Category: politics

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TPB AFK

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard är en dokumentär om The Pirate Bay och dess grundare som hade premiär igår på Berlins filmfestival och online. Filmen har tagit fyra år att färdigställa och följer de tre grundarna av The Pirate Bay under rättegångarna. Filmen sägs vara den första film som har premiär både online och på en större filmfestival samtidigt, den kan ses och delas fritt.

På YouTube har den hitintills setts av cirka 103000 personer i skrivande stund.

Här finns fler länkar till filmen i olika format.

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Earth Hour 2012

Today is Earth Hour 2012.
Most lights in the office are shut off. I’m working the night, I usually do that whenever I work alone, but doing it with a thought today.

Changing the theme to require less energy to display (in theory, on CRT:s anyway 🙂 ).

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If a PDP-8 minicomputer can’t help with Greece, who can?


.BASIC
NEW OR OLD--OLD
FILE NAME--HELLO.BA

READY
RUN

HELLO BA 5A

HELLO, MY NAME IS PETEY P. EIGHT.

WHAT’S YOUR NAME ?BEARDY

HI THERE BEARDY. ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELF HERE
IN THIS WONDERFUL PLACE?YES

OH, I’M GLAD TO HEAR THAT BEARDY

SAY, BEARDY, I CAN SOLVE ALL KINDS OF PROBLEMS
EXCEPT THOSE DEALING WITH GREECE. WHAT KIND OF
PROBLEMS DO YOU HAVE (ANSWER SEX, HEALTH, MONEY,
OR JOB)?

Not even a DEC PDP-8 (simulated in SIMH) running OS/8 and a BASIC program, HELLO.BA, can help with Greece!

PDP-8

Guess if I dropped my jaw in surprise and amusement when I read that, when playing around with a simulated historic computer just now. If not even that can help to solve the problems of/with Greece, I guess they’re doomed! 🙂

On another note, SIMH is a great thing, the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer (from 1965) seems to have been a nice machine in its days, and OS/8 quite a decent OS for its time and environment. Expect another post on SIMH and simulating/emulating old computers shortly.

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Four years after The Pirate Bay raid

Apparently, yesterday it was exactly four years since (the) The Pirate Bay raid. Time really flies.. I remember it well. I think I probably still have the police lists of the confiscated computers in some dusty directory, they leaked, or was made available some time after, if I recall correctly that is.. (A few minutes later:) But I couldn’t find them now when looking, oh well.

TorrentFreak wrote:

After the raid it became clear that the US had threatened to put Sweden on the WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, with John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA writing a letter to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

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Exercising civil rights and duties

Today is the EU parliament election in Sweden. I have been exercising my civil right and duty, and voted. I think it’s important to do so, even if one isn’t very politically active otherwise, the least one can do is make an opinion and vote when there is an election.

I can report that things seemed to go well, all parties were represented in the box holding the ballots. Something slightly annoying was a person from one party standing outside of the house handing out ballots for his party. I guess that’s free for any party to do, but it only pisses me off, personally.

Continue reading “Exercising civil rights and duties”

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Conviction in The Pirate Bay trial, only a beginning

Yesterday, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor in damages, by The Stockholm District Court. The four, who have denied any wrongdoing, are expected to appeal the verdict and have previously vowed to take the case as high as the Swedish Supreme Court if necessary. (Pirate Bay guilty)

Lew has written an insightful article on Kiwipolitico titled “Social, economic and political fallout of the Pirate Bay convictions”. Go read it.

Continue reading “Conviction in The Pirate Bay trial, only a beginning”