I don't buy for a second that he was doing it to find space for movies. It just makes no sense at all.
Let's assume for a moment that all of his movies were DivX-encoded at 650 MB each, just for the sake of argument.
* Hard drives four years ago were still relatively inexpensive. By working at McDonald's part-time for three weeks or so he could have had a new hard drive.
* Even if he had so many movies that he required an additional hard drive, why could these movies not have been burned to CD-R instead? CD writers were available for less than $100 and CD-Rs could have been found for less than 50 cents a piece. He could have had virtually unlimited space as long as he purchased a new spindle now and then. (See afformentioned McDonald's reference.)
* Most importantly, what did he expect to do with those movies? Unless he had a T3 or something equivalent to his house, he would have had to wait hours to both upload for storage and download to view. I've had 1.5 Mb/sec DSL for four years, so I know that it would have been feasible back then, but it still would have been far less effort to burn them to CD-R. And at least then they would have been portable, far more so than a hard drive.
* Assuming 1.5 Mb/sec broadband, it would have taken almost an hour just to download one movie. So, he would have taken an hour to download, an hour to upload (at the VERY least since most broadband companies don't use the same upload/download speed), and another hour to download when he wants to watch it? Was he planning on installing a streaming media server as well?
* Why NASA? Why not find some schlep on his ISP who wasn't running a firewall, had lots of space, and store the data there? A Joe-Clueless-User would have been far less able to determine who was storing data on his system than NASA.
I'm sorry, but I just dont buy the "he was looking for computer space to store movies he'd downloaded" line. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Sounds more to me like he was doing something nefarious and was hiding it or he was just looking for ego points and got nabbed in the process.
That is a good point, but unfortunately that will probably confuse a lot of people. As was pointed out in earlier threads, a lot of people consider IE to be "the Internet". I think that it would be far more confusing to people to imply that IE is not "standards compliant" when their natural reaction will be "but it's always worked for me". They don't care about standards like we do.
I do understand what you're saying, but I think that the first line of attack should be to remove the mirage that "IE = Internet" instead of "IE = closed standards".
After all, there are a lot more to Firefox than just standards. Speed, tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc. They're all important. Standards are just a part of it. Let's get people to realize that "IE != Internet" first. That way they'll be more open to the reasons why other options are better.
I am thrilled that an open-source product has the popularity and support to achieve such an incredible goal. I don't remember any OSS product ever having so much exposure, Linux itself not withstanding.
I personally have converted at least five people at work and several other friends to Firefox, all of whom have nothing but praise for it. Any web sites that I maintain now say "Designed for use with Firefox" with a link.
Regarding the comments about "Who reads newspapers at this time of year" and so forth, you need to remember that the NYT is reprinted and read all over the world. This is not just a single newspaper in a single city. The NYT is also highly respected (not that it really deserves it), so a lot of people will read it.
The next step IMHO should be USA Today. That too is a globally printed newspaper and usually has a different reader base than NYT.
My only concern in that they might have set a precedence with including names of donors. Let's face it. How many of you who donated did so more (not only, but more) because of the "coolness" factor of having your name printed instead of the core purpose of supporting a great browser?
1. I don't want to be on a monthly payment plan ($17.99 or something) where I have to get 7 movies in that month in order to be paying less than renting the movies at the video store.
But you're willing to pay a much higher, monthly fee for a broadband connection that gives you a relatively fast way of downloading movies. Of course, I suppose that you could be a masochist who finds some perverse pleasure in downloading hundreds of megs over a 56K modem using his PeoplePC dial-up.
putting them into the mail takes longer for me than does going to the video store that's less than two miles away.
Holy sh*t, dude! I don't know anyone who has a plot of land so large that it takes more than two miles to go to his mailbox! I'm glad that I don't have to pay your real estate taxes!
3. Downloading movies is free. 66 cents each still costs more than downloading them.
Really? So, you're getting your broadband connection for free as well?
They come in a format that is all ready to be played on your computer (if you so desire) instead of having to wait to convert the 4GB to that format yourself.
Yes, it's very, very inconvenient to have my PC crunch away at doing that overnight when I'm asleep and during the day when I'm at work.
I feel your pain. Netflix really is the devil to broadband-using movie watchers.
One can own and enforce a copyright without putting unreasonable barriers in front of the consumers to deny them their rights to look for alternatives.
The Lexmark issue comes to mind. They were abusing copyright IMHO to act like a mafia "family" - once you're in the family, you don't go anywhere else. (Epson also implements a chip-on-ink-cartridge methodology - a reason why I'll never buy Epson again.)
Sadly, unless we get more funding and more educated people into the U.S. Patent office should this lawsuit be successful (which I doubt), this will probably be nothing more than a migration from copyright litigation to patent litigation. What's worse, the patent office, like the copyright office is doing now, will blindly approve more and more patents without truly looking at the ramifications of such approvals.
The issue at hand is not necessarily the intent to infringe as it is to protect the consumer.
Consider how many programs out there are starting to employ "phone home" technology to confirm that you are a legitimate user. What if the company's network is down? What if your own network is down? What if the company goes out of business? You can no longer authenticate to use software that you legally purchased (or "licensed" as the anal-retentive will be forced to correct). Is that not theft to a degree on the part of the company who took your money for a product that you can no longer use through no fault of your own?
For how long have we had to deal with inserting a CD into the drive to play a game when the disc really should be stored away for safe keeping? Hell, we even had to deal with "key disks" in Commodore 64 heyday!
How many had CD-ROM drives that were not totally compatible with on-disc protection schemes? Add another upgrade cost to the consumer because of a protection that did not need to be there.
And on top of it all if you do anything to circumvent the protection, even with no intent to infringe, you've broken the law just by the very nature of bypassing the copy protection. Absolute insanity reigns.
Copy protection of software does nothing but hurt the consumer no matter how you look at it. The consumer might have to pay a slightly higher cost for royalties to any copy-protection mechanism company. The consumer might not be able to use their software in the future if the company shuts down, depending on the method of protection. The consumer then (technically) breaks the law by attempting to bypass any copy-protection.
What's worse is that the consumer has to deal with all of this even if he plans on never, ever giving it to anyone else! So, copy protection is a benefit to the consumer HOW?
Oh, it's to protect the profitability of the COMPANY? Really? Then what's this alt.binaries.cracks that I've heard about?
For instance, the $20 MSRP of ESPN NFL 2Kx includes a royalty paid to ESPN and thus to its majority owner, The Walt Disney Company. Disney was behind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Exactly how is this even relevant? The fact of the matter is that all products that we purchase will have some type of connection to other companies, products, and ideals that we otherwise would not agree with.
People who are against the evil, oil companies still purchase products that require petroleum-based materials and still fill up their automobile's fuel tanks.
People who are against foreign manufacturing still continue to buy products with components from foreign companies, even if the product itself is manufactured in their country of residence.
When it comes to financial support, just about all companies, certainly the large corporations, always fund projects, politicians, and events that will anger somebody. You name any major corporation and someone will mention something or someone who had some kind of backing from that company, regardless of how small, that offended them - ranging from support support of gay marriage to a Christmas display, and every political view in between. You will never find any major company that has supported projects or events that please all of the people all of the time. Disney is no exception.
And as for the Bono Copyright act, who is more to blame? Disney for pushing it, or our inept politicians for ignoring the people that they're supposed to represent and passing the bill? Look in the mirror and you'll see who shares the blame for that bill. After all, Disney didn't elect the official that voted "Yes".
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I don't buy for a second that he was doing it to find space for movies. It just makes no sense at all.
Let's assume for a moment that all of his movies were DivX-encoded at 650 MB each, just for the sake of argument.
* Hard drives four years ago were still relatively inexpensive. By working at McDonald's part-time for three weeks or so he could have had a new hard drive.
* Even if he had so many movies that he required an additional hard drive, why could these movies not have been burned to CD-R instead? CD writers were available for less than $100 and CD-Rs could have been found for less than 50 cents a piece. He could have had virtually unlimited space as long as he purchased a new spindle now and then. (See afformentioned McDonald's reference.)
* Most importantly, what did he expect to do with those movies? Unless he had a T3 or something equivalent to his house, he would have had to wait hours to both upload for storage and download to view. I've had 1.5 Mb/sec DSL for four years, so I know that it would have been feasible back then, but it still would have been far less effort to burn them to CD-R. And at least then they would have been portable, far more so than a hard drive.
* Assuming 1.5 Mb/sec broadband, it would have taken almost an hour just to download one movie. So, he would have taken an hour to download, an hour to upload (at the VERY least since most broadband companies don't use the same upload/download speed), and another hour to download when he wants to watch it? Was he planning on installing a streaming media server as well?
* Why NASA? Why not find some schlep on his ISP who wasn't running a firewall, had lots of space, and store the data there? A Joe-Clueless-User would have been far less able to determine who was storing data on his system than NASA.
I'm sorry, but I just dont buy the "he was looking for computer space to store movies he'd downloaded" line. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Sounds more to me like he was doing something nefarious and was hiding it or he was just looking for ego points and got nabbed in the process.
That is a good point, but unfortunately that will probably confuse a lot of people. As was pointed out in earlier threads, a lot of people consider IE to be "the Internet". I think that it would be far more confusing to people to imply that IE is not "standards compliant" when their natural reaction will be "but it's always worked for me". They don't care about standards like we do.
I do understand what you're saying, but I think that the first line of attack should be to remove the mirage that "IE = Internet" instead of "IE = closed standards".
After all, there are a lot more to Firefox than just standards. Speed, tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, etc. They're all important. Standards are just a part of it. Let's get people to realize that "IE != Internet" first. That way they'll be more open to the reasons why other options are better.
I am thrilled that an open-source product has the popularity and support to achieve such an incredible goal. I don't remember any OSS product ever having so much exposure, Linux itself not withstanding.
I personally have converted at least five people at work and several other friends to Firefox, all of whom have nothing but praise for it. Any web sites that I maintain now say "Designed for use with Firefox" with a link.
Regarding the comments about "Who reads newspapers at this time of year" and so forth, you need to remember that the NYT is reprinted and read all over the world. This is not just a single newspaper in a single city. The NYT is also highly respected (not that it really deserves it), so a lot of people will read it.
The next step IMHO should be USA Today. That too is a globally printed newspaper and usually has a different reader base than NYT.
My only concern in that they might have set a precedence with including names of donors. Let's face it. How many of you who donated did so more (not only, but more) because of the "coolness" factor of having your name printed instead of the core purpose of supporting a great browser?
1. I don't want to be on a monthly payment plan ($17.99 or something) where I have to get 7 movies in that month in order to be paying less than renting the movies at the video store.
But you're willing to pay a much higher, monthly fee for a broadband connection that gives you a relatively fast way of downloading movies. Of course, I suppose that you could be a masochist who finds some perverse pleasure in downloading hundreds of megs over a 56K modem using his PeoplePC dial-up.
putting them into the mail takes longer for me than does going to the video store that's less than two miles away.
Holy sh*t, dude! I don't know anyone who has a plot of land so large that it takes more than two miles to go to his mailbox! I'm glad that I don't have to pay your real estate taxes!
3. Downloading movies is free. 66 cents each still costs more than downloading them.
Really? So, you're getting your broadband connection for free as well?
They come in a format that is all ready to be played on your computer (if you so desire) instead of having to wait to convert the 4GB to that format yourself.
Yes, it's very, very inconvenient to have my PC crunch away at doing that overnight when I'm asleep and during the day when I'm at work.
I feel your pain. Netflix really is the devil to broadband-using movie watchers.
Not necessarily. Is not articifical copy protection nothing more than the forced application of copyright protection?
One can own and enforce a copyright without putting unreasonable barriers in front of the consumers to deny them their rights to look for alternatives.
The Lexmark issue comes to mind. They were abusing copyright IMHO to act like a mafia "family" - once you're in the family, you don't go anywhere else. (Epson also implements a chip-on-ink-cartridge methodology - a reason why I'll never buy Epson again.)
Sadly, unless we get more funding and more educated people into the U.S. Patent office should this lawsuit be successful (which I doubt), this will probably be nothing more than a migration from copyright litigation to patent litigation. What's worse, the patent office, like the copyright office is doing now, will blindly approve more and more patents without truly looking at the ramifications of such approvals.
I'm not sure which is worse.
The issue at hand is not necessarily the intent to infringe as it is to protect the consumer.
Consider how many programs out there are starting to employ "phone home" technology to confirm that you are a legitimate user. What if the company's network is down? What if your own network is down? What if the company goes out of business? You can no longer authenticate to use software that you legally purchased (or "licensed" as the anal-retentive will be forced to correct). Is that not theft to a degree on the part of the company who took your money for a product that you can no longer use through no fault of your own?
For how long have we had to deal with inserting a CD into the drive to play a game when the disc really should be stored away for safe keeping? Hell, we even had to deal with "key disks" in Commodore 64 heyday!
How many had CD-ROM drives that were not totally compatible with on-disc protection schemes? Add another upgrade cost to the consumer because of a protection that did not need to be there.
And on top of it all if you do anything to circumvent the protection, even with no intent to infringe, you've broken the law just by the very nature of bypassing the copy protection. Absolute insanity reigns.
Copy protection of software does nothing but hurt the consumer no matter how you look at it. The consumer might have to pay a slightly higher cost for royalties to any copy-protection mechanism company. The consumer might not be able to use their software in the future if the company shuts down, depending on the method of protection. The consumer then (technically) breaks the law by attempting to bypass any copy-protection.
What's worse is that the consumer has to deal with all of this even if he plans on never, ever giving it to anyone else! So, copy protection is a benefit to the consumer HOW?
Oh, it's to protect the profitability of the COMPANY? Really? Then what's this alt.binaries.cracks that I've heard about?
For instance, the $20 MSRP of ESPN NFL 2Kx includes a royalty paid to ESPN and thus to its majority owner, The Walt Disney Company. Disney was behind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Exactly how is this even relevant? The fact of the matter is that all products that we purchase will have some type of connection to other companies, products, and ideals that we otherwise would not agree with.
People who are against the evil, oil companies still purchase products that require petroleum-based materials and still fill up their automobile's fuel tanks.
People who are against foreign manufacturing still continue to buy products with components from foreign companies, even if the product itself is manufactured in their country of residence.
When it comes to financial support, just about all companies, certainly the large corporations, always fund projects, politicians, and events that will anger somebody. You name any major corporation and someone will mention something or someone who had some kind of backing from that company, regardless of how small, that offended them - ranging from support support of gay marriage to a Christmas display, and every political view in between. You will never find any major company that has supported projects or events that please all of the people all of the time. Disney is no exception.
And as for the Bono Copyright act, who is more to blame? Disney for pushing it, or our inept politicians for ignoring the people that they're supposed to represent and passing the bill? Look in the mirror and you'll see who shares the blame for that bill. After all, Disney didn't elect the official that voted "Yes".