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So... I guess Pirate Bay isn't very popular here since, well, it's used to download software for free. Software that some of us created and that we want to get paid for.
And next to software of course music, movies, books and pr0n. All copyrighted material that the creators didn't get paid for.
As far as I know downloading that stuff isn't illegal in the Netherlands though.
I still buy software, music, books and movies, but there's just so much stuff (some of it hard to get or even unavailable where I live) that I too downloaded some stuff once in a while.
Sometimes my download lead to an actual purchase. Sometimes I was glad I didn't pay for such garbage. Needless to say, not every download from TPB was a lost sale, but it was always a gain for me.
So it's not only a loss for me, it's a loss for the artists who's music I downloaded, it's a loss for the people who shared their own stuff using TPB and it's just a loss for the world in general.
And I just read they're now targeting another good friend of mine... AdBlock[^].
I guess the popularity of TPB and AdBlock is just the public saying "we've had enough!" and the closing of TPB and possible sueing/closing of AdBlock is the big bosses saying "nope"...
Luckily there's still good, free and completely legal stuff out there!
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I personally think that if it wasn't for the Pirate Bay the entertainment industry would never have got off their asses and created services that are actually good value for money, such as Spotify and Netflix.
I also think it's responsible for a much closer release schedule when it comes to TV and movies in different countries (I remember at one point when Lost was on, there was a gap off over a year between it being shown in the US, and then finally shown in the UK).
It's time had passed though, and I'm not sad to see it go, but I do think the way it's founders were hounded was completely OTT (apart from the guy who also hacked into banks and so on).
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JMK-NI wrote: I do think the way it's founders were hounded was completely OTT
Serial killers get better treatment (and less punishment)!
It shows again who is in charge of this world...
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I've already seen plenty of "you are blocking ads therefore you are a thief" messages.
They can go elephant themselves with a large pine cone.
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Every time I see one of those, I write a new adblock rule. Problem solved. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Thou shalt not steal... The government doesn't tolerate competition!
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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As an aside a bit, that's the good thing about the Internet with open source. Once it's out there it's out there. You can stop a person / company, but you can't stop the idea. Anyway, if they close down AdBlock I'm sure someone else will make another version.
Oh, and I think most people have downloaded from TPB a time or two, regardless if they admit it. I remember back in my 3D days I "liberated" a copy of 3DS Max from work. I never would've learned Photoshop had I not "borrowed" a copy from the Internet. Eventually, I dumped 3DS Max and went legit with Photoshop, but that was after I learned it and pretty much use it for everything graphics-wise. It's still the best image editor IMO, never would've known that before I used it.
Jeremy Falcon
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The more they tighten their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers.
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Funny how PB and Azure go down at the same time.
Mind you, no-one has ever made the cloud thing work better than PB, so using them was probably a good idea.
Sander Rossel wrote: And I just read they're now targeting another good friend of mine... AdBlock[^].
That is absolutely ridiculous.
What are they going to do? Try to prove that people who use ad blockers would click through if the ads weren't blocked?
We pay for our bandwidth, so we should charge advertisers the cost of downloading their cr@p.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: That is absolutely ridiculous.
In the Netherlands we pay a tax on USB drives and empty CD's because the government believes we use them for illegal music, films and software and by taxing them they intend to pay the original authors back before we even did anything. I really hate those copyrights organizations (BAF/BREIN for the Netherlands and Belgium).
Now tell me what's ridiculous 
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Canada too 
Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.
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Sander Rossel wrote: In the Netherlands we pay a tax on USB drives and empty CD's because the government believes we use them for illegal music, films and software and by taxing them they intend to pay the original authors back before we even did anything.
What you need, then, is a good torrent site.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: so we should charge advertisers the cost of downloading their cr@p
And so we can extend this argument and say websites should charge you for accessing their site.
...and around we go.
Free websites, like free newspapers, free TV and free radio, mostly survive on ads. Amusingly paid TV also seems to survive on ads, but we won't go there.
The "crap" that you attribute to advertisers can be crap. It can be misleading, annoying, or downright malicious. The majority of advertising isn't. It's actually stuff that you want. (if it wasn't then we wouldn't have advertising. It simply wouldn't work).
Take someone like yourself who has a skill and a passion. They pursue that passion and build something they really like. And then others like it and in some cases they start building more of them and selling them to people who ask for that thing. They then build it more and look around for more people who might like (or even really need) the thing they have built. Suddenly they have a business and they are advertising. They are still the same person, like you, doing what they love doing, and often they are making a lot of people's lives easier. It's called innovation and it drives economic growth and well-being for an entire economy.
I mention this because I'm sick of the knee-jerk reactions to advertising and the broad strokes that advertisers are painted with. I also say this because I've just spend 3 exhausting days talking to software developers building truly incredible things and who want to let other software developers know about it. They want to advertise on CodeProject. That's a good thing because
a) it allows software developers to pay their bills and get back to doing what they do best: Build Awesome Stuff.
b) it allows other software developers to find tools that dramatically improve their products. Don't Reinvent The Wheel is our mantra. Promoting the adoption of stuff others have made and tested and documented and are supporting and enhancing is a Really Good Thing. It saves us an enormous amount of money.
AdBlocker is like having someone standing in front of someone's shop and everytime a person who has it installed walks by, they hold up a huge black canvas in front of the shop to stop someone seeing it. It materially interferes with a business' ability to carry out their business. In the physical world you would be charged.
Physical shops, though, don't throw buckets of vomit on you when you walk past them. Unlike some online advertising. AdBlock Plus, however, isn't discriminating - it's a one-size-fits-all.
Worse: AdBlock Plus actually allows you to pay them to have your site whitelisted. They don't go around surveying sites and saying "this one is good and this one is bad", or checking advertisers and saying "this one is legitimate, or interesting, or helpful, and this one's a steaming pile of manure". No: they judge a site based on how much someone pays them to be allowed to operate their business.
That's called extortion. That's also illegal last time I checked.
So I for one am against AdBlocker. I'm for a system that will block crap ads. We at CodeProject spend inordinate amounts of time trying to hunt down and kill bad ads, and spend even more time talking to amazing software developers to ensure they get a chance to show off their stuff to other software developers. If AdBlocker committed itself - deeply committed itself - to focussing on blocking ads that were disrupting or malicious, to creating a charter of acceptable advertising, to nurturing a cooperation to show that good advertising can work really well - then I'd support them wholeheartedly.
Sadly someone else will have to take up that challenge because it's not in their DNA.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I use Maxthon, so I couldn't use adblock even if I wanted to; but I don't deny people the right to block advertising -- especially on mobile devices, where bandwidth can be particularly costly.
I have no objection to advertising existing on web-sites, even though I do not allow any on my own site, but I do take exception to the kind of marketing morons who believe that we should pay the bandwidth for the privilege of downloading multi-megabyte ads -- give a moron a discrete banner, and he'll fill it with rich-media cr@p that not only detracts from the appearance of the page, but is also an order of magnitude larger than the page itself.
One of the reasons I use Maxthon is that, while not having adblock, it does have a plug-in that prevents the download and playing of rich-media content without express permission, i.e. with a Play button, and many pages are absolutely littered with tiny little advertising frames where all I see is Play buttons, meaning that each one is probably heavier than the content I want to view.
That's what I take strong objection to, and I don't see how anyone has the moral right to decry that objection.
Note: If someone has a product they're proud of, and sees me as a potential customer, the first thing they want to do is not piss me off.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I get IP and its theft, I really do (how can anyone who creates it not?), but:
During my year or so of using Napster I bought over a dozen CDs that I would never have purchased had I not been recommended them, downloaded tracks and had a good listen. Ultimately it's in my interest to do so as if the IP producer doesn't get paid, they stop producing. The number of times I've bought something and found I'd wasted my money makes me reluctant to spend money on new stuff; in the words of Capt. Beefhart "Taste and Try Before You Buy"!
There are sometimes things I can't get through legitimate channels. I pay my cable subscription fees, but if I miss an episode, or worse, the last 5 minutes due to a schedule change .... I shouldn't have to pay again for something I tried to PVR first time round. I have no qualms about grabbing from PB in these instances.
I hope I don't abuse the privilege and I think my ethics are intact.
Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.
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Sometimes the only user-friendly version that treats customers as a consumer instead of an outright criminal of a piece of software (*cough*games*cough*) can be obtained through TPB 
Draconic DRM, anyone? Having to be online whenever you play your single-player game? Only being able to install it three times? Mandatory registration?
Not to mention expensive DLC's that add a few hours gameplay to a game that only had a few hours to begin with...
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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So my wife went with AT&T a couple of weeks ago. They have a $45 per month package with 1GB data. Should be sufficient: I use my phone more than she does and I used 215mb in a month so no way she's going to hit her limit.
Or so we thought.
Two weeks in she had a text telling her she has hit 1gb. WTF??? Looking at her history seems she has been using the internet in the middle of the night quite a lot. Funny it's only at night.
The customer unsupport guy told me we have to switch off cellular data every night before we go to bed to stop it even though we are on pretty decent wifi. Why would the phone use cellular data when it is connected to wifi and why only at night?
When I told him I didn't believe him and wanted to talk to a supervisor he hung up on me.
Way to go AT&T: looking at various forums seems like this is quite a common problem.
I shall be ranting in 140 character bites on Twatter.
AT&T: I nominate you for scumbag company of the day.
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You should call back and calmly explain to the (hopfully different) CS rep, what happened and that you would still like to speak to a supervisor or manager. Remember all these calls get recorded so you can refer to them when you write to their marketing department explaining why you are terminating your contract.
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That's why I have Tmobile... the coverage isn't as good as some of the others, but their customer support/ service has always been stellar.
Now if I can figure out a good way to get rid of Comcast... 
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I have to agree with this. Although I'm looking to switch in the near future to something cheaper, T-Mobile has had great customer service, even though I only use prepaid.
djj55: Nice but may have a permission problem
Pete O'Hanlon: He has my permission to run it.
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Indeed: I have T-Mobile and whilst I have poor cellular reception where I live, I switched on the T-Mobile WiFi and it works fine. That's $45 for 2GB - think that's the answer! 
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If it's an Android phone, you can individually "ban" applications from using mobile data at all:
Go to "Settings", "Data Usage", click on the app, and check the "Restrict background data" box. It then will only connect to the internet via WiFi.
I understand you can do something similar for iOS as well.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I borrowed one Android phone for couple of months (Mine broke and I didn't want to buy new one) And about a week ago it started calling random numbers from my contact list. WTE?!
The most resent was at 7 am after I was too slow to turn it of. When I picked up the phone it was already dialed the number. I didn't even unlock the b@st@rd.
The most embarrassing part was: It was calling my boss in the middle of the night at 7 am .....
When that happened I kindly returned it and turned my 3xxx Nokia back on. That little thing was off for at least 3 years solid and his battery was full when I turned it back on.
What a wonderful phones they were.
Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true
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Argonia wrote: in the middle of the night at 7 am
7AM isn't the middle of the night! 
It's one of the most productive times of day - if only because no one else is up and that means peace and quiet!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Argonia wrote: Nokia back on. That little thing was off for at least 3 years solid and his
battery was full when I turned it back on
I assure you, the new Nokia phones are in my experience nothing like they used to be... 
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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