Posts by Steen Hive

@David Simpson

"I thought this guy was a tory - you know the sort who cracked down on the criminals rather than simply criminalising everybody."

Ah you maybe weren't born when that authoritarian traitorous witch Thatcher decided to go after the miners & sundry other ordinary working people. Everything that followed her has just been more of the same. British Conservatism is infested with thinly disguised fascists and now Labour are hanging on their coat-tails after selling out to get elected.

I can't see a pathetic spiv like Boris doing a Red Ken - telling his own party to fuck off and standing on a truly principled platform, can you?

@ratfox

"Maybe copyright infringement is not technically theft, but it is still illegal, and the word most closely describing the activity is theft."

"Technically", it is theft, but not larceny - for the millionth time (sigh) the works are not stolen, the "copyright" is. Again, copyright is not a natural property right, nor is copyright law the protection of a tangible asset. It is an implicit contract between the state and the creator to help the creator obtain reward for his works. "Copyright infringement" is also not "technically" illegal. It is "technically" unlawful with regard to the civil code in most juristictions, though.

Criminalising ordinary people for what are actually civil offences, removing *much* more important rights (like privacy and freedom from arbitary search and seizure for example) in order to protect the business model of a cartel is orders of magnitude more dangerous and immoral than copyright theft - it is (among other things) used as leverage to precipitate total surveillence of the population by the state and business interests. If only artists et. al. could see where the real criminals are.

Yes, I'm an artist. I know which side my bread is really buttered on, though.

Paris, because as you know copyright subsists in her video, and obviously anyone that looked at it is a filthy criminal paedophile terrorist thief freetard who deserves to be locked up. </sarkybastard>

@AC++

Bjarne Stroustrup was born and bred in Aarhus which is in Denmark, which is not in Sweden, which is not the capital of Austria, by the way.

@Shill

"well make your fcking choice and don't use BT or Virgin - go and pay more for an inferior service at a second rate ISP who wont subsidise his service with advertising."

As someone living outside the UK in a civilised part of Europe, I have to ask how it's at all effing possible to obtain a connection that is inferior to a BT one? Domestic "broadband" connections in the UK are already a laughing stock and now you're adding blatant spying and misinformation to that ridiculous circus? Back to the Lubyanka with your sorry arse, please!

@AC

"So 9/11 happened because the US in its infinite wisdom had decided that security was something they only did on international flights, not internal ones"

Funny that, I could've sworn it was partly because of the foreign military bases dotting Saudi Arabia like a pox.

@Dave

@Dave

"Using a criminal brain is a terrible idea, you'll end up with a drug addicted psychopathic killing machine."

Er.. "Soldier" is shorter.

@Peter Fielden-Weston

This is better. In this age of absolute military power, what is less important from a criminality pov is the indescriminate killing of non-combatants, and what is more important is the indescriminate choice of enemy.

@frymaster

"Even if you are "sending money to the artists" it's still stealing. Distributors have to live too, y'know."

Big hairy straw-man argument. Of course distributors have to live and they are welcome to "add value" to a product. Unfortunately they don't so in effect they are just theiving off both the producer of works and the consumer. This is even more true if the product is distributed by, for example, bittorrent.

@so many fallacies

"To say 'the innards of a camera flash cannot harm anyone' is totally false."

Of course not! I mean you could accidentally swallow them, or something.

You appreciate that saying, for example, 'water cannot harm anyone' is totally false too, by the way?

Hang on a minute...

She was forcibly deplaned from a bought-and-paid-for seat because some fuckwit drone lost HER BAG? That's an assault in itself, and the stalinist shits probably didn't receive half the 'suspected assault' they deserved. Surprised they didn't send in SO19 to deal with a "perceived brown person threat scenario".

@Roger Stenning

"No password protection when I looked it over, Pretty boring stuff, actually. 13:00 Friday 4th April."

Oooer! "It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteeen."

@Jonas Nagel

Look it up. Copyright is the *exclusive* right to copy granted to the creator of works, alone. It subsists automatically (in most juristictions anyway) in any creative work.

When you make a copy of a work you *deprive* the creator of his exclusive copyright THAT is what is stolen. Again look it up, and don't get confused with patent law or trade secrets, please. The term "copyright infringement" describes the infringement of the law not of the right.

Let me state clearly. "copyright" is a minor protective contract between the creator of works and the state. It is not an excuse for trampling over real rights, like privacy, it is not "Intellectual Property" or any other such makey-uppy twaddle. it is just that.

@Chris

"as much crap gets thrown about the US, at least you can still protest in front of the white house and the congress building."

Pull the other one...or better still ask Cindy Sheehan.

Dead bird for democracy.

@DaveK

As an Amiga fan & a musician, the lack of MIDI ports on the Amiga was the second-worst design decision in the history of computers (after IBM not going with the 68k).

"Cracked by MCA" under AmigaOS? Jesus! it would've been legend.

Eh

Guns shouldn't be used on a wall, they're for de fence.

CO2? Pah!

My own completely scientific gut says we'll have a lot more to worry about if relatively minor, CO2-induced rising sea temperatures start all that masses of lovely, unstable submarine (CH4)8(H2O)46 a-bubblin'

@Matt Bryant

"Suppose the FBI had arrested the 9/11 bombers before they struck on the suspicion that people that didn't want to learn how to land a commercial airliner, just how to take off and fly it, I presume you and Mr Smith would be calling them "Muslim patsies" too?"

If they hadn't actually committed a crime, that's EXACTLY what they'd be. I think you should look up the definition of "patsy".

Then you should go and look up things like "the law", etc. and reflect upon how this dupe ended up in the slammer without actually committing a crime, possibly using search terms like "Gillian Gibbons" for comparison.

Tux, because in your World, he'd be sent down for being a commie sympathiser.

@Angus Wood

"Yes - it is just you. You're probably making the old student politics error of assuming that wealth is a non-zero sum game; that is if one person has more then another person has less. This is not the case."

Shurely shome mishtake? The student error is assuming that wealth IS a zero-sum game. However you make an equally elementary error in assuming that wealth is *always* a non-zero-sum game - production must accrue value to generate wealth, and this is patently not always the case. Anyway this isn't about economics 101, really it's about "capitalism" in it's modern form which sets in stone that for the vast majority of people, wealth generated must solely be in the form of subsistence - ie. it isn't their wealth at all. This is, for anyone with a conscience, sub-optimal - the fact that a handful of people own vastly skewed proportions of the overall wealth could be viewed as a ludicrous inefficiency, too.

It's fantastic that Bill Gates has a social conscience, but maybe it would have been more efficient distribution-wise to let the people who generated his wealth keep it in the first place.

Paris, because she knows a thing or two about game theory, about the futility of using static, normative models to describe dynamic, often chaotic systems, and about the lurking dangers of coercing systems to fit models rather than using models to describe systems.

@Steve Green

"As I say, DAB will be the preserve of luddites and technophobes, because why would anyone want to listen at lower quality to a narrower range of stations (all DAB stations have Internet streams) and possibly with dodgy reception quality?"

Having recently experienced first-hand the horror that is commercial radio in the UK, I can only say - "because maybe the content would be better?" The true signal-to-noise ratio of radio hasn't changed much since 1922.

@lglethal

"PS Yes i know i have way too much time on my hands!"

Most thinly-veiled racist wankers do.

@Eponymous Cowherd

"In other words apart from a *couple* of legitimate downloads everything he downloads is in violation of copyright."

Is it violation of YOUR copyright? If not, then stuff it where the sun don't shine, sunshine.

Copyright is a contract between the producer of works and the state, not involving ISPs, their users or you.

None of which applies to ISPs blatantly flouting trade-descriptions legislation in spirit and probably in letter.

Neutrino

What subatomic particle whizzed through my brain, welded some synapses and made me read "Chuck Norris & Partners"?

@@the terror apologists

"Name ONE government that you could *honestly* say would be prepared to do the same."

Some Scandinavian ones might possibly have second thoughts about it. As for the rest...without even blinking - they do it all the time.

Are Friends Electric

The fact that people can even use the word "friends" in this context is flabbergasting.

I will not have a facebook - nor anything like it, period. You can stuff this "social contact lite" up your arse, thanks very much - it creates more empty howling souls than it could ever heal. I can't see my "friend" Billg helping me out with the rent if I'm a bit short this month.

From long before the Interweb:

"You know I hate to ask, But Are Friends Electric? Only - mine's broke down, and now I've no-one to love"

Paris - an empty, howling soul with more "friends" than you can shake a stick at.

@Harmful to Animals

"You know what's really harmful to wildlife? The nuclear missile launched into the American heartland from a sub you didn't detect because you couldn't use sonar. 9 out 10 conservationists, when surveyed, listed "being melted into glass" as a possible contributor to poor health in fuzzy mammals."

Everyone knows of course that missiles fired from subs detected by sonar are harmless, unlike faux-paranoia..

@Anony Mous

No point countering "idiocy" with inanity. Just because you happen to be speaking in tune with the mob this time, doesn't mean it'll always be that way. Then you'll be just as fucked as our webmaster friend.

@Tim

"neo-socialist bollocks"

Care to explain what's "neo" about it?

I'm sure the people who made the £375k would work less hard if the govt took it off the prick in tax.

8088 - A title is required, apparently

4.77MHz of rubbish. Damn you IBM for not using the vastly superior Motorola 68K thereby consigning software to years of farting around with segment registers.

Where would we be now, I wonder?

First Strike

I always get the uneasy feeling that morons that advocate pre-emptive first strike are the most deserving to be on the receiving end of one.

Wow

The 3 most boring things in the known universe in one article - football, the pope & his bononess.

The fund being based in Silicon Valley provides an IT angle?

Victims

Most people are actually victims of their computers, it's just they don't know it.

Many laws are framed with a criterion of reasonableness - such as "would a reasonable person expect to know if their computer was being used to help crack the launch codes of ICBMs" Of course the answer is yes - get these morons off the net.

@Tim

"Pro Tools"

Mwahhahahh. Pick the most ridiculously inadequate piece of underperforming, overpriced "industry standard" rubbish you can find? If DigiDesign went tits up, I'd split my sides.

ProTools? Just say NO!

Useless

UPNP is about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. If you're too lazy to learn playschool networking, don't network.

Sometimes this "use stuff even if you don't know how to use stuff" philosophy makes me want to puke.

No wrong

Björk can do no wrong. I worship her very footsteps.

Green Gene?

Job with IBM?