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The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

thepiratebay.se

91–100 of 146 posts

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#91
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Speed limits are slow and people are impatient. 55 MPH on a highway feels quite pokey in clear conditions when 75 MPH is easily possible with no appreciable loss in safety. And 30 MPH on surface streets is positively crawling. They are designed low knowing that the average user will exceed them, similar to the MPAA's tax on blank recording media where the expectation of violating is built into the product. 2. Blen…

So, I'm not a traffic engineer, but I do work with several on different projects. In the city, speed limits are not designed for revenue or assuming most people will exceed them. They are designed because that is the safest speed to drive. They assume several things here: 1. Non-ideal conditions with many traffic lights require slower speed limits. 2. Views are often blocked by building, landscaping etc. 3. There are…

Politics definitely does influence speed limits. Example 1: a freeway was planned for decades, and when construction was finally ready to start, environmentalists sued to halt construction. Several years later, part of the settlement was a 55MPH speed limit.

Example 2: a small town declares with pride that all streets controlled by the city finally have limits of 35MPH or slower, even though there are several roads capable of much higher speeds.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? I'm not a driver myself, so I haven't had to experience speed limits first hand. What's the problem with just driving under the posted speed limit?

Usually, posting an Ayn Rand quote on the Internet is a good way to start a flame war. But there's one quote in particular that few intelligent people will disagree with, and that even fewer will be able to dispute. “There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be…

What a load of absolute tosh. Governments provide a lot more than 'cracking down on criminals'. Or are you one of these supposedly 'intelligent' people who see public schools as a sequestering station for criminals? When an industry receives a government subsidy, how is that 'cracking down on criminals'? Perhaps we should ask the street-sweepers how effective they are at 'cracking down on criminals'? What about firefighters and paramedics, how are they turning the common citizen into a criminal?

Why must libertarians so egregiously misdefine common terms? Why are they so wilfully self-delusional?

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shit happens. Speeding makes it much worse when it does. Statistics repeatedly fail to bear out your assertion. Promised increases in death rates that accompany increased highway speed limits essentially never materialize. Modeling drivers as ideal gas particles whose collision rate is proportional to speed is simply wrong.

Collision rate isn't what we want to minimize; fatality rate is. And the odds of pedestrian death in a collision are about 5% at 20mph, 45% at 30mph, and 85% at 40mph. Source: http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm As a side note, when claiming statistics support your point of view, please cite those statistics. Keeps everyone honest. Thanks.

I don't think anyone here wants to raise speed limits in pedestrian-heavy areas. Talking about pedestrian fatalities is not constructive to an argument about freeway speed limits.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers can and do. We collectively decided that a .99 cents for a song or $15 for a physical album isn't worth it. Equilibrium will eventually happen, the smart artists are already making money in the new music industry. The recent HN post about xx comes to mind. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504851

Sure is easy to decide songs aren't worth $0.99 when the alternative is to just take them for free, whether the owner wants you to or not.

Yes and no. The pirating situation isn't that simple. I used to pirate a lot of games, but then Steam came along and I've pretty much not pirated anything since. Pirating was, for me, not just about being free in cost, but also a way to get the games via the internet without having to go into a shop and see if they had it, then possibly wait until they ordered it in. There was also the pain of license keys when they didn't work - it only takes a couple to start making you gun-shy.

Admittedly it's not music and I'm not familiar with the pirating in that arena, but it seems to me that pirating is a more complex beast than most people paint it.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#95
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers can and do. We collectively decided that a .99 cents for a song or $15 for a physical album isn't worth it. Equilibrium will eventually happen, the smart artists are already making money in the new music industry. The recent HN post about xx comes to mind. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504851

Sure is easy to decide songs aren't worth $0.99 when the alternative is to just take them for free, whether the owner wants you to or not.

We'd all be doing the same thing with tomatoes and chips if they could be duplicated for the cost of wiggling some electrons back and forth.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shit happens. Speeding makes it much worse when it does. Statistics repeatedly fail to bear out your assertion. Promised increases in death rates that accompany increased highway speed limits essentially never materialize. Modeling drivers as ideal gas particles whose collision rate is proportional to speed is simply wrong.

Collision rate isn't what we want to minimize; fatality rate is. And the odds of pedestrian death in a collision are about 5% at 20mph, 45% at 30mph, and 85% at 40mph. Source: http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm As a side note, when claiming statistics support your point of view, please cite those statistics. Keeps everyone honest. Thanks.

He is talking about highway speeds not side streets in a city.

I grew up in Maine, I-95 while I was younger had a completely baseless speed limit of 65mph. North of Augusta there is an average of about 20 miles between exits and very few travelers, there is no reason what-so-ever to impose a 65mph speed limit.

I now live in Boston and I-95 north to Maine travels though New Hampshire (for a whopping ~10 miles). Everyone knows that you follow the letter of the law in regards to the speed limit in New Hampshire. Why? I assure you it has nothing to do with safety, just as the $2 toll has nothing to do with maintaining 10 miles of highway. The state farms income from that highway in the form of tolls and tickets.

I'll give you speed limits make sense in cities, but given the fact that I've lived in Boston for 6 years now and seen about 3 people pulled over for speeding in that time, it doesn't really appear to be much enforced. Highways on the other hand have absurdly low speed limits and are farmed for ticket income regularly.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#97

Yes, I cannot believe that those guys are still running. Amazing.

I speculate that it may be an attempt to stem movement to the significant number of private trackers that dependably provide higher quality torrents earlier than public sites. Allowing TPB to stay up means that people must sort through muck and viruses to locate the content they want. For many, that is enough and they don't bother looking a little deeper.

Lol, but that is 'conspiracy-esque' speculation.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#98
post #49
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that, in general, supporting the law is good. Even in case of laws one deems silly. Even in a country where the lawmaking is somewhat corrupt. Getting picky about which laws I obey would contribute towards social climate of not respecting the law in general. There are countries like that and their societies suffer as a result. On the other hand for some laws the benefits of breaking them outweigh the above…

The people who say that copyright laws are evil are generally the same people who say the laws that make DDOS attacks a felony are criminalizing "the digital equivalent of a sit-in"... but only when the DDOS is being carried out by people they agree with.

I can't speak for everyone, but when the US gov or the MPAA DDOS's a website they disagree with, I'm not angry because what they are doing is illegal, I'm angry about the hypocrisy in declaring something to be both legally and morally wrong, except when it serves their purposes.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Underground Railroad. Prohibition. Hush-A-Phone. The Communications Decency Act. Crypto export regulations. Breaking DRM.

The DRM argument for piracy is a bit of a straw man. Music hasn't been sold with DRM for over three years, but it still makes up a sizable portion of The Pirate Bay's offerings. You could say that musicians are being tyrannical by choosing to distribute their recordings in the way that maximizes their profit instead of choosing to give it away. I would reply that some people do choose to give away their work. I'm hap…

Expecting people to know and care about DRM, is like expecting people to read and understand the Table of contents in food.

The Hambuger seller: 1. A picture of an Hamburger $4 2.Sale, with just a tiny bit of arsnic in it, $8. Sale, Arsnic free, for maybe $12.

With this hypothetical Humburger product, most people will still pick option 2, not thinking about reading the table of content or understanding the effect arsnic has on the body (maybe they do not know what the word arsnic mean). They will look at the price and pick the cheaper one of two semi-looking identical products.

The way to get food arsnic free is not about teaching the average man what arsnic is, what its effects are on the human body, and that they might prefer the arsnic free food. That its their responsibility, and noone else, to identify food that are arsnic free.

DRM is by its definition a program, created to disrupt computer operation and gain access to private computer systems. This is an identical definition to that of malware. That DRM is indistinguishable from Rootkits should make it obvious to society as a sign that DRM is harmful.

DRM should thus be illegal in commercial sold products, identical to the food industry regulation. Consumers are protected from food that is directly harmful (like arsnic sprinkled hamburgers). If a program is written to be directly harmful, it too should be illegal to sell. If the goal of the program is to disrupt computer operation and gain access to private computer systems, it should not matter if a song is attached to it.

Re: The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

#100
post #41
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crime "conspiracy to commit murder" does not require you, personally, to actually kill someone, nor does it even require a death to occur.

A firearm shop will sell you the gun, but they won't pull the trigger for you. What about the torrent applications like uTorrent, Transmission, rTorrent, etc? Are they equally as guilty in your eyes?

First of all, I would like you to read my comment to the other person who replied to me, because I did not state that anyone in this situation was actively guilty, only that the argument that people were not doing anything illegal solely because they did not actively do the act is overly simplistic (and in fact generally incorrect with regards to piracy, as my example from the other post shows, even if it is specifically correct for this example, although that would require some support). I will also ask you to please pay attention to who wrote the arguments you are responding to, as all language will be more easily understood if you know how to better decode the other person's statements.

However, you have now drawn a parallel to a different group of people (people who make clients, as opposed to people who build search engines), and I think the results there are more easy to see. For context, I run Cydia, the alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iPhones. We specialize (and in fact only really care about) software that is not an "App" (and thereby could not ever be submitted for sale in the App Store); however, as Apple rejects many apps, we tend to often get people coming to us with their submissions that they feel Apple should not have rejected from their store.

Many of these rejected products are torrent clients, and when they come to Cydia, we now blanket reject them as well. The reason is that the people who write these clients really are attempting to promote piracy in a way that the gun shop owner is not attempting to promote murder: the majority of their users are using them to pirate, they know that this is the case and are profiting directly off of the result, and prominently feature piracy in their marketing by showing screenshots of people pirating along with "see how easy it is?".

This latter point is very important: the firearm shop in your example was probably started by someone who either likes explosives, likes the history of war, likes hunting, or feels some need to protect himself and his community from the government or thieves or any other random threat; the person who owns the shop probably is not himself out killing people, he probably did not make the shop to make it easier for himself to get guns, and he probably did not build a business with the idea "most of the people I sell these guns to are murderers".

The result is that you don't see firearm shops that have giant signs on the front of their store with a picture of themselves killing someone as marketing for how simple and effective their guns are. When someone comes into their shop asking how to more effectively kill someone with their gun, they do not happily and cheerfully help them with their support issue. They also don't run community events (to draw a parallel to web forums) for people to mingle and discuss how much fun they have killing people.

However, this kind of thing is what happens when people start selling a torrent client: these two situations are quite obviously not the same situation, and yet I keep seeing this firearm example come up in defense of selling torrent clients as "if I can sell firearms that someone might use to murder someone, why can't I sell torrent clients that someone might use to commit copyright infringement". I seriously dare people to temporarily ignore the moral issues (as they are irrelevant for this specific discussion) and assume that murder and copyright infringement are equivalent crimes (alternatively, replace murder with something like "stealing candy from babies" or some other humorous and petty physical crime), and then think about how the mindsets and activities of these two actors can be discerned.

Regardless, the result is that you simply can't be successful selling a torrent client unless you pander to the pirates in your advertising and support because the pirates are nearly all of your user community; thereby, I found that without constant vigilance every torrent client I accepted ended up going down this path where I'd find the vendor's official Twitter account promoting piracy, the description on the products would keep ending up with more and more demonstrations of piracy, and I'd find out from users that they were specifically helping with piracy-related use cases via e-mail. Now, whether the law makes these people particularly "guilty" is another question: as someone whom these laws have occasionally threatened to smack down (and who has had friends actually get smacked), the position of Cydia is to simply not risk the result and reject the app (especially as you can always just host it yourself or with another party, and you can take payments for it yourself: it is a truly open ecosystem).

(Now, of course, I make this argument, and thanks to "howcan" and people like him, will have to add a giant hedge: nothing in this argument is trying to draw a parallel between the moral ramifications of taking a human life and copying a song; to the extent that you would like to have that argument you should not only have it somewhere else, but you should not have it with me, as the implication of taking that stance is that I am attempting to put myself in the "maybe I'm a murderer" category, which is both insulting and silly given what I do: it is the kind of argument that causes people who, in entirely well-meaning capacity, bring up an analogy from World War II, and then derail into "did you just call me a Nazi?!", when in fact nothing of the sort was implied by the relevant parts of the metaphor.)

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