The interesting thing is, there's a Wired News article about something similar to this concept in this very day's issue.
Freenet (not to be confused with the library system of providing free Internet access) apparently creates a sort of decentralized network for the exchange of files and information and such. It looks like an interesting idea, though critics charge it would be nothing more than a tool for piracy.
What about the time Barnes & Noble sued to try to stop Amazon from calling itself "the world's largest bookstore" because they didn't have a brick-and-mortar presence (like, ahem, Barnes & Noble) and hence shouldn't be able to call themselves a "bookstore"? And I'm pretty sure there have been other little squabbles that slip my mind at present.
Huh? I don't think you can sue someone just beacuse you dissagree with there use of a word. That dosn't make any sense. If you say "I'm cool" does that mean I can sue you if I think you're an idiot? hrm... maybe that would a good thing:P
It's called "truth in advertising" laws. If they "feel" that Amazon is being "misleading" with its advertisements, ie representing itself as something it isn't, they can sue. Even if it's for no damages, just to make them stop using that term in advertising, it's still a general nuisance and money drain.
If Bezos had simply obtained the patent, and kept it in the company's portfolio for defense, then he would have some merit in that point. But he took B&N to court, and
stopped them from using the "1-click" system. He used that patent offensively, not defensively. (And as far as was mentioned, B&N wasn't throwing Amazon any legal punches before Amazon did).
What about the time Barnes & Noble sued to try to stop Amazon from calling itself "the world's largest bookstore" because they didn't have a brick-and-mortar presence (like, ahem, Barnes & Noble) and hence shouldn't be able to call themselves a "bookstore"? And I'm pretty sure there have been other little squabbles that slip my mind at present.
Barnes & Noble has never liked the idea that an on-line concern might, theoretically, do to it what B&N itself does to the little independent bookstores wherever it puts in a shiny new B&N franchise. They'd be very happy if they could put Amazon out of business, and have been trying to throw whatever monkeywrench they can into Amazon's plans ever since it first came to their attention. Not to mention, as I've noted elsewhere, ripping off pretty much the entire look and feel of Amazon's site for their own.
I dislike the necessity of having to use patents defensively. But I'm finding it harder and harder to blame Jeff Bezos for protecting himself and his firm using means that others would use to try to bring him down if he didn't.
How would YOU react if you'd spent all the time and effort Bezos has, only to see that a competitor is copying everything you do, and trying very specifically to put YOUR company out of business? What other methods are there, legally, to stop this sort of thing?
This is a very good point. How many of you have looked at Barnes and Noble's website? It's more or less an exact copy of Amazon's, right down to the page layout and fonts. If you could sue for "look and feel," Amazon would have them dead to rights. It's extremely tacky, especially when you consider that B&N was a Major Name in the brick-and-mortar bookstore world long before Amazon even existed...and was itself engaged in the tacky business of putting smaller brick-and-mortar stores out of business. They didn't even bother to try to innovate...why, when you can rip off a perfectly good competitor's site style? Frankly, I'm surprised that the one-click deal was the only thing Amazon has sued them over.
Which is why, if I don't buy from Amazon, I definitely won't buy from B&N.
Well, Sigma Designs is making a driver for their new Netstream 2000 decoder card...they're even open-sourcing all components except the driver itself (which will be linked to as a binary library file). You can read about it in their Linux newsgroup on their company news server.
Sadly, this is a card that costs $200, as it's more of an industrial-strength info-kiosk/server type device than a consumer DVD decoder card. And they're still refusing to do even binary drivers or an unencrypted Linux file player for the Hollywood Plus out of fear that it would break their agreement with DVDCCA or be used to play deCSS'd DVDs, respectively.
Also somewhat annoying is the fact that when someone asked about BeOS drivers in the Linux group (a perfectly legitimate question, IMO), Marshall Goldberg, their marketing director, replied, "I'm sorry, but this is the Linux area, not the BeOS area." (And there isn't a BeOS area on their server.)
"It's a well known technology truism that all of the smart people don't work for you, and that one of the surest ways to success is to get more ideas and more work out of people outside your own fences."
Proof positive that Tim O'Reilly knows from whence he speaks. That's got to be one of the most effective and concise explanations of the philosophy behind open source development I've ever read.
This is so...but mainly because it's a direct paraphrase of one of the central theses of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which is widely considered to be the canonical explanation of how and why the open source development process works. That's how it came to be a "well-known technology truism."
What I want to know is, when will the netscape-common & netscape-communicator RPMs for Red Hat be out? Why do they always lag behind the "official" releases, anyway?
I'm not sure whether the act of moderation could be accomplished via NNTP or not...if it were just done via the web browser, I could see an "X-Moderation-Threshhold" header, altered in the actual article on the server when someone marks a message up or down on the webpage. (I'm assuming that Slashdot would use a single NNTP server model, like SFFnet and others.)
For the ads, I could see a Deja/Sexzilla-style "advert-.sig" being added to the end of each comment. I have to note, though, that any web site that depends on banner ads for its revenue is fooling itself; I use Junkbuster and only RARELY view Slashdot ad banners--and I expect a lot of Slashdotters do the same. My computer's screen is my property, and I want as few banner ads taking up space in that property as possible--not to mention the extra time it takes them to crawl down my 33.6 modem line.
...I have no problem with Disney wanting to retain the copyright on Mickey Mouse.
People are always getting "Copyright" and "Trademark" mixed up.
Characters (such as Mickey Mouse) cannot be copyrighted. They can be trademarked.
What does this mean?
If Disney had let the copyright expire, people could have released copies of "Steamboat Willie" and other such cartoons on tape, the way people can print the earlier Sherlock Holmes books or other classic works. But as far as I know, they couldn't have created "Mickey fanfic" because the character is still a trademark of Disney, and would continue to be for as long as Disney's around.
This is the exact same thing, almost word for word, that the Lucasfilm folks have been saying for months, including the last time this story popped up on Slashdot. Nothing has changed. Are our memories so short that we need these constant "reminders"?
Y'know, I think we're all missing a big opportunity here. Just as the Christian Fundamentalists saw the "impending Y2K disaster" as a possible chance to minister to those who could be converted by adversity, we should see the AOL problem as a chance to convert people to better means of Internet access--free means of Internet access.
Here's a list page that keeps track of all free ISPs for all operating systems.
Worldspy's system requires no ad-banner viewing (though why they want you to download nine megabytes of Javastuff to use it is a bit beyond my comprehension).
Pro-USA offers free ISP service into perpetuity (or at least for as long as the service lasts) for a $30 total setup fee plus filling out one marketing survey per month. This service is simply the same sort of basic PPP that any ISP provides--so Linux is perfectly acceptible.
Of course, I expect that the reason many of these people continue to use AOL even with the rapid growth of local and free ISPs is the extra "value-added" services AOL provides...forums and specialized content and such. In which case many of the people will be unreachable.
But anyone who connects to AOL simply due to a promise of free hours should be told that there are unlimited free hours out there for the taking. Not to let them know is unconscionable.
The '80s cartoon, while it had potential, was incredibly lame in a lot of ways. Its plot was Yet Another Gilligan's Island Retread, it bore only an orthagonal resemblance to the game, because it had to be sanitized of all those "nasty nonChristian elements" like, say, clerics...and by giving each character a "magic gadget," it seriously detracted from believing in the characters' own innate skills. To say nothing of breaking the fourth wall by having the characters interact with a "Dungeonmaster". (Hey, guys! Free clue...the Dungeonmaster is the one who's controlling everything! Of course he could send you home if he wanted...)
This movie, on the other hand, is one of the things I've been looking forward to for the longest time...there's been so little good D&Dish stuff available.
(By the way, for any who like the same sort of fantasy as D&D in books, look into Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, and P.C. Hodgell's Godstalk and Dark of the Moon.)
At my K-Mart, the cash register prints out two receipts: one for the customer to keep (with full number printed thereupon) and one for the customer to sign (also with full number & other data printed thereupon) which then goes into our till. I am led to believe that we need that copy in order to be able to charge the customer for the merchandise. I don't think we could have the number blacked out and still process the charge.
The fact of the matter is, there are lots of people who could steal your card number...and not just in the places you use it. People at the bank who issued it could get ahold of it, too...people could (and have in times past) take rubbings through the envelope in which it is delivered to you. The only way to keep your number a complete secret is not to use it at all...and what would be the point of that?:)
Thankfully, many of the places where one could potentially use a stolen credit card number are becoming more watchful about getting verification of details, such as billing address. It won't stop fraud completely, but will help cut it down.
The thingie of it is, they couldn't institute a better encryption scheme on DVDs.
Why? Why good ol' Uncle Sam's "strong encryptions are munitions, heh heh heh" laws, of course!
In order for DVD technology to remain exportable to foreign shores, the level of encryption embodied within it had to be very weak. Undoubtedly they would gladly have put something it would have taken the NSA to crack on it if they could, but they legally couldn't and still be able to sell it overseas. They were, thus, relying on security through obscurity, and, as it ever will, it came around to bite them on the arse.
I just want to back up the feelings that I have and that have been growing due to rampant abuses of power and the fact that a little conspiracy has essentially screwed a whole class of people over.
Dude, you're seeing things from a strictly user-based perspective. There are a lot of things in the 'net that are beyond user control...but choice of ISP isn't one of them. If your ISP does something you don't like--be that yanking things from you, or behaving so badly as to get themselves UDP'd--then you can change to another.
I've posted elsewhere in this thread about public-access or commercial news servers. They are out there; you can use them, and since USENET is all they do, you can be darned sure they do it pretty well. You're not strictly locked into one ISP forever, you know.
The net shouldn't cost so god damned much in the first place.
Guess what? It doesn't anymore. In fact, if I lost my school account, I could 'net completely for free just by using a dialin account from someone like AltaVista, Bluelight.com, Worldspy, or any of the dozen other free-dialup ISPs out there. (Granted, I'd be stuck in Windows as none yet support Linux, but still.) Add those to a news-only ISP, and you've got free news.
An AC in a reply down below stated a very good question that probably will never get looked at: Who keeps Moderating this guy up?
Nobody does. He, like I, has been around long enough, and posted enough things that he has had moderated up, that he's gained the +1 Karmic Posting Bonus that you get when your Karma reaches 25. Thus, unless he checks the "No Score +1 Bonus" box (as I did for this post, since it's really off-topic and not worth starting out at 2), all his posts will start out at Score: 2 automatically. Whenever you see a "Score: 2" with no reason after it, you can generally assume that to be the case for that particular poster.
FirstNoel, I'm glad that you've learned about how USENET and UDPs operate through following this discussion. I regard that to be the one good use for kooks like S-term; they provide a good counterfoil for us to use to present our arguments and explanations.
Well, let's see. There's Deja & Remarq just for starters.
Yahoo also has a listing of public-access USENET sites. Sadly, spammers being who and what they are, most public-access sites that allow posting soon become abused right out of existence.
There are always choices for USENET service. Even if you already pay your ISP for its USENET, additional access elsewhere isn't really all that expensive. These are also viable options for people who use free dialin services like AltaVista or Blue Light that don't provide anything beyond bare-bones dialup access.
Man, all your posts should be moderated up as "Funny".:) I never cease to be amused by watching the kooks scuttle out like roaches when the light comes on in response to discussion of a UDP...
What is the network made of? Think about that for a moment. It's not made of T1 and T3 and other cables and routers...because by themselves, those wouldn't have any information flowing through them.
Soylent Green is made of peop--er, ahem, the network is made of computers. And each computer in that network is owned by someone. Be it a university, a corporation, a single person...all these count as individuals in the eyes of the law.
Just as a whole bunch of people who own a club may decide, collectively, that they don't want some other person in it, the whole bunch of people who own the network's computers may decide that they don't want some other person's computer using it. That's perfectly legal. As has been explained to you over and over and over and over. But you don't seem to get it, and will continue not to get it.
Oh well...at least you're providing a good reason for dozens of informed people to post their explanations so that those who are merely ignorant of the facts instead of stubbornly wrong-headed can make up their minds...
Your argument essentially boils down to the equivalent of, "Because I pay money to go into a building to watch a movie, I have the right to do anything I want to there! It's my money!" If you try doing that in real life, see how far it gets you.
USENET is not a "public" (ie, government-run) forum. It's a whole bunch of private machines strung together, and when you buy an account with USENET, you buy the right to use one of those private machines to access the content carried from the rest of those machines.
Sometimes one of those private machines will start dumping crap into the channels used by the rest of those private machines. The owners of those other machines will take every possible initiative to try to get the owner of that one crap-spewing machine to cut it out. Finally, strictly as a last resort, they will tell the owner of that machine, "Until you get your act together, you can't join in any of our reindeer games" and thus kick him out of the network.
Yes, this hurts the little people who subscribe through that machine. That's the whole point! Now the owner of that machine will find himself under pressure from within as well as from without--either he fixes the problem, or his users leave him for other services that can provide what they need. And since the UDPers always give a good amount of notice, I would guess that most of the time a UDP is threatened, it never actually becomes necessary because the sheer threat of it is enough to force the offender to clean up his act.
At any rate, as others have noted, participation in a UDP is strictly voluntary; any site can configure itself to ignore cancels from UDPers. In practice, of course, few do, so the threat remains effective.
This is simply an example of USENET's self-regulation mechanisms at work...when someone gets too out of line, he either gets kicked back into line or gets kicked out. It's actually kind of neat, seeing how a system with no one governing body in charge can still regulate itself. Sort of gives you hope for humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Freenet (not to be confused with the library system of providing free Internet access) apparently creates a sort of decentralized network for the exchange of files and information and such. It looks like an interesting idea, though critics charge it would be nothing more than a tool for piracy.
Maybe so, but someone found it amusing enough to moderate it up one. Which is more than can be said for you. :)
Why is everyone so hostile against Microsoft for putting smaller software companies out of business?
My understanding is that they simply can't compete--sad, but it's not Microsoft's fault. They simply do the same thing more efficiently.
Barnes & Noble has never liked the idea that an on-line concern might, theoretically, do to it what B&N itself does to the little independent bookstores wherever it puts in a shiny new B&N franchise. They'd be very happy if they could put Amazon out of business, and have been trying to throw whatever monkeywrench they can into Amazon's plans ever since it first came to their attention. Not to mention, as I've noted elsewhere, ripping off pretty much the entire look and feel of Amazon's site for their own.
I dislike the necessity of having to use patents defensively. But I'm finding it harder and harder to blame Jeff Bezos for protecting himself and his firm using means that others would use to try to bring him down if he didn't.
Which is why, if I don't buy from Amazon, I definitely won't buy from B&N.
Believe it or not, someone actually has created (and is trying to market) such an animal.
Sadly, this is a card that costs $200, as it's more of an industrial-strength info-kiosk/server type device than a consumer DVD decoder card. And they're still refusing to do even binary drivers or an unencrypted Linux file player for the Hollywood Plus out of fear that it would break their agreement with DVDCCA or be used to play deCSS'd DVDs, respectively.
Also somewhat annoying is the fact that when someone asked about BeOS drivers in the Linux group (a perfectly legitimate question, IMO), Marshall Goldberg, their marketing director, replied, "I'm sorry, but this is the Linux area, not the BeOS area." (And there isn't a BeOS area on their server.)
What I want to know is, when will the netscape-common & netscape-communicator RPMs for Red Hat be out? Why do they always lag behind the "official" releases, anyway?
I'm not sure whether the act of moderation could be accomplished via NNTP or not...if it were just done via the web browser, I could see an "X-Moderation-Threshhold" header, altered in the actual article on the server when someone marks a message up or down on the webpage. (I'm assuming that Slashdot would use a single NNTP server model, like SFFnet and others.)
For the ads, I could see a Deja/Sexzilla-style "advert-.sig" being added to the end of each comment. I have to note, though, that any web site that depends on banner ads for its revenue is fooling itself; I use Junkbuster and only RARELY view Slashdot ad banners--and I expect a lot of Slashdotters do the same. My computer's screen is my property, and I want as few banner ads taking up space in that property as possible--not to mention the extra time it takes them to crawl down my 33.6 modem line.
People are always getting "Copyright" and "Trademark" mixed up.
Characters (such as Mickey Mouse) cannot be copyrighted. They can be trademarked .
What does this mean?
If Disney had let the copyright expire, people could have released copies of "Steamboat Willie" and other such cartoons on tape, the way people can print the earlier Sherlock Holmes books or other classic works. But as far as I know, they couldn't have created "Mickey fanfic" because the character is still a trademark of Disney, and would continue to be for as long as Disney's around.
At least, as far as I know. IANAL and all.
Incidentally,
Quite a good cautionary tale.
This is the exact same thing, almost word for word, that the Lucasfilm folks have been saying for months, including the last time this story popped up on Slashdot. Nothing has changed. Are our memories so short that we need these constant "reminders"?
Y'know, this kind of post is just the kind of thing that the DVD CCA used as evidence against the DVD hackers in their testimony.
And let's not forget about the "These are from a bunch of criminals" T-shirts that nearly caused even more trouble in the suit...
Angry words hurt far more than they help.
*sigh* I'm beginning to think Katz may be right about something for a change.
Y'know, I think we're all missing a big opportunity here. Just as the Christian Fundamentalists saw the "impending Y2K disaster" as a possible chance to minister to those who could be converted by adversity, we should see the AOL problem as a chance to convert people to better means of Internet access--free means of Internet access.
Here's a list page that keeps track of all free ISPs for all operating systems.
Worldspy's system requires no ad-banner viewing (though why they want you to download nine megabytes of Javastuff to use it is a bit beyond my comprehension).
Pro-USA offers free ISP service into perpetuity (or at least for as long as the service lasts) for a $30 total setup fee plus filling out one marketing survey per month. This service is simply the same sort of basic PPP that any ISP provides--so Linux is perfectly acceptible.
Of course, I expect that the reason many of these people continue to use AOL even with the rapid growth of local and free ISPs is the extra "value-added" services AOL provides...forums and specialized content and such. In which case many of the people will be unreachable.
But anyone who connects to AOL simply due to a promise of free hours should be told that there are unlimited free hours out there for the taking. Not to let them know is unconscionable.
This isn't the only thing Gemstar's done recently that should concern us.
Gemstar also just bought NuvoMedia, the makers of the Rocket eBook platform.
I wonder if they'll be suing Peanut Press next for using an encrypted method of delivering electronic literature?
The '80s cartoon, while it had potential, was incredibly lame in a lot of ways. Its plot was Yet Another Gilligan's Island Retread, it bore only an orthagonal resemblance to the game, because it had to be sanitized of all those "nasty nonChristian elements" like, say, clerics...and by giving each character a "magic gadget," it seriously detracted from believing in the characters' own innate skills. To say nothing of breaking the fourth wall by having the characters interact with a "Dungeonmaster". (Hey, guys! Free clue...the Dungeonmaster is the one who's controlling everything! Of course he could send you home if he wanted...)
This movie, on the other hand, is one of the things I've been looking forward to for the longest time...there's been so little good D&Dish stuff available.
(By the way, for any who like the same sort of fantasy as D&D in books, look into Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, and P.C. Hodgell's Godstalk and Dark of the Moon.)
At my K-Mart, the cash register prints out two receipts: one for the customer to keep (with full number printed thereupon) and one for the customer to sign (also with full number & other data printed thereupon) which then goes into our till. I am led to believe that we need that copy in order to be able to charge the customer for the merchandise. I don't think we could have the number blacked out and still process the charge.
:)
The fact of the matter is, there are lots of people who could steal your card number...and not just in the places you use it. People at the bank who issued it could get ahold of it, too...people could (and have in times past) take rubbings through the envelope in which it is delivered to you. The only way to keep your number a complete secret is not to use it at all...and what would be the point of that?
Thankfully, many of the places where one could potentially use a stolen credit card number are becoming more watchful about getting verification of details, such as billing address. It won't stop fraud completely, but will help cut it down.
The thingie of it is, they couldn't institute a better encryption scheme on DVDs.
Why? Why good ol' Uncle Sam's "strong encryptions are munitions, heh heh heh" laws, of course!
In order for DVD technology to remain exportable to foreign shores, the level of encryption embodied within it had to be very weak. Undoubtedly they would gladly have put something it would have taken the NSA to crack on it if they could, but they legally couldn't and still be able to sell it overseas. They were, thus, relying on security through obscurity, and, as it ever will, it came around to bite them on the arse.
I just want to back up the feelings that I have and that have been growing due to rampant abuses of power and the fact that a little conspiracy has essentially screwed a whole class of people over.
Dude, you're seeing things from a strictly user-based perspective. There are a lot of things in the 'net that are beyond user control...but choice of ISP isn't one of them. If your ISP does something you don't like--be that yanking things from you, or behaving so badly as to get themselves UDP'd--then you can change to another.
I've posted elsewhere in this thread about public-access or commercial news servers. They are out there; you can use them, and since USENET is all they do, you can be darned sure they do it pretty well. You're not strictly locked into one ISP forever, you know.
The net shouldn't cost so god damned much in the first place.
Guess what? It doesn't anymore. In fact, if I lost my school account, I could 'net completely for free just by using a dialin account from someone like AltaVista, Bluelight.com, Worldspy, or any of the dozen other free-dialup ISPs out there. (Granted, I'd be stuck in Windows as none yet support Linux, but still.) Add those to a news-only ISP, and you've got free news.
FirstNoel, I'm glad that you've learned about how USENET and UDPs operate through following this discussion. I regard that to be the one good use for kooks like S-term; they provide a good counterfoil for us to use to present our arguments and explanations.
Well, let's see. There's Deja & Remarq just for starters.
Yahoo also has a listing of public-access USENET sites. Sadly, spammers being who and what they are, most public-access sites that allow posting soon become abused right out of existence.
For those willing to pay a bit of extra money, there is also Yahoo's commercial news server category.
There are always choices for USENET service. Even if you already pay your ISP for its USENET, additional access elsewhere isn't really all that expensive. These are also viable options for people who use free dialin services like AltaVista or Blue Light that don't provide anything beyond bare-bones dialup access.
Man, all your posts should be moderated up as "Funny". :) I never cease to be amused by watching the kooks scuttle out like roaches when the light comes on in response to discussion of a UDP...
What is the network made of? Think about that for a moment. It's not made of T1 and T3 and other cables and routers...because by themselves, those wouldn't have any information flowing through them.
Soylent Green is made of peop--er, ahem, the network is made of computers. And each computer in that network is owned by someone. Be it a university, a corporation, a single person...all these count as individuals in the eyes of the law.
Just as a whole bunch of people who own a club may decide, collectively, that they don't want some other person in it, the whole bunch of people who own the network's computers may decide that they don't want some other person's computer using it. That's perfectly legal. As has been explained to you over and over and over and over. But you don't seem to get it, and will continue not to get it.
Oh well...at least you're providing a good reason for dozens of informed people to post their explanations so that those who are merely ignorant of the facts instead of stubbornly wrong-headed can make up their minds...
Your argument essentially boils down to the equivalent of, "Because I pay money to go into a building to watch a movie, I have the right to do anything I want to there! It's my money!" If you try doing that in real life, see how far it gets you.
USENET is not a "public" (ie, government-run) forum. It's a whole bunch of private machines strung together, and when you buy an account with USENET, you buy the right to use one of those private machines to access the content carried from the rest of those machines.
Sometimes one of those private machines will start dumping crap into the channels used by the rest of those private machines. The owners of those other machines will take every possible initiative to try to get the owner of that one crap-spewing machine to cut it out. Finally, strictly as a last resort , they will tell the owner of that machine, "Until you get your act together, you can't join in any of our reindeer games" and thus kick him out of the network.
Yes, this hurts the little people who subscribe through that machine. That's the whole point! Now the owner of that machine will find himself under pressure from within as well as from without--either he fixes the problem, or his users leave him for other services that can provide what they need. And since the UDPers always give a good amount of notice, I would guess that most of the time a UDP is threatened, it never actually becomes necessary because the sheer threat of it is enough to force the offender to clean up his act.
At any rate, as others have noted, participation in a UDP is strictly voluntary; any site can configure itself to ignore cancels from UDPers. In practice, of course, few do, so the threat remains effective.
This is simply an example of USENET's self-regulation mechanisms at work...when someone gets too out of line, he either gets kicked back into line or gets kicked out. It's actually kind of neat, seeing how a system with no one governing body in charge can still regulate itself. Sort of gives you hope for humanity.