I've been putting up with this minor annoyance for a while on my Toshiba Satellite. When I open the lid and find just the mouse cursor on an otherwise blank screen, I hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE and then type in my password to login again.
I'm fine with the idea of private commercialization of space by companies that have start-up capital to do it, but do we really have to abandon NASA to the budget-cut wolves in favor of private companies that require crowd-funding? NASA is pretty ramped up already; why don't we just crowd-fund NASA?
The OWS movement is encouraging in that it shows that people are waking up to the fact of corporate oligarchy, but it lacks any clear agenda. Even if OWS or some other grassroots movement toppled the government tomorrow, we'd undoubtedly get something even worse to replace it. If OWS does develop a clear agenda, it might incite some serious reform, but we'll still be just cogs in the corporate machine even if we're happier with our working conditions. A slave on a plantation with a full belly and nice clothes and good healthcare is still a slave on a plantation.
We need a solution that doesn't require a huge amount of money, weaponry, or other resources. We need a solution that doesn't require violence or even any law-breaking. We need a solution that a small number of people can implement, anywhere in the nation (and in most parts of the world). We could try to abandon society and build our own, but that would be leaving an awful lot of people behind. . . we need a solution that allows us to stand our ground, band together, and deal with the oligarchy from a position of power.
I say: When life gives you corporate oligarchy. . . incorporate!
My solution is a sort of chewy Communist nougat center with a crunchy delicious Capitalist shell.
Imagine thirty or forty people getting together and pooling their resources to buy or lease some real estate (a high school campus in Detroit would be perfect, but it could be anywhere). They form an umbrella corporation that acts as their collective face to the outside world, and provides business administration services to members of the community. Those members of the community who have their own businesses or who want to start their own businesses are freed to do the work they really want to do, while the umbrella corporation handles the drudgery common to all businesses, like payroll and taxes and human resources and so on. Those who are not ready to start their own businesses provide a labor pool for those who are.
The gross income of everyone's entrepreneurial pursuits goes to the umbrella corporation, which pays all the expenses of the various businesses. The umbrella corporation also pays for things like rent/mortgage of communal living spaces, utilities, medical insurance for members of the collective, etc. What's left over is divvied up as profit sharing, with the umbrella corporation itself taking a share. The umbrella corporation uses its share of the income to expand into new businesses, and to improve living conditions for the collective. Shares for members of the collective are calculated by share-hours; for example, if the collective has 100 members who work a combined total of 500 hours in a particular week generating a net income of $100,000, then everyone gets paid $20 for each hour they worked that week ($100,000/500 work-hours = $20 per share-hour). . . so everyone gets the same, but those who go the extra mile and put the long hours in get rewarded for working harder. Since everyone's income is directly dependent on everyone else's productivity, any tendency toward laziness and shirking and gaming the system is corrected on a peer-to-peer basis.
Some members of the collective are paid to be janitorial staff, so there's never any controversy over whose turn it is to clean up, or over who left the mess in the common area. If someone in the collective wants to run a restaurant, the other members can eat there free, subsidized by the umbrella corporation. If we don't have a restaurant, the umbrella corporation pays someone to shop for groceries and cook. . . so there are never any "who ate my food?" arguments, because it's OUR food and it's someone's job to make sure we have plenty on hand.
If a member of the collective fails at their chosen business, the collective absorbs their labor into some other business until they can regroup and try again or try something different. That person still gets a paycheck, still gets fed, st
So can they turn skin cells directly into any kind of cell, or just neurons? 'Cause I'm thinking the old parody of MAKE.MONEY.FAST might be about to come true.
It might be worthwhile to point out that most films shared on torrent sites are NOT exact copies of DVDs, though some certainly are. The great majority are "rips" rather than copies... they are sized down to not only transfer faster, but to fit on a single CD (not a DVD). 700 MB is the most common size for a movie that is shared on a torrent site. Therefore, we're not talking about making an exact copy of a Ferrari here, we're talking about making a copy that looks like a Ferrari, but crappier, and doesn't perform nearly as well... but DOES get peoples' attention and make them more aware of the Ferrari brand, possibly inducing them to go out and buy the real thing.
Analogies aside, the assumption that every movie download represents a lost sale is absolutely bogus and one-sided. I often download films that I would never go see in the theater or rent on DVD, because I have a limited budget for such things... but since it's free, my curiosity allows me to explore beyond the bounds of both my disposable income and my normal range of interests. If I find that I have downloaded something really good, I may add it to my normal range of interests, and start spending money on it and things like it. For instance, I never really liked Westerns until I started filesharing, and saw some really good ones... now I own commercial DVDs of at least a dozen Westerns, because watching movies in relatively low resolution with relatively poor sound quality is not nearly as cool as watching them in their full uncompressed glory on a big screen TV with good sound.
The police in Sweden didn't just take the Pirate Bay servers... they also confiscated servers belonging to other, unrelated businesses as well. This, without even being sure (according to the police themselves) that the Pirate Bay people had broken any Swedish law.
Some of the other servers were related, insofar as they were also torrent servers. The site known as Karagarga was affected, as was the Asian DVD Club. There was no warrant against these sites, but they are down nonetheless... and I repeat, according to the police themselves, they are not even sure that the Pirate Bay, which they did have a warrant for, was violating any of the laws in Sweden.
What Pirate Bay did more than anything else to bring this massive shitstorm down upon their heads was not facilitate filesharing; rather, they taunted the MPAA/RIAA and their lawyers egregiously and often, and no doubt caused quite a bit of apoplexy among these people over the last few years.
Me, I'm not interested in the films that come out of Big Hollywood. I like old classics, I like arthouse, I like cult, I like rarities. The torrent site I frequent specializes in those genres, and doesn't even allow people to share Big Hollywood product. The site owners don't like the DMCA, but they do comply with it, and consequently have never been bothered by MPAA/RIAA about their activities. In their private forums, they have had a running poll going for most of a year now, which is somewhat illuminating... and overwhelming percentage of the members there (82%), people who are all quite familiar with where and how to download anything they want for free, still buy commercial DVDs and CDs! This data corroborates findings of researchers at major US universities, who have concluded that filesharing does not necessarily hurt the sales of traditional media. The research indicates that filesharing of majorly hyped Big Hollywood releases (like a new STAR WARS movie, for instance) has a small but noticeable negative impact on ticket sales and DVD rentals, but that filesharing of more obscure fare actually has a significant POSITIVE impact on ticket sales and DVD rentals -- it exposes more people to the work in question, and consequently, more people go out and buy a commercial copy of it.
It seems that the real problem is not that filesharers are evil 'pirates' who are cutting into MPAA/RIAA profits due to their wicked refusal to pay for culture... the problem is that when you buy a cinema ticket or buy/rent a DVD, and you have never seen the film or heard the album before purchasing, you are far more likely to spend money on movies and music that you ultimately find disappointing, and people don't like that. Filesharing should properly be regarded by Big Hollywood as pressure to stop making such a tremendous amount of recycled garbage, stop using marketing as the ultimate focus and raison d'etre of every film and CD produced, and get back to the old school traditions of making fine art for fine art's sake, with marketing a strictly post-production affair that has no say in what scripts get chosen or how directors do their jobs.
Would you buy a car without taking it for a test drive? Would you pay for clothes without trying them on? How many times have you walked out of a theater after a film, or ejected a DVD from your DVD player, and wished for your money back? All the actual hard data that has been collected shows that even hardcore filesharers DO go out and buy commercial DVDs and CDs; they like to own the tangibles and they like to support the artists and companies whose work they appreciate... so filesharing isn't piracy, it's more akin to trying something before you buy it, and rejecting it if it's poorly made. MPAA/RIAA's strident insistence that filesharing is piracy is simply their bid to retain their obscenely high profits without doing the tough job of making products worth buying. They prefer to work according to formulae and sell the same tired bullshit again and again, with explosions and special effects in lieu of actual
New technologies often require changes in the law and in the legal system itself, and computer technology is far from being an exception to that. As a society, we really need to have more specific legal definitions of what is and what is not black-hat hacking, defined by people who truly understand the technology... namely, white-hat hackers. Until this happens, we will continue to see people unjustly prosecuted for pointing out their local emperor's nudity, and we will continue to see nonsensical bills bouncing around Washington, D.C., written by and debated by people who don't understand them and who have no clue what stand to take on them. Senatards and Congresscritters simply are not qualified to make these decisions for us, but they will continue to do so until the ubergeeks get organized into a Congressional subcommittee or something, and take the reins.
"If it takes an entire developement cycle to simply improve the current version's bugs, I'd gladly accept and encourage that."
Hear, hear. The real pitfall for any technical production process, from software to space shuttles, is the ascendancy of a businesslike concern with the product's image to the point that it begins to dictate release deadlines. It's all well and good to worry about image, but when that worry becomes such a focus that it dictates the way that technical work gets handled, suddenly your product or process has become an example of form over function... and unless your product is tuxedoes for corpses or something similar, SCREW form over function!
Wow, I have such incredibly mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I have loathed Microsoft and Bill Gates ever since that angry letter he wrote calling people thieves for sharing copies of his BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. On the other hand, the world of advertisement brokers is bursting at the seams with companies that can't even be trusted as far as you can trust Microsoft (let's face it, you can't *really* trust Microsoft, but you can trust them to be Microsoft, to be there tomorrow, and to adhere to some degree to their own Terms of Service). Google AdSense needs some real competition... they turned down our torrent site simply because it's a torrent site, in spite of the lack of pr0n, the DMCA compliance statement, and the fact that most of our torrents are public domain or otherwise of no interest to MPAA.
Is this going to give me a reason to choose Microsoft for something over Google??? The mind boggles.
THIS POST HAS BEEN RATED STFU BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
As much as I love shouting "ARRRRRRRR!" at my friends, dressing up in full regalia and talking about the FSM, waving a cutlass around, and boarding treasure-laden ships in order to relieve them of their doubloons and swooning womenfolk before scuttling them, when the discussion turns serious it just pisses me off to be called a 'pirate' for the sharing I do using BitTorrent.
The site where I do 95% of my uploading and downloading is dedicated to movies that are old, out-of-print, independent, or rare; movies that have cult appeal; arthouse movies that the average American has never seen or even heard of; subtitled Asian cinema that is only marginally popular with English speakers, and films that are so ridiculously bad they circle around the back of awfulness and become good by virtue of their entertaining badness. My favorite torrent site doesn't even allow big Hollywood blockbusters unless they are old enough to be classics.
The site has to support itself with donations and advertising. Google Adsense and many other ad brokers won't allow their ads to be shown there, because they consider it a 'pirate' site... even though what we do there actually stimulates the sales of DVDs for films that are either too obscure to sell well, or too old to be effectively milked by giant corporations who don't actually give a skinny rat's ass about art.
Secret Cinema has private forums, where a core group discusses films and does most of the uploading for the site. These are people who are much net-savvier than your average p2p user, people who are thoroughly familiar with the torrenting scene in general, and who know where and how to download for free virtually anything they want to watch or listen to... yet a recent poll of this very group revealed that approximately 82% of them still buy authorized versions of DVDs and CDs. Why? Various reasons... some are simply collectors, and like to have the tangibles, with official cover art and DVD extras and so on. Some like to support the studios and directors who in their estimation make good cinema. Virtually ALL of them end up giving money to MPAA/RIAA for movies and music that they would never have bought (and would possibly never have even heard of) if not for online filesharing.
Why does MPAA/RIAA call these people 'pirates'? Why do they make it so difficult for sites like Secret Cinema to make enough money to survive? It's clear that p2p filesharing stimulates legitimate purchases of box office tickets, DVDs, and CDs... yet they want to sue us all, lock us up, shut down our sites, put rootkits on our computers and DRM on the legitimate media we buy.
Compounding this utter stupidity on the part of MPAA/RIAA is the fact that they expect the public to buy goods from them sight unseen. I wouldn't buy a car without taking a look at it (and taking a test drive) first, would you? Why should I buy a DVD or a CD without knowing if I like the movie or music on it? Why should I pony up at the box office or the concert hall without having some kind of familiarity with the product I'm paying for? If it's GOOD and not utter SHITE, I won't mind paying for it even if I've already seen it on my computer monitor... but MPAA/RIAA wants to keep their products under wraps until we pay up, so that they can continue cranking out GARBAGE and selling it to an unsuspecting public! This is probably why Hollywood has degenerated into the massive crapfest that it is today; they know that they can make money from inferior product, as long as the trailer looks good. Screw that, I want to see what I'm buying before I pay for it, and that doesn't make me a criminal.
What nobody seems to have realized is that, not only does the Bosnian pyramid sit directly over the center of the Earth, but if you draw a straight line between it and the Great Pyramid of Cheops (aka Kufu) in Egypt, then extend that line in the same direction, it will bisect the Earth into two exactly equal hemispheres. Obviously proof of either unsuspected high technology in ancient times, or the intervention of some space-faring alien civilization.
Toshitsugu Takamatsu / Masaaki Hatsumi Documentary
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Wisdom From The Last Ninja
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There is a documentary film about Toshitsugu Takamatsu, with Masaaki Hatsumi in it as well. It's a Japanese film, the title in English is "Takamatsu Toshitsugu, the Last Real Ninja". It's based upon a black-and-white movie filmed in the '60s that shows Takamatsu Sensei teaching Hatsumi Sensei in a park. Takamatsu Sensei demonstrates unarmed techniques and weapon techniques from the nine schools, with comments in Japanese (subtitled in English) by Hatsumi Sensei.
A torrent for this film was uploaded to Secret Cinema http://www.secret-cinema.com/ a while back. It's dead now, but I am busily working on getting it back up again, so if you're interested check Secret Cinema for it in the next few days.
> From the article 'Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which
> child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more
> sadistic, using younger and younger children.
This, of course, has led to hordes of scientists meticulously documenting the wanton torture of stem cells. If it goes on, we'll soon be seeing the entire population of Earth making holograms of themselves setting fire to the concept of a zygote.
It's an easy thing to tell website managers not to "use ad providers that (try to) abuse the viewer's good will", but it's not always so easily done. The bad ad providers that have no compunctions against abusing the viewers also have no compunctions against lying to website managers about whether they do or do not attempt such abuse, and there are so very many ad providers out there to choose from (with such a high percentage of bad ones) that it can take months to find a choice that doesn't absolutely drip slime, with the only viable way of finding out who is who being to try them out one by one. That alone can lead to months of your site displaying unacceptable ads as you shuffle through all the choices looking for one or two that don't totally suck. Add to this the pressure from upper management to use whatever gives results, and website managers can find themselves faced with a formidable problem.
What we really need is some way to clean up the wretched, filthy underworld that the ad providing business has become, like an unimpeachable ad provider standards organization that can help sort out the wicked from the honest.
LiveJournal might be a little over-the-top in actually introducing this as a deal-killer in their ToS, but I can see their point... hosting and other expenses have to be paid for by someone, after all, and it's far better from a user's perspective to pay for the tools and content you access by allowing a few ads to show on your screen than it is to have to whip out a credit card and give money to every site that you find useful.
Secret Cinema, the Cult/Arthouse torrent site -- http://www.secret-cinema.com/ -- has been doing the same thing for almost a year now, but instead of inserting a clause into their ToS and threatening to ban people, they simply ask nicely that users don't block their ads. LiveJournal might find that they make slightly less money, but generate more goodwill, by taking a similar approach.
jonwil (467024) wrote: >China does not need google, there are plenty of chinese search engines that WILL >comply with the chinese government.
And in fact, this is why this whole to-do is an irrelevant tempest in a teacup. I live in China, and I split my (excessive) computing time between my home machine and a net cafe near my fiancee's place. I have yet to see a single Chinese computer user go to Google for anything... they all use Baidu.com instead.
What we should be asking here is: Why do people only watch a movie once, and then never feel the urge to watch it again?
Answer: Because it's a crappy movie, and not WORTH watching again.
Certainly there exists a small percentage of people who, like Sam, only ever watch movies once... either they don't really love cinema all that much, or they just aren't terribly skilled at distinguishing good movies from crap movies based on trailers, posters, and other advertising. Most people aren't like that, though... MOST people have favorite movies that they don't mind buying on DVD for $10 or $20 precisely because they DO want to watch that movie more than once.
Let's not forget that there is no generic movie object that we can use to judge the value of all movies. Films are not qualitatively equal to each other; they don't even have an intrinsic value that is not at least partially subjective, and therefore the value of a film TO YOU cannot be accurately estimated before you've actually seen the damn thing. Would you buy a car without knowing anything about the make, model, or year? I know I wouldn't... and I don't buy DVDs of movies I haven't seen. Why should we allow movie studios to charge us a premium price for a product whose quality and value to us we cannot accurately judge before paying?
Downloading movies should be free, or at worst very, very cheap and unladen with DRM and other luncheon coldcuts that treat the customer as guilty before proven innocent. There are many reasons why this is true, not just the "sight unseen" argument above. Letting people download movies for free and share them with others means that more people will see far more movies than they would if they had to pay for them... and this stimulates DVD and cinema ticket sales by broadening peoples' horizons, and by generating an interest in owning the DVD and/or seeing the film on the big screen. This in turn provides some badly-needed upward pressure on filmmakers to stop churning out half-baked garbage that nobody wants to watch more than once.
You may scoff at the idea of people buying a DVD of a film they downloaded for free, but I'm not just theorizing here... I run a BitTorrent site, and I know firsthand that a lot of people like to own the DVD even if they already saw the movie for free... IF it's a good movie. They like the higher resolution of a DVD over a rip, they like to have the packaging, they like to have the DVD extras, and a good number of them actually feel enough loyalty to the people who make good movies to go ahead and put some money in their pockets so they'll be encouraged to make more. My site's users are sophisticated netizens who can find and download anything they want to see at will, yet forum conversations and a recent poll confirmed what I long suspected about such people: THEY STILL BUY DVDs.
In developing nations, most people don't have the income necessary to support a broad knowledge of culture, unless they buy cheap bootlegs or download movies for free. In China, bootleg disks are everywhere, but increasingly you can see people sitting in Internet cafes for hours, downloading and watching movies with headphones on because they don't have a computer and/or an Internet connection at home, and don't have a TV set and/or a DVD player at home either. In rural areas, you can often see storefronts converted to makeshift theaters where farmers can go to watch bootleg disks projected on a screen on the wall (and boy do they love American movies). Should we impose a cultural penalty on these people for not being wealthy enough to afford a $20 DVD? Hollywood isn't losing sales when these people, uh, "pirate" movies, because if they didn't have the cheap or free options they have, they would never be able to buy movies at all!
If we DON'T let the third world download for free, there will be an even larger pirate market in undeveloped countries, and that puts money in the pockets of some pretty awful people. If we DO let the third world download for f
Why is there no Altair 8800 on this list?
We had one at home when I was a kid. To bootstrap it, you had to use toggle switches on the front panel (each with a corresponding LED) to give it enough of an instruction set to tell it YOU ARE A COMPUTER! PLEASE READ THIS PUNCH TAPE. Then you could feed a BASIC interpreter through the punch tape reader hanging off the side of the teletype, and *then* you could sit down and start coding. The teletype was the only I/O we had for the longest time... then we got a monitor, and used the teletype as a keyboard. We had a Pennywhistle 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, too... you had to pick up the phone, dial the number you wanted, wait for the line to be answered by the remote machine, then jam the telephone headset into the modem's cradle and start jiggling toggle switches madly in an attempt to handshake.
My dad ported one of the old Trek games from the PDP-11 to the Altair. I wonder how many dead trees I used up killing Klingons on that thing? We also managed to get Will Crowther's ADVENT game (aka Colossal Cave Adventure) running on the Altair.
I'll never forget the CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA sound of that teletype... damn thing sounded like it ran on gasoline.
Slashdot Mirror
"See what you made me do?" --Every violent religious extremist ever offended by anything, anywhere
I've been putting up with this minor annoyance for a while on my Toshiba Satellite. When I open the lid and find just the mouse cursor on an otherwise blank screen, I hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE and then type in my password to login again.
I'm fine with the idea of private commercialization of space by companies that have start-up capital to do it, but do we really have to abandon NASA to the budget-cut wolves in favor of private companies that require crowd-funding? NASA is pretty ramped up already; why don't we just crowd-fund NASA?
So, what are we going to do about it?
The OWS movement is encouraging in that it shows that people are waking up to the fact of corporate oligarchy, but it lacks any clear agenda. Even if OWS or some other grassroots movement toppled the government tomorrow, we'd undoubtedly get something even worse to replace it. If OWS does develop a clear agenda, it might incite some serious reform, but we'll still be just cogs in the corporate machine even if we're happier with our working conditions. A slave on a plantation with a full belly and nice clothes and good healthcare is still a slave on a plantation.
We need a solution that doesn't require a huge amount of money, weaponry, or other resources. We need a solution that doesn't require violence or even any law-breaking. We need a solution that a small number of people can implement, anywhere in the nation (and in most parts of the world). We could try to abandon society and build our own, but that would be leaving an awful lot of people behind. . . we need a solution that allows us to stand our ground, band together, and deal with the oligarchy from a position of power.
I say: When life gives you corporate oligarchy. . . incorporate!
My solution is a sort of chewy Communist nougat center with a crunchy delicious Capitalist shell.
Imagine thirty or forty people getting together and pooling their resources to buy or lease some real estate (a high school campus in Detroit would be perfect, but it could be anywhere). They form an umbrella corporation that acts as their collective face to the outside world, and provides business administration services to members of the community. Those members of the community who have their own businesses or who want to start their own businesses are freed to do the work they really want to do, while the umbrella corporation handles the drudgery common to all businesses, like payroll and taxes and human resources and so on. Those who are not ready to start their own businesses provide a labor pool for those who are.
The gross income of everyone's entrepreneurial pursuits goes to the umbrella corporation, which pays all the expenses of the various businesses. The umbrella corporation also pays for things like rent/mortgage of communal living spaces, utilities, medical insurance for members of the collective, etc. What's left over is divvied up as profit sharing, with the umbrella corporation itself taking a share. The umbrella corporation uses its share of the income to expand into new businesses, and to improve living conditions for the collective. Shares for members of the collective are calculated by share-hours; for example, if the collective has 100 members who work a combined total of 500 hours in a particular week generating a net income of $100,000, then everyone gets paid $20 for each hour they worked that week ($100,000/500 work-hours = $20 per share-hour). . . so everyone gets the same, but those who go the extra mile and put the long hours in get rewarded for working harder. Since everyone's income is directly dependent on everyone else's productivity, any tendency toward laziness and shirking and gaming the system is corrected on a peer-to-peer basis.
Some members of the collective are paid to be janitorial staff, so there's never any controversy over whose turn it is to clean up, or over who left the mess in the common area. If someone in the collective wants to run a restaurant, the other members can eat there free, subsidized by the umbrella corporation. If we don't have a restaurant, the umbrella corporation pays someone to shop for groceries and cook. . . so there are never any "who ate my food?" arguments, because it's OUR food and it's someone's job to make sure we have plenty on hand.
If a member of the collective fails at their chosen business, the collective absorbs their labor into some other business until they can regroup and try again or try something different. That person still gets a paycheck, still gets fed, st
Call me a spellfag, but it's BLOCS, not blocks.
So can they turn skin cells directly into any kind of cell, or just neurons? 'Cause I'm thinking the old parody of MAKE.MONEY.FAST might be about to come true.
...claims the purple dinosaur is the Antichrist.
And here's further proof! http://www.jlasso.com/jesus/showdown.html
Analogies aside, the assumption that every movie download represents a lost sale is absolutely bogus and one-sided. I often download films that I would never go see in the theater or rent on DVD, because I have a limited budget for such things... but since it's free, my curiosity allows me to explore beyond the bounds of both my disposable income and my normal range of interests. If I find that I have downloaded something really good, I may add it to my normal range of interests, and start spending money on it and things like it. For instance, I never really liked Westerns until I started filesharing, and saw some really good ones... now I own commercial DVDs of at least a dozen Westerns, because watching movies in relatively low resolution with relatively poor sound quality is not nearly as cool as watching them in their full uncompressed glory on a big screen TV with good sound.
Some of the other servers were related, insofar as they were also torrent servers. The site known as Karagarga was affected, as was the Asian DVD Club. There was no warrant against these sites, but they are down nonetheless... and I repeat, according to the police themselves, they are not even sure that the Pirate Bay, which they did have a warrant for, was violating any of the laws in Sweden.
What Pirate Bay did more than anything else to bring this massive shitstorm down upon their heads was not facilitate filesharing; rather, they taunted the MPAA/RIAA and their lawyers egregiously and often, and no doubt caused quite a bit of apoplexy among these people over the last few years.
Me, I'm not interested in the films that come out of Big Hollywood. I like old classics, I like arthouse, I like cult, I like rarities. The torrent site I frequent specializes in those genres, and doesn't even allow people to share Big Hollywood product. The site owners don't like the DMCA, but they do comply with it, and consequently have never been bothered by MPAA/RIAA about their activities. In their private forums, they have had a running poll going for most of a year now, which is somewhat illuminating... and overwhelming percentage of the members there (82%), people who are all quite familiar with where and how to download anything they want for free, still buy commercial DVDs and CDs! This data corroborates findings of researchers at major US universities, who have concluded that filesharing does not necessarily hurt the sales of traditional media. The research indicates that filesharing of majorly hyped Big Hollywood releases (like a new STAR WARS movie, for instance) has a small but noticeable negative impact on ticket sales and DVD rentals, but that filesharing of more obscure fare actually has a significant POSITIVE impact on ticket sales and DVD rentals -- it exposes more people to the work in question, and consequently, more people go out and buy a commercial copy of it.
It seems that the real problem is not that filesharers are evil 'pirates' who are cutting into MPAA/RIAA profits due to their wicked refusal to pay for culture... the problem is that when you buy a cinema ticket or buy/rent a DVD, and you have never seen the film or heard the album before purchasing, you are far more likely to spend money on movies and music that you ultimately find disappointing, and people don't like that. Filesharing should properly be regarded by Big Hollywood as pressure to stop making such a tremendous amount of recycled garbage, stop using marketing as the ultimate focus and raison d'etre of every film and CD produced, and get back to the old school traditions of making fine art for fine art's sake, with marketing a strictly post-production affair that has no say in what scripts get chosen or how directors do their jobs.
Would you buy a car without taking it for a test drive? Would you pay for clothes without trying them on? How many times have you walked out of a theater after a film, or ejected a DVD from your DVD player, and wished for your money back? All the actual hard data that has been collected shows that even hardcore filesharers DO go out and buy commercial DVDs and CDs; they like to own the tangibles and they like to support the artists and companies whose work they appreciate... so filesharing isn't piracy, it's more akin to trying something before you buy it, and rejecting it if it's poorly made. MPAA/RIAA's strident insistence that filesharing is piracy is simply their bid to retain their obscenely high profits without doing the tough job of making products worth buying. They prefer to work according to formulae and sell the same tired bullshit again and again, with explosions and special effects in lieu of actual
This is the best troll I've ever seen.
New technologies often require changes in the law and in the legal system itself, and computer technology is far from being an exception to that. As a society, we really need to have more specific legal definitions of what is and what is not black-hat hacking, defined by people who truly understand the technology... namely, white-hat hackers. Until this happens, we will continue to see people unjustly prosecuted for pointing out their local emperor's nudity, and we will continue to see nonsensical bills bouncing around Washington, D.C., written by and debated by people who don't understand them and who have no clue what stand to take on them. Senatards and Congresscritters simply are not qualified to make these decisions for us, but they will continue to do so until the ubergeeks get organized into a Congressional subcommittee or something, and take the reins.
"WARNING: Modem does not enable user to fly."
Hear, hear. The real pitfall for any technical production process, from software to space shuttles, is the ascendancy of a businesslike concern with the product's image to the point that it begins to dictate release deadlines. It's all well and good to worry about image, but when that worry becomes such a focus that it dictates the way that technical work gets handled, suddenly your product or process has become an example of form over function... and unless your product is tuxedoes for corpses or something similar, SCREW form over function!
How long before we see a story about making bioTamiflu out of used vegetable oil from McDonald's?
Is this going to give me a reason to choose Microsoft for something over Google??? The mind boggles.
As much as I love shouting "ARRRRRRRR!" at my friends, dressing up in full regalia and talking about the FSM, waving a cutlass around, and boarding treasure-laden ships in order to relieve them of their doubloons and swooning womenfolk before scuttling them, when the discussion turns serious it just pisses me off to be called a 'pirate' for the sharing I do using BitTorrent.
The site where I do 95% of my uploading and downloading is dedicated to movies that are old, out-of-print, independent, or rare; movies that have cult appeal; arthouse movies that the average American has never seen or even heard of; subtitled Asian cinema that is only marginally popular with English speakers, and films that are so ridiculously bad they circle around the back of awfulness and become good by virtue of their entertaining badness. My favorite torrent site doesn't even allow big Hollywood blockbusters unless they are old enough to be classics.
The site has to support itself with donations and advertising. Google Adsense and many other ad brokers won't allow their ads to be shown there, because they consider it a 'pirate' site... even though what we do there actually stimulates the sales of DVDs for films that are either too obscure to sell well, or too old to be effectively milked by giant corporations who don't actually give a skinny rat's ass about art.
Secret Cinema has private forums, where a core group discusses films and does most of the uploading for the site. These are people who are much net-savvier than your average p2p user, people who are thoroughly familiar with the torrenting scene in general, and who know where and how to download for free virtually anything they want to watch or listen to... yet a recent poll of this very group revealed that approximately 82% of them still buy authorized versions of DVDs and CDs. Why? Various reasons... some are simply collectors, and like to have the tangibles, with official cover art and DVD extras and so on. Some like to support the studios and directors who in their estimation make good cinema. Virtually ALL of them end up giving money to MPAA/RIAA for movies and music that they would never have bought (and would possibly never have even heard of) if not for online filesharing.
Why does MPAA/RIAA call these people 'pirates'? Why do they make it so difficult for sites like Secret Cinema to make enough money to survive? It's clear that p2p filesharing stimulates legitimate purchases of box office tickets, DVDs, and CDs... yet they want to sue us all, lock us up, shut down our sites, put rootkits on our computers and DRM on the legitimate media we buy.
Compounding this utter stupidity on the part of MPAA/RIAA is the fact that they expect the public to buy goods from them sight unseen. I wouldn't buy a car without taking a look at it (and taking a test drive) first, would you? Why should I buy a DVD or a CD without knowing if I like the movie or music on it? Why should I pony up at the box office or the concert hall without having some kind of familiarity with the product I'm paying for? If it's GOOD and not utter SHITE, I won't mind paying for it even if I've already seen it on my computer monitor... but MPAA/RIAA wants to keep their products under wraps until we pay up, so that they can continue cranking out GARBAGE and selling it to an unsuspecting public! This is probably why Hollywood has degenerated into the massive crapfest that it is today; they know that they can make money from inferior product, as long as the trailer looks good. Screw that, I want to see what I'm buying before I pay for it, and that doesn't make me a criminal.
http://www.secret-cinema.com/
What nobody seems to have realized is that, not only does the Bosnian pyramid sit directly over the center of the Earth, but if you draw a straight line between it and the Great Pyramid of Cheops (aka Kufu) in Egypt, then extend that line in the same direction, it will bisect the Earth into two exactly equal hemispheres. Obviously proof of either unsuspected high technology in ancient times, or the intervention of some space-faring alien civilization.
The torrent is now up again, and being seeded... COME AND GET IT! http://www.secret-cinema.com/
There is a documentary film about Toshitsugu Takamatsu, with Masaaki Hatsumi in it as well. It's a Japanese film, the title in English is "Takamatsu Toshitsugu, the Last Real Ninja". It's based upon a black-and-white movie filmed in the '60s that shows Takamatsu Sensei teaching Hatsumi Sensei in a park. Takamatsu Sensei demonstrates unarmed techniques and weapon techniques from the nine schools, with comments in Japanese (subtitled in English) by Hatsumi Sensei. A torrent for this film was uploaded to Secret Cinema http://www.secret-cinema.com/ a while back. It's dead now, but I am busily working on getting it back up again, so if you're interested check Secret Cinema for it in the next few days.
> child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more
> sadistic, using younger and younger children.
This, of course, has led to hordes of scientists meticulously documenting the wanton torture of stem cells. If it goes on, we'll soon be seeing the entire population of Earth making holograms of themselves setting fire to the concept of a zygote.
http://www.secret-cinema.com/ Cult, Arthouse, Badfilm, and more!
It's an easy thing to tell website managers not to "use ad providers that (try to) abuse the viewer's good will", but it's not always so easily done. The bad ad providers that have no compunctions against abusing the viewers also have no compunctions against lying to website managers about whether they do or do not attempt such abuse, and there are so very many ad providers out there to choose from (with such a high percentage of bad ones) that it can take months to find a choice that doesn't absolutely drip slime, with the only viable way of finding out who is who being to try them out one by one. That alone can lead to months of your site displaying unacceptable ads as you shuffle through all the choices looking for one or two that don't totally suck. Add to this the pressure from upper management to use whatever gives results, and website managers can find themselves faced with a formidable problem.
What we really need is some way to clean up the wretched, filthy underworld that the ad providing business has become, like an unimpeachable ad provider standards organization that can help sort out the wicked from the honest.
LiveJournal might be a little over-the-top in actually introducing this as a deal-killer in their ToS, but I can see their point... hosting and other expenses have to be paid for by someone, after all, and it's far better from a user's perspective to pay for the tools and content you access by allowing a few ads to show on your screen than it is to have to whip out a credit card and give money to every site that you find useful. Secret Cinema, the Cult/Arthouse torrent site -- http://www.secret-cinema.com/ -- has been doing the same thing for almost a year now, but instead of inserting a clause into their ToS and threatening to ban people, they simply ask nicely that users don't block their ads. LiveJournal might find that they make slightly less money, but generate more goodwill, by taking a similar approach.
jonwil (467024) wrote:
>China does not need google, there are plenty of chinese search engines that WILL
>comply with the chinese government.
And in fact, this is why this whole to-do is an irrelevant tempest in a teacup. I live in China, and I split my (excessive) computing time between my home machine and a net cafe near my fiancee's place. I have yet to see a single Chinese computer user go to Google for anything... they all use Baidu.com instead.
What we should be asking here is: Why do people only watch a movie once, and then never feel the urge to watch it again?
Answer: Because it's a crappy movie, and not WORTH watching again.
Certainly there exists a small percentage of people who, like Sam, only ever watch movies once... either they don't really love cinema all that much, or they just aren't terribly skilled at distinguishing good movies from crap movies based on trailers, posters, and other advertising. Most people aren't like that, though... MOST people have favorite movies that they don't mind buying on DVD for $10 or $20 precisely because they DO want to watch that movie more than once.
Let's not forget that there is no generic movie object that we can use to judge the value of all movies. Films are not qualitatively equal to each other; they don't even have an intrinsic value that is not at least partially subjective, and therefore the value of a film TO YOU cannot be accurately estimated before you've actually seen the damn thing. Would you buy a car without knowing anything about the make, model, or year? I know I wouldn't... and I don't buy DVDs of movies I haven't seen. Why should we allow movie studios to charge us a premium price for a product whose quality and value to us we cannot accurately judge before paying?
Downloading movies should be free, or at worst very, very cheap and unladen with DRM and other luncheon coldcuts that treat the customer as guilty before proven innocent. There are many reasons why this is true, not just the "sight unseen" argument above. Letting people download movies for free and share them with others means that more people will see far more movies than they would if they had to pay for them... and this stimulates DVD and cinema ticket sales by broadening peoples' horizons, and by generating an interest in owning the DVD and/or seeing the film on the big screen. This in turn provides some badly-needed upward pressure on filmmakers to stop churning out half-baked garbage that nobody wants to watch more than once.
You may scoff at the idea of people buying a DVD of a film they downloaded for free, but I'm not just theorizing here... I run a BitTorrent site, and I know firsthand that a lot of people like to own the DVD even if they already saw the movie for free... IF it's a good movie. They like the higher resolution of a DVD over a rip, they like to have the packaging, they like to have the DVD extras, and a good number of them actually feel enough loyalty to the people who make good movies to go ahead and put some money in their pockets so they'll be encouraged to make more. My site's users are sophisticated netizens who can find and download anything they want to see at will, yet forum conversations and a recent poll confirmed what I long suspected about such people: THEY STILL BUY DVDs.
In developing nations, most people don't have the income necessary to support a broad knowledge of culture, unless they buy cheap bootlegs or download movies for free. In China, bootleg disks are everywhere, but increasingly you can see people sitting in Internet cafes for hours, downloading and watching movies with headphones on because they don't have a computer and/or an Internet connection at home, and don't have a TV set and/or a DVD player at home either. In rural areas, you can often see storefronts converted to makeshift theaters where farmers can go to watch bootleg disks projected on a screen on the wall (and boy do they love American movies). Should we impose a cultural penalty on these people for not being wealthy enough to afford a $20 DVD? Hollywood isn't losing sales when these people, uh, "pirate" movies, because if they didn't have the cheap or free options they have, they would never be able to buy movies at all!
If we DON'T let the third world download for free, there will be an even larger pirate market in undeveloped countries, and that puts money in the pockets of some pretty awful people. If we DO let the third world download for f
Why is there no Altair 8800 on this list? We had one at home when I was a kid. To bootstrap it, you had to use toggle switches on the front panel (each with a corresponding LED) to give it enough of an instruction set to tell it YOU ARE A COMPUTER! PLEASE READ THIS PUNCH TAPE. Then you could feed a BASIC interpreter through the punch tape reader hanging off the side of the teletype, and *then* you could sit down and start coding. The teletype was the only I/O we had for the longest time... then we got a monitor, and used the teletype as a keyboard. We had a Pennywhistle 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, too... you had to pick up the phone, dial the number you wanted, wait for the line to be answered by the remote machine, then jam the telephone headset into the modem's cradle and start jiggling toggle switches madly in an attempt to handshake. My dad ported one of the old Trek games from the PDP-11 to the Altair. I wonder how many dead trees I used up killing Klingons on that thing? We also managed to get Will Crowther's ADVENT game (aka Colossal Cave Adventure) running on the Altair. I'll never forget the CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA sound of that teletype... damn thing sounded like it ran on gasoline.