Did you wonder why people from Syria and North Korea might actually want to visit that website?
I found the figure mentioned of 100 visitors from North Korea daily pretty amazing to be honest. I checked my own site stats and though there are visitors from 183 countries not one is from North Korea.
Pirate bay is not just movies. You can download plenty of books from it for free, university textbooks, philosophy, whatever.
It was for racial purity. At the time eugenics was a big deal, it stated that some genes which were exhibited as external traits were superior. Hitler was attempting to create a better world by performing artificial selection.
As much as his ideas and methods were bonkers and would never work the fact that humans have stopped evolving naturally is something that some people still want to change.
People are still evolving. Evolution is adaption to existing conditions and is basically impossible to stop. In fact dispute billions of years of multicellular evolution the cells 'in your body' and given time will develop into cancer, then portable cancer inside your body, and given the right conditions portable cancer outside your body.
To the poster below me: he is selling $2500 machines. The people he sells the machines to sell the $.25 napkins but the machine can make 1000 napkins a day. One machine properly worked could turn a gross profit of $91,250/year. He has sold 600 machines so far so that is $1.5 million that the inventor has grossed.
Maybe they aren't super rich but I am sure the napkin makers and the inventor are both doing better then they would otherwise and more importantly they are keeping the money in India.
You need to divide $91,250 by 8 (=$11,406.25), because the napkins are typically sold for $0.25 for 8 of them. Then, subtract out the costs of energy and raw materials and divide the result by 4 (the number of people it takes to work the machine), and each operator makes perhaps $2000. Based on some of the comments in this thread, that's still not bad for rural India, but it's not nearly the numbers you report.
Well there are also people like Jonathan Coulton (the guy who sings "code monkey") who started with nothing and built a fan base. Also he did the ending song for both Portal games.
No doubt there are examples of people who built a fanbase online from nothing.
But I'm sure it helps a lot if you happen to write songs that appeal to nerds and then get featured on slashdot as a sort of novelty act. I don't see that working as well if you write earnest alt-folk love songs instead of songs about Mountain Dew.
Incidentally, there was a story about Coulton on NPR not long ago [1].
But I'm sure it helps a lot if you happen to write songs that appeal to nerds and then get featured on slashdot as a sort of novelty act.
Isn't that kind of the whole point though? You can't just be a no-name, release some music that is very similar to a large number of artists in a popular genre of music, and then expect to hit it big.
The internet is not restricted to nerds anymore. Sure, your average musician isn't likely to get a mention on Slashdot, but there are about a zillion different forums/blogs/etc out there covering a zillion different topics, and if your music appeals to even a small subset of them you can get some pretty cheap advertising. And if your music is good, you can start to build off of that.
I am not sure what Google pays in dues but I am willing to bet it is in excess of $100,000 and probably closer to somewhere in 10 digit range. That is a financial blow that would put pressure on them to stop alienating progressive businesses.
I remember hearing an anecdote many years ago that when food supplies where being dropped over Afghanistan it was the pop-tarts and peanut-butter that were the most popular.
