Well, it was my experience that if you couldn't find a link on BTJunkie, you couldn't find that torrent anywhere.
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.
And the creator isn't obligated to create at all
And you're not obligated to sing 'Happy Birthday(C)' at birthday parties. Now that copyright needed to expire 40 years ago, but somebody's going to make money off that til the Sun dies.
If they didn't want to wait on the Americans to finish up the F35s, why didn't they just go talk to the Russians for some surplus MiGs? Proven design, and they work.
According to new data released today by the Commerce Department, the U.S. can expect 6-8 percent average annual growth in tourism over the next five years, and this year, 64 million foreign travelers are projected to visit the United States -- New Report Forecasts Strong U.S. Travel and Tourism Growth During Next Five Years
How many people read 'terrorism' rather than 'tourism' in the above quote?
SMS goes through computer systems on the way to its destination. Every message has the phone number where it originated and its destination, otherwise you'd never know who sent you that sext wanting to meet you in the janitor's closet, and the sexts to that hot girl in Accounting won't get through. Telco programmers might be 2nd tier, but they'll know how to tell the computers to watch every text from, say, 212-555-1212 and scan it for key words. Reasonably trivial, since the message itself is in plaintext. This isn't rocket surgery, kids.
Back in the day, we used to say 'Nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM.' Nowadays, it's more like, 'Nobody ever got fired for specifying Microsoft.'
Well, they could sell or give the info to auto insurance companies. By gathering data on which cars are where in relation to traffic accidents and traffic density, the insurance companies are bound to use that data to adjust their premium rates. And the tinfoil hat brigadier in me has the feeling they won't decrease.
Not all movies are out on Blu-Ray. Come to think of it, not all movies are out on DVD, either. Some stuff I taped off the tube never made it to DVD because the studios figured they'd never make their investment back.
There's a lotta tv shows I've heard of that I can get on DVD, but they won't play on an American DVD player. A couple series in particular I'm interested in are Aussie kid shows that the creator/producer got fucked by Disney and swore he'd never deal with Americans again. Jonathan M. Shiff is his name, and 'Ocean Girl' is the show. And from what I hear, it's something I want my grandkids to watch. Too bad I'm in the US and not Australia.
What happens if they require a business license to buy one of those terabyte drives? Or worse, stop selling them to anybody but governments? There's a bottleneck there.
What they don't tell you is, most of the distributing companies are wholey owned subsidiaries of the studios. When they start up a new movie, first thing they do is create a production company to do it, for tax purposes. Then they sign contracts with that production company to create and distribute it. Then they find other suckers to finance it. Then they make it and distribute it. First rule of Hollywood production? NEVER use your own money. Second rule of Hollywood? NEVER pay from the gross profits, always pay percentages off 'the backend' of the net profits, or pay upfront with waivers so that the payees can't sue and count this against the net profits of the production company. Third rule? ALWAYS cook the books so that everybody except the production company, who is responsible for paying those percentages off the backend net profits shows a profit on paper. Ask J. Michael Straczynski how much he's made off his share of the backend profits of Babylon 5 from Warner Brothers. Zero, zilch, nada. The way the contracts were written, he'll never see a dime of them. Hollywood accounting at its finest.
Current tech is more than good enough to render all kindsa nifty special effects alright. The downside is, it can take a few weeks to render a 75 second clip and have it look as good as any of the space scenes of 'Return of the Jedi' if you use that laptop of yours. If you or somebody you know has any techie skills, you can build a Beowulf cluster to render it faster. The cool thing is, you can get the software for free, i.e., Blender. Same with editing software. I use avidemux and kdenlive. And yes, I use Linux.
They ain't gonna change because none of the pirates posting on Slashdot have ever elaborated a credible alternative for them. Kodak was killed by superior technology - digital was clearly a better way of taking photos and Kodak just failed to make the leap. But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood? Give everything away for free? The financial physics of that don't work. Maybe they should pay for movies entirely out of popcorn sales.
Never heard of merchandising? Hollywood makes as much through merchandising as they do from the movie itself. Wanna know why that Mickey Mouse tshirt costs 30 bucks and a parody tshirt costs 10 bucks? The licensing fee per shirt the manufacture has to pay to Disney. It costs what, 25 cents to make that Transformer lunch box. Why's it cost 29.99 in the store? Licensing costs to the studio. This business model has been around for a long time. Back in the 60's when I was a kid, the big thing was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the show was a bigassed hit, and the stores were filled with the lunch boxes, the toy guns, the posters, everything. The studio made a killing on that shit, and you can get big bucks for a lunchbox on eBay.
vodo.net is a nice distribution channel. One of their current projects is Pioneer One, a sci fi tv show that just finished its first season, now raising money for their 2nd.
Also, get yourself a copy of 'Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning', a Star Trek/Babylon 5 crossover parody still covered by fair use, until they pass enough laws to go after it. I've got a copy of it, it's free to distribute, and they have a website to contribute to so they can finance their next project.
The word what is actually applicable here is "theft" or "smuggling". Now tell me again, how theft/smuggling has ever been marginalized in the world "after some time", at any point in history.
Except it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. The only thing 'stolen' is an idea, i.e., 'intellectual property'. You know, an intangible. You can't see it, touch it, taste it, or piss on it. People have been selling intangibles for thousands of years. Just ask the Catholic Church. And they've made tons of money on them. Again, just ask the Catholic Church.
The cool thing about an intangible is, you don't need to produce anything to have it. The 'labor' and 'goods' come from the derivatives, like holy books, lunch boxes, posters, etc.
Sources in Washington report the extraordinary rendition of 15 Polish politicians for copyright violation from the Parliament Building of the European Union early today. Acting on secret orders from the MPAA and RIAA, spokesmutants claimed yet another victory in the War Against Piracy and Terrorism. The sources added, an additional 4 British journalists were also captured when they pointed out that it was a British copyright that was infringed upon, not an American copyright. The journalists are said to be 'settling in quite nicely' at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray...
McCain likely wouldn't have survived long in office. The guy's a geezer, and the additional stress likely would have killed him. Which would have left us with Palin. She'd have signed it in an instant.
Rough translation: "This bill doesn't go far enough and it's going to cost us money. Please kill this bill and surrender the internet NOW or kiss your campaign contributions goodbye. What we want is the US government to go anywhere any time we pull their chains and stomp all over those eeeeeeeeeeeevil pirates who are anti-American, anti-corporate profits and obviously terrorrorrorrorrists too. We'll have the new bill in your office so you can jam it through just before elections and don't forget to pick up your checks."
Consider Social Security. What did people do when they got old in the past? Did they die en masse in the streets? No. They generally had families support them or there were private charities that helped out. However, now we are so used to the government taking care of things, there has been a social shift away from families taking care of their elders and now that is firmly ingrained in our society. So now, we couldn't go back now if we tried, unless we accept the pain that it will cause.
Consider history. Back in the day, when the elderly were taken care of by their families, families tended to run to 5+ children. It was a relatively nontechnological time. Let's look at some of the implications.
There was more work to be done than there were people to do them. Hell, they had to import Chinese to build the railroads because there just weren't enough Americans, blacks, and Irish immigrants free to do the job Without that immigrant labor, they just couldn't have been built.
Less technology means more people were employed farming. It was extremely labor intensive, and over 65% of the people were involved in it at the 'grab a hoe and whack these weeds' level. And this was in the most technological society on the planet at the time. People who worked off the farm made damned good money for that time, though the hours were long and the work was hard. If you didn't have enough kids to help you do what needed to be done, you had to hire somebody on, and they wanted real money for real work. Your parents and surviving grandparents would help raise the kids, educate them up to maybe a 3rd grade level, and free up an adult for work. There were no heart transplants, no bypass surgeries, no cancer treatments that were better than useless. People just didn't live as long.
Today, almost nobody is farming other than corporations. There are approximately 140 million jobs in the US (extrapolated from a news article saying 7 million jobs lost equated 5% of the job market, can't remember where I saw this), and approximately 280 million people of job age and reasonably healthy who can do them. Families need 2.5 jobs to make ends meet. In the US, they tend to have 2 or less kids. People on the average here live into their late 70's early 80's and beyond. Medical expenses tend to take an even larger slice of any available funding the older you get. It's been said the worst thing you can do is grow old in America.
Seeing all this, you want people's kids to take care of their parents while holding those 2.5 jobs. What happens if they don't have any kids? When are the kids going to get time to do this? Homeschool their own kids? Not a viable option, really.
The system is very different in the US, where the head of state is also the head of the executive branch, but those are separate roles in most european countries. (In fact, I can't think offhand of anywhere where this isn't true. Byelorussia maybe?)
The UK. The PM is head of the executive branch, but the monarchy is still officially head of state, isn't she?
Doesn't look like those salaries stayed low. At the time, the amounts were comparable to a lower middle class living. These days, they''re heading for the 1% and not slowing down yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Most private trackers aren't open. They're invite-only, and if somebody invites a *AA agent, they lose their access too.
Well, it was my experience that if you couldn't find a link on BTJunkie, you couldn't find that torrent anywhere.
And you're not obligated to sing 'Happy Birthday(C)' at birthday parties. Now that copyright needed to expire 40 years ago, but somebody's going to make money off that til the Sun dies.
If they didn't want to wait on the Americans to finish up the F35s, why didn't they just go talk to the Russians for some surplus MiGs? Proven design, and they work.
How many people read 'terrorism' rather than 'tourism' in the above quote?
SMS goes through computer systems on the way to its destination. Every message has the phone number where it originated and its destination, otherwise you'd never know who sent you that sext wanting to meet you in the janitor's closet, and the sexts to that hot girl in Accounting won't get through. Telco programmers might be 2nd tier, but they'll know how to tell the computers to watch every text from, say, 212-555-1212 and scan it for key words. Reasonably trivial, since the message itself is in plaintext. This isn't rocket surgery, kids.
Back in the day, we used to say 'Nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM.' Nowadays, it's more like, 'Nobody ever got fired for specifying Microsoft.'
Good news and bad news for ya.
Bad news first. You're joinin us at Gitmo.
Good news is, it's Salisbury steak night! Hurry up, it's goin' fast!
With a name like Saad Allami you just know he was being profiled.
Well, they could sell or give the info to auto insurance companies. By gathering data on which cars are where in relation to traffic accidents and traffic density, the insurance companies are bound to use that data to adjust their premium rates. And the tinfoil hat brigadier in me has the feeling they won't decrease.
Not all movies are out on Blu-Ray. Come to think of it, not all movies are out on DVD, either. Some stuff I taped off the tube never made it to DVD because the studios figured they'd never make their investment back.
There's a lotta tv shows I've heard of that I can get on DVD, but they won't play on an American DVD player. A couple series in particular I'm interested in are Aussie kid shows that the creator/producer got fucked by Disney and swore he'd never deal with Americans again. Jonathan M. Shiff is his name, and 'Ocean Girl' is the show. And from what I hear, it's something I want my grandkids to watch. Too bad I'm in the US and not Australia.
What happens if they require a business license to buy one of those terabyte drives? Or worse, stop selling them to anybody but governments? There's a bottleneck there.
Keep thinking, you'll figure it out...
What they don't tell you is, most of the distributing companies are wholey owned subsidiaries of the studios. When they start up a new movie, first thing they do is create a production company to do it, for tax purposes. Then they sign contracts with that production company to create and distribute it. Then they find other suckers to finance it. Then they make it and distribute it. First rule of Hollywood production? NEVER use your own money. Second rule of Hollywood? NEVER pay from the gross profits, always pay percentages off 'the backend' of the net profits, or pay upfront with waivers so that the payees can't sue and count this against the net profits of the production company. Third rule? ALWAYS cook the books so that everybody except the production company, who is responsible for paying those percentages off the backend net profits shows a profit on paper. Ask J. Michael Straczynski how much he's made off his share of the backend profits of Babylon 5 from Warner Brothers. Zero, zilch, nada. The way the contracts were written, he'll never see a dime of them. Hollywood accounting at its finest.
Current tech is more than good enough to render all kindsa nifty special effects alright. The downside is, it can take a few weeks to render a 75 second clip and have it look as good as any of the space scenes of 'Return of the Jedi' if you use that laptop of yours. If you or somebody you know has any techie skills, you can build a Beowulf cluster to render it faster. The cool thing is, you can get the software for free, i.e., Blender. Same with editing software. I use avidemux and kdenlive. And yes, I use Linux.
Never heard of merchandising? Hollywood makes as much through merchandising as they do from the movie itself. Wanna know why that Mickey Mouse tshirt costs 30 bucks and a parody tshirt costs 10 bucks? The licensing fee per shirt the manufacture has to pay to Disney. It costs what, 25 cents to make that Transformer lunch box. Why's it cost 29.99 in the store? Licensing costs to the studio. This business model has been around for a long time. Back in the 60's when I was a kid, the big thing was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the show was a bigassed hit, and the stores were filled with the lunch boxes, the toy guns, the posters, everything. The studio made a killing on that shit, and you can get big bucks for a lunchbox on eBay.
vodo.net is a nice distribution channel. One of their current projects is Pioneer One, a sci fi tv show that just finished its first season, now raising money for their 2nd.
Also, get yourself a copy of 'Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning', a Star Trek/Babylon 5 crossover parody still covered by fair use, until they pass enough laws to go after it. I've got a copy of it, it's free to distribute, and they have a website to contribute to so they can finance their next project.
Except it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. The only thing 'stolen' is an idea, i.e., 'intellectual property'. You know, an intangible. You can't see it, touch it, taste it, or piss on it. People have been selling intangibles for thousands of years. Just ask the Catholic Church. And they've made tons of money on them. Again, just ask the Catholic Church.
The cool thing about an intangible is, you don't need to produce anything to have it. The 'labor' and 'goods' come from the derivatives, like holy books, lunch boxes, posters, etc.
This just in:
Sources in Washington report the extraordinary rendition of 15 Polish politicians for copyright violation from the Parliament Building of the European Union early today. Acting on secret orders from the MPAA and RIAA, spokesmutants claimed yet another victory in the War Against Piracy and Terrorism. The sources added, an additional 4 British journalists were also captured when they pointed out that it was a British copyright that was infringed upon, not an American copyright. The journalists are said to be 'settling in quite nicely' at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray...
McCain likely wouldn't have survived long in office. The guy's a geezer, and the additional stress likely would have killed him. Which would have left us with Palin. She'd have signed it in an instant.
Remember, remember, the 5th of November...
Today we call them 'right-wing fundamentalist nutjobs' and nobody claims them as kin.
Rough translation: "This bill doesn't go far enough and it's going to cost us money. Please kill this bill and surrender the internet NOW or kiss your campaign contributions goodbye. What we want is the US government to go anywhere any time we pull their chains and stomp all over those eeeeeeeeeeeevil pirates who are anti-American, anti-corporate profits and obviously terrorrorrorrorrists too. We'll have the new bill in your office so you can jam it through just before elections and don't forget to pick up your checks."
Consider history. Back in the day, when the elderly were taken care of by their families, families tended to run to 5+ children. It was a relatively nontechnological time. Let's look at some of the implications.
There was more work to be done than there were people to do them. Hell, they had to import Chinese to build the railroads because there just weren't enough Americans, blacks, and Irish immigrants free to do the job Without that immigrant labor, they just couldn't have been built.
Less technology means more people were employed farming. It was extremely labor intensive, and over 65% of the people were involved in it at the 'grab a hoe and whack these weeds' level. And this was in the most technological society on the planet at the time. People who worked off the farm made damned good money for that time, though the hours were long and the work was hard. If you didn't have enough kids to help you do what needed to be done, you had to hire somebody on, and they wanted real money for real work. Your parents and surviving grandparents would help raise the kids, educate them up to maybe a 3rd grade level, and free up an adult for work. There were no heart transplants, no bypass surgeries, no cancer treatments that were better than useless. People just didn't live as long.
Today, almost nobody is farming other than corporations. There are approximately 140 million jobs in the US (extrapolated from a news article saying 7 million jobs lost equated 5% of the job market, can't remember where I saw this), and approximately 280 million people of job age and reasonably healthy who can do them. Families need 2.5 jobs to make ends meet. In the US, they tend to have 2 or less kids. People on the average here live into their late 70's early 80's and beyond. Medical expenses tend to take an even larger slice of any available funding the older you get. It's been said the worst thing you can do is grow old in America.
Seeing all this, you want people's kids to take care of their parents while holding those 2.5 jobs. What happens if they don't have any kids? When are the kids going to get time to do this? Homeschool their own kids? Not a viable option, really.
The UK. The PM is head of the executive branch, but the monarchy is still officially head of state, isn't she?
Doesn't look like those salaries stayed low. At the time, the amounts were comparable to a lower middle class living. These days, they''re heading for the 1% and not slowing down yet.