It might help if you refrained from using the word "Otaku". To you, it may mean "enthusiastic anime fan", but to anyone who actually speaks Japanese, it means "pathetic loser with no life". If you're intending to inform people about a subject, you might want to avoid offending them.
And WTF do you think that/. and User Friendly's favorite word, "geek", means to the outside world? I don't think they think "technology enthusiast" when they hear "geek." Yet,/. readers do. And so do otaku.
"Hi, I really like your product, but I don't want to give you any money for it. You are going to go on making it, right, so I can just steal it? Hello?"
That's the problem, see. Like all digital media, a DVD is trivial to reproduce once its made. In an industrial scale, it's less than $1/disk. But the content on it is not trivial to produce. Animation requires lots of people and lots of time, and altho' the end product is cool, and the people making the storyboards probably have a blast, the actual cel-by-cel drawing must be incredibly tedious work.
I'm playing devil's advocate to some degree here, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that, for the most part, we're talking about the piracy of TV shows. Shows that are shown on television. Shows that people regularly tape or TiVo, often with the commercials removed. Am I "pirating" Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I taped it when it was on the air instead of buying the new $50 full season DVD set? Or more importantly, besides the legal definition of piracy (which certainly does apply if tapes are traded between friends), am I doing something EVIL and WRONG by watching a taped TV show?
With the exception of the fact that someone slapped some subtitles on it so I could understand it, I am only pirating anime to the extent that I pirate every single TV show that I watch --- taped, with the commercials eidted out by my VCR.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go turn myself in for years of stealing TV shows. I'd also like to publicly apologize for the theft of numerous Firefly episodes. I really should have paid for them by making sure that I watched them as they were aired on TV, and then just decided to "go without" if I missed it by abstaining from watching tapes, so that I wouldn't be a thief.
don't like the woman at all, as I'm sure most/. readers don't, but that doesn't matter. She does have a right to privacy. There was no reason for her name to be mentioned on that website. One point in the lawsuit specifically states that the house is not listed in public records under her name. Like most of her property its registered under a corporate identity that can't be easily connected to her to protect her privacy. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if he hadn't disclosed the name of the owner, which is not required for the purposes of his site.
Holy shit! Not only do people not have the right to view my lawn and the exterior of my home, but they also don't have the right to figure out who owns it? I better call my lawyer, but I've got an entire neighborhood to sue. I've also got to go down to the local sign shop and print up a nice, big sign saying, "Thank you for driving by. My lawyer will be contacting you later today."
I'm definitely in favor of privacy rights, but those rights should not extend to things that you can see on my block with the naked eye. It also shouldn't be applied selectively to celebrities. If someone can take a snapshot of my home and say who lives there, then they should be able to do the same thing for Barbara Streisand.
I'm forced to conclude that the RIAA knows that more diverse, alternative radio stations are also more likely to play independent artists and are (maybe) less likely to accept payola, so the RIAA is afraid that the increased sales won't necessarily be of major label releases, and that is the explanation for their opposition to webcasting.
I think you're right on the money, there. It's better to be dying a very slow death on the top of the heap than to take a big gamble for more money and accidentally end up in the number two spot below a new competitor. Right now, the RIAA's profits are shrinking every year. If they took a gamble and tried to introduce new radio station owners to the radio market, they could end up losing ALL of their profits to someone with a better business model and better content.
Just because they've got a terminal disease that will probably kill them off in a decade doesn't mean that they should just walk out in front of a bus and end it now.
Well, guess what, a group of COMPETITORS drawing large market share is NOT MONOPOLY. It is not even collusion. It is competition to draw an audience. It is like accusing auto amnufacturers of having a monopoly because they all amke cars and people buy the cars of 5 competitors 90% of the time, even though the smaller competitors make cars at the same price.
The more popular argument against the rule changes, rather than the idiotic "We're living under monopoly rule" argument that you picked out for your own purposes, is that we DON'T live in a society where the media is controlled by just a handful of voices, and we should keep it that way by resisting further mergers. You're arguing that the media isn't controlled by a few conglomerates, but that there are actually many voices out there now, so why do you want to move toward the media being controlled by a few conglomerates? You seem to recognize that that situation would be a bad thing, but yet you seem to want it to happen, as well.
Disclamer: I am not against the 2nd amendment, it is just that that argument is freakin' weak...
Actually, it definitely helped the Kurds in northern Iraq (aka "Kurdistan"), who have been able to hold their position and build a suitable government in relative safety with the help of machine guns, grenades, and other deadly weapons. With just their own soldiers and their own arms, they had been able to hold off not only the Iraqi government, but also Iranian proxy armies and Al Qaeda forces right up until the Americans came into Iraq a couple months ago and solved almost all of their problems. They even managed to hold off a major offensive from a group that is assumed to be from either Iran or Al Qaeda right before the American and British invasion, and with hardly any (if any at all) help from the Americans or the British.
If tyrannical groups can hold their land against outside forces with guns, then so can less repugnant groups, and that's exactly what the Kurds did for all that time.
IIRC, my local Blockbuster was offering a new service several months ago. Basically, you pay a flat rate and you get 30 DVD rentals per month, which is practically unlimited rentals for anyone but a large family of movie fanatics with several TVs. I haven't seen much of it lately, though...
Haven't they figured out yet that the people that download this crap will NEVER EVER actually buy the DVD release. If you're going to spend DAYS downloading some crappy copy over a P2P network rather than spend a lousy $10 to see it, then that's sad. My time is worth more than a $10 movie ticket. I'll see it in the theater and buy the DVD when it comes out.
Two things. One, it doesn't take days to download it, it takes hours. Three hours on a broadband connection, if you had actually read the article before speaking ignorantly. Second, the people that rent the DVD for $5 from Blockbuster or at an even lower price from Netflix aren't going to buy the DVD, either.
Oh yeah, one more thing. The guys that download the film can do something else while it downloads. They can click the link, then walk away for three hours while it downloads, and then click the file to start it up. What were you doing while the trailers, commercials, pathetic trivia questions, and advisories not to talk during the movie were playing before the movie started?
I am soooooooo tired of this argument. It comes up every time, and always gets modded +5 insightful. Let's be honest, all right? We like KaZaA (Lite) because it lets us download music, movies, pr0n, and software without paying for it. Yes, it's a tool, and I'm sure that there are people using it to download Phish and Pat Matheny concert bootlegs (which I'm told is legal).
And I'm tired of THAT argument. I don't know what you're downloading (but I have an idea of it, because you keep using the word "we"), but a lot of us aren't just getting free stuff without paying for it. A lot of people are downloading ISOs, or free music (there's quite a lot of it, much more than just bootlegs of artists that have signed with record labels), or the loads of free videos like trailers, animated shorts, combo vids, etc. that are available I think that if you really asked around, you'd also find that a lot of us are just downloading episodes of TV shows, which is definitely illegal, but only as immoral as taping the show yourself and fast-forwarding through the commercials. In fact, a lot of the P2P and Fserv advocacy I've heard on/. has basically amounted to either, "Wow, I actually found early episodes SLIDERS (or --insert old sci-fi TV show here--) on Kazaa/IRC/BitTorrent" or "Dude, you can watch Buffy/Enterprise a day early with Kazaa!".
The point is, just because you're pirating lots of copyrighted stuff doesn't mean that the rest of us are. You have no idea what we're downloading, so don't assume. A lot of it is legal and the majority of it is grey area stuff like TV shows or fansubbed anime, and both of those are things that none of the copyright holders really care about.
CD's are not $24!!!! Where the hell are you buying CD's? I walk into most record stores in Toronto and 99% of the time pay no more than $18 Canadian! Popular music is often found for $14. I know that it's similar pricing for CD's in American dollars, and that this is still too much, but dude, let's be realistic. And what CD's are you buying where there's only one good song? I think you need to reevaluate your tastes. There are plenty of good venues for low CD prices. Various online merchants, and emusic have been mentioned in this thread.
$24USD is an exaggeration, but so is $14USD. It's more like $18USD for a new CD, providing that what you want hasn't been shoved into a larger package to force you to pay for stuff that you don't want, such as what has been done with a lot of popular rereleases for older bands in the last few years. And regarding Emusic and such, the parent poster's point was not that music cannot be gotten cheaply, but rather that the RIAA should price it so that you can walk into a music store and buy it for a lower price. Regardless of whether what Kazaa users are doing is morally justified or not, it's just senseless for the RIAA to see the demand for their products declining and not lower the price of those products. There's no real competition in the music industry because of the close-knitted nature of the RIAA and that may or may not be showing in their profits, but they should certainly try something new, because what they're doing isn't working.
First off, yes, there are other services that offer a flat rate. Buffets, cable and satellite TV, Netflix, MMORPGs, car leases, local land line phone service, Blockbuster's new rental service, and many other businesses have a flat rate business model and many of them survive and thrive.
Second, the problems with metered bandwidth. First off is viruses. Many DDoS worms could actually force you to hit your maximum upload capacity for an entire month, which is a problem that is far too common on the internet but absolutely never happens with the food at your restaurant, the gas in your car, or the electricity in your home. Couple that with manually activated worms being used by script kiddies and the lack of an itemized bill (what are they going to do, list every file you downloaded in a month?) and your bill could be worthy of dispute every month. Since you would never know exactly what your entire family may have downloaded, you'll have a problem arguing that a hacker probably stole $10-$30 worth of bandwidth from you, but your ISP will have no problem taking your money.
Another problem is that programs don't come with usage labels. My refrigerator, hot water heater, washing machine, dryer, etc. all come with stickers telling me how much power they use. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, IRC, e-mail spam, and streaming media do not. Again, this is where bandwidth is different than food, gas, and electricity. I know how much food I want to eat and how much it costs. I know how much gas my car uses and how much I need. I know how much electricity the appliances in my home normally use and how much my bill should be. Bandwidth, on the other hand, could produce a completely different bill each month for reasons that the customer probably won't understand, and which could be the result of worms and script kiddies.
If the broadband ISPs want to switch to a metered service business model, then that business model will not be fair to the consumer until a legal mandate is made forcing every program that uses the internet to reveal its bandwidth usage in the same way that a home appliance has to have its electrical usage marked and cars must have their fuel efficiency marked. It also won't be fair until computers are just as easily secured as walking around the side of your house and making that there isn't an electrical cable leading from your house to your neighbor's. Unfortunately that breakthrough is being held back by the first crucial step in its implementation: teaching a pig to fly.
We've been threatened with metered bandwidth since Napster was released, possibly for good reason and possibly because it was just a convenient way to justify squeezing more cash out of us, but I've unfortunately never seen anyone truly analyze the problems that it has, and why it might not be waiting for us in the future after all.
Your local electric providor just keeps charging away per Kw/h of electricity you use, and if you have a higher 'demand' for said electricity you get charged extra for daring to need more electricity than what they deem as a 'nominal' usage during that time period.
So really, ISPs want to be the electric company of our data. The more you use above what they deem 'nominal' you pay a demand fee for and an increased fee over the guy down the street that lives off of one light bulb that is on only one hour a day.
I believe that the point he was making was not about metered bandwidth, but rather the ridiculous justification that the broadband ISPs are using for metered bandwidth, which is that UNSCRUPULOUS BASTARDS (customers) are engaging in SEEDY ACTIVITY (use of what they paid for) and must be stopped. If they said "Hey, y'know, this just isn't working out financially and we need to rethink the deal", that would be one thing, but instead, they're claiming that we need to give them more money because we're using our unrestricted internet access for seedy, and apparently restricted, activity. And this is when they even admit that their bottom line isn't in danger, but that they would just like more money, and they seem to infer that they will be colluding with each other to make sure that there's no cheaper competition. It's like being lectured by a kleptomaniac on the sanctity of personal property.
Was it, or was it not, designed to be used in this way? If it was not, why does the system let you try it?
Your microwave isn't designed to let you put an AOL CD or a piece of tinfoil in it and turn it into a box-shaped firecracker, but it still lets you try it. So the simple answer would be that it lets you do it because it can't control absolutely everything that it interacts with. A download manager isn't designed to be run at the same time as an MP3 player, AIM, ten browser windows, an IRC client, and downloads in other programs at the same time, but it still lets you try it because it has no control over those programs, no different than the microwave's lack of control over your hand and your AOL CD.
Re:short term - new clients are too configurable
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BitTorrent Guide
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Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload, which pisses off the kiddie leechers who don't realize you gotta pay(full upload capacity) to play(maxxing out your download.) I noticed right after the "advanced" and 3rd-party tools came out that speeds dropped.
Whether or not the ability to change your upload speed is a good thing or not is actually debatable, in my opinion. Take the recent release of Ragnarok Online, for instance. Once you download the game, you want to play it, but because it's an online game, you need at least some of your upload speed to play it. With the ability to change your upload speed, you can put the required 10kbps upload or so to playing Ragnarok and the other 12 or 20kbps upload to serving Ragnarok Online to more people on BitTorrent. Without that, you just have to shut BitTorrent down to play the game, which wastes 20kbps that could've been used to send the game to more people.
Because of the processor and bandwidth load of constantly uploading 30kbps to people, I usually have to shut BitTorrent down whenever I want to use what I've downloaded, even if it's just a video (I, like many people, have a slow machine). The ability to easily throttle BitTorrent would, in my case, actually contribute to others, rather than taking something away from them.
The full release was supposed to be an expansion that would cost money, but the expansion was scrapped and now it is being released as a free multiplayer game that doesn't even require RtCW to play. In other words, it's sort of like America's Army. It's an organization releasing a product simply to say, "Hey, we're cool. We make good products, we're nice to our customers. Think about buying another one of our products some time down the line, eh?"
Just to make sure there's no confusion: The final release WILL be free. This is a free beta test for a free game.
So, lets hold a poll; how many customers would American Greetings lose as a result of slashdot readers boycotting them? I think the count will be prety low. Chances are better if you start convincing your parents or grandparents to stop using those cards...
If your parents or grandparents like greeting cards, wouldn't it stand to reason that your birthday/wedding/anniversary/christmas gift to them would also contain... a greeting card?
Everyone uses greeting cards, just some more often than others. Just about any adult or teenager with a distaste for American Greetings is a lost customer for them.
Yes, I'm sure every 6 year old child dragging her mom thru Toys'R'us will now be saying, "Don't buy me THAT mommy - her manufacturer supresses free speech by threatening to persecute adult parodies of it on the web!"
American Greetings is an international greeting card, candle, and merchandise company that sells far more than just Strawberry Shortcake merchandise. Plenty of adults buy their greeting cards for special occasions and I doubt that their primary market for candles is six year old children in Toys R Us. Since just about every adult in the countries in which they do businesss celebrates birthdays and weddings, an adult's assertion that they will never buy anything from American Greetings again will indeed be a customer lost.
With that said, when you use something so obvious as Firebird for the name of your application, you damn well better get a trademark or something because you should just assume zillions of others will think of using the same name. This was a mistake the database people made, for sure.
Trademarking the name wouldn't have mattered. In the eyes of the law, a browser and a database are probably just as far apart as a car and a plane. Sure, they're the same thing in an extremely general sense, like "software" and "vehicles", but in actuality, they are very different. They are not, metaphorically, sold on the same shelf. They perform completely different tasks for different markets and that means that they can both coexist peacefully.
The only reason people think that trademarks are such overwhelmingly powerful things that give you total control over a name in all areas of business is because of how easy it is to steal domain names and such away from people through third parties that have nothing to do with the law, such as ICANN. In legal practice, trademarks aren't really that broad, and this is a legal matter.
Since calling it Firebird is a recent change, why not just pick another name if it's becoming such a big deal? Any particular reason to stick with the name Firebird for Mozilla other than the fact it's already been publicized? If they're getting so much heat from it, I think they should just pick another name right now and end this.
It took them months to find a new name because AOL required a lengthy legal investigation into the legality of the name "Firebird." That investigation did not reveal the FirebirdSQL project because it is a different type of product and therefore has no right to a trademark violation suit against Mozilla. It would take AOL another several months to find another name that didn't infringe on anyone's trademarks, but then this whole problem could just crop up again when another completely unknown company, project, or product claims that they had the name for something else completely different that still doesn't have any basis for a trademark violation suit.
Or to put it simply, they're not changing the name because changing the name costs money and FirebirdSQL has no case against them.
Which pair is more similar, a web browser and a database, or a web browser and a BIOS?
Apparently the legal discrepancy came up because the Phoenix BIOS has a browser feature integrated into it that does not have a different name from the BIOS itself. So yes, I'd say that a web browser named "Phoenix" and a BIOS/browser combo named "Phoenix" are more similar than a web browser named "Firebird" and a database named "Firebird", since the first pair includes two identical things (browsers) with the same name and the second does not.
Just like if someone named their dump truck "firebird". Pontiac could have a fit... it's still a vehicle, even if the use case & market is different.
Software is a much larger field than four-wheeled vehicles. They can serve completely different purposes from one another and often not even touch each other, which isn't the case with two four-wheeled vehicles that drive on the same roads, are both controlled by a steering wheel, both have a brake and an accelerator, etc. I think it's more analogous to vehicles, period.
So if Boeing named their new stealth bomber "Firebird", would Pontiac be right in claiming market confusion? They're both vehicles, even though they serve completely different purposes and are sold in completely different markets. Would Boeing be morally obliged to give up the name?
Actually, we see far more than twenty stupid patent articles a year, but what's more important is that the only ones that we see on/. and other major tech sites are the ones that interfere with other businesses, like the various "I own the internet" sort of patents on linking and online stores that have been issued to several different companies. There are many other patents that are awarded for very stupid things that are physically impossible or will obviously never see the light of day, but those aren't really worth causing a stir about because they won't interfere with anyone's lives. They did, however, bog down the patent office and create enough of a backlog for the patents on linking and online stores to slip through, so they should be a pretty big deal for the patent office itself.
do not think that the Moz team should use Phoenix. Even though it probably passses a legal litmus test, as they are very different products, that doesn't mean they should continue to use it.
I think it would be nice to show some respect to another open source project which precedes yours.....
I guess the summary is, just play nice with others and change the name out of courtesy for others.
Personally, I think that whatever moral high ground the FirebirdSQL people had went out the window when they immediately engaged in a pathetically childish campaign to spam the forums and email boxes of the people that they had a disagreement with. After that little show of petulance, I hope the Mozilla Firebird people hold onto the name like a pit bull with a piece of steak. People with no respect or courtesy for others do not deserve respectful or courteous treatment. They probably deserved the name before, even though they just have a little project that no one has heard of before and no one could reasonably be expected to know about, but they don't know. When you act like they did, your right to be treated in a respectful manner is forfeit.
I wouldn't say that the phallic joystick is blatantly asserting dominance over her gender. You say that it fits the human hand well, and I know a phallic object fits my hand well, I'm in contact with it multiple times a day, as I assume you are as well. However women aren't as familiar with phallic objects. So it is in that sense, that men unintentionally place a barrier there.
Men "unintentionally place a barrier there" by using a control scheme that fits the curvature of the human hand perfectly and has been used for almost a century to control moving objects? That is quite possibly the most insane piece of politically correct bullshit that I've ever heard. You really think that we should use an inadequate control scheme because some women are put off by the fact that it, like hundreds of other objects in their lives, is long and slender, and thus looks like a cock from an incredibly immature female-version-of-Beavis-and-Butthead point of view?
What's next? We shouldn't use power outlets, controller ports, or component cable connections in games because the male and female ends unintentionally demonstrate male penile dominance over the female end's simulated vagina, and thus alienate female gamers? Or hey, after we're done with video games, maybe we could take hoes away from farmers. Their name unintentionally places a barrier between women and farming!
Slashdot Mirror
It might help if you refrained from using the word "Otaku". To you, it may mean "enthusiastic anime fan", but to anyone who actually speaks Japanese, it means "pathetic loser with no life". If you're intending to inform people about a subject, you might want to avoid offending them.
/. and User Friendly's favorite word, "geek", means to the outside world? I don't think they think "technology enthusiast" when they hear "geek." Yet, /. readers do. And so do otaku.
And WTF do you think that
"Hi, I really like your product, but I don't want to give you any money for it. You are going to go on making it, right, so I can just steal it? Hello?"
That's the problem, see. Like all digital media, a DVD is trivial to reproduce once its made. In an industrial scale, it's less than $1/disk. But the content on it is not trivial to produce. Animation requires lots of people and lots of time, and altho' the end product is cool, and the people making the storyboards probably have a blast, the actual cel-by-cel drawing must be incredibly tedious work.
I'm playing devil's advocate to some degree here, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that, for the most part, we're talking about the piracy of TV shows. Shows that are shown on television. Shows that people regularly tape or TiVo, often with the commercials removed. Am I "pirating" Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I taped it when it was on the air instead of buying the new $50 full season DVD set? Or more importantly, besides the legal definition of piracy (which certainly does apply if tapes are traded between friends), am I doing something EVIL and WRONG by watching a taped TV show?
With the exception of the fact that someone slapped some subtitles on it so I could understand it, I am only pirating anime to the extent that I pirate every single TV show that I watch --- taped, with the commercials eidted out by my VCR.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go turn myself in for years of stealing TV shows. I'd also like to publicly apologize for the theft of numerous Firefly episodes. I really should have paid for them by making sure that I watched them as they were aired on TV, and then just decided to "go without" if I missed it by abstaining from watching tapes, so that I wouldn't be a thief.
don't like the woman at all, as I'm sure most /. readers don't, but that doesn't matter. She does have a right to privacy. There was no reason for her name to be mentioned on that website. One point in the lawsuit specifically states that the house is not listed in public records under her name. Like most of her property its registered under a corporate identity that can't be easily connected to her to protect her privacy. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if he hadn't disclosed the name of the owner, which is not required for the purposes of his site.
Holy shit! Not only do people not have the right to view my lawn and the exterior of my home, but they also don't have the right to figure out who owns it? I better call my lawyer, but I've got an entire neighborhood to sue. I've also got to go down to the local sign shop and print up a nice, big sign saying, "Thank you for driving by. My lawyer will be contacting you later today."
I'm definitely in favor of privacy rights, but those rights should not extend to things that you can see on my block with the naked eye. It also shouldn't be applied selectively to celebrities. If someone can take a snapshot of my home and say who lives there, then they should be able to do the same thing for Barbara Streisand.
I'm forced to conclude that the RIAA knows that more diverse, alternative radio stations are also more likely to play independent artists and are (maybe) less likely to accept payola, so the RIAA is afraid that the increased sales won't necessarily be of major label releases, and that is the explanation for their opposition to webcasting.
I think you're right on the money, there. It's better to be dying a very slow death on the top of the heap than to take a big gamble for more money and accidentally end up in the number two spot below a new competitor. Right now, the RIAA's profits are shrinking every year. If they took a gamble and tried to introduce new radio station owners to the radio market, they could end up losing ALL of their profits to someone with a better business model and better content.
Just because they've got a terminal disease that will probably kill them off in a decade doesn't mean that they should just walk out in front of a bus and end it now.
Well, guess what, a group of COMPETITORS drawing large market share is NOT MONOPOLY. It is not even collusion. It is competition to draw an audience. It is like accusing auto amnufacturers of having a monopoly because they all amke cars and people buy the cars of 5 competitors 90% of the time, even though the smaller competitors make cars at the same price.
The more popular argument against the rule changes, rather than the idiotic "We're living under monopoly rule" argument that you picked out for your own purposes, is that we DON'T live in a society where the media is controlled by just a handful of voices, and we should keep it that way by resisting further mergers. You're arguing that the media isn't controlled by a few conglomerates, but that there are actually many voices out there now, so why do you want to move toward the media being controlled by a few conglomerates? You seem to recognize that that situation would be a bad thing, but yet you seem to want it to happen, as well.
...but are any of you old enough to remember reading George Orwell's "1984" and shuddering with horror at the very idea of living in such a world?
You're new here, aren't you?
Didn't help the iraqis...
Disclamer: I am not against the 2nd amendment, it is just that that argument is freakin' weak...
Actually, it definitely helped the Kurds in northern Iraq (aka "Kurdistan"), who have been able to hold their position and build a suitable government in relative safety with the help of machine guns, grenades, and other deadly weapons. With just their own soldiers and their own arms, they had been able to hold off not only the Iraqi government, but also Iranian proxy armies and Al Qaeda forces right up until the Americans came into Iraq a couple months ago and solved almost all of their problems. They even managed to hold off a major offensive from a group that is assumed to be from either Iran or Al Qaeda right before the American and British invasion, and with hardly any (if any at all) help from the Americans or the British.
If tyrannical groups can hold their land against outside forces with guns, then so can less repugnant groups, and that's exactly what the Kurds did for all that time.
IIRC, my local Blockbuster was offering a new service several months ago. Basically, you pay a flat rate and you get 30 DVD rentals per month, which is practically unlimited rentals for anyone but a large family of movie fanatics with several TVs. I haven't seen much of it lately, though...
Haven't they figured out yet that the people that download this crap will NEVER EVER actually buy the DVD release. If you're going to spend DAYS downloading some crappy copy over a P2P network rather than spend a lousy $10 to see it, then that's sad. My time is worth more than a $10 movie ticket. I'll see it in the theater and buy the DVD when it comes out.
Two things. One, it doesn't take days to download it, it takes hours. Three hours on a broadband connection, if you had actually read the article before speaking ignorantly. Second, the people that rent the DVD for $5 from Blockbuster or at an even lower price from Netflix aren't going to buy the DVD, either.
Oh yeah, one more thing. The guys that download the film can do something else while it downloads. They can click the link, then walk away for three hours while it downloads, and then click the file to start it up. What were you doing while the trailers, commercials, pathetic trivia questions, and advisories not to talk during the movie were playing before the movie started?
I am soooooooo tired of this argument. It comes up every time, and always gets modded +5 insightful. Let's be honest, all right? We like KaZaA (Lite) because it lets us download music, movies, pr0n, and software without paying for it. Yes, it's a tool, and I'm sure that there are people using it to download Phish and Pat Matheny concert bootlegs (which I'm told is legal).
/. has basically amounted to either, "Wow, I actually found early episodes SLIDERS (or --insert old sci-fi TV show here--) on Kazaa/IRC/BitTorrent" or "Dude, you can watch Buffy/Enterprise a day early with Kazaa!".
And I'm tired of THAT argument. I don't know what you're downloading (but I have an idea of it, because you keep using the word "we"), but a lot of us aren't just getting free stuff without paying for it. A lot of people are downloading ISOs, or free music (there's quite a lot of it, much more than just bootlegs of artists that have signed with record labels), or the loads of free videos like trailers, animated shorts, combo vids, etc. that are available I think that if you really asked around, you'd also find that a lot of us are just downloading episodes of TV shows, which is definitely illegal, but only as immoral as taping the show yourself and fast-forwarding through the commercials. In fact, a lot of the P2P and Fserv advocacy I've heard on
The point is, just because you're pirating lots of copyrighted stuff doesn't mean that the rest of us are. You have no idea what we're downloading, so don't assume. A lot of it is legal and the majority of it is grey area stuff like TV shows or fansubbed anime, and both of those are things that none of the copyright holders really care about.
CD's are not $24!!!! Where the hell are you buying CD's? I walk into most record stores in Toronto and 99% of the time pay no more than $18 Canadian! Popular music is often found for $14. I know that it's similar pricing for CD's in American dollars, and that this is still too much, but dude, let's be realistic. And what CD's are you buying where there's only one good song? I think you need to reevaluate your tastes. There are plenty of good venues for low CD prices. Various online merchants, and emusic have been mentioned in this thread.
$24USD is an exaggeration, but so is $14USD. It's more like $18USD for a new CD, providing that what you want hasn't been shoved into a larger package to force you to pay for stuff that you don't want, such as what has been done with a lot of popular rereleases for older bands in the last few years. And regarding Emusic and such, the parent poster's point was not that music cannot be gotten cheaply, but rather that the RIAA should price it so that you can walk into a music store and buy it for a lower price. Regardless of whether what Kazaa users are doing is morally justified or not, it's just senseless for the RIAA to see the demand for their products declining and not lower the price of those products. There's no real competition in the music industry because of the close-knitted nature of the RIAA and that may or may not be showing in their profits, but they should certainly try something new, because what they're doing isn't working.
First off, yes, there are other services that offer a flat rate. Buffets, cable and satellite TV, Netflix, MMORPGs, car leases, local land line phone service, Blockbuster's new rental service, and many other businesses have a flat rate business model and many of them survive and thrive.
Second, the problems with metered bandwidth. First off is viruses. Many DDoS worms could actually force you to hit your maximum upload capacity for an entire month, which is a problem that is far too common on the internet but absolutely never happens with the food at your restaurant, the gas in your car, or the electricity in your home. Couple that with manually activated worms being used by script kiddies and the lack of an itemized bill (what are they going to do, list every file you downloaded in a month?) and your bill could be worthy of dispute every month. Since you would never know exactly what your entire family may have downloaded, you'll have a problem arguing that a hacker probably stole $10-$30 worth of bandwidth from you, but your ISP will have no problem taking your money.
Another problem is that programs don't come with usage labels. My refrigerator, hot water heater, washing machine, dryer, etc. all come with stickers telling me how much power they use. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, IRC, e-mail spam, and streaming media do not. Again, this is where bandwidth is different than food, gas, and electricity. I know how much food I want to eat and how much it costs. I know how much gas my car uses and how much I need. I know how much electricity the appliances in my home normally use and how much my bill should be. Bandwidth, on the other hand, could produce a completely different bill each month for reasons that the customer probably won't understand, and which could be the result of worms and script kiddies.
If the broadband ISPs want to switch to a metered service business model, then that business model will not be fair to the consumer until a legal mandate is made forcing every program that uses the internet to reveal its bandwidth usage in the same way that a home appliance has to have its electrical usage marked and cars must have their fuel efficiency marked. It also won't be fair until computers are just as easily secured as walking around the side of your house and making that there isn't an electrical cable leading from your house to your neighbor's. Unfortunately that breakthrough is being held back by the first crucial step in its implementation: teaching a pig to fly.
We've been threatened with metered bandwidth since Napster was released, possibly for good reason and possibly because it was just a convenient way to justify squeezing more cash out of us, but I've unfortunately never seen anyone truly analyze the problems that it has, and why it might not be waiting for us in the future after all.
Your local electric providor just keeps charging away per Kw/h of electricity you use, and if you have a higher 'demand' for said electricity you get charged extra for daring to need more electricity than what they deem as a 'nominal' usage during that time period.
So really, ISPs want to be the electric company of our data. The more you use above what they deem 'nominal' you pay a demand fee for and an increased fee over the guy down the street that lives off of one light bulb that is on only one hour a day.
I believe that the point he was making was not about metered bandwidth, but rather the ridiculous justification that the broadband ISPs are using for metered bandwidth, which is that UNSCRUPULOUS BASTARDS (customers) are engaging in SEEDY ACTIVITY (use of what they paid for) and must be stopped. If they said "Hey, y'know, this just isn't working out financially and we need to rethink the deal", that would be one thing, but instead, they're claiming that we need to give them more money because we're using our unrestricted internet access for seedy, and apparently restricted, activity. And this is when they even admit that their bottom line isn't in danger, but that they would just like more money, and they seem to infer that they will be colluding with each other to make sure that there's no cheaper competition. It's like being lectured by a kleptomaniac on the sanctity of personal property.
Was it, or was it not, designed to be used in this way? If it was not, why does the system let you try it?
Your microwave isn't designed to let you put an AOL CD or a piece of tinfoil in it and turn it into a box-shaped firecracker, but it still lets you try it. So the simple answer would be that it lets you do it because it can't control absolutely everything that it interacts with. A download manager isn't designed to be run at the same time as an MP3 player, AIM, ten browser windows, an IRC client, and downloads in other programs at the same time, but it still lets you try it because it has no control over those programs, no different than the microwave's lack of control over your hand and your AOL CD.
Worse, the "advanced" BT clients let you change your upload rate. Part of the reason BT is so absolutely, amazingly fast is that it forces you to use all your upload, which pisses off the kiddie leechers who don't realize you gotta pay(full upload capacity) to play(maxxing out your download.) I noticed right after the "advanced" and 3rd-party tools came out that speeds dropped.
Whether or not the ability to change your upload speed is a good thing or not is actually debatable, in my opinion. Take the recent release of Ragnarok Online, for instance. Once you download the game, you want to play it, but because it's an online game, you need at least some of your upload speed to play it. With the ability to change your upload speed, you can put the required 10kbps upload or so to playing Ragnarok and the other 12 or 20kbps upload to serving Ragnarok Online to more people on BitTorrent. Without that, you just have to shut BitTorrent down to play the game, which wastes 20kbps that could've been used to send the game to more people.
Because of the processor and bandwidth load of constantly uploading 30kbps to people, I usually have to shut BitTorrent down whenever I want to use what I've downloaded, even if it's just a video (I, like many people, have a slow machine). The ability to easily throttle BitTorrent would, in my case, actually contribute to others, rather than taking something away from them.
The full release was supposed to be an expansion that would cost money, but the expansion was scrapped and now it is being released as a free multiplayer game that doesn't even require RtCW to play. In other words, it's sort of like America's Army. It's an organization releasing a product simply to say, "Hey, we're cool. We make good products, we're nice to our customers. Think about buying another one of our products some time down the line, eh?"
Just to make sure there's no confusion: The final release WILL be free. This is a free beta test for a free game.
So, lets hold a poll; how many customers would American Greetings lose as a result of slashdot readers boycotting them? I think the count will be prety low. Chances are better if you start convincing your parents or grandparents to stop using those cards...
If your parents or grandparents like greeting cards, wouldn't it stand to reason that your birthday/wedding/anniversary/christmas gift to them would also contain... a greeting card?
Everyone uses greeting cards, just some more often than others. Just about any adult or teenager with a distaste for American Greetings is a lost customer for them.
Yes, I'm sure every 6 year old child dragging her mom thru Toys'R'us will now be saying, "Don't buy me THAT mommy - her manufacturer supresses free speech by threatening to persecute adult parodies of it on the web!"
American Greetings is an international greeting card, candle, and merchandise company that sells far more than just Strawberry Shortcake merchandise. Plenty of adults buy their greeting cards for special occasions and I doubt that their primary market for candles is six year old children in Toys R Us. Since just about every adult in the countries in which they do businesss celebrates birthdays and weddings, an adult's assertion that they will never buy anything from American Greetings again will indeed be a customer lost.
With that said, when you use something so obvious as Firebird for the name of your application, you damn well better get a trademark or something because you should just assume zillions of others will think of using the same name. This was a mistake the database people made, for sure.
Trademarking the name wouldn't have mattered. In the eyes of the law, a browser and a database are probably just as far apart as a car and a plane. Sure, they're the same thing in an extremely general sense, like "software" and "vehicles", but in actuality, they are very different. They are not, metaphorically, sold on the same shelf. They perform completely different tasks for different markets and that means that they can both coexist peacefully.
The only reason people think that trademarks are such overwhelmingly powerful things that give you total control over a name in all areas of business is because of how easy it is to steal domain names and such away from people through third parties that have nothing to do with the law, such as ICANN. In legal practice, trademarks aren't really that broad, and this is a legal matter.
Since calling it Firebird is a recent change, why not just pick another name if it's becoming such a big deal? Any particular reason to stick with the name Firebird for Mozilla other than the fact it's already been publicized? If they're getting so much heat from it, I think they should just pick another name right now and end this.
It took them months to find a new name because AOL required a lengthy legal investigation into the legality of the name "Firebird." That investigation did not reveal the FirebirdSQL project because it is a different type of product and therefore has no right to a trademark violation suit against Mozilla. It would take AOL another several months to find another name that didn't infringe on anyone's trademarks, but then this whole problem could just crop up again when another completely unknown company, project, or product claims that they had the name for something else completely different that still doesn't have any basis for a trademark violation suit.
Or to put it simply, they're not changing the name because changing the name costs money and FirebirdSQL has no case against them.
Which pair is more similar, a web browser and a database, or a web browser and a BIOS?
Apparently the legal discrepancy came up because the Phoenix BIOS has a browser feature integrated into it that does not have a different name from the BIOS itself. So yes, I'd say that a web browser named "Phoenix" and a BIOS/browser combo named "Phoenix" are more similar than a web browser named "Firebird" and a database named "Firebird", since the first pair includes two identical things (browsers) with the same name and the second does not.
Just like if someone named their dump truck "firebird". Pontiac could have a fit... it's still a vehicle, even if the use case & market is different.
Software is a much larger field than four-wheeled vehicles. They can serve completely different purposes from one another and often not even touch each other, which isn't the case with two four-wheeled vehicles that drive on the same roads, are both controlled by a steering wheel, both have a brake and an accelerator, etc. I think it's more analogous to vehicles, period.
So if Boeing named their new stealth bomber "Firebird", would Pontiac be right in claiming market confusion? They're both vehicles, even though they serve completely different purposes and are sold in completely different markets. Would Boeing be morally obliged to give up the name?
Does anyone know what company he may be referring to here?
I'm not sure exactly which one, but I think that good old logic can tell us what kind of company it is.
"Startup" + incredible claim that would represent a dramatic leap in technology and change the way that at least one entire industry works = bullshit
Actually, we see far more than twenty stupid patent articles a year, but what's more important is that the only ones that we see on /. and other major tech sites are the ones that interfere with other businesses, like the various "I own the internet" sort of patents on linking and online stores that have been issued to several different companies. There are many other patents that are awarded for very stupid things that are physically impossible or will obviously never see the light of day, but those aren't really worth causing a stir about because they won't interfere with anyone's lives. They did, however, bog down the patent office and create enough of a backlog for the patents on linking and online stores to slip through, so they should be a pretty big deal for the patent office itself.
do not think that the Moz team should use Phoenix. Even though it probably passses a legal litmus test, as they are very different products, that doesn't mean they should continue to use it.
....
I think it would be nice to show some respect to another open source project which precedes yours.
I guess the summary is, just play nice with others and change the name out of courtesy for others.
Personally, I think that whatever moral high ground the FirebirdSQL people had went out the window when they immediately engaged in a pathetically childish campaign to spam the forums and email boxes of the people that they had a disagreement with. After that little show of petulance, I hope the Mozilla Firebird people hold onto the name like a pit bull with a piece of steak. People with no respect or courtesy for others do not deserve respectful or courteous treatment. They probably deserved the name before, even though they just have a little project that no one has heard of before and no one could reasonably be expected to know about, but they don't know. When you act like they did, your right to be treated in a respectful manner is forfeit.
I wouldn't say that the phallic joystick is blatantly asserting dominance over her gender. You say that it fits the human hand well, and I know a phallic object fits my hand well, I'm in contact with it multiple times a day, as I assume you are as well. However women aren't as familiar with phallic objects. So it is in that sense, that men unintentionally place a barrier there.
Men "unintentionally place a barrier there" by using a control scheme that fits the curvature of the human hand perfectly and has been used for almost a century to control moving objects? That is quite possibly the most insane piece of politically correct bullshit that I've ever heard. You really think that we should use an inadequate control scheme because some women are put off by the fact that it, like hundreds of other objects in their lives, is long and slender, and thus looks like a cock from an incredibly immature female-version-of-Beavis-and-Butthead point of view?
What's next? We shouldn't use power outlets, controller ports, or component cable connections in games because the male and female ends unintentionally demonstrate male penile dominance over the female end's simulated vagina, and thus alienate female gamers? Or hey, after we're done with video games, maybe we could take hoes away from farmers. Their name unintentionally places a barrier between women and farming!