Nevertheless, Left 4 Dead’s well-crafted gameplay simply must be experienced in multiplayer. Human teammates (or enemies) make each play-through dynamic, mitigating the game’s two hang-ups: limited map selection and uninspired friendly AI.
From Valve (the creators of Counter-Strike, Half-Life and more) comes Left 4 Dead, a co-op action horror game for the PC and Xbox 360 that casts up to four players in an epic struggle for survival against swarming zombie hordes and terrifying mutant monsters. Set in the immediate aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, L4D’s survival co-op mode lets you blast a path through the infected in four unique “movies,” guiding your survivors across the rooftops of an abandoned metropolis, through rural ghost towns and pitch-black forests in your quest to escape a devastated Ground Zero crawling with infected enemies. Each “movie” is comprised of five large maps, and can be played by one to four human players, with an emphasis on team-based strategy and objectives.
New technology dubbed “the AI Director” is used to generate a unique gameplay experience every time you play. The Director tailors the frequency and ferocity of the zombie attacks to your performance, putting you in the middle of a fast-paced, but not overwhelming, Hollywood horror movie. Addictive single player, co-op, and multiplayer action gameplay from the makers of Counter-Strike and Half-Life. Versus Mode lets you compete four-on-four with friends, playing as a human trying to get rescued, or as a zombie boss monster that will stop at nothing to destroy them.
Suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: 'The founder of popular Bit Torrent site IsoHunt, Gary Fung, has been for all infringing content — an order that could result in the site shutting down. US District Judge Stephen Wilson issued the order last week after years of back-and-forths over the legality of IsoHunt and Fung's two other sites (Torrentbox and Podtropolis). Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors, but for now, things aren't looking good for the torrent site.' Me too, but I think that I should start looking for a new public torrent index. I really liked mininova and used it together with TPB, but now only TPB and private trackers are left and I'd rather use public torrents (not because I don't want to seed, I seed until ratio is =1, but in private trackers, nobody wants to download the files, so I'm stuck trying to seed a 1GB file to ratio =1 for days, even though with my (slow) upload speed of 90KB/s it should take less than 4 hours.
During that time I cann. Now only TPB and private trackers are left and I'd rather use public torrents (not because I don't want to seed, I seed until ratio is =1, but in private trackers, nobody wants to download the files, so I'm stuck trying to seed a 1GB file to ratio =1 for days, even though with my (slow) upload speed of 90KB/s it should take less than 4 hours. During that time I cannot delete that file or move it to another hard disk to free some space on my downloads disk Agreed-disk space and upload speed limitations have prevented me from achieving any 1.0 ratios for a while now. I want to be a good netizen but it's often not practical.
My download is 4mbps, so if I use public trackers (usually a lot of people want to download that torrent) I can give back what I have taken quite easily (it helps that I don't saturate my download speed 24/7, my average download is less than average upload). Once I had a 1024/128 connection. With that, it was impossible to have a decent ratio and still be able to download anything. However, I archive almost everything I download, so I won't need to download it ever again. This way, as my collection grows, I'. B) the amount of illegal content is significantly larger than the amount of legal content.
Have you ever turned off 'safe search'? There's TONS of illegal stuff indexed by google, including minor illegal things like copyright infringement and hate speech, all the way up to crimes that actually hurt people like ponzi schemes, child porn, identity theft rings and virus producers. The only thing different is that Google indexes LOTS of types of illegal content. The difference is volume, do things on.
Google certainly isn't the only place to get anything. Nobody said it was.
If you turn off safe search I think you'll find the amount of illegal content does not significantly overshadow legal content on Google unless you put in very particular search terms. Also, the hit-rate of legal vs. Illegal content on a typical search matters probably more than the actual amount indexed. The difference isn't just scale; the proportions are extremely skewed, and I will bet dollars to donut-holes that the large majority of Google searches are intended to find content legall. If you turn off safe search I think you'll find the amount of illegal content does not significantly overshadow legal content on Google unless you put in very particular search terms. Also, the hit-rate of legal vs. Illegal content on a typical search matters probably more than the actual amount indexed.
The DMCA provisions in question don't mention percentages, majority, or any other such terms. They protect search engines, period, provided that the provider:. a. Does not have actual knowledge that the mat.
Flip side, although they are not the sole source of said legitimate content, they are a primary source. As an occasional Linux downloader, ISOHunt is where I've always gotten those ISO images. Admittedly, it takes a two second Google search to find another source, but the point is that it's the first place I and a lot of other people think of when they want to download a Linux ISO. Thus, clearly that constitutes substantial non-infringing use, regardless of what the MPAA lawyers might say.
I have a really. Interesting concept, 'The thing that accused infringement-aiding sites have to prove is that they have significant non-infringing uses' seems like your saying that if accused you need to prove your innocence. Where is the presumption of innocence, and isn't it the job of prosecution to prove guilt. Your presumed innocent so you do not have to prove that. Not a small legal concept and a pillar of our legal system.
But when money grubbing corporations see their profits erroding, they will get the ambulance c. It is well known that sites like IsoHunt have significant noninfringing uses because significant refers to the quality of the use, not the quantity (see Grokster.) Obviously, torrent trackers are great for distributing noninfringing material cheaply, which is a significant use. Significant noninfringing use, DMCA Safe Harbor, fair use, etc. None of that applies if your intent was to help people infringe and profit from it.
The public record abounds with Fung's intent. Fung got up on TV and brag.
It's not the same thing, not even close to the same thing. Telling someone about something illegal or how to do it is not the same as doing it. The MPAA/RIAA is attempting and succeeding at rewriting the rules to maintain their existing business model. Copyright/patents protections were never intended to be a lifetime stream of guaranteed income by content organizations, they were meant to advance technology and innovation. That concept is gone and we are seeing the affects.
Remember the safe harbor pr. There are plenty of torrent trackers that are exclusively free/legal content, they aren't being prosecuted Untrue. The RIAA presses suits against indie bands distributing their own music they made for a price they choose (Torrents and free respectively), for copyright violations.
It doesn't matter that they are in the right, what matters is it costs years worth of pay to purchase time in court to prove it. The copyright holder industries have shown time and time again that the only thing they want is to be the sole distribution (at a cost) of all musical media. Their statements, actions, and behavior all indicate th.
99% copyrighted material with no distribution rights from authors Google is in the same spot, unfortunately, unless you believe that not blocking their spider in robots.txt is equivalent to giving distribution rights. Somehow I don't think that's going to fly in court ('fair use' might). By the way, if your idea would fly, it would be practically impossible to run a site which distributes legal user-created content: the minute this site became a threat to Big Media's profit margins, they could easily pay for it to be 'DoL'-ed (that's a 'Denial-of-Legality' attack, when they pay third parties to upload enough illegal content to make it possible to sue and shut it down).
After all, Big Media has already been caught uploading its content to YouTube via third parties in a way to make it appear illegally pirated. I wouldn't put it past them to try this 'DoL' shtik. If your intention is to run illegal site you will be held accountable.
Isohunt doesn't run a tracker. They don't even host the actual torrent files. They simply provide a convenient search engine, and then download the torrent from the original source (example: from piratebay). It's like google, if google specialized in only searching for.tor files.
Aside -I better hurry up and find a different source for my 'NapisyPL' files. I like these files due to their tiny size (70 or 130 MB), but have no clue where they originated from. Time to find out before isohunt disappears. Since one cannot read minds, the best way to determine intention of a service provider is to see how they react to take-down notices (and similar requests to cooperate).
TPB was nailed precisely for that thing - they not only ignored them, they cataloged them (thus proving that they have received and read them), and then ignored them. But, so far as I know, IsoHunt does respect take-down requests. In fact, it complies with DMCA rules for that. So long as they do that, I don't see why allegations of aiding copyright infringement should have any substrance. I have already uninstalled bittorrent. It's perfectly usable with most VPN providers.
Or are you moving over to the more modern darknet variants instead? It's effective and that is why they do it. Effective for what?
Effective for convincing a lot of people that the industries in question are a significant threat to society? Effective for mobilizing a massive political blow-back? Effective for convincing consumers who'd otherwise happily provide the industries with income to go to inordinate le. Check out your local library. I've been using the library for about a year now. My library's selection is probably comparable to Netflix (I've recently watched several older movies like the Godfather series, and some WW2 era movies, the X-files series, soon going to watch the Farside), and if they don't have something, I've actually had pretty good success about requesting that they buy items I want and having them acquire them. My library actually has an Annex just for the older videos that they don't have on the shelves right now, and I have access to all of this material that I neither want to pay to watch one time nor want to store, I'm protected against my kids scratching disks.
Now, I live a 25 minute round trip from our library, but once a week, they send a Bookmobile (bus with shelves) all over the county, and I can request that they send my requested materials out on the local Bookmobile, which is a 6 mile round trip, which is closer than my nearest video store. I have had a couple of items that were so scratched I couldn't watch the whole thing, but I just requested a new copy and put a note in the old one so they could remove it from circulation. You're probably paying property taxes (even if you rent, the landlord is paying some of your rent in taxes) to support a library and this is a far better option than paying for the video store (I also get all items for 1 or 3 weeks depending on the item, and cheaper fees if I keep it too long), risking getting sued, or buying it myself. It's a game of whack-a-mole. My concern is the same is the real game of whack-a-mole. One game I played as a kid (sharks not moles), the better you did, the more the game speed up until it was impossible to win. The internet is all about copying, it's fundamental, and it's never easier.
It's what Turing machines do. Consider Streaming even, there is not such thing as streaming, it's still downloading, however renamed to keep rightsholders from realising what it really is. Theoretically it's possible to create a file sharing service that is incredibly difficult perhaps almost impossible to monitor and trace. Onion routing works pretty well, there are robest methods of key exchange, and it seems encrypted links are good enough to protect online banking. All the while bandwidth, computational capacity and digital storage is getting better, faster and cheaper.
If one thought piracy was at an all time high now and the tide will start to turn against it, then one is like a luddite before the industrial revolution. Maybe Big Content does end up shutting down P2P faster than it can pop back up, and even win some candy floss in the process. Piracy will just move back to untraceable anonymous physical media. You see, one underestimates the bandwidth of a portable hard drive or USB stick moving from A to B.
What about ACTA border searches of your iPod and laptop? Considering the size of a 32gb MicroSDHC Card now, (I was amazed when these things came out at 2gb!) it becomes possible to move 40+ VCD movies in something as big as your fingernail which a data smuggler could stitch into clothing for gods sake. Still don't get what I mean?
A high end 32gb SDHC card costs alot, but so did a $10 4gb card once upon a time. What happens when these things hit 500gb, 1000gb? Become so cheap that you give them away like we do with burned CD/DVD-Rs now? Another example, my entire music collection (legit) took up most of my expensive 80gb harddrive in 2003/2004. Today that same price point, buys me a 1.5TB drive, with change.
My music collection that has only grown a little suddenly has a trivial footprint. A hypothetical pirated movie collection of hundreds of 700mb VCD-quality movies now fills up a good chunk of ones hypothetical 1TB drive. In six years that will be nothing on my $100 50TB drive. By the end of the decade you could afford to have a desktop computer with every major movie of the last 50 years stored on it with room to spare. Yeah so you were thinking maybe we are seeing the end of piracy, but it's only just getting started. Suddenly Big Content seems like a bunch of luddites tearing down the machines of the revolution, failing to see the precipice of change coming. Once the admins and users will start getting jail time and huge fines more often, we would have already moved to more decentralized and anonymous P2P technologies, and if not, such a (predictable) move would just accelerate this migration.
And besides, dictatorships crack down heavily on their internet users, but these users still try to get past censorship despite very heavy risks for their own lives. What makes you think that western governments' cracking down on filesharers will have any more effect than what China, Iran et. Do to their people? Filesharing will go on, it will just be a little bit more underground and not so open as it is today.
If I go home tonight, can I log on to MSN Messager and expect it to be painfully easy to download all of this week's Xbox 360 releases with just a few clicks? Hey, if I've got a friend who buys all this week's 360 releases and Rips them into ISO's for me, then I sure as heck could.
So what seperates IsoHunt from say an MSN Chatroom, where I happen to come across such a buddy. The fact that it makes the process more efficient? They shouldn't be stopping the people optimizing the downloading, they should be stopping the people downloading, or the ones uploading!
I don't buy drugs and I don't deal drugs but if I tell someone who wants drugs where a drug dealer is - tha. So what seperates IsoHunt from say an MSN Chatroom, where I happen to come across such a buddy. The fact that it makes the process more efficient?
1) You've got it. It's more efficient. Choose your battles.
If you're an environmental activist, are you going to go after the guy flicking a cigarette butt out his car window or the electronics recycling center that dumps everything in a city park? 2) My original main point. Can torrent sites be used for legitimate purposes? But people perpetuating that argument are, apparently, caught up in theory and completely ignoring reality. The sites are made for software piracy, pure and simp.
Wrong question. Would having a 20-year copyright have a deleterious effect on creating new works? I rather think not; I doubt many business ventures rely on payments 20 years away for their justification. Now, what benefit would I have from a 20-year copyright? Far more material in the public domain. Far less lost creative material (it's easy for things to get lost over 70+ years of neglect). Less problem with reproducing creative work; consider the TV show 'WKRP in Cincinatti' which cannot be reprod.
Because I'm willing to let you use my work for free ideas are not something that can be controlled the free exchange of ideas leads to a better understanding of the universe. I believe it's reasonable to charge someone for your labor however you shouldn't be able to charge anyone they choose to share it with. As the labor is finite but the product is infinite only the labor can be reasonably charged for. It's the pricing that's become unreasonable. A song should not cost a dollar forever eventually cost is. Until consumers have a compelling reason to buy an authorized copy Thats the problem with the system - is that an unauthorized copy can be more than enough for most people.
So what are you going to do to make the authorized copy more compelling? Name something you can add to an authorized copy that can't be added to an unauthorized copy. Aside from something physical you can't download (like a poster), or locking it with DRM (which people fight against) you simply can't make it more compelling to buy.
Tell you what - implement a system that says if I own every CD by a given. It depends on what we're talking about. Music, for various reasons, is just too convenient to pirate. Most people can't tell the difference between a decent-quality MP3 and CD quality. It's already in a format you're most likely going to want it in (unlike physical CDs), they're small enough that even if the seeders aren't very fast you're not waiting very long for your file. The only way they can compete is price.
I bought far more music from allofmp3 back in the day than I bought from iTunes. I don't like isohunt (for reasons I can't remember) and I think copyright violations are wrong in some/most cases (I'm in the 10-20 year copyright crowd), but why would isohunt or anyone else who gets hit by judgements care much?
It doesn't take too many hours to move the site to some other country. And as a former abuse-handler of a large webhost, I know that simply hosting whatever you're doing in a different country that the people who wants to shut you down will make it very hard for them (at least in countries not ruled by the RIAA or MPAA.) (as abuse-handler, the best part of my job was to tell all morons sending me DMCA-notices to stuff it, since the DMCA is a US-thing and if they had a valid complaint to make they would say so instead of using silly DMCA-mails to [email protected]). 'Fung claims he's still hoping for a more agreeable resolution that won't result in IsoHunt closing its doors,' Hah! That's a joke, right? More agreeable that having to remove infringing content? The only thing more agreeable than that is if he removes it all AND pays massive fines. More agreeable to.him.?
That's equally funny. For that to be a remote possibility someone in authority would have to be okay with him facilitating the transfer of copywrighted material and there's just about. I realize Canada is a party to the Berne Convention, but what does a US Judge have to do with a site run entirely in Canada? On a side note, the original judgement against them was the categorized system in which users access torrents, specifically that it had sections for movies, music and such that could be browsed without a search input.
They have been working on a 'lite' version of the site that removes all the functionality that the MPAA complained about and are hoping to present it as a way to stay in. Most cities have these buildings full of books and even media, which they seem perfectly happy to loan out for free. I'm not entirely sure what their business model is, but they've been doing this for as long as I can remember, so it appears viable, strange though that may seem. It might be time to rediscover them. Until the Dewey Decimal System is identified as 'An indexer providing links to materials under copyright' and gets shut down by the courts.
Oh sure, Melvil Dewey might try to claim he was only trying to provide a way for people to find material, but the links in the Dewey Decimal System clearly link to material he doesn't own, and that he has no right to make available. I mean, you use the site to search for the desired torrent, and then click to download the.torrent file - it would be easy to host the.torrent files on a separate server, seperate site, or by a separate company altogether. Would this get around the ruling? 'Piercing the corporate veil' - establishing the connections between A, B and C - is well worth the effort for the payoff it delivers in court. The prosecutor has all the elements of a criminal conspiracy in his hand. The felony charge. When people start infringing copyrights, they are attacking centuries of legal thought.
No, less than a century of legal thought, as before the 20th century copyrights had reasonable lengths. I wonder how much 'pirated' material is older than 20 years?
Copyright is not about ownership, it is about a limited time monopoly to get creators to create. Jimi Hendrix will perform no more; his work should be in the public domain, as should anything else longer than the length of an invention's patent. Nothing made before 1990 should be covered by copyright, and if it wasn't I believe there would be little piracy. I'm sure creativity would evolve much faster. Like technology, art is built on what has come before. Nothing is created out of a vacuum. And when copyright terms are extended, it is also an attack on centuries of legal thought.
The sole purpose of copyright is to enrich the public domain by promoting the publishing of art and sciences by granting a limited monopoly on distribution. Extending the term of that copyright is a direct attack on that sole purpose, while 'piracy' is merely an attack on the method of promotion. Copyright law is a misnomer, it is really copyright restriction. We all have a right to copy anything we want, this is a nat.
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