more amusing given that Google already had an equivalent (and superior) functionality resulting from including "image", "shopping" and the like sample results as a section inline, which required no Ajax functionality.
At the recent WWW2010 conference I attended, the side bar was viewed positively by engineers from Bing, Yahoo, and Google alike. Considering they have access to real-world usage data and you do not, I'm inclined to take their side. In fact, Bing claimed the UI redesign _alone_ significantly increased traffic before any backend changes had taken place
Oh for fuck's sake, I have the real world usage data in form of thousands of corporate users, probably far more scientific then theirs since I get to see the way people at work actually interact with Google, something no server logs at Google can ever show. And listening to claims of companies spouted at, of all places, a conference, where every one company tries to out-posture all the others! That's like going to a Comdex circa 1994 and hearing the ever-present IBM salesmen and engineers positively promising you that OS/2 will take over the world! Guaranteed! Or going to some programming conference and learning that Smaltalk is all the rage that will replace every other language and paradigm ever invented! Etc and so on.
There has to be some kind of special category of gullibility just for the "serious" (as opposed to the get-away-and-party kind) trade conference goers.
.... but regardless there's no fucking way 80% of users care about it or the side bar enough to disable it. Maybe 0.8%. This is why there's no opt-out.
Bullshit. The fade in is a "feature" that adds no objective value whatsoever and slows down user interaction. All such "features" are universally turned off by pretty much any user that has a clue how to do it, irrespective of where they can be found, be it an operating system interface, application interface, search engine interface or some other conceivable user interface. And for some users, like the thousands using Windows on corporate Thin Client terminals over RDP links, the cost is much, much higher, with no corresponding gain of any kind.
Furthermore any aesthetic effect is lost after a few dozen times, never you mind hundreds or thousands of iterations, leaving only the loss of productivity in its wake.
Similarly, the side bar annoys people because it adds no value for most users and has a cost in screen real estate.
In general, the rule of thumb is that any "special effects" or "pretty UI elements" have to provide an actual usability benefit that is greater then the corresponding cost of the feature, be it in interaction speed, screen real estate or some other resource. Otherwise they are not only pointless, but can only be classified as a usability regression, also commonly known as "marketing driven design" or "Microsoft-style cluster-fuck".
I miss the days when Google was a simple, plain HTML page resulting from the fact that it was driven by its designers and users. Now arrogant marketing VPs with no clue whatsoever push on us "features" like fade-ins (which do wonders when viewed over RDP and VNC links) and side bars while ignoring allnegativefeedback and making sure that no opt-out is possible to stroke their towering egos by pretending that everyone loves their "innovations". Otherwise 80% of users would have it off in an instant and the "innovator" VP's stupidity would register with some other VPs at Google HQ and give them ammo in some back-stabbing corporate ladder-climbing moves.
In other words I miss the days before Google jumped the shark.
Right-wing feminists ???? When the hell did that happen?
Somewhere around the time when they whizzed right past their original supposed casus belli of fighting workplace discrimination against women and morphed into a veritable female supremacy movement with all the subtlety and nuance of a massively overweight, excessively hairy, screeching man-hater of a lesbian landing on you from a height of 200 meters.
Ever wondered what would happen if they had NOT used nukes?
We do not need to wonder. We know. Japan was about to surrender (it attempted an increasing number of peace overtures beginning in April 1945) but its great mistake was that it attempted to involve the Soviet Union in the surrender proceedings (as an assurance against more US atrocities) and so the US had to show both Japan and the Soviet Union who's the boss.
Also, the US was involved in mass scale atrocities in japan well prior to the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like for example the March 9-10 1945 firebombing of Tokyo which killed 100,000 people.
Consider the numbers, and you can't say a little nuke here and there was really that bad for them.
As we now know from history (and things that have been declassified long after the war) that the main "target audience" of the use of nukes was the Soviet Union, the only viable threat to the freshly nascent in 1945 Global US Empire.
A major flaw of the "gated community" concept that all of these would-be-John-Galts are building is that they seem to have no provision for growing their own food and depend entirely on external food supply.... not very siege worthy if you ask me.
I won't bother with the rest of your "Non-Christians Evil! + Christians Good!" (with a hint of "Americans good, non-Americans evil!") rant but the Mongol empire was multi-religious and Christians were represented in great numbers as were Buddhists, Muslims, Manichaeanists and others. Genghis Khan even went as far as to set up a special institution to keep strife between the various religions in his empire down. His Christian followers were responsible for much of the slaughters under his command.
And then of course is the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts, the pogroms of various Christian splinter groups by others etc etc etc. And things like "Gott mitt Uns" on the belt-buckles of Waffen SS (hint: they didn't mean Allah).
Religions all suck pretty much the same, Christianity and its followers being as bloody and vile as the rest of them.
And the American Empire is just as unjust and evil as all the empires before it. You see the problem is not with who does it, or under what "noble" and "glorious" excuse (usually to try to "pre-emptively" stop others from doing the same thing you are doing, i.e. attempting to dominate and control others) but with the very notion of an empire.
Irrelevant. Until those "efforts" crystallize into a real change in laws, what you're engaging in is nothing more than gazing into a crystal ball to make predictions.
I see, you are the type who marches, well dressed, sporting a fancy watch into a dark alley full of thugs twirling baseball bats with nails sticking out of them and declares "until they actually bash my brains out, I refuse to engage in gazing in crystal balls". Too bad your ilk finds itself floating in the river more often than not. One could think of it as natural selection of those who never grasped concepts like "pattern of behavior" or "probability of success".
You're taking for granted that such efforts will succeed and that once they do, nothing can be done to revert the changes they cause.
See above. The past pattern of behaviour of the mega-corps, their lobbyists, corrupt politicians, mass media etc indicates clearly that the efforts have extremely high probability of success and that the effort required to reverse these changes is beyond the docile citizenry and, at best, it would take many decades to succeed.
Also, I see that telling you in advance that I wasn't implying that you're wrong, and that therefore trying to refute my words on the assumption that they meant that you're wrong, was futile.
I am objecting to your use of terms like "crystal ball" when not only we have a massive pile of evidence describing the successes past but we also have a pile of evidence highlighting the operations under way. If one were to apply your standards to, say, the sunrise, you would be claiming that the Sun "might" be raising tomorrow and that I should not be making any "crystal ball" predictions as to the event because I am "taking for granted" that the event would occur. The probability of success of the efforts of the mega-corps in the area of perverting laws to their liking is at this point in time only slightly lower than that of the Sun raising tomorrow.
At this point, it seems you've resorted to looking at your crystal ball to mak predictions. Therefore I find any further discussion pointless, since you're no longer basing your argument solely
in facts.
What are you talking about? Efforts are presently underway to "homogenize" the copyright laws to the US standard (actually exceeding it) in all of the most industrialized countries, with the idea of overriding the wishes of local electorates via international treaty mechanisms. Or haven you heard about ACTA?!. There is no need for any "crystal balls" when we have the whole scheme spelled out in black and white by its own peddlers.
Ok I see where you are confused. The magnet link can have whatever label or description it wants, but the site operator has no way of knowing the name of the actual file being shared, only those doing the sharing know that now. Does that help you understand better?
And that is enough for "aiding and abetting copyright infringement". Because unless you enter for your "Avatar 3D" movie the description of "Blah, Bleh and Bloh", in which case no one will be ever able to tell what the fuck is it that you are sharing, the copyright crusaders will quickly attack the site for linking the phrase "Avatar 3D" to the idea of a "magnet" which in turn is employed in file sharing.
That is merely scare tactics. The "unity" cache is indeed minimum 40GB, which guarantees high levels of retention in the swarm, but people had used PerfectDark with much lower upload speeds. But you will be penalized if you disconnect from the swarm by having much slower download and search times until the other peers see you as "reliable" again. If your node is really slow, you will get banned by other nodes, which is essentially what happens in every P2P protocol, including BitTorrent which will mark your node as "snubbed".
These two features essentially fulfill the same role as all those silly "upload ratio" police tactics employed by pretty much every "private" BitTorrent tracker out there.
And you forget that Japan has 100 Megabit fiber for $20/month. They can have inefficient, multi-hop routing, bandwidth hogging protocols, because they have tons of bandwidth. Inside the country,
anyway.
Not really. The fun with "plausible deniability" is the fact that you do not always have to do multi-hop routing, for all files, just enough of them to create a shield of "reasonable doubt" in any jury. BitTorrent however does none at all, amongst a myriad of other short-comings which have no ties to communication efficiency.
Also, as I pointed out, BitTorrent has no efficiency advantages whatsoever over traditional P2P protocols and in fact uses pretty much the same strategies of dividing files into chunks and using hashes to identify them. Worse, because BitTorrent uses "trackers", which in addition to being dime-a-dozen can also be "private", it has many orders of magnitude higher propensity for swarm fragmentation, which in turn leads to very low retention of older files and all search engines are choke-full of incomplete torrents with peers but no seeds. Not to mention that the very search process itself is also prone to fragmentation as there is no universal search capability. In short BitTorrent is essentially a junk protocol, compared even to its predecessors, no matter which way you evaluate it.
And that is not the same everywhere, which was exactly my point. Judges and men with guns don't call "infringement" and "aiding and abetting" the same things in all places.
Unfortunately for this argument, the dominant military and economic powers, all dominated by the "big content" and "big media" conglomerates, have a way of "encouraging" change in their "partners" in this regard. See also under: Sweden and Norway.
Unless you are planing to host in Iran, for Iranian public, your are basically just stalling for time pretty much everywhere else.
You give a downloader or two a criminal conviction and jail time, you'll see hell raised on a scale that makes that look tame.
Hell? The public in the "industrialized" nations is far too apathetic to lift a finger when their civil rights are stripped away from them left and right, when they are made to line up like cattle for strip and anal-probe searches at every two-bit airport, when anything of worth is being stolen from them by oligarchic neo-aristocracy, while they can be "disappeared" be means of mere accusations of "terrorism" etc and so on and you think the mindless tubs of lard will all rise up when they have to stop using Rapidshare?
Are you for real?
And you'll see people once again go to more secure protocols.
That indeed will happen, which was my entire point. Return to sane protocols and abandonment of idiotic fads like BitTorrent or "direct downloads" from crooks like Rapidshare is fact the "inevitability" in my original post.
The point is of course that none of this is necessary. A P2P system far superior to BitTorrent can be constructed that is completely immune to these stunts.
If you insist on depending on pathetic kludges like BitTorrent, the media conglomerates do not even need to eradicate all related websites to be successful, they only need to Balkanize and fracture the sharers into hundreds of small camps each independent of another (say "private trackers") which have no overlap and in which scenario locating a file would require membership in tens of flight-by-night "clubs" each with its own search engine and putting up with constant churn of trackers and search engines, not to mention that in a fractured network such as this the file retention statistics would become even more abysmal then they are now.
And all of this an exercise in utter futility as much better, tried and true technologies exist.
I truly am in awe of the capacity of some to perform truly impressive mental gymnastics in order to come up with the most self-defeating means to do something... and then to stand by them to the very end while the rickety house of their own making comes down burning around their ears. Amazing.
This is of course largely irrelevant. I hold the entire copyright scheme illogical and contrary to basic properties of information, but even if it is so, what counts is what judges and men with guns call "infringement" and "aiding and abetting". Logic and reason have no place at the table in this contest. And since these men are all pretty much in the pockets of the "big media"...
Note that not so long ago Sweden and other Nordic countries were thought to be lands of reason and restraint in this area... but money and power have their ways and one after another they became anything but.
So do not hang your hopes on legalese hair splitting, for the final outcome of this is pretty much predetermined.
I think a technology such as I2P is likely to be a part of it. Note the word "part". The general dufus public is simply not ready to set up individual components to assemble them into a working system. What is required is a simple to install application that covers all the required functionality out of the box. This is what a major part of appeal of systems like BitTorrent is, all you need is a single program and your web browser. Any soccer mom can pull this off.
Until we have an all-in-one solution like that (hopefuly with features like anonymous chat and bulletin boards, ala Winny) we will see the lemmings searching desperately for a way to get free contents in a way that they can grasp... and falling victims to all sorts of scams like Rapidshare.
Mind providing a link to where this was decided? The "cornerstone" of why the Pirate Bay is having legal issues is the fact that they are running a tracker and hosting torrent files. As I said
before, magnet links will not require a tracker so this will no longer be an issue. I think you are underestimating the resilience of bittorrent.
Pirate bay tracker has been offline for ages now. What the courts decided was that PirateBay itself "facilitated copyright infringement" and that is enough for both torrent files (which also do not contain any copyrighted data and which was what the defense of PirateBay was hanging on) as well as for magnet links. In this regard there is no difference at all because the charge of "facilitation" can be made irrespective of how many and how convoluted your levels of indirection get from the actual copyrighted file.
No it would be mapping a magnet link to a hash in this case. Considering that these sites will have absolutely no way of knowing whether these files are copyrighted or not (remember, they don't even know the file names) how can they be liable?
Did I not just explain to you that "not knowing the file names" renders such "search" sites utterly useless? What then are you using these "search" websites for? Do you enter hex numbers to search for hex numbers? Do you actually have a clue about what you are talking about? I knew I should not answer ACs...
I've seen evidence of google filtering torrents, but not magnet links. And there is good reason for that distinction.
There is no distinction. Both do not contain any copyrighted information in themselves and both are primarily used to locate copyrighted information with intent of copyright infringement.
Torrent sites themselves will function more like search engines for these links (think Google).
You clearly were not following the PirateBay legal wrangling developments. Hosting mere magnets is no longer an excuse that lets you avoid legal assault by the copyright crusaders. This was in fact the cornerstone of the massive defeat PirateBay has suffered and set the precedent for all future sites.
Google will also be required to filter all "magnet" or "torrent" links, and is already doing some filtering.
When these sites are no longer hosting anything and in fact don't even know the names of what files are being shared (only hashes), how can they be held liable for them?
The entire point of search websites is that they offer the service of mapping of the file name or description to a torrent (or magnet or hash or whatever). If you remove that functionality, they will no longer serve any purpose whatsoever as "search" engines. If you keep that functionality then you are liable for "facilitating copyright infringement"...
If you went after a site like that, wouldn't you also have to go after Google for doing the same thing?
I already mentioned that Google is gearing up to filter all "torrent" and "magnet" links out, thus avoiding any legal responsibility. And yes, MPAAs of the world would go after Google if Google did not play ball (but it does and so they won't).
I doubt we'll see those features in consumer p2p applications because they'll probably make the speed suck..
Will see? Winny, Share and PerfectDark are fairly old systems that dominate the Japanese P2P scene for many years now. All of them have the features I mentioned, in addition to built-in bulletin-boards, message streams and what not.
Speed problems in the USA and many other places have nothing whatsoever to do with these protocols, but everything to so with pathetic broadband services. BitTorrent is "faster" then older P2P technologies only because it was introduced later when broadband became more available and the general public, in its usual brainless way, decided that BitTorrent was somehow responsible for their perceived speed increase.
In fact BitTorrent has no speed advantage whatsoever when compared to many other P2P protocols, many of them based on exactly the same idea of dividing files into chunks and exchanging them individually.
I'm not sure, as time progresses more and more people I know are moving away from BitTorrent due to these actions, but not to more decentralised protocols, but to less decentralised services such as rapidshare, etc...
It will last only as long the copyright crusaders take their time to get around to targeting the Rapidshares of the world. Once they go after these sites and after a few spectacular 20-year prison convictions for some of their owners, that loophole will disappear as well. Just a matter of time.
I personally don't understand why. It's like a massive step back, even worse than going to back to FTP due to all the restrictions unless you pay to be a "premium" member. Not to mention that it's even more centralised than before, it makes no sense to me.
The truth is that most Internet users are technological illiterates and on top of that suffer from a severe case of herd mentality. They simply click on all of these "Direct Download 100x Faster!!!" ad links and then tell all their friends about these wondrous "new" ways of "getting stuff". It will take a few well-televised prosecutions of some downloader scapegoats (who all believe themselves to be immune because "downloading" is not "breaking copyright") to put that to rest.
Both of which are after-thought, duct-tape-and-chewing-gum add ons which are incompatible between clients and which suffer from all sorts of swarm fragmentation issues and other flaws brought on by severe deficiencies of the BitTorrent protocol in this area.
BitTorrent was not designed to support such functionality and even with these desperate modifications it is still way behind on other features, such as anonymizing routing, store encryption, steganography etc. In fact by the time you get BitTorrent to do all these things, it won't be BitTorrent anymore but a poor approximation of one of the P2P protocols I mentioned earlier.
Clear answer is of course a P2P protocol that was designed with all of these things in mind from ground-up, i.e. a protocol that assumes a severely hostile environment.
All of this has been set in stone the moment people decided (for sheep-like herd mentality reasons) to flock to BitTorrent, a protocol that depends on centralized trackers and search engines.
BitTorrent is in fact a giant step backwards from the traditional P2P systems that preceded it and light years behind systems like Winny or PerfectDark which feature not only decentralized search but also end-to-end encryption, encrypted disk caches and routing that attempts to provide full anonymity.
But then again, some people are incapable of learning about foibles of fads any other way then the hard way.
I foresee that within few years we will see a rapid decline of BitTorrent, after majority of trackers and search websites are brought down by a combination of draconian penalties, scare tactics aimed at ISPs and similar aggressive measures.... at which point sanity will prevail over fashion and the development in distributed (and thus for all practical purposes unkillable) systems will resume again.
I see. What you are saying then that you, and your intellectual kin, decide to ignore arguments arbitrarily not due to their factual contents, chain of reasoning or other such factors but upon "coloring". So, If I were to write using formal English straight out of a Victorian-era letter, you would accuse me of being "too formal", if I were to write using allegory, you would accuse me of being "too poetic", if I were to write using sarcasm, you would say I was "not serious enough", etc and so on. And then, in each and every case you would accuse me of "bias" because I did not conform to your, wholly arbitrary, standard of presentation of my arguments, standard that is specifically designed to be a set of ever moving goal-posts, which present an ever elusive target for your opponents. All constructed of course so that you can smugly posture as being "objective" and all of your opponents "biased".
How very comfortable defense wall did you build yourself there. Too bad that it also exposes your position as utterly intellectually bankrupt.
For you see, the contents of a message does not change based on how it was delivered or by whom it was delivered, were it prose or poetry or allegory or comedic hyperbole, be it by a janitor or a holder of 27 doctorates from 10 universities, although some people would wish very, very, very much for it to not be so and that only ideas of certain "right" people speaking in a "right" way could be considered "legitimate".
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, that this entire "study" is utter horse shit. Most corporate users do not use Google home page for searches (they usually have a corporate intranet home page and use the search browser box - present in all browsers today - instead). They use the Google home page as a switchboard to News, Maps, Gmail etc, which is precisely where the useless "feature" gets in the way. I should know, I have watched hundreds of them do so. Personally. It got so bad that we now push a standard set of bookmarks to desktops for News, Maps etc that allow people to bypass Google home page.
So Google can stick these kind of transparent face-saving and "we are right even when we are wrong" studies and stick'em whey they belong. Up theirs.
Furthermore, this entire discussion would not be taking place if Google actually stood behind the fake "studies" and allowed an opt-out to the older, simpler (and thus easier on bandwidth and what-not, Ajax-free, page). That alone would prove if they are right or wrong. They however know quite well what would happen and thus no choice will ever be offered to the users (save switching to Bing - with its own litany of issues - and the like).
Right ... and all the people begging me (and any other IT professional I work with) for help in turning these "features" off also do not represent the majority of users. In fact the majority of users I managed to meet in my 30 and some year career apparently does not represent the "majority of users" .... only you do. Congratulations. Probably that is because of your self-awarded "credibility". I fully expect that you were in the "majority of users" who positively loved "Clippy" and had him turned on permanently.
There is a major difference between "not caring" and not knowing what to do about it. Thus what usually happens is that the issue becomes a low-key nuisance about which users cannot do anything or about which they are afraid to ask (because it seems like they are somehow supposed to adjust to it and they do not want to appear stupid or "behind the times") and after a while they become so accustomed to it that they learn to tune it out, like rheumatics learn to live with their pain. Only when reminded, usually during some unrelated conversation with IT personnel they suddenly exclaim: "and would someone do something about this fucking xyz thing that drives me crazy for months now!!!". That is the standard pattern which I have witnessed countless times.
Correction: they included it because some bozo at Google panicked about Bing doing something that they did not have, regardless of any advantage, usefulness or other factors. This is a standard pattern of behaviour of incompetent management who is faced with a possibility of somewhat viable competition. They simply attempt to emulate all and any features of the competitors in hopes that a "shotgun" approach of "and we have that feature of theirs too!" will save their market position .... somehow.
A situation all the more amusing given that Google already had an equivalent (and superior) functionality resulting from including "image", "shopping" and the like sample results as a section inline, which required no Ajax functionality.
Oh for fuck's sake, I have the real world usage data in form of thousands of corporate users, probably far more scientific then theirs since I get to see the way people at work actually interact with Google, something no server logs at Google can ever show. And listening to claims of companies spouted at, of all places, a conference, where every one company tries to out-posture all the others! That's like going to a Comdex circa 1994 and hearing the ever-present IBM salesmen and engineers positively promising you that OS/2 will take over the world! Guaranteed! Or going to some programming conference and learning that Smaltalk is all the rage that will replace every other language and paradigm ever invented! Etc and so on.
There has to be some kind of special category of gullibility just for the "serious" (as opposed to the get-away-and-party kind) trade conference goers.
Bullshit. The fade in is a "feature" that adds no objective value whatsoever and slows down user interaction. All such "features" are universally turned off by pretty much any user that has a clue how to do it, irrespective of where they can be found, be it an operating system interface, application interface, search engine interface or some other conceivable user interface. And for some users, like the thousands using Windows on corporate Thin Client terminals over RDP links, the cost is much, much higher, with no corresponding gain of any kind.
Furthermore any aesthetic effect is lost after a few dozen times, never you mind hundreds or thousands of iterations, leaving only the loss of productivity in its wake.
Similarly, the side bar annoys people because it adds no value for most users and has a cost in screen real estate.
In general, the rule of thumb is that any "special effects" or "pretty UI elements" have to provide an actual usability benefit that is greater then the corresponding cost of the feature, be it in interaction speed, screen real estate or some other resource. Otherwise they are not only pointless, but can only be classified as a usability regression, also commonly known as "marketing driven design" or "Microsoft-style cluster-fuck".
I miss the days when Google was a simple, plain HTML page resulting from the fact that it was driven by its designers and users. Now arrogant marketing VPs with no clue whatsoever push on us "features" like fade-ins (which do wonders when viewed over RDP and VNC links) and side bars while ignoring all negative feedback and making sure that no opt-out is possible to stroke their towering egos by pretending that everyone loves their "innovations". Otherwise 80% of users would have it off in an instant and the "innovator" VP's stupidity would register with some other VPs at Google HQ and give them ammo in some back-stabbing corporate ladder-climbing moves.
In other words I miss the days before Google jumped the shark.
Somewhere around the time when they whizzed right past their original supposed casus belli of fighting workplace discrimination against women and morphed into a veritable female supremacy movement with all the subtlety and nuance of a massively overweight, excessively hairy, screeching man-hater of a lesbian landing on you from a height of 200 meters.
We do not need to wonder. We know. Japan was about to surrender (it attempted an increasing number of peace overtures beginning in April 1945) but its great mistake was that it attempted to involve the Soviet Union in the surrender proceedings (as an assurance against more US atrocities) and so the US had to show both Japan and the Soviet Union who's the boss.
Also, the US was involved in mass scale atrocities in japan well prior to the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like for example the March 9-10 1945 firebombing of Tokyo which killed 100,000 people.
As we now know from history (and things that have been declassified long after the war) that the main "target audience" of the use of nukes was the Soviet Union, the only viable threat to the freshly nascent in 1945 Global US Empire.
A major flaw of the "gated community" concept that all of these would-be-John-Galts are building is that they seem to have no provision for growing their own food and depend entirely on external food supply.... not very siege worthy if you ask me.
I won't bother with the rest of your "Non-Christians Evil! + Christians Good!" (with a hint of "Americans good, non-Americans evil!") rant but the Mongol empire was multi-religious and Christians were represented in great numbers as were Buddhists, Muslims, Manichaeanists and others. Genghis Khan even went as far as to set up a special institution to keep strife between the various religions in his empire down. His Christian followers were responsible for much of the slaughters under his command.
And then of course is the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts, the pogroms of various Christian splinter groups by others etc etc etc. And things like "Gott mitt Uns" on the belt-buckles of Waffen SS (hint: they didn't mean Allah).
Religions all suck pretty much the same, Christianity and its followers being as bloody and vile as the rest of them.
And the American Empire is just as unjust and evil as all the empires before it. You see the problem is not with who does it, or under what "noble" and "glorious" excuse (usually to try to "pre-emptively" stop others from doing the same thing you are doing, i.e. attempting to dominate and control others) but with the very notion of an empire.
I see, you are the type who marches, well dressed, sporting a fancy watch into a dark alley full of thugs twirling baseball bats with nails sticking out of them and declares "until they actually bash my brains out, I refuse to engage in gazing in crystal balls". Too bad your ilk finds itself floating in the river more often than not. One could think of it as natural selection of those who never grasped concepts like "pattern of behavior" or "probability of success".
See above. The past pattern of behaviour of the mega-corps, their lobbyists, corrupt politicians, mass media etc indicates clearly that the efforts have extremely high probability of success and that the effort required to reverse these changes is beyond the docile citizenry and, at best, it would take many decades to succeed.
I am objecting to your use of terms like "crystal ball" when not only we have a massive pile of evidence describing the successes past but we also have a pile of evidence highlighting the operations under way. If one were to apply your standards to, say, the sunrise, you would be claiming that the Sun "might" be raising tomorrow and that I should not be making any "crystal ball" predictions as to the event because I am "taking for granted" that the event would occur. The probability of success of the efforts of the mega-corps in the area of perverting laws to their liking is at this point in time only slightly lower than that of the Sun raising tomorrow.
What are you talking about? Efforts are presently underway to "homogenize" the copyright laws to the US standard (actually exceeding it) in all of the most industrialized countries, with the idea of overriding the wishes of local electorates via international treaty mechanisms. Or haven you heard about ACTA?!. There is no need for any "crystal balls" when we have the whole scheme spelled out in black and white by its own peddlers.
And that is enough for "aiding and abetting copyright infringement". Because unless you enter for your "Avatar 3D" movie the description of "Blah, Bleh and Bloh", in which case no one will be ever able to tell what the fuck is it that you are sharing, the copyright crusaders will quickly attack the site for linking the phrase "Avatar 3D" to the idea of a "magnet" which in turn is employed in file sharing.
Does that help you understand better?
That is merely scare tactics. The "unity" cache is indeed minimum 40GB, which guarantees high levels of retention in the swarm, but people had used PerfectDark with much lower upload speeds. But you will be penalized if you disconnect from the swarm by having much slower download and search times until the other peers see you as "reliable" again. If your node is really slow, you will get banned by other nodes, which is essentially what happens in every P2P protocol, including BitTorrent which will mark your node as "snubbed".
These two features essentially fulfill the same role as all those silly "upload ratio" police tactics employed by pretty much every "private" BitTorrent tracker out there.
Not really. The fun with "plausible deniability" is the fact that you do not always have to do multi-hop routing, for all files, just enough of them to create a shield of "reasonable doubt" in any jury. BitTorrent however does none at all, amongst a myriad of other short-comings which have no ties to communication efficiency.
Also, as I pointed out, BitTorrent has no efficiency advantages whatsoever over traditional P2P protocols and in fact uses pretty much the same strategies of dividing files into chunks and using hashes to identify them. Worse, because BitTorrent uses "trackers", which in addition to being dime-a-dozen can also be "private", it has many orders of magnitude higher propensity for swarm fragmentation, which in turn leads to very low retention of older files and all search engines are choke-full of incomplete torrents with peers but no seeds. Not to mention that the very search process itself is also prone to fragmentation as there is no universal search capability. In short BitTorrent is essentially a junk protocol, compared even to its predecessors, no matter which way you evaluate it.
Unfortunately for this argument, the dominant military and economic powers, all dominated by the "big content" and "big media" conglomerates, have a way of "encouraging" change in their "partners" in this regard. See also under: Sweden and Norway.
Unless you are planing to host in Iran, for Iranian public, your are basically just stalling for time pretty much everywhere else.
Hell? The public in the "industrialized" nations is far too apathetic to lift a finger when their civil rights are stripped away from them left and right, when they are made to line up like cattle for strip and anal-probe searches at every two-bit airport, when anything of worth is being stolen from them by oligarchic neo-aristocracy, while they can be "disappeared" be means of mere accusations of "terrorism" etc and so on and you think the mindless tubs of lard will all rise up when they have to stop using Rapidshare?
Are you for real?
That indeed will happen, which was my entire point. Return to sane protocols and abandonment of idiotic fads like BitTorrent or "direct downloads" from crooks like Rapidshare is fact the "inevitability" in my original post.
The point is of course that none of this is necessary. A P2P system far superior to BitTorrent can be constructed that is completely immune to these stunts.
If you insist on depending on pathetic kludges like BitTorrent, the media conglomerates do not even need to eradicate all related websites to be successful, they only need to Balkanize and fracture the sharers into hundreds of small camps each independent of another (say "private trackers") which have no overlap and in which scenario locating a file would require membership in tens of flight-by-night "clubs" each with its own search engine and putting up with constant churn of trackers and search engines, not to mention that in a fractured network such as this the file retention statistics would become even more abysmal then they are now.
And all of this an exercise in utter futility as much better, tried and true technologies exist.
I truly am in awe of the capacity of some to perform truly impressive mental gymnastics in order to come up with the most self-defeating means to do something ... and then to stand by them to the very end while the rickety house of their own making comes down burning around their ears. Amazing.
This is of course largely irrelevant. I hold the entire copyright scheme illogical and contrary to basic properties of information, but even if it is so, what counts is what judges and men with guns call "infringement" and "aiding and abetting". Logic and reason have no place at the table in this contest. And since these men are all pretty much in the pockets of the "big media" ...
Note that not so long ago Sweden and other Nordic countries were thought to be lands of reason and restraint in this area ... but money and power have their ways and one after another they became anything but.
So do not hang your hopes on legalese hair splitting, for the final outcome of this is pretty much predetermined.
I think a technology such as I2P is likely to be a part of it. Note the word "part". The general dufus public is simply not ready to set up individual components to assemble them into a working system. What is required is a simple to install application that covers all the required functionality out of the box. This is what a major part of appeal of systems like BitTorrent is, all you need is a single program and your web browser. Any soccer mom can pull this off.
Until we have an all-in-one solution like that (hopefuly with features like anonymous chat and bulletin boards, ala Winny) we will see the lemmings searching desperately for a way to get free contents in a way that they can grasp ... and falling victims to all sorts of scams like Rapidshare.
Pirate bay tracker has been offline for ages now. What the courts decided was that PirateBay itself "facilitated copyright infringement" and that is enough for both torrent files (which also do not contain any copyrighted data and which was what the defense of PirateBay was hanging on) as well as for magnet links. In this regard there is no difference at all because the charge of "facilitation" can be made irrespective of how many and how convoluted your levels of indirection get from the actual copyrighted file.
Did I not just explain to you that "not knowing the file names" renders such "search" sites utterly useless? What then are you using these "search" websites for? Do you enter hex numbers to search for hex numbers? Do you actually have a clue about what you are talking about? I knew I should not answer ACs ...
There is no distinction. Both do not contain any copyrighted information in themselves and both are primarily used to locate copyrighted information with intent of copyright infringement.
You clearly were not following the PirateBay legal wrangling developments. Hosting mere magnets is no longer an excuse that lets you avoid legal assault by the copyright crusaders. This was in fact the cornerstone of the massive defeat PirateBay has suffered and set the precedent for all future sites.
Google will also be required to filter all "magnet" or "torrent" links, and is already doing some filtering.
The entire point of search websites is that they offer the service of mapping of the file name or description to a torrent (or magnet or hash or whatever). If you remove that functionality, they will no longer serve any purpose whatsoever as "search" engines. If you keep that functionality then you are liable for "facilitating copyright infringement"...
I already mentioned that Google is gearing up to filter all "torrent" and "magnet" links out, thus avoiding any legal responsibility. And yes, MPAAs of the world would go after Google if Google did not play ball (but it does and so they won't).
Will see? Winny, Share and PerfectDark are fairly old systems that dominate the Japanese P2P scene for many years now. All of them have the features I mentioned, in addition to built-in bulletin-boards, message streams and what not.
Speed problems in the USA and many other places have nothing whatsoever to do with these protocols, but everything to so with pathetic broadband services. BitTorrent is "faster" then older P2P technologies only because it was introduced later when broadband became more available and the general public, in its usual brainless way, decided that BitTorrent was somehow responsible for their perceived speed increase.
In fact BitTorrent has no speed advantage whatsoever when compared to many other P2P protocols, many of them based on exactly the same idea of dividing files into chunks and exchanging them individually.
It will last only as long the copyright crusaders take their time to get around to targeting the Rapidshares of the world. Once they go after these sites and after a few spectacular 20-year prison convictions for some of their owners, that loophole will disappear as well. Just a matter of time.
The truth is that most Internet users are technological illiterates and on top of that suffer from a severe case of herd mentality. They simply click on all of these "Direct Download 100x Faster!!!" ad links and then tell all their friends about these wondrous "new" ways of "getting stuff". It will take a few well-televised prosecutions of some downloader scapegoats (who all believe themselves to be immune because "downloading" is not "breaking copyright") to put that to rest.
Both of which are after-thought, duct-tape-and-chewing-gum add ons which are incompatible between clients and which suffer from all sorts of swarm fragmentation issues and other flaws brought on by severe deficiencies of the BitTorrent protocol in this area.
BitTorrent was not designed to support such functionality and even with these desperate modifications it is still way behind on other features, such as anonymizing routing, store encryption, steganography etc. In fact by the time you get BitTorrent to do all these things, it won't be BitTorrent anymore but a poor approximation of one of the P2P protocols I mentioned earlier.
Clear answer is of course a P2P protocol that was designed with all of these things in mind from ground-up, i.e. a protocol that assumes a severely hostile environment.
All of this has been set in stone the moment people decided (for sheep-like herd mentality reasons) to flock to BitTorrent, a protocol that depends on centralized trackers and search engines.
BitTorrent is in fact a giant step backwards from the traditional P2P systems that preceded it and light years behind systems like Winny or PerfectDark which feature not only decentralized search but also end-to-end encryption, encrypted disk caches and routing that attempts to provide full anonymity.
But then again, some people are incapable of learning about foibles of fads any other way then the hard way.
I foresee that within few years we will see a rapid decline of BitTorrent, after majority of trackers and search websites are brought down by a combination of draconian penalties, scare tactics aimed at ISPs and similar aggressive measures .... at which point sanity will prevail over fashion and the development in distributed (and thus for all practical purposes unkillable) systems will resume again.
I see. What you are saying then that you, and your intellectual kin, decide to ignore arguments arbitrarily not due to their factual contents, chain of reasoning or other such factors but upon "coloring". So, If I were to write using formal English straight out of a Victorian-era letter, you would accuse me of being "too formal", if I were to write using allegory, you would accuse me of being "too poetic", if I were to write using sarcasm, you would say I was "not serious enough", etc and so on. And then, in each and every case you would accuse me of "bias" because I did not conform to your, wholly arbitrary, standard of presentation of my arguments, standard that is specifically designed to be a set of ever moving goal-posts, which present an ever elusive target for your opponents. All constructed of course so that you can smugly posture as being "objective" and all of your opponents "biased".
How very comfortable defense wall did you build yourself there. Too bad that it also exposes your position as utterly intellectually bankrupt.
For you see, the contents of a message does not change based on how it was delivered or by whom it was delivered, were it prose or poetry or allegory or comedic hyperbole, be it by a janitor or a holder of 27 doctorates from 10 universities, although some people would wish very, very, very much for it to not be so and that only ideas of certain "right" people speaking in a "right" way could be considered "legitimate".