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But ebooks still have one fatal flaw for me: paper reads 10%-30% faster. (Two flaws if you count vulnerability to jacuzzis.) I'd found this out on my own at work. If I needed to read 200 pages of reports I was better off sending print-jobs to every printer in the building (splitting reports to prevent irritated coworkers). My time saved was worth the additional printing costs.

That speed difference is like driving 45 instead of 60... ok for short distances, dreadful on roadtrips. As a dedicated (nee addicted) reader, this could mean 100 fewer books read per year. Ouch.

If you must read on a monitor, this advice helps. But until they get electronic paper right, the crushed tree system is the way for me.

See "Bill Gates Dollars" for a proper perspective. While there are relatively few people with billions to blow trying to bribe whole countries, there are plenty of people with modest multi-million dollar nest eggs that might want that suit. Not being one of them, I'd be happy to sell that suit for what it's worth if I owned it. What would you do with it?

mostly what .... there's a lot of music (gotta bring ear plugs if you want to sleep at night ....) there's a lot of art, fire, flame throwers, big sparky things, naked people, people dressed outrageously, dust, dirt, cars in fancy dress, opera, moments of wonder, .....

This is a very un-geek way to explain - perhaps some pictures ..... some panoramas or from above or a rubber duck jazz club or a galleon (err bus) or a beached whale or art or fire or home mande roller coasters (is that geeky enough?) or wind or anime come to life or .....

well you get the idea - it's lots of different things to different people - don;t forget you have to bring some art of your own to share .... remember the only thing you can buy there is ice - leave the $$ at home

According to Brad Templeton, the law is "almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not."

I know a few people who have talked about "poor man's registration". You take a copy of your work, put it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself. The post office stamp is an official timestamp, which can prove when you came up with the work. If there is ever a dispute, they can open it in the courtroom. If independant creators used methods like this, rather than going through the copyright registration process, then it would probably explain the poster's unexplained drop-off at around 1981.

Other EFF board members include John Perry Barlow [also associated w/the Grateful Dead] and John Gilmore, neither of whom would endorse systems that require DRM. Beyond that, the EFF's general vibe of promoting online privacy and the right to anonymity would make the EFF incompatible with DRM systems.

I think that this bad meme (that the EFF wants C.L.) got into Slashdot a few months ago when an article covered the talk an EFF staff member gave on compulsory licencing. Talking about it or listing it as one method of compensating artists != endorsing it, but that confusion was made.

First I heard of it was from Landon Noll and Mel Pleasant. It is noted in brief as one of the techniques in this plan to end spam (though their plan, which did include the triplets, is not laid out in full there.)

It is a worthwhile technique for a little while, and if spammers were rational, would be worthwhile for some time to come. But spammers are not rational, and already this technique is not as useful as would be hoped.

Do a Google Search for Tempfailing especially in ASRG to see statistics etc.

This is my absolute last post in this thread/article/whatever, after a nice flamewar, I am ready to quit.

I love the greater common good as much as the next guy, but as a capitalist, I believe that most people will work toward that good only when "encouraged" by economic incentives. This doesn't necessarily mean wealth, but it probably does. Bill Gates' 60" television is the product of his success. He might not be the best example, but he still helped bring computing to the masses, in exchange for this, he became fabulously wealthy. A move toward that greater good was established through financial incentive. Had Microsoft failed, Bill would have probably graduated Harvard and become a lawyer/accountant/whatever.

Oh, and for the DMCA folks, Clicky Here

Also remember that a work must be explicitly placed in the public domain. See the Creative Commons if you'd like to allow others to use your works.

Please read this for a little more information: 10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained

With many arguments positive and negative. Remarkably, however, nobody after reading the arguments think the pro-dam case is a "slam dunk." At most it's slightly on the positive side.

Yet if you step back, you realize that in a free country, there is no way a project of this sort could go ahead, unless it was such an immense and overwhelmingly positive step, a necessity -- and even then I have doubts that you could arrange for the relocation of 1 to 3 million people, even with bribes of nicer houses on less fertile land.

So if you couldn't approve of this in a free country, how can you approve of usuing authoritarian techniques to make it happen, if the benefits are under any question at all?

I toured the dam and the river last year. You may be interested in my many photos and notes, which are on my China and Yangtse photo pages

Good question ... through Google Groups I found this page.

• emails get through regardless of domain, unlike blacklisting or whitelisting
• The protocol stays the same
• anonymity exists
• common carriers exist

The executive summary:

"The plan is to divide the network into two camps, those who can be held accountable for spam, and those whose status is unknown. Mail would flow unimpeded for those on the accountable list, since by definition, we would have other ways to deter or deal with spam from such networks.

For the rest, mail would be redirected through special relay servers whose job it is to "throttle" or rate-limit the amount of mail any party can send. As such, single person to person mail would normally be unimpeded, but mass mailing (regardless of content) from untrusted addresses would be impossible. In effect, mass mailing becomes a slightly privileged operation open to those who can be held accountable if they abuse it by sending such mailings to people who don't know the sender.

Medium volume mailing (small lists, sudden bursts) would be slowed rather than blocked, mainly to detect if the volume is getting to spam levels. Small mailings would still be delivered at a slower rate, but injurious spam campaigns would not work.

In effect the only limitation put on E-mail is that those who wish to host mailing lists must get on the list of those who will be accountable for the abuse of lists. It's even possible to run open relays again. All other mail is delivered. "

• emails get through regardless of domain, unlike blacklisting or whitelisting
• The protocol stays the same
• anonymity exists
• common carriers exist

The executive summary:

"The plan is to divide the network into two camps, those who can be held accountable for spam, and those whose status is unknown. Mail would flow unimpeded for those on the accountable list, since by definition, we would have other ways to deter or deal with spam from such networks.

For the rest, mail would be redirected through special relay servers whose job it is to "throttle" or rate-limit the amount of mail any party can send. As such, single person to person mail would normally be unimpeded, but mass mailing (regardless of content) from untrusted addresses would be impossible. In effect, mass mailing becomes a slightly privileged operation open to those who can be held accountable if they abuse it by sending such mailings to people who don't know the sender.

Medium volume mailing (small lists, sudden bursts) would be slowed rather than blocked, mainly to detect if the volume is getting to spam levels. Small mailings would still be delivered at a slower rate, but injurious spam campaigns would not work.

In effect the only limitation put on E-mail is that those who wish to host mailing lists must get on the list of those who will be accountable for the abuse of lists. It's even possible to run open relays again. All other mail is delivered. "

Significant differences separate spam from bulk mail, making them opposites, not just non-equals. In short, bulk mail is a negotiated part of a public good, spam is an unnegotiated public bad that interferes with (or can ruin) a public good. Differences include:

• Negotiations and trade:

  With bulk mail every step of the process involves trade and negotiations. This includes the last step- you receiving mail- because bulk mail subsidizes first class mail. Granted, this last step was negotiated as a group (all people in the US using the US postal service).

  Spammers don't negotiate and don't trade with the people affected by their actions- one doesn't hear of them sitting down to say "I'm going to use this stolen credit card to buy an account for $30 and then send out 5,000,000 spams that'll cost you 3 days of sysadmin time and a crashed hard drive. Deal?" or "I'm going to use your return address so that your email box fills every 2 hours with bounces, and you lose important emails from a prospective employer, in return for me not getting antispam complaints. Deal?"

• Predictable prices and costs:

  Bulk mail is used by the USPS to have smoothed out, predictable costs and income- again, subsidizing first class mail. From the USPS's point of view, everything is known and predictable *within the system* with standardized costs i.e. "this week in this area we'll be paid $.15 per mail for an average of 200,000 deliveries of ads. If someone wants to send 2x the ads they'll pay 2x the old total. We'll also be paid $.37 for about 20,000 first class mailings. Each postal worker will carry about 20 lbs of mail, except at holidays where it is 30 lbs..." Same from the user's p.o.v. "6 days a week a postal worker'll come by the mailbox. It'll take about 4 days for a letter to arrive, 7 during holidays, and about 1/100,000 will go astray (or whatever the error rate is).

  Because spam isn't negotiated and because of the fake return addresses, etc, you have unpredictable and unknown costs, i.e. "every day I'll send an average of 5 mails, receive 10 mails from non-strangers (including annoying ones, but I voluntarily gave my cousin or Microsoft my address), and at random times get horrible pictures, be flooded by bounces or have my ISP crash or be blacklisted." Those costs are externalities- costs (or benefits) that accrue to entities outside of the negotiation process.

  I've seen arguments that say that because of peering agreements, ISPs or users should think of a flood of spam bouces the way an 'All-You-Can-Eat' restaurant thinks of Sumo wrestlers: an expensive but expected cost. No, because the wrestler still fits on the bell curve the restaurant uses to predict eating habits, and what the wrestler does is legal. No human can fill their stomach with more than about a gallon of food, and the contract with the restaurant is that it is "All YOU can eat HERE", you don't get to feed two people on one ticket or bring food home using rubber pockets. Spammers cheat- its like one person paying and letting 10 people sneak in the back door. And they break the contract- those peering agreements / contracts usually say no spamming.

• Unrecoverable costs and opportunity costs:

  spammers cause damage far in excess of the money they put into the system. Its like the flu, a computer virus, forest fire or a traffic accident- the money paid into recovering from it is nowhere near the total damage it caused- you get a net loss to society because it happened. Spam also causes opportunity costs- all that time and money spent recovering from spam could have been spent in more productive ways. Money spent merely to restore you to where you were before is money wasted compared to being able to invest in the future.

People really need to do some research before posting.
See #6

You can read the original spam email on Templeton's site. The list of addressees is like a directory of the early net, including addresses like KLEINROCK at USC-ISI and POSTEL@USC-ISIB. I wonder how many spam harvesters will find these addresses and try to send them mail, now that they've been posted to the web :).

..are interesting. Basically all mail would still be delivered in his utopian email system but all untrusted sources would be throttled.
Worth a read imho.

Read Richard Stallmans view on spam also mentioned in the article
He also predicts the first online dating service!!!!!

Actually, Spam [spam.com], has been around for over 100 years...just check the spam museum! [hormel.com]

Actually, that would be, ahem, GNU/Spam.

Please insert your own "GNU/Spam" joke here.

Yes!

Yeah, that is the case (as another poster pointed out). See also this page (10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained) for a quick primer on copyright law.

According to This Site, The earliest spam was sent by DEC in 1978.

Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast, using the ARPANET directory, inviting people to receptions in California. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and a notice was sent out reminding others of the rule.

Interestingly, a young Richard Stallman argued that spammers had every right to send spam.

According to This Site, The earliest spam was sent by DEC in 1978.

Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast, using the ARPANET directory, inviting people to receptions in California. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and a notice was sent out reminding others of the rule.

Interestingly, a young Richard Stallman argued that spammers had every right to send spam.

So perhaps the story there isn't true, but, you've been able to write Perl using white-space only for a little while now:

Acme::Bleach

It's also worth taking a look at Clarinet's offering:

ProleText...

2) "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation."

False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that's main difference under the law. It's still a violation if you give it away -- and there can still be serious damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property. There is an exception for personal copying of music, which is not a violation, though courts seem to have said that doesn't include widescale anonymous personal copying as Napster. If the work has no commercial value, the violation is mostly technical and is unlikely to result in legal action. Fair use determinations (see below) do sometimes depend on the involvement of money.

Actually, according to this page, the first spam message ever was by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978. Too bad you can't patent stuff 25 years later, it would have been good PR for Compaq/HPQ/DEC to repent for spamming and patenting it ;-)

But I changed my mind.

Wrote an addendum to my earlier essay on it with the reasons why which can be found at my spam essay site

Moral: spammers hoover slashdot, so don't post your email here, ever.

Screw that. I refuse to hide or obfuscate my email address. I've been using the Internet for 15 years. I remember the time when the Internet was mostly spam-free, and people rarely forged email addresses even though everyone knew how to.

My real email address is deven@ties.org -- this is my primary personal email address, not a spam-trap address. I know that the spammers are harvesting address from Slashdot and everywhere else. I don't care. Let them have the address. I've never hidden it, and I never will. I'm stubborn that way. (It's akin to refusing to change your lifestyle in response to terrorism, even when you know you're at risk...)

Of course, since I don't hide my email address, I get tons of spam, along with "Joe job" bounces/replies for spams forged in my name, plus more bounces copied to postmaster, since I receive postmaster mail for several domains. Bring it on! It just provides me with a larger corpus of bogus email to use for Bayesian filtering, or whatever other technique I may experiment with...

I firmly believe that a technical solution will be required to solve the spam problem. Legislation won't prevent the virtually-untraceable international spams, and may not even prevent local ones if it's not zealously enforced. Social controls haven't been effective. We need to prevent the spam from being delivered in the first place, or at least mark it as suspicious so legitimate mail doesn't drown in the noise so easily.

Beyond basic filtering like SpamAssassin and Bayesian filtering, there are other technical solutions worth exploring. Human validation techniques like TMDA might help. Finding a way to punish spammers and drive up their costs, such as E-Stamps or selling interrupt rights (original paper: HTML or PDF), might be effective. (But likely a higher barrier to legitimate mail.) Some sort of PGP-style Web of Trust might be very effective if done well, but it would be difficult to build. Perhaps some "soundness" principles could be borrowed from Usenet II to create a similar system for email...

Let's cross our fingers and hope to find a truly effective solution (or combination of solutions) in the near future!

*sigh*

Here: this was linked above, too, but you could stand to re-read it. There do not have to be any damages for infringement to exist. And they do not have to try to collect any to get him to take his site down if it IS found to be infringing. And it MAY be found to be fair use, but that is less likely if it is found that he copied large chunks of the code verbatim, which is what we are discussing here, and as someone else also pointed out, that's only an argument you get to use after you're already in court, having admitted to infringement.

I don't disagree with your analysis of the district's behavior, but attributing their move to slimy tactics doesn't just magically blow away the legal argument.

It's worth emphasizing, however, that fair use is a defense that you use in court, rather than a principle you cite to avoid court. As Brad Templeton notes in his 10 Big Myths about copyright explained,

This is not a loophole; you can't just take a non-parody and claim it is one on a technicality. The way "fair use" works is you get sued for copyright infringement, and you admit you did infringe, but that your infringement was a fair use. A subjective judgment on, among other things, your goals, is then made.

I used to go out regularly for showers, usually the Perseids. It's usually too cold for the Geminids.

But after last year's Leonids, where I got a 7,000/hour rate -- 2 per second for a sustained 15 minutes -- in Japan, it's hard to go out for the regular showers again, where even witha claimed rate of 75/hour you are likely to see fewer without the best conditions.

Pictures are here and here for 2002.

Even this year's show, which got up to 600/hour at the peak,and thus the 2nd best show in my experience, was a letdown.

Of course, I missed the 1966 show, being too young. Joe Haldeman saw it and told me it was like standing on the bridge of the Enterprise and watching the stars go by. He said for the first time he really could understand how he was standing on a planet moving in space.

But that was an estimated 70,000 per hour rate.

We won't see that again from the Leonids for about 97 years, if we see it then. It is possible another surprise show could come now that they are getting better at predicting, but I doubt it.

So yes, the past few years have shown an abundance of good shows. There was also a good Perseids show in the mid 90s, about 300/hour just after its comet went by. But the show is over for now, and I doubt the Geminids rate a /. headline.

I used to go out regularly for showers, usually the Perseids. It's usually too cold for the Geminids.

But after last year's Leonids, where I got a 7,000/hour rate -- 2 per second for a sustained 15 minutes -- in Japan, it's hard to go out for the regular showers again, where even witha claimed rate of 75/hour you are likely to see fewer without the best conditions.

Pictures are here and here for 2002.

Even this year's show, which got up to 600/hour at the peak,and thus the 2nd best show in my experience, was a letdown.

Of course, I missed the 1966 show, being too young. Joe Haldeman saw it and told me it was like standing on the bridge of the Enterprise and watching the stars go by. He said for the first time he really could understand how he was standing on a planet moving in space.

But that was an estimated 70,000 per hour rate.

We won't see that again from the Leonids for about 97 years, if we see it then. It is possible another surprise show could come now that they are getting better at predicting, but I doubt it.

So yes, the past few years have shown an abundance of good shows. There was also a good Perseids show in the mid 90s, about 300/hour just after its comet went by. But the show is over for now, and I doubt the Geminids rate a /. headline.

News:Closely watched copyright case goes to jury - San Francisco Chronicle - 2 hours ago
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Defense rests in ElcomSoft copyright trial - San Jose Mercury News - 10 Dec 2002
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The author cites at the start of his paper, my own article on this concept. Many people have come up with this idea independently, and while I was one of the earlier ones, proposing it at USENIX in 1996, it has earlier roots as well in places like AMIX and others.

In fact, I seem to get a mail every week from somebody who has just thought up this idea!

However, since being an early proponent, I have decided it's not so good an idea after all, though it can form one component of an anti-spam strategy, particularly for dealing with how to continue to allow anonymous mail in the anti-spam world.

At the heart of it, spam is the abuse of bulk mail, so solutions should attack the cause, not the symptoms. Undesired non-bulk mail is still undesired but it is not in any remote way a critical problem worthy of a complex solution, and we have decided as a socity you should not have any right not to be annoyed, though you can have a right to not have your mailbox overwhelmed. (Just as a ping is not on offence, but a ping-flood is.)

As it turns out, while timesharing always seems cheaper from the economic analysis, people tend to pick the PC anyway, under their control.

However, in this case, having the disk at the home makes sense. See my latest essay on this, or what I call Poor Man's Video on Demand

Interesting to note that Apple leaves alone people like Apple Auto Glass here in Canada -- different industry!

We should be more concerned with the ownership of generic words at the DNS level which is the real trademark travesty these days.

You know what they say about people who represents themselves in a court of law? Glad I'm not you guys.

Legal definition of property

Copyright myths dispelled

The actual law

Fair use & copyright resourse at stanford

More resourses pro & con

Intellectual property

I know people don't want to read and understand the above, but they certainly want to voice their opinion of the way it should be when the law comes after them. A little late IMHO.

Nope. See #6 on this list.

Say what you like about Gates and Microsoft, but the fact remains that in dollar terms, he's done far more for worthy causes than the typical Open Source advocate

Sure, he is giving a lot of money to his foundation.

On the other hand, according to this source, he is worth more than US$ 60bn.

And, according to this other source, our charitable friend Bill Gates makes about US$ 31 per second.

I don't think RMS, Linux, or ESR wealth or income will ever come close...

So, for Mr Bill Gates, giving US$ 1.2bn per year is... what? Giving away 1/50th of his total worth per year?? Now, that's pretty generous.

Don't misunderstand me: I truly thing it's generous. But you have to put this into perspective, especially when it comes to your comment about ESR. I personnaly think the article you referenced sipply means ESR is determined to enjoy his money... while we enjoy, for free, the software he created.

Templeton's writings are here.

It just has de facto power because every nameserver in the world is configured to point at ICANN's set of root servers, and it is that way because the name servers all come configured that way out of the box.

There is a good reason for this, we don't want a fractured net where different people get different answers to a DNS query.

At the same time, if we truly have the will to dump ICANN, and we all do it at once (or at least the most commonly used nameservers do it at once) their power can be totally stripped from them.

I outline how at this page

No, you're wrong. See item 6 on this web page. Characters can be copyrighted, and Mickey Mouse is. Likewise for Winnie the Pooh.

Unfortunately, you're looking at the theoretical maximums for film. The reality of most shots is far different. The contrast range isn't an issue for 99.9% of the population either, since prints only have a contrast range of around 100:1.

The biggest difference right now is color accuracy. Until the Foveon chip reaches 11 Megapixels, we won't have anywhere NEAR the color range of film.

For further reading: here's and excellent summary of the topic.

This, of course, begs the question, what is actually the resolution of a 35mm film?

From what I've read, a top-quality 35mm image, tripod, top-rate lens and finest-grained film under good light conditions has some 20million pixels. Twelve million is a more typical amount. And 4MPixels for a point and shoot cameras. (source

Colour seems to be a different point.

Of course, this is all highly subjective. So, let's start another Analog/Digital discussion (see LP/CD)

To avoid a flamewar, I don't want to imply that a Digitcal Camera is of has the same quality as a CD, and a analog 33mm is inferior to Digital cameras.
To avoid another flamewar, I don't want to imply that LPs are inferior to CDs.

Finally, the purpose of Copyright is not to protect the economic rights of a creator; the actual Article from the Constitution (Article I, section 8), states
The Congress shall have power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
By giving protections to creators, there is incentive for them to create and share those creations with the rest of society "to promote progress of science and useful arts".

On a side note, if you ever have an opportunity to take a course/workshop/etc. on copyright, I highly recommend it. I took a 2 1/2 course last summer though the U of Mich and it was fascinating -- I didn't know how much I didn't know!

But one thing I would like to find that I dimly remember is the first use (on Arpanet mailing lists in the late 70s) of the Johnny Storm "Flame On!" when getting angry in a posting.

In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside.

All sorts of first spams from email, to usenet, to MUDs.

If you have a good clean image at 300 dpi you will not notice the difference at all... The grandparent to this post is totally correct, and you are wrong, it does not matter for photos one bit. Your grain on an indoor film at 5 x 7 is going to be around 200 dpi anyway.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. Brad Templeton seems to have the most understandable page on the resolution of normal 35mm film shot with "good" standard pratice, not the best film with perfect technique. I'm not talking about pictures made with a plastic lens Kodak disposable camera. According to him, you should be able to get 12 megapixels on your 35mm film. Blown up to a 5"x7" print, that means 600 DPI. At that size, each pixel is 2.6 sq mils. At 200 DPI, each pixel is 25 sq mils. So, if you don't mind having your dots 10 times as big, you will be happy.

When you say I won't notice the difference, I have to wonder if you know I carry a B&L Hastings Triplet with me at all times. >:-)

[1] Image Quality [2] Bandwidth [3] Frames per Second (speed)

The other posters are correct pointing out the limitations inherent in high speed digital photography because today there are certainly a few that need to be over come before the transition can be made. With the speed of memory technology we are able to store a limited amount of image data on camera and allow for this to be transfered after capture has taken place. Already we see the beginings of high speed digitals that can be run indefinately with a loss in image quality. When you take out color completely and drop frame resolution than there is alot you can make a digital camera do. The reason that you have a loss in image quality as the speed increases is because the CCD / CMOS / CIF [Common Interchange Format] can't read out the image data fast enough between frames. Current implementations make one chip act as two whereby only one half of the imager captures at a time while the other half is busy transferring its data.

Readers should keep in mind that CMOS is used primarly in video because you can change the analog image data over to a digital value much quicker since there are more A/D converters and they are located closer to each pixel. If you are having trouble with the difference between the two How Stuff Works has a decent explaination. If you are looking for a vendor or want to read some data sheets to get a better idea of the differences between High Speed and High Resolution than I suggest visiting Redlake , one of the many vendors that have products on the market. If you want a better explaination of the target Image Quality that digital is trying to achieve than head over to this guy's site. I guess I will make this my paragraph of website plugs. I couldn't resist linking to an article written by a Professor of the program that I graduated from. It is about capturing a picture of a bullet hitting an object using a conventional megapixel imager.

I am glad that /. finially decided to run an article on this topic :) although it is plain to see that some of you are confused about what this technology is used for. Also I found it quite humorus that the one guy quoted image size of what he assumed the image sensor as 1024x768 which is the most commonly used screen resolution but probably has never been a image sensor size. Here is a good reminder from micron concerning the differences in resolutions. Most image sensors that are developed are of the same size in both dimensions. Not all but most.

Bandwidth isn't a problem. Another misconception that I hope to alievate. With fiber you are not limited by the amount of data that you can transfer through the cable, but by how you store the data once it is transferred. Now of course changing the data from light into electrical would cause a slow down. The reverse is also true. What someone should find out is the limitations of these converters. The only way we would see an advantage of using fiber was if we could finish developing new methods to store the data. I have read scientific columns on 3D optical storage techniques that might be applicable in the future. I think I got a bit off the track let me try and get back on.

The reason Bandwidth isn't a problem is because we don't have the capability to produce digital images at the same rate as with film technology. While it would be nice to have a 1024 x 1024 sensor running at 12K - 40K fps, it is not something that we can do currently.

So the question is what do you want to do with the high speed camera? How much important is Image Quality? How much do you want to spend on capturing the image data? See when it comes down to it, it all depends on the situation.

I am not quite sure why we are talking about high speed digital cameras in the first place. Maybe the person who wrote the article didn't research the equipment that this guy was using. I found his website and it says he is using film. Oh nevermind I reread it and he posed the question about why not use digital. I sure hope that I have answered that question!

Someone should brave the Japanese site linked off of the itworld site and find out the resolution of the 1 million fps Japanese camera. I bet it isn't very much.

A good set of essays on the costs of spam, and possible non-law-based solutions, can be found here. A list of costs is found in 7. Why spam is evil.