Off the top of my head: Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recent recitation by their poetmaster Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning," four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been disappointed by the poem's reception and was just about to embark on a reading of his twelve book epic entitled "My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles," when his own major intestine, in desparate attempt to save life and humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all died along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, England in the destruction of the planet Earth.
I'm remembering this part in Peter Jones' voice and the other part in Douglas Adams', so I'm probably mixing up differences between the radio show and the HHG audiobook.
No problem. I gave it a miss too.:-) I may go back to WOT if he ever finishes it but the last few installments were so boring that I can't be bothered. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series is superior to WOT in every respect.
No, Doctor Who was the best Scifi show ever created.
Efforts to get that show played on Scifi-Channel would be better rewarded. 25+ years of eps without the derivitive dribble.
Doctor Who was good but certainly not as consistently good as Farscape. Your memory is doing a good job of keeping eps like City of Death and Curse of Fenric while filtering out Timelash or Horns of Nimon.
And FYI, Doctor Who did run for a while on Sci-Fi channel. Mostly from the mid-Tom Baker era in their original 30-min format and heavily edited to add commercial time. Efforts to get that show out on DVD faster would be better rewarded that offering it as pearls to the USA network swine.
The reason Farscape is being canned has nothing to do with the quality or ratings of the show, except perhaps that quality is expensive and they don't get all the dough. USA/Sci-Fi channel would rather pimp crap shows they own and can milk for syndication than run something worth watching.
Just my 2c, not to be spent on any product advertised during John Edward,
Paul
Heh, even a poor rip-off of Cowboy Bebop or Lexx would be worth watching. Certainly better than what Sci-Fi channel is showing these days. Did I mention they should be damned for cancelling Farscape?
Was that anything like the other Brit Sci-fi's? Y'know Dr. Who and Red Dwarf?
Less funny than Red Dwarf, more serious than Dr. Who. Production values were similar to Dr. Who at the time (late 70's/early 80's) with lots of blinking lights and spaceships that on screen were obviously models. Plots were often very slow, often made tolerable only by good dialogue from Avon, one of the B7 crew (well...in name at least), or Commander Servalan, the villian of the show who's always trying to recapture Blake and the rest. As I recall, Avon was the only one of the 7 that had any common sense at all, the rest would blindly walk into the most obvious traps. Avon wasn't a very sympathetic character though, but very well acted by (...short trip to imdb...) Paul Darrow.
If Firefly is like B7 it may have some promise but I doubt it'll be enough to replace Farscape (damn you Sci-Fi channel).
I seem to recall seeing an ST documentary (maybe it was Trekkies) with Braga claiming that ST is the only TV series that accepts scripts from fans. Having read a few fanfics, I shudder to think what most of those scripts must be like. Or how about trying to get the fans to agree on what direction the show should take? Yeesh.
I don't think the issue is that they don't have enough new ideas or writers, but that new ST limits itself too much with the magic-reset-button rule. All plots have to be resolved by the end of the episode without changing the situation or the characters, which really puts a damper on good stories. If they'd open themselves up to story arcs that encompass one or more seasons like Bab5, Buffy, and Farscape (damn you Sci-Fi channel, damn you all to frell), it might breathe some life into even the excruciatingly dull Enterprise. Of course, having to define a continuity might mess up their lucrative novel franchise so there's no way that'll ever happen.
I would say yes save the show. However, I dont' like that show. It's too much like Star Trek, which I hate. I mean, I'm a geek... Wait... I don't watch TV anymore really. Go ahead and cancel all the shows you want.
That was an important speech sir, and it needed to be made, but might I suggest that from this moment on, the rest of this discourse is conducted by those with brains larger than a grape.
So this link from/. should help him out quite a bit? Hooray for everybody!
I don't know about everybody. It might draw him here and the next thing you know, he'll have a site called slashdot-watch.com to complain that his posts aren't being modded up to 5.
Actually not so. The timelord council can actually grant certain time lords a second set of regeneration cycles, tho i forget exactly where i read this, i think it was in one of the advanced Dr Who books, when he was put on trial. This could get quite interesting. I dont see him running out of lives jst yet.
It was in the 20th anniversary episode, The Five Doctors. The Council of Time Lords offers a second regen cycle to the Master in exchange for helping the Doctor(s) trapped in the Death Zone.
Heh, I wonder if I can salvage some scrap of reputation by mentioning that I don't really have every Doctor Who fact memorized. I saw the ep about a month ago on DVD (with quite a good commentary track BTW).
Naturally a GUI is used to actually place the objects, and an excellent GUI at that. The best as a matter of fact, it feels wholly natural and like a third arm. But without the CLI it just would not be the same. The perfect blending of the two worlds.
Heh, my brother is the 3D modeler, not me (I just dabble in UT maps), so I'll bow to your superior knowledge and experience with the tools. And I agree with you, once you get the feel for an app and interface, everything becomes natural. I'm almost to that point with Codewright (still fighting some of the quirks) and the VDOS CLI built into it much nicer than searching for a cmd box in 40 or so open windows. Although, as nice as Codewright is for source editing, I'd give it up in a heartbeat if I could just say "Fix this code so it runs on the new platform. Format it nicer. Add the comments that should have been there in the first place." And then take an early lunch.:-)
After an extended use of Rhino3D today I found myself trying to type commands into Photoshop. . . .::sigh::
lol. I have the same problem with Opera and using mouse gestures in everything else.
The tradeoff between efficiency and intuitiveness will probably get smaller in the future, but progress requires both faster systems and better UI design. The faster part is easy, and in fact, a lot of the performance over time of a 1+GHz PC isn't used except by the newer games (at least that's true on my PC).
It's the development of better interfaces by the people who use computers day in and day out that needs to push forward. And the parent poster is right: the "CLI RuLeZ a11 d00d!" attitude of a large part of the geek community as seen right here on Slashdot isn't helping.
I'll bet dollars to donuts (mmm...dollars) that Microsoft R&D engineers aren't sitting on their asses, content that that Windows is the be-all and end-all of user interfaces. (Their Marketing might say that, but Marketing will say anything. And no, the MS R&D thing isn't just a joke...they don't really have an Apple to steal from anymore when it comes to interfaces). They know that if they don't, someone is going come up with a better interface and at that point, everyone else will be struggling to catch-up. Project Oxygen and similar efforts are promising, but without help they might end up to MS like Xerox PARC did to Apple (a bit of cash, but no future).
Paul (That last sentence makes me sound like I'm with Project Oxygen. Nope, just interested. I _am_ working toward a Master's in HCI though.)
The Unix ideal is small programs doing simple tasks. If you want something more complex you string them together. The command line works great for that and is arguably better than using a GUI to do the same sort of things, i.e. move a bunch of files, run them through a perl wringer, dump output to the printer, etc. all at once.
Some tasks don't fit the model of simple steps. There's more to life than just shuffling files around. How about writing a novel? Touching up a photograph? Building a UT map? Give me a GUI with point-and-drool over edlin any day.
The point of a good interface is no to require a human interact at every step, but to ONLY require human interaction when absolutely necessary: at the point a decision needs to be made. There's a lot of work that goes into an interface like that, whether it be a mass of linked scripts and batch files or an app that compresses the tedious work of drawing a Jurassic Park dino into a single button (sorry, 3DSMax joke). But it's worth it to the end user to be able to just point and say "Do what I want with that" (someday). Might even be worth money;-)
A mouse works well while sitting at a desk with a ~20in. monitor displaying at most 2K x 1.5K resolution, but try increasing the screen size by 10 or 100 so that it takes up an entire wall. Now using a mouse requires a lot more effort to move the pointer all the way across (and speeding up pointer movement comes at a cost of accuracy). It's much easier to point at what your looking at, especially if the pointer follows your finger movement.
How about 3D? It's difficult to map a mouse that moves in a 2D plane into a 3D environment. 3D joysticks and other controllers really aren't that much better. People already know how point to objects around them, and that's the whole point of the project; use the communication methods people already know instead of forcing them to learn new, mostly unintuitive ones. Just because typing and point-and-click are easy to learn and work fine with today's computers doesn't mean there's no room for improvement in HCI while everything else getter bigger and better.
Don't know about red bills, but I remember being handed some US Silver Certificates once, which look just like $1 bills, but have little blue banners on them. Legal tender nonetheless. Guy paid for a sandwich with 'em. Those things are worth, like $50 a pop to coin collectors.
The bills with a red seal are US Notes, the original national currency and last put into circulation by JFK. US Notes and Silver Certificates have been completely replaced by Federal Reserve notes (green seal) and are no longer printed.
However, they are still legal tender and should be accepted for face value. In most cases, the entertainment value of trying to spend one at a sandwich shop is worth more than the 10% over face value that you'd get from a collector. The only $1 silver certificates that are worth $50 to a collector are rare dates with a small printing run or in exceptionally good condition (Brilliant Uncirculated).
Im still looking for the part where I agree to give my soul to bioware when I buy the game. That always hapens when I buy one of these games.
It's Dungeons and Dragons. You lose your soul every time you play it.:-)
There's a Jack Chick comic somewhere in all this, probably one where the Young Innocent is duped into signing the NWN EULA in blood. Then Trent Oster pulls off a mask to reveal his true form.
I'm not sure I understand... are you talking pick out the books they want via the Web, go to the library, and pick them up (which few libraries will have the staff to do) or something else?
My local library network (Washington Co., OR) offers this service. The card catalog is on the web and holds can be placed by entering a library card number and pickup location. If the specified pickup library is different from the "home" library of the book, CD, or video, they'll ship it to be picked up, and back "home" when it's returned.
However, this probably only works because the area is limited and all the libraries are within driving distance of one another. With a larger network, the shipping costs would quickly become prohibitive, certainly beyond the means of a publicly funded library. Netflix can do it nationwide, but they charge a monthly fee which covers shipping (and they only rent DVDs, which are much lighter than books or videocassettes).
The parent poster may have been sugguesting lending books, music, and video digitally over the 'net, which would be much cheaper than using the shipping companies. However, this involves making copies, and libraries are not allowed to make photocopies or dubs to lend out, only the originals. There may be ways around this restriction, such as locking the digital copy until it's been returned (one suggestion from the Film88 topic). However, that's more of a gray area than the rights spelled out under the First Sale doctrine, and it remains to be seen how the **AA would react (my guess is they'd fight it).
You're right, the First Sale Doctrine (1976 Copyright Act, section 109(a)) does cover video rentals. It's software and audio recordings where rentals are limited by 109(b).
So I need to modify my argument a bit. Film88 is still different from Blockbuster because when BB rents a tape or disc, they're deprived of it for the duration of the rental. Film88 isn't deprived of their copy when they stream it to a customer. They are making an unauthorized copy, which is not protected under First Sale. (Yes, this is a bit of a twist on the popular theft vs. copyright infringement rationalization.)
They're different from Blockbuster because Blockbuster pays more than the ~$20 retail price for a VHS tape or DVD in exchange for permission from the copyright holders (usually MPAA studios) to rent out movies (well, and for early availibility too). Film88 is more like pay-per-view than Blockbuster, but again, the PPV channel has paid for permission to broadcast the movie.
It's the permission that's the key here; simply buying a copy of a movie does not give one the right to make more copies or give public viewings (however you want to interpret streaming video), as the FBI warning at the front clearly states.
Iran is not a signatory country to the Berne Convention or Copyright Treaties so it would be tough to go after a company based there. However, those treaties do allow the copyright owners to enforce their copyright in the signatory countries, so a customer could be prosecuted under the laws of the country where they live. So for those of us in the USA, read that FBI warning a little more closely.
Some disclaimers: IANAL. I also don't think that copyright holders should be allowed to pre-emptively prosecute or otherwise limit the rights of anyone who 'might' infringe, so please don't read any more into my comment than I put there, even if it appears to go against the Slashdot flow.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess Civil Rights Action Panel was on the list of rejected titles
Yup, just after the Civil Liberties Implementation Team.
-Paul
Off the top of my head:
Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recent recitation by their poetmaster Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning," four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been disappointed by the poem's reception and was just about to embark on a reading of his twelve book epic entitled "My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles," when his own major intestine, in desparate attempt to save life and humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all died along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, England in the destruction of the planet Earth.
I'm remembering this part in Peter Jones' voice and the other part in Douglas Adams', so I'm probably mixing up differences between the radio show and the HHG audiobook.
Paul
You want a bad original joke, how's this:
Q: What did the giraffe say to the elephant?
A: I'm taller than you.
Worse:
Q: What did the giraffe say to the sheep?
A: I'm taller than ewe.
Paul
missed Winter's Heart. My mistake.
No problem. I gave it a miss too. :-) I may go back to WOT if he ever finishes it but the last few installments were so boring that I can't be bothered. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series is superior to WOT in every respect.
Paul
No, Doctor Who was the best Scifi show ever created.
Efforts to get that show played on Scifi-Channel would be better rewarded. 25+ years of eps without the derivitive dribble.
Doctor Who was good but certainly not as consistently good as Farscape. Your memory is doing a good job of keeping eps like City of Death and Curse of Fenric while filtering out Timelash or Horns of Nimon.
And FYI, Doctor Who did run for a while on Sci-Fi channel. Mostly from the mid-Tom Baker era in their original 30-min format and heavily edited to add commercial time. Efforts to get that show out on DVD faster would be better rewarded that offering it as pearls to the USA network swine.
The reason Farscape is being canned has nothing to do with the quality or ratings of the show, except perhaps that quality is expensive and they don't get all the dough. USA/Sci-Fi channel would rather pimp crap shows they own and can milk for syndication than run something worth watching.
Just my 2c, not to be spent on any product advertised during John Edward,
Paul
It's spelled Schwartzschild -- as in "black shield" in German.
Sorry for the pedantry, but I had a tensors prof who grated us on that point needlessly for an entire lecture, so I can't help mentioning it.
Sorry to be pedantic about your pedantry, but your prof is wrong. Karl's last name is spelled "Schwarzschild."
Paul
Heh, even a poor rip-off of Cowboy Bebop or Lexx would be worth watching. Certainly better than what Sci-Fi channel is showing these days. Did I mention they should be damned for cancelling Farscape?
Paul
Was that anything like the other Brit Sci-fi's? Y'know Dr. Who and Red Dwarf?
Less funny than Red Dwarf, more serious than Dr. Who. Production values were similar to Dr. Who at the time (late 70's/early 80's) with lots of blinking lights and spaceships that on screen were obviously models. Plots were often very slow, often made tolerable only by good dialogue from Avon, one of the B7 crew (well...in name at least), or Commander Servalan, the villian of the show who's always trying to recapture Blake and the rest. As I recall, Avon was the only one of the 7 that had any common sense at all, the rest would blindly walk into the most obvious traps. Avon wasn't a very sympathetic character though, but very well acted by (...short trip to imdb...) Paul Darrow.
If Firefly is like B7 it may have some promise but I doubt it'll be enough to replace Farscape (damn you Sci-Fi channel).
Paul
The funniest part was using the Swiss Army Knife to do the assembly. I suppose it's possible, but I was LOL.
That knife is a Victorinox Cybertool. My last two systems were put together using one of those. Very handy (8 screwdriver bits!)
Paul
Chris Barrie would be perfect as Zaphod Beeblebrox. He already has the obnoxiousness and overblown ego down pat from playing Rimmer.
For Arthur Dent I really can't imagine anyone other than Simon Jones, the original.
Paul
Agreed, but NOT until he finishes Good Omens. I want to see Gilliam's vision of that even more than HHG.
Paul
Forget about the book, watch the movie again and ask yourself: who were the bad guys?
Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier.
Paul
I seem to recall seeing an ST documentary (maybe it was Trekkies) with Braga claiming that ST is the only TV series that accepts scripts from fans. Having read a few fanfics, I shudder to think what most of those scripts must be like. Or how about trying to get the fans to agree on what direction the show should take? Yeesh.
I don't think the issue is that they don't have enough new ideas or writers, but that new ST limits itself too much with the magic-reset-button rule. All plots have to be resolved by the end of the episode without changing the situation or the characters, which really puts a damper on good stories. If they'd open themselves up to story arcs that encompass one or more seasons like Bab5, Buffy, and Farscape (damn you Sci-Fi channel, damn you all to frell), it might breathe some life into even the excruciatingly dull Enterprise. Of course, having to define a continuity might mess up their lucrative novel franchise so there's no way that'll ever happen.
Paul
I would say yes save the show. However, I dont' like that show. It's too much like Star Trek, which I hate. I mean, I'm a geek ... Wait... I don't watch TV anymore really. Go ahead and cancel all the shows you want.
That was an important speech sir, and it needed to be made, but might I suggest that from this moment on, the rest of this discourse is conducted by those with brains larger than a grape.
Paul
So this link from /. should help him out quite a bit? Hooray for everybody!
I don't know about everybody. It might draw him here and the next thing you know, he'll have a site called slashdot-watch.com to complain that his posts aren't being modded up to 5.
Paul
Actually not so. The timelord council can actually grant certain time lords a second set of regeneration cycles, tho i forget exactly where i read this, i think it was in one of the advanced Dr Who books, when he was put on trial. This could get quite interesting. I dont see him running out of lives jst yet.
It was in the 20th anniversary episode, The Five Doctors. The Council of Time Lords offers a second regen cycle to the Master in exchange for helping the Doctor(s) trapped in the Death Zone.
Heh, I wonder if I can salvage some scrap of reputation by mentioning that I don't really have every Doctor Who fact memorized. I saw the ep about a month ago on DVD (with quite a good commentary track BTW).
Paul
Naturally a GUI is used to actually place the objects, and an excellent GUI at that. The best as a matter of fact, it feels wholly natural and like a third arm. But without the CLI it just would not be the same. The perfect blending of the two worlds.
Heh, my brother is the 3D modeler, not me (I just dabble in UT maps), so I'll bow to your superior knowledge and experience with the tools. And I agree with you, once you get the feel for an app and interface, everything becomes natural. I'm almost to that point with Codewright (still fighting some of the quirks) and the VDOS CLI built into it much nicer than searching for a cmd box in 40 or so open windows. Although, as nice as Codewright is for source editing, I'd give it up in a heartbeat if I could just say "Fix this code so it runs on the new platform. Format it nicer. Add the comments that should have been there in the first place." And then take an early lunch. :-)
After an extended use of Rhino3D today I found myself trying to type commands into Photoshop. . . . ::sigh::
lol. I have the same problem with Opera and using mouse gestures in everything else.
Paul
The tradeoff between efficiency and intuitiveness will probably get smaller in the future, but progress requires both faster systems and better UI design. The faster part is easy, and in fact, a lot of the performance over time of a 1+GHz PC isn't used except by the newer games (at least that's true on my PC).
It's the development of better interfaces by the people who use computers day in and day out that needs to push forward. And the parent poster is right: the "CLI RuLeZ a11 d00d!" attitude of a large part of the geek community as seen right here on Slashdot isn't helping.
I'll bet dollars to donuts (mmm...dollars) that Microsoft R&D engineers aren't sitting on their asses, content that that Windows is the be-all and end-all of user interfaces. (Their Marketing might say that, but Marketing will say anything. And no, the MS R&D thing isn't just a joke...they don't really have an Apple to steal from anymore when it comes to interfaces). They know that if they don't, someone is going come up with a better interface and at that point, everyone else will be struggling to catch-up. Project Oxygen and similar efforts are promising, but without help they might end up to MS like Xerox PARC did to Apple (a bit of cash, but no future).
Paul
(That last sentence makes me sound like I'm with Project Oxygen. Nope, just interested. I _am_ working toward a Master's in HCI though.)
The Unix ideal is small programs doing simple tasks. If you want something more complex you string them together. The command line works great for that and is arguably better than using a GUI to do the same sort of things, i.e. move a bunch of files, run them through a perl wringer, dump output to the printer, etc. all at once.
;-)
Some tasks don't fit the model of simple steps. There's more to life than just shuffling files around. How about writing a novel? Touching up a photograph? Building a UT map? Give me a GUI with point-and-drool over edlin any day.
The point of a good interface is no to require a human interact at every step, but to ONLY require human interaction when absolutely necessary: at the point a decision needs to be made. There's a lot of work that goes into an interface like that, whether it be a mass of linked scripts and batch files or an app that compresses the tedious work of drawing a Jurassic Park dino into a single button (sorry, 3DSMax joke). But it's worth it to the end user to be able to just point and say "Do what I want with that" (someday). Might even be worth money
Paul
A mouse works well while sitting at a desk with a ~20in. monitor displaying at most 2K x 1.5K resolution, but try increasing the screen size by 10 or 100 so that it takes up an entire wall. Now using a mouse requires a lot more effort to move the pointer all the way across (and speeding up pointer movement comes at a cost of accuracy). It's much easier to point at what your looking at, especially if the pointer follows your finger movement.
How about 3D? It's difficult to map a mouse that moves in a 2D plane into a 3D environment. 3D joysticks and other controllers really aren't that much better. People already know how point to objects around them, and that's the whole point of the project; use the communication methods people already know instead of forcing them to learn new, mostly unintuitive ones. Just because typing and point-and-click are easy to learn and work fine with today's computers doesn't mean there's no room for improvement in HCI while everything else getter bigger and better.
Paul
Don't know about red bills, but I remember being handed some US Silver Certificates once, which look just like $1 bills, but have little blue banners on them. Legal tender nonetheless. Guy paid for a sandwich with 'em. Those things are worth, like $50 a pop to coin collectors.
The bills with a red seal are US Notes, the original national currency and last put into circulation by JFK. US Notes and Silver Certificates have been completely replaced by Federal Reserve notes (green seal) and are no longer printed.
However, they are still legal tender and should be accepted for face value. In most cases, the entertainment value of trying to spend one at a sandwich shop is worth more than the 10% over face value that you'd get from a collector. The only $1 silver certificates that are worth $50 to a collector are rare dates with a small printing run or in exceptionally good condition (Brilliant Uncirculated).
Paul
Im still looking for the part where I agree to give my soul to bioware when I buy the game. That always hapens when I buy one of these games.
It's Dungeons and Dragons. You lose your soul every time you play it. :-)
There's a Jack Chick comic somewhere in all this, probably one where the Young Innocent is duped into signing the NWN EULA in blood. Then Trent Oster pulls off a mask to reveal his true form.
Paul
I'm not sure I understand... are you talking pick out the books they want via the Web, go to the library, and pick them up (which few libraries will have the staff to do) or something else?
My local library network (Washington Co., OR) offers this service. The card catalog is on the web and holds can be placed by entering a library card number and pickup location. If the specified pickup library is different from the "home" library of the book, CD, or video, they'll ship it to be picked up, and back "home" when it's returned.
However, this probably only works because the area is limited and all the libraries are within driving distance of one another. With a larger network, the shipping costs would quickly become prohibitive, certainly beyond the means of a publicly funded library. Netflix can do it nationwide, but they charge a monthly fee which covers shipping (and they only rent DVDs, which are much lighter than books or videocassettes).
The parent poster may have been sugguesting lending books, music, and video digitally over the 'net, which would be much cheaper than using the shipping companies. However, this involves making copies, and libraries are not allowed to make photocopies or dubs to lend out, only the originals. There may be ways around this restriction, such as locking the digital copy until it's been returned (one suggestion from the Film88 topic). However, that's more of a gray area than the rights spelled out under the First Sale doctrine, and it remains to be seen how the **AA would react (my guess is they'd fight it).
Paul
You're right, the First Sale Doctrine (1976 Copyright Act, section 109(a)) does cover video rentals. It's software and audio recordings where rentals are limited by 109(b).
So I need to modify my argument a bit. Film88 is still different from Blockbuster because when BB rents a tape or disc, they're deprived of it for the duration of the rental. Film88 isn't deprived of their copy when they stream it to a customer. They are making an unauthorized copy, which is not protected under First Sale. (Yes, this is a bit of a twist on the popular theft vs. copyright infringement rationalization.)
Another 2 rials,
Paul
(Still NAL)
They're different from Blockbuster because Blockbuster pays more than the ~$20 retail price for a VHS tape or DVD in exchange for permission from the copyright holders (usually MPAA studios) to rent out movies (well, and for early availibility too). Film88 is more like pay-per-view than Blockbuster, but again, the PPV channel has paid for permission to broadcast the movie.
It's the permission that's the key here; simply buying a copy of a movie does not give one the right to make more copies or give public viewings (however you want to interpret streaming video), as the FBI warning at the front clearly states.
Iran is not a signatory country to the Berne Convention or Copyright Treaties so it would be tough to go after a company based there. However, those treaties do allow the copyright owners to enforce their copyright in the signatory countries, so a customer could be prosecuted under the laws of the country where they live. So for those of us in the USA, read that FBI warning a little more closely.
Some disclaimers: IANAL. I also don't think that copyright holders should be allowed to pre-emptively prosecute or otherwise limit the rights of anyone who 'might' infringe, so please don't read any more into my comment than I put there, even if it appears to go against the Slashdot flow.
Just my 2 rials,
Paul