It's not that it's hard to do - it's that it requires manual intervention. I can do it, my grandma can't.

Also, in CGNs (Carrier Grade NATs) the ISP controls the NAT, not the home user.

And clearly by making an illegal copy you are enriching yourself.

Yes, making. Not taking.

If it's illegal to create something in order to enrich yourself, then by gods, ban home cooking - who knows how many restaurants are getting robbed from their rightful income by all those families having the gall to create their own food, and cheaper than the restaurant food?

Or what about those growing their own spices in the garden? Clearly, they do not need to buy spices then, so they enrich themselves. Off with their heads!

I could go on, but I think my point is made...

The film in question wasn't a shitty 25-year old horror movie, but "Beck: Buried Alive" which was released 2011. It was released on the internet 2 days before it's DVD release.

I do agree the damages are insane however...

Ah, but you are missing one important detail about BTC/LTC etc.

While we can move to an alternate currency, that currency in and of itself will need some valuation at some point. How are you going to evaluate this new currency?

Everyone might move to WTFCoin, FooCoin or WhateverCoin tomorrow. But moving to these currencies would be equally useful as, say, monopoly money.

A currency is not valued in some arbitrary number but rather the (perceived) value of that currencys financial backbone. The US Dollar is based on the oil, the Yuan is based on China's economy, and the Euro is based on the European economy (or rather, the countries involved in the EMU union). What is WhateverCoin based upon?

So far it seems that BTC is a "digital gold standard" while LTC is "The silver to BitCoins gold" and therefore directly dependent on BTC. See?

Linux as in GNU/Linux still doesn't dominate any end-user products. Android/Linux do though.

So you agree, then, that Hollywood loves the piracy all the while condemning it? That the most important thing is not getting paid for every copy, but getting those copies as widespread as possible?

Diaspora seems sorta-kinda dead though, Status.net or BuddyCloud seems to me to be a much better solution.

MediaGoblin is based on Status.Net btw, and yes, the only thing left on that project is a paywall module and end-user polish, then it seems to meet most of my concerns. Might invite a friend or two and have a hackathon on it some future weekend, but we shall see... :)

Got an even better idea in mind.

Invent decentralised Facebook with away to distribute your own creations. I'm thinking something like a blog, but with an option to insert a paywall, integrated on top of say, status.net or buddycloud. Make the software as easy to set up as a home router, or why not Wordpress? :)

That ought to create the infrastructure neccessary to beat Hollywood. Would write it myself if I weren't buried knee-deep in work... :P

No, just come to the conclusion that the absolutely fastest way to put Hollywood out of it's misery would be to stop pirating (and thus promoting) their content.

If even 20% of everyone pirating "hollywood" would instead promote free movies, songs and software, Hollywood would be in serious trouble. As it stands however, not even 0.01% do that...

Oh well.

So, we all know that these sites basicly ammounts to free advertising for their counterparts, right?

The industry believes (publicly atleast) that less piracy means more sales.

Numerous studies however have shown that less piracy means less sales.

So, by pirating we're actually supporting these bastards hell-bent on suing the crap out of us, the consumers.

Therefore, here is my idea; let's stop pirating. Let's stop enjoying mainstream media. Let's stop reccomending it, talking about it - unless it's free to download, of course. Then see how long Hollywood can keep it up.

Let's give them the nightmare they deserve, shall we?

One thing I wonder about - so you have a gun that is made out of plastic. But conventional ammunition is not. Right?

So who are you going to shoot when you don't have any bullets?

economy - not more than a fire or earthquake would.
travel - only as far as we let them. Flight is as (in)secure as it has always been. They can't catch everyone. Therefore increased security do little but annoy regular people.
Geopolitics - It depends. School shootings, the Washington sniper etc. are to be considered acts of terror just as much as plane hijackings and suicide bombers.
Political careers - Unfortunately you are right about this one, but it is easy to refute any criticisms with cold hard facts. Wish there was a politician with enough balls to do this, but sadly there is not.

So no, there are no good reasons for the fear-mongering. Either cops are smarter than the terrorists or terrorists are smarter than the cops, in the former case mass surveillance is unneccessary, in the latter case mass surveillance is useless.

Terrorists are real.

So are bathtubs, so are stairs and so are traffic accidents, all which cause more lives lost than terrorists.

Any death other than the one of old age is terrible. Accidents happen that cause people to suffer for quite a while before dying. Some people have lost their lives in earthquakes - literally buried alive, waiting days for a rescue that never come. Other people die in house fires in the most horrible agony you might imagine. Therefore, Terrorists do not frighten me any more than an earthquake would.

Oh, sure. Terrorists are horrible people, hell-bent on violating the worst crimes of war possible. They are no stranger to detonating a nuclear bomb in the middle of any decently sized american city. Does that thought scare me? Yes, a bit. But does it make me cower in fear under my bed? No sir. I'm not afraid of these terrorists, because I know that if I'm afraid of them, then I'll always be afraid. The Terrorists have won.

I put my faith in the state to protect me as much as possible from these terrorists, as well as protect my liberties as best can. Unfortunately this paralyzing fear of terrorists have made the state erode my liberties without actually protecting me from terrorists. Therefore, I oppose those changes.

It's not about being stupid or brave. It's about not letting a bunch of jackasses control my life. And as long as I draw breath, they won't.

It's good as long as they use a common interface.

KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Unity all use the X display server right now.

However, with this move, some of those will use Wayland, some will use MIR, and some will be able to use both.

As long as the parts are interchangable - great. But as soon as interfaces change, it's generally bad.

"OpenGL doesn't just work. It just works if you have a modern nVidia card and the binary drivers. Otherwise, it works with caveats."

Which a SteamBox would solve totally. And even Windows/DirectX isn't "Just Works", here, either, and never has. It's an economics of scale problem, however.

If many devs support a certain system, then the pitfalls will become smaller as the kinks and caveats of the system gets worked out. Valve experienced this when they ported Source to Linux. That meant a lot of bugs were worked out in both nVidia, AMD and Intel drivers.

I give you one thing though; Linux is incredibly hard to support due to how the distros are handled. There are two ways one can go about it, either release the source and sell "game packs" (not as crazy as it sounds) - or have a middleman that concentrates on making .deb/.rpm packages of your game for the most popular distros. Neither option is 100%...