For anyone that is looking to purchase a vacation home, why not a castle?
But seriously… I want a castle for my birthday! (please) 🙂
For anyone that is looking to purchase a vacation home, why not a castle?
But seriously… I want a castle for my birthday! (please) 🙂
They aren’t the first to do it, but these guys took it to a whole new level. 🙂
That’s so much Diet Coke that the chemicals in it are probably going to kill the grass and trees behind them. 🙂
I saw the MPAA’s “Pyramid of Internet Piracy” on Digg this morning, and I’m curious if anyone knows what a “Top Site” is (without reading the PDF file below I mean)? I’ve spent countless hours educating myself on everything related to my MPAA case, and this one is new to me.
{scratching head} All I know is clusters of high speed computers with extraordinary speed and power are f’ing expensive (I happen to have first hand knowledge of this – digitalpoint.com gets so much traffic that I’m in the process of building out web and database clusters because a couple servers can’t handle the traffic).
Forgetting about the legality of running a “Topsite” for a second, from a pure business standpoint, why in hell would anyone spend what I can only assume is 6 figures on server clusters to distribute something for free? Whoever is running these “Topsites” should find something better to do with their money/resources IMO. Then again, maybe Topsite servers are cheap (but still having extraordinary speed and power). If that’s the case, maybe I should have purchased some Topsite servers and converted them into web/database servers and saved some money. 🙂
I Googled “Top Site(s)” and “Topsite(s)” and I couldn’t find any information about it.
I always thought “top sites” were those stupid directories that list the top 10 sites for a category or whatever…
According to the MPAA’s pyramid of piracy, bittorrent.com (which has partnered with MPAA) is a “Facilitator” (see previous post). Strange.
From this: //mpaa.org/press_releases/pyramid_of_piracy.pdf (don’t ask me why they insist on using PDFs for everything, including images)
I hope the MPAA won’t sue me for using their image. Oh wait, they already are… my bad.
So apparently the MPAA and BitTorrent, Inc. are working together to clean up piracy (specifically film piracy in this case [of course since they are the MPAA]).
From Dan Glickman (MPAA Chairman and CEO):
Okay, that sounds like a good first step (and hopefully down the road they will start selling movies for download). But uhm… they seem to be failing miserably at this. If you do a search for a movie using the search function right at the top of BitTorrent.com, it looks like you can download pretty much anything (and this is the company that the MPAA thinks is “leading the way for other companies by their example”?). I suppose BiTorrent, Inc. could be logging everything that people download and giving it to the MPAA so they can file lawsuits, but wouldn’t that be some sort of entrapment?
All this stuff is very bizarre, but terribly interesting at the same time. We have the MPAA promoting BitTorrent’s site, yet you can download anything illegally right from the site they are promoting. You have Warner Brothers getting ready to distribute movies legally via BitTorrent (and promoting BitTorrent as well), but then at the same time Warner Brothers own message board is full of people helping each other to download Warner Brothers material that is under copyright via BitTorrent (and WB doesn’t currently offer any legal downloads via BitTorrent that I know of).
Either way, if I was the MPAA (or any movie studio like Warner Brothers), I would tell BitTorrent, Inc. to piss off/clean up their crap and at the very LEAST I certainly would stop sending them traffic.
The underlying technology for BitTorrent is nothing short of revolutionary, and if done properly it could change the way any sort of media is distributed (legally), but for some reason they don’t seem to be leveraging what they have. If they can “fix” their issues, I hope they go public, because I would be the first in line to invest in them (the ideas/technology behind it is amazing). BitTorrent, Inc. needs me as a software developer/business consultant I think. 🙂
Links:
Hmmm… alien microbes that fell in India? Odd but (maybe) true…
Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600ËšF. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250ËšF.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.
//www.popsci.com/popsci/science/2c21c0f98d07b010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
This is just more blah, blah about the whole MPAA vs. me thing.
One thing that I think people are not understanding here is that I’m not trying to change the world with this. I’m not trying to “take down the MPAA”, change any copyright or file sharing laws or anything else as grandiose as that. Hell, I have expensive billing software that I wrote that is pirated every day (I’m just too lazy to sue them… too much hassle and work IMO).
I’m still not 100% certain what the details are for the stuff the MPAA has against me (other than it was downloading “Meet The Fockers”), but I’m sure it will come out in the discovery process. I do think it will be very interesting to check out their methodology for pinpointing users for their John Doe lawsuits. Even if the world jury lost their minds and I was somehow found guilty and had to pay whatever the court sees fit, the whole process would have been a cool story to tell. And maybe I could even learn something in the whole process. I’ve learned a TON about all sorts of interesting stuff already as a result of this case – for example BitTorrent technology is actually pretty amazing from a purely technical standpoint [other companies like Apple, some Linux distributions, etc. seem to think it’s a pretty good technology too]. Even Warner Brothers is going to be distributing movies via BitTorrent (legitimately with DRM intact of course), which I think will be *awesome*. When it comes down to it, it’s all about decentralization and utilizing whatever resources are available. I’m still hoping Apple will do an iTunes Movie Store, and if the backend works with file sharing/swarming technology where users could earn credits for ultimately footing Apple’s bandwidth bills, then all the better.
Anyway, my point is that I’m not trying to save the world… I’ve received countless emails/phone calls from people who treat me like the second coming of you-know-who, and just think people are blowing everything out of proportion (obviously). I’m not interested in writing a book about it or making a movie about it (well, unless maybe someone can somehow slip in a love scene for me with someone like Rachel McAdams… haha!)
Some useful advice from me… “Don’t ever take things at face value if your gut tells you that something is fishy. Ultimately knowledge is power, and the best way to get knowledge is to figure it out on your own. Sometimes you might even come up with a better way of doing things by ‘thinking outside the box’.”
BTW – if Rachel McAdams is reading this… can you call me please, I must have lost your phone number… 😉
I was having lunch with Tom today and we started blabbing about something kind of funny…
You know how pretty much anything can be “traded” (stocks, bonds, resources, etc.)? It’s just all based on the perceived future value of something. So wouldn’t it be interesting to essentially issue shares of yourself. Shareholders would essentially own a percentage of whatever ideas/patents/products/income, etc. that you generate over your lifetime. Basically they would be buying part of you in the hopes that you do something cool in your life so they get some upside with their investment.
The funniest part would be to watch your stock go down when you leave the country on vacation or get sick, and then come back up when you are in the country and healthy. 🙂
Who want’s to buy a piece of Shawn’s Brain? We’ll call it SBrain, Inc… 1 employee that can never be fired or quit. 🙂
Someone just let me know that digitalpoint.com is in the top 100 most trafficked domains for English language sites (#99 specifically). Hmmm… that’s pretty cool. 🙂