For a time, Empornium was asking for a donation, and in return you got access to a better search engine, there was no requirement that you give them 5 bucks to download anything. They dropped the donation thing almost a year ago, and had to close the forums down because of all the pissed off freeloaders trolling. The torrent side never closed, but the trolling fanboys ran off a lot of old members and the torrent upload quantity dropped for a while, but the forums have been back open since christmas, and the number of torrents uploaded is getting back to its old level. Its obvious that there are the trolling fanboys here (note the 'check it out' line above) slamming Empornium for asking for a donation, yet almost every other pirate site also asks for donations. Weird. Also, the idiot saying the admins are getting X amount of dollars a month? How does he know, does he have access to their bank accounts? I seriousl doubt it.
Its aggrevating to read a bunch of responses from people who obviously have never used the yahoo toolbar, although its typical of the/. userbase, I suppose.
People who have never used the toolbar keep overlooking the most obvious use for it... bookmark portability. The search field being always there and easily available is a nice idea and all, but having my bookmarks easily available on any PC I use is more valuable to me than any search engine. I have 4 computers at home, several friends computers that I routinely use, parent's computers, computers at work, etc. Before switching all those computers to Firefox, I was able to have a central source for bookmarks. At any computer, I could add bookmarks, change existing ones, delete dead links, and the updated bookmarks followed me around wherever I logged in.
After updating all these computers to Firefox, I now have to manually update the bookmarks everywhere I go, by hand. I still havent found a decent extension that lets me do this as easily as the yahoo toolbar did with IE. The closest I have come is to create a homepage that has all my bookmarks as links, but then I'm stuck editing html whenever the page needs updating.
And before you cry "but you have to install the toolbar on every computer before you have access to those bookmarks"...not so. As anyone who actually uses my!yahoo as their email/news portal knows, you can log on to my!yahoo from any computer and see your bookmakrs displayed on the front page.
This is the best use for the toolbar for me, but I suppose there are those out there who don't have more than one computer, and don't have friends with computers, and don't do tech support for family members with computers, and, *gasp*, dont use computers at work (yes, slashdot readers, there are actually jobs out there that don't involve computers). For those people, they wouldn't find it usefull, but for those in my situation, I recommend you try the toolbar before slamming it as just another 'search-engine-in-the-menu-bar' thingie.
The original aorula.com article said:
"In addition, the individual must write a return letter, which consists of an explanation and/or an apology. This will then be passed on to the copyright owner, who will look it over and consider further action. It appears that if a valid explanation is given (ie. I don't know how to secure my access point and my neighbors run wild on my connection...) then both Comcast and the copyright owner will be happy. If the explanation is not satisfactory however, they may proceed with fines, termination of service, ect."
I read the letter, and how the fuck the aorula.com article poster, Tim Markle, got all that from the comcast letter, I don't have damn a clue. Sounds like his brain shut down while reading the letter and he let his paranoid fantasies take over (someone get him a tin foil hat, quick!).
This is irritating... this is at least the third time this same 'comcast letter' issue has hit slashdot, and its always the same wording in the letter, yet the/. editor posting the article didn't even bother to read the letter. If you go read the letter from comcast, it mentions nothing about sending an appology, nor do you have to respond at all. In effect, it only says 'take the file down or send us a letter explaining why you think you have a right to make the file available to others, and we will forward it to the copyright holder.'
You would think the editors here would actaully read the source letter before jumping on the paranoia bandwagon.
I'll let you 'non Americans' in on a little secret.... we have guns just in case those fucking British try to take back the colonies. You guys should get some guns too, just in case the fucking Brits show up on your door step demanding you pay them a tax for that shovel you made in your garage with materials you found in your backyard. Thats what they used to do to us. Until we got guns. You know how those damn British can be.
err.... I would rather put up with a few virus and gui/software crashes than pay thru the nose for a Mac, then scrounge around for software that will run on it, and pay thru the nose for that as well, and have no hardware upgrade path. By the way, "Mac's owners dont even know what a virus is" not because Mac's are immune to viruses (they aren't) but because Mac owners are generally clueless to begin with.
Well, lets see.... drugs use is illegal unless prescribed by a doctor, so blocking pro-drug-use sites is a no-brainer. Porn obviously should not be viewable by minors, so those sites should also be filtered. But pro-gun sites? Nothing illegal about owning a gun, unless your a felon. Our founding fathers thought the right to own a gun was pretty important, in fact, they thought it was so important they put it into our Bill Of Rights, second only to the freedom of speech.
So, your sarcasm about being shocked that those sites are blocked, only shows your not thinking the issue through.
Allow me to shed some light on this incident and perhaps also answer a few questions that have poped up.
1st, this didn't happen in Knoxville, Tennessee. It happened on a nearly deserted section of interstate near Newport, Tennessee. We are talking over 60 miles away from Knoxville. Also, until the interstate went through that area to connect east Tennessee to North Carolina in the 1970's, Newport was a barely even a dot on the map. There is a world of difference between an urban area such as Knoxville (population is close to 200k) and the backwater 'town' of Newport. Its what we call 'the sticks'. The section of interstate in that area has nothing but hills and farmland on either side, with the occasional billboard.
2nd, growing up in this area, (30 miles from Newport) you always heard the word 'Newport' associated with moonshiners, marijuana growers, car theft rings, and other assorted criminal activity. This is a very rual area, and a very rough one at that. And yes, I'm sure there are a few cliche inbread couples that produced some idiot kids, but I doubt that was the case here. I saw the kids on the local news, and they didn't have hunchbacks or anything. They looked like normal kids.
3rd, as for 'how did those kids get GUNS??'. Those kids probably grew up with guns hanging on the wall above thier beds, and were probably hunting rabbit, squirl, opossum, and whatever else that moved, by age 7 or 8. Its just a fact of life in the rual southeast, you hunt or you go hungry. If your making a good living farming or raising tobacco, then you hunt for fun. If you live in Newport and you don't hunt, its probably because your blind. You learn early in life how to handle guns, and guns are everywhere. I used to go into my friends houses when I was in my teens, and there was always a rifle or two, and some shotguns in ALL my friends houses, all fully loaded, within easy reach. And you know what? None of those kids ever shot anyone, or accidently shot themselves. In fact, I have had friends die in car wrecks, from cancer, from aids, from drowning, from motorcycle crashes, etc, but no one I know has ever been shot, even with all these guns around.
IMHO, they were just bored, did something really, really stupid (and this probably wasn't the first time they did it, just the first time someone died), and then needed to blame something or someone, and the GTA game was an obvious target for thier blame. And by the way, not once in all the local news reports did the game come, this/. article was the first I had heard about it.
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For a time, Empornium was asking for a donation, and in return you got access to a better search engine, there was no requirement that you give them 5 bucks to download anything. They dropped the donation thing almost a year ago, and had to close the forums down because of all the pissed off freeloaders trolling. The torrent side never closed, but the trolling fanboys ran off a lot of old members and the torrent upload quantity dropped for a while, but the forums have been back open since christmas, and the number of torrents uploaded is getting back to its old level. Its obvious that there are the trolling fanboys here (note the 'check it out' line above) slamming Empornium for asking for a donation, yet almost every other pirate site also asks for donations. Weird. Also, the idiot saying the admins are getting X amount of dollars a month? How does he know, does he have access to their bank accounts? I seriousl doubt it.
People who have never used the toolbar keep overlooking the most obvious use for it... bookmark portability. The search field being always there and easily available is a nice idea and all, but having my bookmarks easily available on any PC I use is more valuable to me than any search engine. I have 4 computers at home, several friends computers that I routinely use, parent's computers, computers at work, etc. Before switching all those computers to Firefox, I was able to have a central source for bookmarks. At any computer, I could add bookmarks, change existing ones, delete dead links, and the updated bookmarks followed me around wherever I logged in.
After updating all these computers to Firefox, I now have to manually update the bookmarks everywhere I go, by hand. I still havent found a decent extension that lets me do this as easily as the yahoo toolbar did with IE. The closest I have come is to create a homepage that has all my bookmarks as links, but then I'm stuck editing html whenever the page needs updating.
And before you cry "but you have to install the toolbar on every computer before you have access to those bookmarks"...not so. As anyone who actually uses my!yahoo as their email/news portal knows, you can log on to my!yahoo from any computer and see your bookmakrs displayed on the front page.
This is the best use for the toolbar for me, but I suppose there are those out there who don't have more than one computer, and don't have friends with computers, and don't do tech support for family members with computers, and, *gasp*, dont use computers at work (yes, slashdot readers, there are actually jobs out there that don't involve computers). For those people, they wouldn't find it usefull, but for those in my situation, I recommend you try the toolbar before slamming it as just another 'search-engine-in-the-menu-bar' thingie.
The original aorula.com article said: "In addition, the individual must write a return letter, which consists of an explanation and/or an apology. This will then be passed on to the copyright owner, who will look it over and consider further action. It appears that if a valid explanation is given (ie. I don't know how to secure my access point and my neighbors run wild on my connection...) then both Comcast and the copyright owner will be happy. If the explanation is not satisfactory however, they may proceed with fines, termination of service, ect." I read the letter, and how the fuck the aorula.com article poster, Tim Markle, got all that from the comcast letter, I don't have damn a clue. Sounds like his brain shut down while reading the letter and he let his paranoid fantasies take over (someone get him a tin foil hat, quick!). This is irritating... this is at least the third time this same 'comcast letter' issue has hit slashdot, and its always the same wording in the letter, yet the /. editor posting the article didn't even bother to read the letter. If you go read the letter from comcast, it mentions nothing about sending an appology, nor do you have to respond at all. In effect, it only says 'take the file down or send us a letter explaining why you think you have a right to make the file available to others, and we will forward it to the copyright holder.'
You would think the editors here would actaully read the source letter before jumping on the paranoia bandwagon.
I'll let you 'non Americans' in on a little secret.... we have guns just in case those fucking British try to take back the colonies. You guys should get some guns too, just in case the fucking Brits show up on your door step demanding you pay them a tax for that shovel you made in your garage with materials you found in your backyard. Thats what they used to do to us. Until we got guns. You know how those damn British can be.
Funny how ALL the priests caught molesting altar boys are catholic. LOL.
err.... I would rather put up with a few virus and gui/software crashes than pay thru the nose for a Mac, then scrounge around for software that will run on it, and pay thru the nose for that as well, and have no hardware upgrade path. By the way, "Mac's owners dont even know what a virus is" not because Mac's are immune to viruses (they aren't) but because Mac owners are generally clueless to begin with.
Well, lets see.... drugs use is illegal unless prescribed by a doctor, so blocking pro-drug-use sites is a no-brainer. Porn obviously should not be viewable by minors, so those sites should also be filtered. But pro-gun sites? Nothing illegal about owning a gun, unless your a felon. Our founding fathers thought the right to own a gun was pretty important, in fact, they thought it was so important they put it into our Bill Of Rights, second only to the freedom of speech. So, your sarcasm about being shocked that those sites are blocked, only shows your not thinking the issue through.
Allow me to shed some light on this incident and perhaps also answer a few questions that have poped up.
/. article was the first I had heard about it.
1st, this didn't happen in Knoxville, Tennessee. It happened on a nearly deserted section of interstate near Newport, Tennessee. We are talking over 60 miles away from Knoxville. Also, until the interstate went through that area to connect east Tennessee to North Carolina in the 1970's, Newport was a barely even a dot on the map. There is a world of difference between an urban area such as Knoxville (population is close to 200k) and the backwater 'town' of Newport. Its what we call 'the sticks'. The section of interstate in that area has nothing but hills and farmland on either side, with the occasional billboard.
2nd, growing up in this area, (30 miles from Newport) you always heard the word 'Newport' associated with moonshiners, marijuana growers, car theft rings, and other assorted criminal activity. This is a very rual area, and a very rough one at that. And yes, I'm sure there are a few cliche inbread couples that produced some idiot kids, but I doubt that was the case here. I saw the kids on the local news, and they didn't have hunchbacks or anything. They looked like normal kids.
3rd, as for 'how did those kids get GUNS??'. Those kids probably grew up with guns hanging on the wall above thier beds, and were probably hunting rabbit, squirl, opossum, and whatever else that moved, by age 7 or 8. Its just a fact of life in the rual southeast, you hunt or you go hungry. If your making a good living farming or raising tobacco, then you hunt for fun. If you live in Newport and you don't hunt, its probably because your blind. You learn early in life how to handle guns, and guns are everywhere. I used to go into my friends houses when I was in my teens, and there was always a rifle or two, and some shotguns in ALL my friends houses, all fully loaded, within easy reach. And you know what? None of those kids ever shot anyone, or accidently shot themselves. In fact, I have had friends die in car wrecks, from cancer, from aids, from drowning, from motorcycle crashes, etc, but no one I know has ever been shot, even with all these guns around.
IMHO, they were just bored, did something really, really stupid (and this probably wasn't the first time they did it, just the first time someone died), and then needed to blame something or someone, and the GTA game was an obvious target for thier blame. And by the way, not once in all the local news reports did the game come, this
D