Gillette has been doing what the whole printer industry is doing with Razors for YEARS: Give the tool away cheap or for free and charge high for the blades. Some printers are actually sold cheaper than the ink cartages who come with the printer. So the ink cartridges who come with printers now only contain one third of the volume, just to make you go buy a new one a week after purchase.
This is just not fair. Boycott the whole printer industry AND save the environment at the same time: Print less. Encourage your friends to do the same. Trees are today being cut down ten times the rate they are being reproduced! This is a fact. Yes, if we keep this up then the planet will be free of trees by the end of the century. So teach the evil printer industry a lesion, print less. And No, switching brand will not help, they are all running the ink scam.
The site LokiTorrent does not seem to have a smart DMCA policy, Google has one and if you have one then you MUST FIRST say hey, you got file foo at bar.
And having a DMCA policy means that IF someone sends me a mail that says get this shit off your sites then I must do so upon reading it.... all fair. This enables anyone to remove things from my site as long as they play nicely, it also enables me to fight back if they do not do so politely. And no-body here knows if MPAA ever tried to contact Lokitorrent politely before suing them, do we? (they should have, but more importantly, would be required to if they had a DMCA policy)
"just go buy legit copies." Where And How? Please tell us.
Bittorrent and Copyright are killed by Freenet
on
LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
·
· Score: 1
FORGET about BitTorrent.
BitTorrent, Direct Connect and those like them are LAST GENERATIONS things, soon to be dead.
FreeNet and things like it (now small and slow) will the next few years grow, and they will grow more rapidly the harder **AA attacks people.
It is just a matter of time before ALL MOVIES, all songs, all books and everything else that can be put on a computer IS ON FREENET (or something like it).
COPYRIGHT DIEAD the moment someone got the IDEA to create Freenet. It is that simple. Perhaps the concept remains, but the ability to control it is gone.
THIS IS A HUGE CHANGE and a first in the digital evolution because freenet allows you to anonymously post or download what ever you want. There is no stopping, or suing, or anything to do about it!
THE REAL TRIAL was COPYRIGHT v.s. FREE SPEECH. Copyright was the winner every round UNTIL FREENET appeared and killed it. (Yes, you will have it on paper, but there is no longer any controlling it).
1. Modem, upload warez to bbses. Could be stopped. Replaced by
2. Napster, Gnutella and others, could also be stopped. Replaced by
3. Direct Connet / BitTorrent / E-Donkey. Not encrypted, you can find out who is using these. YESTERDAYS PROTOCOLS. BitTorrent is 4 years old. Shortly (already, people are using them..) replaced by
4. Freenet / Metanet - CAN NOT BE STOPPED, CAN NOT BE CONTROLLED, COPYRIGHT *IS* DEAD. This is the current situation.
**AA are still stuck at #3. They are suing based on a reality from years ago. The Judges of Evolution and Time already ruled Free Speech Won on Free Speech vs Copyright, this trial is mere a joke and all this does is push forth step #4. Thanks, **AA, shortly everything you hold copyright on can be downloaded anonymously (this would have happened anyway, though, you are just making it happen faster)
What you can and should do instead if to provide a simple interface where people could buy the right to view a movie for $5 or $15 or whatever. Just the rights that would have come with the DVD, and you do not even have to produce the DVD or do anything active at all! Think of the profit.
WHAT I AM SAYING IS that the movie industry can charge the price of a DVD minus the cost of the garbage (the DVD disc and package) and trust me on this, people WILL BUY because the reasons people download is not to steal, but because the media is better and much more practical.
Would YOU not use a interface if it were Legal, at the MPAA site, and said Buy the _right_ to any movie, fixed price $?? ($? would be excellent), just type the movie name (or file name) and Done!
I would go from looking at them as evil persons who sued the person who made it possible for me to use the DVD discs I legally bought on my own entertainment system to looking at them as smart people.
And I don't, and I probably should. Please enlighten me.
What if their site shows torrents, but does not have a tracker? I wrote my torrentsniffing stuff so I didn't have to like look around for stuff, I wanted lots of torrents on a page so I wrote some extremely simple stuff that basically looks for torrents, checks if their are valid, lists whatever files they claim to be in them and volla spits it out on web pages (about 40 lines of BASH, actually..).
Am I in violation of this DMCA thing with very unclear and hard language? I figure it like this: Google has this bot thing that puts stuff into Google, I got this Extremely-Simple-Google-Like thing that basically does the same as they do (perhaps more like the news service, though, since it puts all on a page, kind of like the early start / home pages from the 90s).
Note that I never ever actually got any kind of legal letter or complaint or anything close to it ever (and I actually do assume my page is legal, so please tell me if I am wrong).
Please tell me where I can buy the legal right to download a movie in divx format from a peer to peer network and view it! This is not possible and this is why the movie industry may be losing some money to peer to peer networks. It is because they are idiots. People ARE willing to pay for the things they download, but they are not able to do so. There is no way of doing so.... Please tell me I am wrong. The DVD format did not replace the VCR, divx did! People want divx. They do not want DVD. So they choose divx. This does NOT mean they are unwilling to pay for it (but as said, they are currently unable to).
I could not agree more, the idea sounds totally stupid. I sure hope they do not make any such thing with loud speakers "so people can share". The noice from phones and people using them in public places is bad enough already.
How are they going to tell television on such a tiny screen no matter how good they manage to make the picture? Going from cinema picture to a tiny normal TV is bad enough, looking at a stamp size picture doesn't sound very nice no matter how great they make the picture.
There is not a single scientific fact that contradicts that the sun one day will burn out and die. This will have extremely bad consequences for us. The first step is obviously to get of this planet, but this only gives human kind a few extra thousand years. We must as soon as possible spread out beyond this galaxy to ensure the survival of humans and perhaps life in general. We must leave. Now. Immediately. The clock is ticking, and NASA has far from the needed funds for this project. In fact, human long-term survival would be best served by all members of humanity gathering around the single goal of Getting us the hell Off This Planet ASAP.
Then forget it. It will be Closed Source. And the developers seem to be more focused on what kind of advertisements the client shoud have. This will never ever be a big hit. Direct Connect finally hot hash support and works excellent, Linux users can enjoy gift (linux users means many ogg files) and so forth... Those protocols, like BitTorrent, are good because there is alot of different software for them - because the protocols are open, reference clients are made in open source and so on.
like there is not tons of copyright violations at
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&safe=off &output=search&q=hardcore&btnG=Search
What if the porn site actually WiNS? Best not to have any stock in any search engine if that were to happen!
Look at the bigger picture. If it is found illegal for Google To LINK to Sites with copyrighted images, or better, PAGES (text can be copyrighted too, same thing). Then what?
Then EVERYTHING that is part of the search engine must manually be checked to verify that the content is not copyrighted. Basically the End Of All Search Engines as we know.. Or all sites who want to be part of the search engine must perhaps sign some disclaimer where the web site owner personally guarantees the site never will violate any copyright laws...
I hope who ever will look at the legal side understands the principles involved here..
I use Linux and I never hard spyware installed on my computer. Obviously, I also never had to install a anti-spyware program. If you are using a OS that allows spyware, then you are taking a risk. It is you choice do to so. But do not cry about your data loss. You took the risk. You did not use
Linux.
Try it. Once. You can download a Live CD and try it even without installing it. If the 5 minutes this takes was a waste of time, then too bad. But if not, then you may just learn how to use a secure, modern OS that does not allow viruses for the rest of your life.
P.S: It's my birthday today. Actually. (as if anyone cares).
Google does use and respect the robots.txt tag and it is no problem to ask it not to index folders on your personal site. If someone is illegally using your content then it is the persons providing it who are the problem, not the spider that mirrors the site. Spiders may carry illegal and copyrighted content, yes, but since spiders tend to drop the cached eventually if the original site goes down, the problem is still best solved by removing the site with the bad content.
I personally use a smooth.htaccess to prevent anyone and thing from using my images without having the right url as referrer. This is easy to do and perfect for preventing other sites of linking directly to given file types like swf, jpg and png.
How you and your content appear in search engines is entirely up to you.
Some porn providers actually encourage you to to use their content under some license terms, this is how I got the content for the instant wank galleries at
hardcoretorrents.com. Perhaps the porn provider just needs to provide the content they feel other people are violating under better terms?
Why anyone would be foolish enough to ask to be removed from Google is something I do not understand. The hits generated from them, at least according to my logs, is extremely valuable and important. More visitors, more income is true in most cases. And my logs clearly indicate that if I was to be removed from Google, then the number of daily visitors at my torrent site bt.g.la and other sites
would go down. It's that simple.
More pages v.s more relevant pages
on
Google Index Doubles
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Personally I find that the lack of relevant pages if the biggest problem with search engines, not the lack of pages with information. It seems I always find what I'm looking for eventually, what I need improved is the time I spend looking though spam-bomb pages before I find a page with the correct information.
These spam-pages seem to be increasing; I mean those pages with just a buch of keywords or the output of some search system.
A blog is just a means of sharing information and opinions, just like newspapers and television. A blod is just another way of presenting information, like the digital versions of newspapers do.
The quallity of a blog depends on the person administrating it and running it, and the people who write in it. I mean, come on, some of the major news websites out there are blogs. Like slashdot...
I don't have a DVD player. I don't have a CD player. I don't have a VCR. I don't even have a television set. This is actually the honest truth.
And I consider hard media dead. Dead, I tell you. All my entertainment is enjoyed on a large computer screen. I would have gotten a projector if I had a bigger apartment, I am sure I'll never own a television set or any of it's related devices ever again.
So what is the movie industries alternative for me? Nothing. This is the alternative I want:
I buy a one months free rental card from a major TV station or producer, or from some movie corporation. The one months pass gives me the right to view all and anything from that particular corporation. The corporation should make all their shows available in high quality easily-distributed divx files. Not only does this make customers satisfied, but it allows people to distribute the files and advertise them freely. Movie vendors could also make two versions available: One available for everybody with advertisements and one without. Those who would pay for a non-advertisement copy would do that, those who do not want to pay will not do that regardless.
I'm sure I am not alone in being willing to pay for the copyrighted files available on the net. I would very much like to clarify that it is the divx versions available on the net I am willing to pay for. I am not willing to pay for any streaming service, any service with a closed file format, any format that requires a special player and so forth. The movie industry tends to want control, restricting the customers freedom to use the product to the point where he simply will not buy. He will get a free hi-qualify copy that is USABLE instead. 'I would pay for a streaming service or a dvd if it gave me the right to download the xvid version,' someone told me a while ago.
Now, how would the movie industry end piracy anyway? THIS IS NOT A REALISTIC option. They can not do that. They can, however, MOVE the piracy. They can move it from BitTorrent to Freenet. Then what? There is already freenet and there is not a thing anyone or any corporation, no matter how big or small, can do about it. BitTorrent sites can be closed by Napster was closed.
The public demand for soft-versions (not on hard media) of entertainment is what is making BitTorrent use up to 85% of the outgoing bandwidth at Universities because they industry itself does not provide any realistic meet for the demand.
So what is wrong with hard media? First, it is very unpractical. It takes up space. It involves finding the hard media and inserting it into some device. Download the file and it's already playable from the device, without finding anything. Any computer, xbox and other funny device today can store one movie, and that is all the space needed. Movies are so widely available today anyway there is no need to store it, most people now tend to just download and play music and movies a few times before they delete it. People used to burn these things back in the last century, today it's quicker to download a music album off the net when you want to listen to it than to find the CD you bought of the album 20 years ago.
The environmental issue: There is not a single scientific paper published the last 25 years that contradicts a 6 th wave of mass extinctions (We have had 5 throughout history, the dinosaurs got hit by the second) within the next two hundred years due to the human species over-harvesting, destroying of natural habitats and pollution. We are cutting down ten times more trees than the world naturally produces, we are harvesting 25% to 50% of all plant material produced by the earth in any single year. We need to stop producing garbage. CDs, DVDs and video tapes are unneeded garbage, things we produce not for survival but to entertain ourselves. And for no good reason at all. Electronic distribution eliminates the whole harmful production of these hard-media items.
Then again
GnomeMetting and calling cards from Linuxjack.com pretty much gives us spoofing anyway. Not that the phone number is spoofed in any way, it's just that it changes once you've used up your calling card and buy another one.. Personally I've assumed this to be a bad thing, but I do see the value with all this talk about caller id spoofing....
But keep in mind that the gain from switching to Linux comes first after a few year. Initially, teaching everyone involved Linux will be a cost equal to the cost of commercial software licenses. These costs will soon go away, and the Linux software will keep on working for years - free.
While many people today view their personal networks as private things that must be guarded, many people are today starting to view wireless access points as public goods instead of something that needs to be protected.
A free everywhere wireless network is quite possible. I've heard quote a few people say things like "Well, if my ISP goes down it's OK, I got two neighbours who also have their networks open". Opening your network to everyone is not unsafe or a bad idea, it's a question of overall security. Allowing ANYONE who happen to be behind your firewall access to a service is stupid. The right thing to do is to secure the service with passwords regardless of who or what uses it. Viewing all networks as public and securing properly according to this is much better than the old firewall approach.
So, you are secured and it is OK for anyone to access your LAN, just open it up. Let anyone use the public Internet through your access point!
If everyone who has the Internet at home would do this in a mayor city then anyone there would be able to get the Internet free - anywhere - today!
Isn't the amount of money thrown at computer security a little high compared to the cost of setting up a free firewall like
iptables
and verifying that it works with nmap a little high?
What I really like about Gaim is the libraries, they have been the basis for many other excellent tools. Like BitlBee http://www.bitlbee.org/, a very nice gateway that allows you to talk to anyone using anything through your irc client. Aterm + Screen + Irssi is my personal favorite communication's suite.
Check out the X.org 6.8 Screenshots at LinuxReviews, showing off the new real transparency and drop shadow technology. These things may not increase your shareholder value, but it will allow you to impress people in a big way.
It is possible to use cygwin and the GPL Linux version of X-Chat in Windows, thereby avoiding the shareware license (which I personally find violates the GPL because X-Chat uses GPL libraries).
Did I just read 900TB of storage, 300M transactions per day and trade music, television, movies and books?
Makes me want MULTIMEDIA WIKI NOW. Edited / uploaded by everyone, for everyone. Like the articles on the normal wiki, just with image, sound, videos and everything else.
All we need is some geek to setup one of those popular wikis with a donate now button. I'm confident donations would pay the bandwidth..
Sometimes it is quite unlear if the domain name is the same because of conisidence, but in this case, Lamparello's site criticizes Falwell's stance against homosexuality and includes a disclaimer that reads, "This Web site is not affiliated with Jerry Falwell Ministries.", the site using the "same name" even admits they did choose the name because of the resembelence. This is something very different from the kathy.com story where Pengiun is trying to steal another persons domain for no reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Gillette has been doing what the whole printer industry is doing with Razors for YEARS: Give the tool away cheap or for free and charge high for the blades. Some printers are actually sold cheaper than the ink cartages who come with the printer. So the ink cartridges who come with printers now only contain one third of the volume, just to make you go buy a new one a week after purchase. This is just not fair. Boycott the whole printer industry AND save the environment at the same time: Print less. Encourage your friends to do the same. Trees are today being cut down ten times the rate they are being reproduced! This is a fact. Yes, if we keep this up then the planet will be free of trees by the end of the century. So teach the evil printer industry a lesion, print less. And No, switching brand will not help, they are all running the ink scam.
The site LokiTorrent does not seem to have a smart DMCA policy, Google has one and if you have one then you MUST FIRST say hey, you got file foo at bar.
And having a DMCA policy means that IF someone sends me a mail that says get this shit off your sites then I must do so upon reading it.... all fair. This enables anyone to remove things from my site as long as they play nicely, it also enables me to fight back if they do not do so politely. And no-body here knows if MPAA ever tried to contact Lokitorrent politely before suing them, do we? (they should have, but more importantly, would be required to if they had a DMCA policy)
"just go buy legit copies." Where And How? Please tell us.
FORGET about BitTorrent.
BitTorrent, Direct Connect and those like them are LAST GENERATIONS things, soon to be dead.
FreeNet and things like it (now small and slow) will the next few years grow, and they will grow more rapidly the harder **AA attacks people.
It is just a matter of time before ALL MOVIES, all songs, all books and everything else that can be put on a computer IS ON FREENET (or something like it).
COPYRIGHT DIEAD the moment someone got the IDEA to create Freenet. It is that simple. Perhaps the concept remains, but the ability to control it is gone.
THIS IS A HUGE CHANGE and a first in the digital evolution because freenet allows you to anonymously post or download what ever you want. There is no stopping, or suing, or anything to do about it!
THE REAL TRIAL was COPYRIGHT v.s. FREE SPEECH. Copyright was the winner every round UNTIL FREENET appeared and killed it. (Yes, you will have it on paper, but there is no longer any controlling it).
1. Modem, upload warez to bbses. Could be stopped. Replaced by
2. Napster, Gnutella and others, could also be stopped. Replaced by
3. Direct Connet / BitTorrent / E-Donkey. Not encrypted, you can find out who is using these. YESTERDAYS PROTOCOLS. BitTorrent is 4 years old. Shortly (already, people are using them..) replaced by
4. Freenet / Metanet - CAN NOT BE STOPPED, CAN NOT BE CONTROLLED, COPYRIGHT *IS* DEAD. This is the current situation.
**AA are still stuck at #3. They are suing based on a reality from years ago. The Judges of Evolution and Time already ruled Free Speech Won on Free Speech vs Copyright, this trial is mere a joke and all this does is push forth step #4. Thanks, **AA, shortly everything you hold copyright on can be downloaded anonymously (this would have happened anyway, though, you are just making it happen faster)
What you can and should do instead if to provide a simple interface where people could buy the right to view a movie for $5 or $15 or whatever. Just the rights that would have come with the DVD, and you do not even have to produce the DVD or do anything active at all! Think of the profit.
WHAT I AM SAYING IS that the movie industry can charge the price of a DVD minus the cost of the garbage (the DVD disc and package) and trust me on this, people WILL BUY because the reasons people download is not to steal, but because the media is better and much more practical.
Would YOU not use a interface if it were Legal, at the MPAA site, and said Buy the _right_ to any movie, fixed price $?? ($? would be excellent), just type the movie name (or file name) and Done!
I would go from looking at them as evil persons who sued the person who made it possible for me to use the DVD discs I legally bought on my own entertainment system to looking at them as smart people.
And I don't, and I probably should. Please enlighten me.
What if their site shows torrents, but does not have a tracker? I wrote my torrentsniffing stuff so I didn't have to like look around for stuff, I wanted lots of torrents on a page so I wrote some extremely simple stuff that basically looks for torrents, checks if their are valid, lists whatever files they claim to be in them and volla spits it out on web pages (about 40 lines of BASH, actually..).
Am I in violation of this DMCA thing with very unclear and hard language? I figure it like this: Google has this bot thing that puts stuff into Google, I got this Extremely-Simple-Google-Like thing that basically does the same as they do (perhaps more like the news service, though, since it puts all on a page, kind of like the early start / home pages from the 90s).
Note that I never ever actually got any kind of legal letter or complaint or anything close to it ever (and I actually do assume my page is legal, so please tell me if I am wrong).
Please tell me where I can buy the legal right to download a movie in divx format from a peer to peer network and view it! This is not possible and this is why the movie industry may be losing some money to peer to peer networks. It is because they are idiots. People ARE willing to pay for the things they download, but they are not able to do so. There is no way of doing so.... Please tell me I am wrong. The DVD format did not replace the VCR, divx did! People want divx. They do not want DVD. So they choose divx. This does NOT mean they are unwilling to pay for it (but as said, they are currently unable to).
I could not agree more, the idea sounds totally stupid. I sure hope they do not make any such thing with loud speakers "so people can share". The noice from phones and people using them in public places is bad enough already.
How are they going to tell television on such a tiny screen no matter how good they manage to make the picture? Going from cinema picture to a tiny normal TV is bad enough, looking at a stamp size picture doesn't sound very nice no matter how great they make the picture.
There is not a single scientific fact that contradicts that the sun one day will burn out and die. This will have extremely bad consequences for us. The first step is obviously to get of this planet, but this only gives human kind a few extra thousand years. We must as soon as possible spread out beyond this galaxy to ensure the survival of humans and perhaps life in general. We must leave. Now. Immediately. The clock is ticking, and NASA has far from the needed funds for this project. In fact, human long-term survival would be best served by all members of humanity gathering around the single goal of Getting us the hell Off This Planet ASAP.
Then forget it. It will be Closed Source. And the developers seem to be more focused on what kind of advertisements the client shoud have. This will never ever be a big hit. Direct Connect finally hot hash support and works excellent, Linux users can enjoy gift (linux users means many ogg files) and so forth... Those protocols, like BitTorrent, are good because there is alot of different software for them - because the protocols are open, reference clients are made in open source and so on.
like there is not tons of copyright violations at http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&safe=off &output=search&q=hardcore&btnG=Search
What if the porn site actually WiNS? Best not to have any stock in any search engine if that were to happen!
Look at the bigger picture. If it is found illegal for Google To LINK to Sites with copyrighted images, or better, PAGES (text can be copyrighted too, same thing). Then what?
Then EVERYTHING that is part of the search engine must manually be checked to verify that the content is not copyrighted. Basically the End Of All Search Engines as we know.. Or all sites who want to be part of the search engine must perhaps sign some disclaimer where the web site owner personally guarantees the site never will violate any copyright laws...
I hope who ever will look at the legal side understands the principles involved here..
I use Linux and I never hard spyware installed on my computer. Obviously, I also never had to install a anti-spyware program. If you are using a OS that allows spyware, then you are taking a risk. It is you choice do to so. But do not cry about your data loss. You took the risk. You did not use Linux.
Try it. Once. You can download a Live CD and try it even without installing it. If the 5 minutes this takes was a waste of time, then too bad. But if not, then you may just learn how to use a secure, modern OS that does not allow viruses for the rest of your life.
P.S: It's my birthday today. Actually. (as if anyone cares).
Google does use and respect the robots.txt tag and it is no problem to ask it not to index folders on your personal site. If someone is illegally using your content then it is the persons providing it who are the problem, not the spider that mirrors the site. Spiders may carry illegal and copyrighted content, yes, but since spiders tend to drop the cached eventually if the original site goes down, the problem is still best solved by removing the site with the bad content.
.htaccess to prevent anyone and thing from using my images without having the right url as referrer. This is easy to do and perfect for preventing other sites of linking directly to given file types like swf, jpg and png.
I personally use a smooth
How you and your content appear in search engines is entirely up to you.
Some porn providers actually encourage you to to use their content under some license terms, this is how I got the content for the instant wank galleries at hardcoretorrents.com. Perhaps the porn provider just needs to provide the content they feel other people are violating under better terms?
Why anyone would be foolish enough to ask to be removed from Google is something I do not understand. The hits generated from them, at least according to my logs, is extremely valuable and important. More visitors, more income is true in most cases. And my logs clearly indicate that if I was to be removed from Google, then the number of daily visitors at my torrent site bt.g.la and other sites would go down. It's that simple.
Personally I find that the lack of relevant pages if the biggest problem with search engines, not the lack of pages with information. It seems I always find what I'm looking for eventually, what I need improved is the time I spend looking though spam-bomb pages before I find a page with the correct information.
These spam-pages seem to be increasing; I mean those pages with just a buch of keywords or the output of some search system.
A blog is just a means of sharing information and opinions, just like newspapers and television. A blod is just another way of presenting information, like the digital versions of newspapers do.
The quallity of a blog depends on the person administrating it and running it, and the people who write in it. I mean, come on, some of the major news websites out there are blogs. Like slashdot...
I don't have a DVD player. I don't have a CD player. I don't have a VCR. I don't even have a television set. This is actually the honest truth.
And I consider hard media dead. Dead, I tell you. All my entertainment is enjoyed on a large computer screen. I would have gotten a projector if I had a bigger apartment, I am sure I'll never own a television set or any of it's related devices ever again.
So what is the movie industries alternative for me? Nothing. This is the alternative I want:
I buy a one months free rental card from a major TV station or producer, or from some movie corporation. The one months pass gives me the right to view all and anything from that particular corporation. The corporation should make all their shows available in high quality easily-distributed divx files. Not only does this make customers satisfied, but it allows people to distribute the files and advertise them freely. Movie vendors could also make two versions available: One available for everybody with advertisements and one without. Those who would pay for a non-advertisement copy would do that, those who do not want to pay will not do that regardless.
I'm sure I am not alone in being willing to pay for the copyrighted files available on the net. I would very much like to clarify that it is the divx versions available on the net I am willing to pay for. I am not willing to pay for any streaming service, any service with a closed file format, any format that requires a special player and so forth. The movie industry tends to want control, restricting the customers freedom to use the product to the point where he simply will not buy. He will get a free hi-qualify copy that is USABLE instead. 'I would pay for a streaming service or a dvd if it gave me the right to download the xvid version,' someone told me a while ago.
Now, how would the movie industry end piracy anyway? THIS IS NOT A REALISTIC option. They can not do that. They can, however, MOVE the piracy. They can move it from BitTorrent to Freenet. Then what? There is already freenet and there is not a thing anyone or any corporation, no matter how big or small, can do about it. BitTorrent sites can be closed by Napster was closed.
The public demand for soft-versions (not on hard media) of entertainment is what is making BitTorrent use up to 85% of the outgoing bandwidth at Universities because they industry itself does not provide any realistic meet for the demand.
So what is wrong with hard media? First, it is very unpractical. It takes up space. It involves finding the hard media and inserting it into some device. Download the file and it's already playable from the device, without finding anything. Any computer, xbox and other funny device today can store one movie, and that is all the space needed. Movies are so widely available today anyway there is no need to store it, most people now tend to just download and play music and movies a few times before they delete it. People used to burn these things back in the last century, today it's quicker to download a music album off the net when you want to listen to it than to find the CD you bought of the album 20 years ago.
The environmental issue: There is not a single scientific paper published the last 25 years that contradicts a 6 th wave of mass extinctions (We have had 5 throughout history, the dinosaurs got hit by the second) within the next two hundred years due to the human species over-harvesting, destroying of natural habitats and pollution. We are cutting down ten times more trees than the world naturally produces, we are harvesting 25% to 50% of all plant material produced by the earth in any single year. We need to stop producing garbage. CDs, DVDs and video tapes are unneeded garbage, things we produce not for survival but to entertain ourselves. And for no good reason at all. Electronic distribution eliminates the whole harmful production of these hard-media items.
Then again GnomeMetting and calling cards from Linuxjack.com pretty much gives us spoofing anyway. Not that the phone number is spoofed in any way, it's just that it changes once you've used up your calling card and buy another one.. Personally I've assumed this to be a bad thing, but I do see the value with all this talk about caller id spoofing....
But keep in mind that the gain from switching to Linux comes first after a few year. Initially, teaching everyone involved Linux will be a cost equal to the cost of commercial software licenses. These costs will soon go away, and the Linux software will keep on working for years - free.
While many people today view their personal networks as private things that must be guarded, many people are today starting to view wireless access points as public goods instead of something that needs to be protected.
A free everywhere wireless network is quite possible. I've heard quote a few people say things like "Well, if my ISP goes down it's OK, I got two neighbours who also have their networks open". Opening your network to everyone is not unsafe or a bad idea, it's a question of overall security. Allowing ANYONE who happen to be behind your firewall access to a service is stupid. The right thing to do is to secure the service with passwords regardless of who or what uses it. Viewing all networks as public and securing properly according to this is much better than the old firewall approach.
So, you are secured and it is OK for anyone to access your LAN, just open it up. Let anyone use the public Internet through your access point!
If everyone who has the Internet at home would do this in a mayor city then anyone there would be able to get the Internet free - anywhere - today!
Isn't the amount of money thrown at computer security a little high compared to the cost of setting up a free firewall like iptables and verifying that it works with nmap a little high?
What I really like about Gaim is the libraries, they have been the basis for many other excellent tools. Like BitlBee http://www.bitlbee.org/, a very nice gateway that allows you to talk to anyone using anything through your irc client. Aterm + Screen + Irssi is my personal favorite communication's suite.
BitlBee Guide - Talk to msn, icq and jabber contacts using any IRC client: http://linuxreviews.org/software/irc/bitlbee/
Check out the X.org 6.8 Screenshots at LinuxReviews, showing off the new real transparency and drop shadow technology. These things may not increase your shareholder value, but it will allow you to impress people in a big way.
It is possible to use cygwin and the GPL Linux version of X-Chat in Windows, thereby avoiding the shareware license (which I personally find violates the GPL because X-Chat uses GPL libraries).
Did I just read 900TB of storage, 300M transactions per day and trade music, television, movies and books?
Makes me want MULTIMEDIA WIKI NOW. Edited / uploaded by everyone, for everyone. Like the articles on the normal wiki, just with image, sound, videos and everything else.
All we need is some geek to setup one of those popular wikis with a donate now button. I'm confident donations would pay the bandwidth..
Sometimes it is quite unlear if the domain name is the same because of conisidence, but in this case, Lamparello's site criticizes Falwell's stance against homosexuality and includes a disclaimer that reads, "This Web site is not affiliated with Jerry Falwell Ministries.", the site using the "same name" even admits they did choose the name because of the resembelence. This is something very different from the kathy.com story where Pengiun is trying to steal another persons domain for no reason.