Posts made by raphjd

Not all mods are fans of chat, but all are on at various hours through out the day.

Tom and I decided that it would be best not to have students as moderators because of the school work issue.

HOWEVER, if you think you can handle being a mod, without affecting your education, then feel free to apply.

That sounds odd. Even though I'm house hunting and working crazy hours to finish up this years billings for work, I always check the pending torrent list.

I can't remember what I was doing at that time {probably in bed}, but if I was on and your torrent showed up as seeded properly, I would have approved it.

I guess we should just let anything be uploaded, no matter if it's seeded or not.

I guess quantity is more important that quality.

@Doondie:

Hey, everyone!
I'm living in Veliko Tarnovo - the source of the European culture, which used to be the Medieval capital of (one of) the most ancient, culturally and naturally beautiful country in Europe - Bulgaria.
If you have some free time, need to recover, need to meet cool people, want to learn and see something about history - here's the place - land of mighty kings, historical battles, ancient monuments and culture.
Keep smiling and be healthy!

Sounds like a fantastic place.

BTW, are you sure you don't work for the local tourist board?

Several countries have already had this proposed by the music and movie industries.  This idea would make the music and movie industries hugely more powerful than they already are.  That's the same reason why more than a few countries already said no to the idea.

ISPs love the idea because they would get a huge profit increase due to lower amounts of internet traffic.  This would also mean that there would be less incentive for them to upgrade their systems.

The proposals have been drawn up by an independent review headed by Denis -Olivennes, the chairman of Fnac, a French entertainment retailer.

Yes, independent of the gov, but not independent of the companies that would see huge personal profit gains. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose under this proposal.

You know you can fully trust their opinions. <sarcasm>> In exchange for the clampdown on illegal downloading, the music industry has agreed to make individual downloads of archive French material available on all types of players by dropping digital rights management protection.

Oh, so under their new proposal, they are willing to obey the "fair use" laws of France that the have refused to follow for several years.  How fucking nice of them to finally be willing to follow the law.  Seems a bit ironic, doesn't it.

There is also another problem.  Ipod stuff will not play on MP3 players and vice versa, no matter what the music industry says.  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs want it that way so they can make more profits.  So this is a non starter, but it sounds good if you are brain dead.

The French film industry has agreed to release DVDs more quickly after a film's first cinema screening, reducing the delay from 7.5 months to 6 months.

How nice of them to give us the movies on dvd 1.5 months earlier. <rolleyes>Have they talked to the cable/satellite providers?  They make huge profits from their "box office" type service and I'm sure they won't want to give any of that up. 1.5 months of lost income isn't gonna make them too happy.

Why not put Europe on the same time scale as the US?!  That's why so many movies are pirated.  A movie comes out in the US and takes 6+ months before Europe gets it.  Having all countries getting the movie at the same time would help cut down on piracy.  Even the movie industry has admitted that most movie downloads are due to the time gap for release between countries.  Yet, like the stone age barbarians they are, they don't want to change their ways

Then of course there is the issue of things not being available in a certain country, but widely available in the rest of the world.

The BBC is renowned for this.  The UK is still waiting for much of the BBC stuff to come out here and some things have even been banned in the UK by the BBC.

The Ab Fab christmas special "White Box" is banned in the UK, but the BBC will not tell us why.  Oddly, they aired it twice when it originally came out years ago, but since banned it.  The rest of the world has this but we can't.

Are You Being Served and Are You Being Served Again {aka Grace and Favour in the UK} have been fully released on dvd in the rest of the world several years ago, but the UK only has up to series 6 of Are you Being Served and none of Are You Being Served Again.

Keeping Up Appearances just finally got fully release in the UK, several years after the rest of the world already had it.

This is the case with most of the older classic British Sit-Coms or Brit-Coms as they have become known.

Then of course there is the huge cost of things in the UK vs many other countries. BBC dvds are much, much cheaper in the US than in the UK even at the old exchange rate {before the $ dropped}.  We pay to produce it through our TV taxes and you guys get it for less than us.

Mr Sarkozy has taken a strong stand against internet piracy, raising the issue during his election campaign and appointing Mr Olivennes to lead the review soon after becoming president.

Of course he did.  Most of his election campaign was funded by the industry he is now willing to give his country to.

The president will use his speech today to "underline his attachment to culture but also his wish to see artists live from their work and have their rights respected on new platforms", his spokesman said.

I'm not sure if he's lieing or too stupid to realize that this will never happen.  The music industry {et al} take huge chunks of the profits and give extremely little to the artists.

This is why you see artist such as Prince give his albums away in newspapers with an ad against music industry greed.  That's also why he changed his name to that symbol, so he could produce stuff on his own record label and get a decent return for his work.

Mr Olivennes this year highlighted the problem of illegal downloading in a book entitled Free is Theft, in which he argued that piracy stole funds from French culture by reducing the money raised by levies on cinema takings and pay-television.

So the head of the retail association isn't concerned with profits, just lost tax revenue.

+++++

I wonder what would happen if all piracy stopped today and it was never a problem again.  Would they still act as if it was still a huge problem so these organization can keep getting massive fee to "fight" piracy?!

I have a feeling it would be like when the gov wants to strip us of more of our civil rights, the make up terrorist scares so we won't feel so bad about losing our rights.  Tony Blair made this an art form.  I wonder if he gets royalties from it.  :whistle:

See the quote below from the article makes my point;

To put in place the new enforcement body, the government would have to introduce legislation amending copyright, data protection, telecommunications and consumer protection laws, with a vote in parliament as soon as spring 2008.

Look at all the rights people would lose under this kind of new system.</rolleyes></sarcasm>

Non seeded torrents stay in the system for 7 days before they are automatically deleted.

If it shows up as seeded before the 7th day and there are no other issues {dupes, illegal files, etc}, then it will be approved.

Most Muslim/Arab and African countries have anti gay laws.

Many/most of the former USSR countries are anti gay.

China is also not gay friendly, even though they partially legalized homosexuality.

The surprising thing {not really} is that the EU says that in order to join, you have to have basic human rights laws in place, that protect everyone. Yet they still allow countries to join that violate one of their most basic rules. Actually, it's their first rule of membership.

Certain people have repeatedly shown that they know what they are doing and can be trusted. Sure, everyone can make the odd mistake now and again, but that's not going to crater the site.

I'm all for having a "white list" for trusted uploaders. The problem comes from the users who aren't white listed and they scream and moan that we hate and don't trust them. This could tear the site apart.

Also leaving a comment and rating a video/file is a good thing too. :whistle:

.dat files are also cd files and can be burned on to a cd with ease.

Just be sure you are using a part file {as mentioned by Foof} vs a cd file.

Nation bashing is prohibited.

While certain nations may do things you do not like, you are not allowed to bash the whole nation.  If you would like to discuss a topic, feel free, but make sure you do not tread into bashing the whole nation.

Civil, polite discussions are allowed.

EDIT: This applies to religion, race, creed, etc, etc, etc as well.

Before I get into the main part of my post, let me say that nation bashing {against any nation} is not allowed here. Polite criticism in a discussion is not bashing, but it's easy to turn bad.

That said, let's get on with the show.

No idea what site the OP got that from, but it's a bunch of disjointed rubbish.

Deportation is only used when someone breaks the law. What law was broken for you to be deported?!

What does Dutch Elm disease have to do with deportation?! The UK has suffered harshly from Dutch Elm disease, do you hate them too?!

Anger over bad tv shows?! Well, duh, I don't like 90% of what's on TV, but I don't say the nation is crap over it. Instead I find the channels with stuff I like; ie The Discovery Channel et al.

Why are you complaining that Yellowstone is popular? It shows that nature conservancy is beginning to grow and that's a good thing.

Hitting another car will always lead to insurance companies wanting money. HOWEVER, if your mom had insurance, then your mom's insurance company would have dealt with the other peoples' insurance company directly. If your mom had insurance and the other companies were harassing her directly, then she should have told her insurance company about it and let them deal with it.

I discriminate against assholes. Religion, race, etc, etc have nothing to do with it. I have friends in every group and there are people in every group that I can't stand.

@pdu4:

@Director97:

Greetings. Can anyone explain to me what a "POWER USER" is and how one attains such a status? Thanks!

Click on "Rules" on the top blue bar, then click on "Moderating rules - Whom to promote and why". I don't mean to be a 'smart ass' but you will find that if you read the "Rules" "FAQ" and the "Guides & How To's" in the Forum section there is hardly a question that is not covered.

Also read the condensed rules sticky thread in the general discussion section.

At the moment, we have 28 uploads that have never been seeded and 9 uploads were the uploader is running multiple torrents.

That's 37 new torrents we could have IF the uploaders followed the rules.

from TorrentFreak.com;

RCMP {Royal Canadian Mounted Police}TOLERATES PIRACY FOR PERSONAL USE.

The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.

Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the Canadian police made clear that Demonoid?s users don?t have to worry about getting caught, at least not in Canada.

According to the Canadian police it is impossible to track down everyone who downloads music or movies off the Internet. The police simply does not have the time nor the resources to go after filesharers.

?Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,? Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the Canadian police, said in an interview with Le Devoir. ?It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,? he added.

St-Hilaire explained that they rather focus on crimes that actually hurt consumers such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances.

A wise decision, especially since we now know that filesharing has absolutely no impact on music sales. On the contrary, a recent study found that the more music people download on P2P-networks, the more CDs they buy.

Now back to the claim that 40% of the BitTorrent traffic is encrypted in the UK. My first question would be, how do they know that it?s BitTorrent traffic if it?s encrypted?

I work for an oil service company and we encrypt all our internet traffic.

From Zeropaid.com;

The Pirate Bay: 'BitTorrent as a Protocol Won't Last Much Longer'

One of BitTorrent's most senior pirates speaks out in an in interview for a German blog and what he has to say may cause some concern over at BitTorrent Inc.

In Berlin to check out the Oil of the 21st Century conference this past weekend, Brokep over at The Pirate Bay was interviewed by the German blog Netzpolitik.org about his thoughts on the past, present, and future of the world's largest BitTorrent tracker site.

It is admittedly a slow at first, but about 11:40 in it gets quite interesting. When asked to discuss his vision for the future of the Pirate Bay, Brokep said he it will continue to "…still grow for a couple of months or maybe a year," but that he doesn't "...think that Bittorrent as a protocol will survive much longer."

Not around much longer? Yep, you heard it right. Brokep explained that The Pirate Bay is currently working to replace BitTorrent with a new protocol of its own.

There are apparently several reasons for the decision and none of them have anything to do with Swedish world domination. The first is is that BitTorrent Inc. recently decided to close the source of some newer additions of the BitTorrent protocol

"The biggest problem is that it's owned by the Bittorrent company, which develops new versions of it," Brokep said in the interview. "So we don't have any input as users to say what we want in the protocol. And Bittorrent is funded by companies which we don't necessarily like as well."

The second reason is that wants to develop a protocol that finally deals with the increasing influx of anti-piracy organizations, spammers, and other riff raff to the BitTorrent scene.

He writes:

Running TPB, I've been thinking a lot of how to make the content cleaner for the end user. Spam-blocking, fake-blocking, and being able to clean file-names in bundles is a big thing that I would like to see more of in the new protocol.

Brokep would also like to see redundancy in uploaded content taken care of as well, something I'm sure the former MODs at OiNK would liked to have had at their disposal instead of having to post endless "dupe" warnings.

Brokep continues:

Also having the same content from several uploaders is something we see a lot of, as well as on most of the other major trackers, so being able to share peers between trackers and between users with the same files in different bundles on the same trackers (through hash search services) would really increase download speed and availability.

Brokep realizes that's a big gamble, but he thinks that's it's a necessary one. "So if our new protocol works," he says "we will be one of the big websites still. If it doesn't, maybe someone else takes over."

Moreover, Brokep says "..to compare with torrents instead of having a complicated encoded file, we simply have a '.p2p' file that is a bzip2ed file in XML format which contains a list of files in the bundle."

"This would also make all files have file-hashes which will make it even harder for fakers and spammers," he said.

The Pirate Bay crew supposedly already developed a working client, but an initial release isn't expected until sometime early next year.

From Zeropaid.com;

Canadian Gov't Study: P2P Increases CD Sales

Most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits concludes that there is a positive correlation between file-sharing and CD sales.

The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada is a a newly commissioned study by Industry Canada, a ministry of the federal government, and includes some of the most extensive surveying to date on the music purchasing habits of the Canadian population .

Conducted by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz of the Department of Management at the University of London in England, the study concludes that illegal file-sharing does not cause a decrease in music sales as the music industry has insisted all along. In fact, it does just the opposite, in that it apparently tends to actually INCREASE music purchasing.

"Our review of existing econometric studies suggests that P2P file-sharing tends to decrease music purchasing," says the study. "However, we find the opposite, namely that P2P file-sharing tends to increase rather than decrease music purchasing."

What makes the study so fascinating is that it's been commissioned and released with the blessings of the Canadian Federal Government and not some self-serving poll commissioned by the music industry.

Among the key findings:

• For every 12 P2P downloaded songs, music purchases increase by 0.44 CDs. That is, downloading the equivalent of approximately one CD increases purchasing by about half of a CD.

• No relationship between P2P file-sharing and purchases of electronically-delivered music tracks (e.g., songs from iTunes).

• Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs and roughly one quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase.

• Only the effect of illegally downloading music that is not available for purchase influenced music purchasing, with a 1% increase in such downloads being associated with nearly a 4% increase in CD purchases.

• People who also own an MP3 player appear to be less likely to purchase CD albums.

The study also found that other forms of entertainment such as movies, concert tickets, and video games tend to increase with music purchases. It has been argued in the literature that the increase in the number of entertainment choices has led to a decline in music purchasing, but the study concludes otherwise. It found that a reported interest in music is very strongly associated with music purchases.

Moreover, this analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. Furthermore, it finds indirect evidence of the 'market creation' effect of P2P file-sharing when music is otherwise unavailable.

The study is somewhat difficult to sort through, but the conclusions are unmistakable: file-sharing actually benefits music sales. It basically confirms what I've said all along and that's that BitTorrent tracker sites like OiNK actually made better music fans of us all and allowed us to discover new music that we wouldn't have found otherwise. You can read the study for yourself here.

@DarknessWing:

@nomadix:

Howdy Mates ;

about 65 glass implants currently - about 50 more to go in -
did nipple - left - took out 17 years ago
6g P A havent worn in 3-4 years - used to wear it in my ear when not installed for sex

I am rather fond of scarifications - embossing the skin

Cheers:

What is glass implant?

Exactly what it sounds like. He has a piece of glass implanted under his skin.