It’s really sort of a sore spot because we live in what I call an age of conformity, where you have to travel with the herd. If you don’t travel with the herd and if you don’t say yes to that little man who’s leading the pack, you’re branded as a rebel. I am trying desperately - I hope - to be an individual. I think there’s quite a bit of difference. Actually, I can’t stand them, they drive me out of my mind. The rebels. I see them at parties and they sit in corners looking terrible sensitive and introverted, and yet my feeling is they’re just as mediocre as the people they despise who are the conformists. Their answers are always pre-determined, the rebel always has to say no to everything society asks of him just as the conformist always has to say yes.
(Source: twelvevacancies, via godiseven)
About 7 years ago, I heard that a Senator named Barack Obama had been elected to the Senate. I thought it would be hilarious to change his picture on wikipedia to this one that I made using MS Paint:
I had no idea he would be the President of the United States one day.
If you’re ever extremely bored, look through wikipedia’s change log of the page, I’m sure it’s there.
(via slyandsuppafly)
Remember when NYC was a shithole? Most of us can’t because we’re not from here. But these pictures are a good look into some of the grossness that was The Big Apple.
I remember very clearly.
(Source: joshsternberg, via capitalnewyork)
@GSElevator was created by an employee at Goldman Sachs. They tweet conversations that they overhear at the office.
Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.
Because of Edison’s patents it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North American East Coast. The movie studios therefore relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there were no patents. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disney’s biggest hits ever.
So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other people’s creative works, without paying for them. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being able to re-use other people’s creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide by their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other people’s rules.
The reason they are always complaining about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between each other, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existence in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.
And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for Freedom of Speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.
The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a Swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet into a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the American people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and TV shows that make them think that they’re fat.
In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the World. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complaining that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.
Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.
(Source: torrentfreak.com, via samuelfromtheshire)
I picked up the HP Envy 14 Beats Edition laptop.
I really like the red backlit keyboard.
My posse's full of women, computer nerds and thugs. Much to my dismay, I'm none of the above.