Skapare sends word from TorrentFreak that Norway's Simonsen law firm has
lost their license to pursue file sharers.
"Just days after Norway's data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it's now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won't be renewed." Skapare adds, "Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA. More info on the Norwegian perspective in this
Google translation from Dagbladet.no."
Half-right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA.
A bigger part of it is just that European governments take the privacy of their citizens very seriously.
Except Britain, of course.
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And Sweden *cough*IPRED*cough*
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*cough*IPRED*cough*
I recommend seeing a doctor, right away.
Re:Half-right... (Score:5, Funny)
A bigger part of it is just that European governments take the privacy of their citizens very seriously.
Except Britain, of course.
I was under the impression the British government took privacy very - almost too - seriously. They even have those cameras set up to monitor private lives - ensuring no one's right to privacy goes overlooked or unwatched. How can the government know their citizens have privacy if the government can't watch?
Parent
How do I Immigrate? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How do I Immigrate? (Score:5, Informative)
Instructions [www.udi.no]
Parent
Re:How do I Immigrate? (Score:4, Funny)
Critical oil industry application skills would be a help. Or saturation diving experience.
. . . and if your idea of Christmas Dinner is a blow-torched sheep's head, you're in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalahove [wikipedia.org]
"I got dibs on the tongue!"
Parent
Re:How do I Immigrate? (Score:5, Informative)
Before we scare away all the nice people, it's a traditional christmas dinner but not the most typical. Top three are pork ribs, Pinnekjøtt [wikipedia.org] and Lutefisk [wikipedia.org]. A minority has also adopted the english christmas turkey, smalahove is probably around 5th place. P.S. If you read anywhere that Pizza Grandiosa [wikipedia.org] is popular for christmas, it's for the kids that don't want the wierd stuff :D
Parent
Re:How do I Immigrate? (Score:4, Interesting)
Top three are pork ribs, Pinnekjøtt and Lutefisk.
Advice: avoid lutefisk. It's nasty, very nasty.
In fact, in the nastiest dish in the world competition, Norway powered into second place with lutefisk. It was judged more repulsive than Scotland's haggis, but less disgusting than the Swedish entry, surströmming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstrmming [wikipedia.org], even the Swedes have to drink a bottle of vodka before eating it).
Boiled sheep's eyes or raw sea-slugs taste a lot nicer than lutefisk or surströmming. I speak from actual experience.
Parent
One third right... (Score:2)
And Germany. And...?
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All in the name of war against terror, of course.
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This is not over yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is that what is police business is now pretty much outsourced to a private entity. An entity with a very strong economic stake in said business.
The ip addresses this firm has collected has for instance been used to demand personal information on users from ISPs. They want to have the right to acquire that sort of information -without- involving the courts. That is completely unacceptable. What makes this even worse is that what is currently happening an
Re:This is not over yet... (Score:5, Funny)
"Pirate-hunters" -- you are speaking of course about their age-old enemies, the ninjas?
Parent
Re:This is not over yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Pirate-hunters" -- you are speaking of course about their age-old enemies, the ninjas?
Is this why we never hear of piracy reports from Japan. I just put two and two together and it now makes perfect sense.
Parent
Re:This is not over yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
"- Da er et brev med en anbefaling på ingen måte nok. Hvis ikke det kommer noen nye opplysninger, vil jeg ikke tro at brevet gjør noen særlig forskjell, sier han. "
(..since we recently had a meeting with the department concerning this..)
"- A letter with a recommondation is by no means enough. Unless there is new information relevant to the case, I do not believe the letter will make any difference".
Parent
Or maybe they don't care... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe its not that they care so much about privacy that they don't care so much about piracy.
The reason the US gets so butt-hurt about piracy is because hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office (mostly S Korea, France, India and mainland China and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions), and my guess is that the number is even smaller when it comes to DVDs.
Now I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that a lot of the locally produced works in Norway receive significant public funding. If true, that's also an incentive to ignore piracy because if tax dollars are paying for the creation then it isn't a big leap of logic to expect that the results are "owned" by the public too.
So, from that perspective, it seems reasonable that anti-piracy would be near the bottom of the list of government priorities in Norway (and many other countries for that matter).
Re:Or maybe they don't care... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe its not that they care so much about privacy that they don't care so much about piracy.
The reason the US gets so butt-hurt about piracy is because hollywood dominates the entertainment business worldwide - there are only a handful of countries were domestic movies regularly outsell hollywood productions at the box office (mostly S Korea, France, India and mainland China and some of that is helped by quota restrictions on foreign productions), and my guess is that the number is even smaller when it comes to DVDs.
Now I'm going to make a wild-ass guess that a lot of the locally produced works in Norway receive significant public funding. If true, that's also an incentive to ignore piracy because if tax dollars are paying for the creation then it isn't a big leap of logic to expect that the results are "owned" by the public too.
So, from that perspective, it seems reasonable that anti-piracy would be near the bottom of the list of government priorities in Norway (and many other countries for that matter).
I've always felt that when govenrments worry about things like piracy and drug usage, what they're really doing is sending the message "we have an overabundance of resources and personnel which is why we can afford to worry about these things -- please reduce our size and power immediately." The message is quite clear but there are a lot of people who have difficulty interpreting it.
Parent
So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters: (Score:2, Interesting)
We've a few questions.
1. What's the tech economy like over there?
2. How long does it take to learn your language OR how English friendly is it?
3. What's the average cost of living in your cities?
Thanks in advance.
Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters: (Score:4, Informative)
1. It's OK. Mostly in finance and oil industry. Java (SOA) is heavily used.
2. Business is basically English (even for Norwegian companies). My company has Swedes (lots), Sri Lankan, Englishmen, couple of Indians/Pakistani, French. Coding/documentation is in English.
3. About like Bay Area.
All that, and we get standard 5 weeks of paid vacation, paternity/maternity leave (husband/wife get to share how much they spend at home the first year), strong currency (relatively cheap to buy stuff when you travel), beautiful Swedish women.
Minuses: a socialist government and Jante Law [wikipedia.org] ingrained in the Norwegian psyche.
Parent
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Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters: (Score:5, Informative)
If you make a lot of money, and spend most of it on non-food, it is probably possible to pass 60 %, but that is rare.
I would also say the numbers are misleading without some information on what you get. Norway, like the rest of Europe, has universal heath care so there is no health insurance to pay, no matter what preconditions you may have. The taxes also include unemployment benefits, a pension plan and 100 % pay for a year if you can't work due to illness. Comparing tax rates without accounting for insurances you absolutely need to have is not fair.
Parent
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In isolation, no. However, taxes have a unique status among all other expenses: they tend to affect all companies equally. So if you make widgets, and your tax rate increases, so does the rate of all other companies making widgets. Result: price of widgets increases by some margin. The supply-and-demand scenario you mention does not apply here.
It'd be nice if you would address this before being so quick t
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Top-tax is 48% (starts at 450.000kr if I remember it right). Why don't you guys just simply google it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world [wikipedia.org]
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Because a native might provide information on the secondary taxes not listed on that page.
It is a great page, but it doesn't come close to the total tax load.
In the US, the stated tax rate is 28% on the page.
In reality, it's much higher.
So I know that the rate on that page doesn't include.
Social security Taxes (7.5%) -- except for rich people.. who it can be .1% or less (esp if they structure their income as dividends) .1% o
Employer portion of social security (7.5%) -- except for rich people.. who it can be
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You forgot Medicare taxes (2.9% of income?) too.
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1. Soso. Opera's doing very nicely these days at least. :p Also, I think we're a leading force in micro/nano technology.
2. Norwegian is kinda hard to learn as you can't learn it well by studying alone. It has so many ways of expressing yourself that wouldn't make any sense in eg. English. I guess it's the same for most languages, but Norwegian is considered a hard language to learn because of all the irregularites. Something we learn in school is "EVERY rule has an (many) exceptions." :p English and Norwegi
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I think Dubai was more expensive than Oslo :)
But it's OK, actually. Most big cities in the north and west of Europe are getting expensive, but salaries are matching. Apartments can range from a few thousand NOK if you have luck (my cave is one of the cheap ones) to 15000 NOK (well over $2000) if you're an idiot. You don't need to live smack-dab in the middle of downtown, especially if you don't actually work there. It's also a relatively small city, so despite the best efforts of Ruter/NSB, you can get to w
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I don't know why you think that Norwegian is hard to learn but we have a student from England here and he learnt fluent Norwegian within a few months without any major effort. The language is pretty easy, no fancy grammar or the like.
Try learning Russian or Finnish and then compare it to Norwegian!
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Major companies work in English. English is a required language in all schools now, so only the older people and the language challenged can't speak it in some way. But, Norwegian isn't so hard to learn. Lots of words shorter than English ... "light and sound" is "lys og lyd" ... "USB memory stick" is "USB minne pinne" ... "lightning and thunder" is "lyn og torden". And "FAEN [youtube.com]" is the universal curse word.
Cost of living in the Oslo area is very high (you might want to try Trondheim if you like the cold
Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters: (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Norwegian myself, though lived there 7 years. Possibly moving back in the near future.
You forgot to ask for:
So yes, it's a pretty nice place to be, unless you can't stand snow, rain, and socialists in power.
Parent
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Nice summary even though I don't understand how one could think that French would be easier to learn than Norwegian.
Actually 100% of the movies are original language with subtitles, except for children stuff. I have yet to find a single dubbed 12+ movie.
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1. Opera is based in Oslo. A couple of Oil&Gas oriented IT companies exist.
2. Norwegian is very easy to learn if you actually take a little time and do it. But it's not required, especially not for an IT job.
3. Oslo is one of the most expensive cities in world, but so are the incomes.
Plus: a socialist government, 44(54) weeks maternity/paternity leave 100%(80%), amazing countryside
Have a look at wikipedia. If you like to live the "American dream" then you will probably be disappointed. If you life witho
Election year (Score:5, Informative)
Don't expect this to be the last word on the matter, the politicians just don't want to rock the boat right now.
The Minister of culture has openly supported the vigilante tactics of the "pirate-hunters", but this is probably not the right time of the 4-year election cycle to do anything drastic.
During the last election the same man promised to re-legalese file sharing. The statement was retracted only days after a surprising high turnout of young voters won him and his party the election...
It's not fair! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Damn, I wish I were Norwegian!
Well, if it's any consolation, you can at least blame your mother for that.
Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Anybody getting of on that shit needs to have their dick cut off.
That's perhaps a bit harsh. I know a couple of guys that get off over anime drawings of young looking girls. The stuff revolts me, I find it incredibly repulsive... But we talked about why it is that they like younger looking females, and we all agreed that the most plausible explanation (we could think of) was that attraction to younger females was at one point in our evolution quite favourable due to much shorter life spans. If you were going to breed, you did it when you were young. This of course select
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Yarrrrr... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm currently sitting here listening to an mp3 of the Symphony of the Seas, from the old album Hooked on Classics, along with mental flashbacks of the scene where the Jolly Roger was raised during Pirates of the Carribean.
As this article refers to a victory for piracy, it is a good opportunity to issue a collective, impassioned scream of defiance against the very concept of intellectual property; to remind ourselves of who the enemy is, and why they must, and eventually will, be entirely and unrelentingly destroyed.
WIPO, RIAA, MPAA, and other related organisations, you are recognised as institutions which perpetuate the toxic mentality that making money is, in itself, more important than being alive to spend it. In our ongoing war with you, it is we, the greater public of this planet, who have the will of God on our side. We will have justice. We will have vengeance.
You are going to be removed from human memory.
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Yes, small.
I see what I'm doing as "value added". My years of work are the "value added" part.
Besides, you could easily apply those same concepts to "real" property. Take land-property as an example: the earth was here long before humans.
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Once you bring in "value added", suddenly cars and crops become legitimate property. The same goes for the digital world.
Not quite.
A car is legitimate property because it can only be in one place at a time. If I take your car, you don't have it anymore. As the owner of a car, you have the right to hang onto that car until you voluntarily give it up, so if I want it, I'll have to pay you (or convince you some other way).
Information doesn't work that way. You can keep your copy of a song, program, etc. and use it however you like even while someone else is distributing copies: their use can't possibly conflict with your use. It
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2. I'm not defending the excessively long copyright lengths that we see. Personally, I think ten or twenty years is plenty. What I'm arguing about is the idea that copyright lengths should be eliminated, or filesharing legalized. What those things do is effectively reduce copyright lengths to 0 seconds. Heck, I've toyed with the idea of putting my own work under a much shorter copyright length (like a 14-year founder's co
A good start... (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy ser (Score:2)
Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously
I wish my government would. Little did the founding fathers suspect that some day our privacy would be at risk, or it would have been included in the Bill of Rights.
The summary is wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
The "pirate chasing"-lawyers got a temporary license in 2006 for doing exactly that while we were waiting for new laws.
That license is now expiring (This autumn) and they're not getting a new one. Not because they want to protect the privacy of Norwegian citizens, but because temporary is temporary.
Now, read my last sentence again please.
(Still though, Norway's a good place to live - can recommend it to everyone!)
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If I ever find you, you son of a bitch, I will pummel you within an inch of your life with magic missiles until you beg for mercy. Perhaps if my mood at the time feels chaotic evil I will cast chromatic spray upon you for the coup de grace. You should beware because I am much more powerful than a lowly level 5 dwarf. Huzzah!