Kim Dotcom Offers $5 Million Bounty To Defeat Extradition 253
heretic108 (454817) writes "Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom has posted a bounty of $5 million to anyone who can dig up any dirt which saves him from extradition to the U.S.. This bounty would be payable not only to government employees, but also to anyone who can retrieve documents clearly proving corruption in the whole prosecution process. 'We are asking for information that proves unlawful or corrupt conduct by the US government, the New Zealand government, spy agencies, law enforcement and Hollywood', Dotcom told website Torrentfreak.com."
You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cell (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yea, you should definitely defend the fraudster by claiming it was US government corruption that put him where he is.
He should be let off because his corruption was okay, because someone else was doing it too ... right?
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
If simply being an asshole was just cause to terminate your civil rights, we'd all be behind bars.
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... Do you know absolutely ANYTHING about kim dot com? If he were JUST an asshole, I'd agree with you.
Let me guess, you know nothing about his history and you think megaupload was a legitimate file sharing site?
Being an asshole is one of his better traits.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Informative)
Go look into Kimvestor, a shoddy investment firm, and Data Protect. He made his "fortune" selling the latter off at the peak of the dot com bubble. Later he straight up pump-and-dump'd Letsbuyit.com, netting over â1.5m in profit.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your point? That he was guilty then, so whatever charges the government brings against him now are valid, and no matter how much the government violates standard procedures and illegally obtains evidence, it should be ignored?
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who doesn't know... Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
Sure, he is. What's truly incredible is that a piece of lowlife scum such as that can come out looking like the good guy. He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
He might be bad, but the people pursuing him are much worse. The fact that they're doing it using your taxes and claims of legality makes it vastly worse still.
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Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
What a misleading edit.
He's a career criminal, fraudster and basically the exact same of professional fraud as the corrupt politicians he's now trying to "expose". If you think his motivations are anything but 100% selfish, I have a few bridges at really good prices.
He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
In this class of sleazebags, there is no small and big or better and worse. They are all the same type of scum, and making us believe we should go after one but not the other is exactly how they thrive - because the good people are easily distra
re: Dotcom's history (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to defraud telephone companies with custom made electronic boxes that let people cheat the established system, making long distance calls for free. That was before their careers took off, building and selling computers. Please elaborate on how that activity done as teenagers for kicks invalidates Apple as a legitimate business today?
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Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Because it's not once. Your counterexample doesn't apply.
Kimble is a career criminal. He's shown again and again and again that he doesn't like honest work and prefers to trick people out of their money instead. He's shown that he changes his methods, but not his ways. He's shown it so often that only a complete moron would believe a single word out of his mouth.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:4, Interesting)
Kim Dotcom steals from the rich? Kim Dotcom facilitates acquisition of 'protected' material to the poor? Sounds like my kind of scum.
The fact that he's taking on government corruption is a nice bonus.
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Irrelevant. His rights are immutable.
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This is just want prisoners are asking for....more assholes behind bars.
Re:You can't enjoy five million dollars from a cel (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, you should definitely defend the fraudster by claiming it was US government corruption that put him where he is.
He should be let off because his corruption was okay, because someone else was doing it too ... right?
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
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Why do you have to pick one or the other?
He's guilty, everyone knows it, why would you willingly let him go? Why not take out both of the criminals instead of exchanging one for the other?
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If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
And this is how sleazy fraudsters survive. It's called misdirection. They're exploiting the weak minds of good people who don't realize that the other thing he's pointing at is simply the same thing in a different place. Politicians and sleazy fraudsters are of the same kind. By constantly pointing at each other, they prevent us from taking them down, because we can never decide which one to get rid of, focus and finally do it.
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All these people complaiing about how "horribly corrupt" the US government are are just playing a huge round of "First World Problems". The US is #19 [transparency.org] on the Transparency International list. That's not superb, but it's out of 177 countries... I mean, for crying out loud, Yanukovych in Ukraine had a personal zoo at his house - tens of billions of dolllars stolen from a country whose per-capita income is less than that of Mongolia's. And that sort of stuff is hardly unusual in the world. Have any of you compla
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OF all the countries in the world, the US should be #1, because of things like the DoI, and Constitution. Our history and the stories we tell, are all about "Give me Liberty or Give Me Death" type liberty, and yet, here we are talking about how corrupt our government is and how it acts illegally, from Snowden to Dotcom..
The problem is that we have too much power accumulated in too few hands, because we don't like the decentralized form of government because it doesn't offer the support for Government Crimin
Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the film industry creating a cartel and using laws to enforce it, stuff like region coding DVD's and BluRay's, encryption, or adding unskippable bs like copyright notices on LEGIT bought products. The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product, but corrupt governments side on the media cartels who refuse to update their business models to the current real world - they are stuck in the last century.
The law has been bought and paid for by the corrupt media cartels. The law is a disgrace, as are our bought corrupt politicians.
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Your argument about a better product is pretty poor. You seem to be saying that it's worth violating the laws of a democracy merely in order to get better-packaged video entertainment. I don't see how a democracy can function well if people are willing to so casually disregard laws they don't support.
Your argument about a corrupt legislative process is much more interesting, though. It calls into question whether or not we're really a democracy, and thus whether or not obeying the laws per se should carr
Re:Cartels (Score:4, Interesting)
A democracy *can't* function that way. The laws aren't supported by the people; they're put there when 98% of the population has no idea what they are, what they mean, what they do, or that those things are actually wrong in some way.
Re:Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws MUST be supported by the general population if they are supposed to be upheld. Laws OPPOSED by the majority of people are actually a threat to the legal system itself.
If there is laws that most people oppose (like, say, a lot of laws in former communist states), they will break it, or at the very least, they will not report it if they know someone else breaks it. Be honest: Imagine your best friend kills someone in cold blood, would you tell on him? I'd say the chance that you do is at the very least a LOT higher than you ratting him out for downloading some blockbuster movie. Why? Because your support for the law against murder is (at least if you're a somewhat normal human being) a lot stronger than your support for copyright. If the latter exists at all.
Copyright is a law that is enforced by and for a minority. While at the same time opposed or ignored by a majority. The danger here is now that this not only means that copyright becomes a hollow shell of a law, it means that laws are questioned entirely. Allow me an example.
I remember an experiment where a "no littering" sign was put up prominently on a corner of the street. And no littering happened. The place was clean. Then, after a week IIRC, they dumped some litter on the spot and it didn't take long for the litter to grow and multiply. When people see a law being ignored with impunity, they will follow suit.
The problematic thing here is that copyright is one thing. What's next? When you can break copyright laws, why not other laws? We identify copyright laws as unjust and wrong, so what about the others? Are the other laws right? Or should we take them into question as well? Why not break other laws? Once you broke one, breaking another one gets a lot easier.
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Laws MUST be supported by the general population if they are supposed to be upheld. Laws OPPOSED by the majority of people are actually a threat to the legal system itself.
I feel I must pick a nit here. Laws which people will not follow are a threat to the concept of "the law" itself, but these laws are only a threat to a legal system which seeks to act honorably, and in the best interest of The People.
Re:Cartels (Score:4, Informative)
That's not even a requirement.
People follow the law out of, well, custom. People actually like living in a predictable environment, and it's predictable to live in a world that has laws you can rely on. Do this and you're a good citizen, do that and you're not. That's something that is generally very well liked among humans. Most people like a predictable life.
And as long as this predictable environment does not conflict too much with their own version of morality and legality, they will support it. They might not support all laws, they may even not care about most of them, and they will probably not understand the reasoning behind some, but, and that's the important part, they don't openly oppose them.
And as long as this is the case, a country is stable and will be supported by its citizens. Only if you start ruling against your population, you will need more and more rigid and oppressive structures to keep up the status quo. And if history has shown us anything, then that such a situation is not sustainable in the long run because you need to waste resources to prop the system up against the own population, which not only costs you resources you could spend elsewhere, it also means that your population will only offer you the bare minimum of support needed. And you will need to watch them closely to ensure that they actually do it, there's no "voluntary" work you can depend on.
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Yes, you're talking about Promise Theory. Attempting to enforce a policy which a population hasn't promised to conform to is an attack. In group dynamics, the promise of the group is complex: it's not a straight 50-50 majority, and it's often affected by social structures (e.g., special interests, minority groups, and their impact on rights of the majority and other minorities). Regardless, the concept holds: if your group hasn't agreed, as a group, to the rules, then your group is under attack.
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Re:Cartels (Score:4, Insightful)
If a law is so easy to casually disregard, and violating it provides a clear benefit to the violators and the harm it causes is theoretical, that's a sign the law itself is bad. Eating at Burger King should not be thought such a harm to McDonalds that it should be outlawed.
We ought to have digital public libraries by now. Such a thing is a clear benefit to society. Searchable works of art! No more archaic card catalogs. No more denying a patron because all the copies are currently checked out. No more losses from patrons being careless with the physical media and damaging it. Far less storage space needed, space which can be used to hold more works, or repurposed. No more late fees and returns. No more having to physically travel to the library, twice, spending time and most likely gas. Did you see the article some days ago about streaming saving society lots of money compared to fooling around with DVDs? We could have all of this, now, if not for copyright law.
Everyone should be willing to practice civil disobedience of bad laws. Be like Rosa Parks and don't meekly go along with racist seating arrangements. If US citizens are no longer willing to do that, maybe we ought to petition the British Monarchy to let us back in the fold, and we'll all issue a national apology to George III.
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Why, you sound like you know exactly what you're talking about. Why don't you just go pick up your $5,000,000 cheque?
Oh right, because you're just talking out your ass.
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What about the film industry creating a cartel and using laws to enforce it, stuff like region coding DVD's and BluRay's, encryption, or adding unskippable bs like copyright notices on LEGIT bought products.
It's their product and they can sell it under any circumstances they want. Don't like DRM? Don't buy it, but don't use DRM as an excuse to pirate something. Or, buy it and use one of the many products that will rip a copy free of DRM and the notices.
The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product, but corrupt governments side on the media cartels who refuse to update their business models to the current real world - they are stuck in the last century.
No, pirates are simply giving people an excuse to get stuff for free. You argument is akin to saying "I don't like GPL terms so I will go ahead and take the source and do whatever I want with it and distribute it without providing the source code; the desires of
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I know at least one person who would love to buy a lot of UBIsoft games if they only offered them in a way I can agree with.
I am actually honestly sad that I will never play some of their more recent games. They sound quite good.
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I know at least one person who would love to buy a lot of UBIsoft games if they only offered them in a way I can agree with.
This.
It's know that the problem with monopolies is that they can offer products to the market at conditions (price or otherwise) that only a fraction of the market is willing to accept. In a non-monopoly situation, a competitor would offer the product at more acceptable conditions, and make a sale.
It's high time these monopolies get smashed. I'm for copyright, but against licensing. Why not have compulsory licensing for copyrighted works, so that you and I could start up a distributor who offers these works
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I know at least one person who would love to buy a lot of UBIsoft games if they only offered them in a way I can agree with.
This.
It's know that the problem with monopolies is that they can offer products to the market at conditions (price or otherwise) that only a fraction of the market is willing to accept. In a non-monopoly situation, a competitor would offer the product at more acceptable conditions, and make a sale.
It's high time these monopolies get smashed.
The studios are hardly monopolies - they have plenty of competition no one exerts enough market pressure to eliminate the others. What you want is lower prices, but that is not the result of monopoly prices but rather a number of individual actors deciding what price point ensures sufficient demand to make the desired profit. In addition, since ether cannot price discriminate on initial release they price high and drop the price over time to try to extract as much revenue as possible form each buyer; which
Cartels (Score:5, Informative)
That's really only true in the United States and somewhat less so in Europe. In most of the rest of the world they don't really give a damn about copyright, at least in practice. Oh sure, foreign governments will sign the copyright conventions or promise to enforce local laws, but in practice they turn a blind eye.
First, film and music piracy is largely considered to be an American problem and it's hard to get people to care much about rich foreigners being less rich (and all Americans are rich by their standards). Second, in Mexico, Brazil and other South or Latin American countries, media piracy is looked upon with about the same seriousness as jaywalking if it's looked upon as a crime at all, which it's often not. The police down there largely couldn't care less and they look the other way in return for modest bribes. Third, in societies such as Mexico and Brazil, which are very unequal in terms of wealth and income, pirated or knock off goods are the only way that most people have any access to consumer items. Without pirated media and knock off goods, they largely wouldn't be able to afford any foreign things like DVDs, name brand fashions, music, video games and the like.
Lastly, the copyright business in Mexico especially is frequently under the control of the cartels (the drug cartels not the American media cartels). The two biggest are Los Zetas [wikipedia.org] (who based their logo on the title card of The Godfather) and La Familia Michoacana [wikipedia.org]. The pirated DVD business doesn't bring in as much scratch as drugs, but it does provide walking around money to pay cartel foot soldiers and helps the cartels maintain presence and better control territories in Mexico. Of course, it goes without saying that they're not very concerned about copyright laws being that they torture and kill as a matter of doing business. The Mexican government itself already doesn't have a large enough budget for their own internal needs, never mind enforcing foreign copyrights. So you see, copyright is essentially de-facto meaningless outside the United States and Europe.
Re:Cartels (Score:5, Interesting)
The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product
"Giving consumers a better product" would be going out and making their own movies that are better than Hollywood's. No laws against that anywhere. It's also not what they're doing. What they're doing would be more akin to me walking into your place of work and offering to do the work you did for the past month, for $50. You've already done the work, you just don't get paid, and I get $50. That's just giving your employer a better product, right? These tired old excuses for piracy are, ironically, from the last century, and I didn't realize people still talked like this in 2014.
To stretch your analogy:
Well, except that, if my employer wanted a copy of the work I've done for the last month, which, BTW, I was already paid for, I wouldn't expect him to pay me my full salary to have it done all over again. Not when he can, and does, have the minimum wage secretary make a Xerox for nothing more than the cost of her time, a little electricity, ink, and paper.
Just because the industry wants to exploit their rape of popular culture [techdirt.com] and turn every thought or utterance [billboard.com] into a money stream for themselves, and has the money and position to get the elected officials to pass laws that are diametrically opposed to the wishes of the electorate that voted them into office, doesn't make it right.
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To stretch your analogy:
It's not your employer who wants the copy. It's another company entirely. Your employer passes on the copy. The other company is happy, because they just got a month's worth of work for nothing. Your employer doesn't much care, at first. Sure, they got what they paid for, but then they start thinking that maybe next month they'll get a copy off some other company for nothing, and not need to pay you anything.
And you; well you're just screwed. Two companies are making money from
Re:Cartels (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope.
Basically nope. I mean, sure, you can make stuff up about me if it makes you feel better. If you look at my wall full of DVDs and don't even consider the ones I've given away to charity shops, you'd be hard pressed to claim I'm a freeloader.
I still use TPB. Heck, I even download Agents of Shield from TPB despite it being 100% legal for me to watch it either broadcast or online.
Why do you think I do that?
It's because the service offered by TPB and the resulting product is indisputably etter than what you can get elsewhere. The advantages of TPB are:
* Variety of size / quality options available.
* Everything available in one place.
* Great search engine.
* No "streaming" crap, you just get a file.
* No DRM: you can watch the file anywhere.
* No ads.
* No unskippable "content".
* Works in my favourite media player.
* Works on my phone.
* Even my in-law's TV can play the files natively.
* Some very old, obscure stuff available.
* Good download clients where you can prioritise stuff you want now, versus stuff you want later.
The disadvantages:
* No obvious way to compensate people for their work.
* I do not actually believe that impossibly proportioned women would like to date my testicles.
A better product is more than just the film itself. If someone jabs you with a sharp stick for the entire duration of the film as a condition of you watching it, then that, too is part of the product.
TPB removes the bit where they jab you with sticks. People like that, free or not.
WHO is last century? (Score:2)
You apparently have never watched a movie on DVD or BluRay or tried to use a proprietary streaming service. Are you sure you're not the one from last century? From what I remember, we didn't really start having all these problems, until around 1996 (or 1999 for me; that's when I bought my first DVD). Until around then, things mostly Just Worked, so most of us didn't really have any reasons to pirate anything, therefore we didn't.
The right analogy is that your boss paid you big bucks to write TPS reports,
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I thought theaters were part of the outdated business model that everybody suggests 'Hollywood' should change?
People have a great many options for self-publishing online. And quite a few people do. Just how much that has displaced consumption of Hollywood fare (legal or otherwise, and whether that's based on it being a better product or out of principle) is a different question.
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No I imagine that getting a movie into a theater is probably harder than getting your music onto a commercial radio station. Most commercial radio stations don't play music from bands that are not signed to a label unless they are promoting a local show {ie. you payed them for advertising}
The idea that the internet has a made it possible for an artist to make it in music without a label is a farce. My brother plays in a successful local band and I listen to a lot of unsigned bands that have spent the money
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Then you should stop putting deliberate bugs into your code. Why should I buy it from you when I can get a bug free version cheaper?
And please, don't come with legality. There's no logic in laws concerning sex, drugs and copyright, basing an argument on that is like arguing on religious grounds.
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Yeah and the product in question was also created by these "cartels."
So, are you saying it is okay for these companies to bribe legislators to create draconian laws?
Don't like it? Feel free to create your own DRM free content and let everyone have the fruits of your labor. Nothing is stopping you but you and your selfish entitle ideology.
I'd say it's significantly more selfish and entitled to hinder the free market, free speech rights, and private property rights by telling people they can't copy & transmit certain information to others with their own equipment.
For all the screaming and crying that happens, you accomplish a whole lot of nothing. You've effectively lost this battle already, because you have no effective means of actually stopp
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Does this mean I'm not allowed to repaint my car either?
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What's worst about it is that the "upcoming" movie will have been out for ages if you pick up that BluRay later again.
And it can really, really put a stain on your enjoyment if you have to watch your favorite actor (that you're about to see in the movie should it ever start) in a movie that you know stunk to high heavens just 'cause they decided to put a trailer for it before a movie where he was great.
with 5 million bucks (Score:4, Funny)
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Polynesian island with a fresh water source
If one exists, the Polynesians themselves would be very interested in hearing about this island...
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I think I saw a professor build one with coconuts somewhere.
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But this time you'll have Thurstons money to buy proper parts.
Why doesn't he leave (Score:4, Funny)
Why doesn't he just go to some other country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA
EG North Korea, he'd fit right in with all the other Kim's there
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he could change his name to...Kim Dot Kp
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Given his record... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I wouldn't count on him actually planning to pay a cent.
slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom
Which PR agency do you work for that Kimble has contracted to polish up his image?
When will the /. crowd understand that the guy is mostly a career criminal and he's the exact kind of person who will feed you to the sharks if he's your boss? His goal in life is winning and living large, and he doesn't give a fuck about politics, inventions, freedom, Internet or any of the other tools he uses to accomplish his goals.
Suckers, all of you.
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As if there are only a handful of people who don't care about intellectual property. Millions would happily do copyright infringement if there were no adverse consequences.
Re:How about a Kickstarter... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hundreds of millions of people _do_ do copyright infringement, because there are typically no adverse consequences.
FTFY.
Re:How about Kindergarten? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's not yours, don't take it without permission.
If it's not just yours, pay a corrupt legislature to make it exclusively yours, and to make anyone else using it a criminal offense, enforced by the threat of violence.
Fixed that for you.
It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is (Score:2, Insightful)
> It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is, they went back to 1787 to bribe the founding fathers to include copyright in the constitution [...]
How long was copyright protection then? How long is it today? Was infringement a criminal offence then? Today?
Ah, and BTW: it is actually amazing how much corruption Hollywood can get away with. And deepressing.
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I'd hate to say it, even though I think copyright is too long now, going after people who do zero day releases is within reasonable copyright time.
Copyright act of 1790 set the limits to 14 years, then another 14 if the author was still alive. I'm not sure how to read the penalties, since I'm not a lawyer from the late 18th century.
see: http://www.copyright.gov/histo... [copyright.gov]
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Actually he went back to 1703 to bribe the House of Lords to force the new copyright law to be limited to 14+14 years and then have everything go into the public domain "for the advancement of learning" as even then the elected representatives were corrupt and were going to follow the publishers advice and make copyright forever "for the authours" who would get a one time small payment from the publishers.
The "for the starving artists" argument goes back a ways.
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What does it mean for a thing to be yours?
Re:How about Kindergarten? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can make an exact duplicate of my car and drive it away, leaving my car behind, the only thing I'm going to ask is that you burn your duplicate copy of the registration and insurance info, and get your own plates, at your earliest convenience. Why should I care that you have an exact copy of my car? Your analogy, the carjacking, is nothing like copying. First of all, there's the threat of violence. Then there's the time between when you take it and when you return it that I don't have it.
So if you want to fallaciously argue by analogy, at least use a better analogy.
Re:How about Kindergarten? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, and please don't copy the car while I'm in it. That could get confusing, and my duplicate self will probably be just as attached to the duplicate car as I am to the original.
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Fine, the thief can take it when you're sleeping and return it before you wake up. Your car is now a public taxi when you're not using it. Is that fair, and are you okay with that?
The point being, there are many intangible products and services (like movies, trains, restaurants and copyrighted products) you pay for where you don't get a physical product for your money. The service provider is completely within his rights to charge you for ben
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Are you seriously arguing that the latest copy of "The Lego Movie" or "Non-Stop" are ideas?
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Actually, they're all wrong because any set of individuals with no cultural background (i.e. no existing morals, ethics, etc.) living in a world where these things may happen to them would feel threatened. Societies always provide protections against these threats: as they form, they group together to protect their members, which quickly becomes the unstructured hunting and killing of threat sources (i.e. kill people or other tribes who kill your clansmen), and eventually laws and police forces and gover
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Nobody has a fully-resolved cause-and-effect engine in his head.
This is true to and extent. We do know that our actions have consequences, even if unknown and rippling consequences that extend far beyond our intended realm. The fact that we have dozens of movies(Groundhog Day) and TV shows (Voyager - "Year from Hell") dealing with the unintended consequences of actions proves we understand that while we don't fully know the consequences, we do understand that there are consequences.
Most Religions deal with this by having the Deity know all the consequences of our actio
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Changing some of your actions to reduce suffering of others is often also sub-optimal. We could solve a lot of crime with telescreens, party propaganda, and laws against thought crime.
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Actually, for most rapes, there are no consequences - the rates of reporting of rape are very low, and the rate of conviction on reported rapes is extremely low. And as a consequence, rape is extremely common. About 30% are raped at least once during their lives, and in anonymous surveys of men asking what sexual activities they've done (some of which are rape), about 10% of young men confess to having raped at least once and about 3% confess to serial rape.
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This is bullshit fear mongering.
Statistics about rape vary widely, mostly because "rape" is not clearly defined. People with an agenda to push use "rape" as a term because our mental image is that of someone brutally abusing his (generally) victim, forcing sexual intercourse against physical resistance, with screams and blood and violence.
But to arrive at that 30% number, you need to include every outlandish definition of "rape", which includes statutory rape (boyfriend who is age-of-consent +1 day having c
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Thousands? There are tens of thousands of burglars in my city, and more than one murder per day. More than 10% of the general population here has committed minor aggravated assault.
Kryptonite Inc. will pay for your bicycle, up to $5000, if it's stolen when properly locked with one of their locks. Except in New York City, because there are projected to be over a hundred thousand bike thieves there (New York's population is about 15 times the population of my city) and bikes theft is hardcore.
With milli
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So, your city is 1/15 the size of New York City, but there is more than one murder a day and tens of thousands of burglars? Can you tell us what this shit hole city is?
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If there were really no consequences, we would be ok with people committing murder, rape and theft! Welcome to Valhalla, where we hack each other to death with axes and then wake up the next morning and happily feast together.
The reason that murder, rape and theft are crimes, is that there are consequences. If you could address them (though you can't), then you would have eliminated some crimes
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Where are you people coming from? "Oh, if I get rich, but the other guy starves in the street, his suffering is a consequence.." No, his suffering is something you don't necessarily care about. It's only consequential if you care about it. I make more than the average ($55,000 is the mean income of Americans), and that means that someone, somewhere, is experiencing poverty because I'm not. That's inconsequential: I'm definitely getting a raise or a higher paying salary when I see the opportunity.
If yo
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Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score:5, Interesting)
The US Government is corrupt in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2. You needn't prove it to know it is true.
That's true of all government.
Re:Al-Gebra (Score:2)
1 + X = 2
ftfy.
Mathematics does prove it, BTW.
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Uh, if X is 1 in your little equation, it's not true.
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Well, slashdot removed the greater than or less than signs from my comment.. So my comment is, If X is less than or greater than 1 in your little equation, it's not true.
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The US Government is corrupt in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2. You needn't prove it to know it is true.
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell actually needed about 378 pages to prove that 1+1=2, in their Principia Mathematica.
From wikipedia:
"From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1+1=2." —Volume I, 1st edition, page 379 (page 362 in 2nd edition; page 360 in abridged version). (The proof is actually completed in Volume II, 1st edition, page 86, accompanied by the comment, "The above proposition is occasionally useful.")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
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Why Academia is stupid in a nutshell. It takes a couple volumes of work to prove what everyone already knows. And while I know that proof is different from "common knowledge" especially in Academia, it is about as hilarious as Time Magazine declaring "men and women are different".
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the benefit is that once you can prove something "obvious" (what is obvious, anyway?) is a sufficiently radical way, it's then easy (or at least possible) to start proving incredibly non-obvious things [wikipedia.org].
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The proof is all about connecting things. It is like trying to prove that humans can walk on two legs using the general theory of relativity. You have models that work on the small scale, and those that work on a bigger scale. Proving even the simplest things that are normally done on the large scale is a quite difficult exercise, but it helps to add validity to the small scale model.
Attitudes like, "it's obvious" is what led to beliefs that the world is flat. And I'm pretty sure I can find some government
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"It's not what you know. It's what you can prove in court" -- Law Abiding Citizen
It's not what you know in court, but how much the President likes the cut of your jib.
- What Bill Gates could have said after the DOJ let MS off the hook Scott-free for antitrust violations.
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It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials, so Kim Dotcom performing a corrupt action in hopes that someone involved in the process is corrupt enough to expose the corruption.
He's going about bribery all wrong though; it's not illegal if you call it "campaign donations."
Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:US Government is Corrupt by Inspection (Score:4, Insightful)
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials
No. No it is not. You may wish to read up on something called Watergate [wikipedia.org], for example, and recall that no reporters were ever charged with a crime for exposing it. Or the Iran-Contra Affair [wikipedia.org]. In fact, the exposure of illegal and unethical government activities by journalists, police and whistleblowers goes on at a brisk pace every day. It is not illegal.
What is illegal is sharing classified materials without authorization from the government to do so. cf The Pentagon Papers [wikipedia.org]. Those by the way weren't even exposing illegal acts, they were exposing incompetence and poor decision-making. But Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted because he didn't have the legal right to share them with newspapers and by extension the public.
I'm not espousing a stance on Snowden either way. I'm just saying it's important to distinguish which activities are illegal and which are not. It is fair to say that it is illegal to expose any kind of classified information - relating to anything, legal or not - without explicit authorization from the government. But exposing corruption and illegal activities by the US government is definitely not illegal in and of itself.
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This guy was never actually anything he claimed to be. The only thing he was (and is) really great at is self-portrayal. He's great at self marketing. But that's about it.
Maybe that's why I can't stand him. He actually accomplished NOTHING. Except duping others into buying his show.
Why did he never try to get into politics?
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He did, actually. [yahoo.com]
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I'd mod you up if I had points today. Glad at least a few people here see through the facade.
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Yes, because paying $5 Million is sure to turn up lots of 100% true information...