U.S. Shuts Down Megaupload
- Thread starter $CASH$
- Start date
It used to be very bad, especially for a few months last year when they drastically increased the waiting times and cut down the download speed. Then they switched to no waiting time and fast speend and it has been a very good host since then. You don't get parallel downloads if you a free user but you didn't get those from Megaupload either so for the last 6 monhts before the Megaupload shutdown both have been on pretty much the same level in terms of convenience. Mediafire is the best obviously, in terms of speed, but it's not as if you can download 20 times in the same time at 5MB/s - your hard drive can't handle it anyway...
Why shouldn’t an inventor be able to protect his hard work? They worked hard on it and should be able to have the opportunity to sell it and make a profit…at the very least make sure nobody steals their idea. Maybe the people who are putting out inferior products should work a little harder and put out a better product?
It is true that a small group of people profit enormously…but most don’t. You’re looking at the very few large companies who make millions (and they should be able to…it’s their time and money invested…not yours).
I work with individual inventors on a daily basis. Most inventors spend years on their inventions…a shit load of time and money. They make just enough selling and licensing their patents to get by…maybe buy a house and put a little in the bank.
In some cases a large corporation comes along…steals their idea and bullies them around…makes millions off of it. Why shouldn’t that individual inventor be able to get some of that?
It is true that a small group of people profit enormously…but most don’t. You’re looking at the very few large companies who make millions (and they should be able to…it’s their time and money invested…not yours).
I work with individual inventors on a daily basis. Most inventors spend years on their inventions…a shit load of time and money. They make just enough selling and licensing their patents to get by…maybe buy a house and put a little in the bank.
In some cases a large corporation comes along…steals their idea and bullies them around…makes millions off of it. Why shouldn’t that individual inventor be able to get some of that?
Writing to disk is an expensive process in terms of computer resources. If you are trying to write a lot of files in the same time at a high speed, this will typically happen to different regions of the disk, so it has to spin, write, spin, write, spin, write, at very frantic pace, and at some point it simply can not keep up. I've crashed disks that way
You are coming at it with the assumption that profit should be a motivation to do stuff while at the heart of my post was the idea that this should never be the case because then you end up with dysfunctional societies as ours. Copyright is only one aspect of it.
As I said, people in academia, invent, discover and write stuff mostly for free and for recognition. There is career advancement as a result, but except for fields in which discoveries can be patented and profitted from, they do it for free. And that's how it has been for most of human history, for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Imagine that the wheel or the printing press had been patented and their use by others forbidden
As I said, people in academia, invent, discover and write stuff mostly for free and for recognition. There is career advancement as a result, but except for fields in which discoveries can be patented and profitted from, they do it for free. And that's how it has been for most of human history, for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Imagine that the wheel or the printing press had been patented and their use by others forbidden
You are coming at it with the assumption that profit should be a motivation to do stuff while at the heart of my post was the idea that this should never be the case because then you end up with dysfunctional societies as ours. Copyright is only one aspect of it.
As I said, people in academia, invent, discover and write stuff mostly for free and for recognition. There is career advancement as a result, but except for fields in which discoveries can be patented and profitted from, they do it for free. And that's how it has been for most of human history, for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Imagine that the wheel or the printing press had been patented and their use by others forbidden
As I said, people in academia, invent, discover and write stuff mostly for free and for recognition. There is career advancement as a result, but except for fields in which discoveries can be patented and profitted from, they do it for free. And that's how it has been for most of human history, for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Imagine that the wheel or the printing press had been patented and their use by others forbidden
not only that ThaG, but today's laws have made it so hard for the average person to capitalize off of copyrights, etc. that it's almost exclusively for corporations these days. gimpypimp, if you work with these people you should know just how difficult it is for them to actually make it. It's a huge game designed specifically for big corporations to capitalize.
Further, do you know how many great ideas/inventions just sit in the dark and collect dust because of those copyright laws? There is new technology that people can't advance because say, Xerox is sitting on the copyrights. Sticking with Xerox as an example, they invented electronic paper in the early 70's, but being that they were a paper & copy company, they didn't see any way to profit from it, so they tossed it to the side to only sit in the dark. It could have been a real cool technology in the 80's & 90's (before all the advanced cell phones we have today), we could have had "reusable newspapers" where your daily news would download and appear on your electronic paper daily and a ton of other potential benefits from the technology. But because it sat in the dark, no one knew and it never advanced.
There are tons of way better examples than that and of course I wont even get into the medical aspect of copyrights which is unbelievably bad for mankind.
So I agree with ThaG, copyright is utterly pointless and does not help mankind in the least bit.
Further, do you know how many great ideas/inventions just sit in the dark and collect dust because of those copyright laws? There is new technology that people can't advance because say, Xerox is sitting on the copyrights. Sticking with Xerox as an example, they invented electronic paper in the early 70's, but being that they were a paper & copy company, they didn't see any way to profit from it, so they tossed it to the side to only sit in the dark. It could have been a real cool technology in the 80's & 90's (before all the advanced cell phones we have today), we could have had "reusable newspapers" where your daily news would download and appear on your electronic paper daily and a ton of other potential benefits from the technology. But because it sat in the dark, no one knew and it never advanced.
There are tons of way better examples than that and of course I wont even get into the medical aspect of copyrights which is unbelievably bad for mankind.
So I agree with ThaG, copyright is utterly pointless and does not help mankind in the least bit.
That's entirely correct.
Also, let me continue with my academic example because it's both close to my heart and about the most ridiculous illustration of how insane the system is. Most academic journals require paid subscription to access articles online, and if you don't have that, you have to pay for each article individually, the price of which varies between $20 and $40 (for a single article!!!). Pretty much nobody pays that way though, and they make most of their money from charging university libraries obscene amounts for access to journals. The result is that the main player in the game, Elsevier made a profit of 4 billion last year. Now how is that content generated - academics write papers then submit them to journals, the journals send them to other academics who review it and judge them sutiable or not for publication, then the journal formats and typesets the papers and they gets published. There is very little work here that is doen by the journals - the research, writing and revewing is done by academics, and on top of that there is usually also a publication fee they pay to get a paper out. Then it gets copyrighted and sold back to them at obscene prices. This is copyright for you.
Now in recent years there have been a push towards at least requring older content to be freely available and then together with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, we also got this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act
If someones thinks the music industry is different, think again. In most cases, the copyrights on older material are owned not by the artists but by the record companies and they make shitload of money off of that older material which the artists never see a dime from. Worse, a lot of classic material just sits in their vaults, out of print but copyrighted and effectively locked out of circulation. Even worse, they don't allow it to be sampled (a big reason hip-hop sucks these days is the clamping down on sampling in the 90s - if there was no copyright, hip-hop would still have a lot of samples and would not be so electronic and horrible today. If anything sharing has allowed all of that music to live again - without file sharing all those albums would be confined only to the collectors that have the records and to the occasional record store that has a surviving copy. Most of the artists we're discussing on this website most of us would have never even heard of without the internet and file sharing - we would be forced to listen to whatever they play on the radio and on TV, and we would like it for not knowing anything better.
So think again whether copyright should exist and be enforced.
Yes, the artists need to be supported and be able to feed their families. But there are other ways to do that.
Also, let me continue with my academic example because it's both close to my heart and about the most ridiculous illustration of how insane the system is. Most academic journals require paid subscription to access articles online, and if you don't have that, you have to pay for each article individually, the price of which varies between $20 and $40 (for a single article!!!). Pretty much nobody pays that way though, and they make most of their money from charging university libraries obscene amounts for access to journals. The result is that the main player in the game, Elsevier made a profit of 4 billion last year. Now how is that content generated - academics write papers then submit them to journals, the journals send them to other academics who review it and judge them sutiable or not for publication, then the journal formats and typesets the papers and they gets published. There is very little work here that is doen by the journals - the research, writing and revewing is done by academics, and on top of that there is usually also a publication fee they pay to get a paper out. Then it gets copyrighted and sold back to them at obscene prices. This is copyright for you.
Now in recent years there have been a push towards at least requring older content to be freely available and then together with SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, we also got this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act
If someones thinks the music industry is different, think again. In most cases, the copyrights on older material are owned not by the artists but by the record companies and they make shitload of money off of that older material which the artists never see a dime from. Worse, a lot of classic material just sits in their vaults, out of print but copyrighted and effectively locked out of circulation. Even worse, they don't allow it to be sampled (a big reason hip-hop sucks these days is the clamping down on sampling in the 90s - if there was no copyright, hip-hop would still have a lot of samples and would not be so electronic and horrible today. If anything sharing has allowed all of that music to live again - without file sharing all those albums would be confined only to the collectors that have the records and to the occasional record store that has a surviving copy. Most of the artists we're discussing on this website most of us would have never even heard of without the internet and file sharing - we would be forced to listen to whatever they play on the radio and on TV, and we would like it for not knowing anything better.
So think again whether copyright should exist and be enforced.
Yes, the artists need to be supported and be able to feed their families. But there are other ways to do that.