Indeed. Surely the rise of fuel efficient cars is a success and shouldn't be punished by raising taxes anyway? And if consumption is going down shouldn't the cost and frequency of repair fall also?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4718249.stm
http://torrentfreak.com/why-pirates-buy-more-music-and-music-labels-fail-090428/
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2347/125/

Dead thread, but i thought it was worth replying to anyway. There've been a slew of reports on /., ars etc, and they seem to have the numbers behind them unlike the industry's: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/ben-goldacre-bad-science-music-downloads

The Guardian is reporting:

British citizens who apply for or renew their passport will be automatically registered on the national identity card database under regulations to be approved by MPs in the next few weeks.

The decision to press ahead with the main elements of the national identity card scheme follows a review by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, of the £4.9bn project. Although Johnson said the cards would not be compulsory, critics say the passport measures amount to an attempt to introduce the system by the backdoor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/30/passport-details-id-card-database

I wrote to my local MP, but he's a useless cunt, and didn't even bother writing back.

From further down that article:
He also denied that there were any significant public spending savings to be made by cancelling the project saying: "This scheme pays for itself. If you cancel all you will get is diddly squat."

This is a reference to the self-financing nature of the project under which it is to be paid for through increased charges for passports and the £60 cost of a biometric identity card.

I had hoped that the new Home Sec would at least have a bit of sense not to emulate his predecessors, but it seems that was misguided. Did Labour even look at the last election results? They have no council mandate, little popular support, they've lost Scotland, and are losing the north, yet they still press on with misguided schemes like ID Cards that are universally unpopular. They've lost all touch with reality.

I remember hearing that Jacqui Smith said that people had approached her saying that they couldn't wait to get ID cards. Even worse, in the long term they've brought back unpopular people like Mandelson, in the hope that nobody would notice or remember how insidious he was.

Sad thing is that I have no faith in the Tories to do any better. No wonder people are voting for UKIP and BNP. If Nigel Farage is seen as more honest than Labour, things are grim for them indeed.

Either way, surely this is the death of The Pirate Bay. It's followed the pattern of being something underground, to becoming something well known amongst the technically literate, to something known by the populace at large, to being discussed by governments, courts and the media to being absorbed by the corporate world.

Like social networking sites like Friendster to Myspace which are in decline or are terminal, the internet crowd is fickle, and will move on to the next big thing at the drop of a hat. Nothing is stopping you.

A comment above from Reddit pointed out that the site has been in ownership for a year now, and that trackers are down to 17 million.

What's replacing it in some sectors seems to be watching tv/movies online, the gray sites that act like iPlayer that link to movies hosted ni China etc. I know quite a few people that use those regularly, that wouldn't necessarily have used torrents before. And sneaker nets are as alive and well as ever.

A lot of other people will think like you, and we can expect to see the pirate bay's traffic to fall, and other trackers to rise in the coming weeks. Whether it recovers or not is a different matter.

The file sharing community isn't the best known for paying for downloads (although studies have shown that they buy more music/films etc), but if this company starts charging for access to TPB or per download, they'd better make sure that they won't reveal any names or info about downloaders. Otherwise all of their appeal will have evaporated.

Fair point, and shouldn't be modded down, but the difference is that this one interprets dance moves!

You'll not hear much praise for the RIAA around here, but it sounds like they're doing you a favour in this instance.

Because the government in Viet Nam doesn't want people to know that the scanners are a useless waste?

Holy shit, nobody mentioned the dual flamethrowers!

I dunno... Coastguard?

A few months ago I picked up a desktop tower, 3.2ghz dual core, 512mb nvidia card, 320gb hard drive.

the only problem is the gamers case, and the tricked out blue leds that are inside, but apart from that, bargain.

You can find them if you look.

How apt, considering your username

I might be wrong, but wasn't Windows 7 supposed to be that total rewrite of Windows that was needed?

And of course, the source for some of the tech he used for the art school project, http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm Almost as old as the internet itself