Get yourself a timebase corrector. A DPS Personal TBC for a few hundred bucks stuck in an old XT chassis will nicely clean out any copyprotection.
Actually, *any* old TBC is great to have around the house, period.
Some TV stations have been known to sell old equipment from their "graveyards" to staff. I once picked up a complete old RCA Image-Orthicon color studio camera. (Circa 1963? 1964?) I was in high school at the time, working on the side as a cameraman for a local TV station. I used to hop onto my bike after school and head right over to the TV station down the road and do the dinnertime newscast. So, one day when one of the older techs there dropped me off after work, with my bike, schoolbag and a 400-lb studio camera in the back of his van, my mother flipped. <sigh> I wish I'd been allowed to keep that thing. It was so cool.
Anyway, I did get to keep a couple of early digital TBCs. They were free-standing, 19" wide rack-mount, occupying three units on the rack. Made by Grass Valley, about 7 or 8 years old when they were retired off one of the mobile trucks in 1991. No computer required, but they were full of 1Kx4 static RAMs. Plug in the video, bring the level up until the SAT light flashes during bright scenes, then crank it back a bit. Run the output video to whatever you want.
Once you have a TBC, you can run a VCR through the TBC, run the TBC's sync output into a good camera (most security cameras have sync in jacks, so that you can run dozens of them on the same display), and then do dissolves and stuff back and forth from the camera to the VCR. To say nothing of dubbing rental movies (but it's easier if you have any non-VHS VCRs kicking around).
And TBCs are great if you like to freeze-frame video: most of them will hold a picture in static RAM if the signal is lost. (Notice sometimes on live news coverage, if the satellite feed is flaky, the announcer will appear to freeze momentarily? That's a TBC freeze, hiding a screen full of static.)
Nowadays, of course, you can do all this on your home computer. But having a few 3/4" VTRs, an old Amiga 500, a couple of TBCs and a home-built genlock gave me a tiny little TV studio a full decade before the iMac.
My first Apex blew up after 20 minutes. (Guess they dont know what burn in is...)
Quality at its finest, huh?
You know, these days, with the manufacturing and sales margins on consumer electronics (especially cheap off-brand stuff), there's no attention to quality. Save $0.05 per unit by not putting a heat sink on a transistor. If you're making 100,000 units, that adds up on the bottom line. Especially an off-brand like an Apex, which everyone is going to buy anyway just for the hidden features...
Once the 90-day warranty is up (and even before, if you feel brave), flip off the lid and feel for anything that gets hot (be careful not to get killed; if you don't know what's live, don't do it). If you've got access to any kind of thermal imaging equipment, use it. (I use an military AMIRIS system at work to find hot spots.)
Stuff to look for is output transistors for the spindle, since they'll be running the whole time the DVD player is on, and they're going to be running between off and full saturation, so they're dissipating electricity as heat in resistive mode. Look also for regulator ICs and switching transistors in the power supply, stuff like that. Pretend you're an overclocker, wanting to get the heat off a CPU chip - don't go so far as water cooling, I'm sure it's unnecessary - but it's exactly the same thing. Lots of black anodized aluminum heatsinks, lots of surface area, lots of non-conductive thermal transfer grease.
Every 10c drop in temperature can double the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of a semiconductor.
Look also for under-rated capacitors, both thermally and voltage-wise. Electrolytic and tantalum capacitors are expensive power supply components; to save money, the manufacturers often skimp on the voltage rating. ie. 6V capacitor on the 5V bus. Not much of a tolerance. Go to Radio Shack, and replace the capacitor with one with at least double the voltage rating (but the same capacitance value). Remember to get the polarity right, and I hope your multilayer board and surface-mount soldering skills are good.
My worst one was at work: we made the mistake of buying a Daytek (Daewoo) monitor. Three warranty replacements later, the current one came in. I'd have bought an NEC myself, but we couldn't return the Daytek by this point. First thing I did was take off the back cover, toss it in front of the AMIRIS, and find the horizontal output transistor was lit up like the sun. Pulled it out, put a huge heatsink under it ($3.95 at a local electronics parts shop), and dropped the temperature of it by 40c.
The monitor has been fine now for 2 years. However, it did have a sibling that was bought at the same time, and lasted three weeks out of the warranty period before the Horizontal Output blew up and took the flyback transformer with it. Sadly, I never got to get into that one and retrofit it with the heatsink that it should have had.
My replacement doesnt seem to have macrovision, Ive been able to record to tape and video in on my computer flawlessly.
Yeah. I'm not sure how different video cards set "record levels", basically the automatic gain control for the input stage of the Analog to Digital converter.
If I were designing one, I'd probably use one of the AGC chips readily available for VHS VCRs - they're cheap, easy to use and easy to find. However, not only are they the reason that Macrovision works only against VHS VCRs, but since computer hardware makes consumer electronics pale in its pursuit for the elusive and almighty buck, I'm sure that I'd have the software gurus do it.
If you're using a 16 bit A/D converter to sample the incoming stream, no one would ever notice if the A/D luminance resolution was a little low: the software can easily be made to pad the data if it determines that the sync pulses or whatever are too high or too low. So, some video cards may be immune to Macrovision, and some may not. It might even be possible for drivers to be written to scrub Macrovision from the incoming video signal on those cards that leave the video level setting up to a software number-crunch.
Keep in mind that Macrovision is entirely an analog "feature" of the outgoing signal from the DVD deck. If the vertical blanking interval is recorded on the DVD (unlikely, but I don't know, since I don't yet have a DVD player and therefore haven't played with them much), then your DVD player will send it out unless it specifically scrubs it. But it's more likely it's not in the movie, but a concession by the electronics industry to the MPAA, and the disc simply turns on or off the Macrovision circuits in the DVD player. So, it fails to turn on the Macrovision circuits sometimes....
Has anyone ever tried running a DVD player on a computer with an ATI Xpert@Play98 or similar card equipped with a video output jack? Does Macrovision exist on those? I'm sure the video converter chip on those doesn't actually get Macrovision commands from the video card driver.
And it plays mp3 cds.:)
Yeah, someone at Apex really likes to ruffle feathers with intellectual property owners.:)
I understand the excitement about getting rid of the region coding on the DVD system. But I wouldn't get too enthused about getting rid of Macrovision; you can do that yourself with a soldering iron and about $20 in Radio Shack parts. And no, I don't have a schematic to share, but if you're interested, I'll tell you how it works.
Unlike most of the discussions here which revolve around digital systems and digital technology, Macrovision is analog.
VCRs, just like cassette decks, have to have a recording level set, so that the tape is neither under-recorded or oversaturated. The appropriate recording level varies by scene and by source; all video signals should in theory have a specific level, but in practice, they don't. Therefore, there must be some compensating mechanism.
VHS VCRs (but not Beta, 3/4" or other professional formats) set their recording level using the black level in the "vertical interval", which is the black bar that you see when your vertical hold control is set wrong. There are scan lines there, and they contain a sub-black pulse that is sent to the vertical oscillator in the TV set to reset it to the top of the frame. But, a lot of the vertical interval is just video black, and is there because early TV sets needed a couple of lines to recover from the vertical reset.
As TV sets became more advanced and the need arose to hide more stuff into a TV picture, the vertical blanking interval has been used for lots of extra things: most notably, closed captioning, pay TV decoder controls, and setting record levels on home VCRs.
Try rolling your picture sometime and see if you can get it to stay on the vertical interval. You'll see a couple of bars flashing around for closed-captioning, and a couple of other bars flashing around that would provide digital signals to turn on and off older addressable analog pay-TV decoders (if your cable company uses them). (Usually, this stuff is in lines 19 and 21, odd fields only, but this depends on the cable company.)
VHS VCRs use black lines to set the record level. I can't remember the line numbers specifically, but it's line numbers in the teens.
If you want to prevent a VHS VCR from recording properly, therefore, all you need to do is screw with the blackness that should be present. If you replace it with white bars and stripes, the VCR will set its recording level low, and the rest of the frame of video will appear dark when you play it back. If you flash it on and off, the VCR will compensate during recording and flash the image bright (normal) and dim. Macrovision also screws with the recorded color indirectly; because the chrominance information's record level is generally set by the amplitude of the colorburst pulse at the start of each scan line, it will appear that the colors get to be too intense (saturated) for the given brightness (luminance) of the picture.
Okay, that's how it works. And, only VHS VCRs are vulnerable (and older/cheaper TV sets that don't properly deal with having crap in the vertical interval). So, how do we kill it?
Simple. What you need to do is detect the Horizontal and Vertical sync pulses, and make sure they always get through to the TV set. That's easy, they're the only things that should be between 0 and 0.3V (out of 1 volt of video). So, selectively filter out anything above 0.3V.
Set up a PLL or something to watch for the 60Hz pulse in that sync stream you've just found. A good chip to do this is the National Semiconductors LM1881 Sync Separator chip. Pin 3 will give you an output that you can use to reset a counter. Throw together a counter circuit using TTL or CMOS logic that will count 23 horizontal sync pulses (pin 1) after the vertical pulse from Pin 3. Once the counter has counted that many lines, you need to make it pass the video. You've now made a 23-line-long vertical pulse - your TV might or might not cope with it, your VHS VCR definately won't (but it won't hurt anything).
Now, all you need to do is, in the time that the counter is counting those 23 lines after reset, you hold the video output to your VCR to 0.3V. Congratulations, you've just scrubbed Macrovision from your video.
I figure about four commonly-available chips and a small power supply. I tried it myself a few years ago using just the LM1881, a counter, and about 6 transistors. I built my Macrovision scrubber not to make VHS copies of movies, but because I collect 1950s and 1960s TV sets, and many of them don't play well with Macrovision, and I still want to be able to watch rented movies on them.
Another trick that works sometimes is to just run the video into the video in jacks on a Beta VCR, and run the recovered video out. Most VCRs, while they're just idling, rebuild the sync pulses and intervals (this is why a lot of older VCRs don't pass closed captioning info to your TV). Since Beta VCRs set their recording level a different way, they're immune to Macrovision.
remember VHS versus Betamax? VHS was more popular. It won.
Actually, the reason VHS vs. Beta turned out the way it did wasn't because of any technical superiority on the part of the VHS format. It was purely price.
In fact, Betamax is a direct descendant of the popular (though old) broadcast format, U-Matic (3/4"). It's the same thing; as video tape head technology moved along and the head gaps could be made smaller, the whole thing could be scaled down in size.
To this day, Beta mechanisms, exactly the same as any old Beta VCR, are the foundation of the Betacam format, which is used in TV stations worldwide, especially for ENG work.
Beta tape is threaded out of the cassette through a much simpler "U"-load system than VHS's "M"-loading system, which basically looks like a Rube Goldberg invention. Instead of a cumbersom system of posts and hacked-up bicycle chain, U-Load systems use a loading ring, which just powers the tape around the head drum with less than half the moving parts of VHS's M-load. The design of the ring-based U-load system is centered around leaving the tape loaded during rewind and fast forward. That way, while you're fast forwarding or rewinding a Beta or 3/4" cassette, you can just hit the REW/FF button and have the picture come up on the screen so that you can see where you are in the tape. With VHS machines, the closest you can come to this is to hit FF/REW while you're playing, and the machine will scan ahead/behind faster. You miss out on the full rewind/fast forward speed.
Beta HiFi isn't a kludge the way VHS's high fidelity sound system is: rather than needing the separate "depth multiplex" hi-fi heads that VHS uses, the Betamax recording spectrum allocated space to FM modulate the sound and record it in between the luminance (brightness) and chrominance (color phase) parts of the signal. This means lower cost and better reliability.
Further, Beta allocates more space on the recording spectrum to allow better encoding of chrominance information. That's why, if you compare a similar vintage VHS machine with a similar vintage Beta, the colors will appear to be more real and usually with less chroma shift (tint change).
Beta's electronic design is such that the HQ system added to VHS playback circuits isn't required: VHS HQ doesn't have a Beta counterpart; Beta is HQ from the drawing board up.
Beta's head drum is a clamshell design, similar to most of the better 3/4" VTRs. The top and bottom of the head drum is stationary, with a small slot that allows the heads to poke through for tape contact. VHS (and cheaper 3/4" VTRs) use a spinning upper head drum. The idea is that the tape will ride on a cushion of air above the spinning head drum, and it reduces tape wear a little bit. But the spinning head drum causes stability issues that reduce the picture quality.
Beta was also designed so that at all recording speeds, the VCR uses the same head azimuth. VHS doesn't do that; for good picture quality (especially in EP mode), you need a four-head VCR, since a two-head VCR is optimized for SP playback/recording. When you hit pause or slow-mo, the VHS VCR turns on its tracking adjustment circuitry and inches the capstan to a complete frame, then it switches to its EP heads, which usually have a better azimuth angle for static display. This is why a 4-head VHS machine is required for a clean pause. Beta VCRs only need two heads to do it, but will only do it if they're equipped to fine-adjust the capstan position.
Want a neat piece of trivia? VHS stands for "Video Home System", and it was designed by JVC (Japanese Victor Company) as their entry into the home VCR market. The Beta format was originally designed as a compact 3/4" professional machine, with the word "Beta" being a Japanese word for "close" - because the Beta video tracks were closer together than 3/4". Beta cassettes, initially, weren't very long: as a professional format, most videocassettes were 20 minutes to 1/2 hour.
VHS is just a knock-off format that does the same thing as Beta, but without infringing on any of Sony's patents for helical video recording, automatic tape (as opposed to cassette) loading, signal processing, etc.
It saddens me that VHS won. Unfortunately, it's gotten to be pretty damned hard to rent a Beta video at Blockbuster, so I run VHS at home, too.
Actually, I've got a bunch of early VTRs, including a Sony 3600 open-reel 1/2" VTR, several of the very eariest Beta and VHS machines, and several 3/4" professional decks. Oh, and a 1967 Ampex Cross-Track open reel deck. Lemme tell you, compare the impotent little plastic noises that today's VCR's make with one of my old 3/4" editing decks, it's just incredible. Hit the play button, and there's a sound of a big motor starting up as the head drum is brought up to speed, and the a good succession of solenoids being turned on and off... "snap... snap... CLUNK!" as the machine engages the play mode.
It's like the difference in sound between a Honda Civic's 1.5L engine, and a Chevy 454 V8.
And man, a 1975 Sony 3/4" professional deck will produce an image that will blow the doors off the best of today's home video equipment.
What you don't realize is what Nike and companies like Nike do in those sweat shops.
What you don't realize is the different value system and civil rights afforded in different societies. Try travelling a little. Visit the middle east sometime. Go to China, take a look around. Kick around in India for a few weeks. The world is a little broader than you seem to understand.
Bitch at the countries that allow this to occur, don't go after Nike - they're just making smart business decisions (ie. cheap labor).
I don't think it's right, either. And I'm not especially interested in buying Nike sneakers, but not for this reason.
Ask yourself this: why haven't the people of these countries fought off their governments and uprisen against the trampling of their civil rights? Is it my fault that they're not capable of doing this?
Now, sit back, think about your American citizenship, everything your forefathers fought the Revolutionary War for, and be grateful that for you, this part of history happened over 200 years ago.
I'm seeing a disturbing trend in America lately, and that is the amount of ill will, rancor, and all-out hatred that is being directed at successful and profitable corporations. These corporations, which are directly responsible for the vibrant economy and standard of living we enjoy today, are continually finding themselves the targets of anti-business leftists.
Gotta be careful, or the US will turn into Canada, and then I'll have no place to go to escape the help-the-poor-before-you-buy-a-Mercedes-and-enjoy- the-success-you've-worked-hard-for Canadian attitude, political system and tax structure.
If nVidia uses strongarm tactics against reviewers, that's fine and dandy. Post on your website your story about nVidia, indicate that you won't review any of their products until their policies change, editorialize about how you feel nVidia may be feeling a little insecure in the face of [insert competitor's name here]'s product.
Sit back and let capitalism work. nVidia's tactics will soon change.
Above all, consult with your lawyer to see what you can and cannot say without incurring slander or libel suits.
Listen, sorry to be posting this here, because it's quite blatantly off-topic, and I'll happily take the karma hit that moderators will assess on me. It's just that this is about the only forum I can think of where I'll get intelligent "yup, I know what you mean" kinds of answers.
I support a number of Winblows 9x systems with ATI graphics cards of varying descriptions. Some of them at ATI 3D Chargers, some of them are Xpert@Play, Xpert@Play98, All-in-Wonder Pro, and All-in-Wonder 128, etc. Most of them are based on either the Rage Pro or the Rage 128 chipset.
And I can't get over how many driver problems I have with these things! I'm not an idiot, I know how to install drivers, and, in fact, I've gone so far as reading ATI's docs. (When in doubt, read the docs.)
One particular case, 16 identical machines running Win 95B (OSR2) and equipped with Xpert@Play98 (Rage Pro) PCI, *every last one of them* after I installed the drivers kept on starting up with "New Hardware Found - PCI VGA Adapter". Again, you'll note, this was after ATI's drivers were installed.
Those machines around the office with the All-In-Wonder cards have frequent crashes, showing invalid page faults in the video drivers.
Since ATI is a hometown company and seems to offer products that suit our needs, we've always used them, but I'm really convinced that their software people couldn't find their own rectal cavities with both hands and a flashlight.
Anyone else have similar experiences with their Windows drivers? How are the Linux and Mac drivers?
The brain is one of the very few muscles in our bodies that we know don't know alot about. This an imporatnt discovery it helps understand how we think are how we use uour brain it might help us solve those great puzzles like why can't I pat and rub my belly at the same time
If your brain is, indeed, a muscle, it's easily understandable how you might be unable to pat and rub your belly at the same time.
>I make a point of running up the toll-free long distance time on the phone numbers they advertise
Be sure to do this at pay phones. Extra $0.35 or so charge to the bill.
Ooh, good idea!
And, how many of you have sent bills to the spammers and then taken them to small claims court when they didn't pay?
Sadly, I'm in Canada, so while it's been tempting, it would be rather hard to collect and even more difficult to bring a court case, since most of the spam I get comes from American spammers...
I had hoped that NBC would retain its journalistic integrity, even when partnering with Satan, but it looks like they're under the control of Billy Boy. Sigh, one less news source to trust.
Journalistic integrity at NBC? I don't think so. Dateline NBC is almost as sensationalist as Extra or any of the other video editions of supermarket tabloids.
With the MSNBC partnership, I feel I can trust their reporting of Microsoft news about as well as I can trust the CBC's reporting of the state of the Canadian federal government.
Never leave the fox guarding the henhouse.
I'll stick with ABC. World News Tonight is great, Nightline is excellent, and they're in league with Disney, not with the devil.
so you are replacing one windows program with another windows program.... WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ON SLASHDOT?
this site is for people smart enough to use linux.
Maybe he wants to learn how to install and use Linux, but he has to spend so much time administering Windows clients that he can't get around to it?
Applaud him for sparing the time to at least get away from Outlook, for which all the exploits seem to be well known.
Time was, and still is, my problem; even after five years of experience with UNIX as a user, learning administering my first Linux box is still quite an uphill battle.
However, you'll be pleased to note that I now type "ls -l" accidentally and frequently at DOS command prompts.
Go easy on the Linux newbie, for together, we will all be Bill Gates' demise.
While we're at it, we ought to get rid of all these businesses trading personal information... Well, I'm the customer, so FUCK YOU! I'll take my money and (much more importantly) my time somewhere else, where I'm actually respected as more than just a gaping wallet.
Yup.
I have no problem with doubleclick.net and stuff like that building huge anonymous user-tendencies. It increases user clickthrus, meaning more money for the website, and ads that are more likely to reflect my interests and maybe even solve a problem that I have.
But when they cross the line and connect that with personal information that identifies me as more than just a cookie number in a browser cache, I resist it just as strenuously as you do.
Of course, all my doubleclick.net cookies have modified user names and are now write-protected to provide me a bit of anonymity again.
Re:Illegal to have an open SMTP server
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shall not be liable for any harm resulting from the transmission or receipt of such message unless such provider permits the transmission or retransmission of such message with actual knowledge that the transmission is prohibited by subsection (a) or subsection (b)(1).
Does this mean that if I have an open SMTP server I can be held liable for junk e-mails flowing through my system?
I'm not a lawyer, but I think this says that if you know you're relaying spam, you're liable. If you don't know, you don't know, and won't be held liable. (But it would be a pretty damned good idea to make sure your servers are secure, anyway.)
Re:How many law suits will come of this
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According to the bill you can sue for 500$ for each piece of spam you get. Wow, I'm sure there are ISP's that get thousands to millions of pieces of unwanted spam mail everydayt.
Actually, more importantly is the cost of the legal representation, because you can bet the spammer isn't going to be getting into the habit of passing out $500 to everyone who complains.
More likely, it'll mean that the spammers will just work harder to cloak themselves better, or move offshore.
It's not going away, folks.
Spamming Offshore Anonymously = EASY.
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Man I miss the days where when someone spammed, or crossposted unrelated material on usenet, their site was attacked by crackers and severly damaged. Unfortunately that it is illegal, and there are too many sites and people who need to be taught a lesson.
Yup. Unfortunately, spammers don't play by the rules. They frequently break into e-mail accounts, or coerce the gullible neophyte to provide an account name and password. Therefore, forgive my skepticism, I doubt there's much that the government can do about it.
Lots of spam originates from XXX websites, and from people selling CD-ROMs of e-mail addresses. There's absolutely nothing to stop you setting that up offshore. Liberia, for instance, has laws that protect the anonymity of company owners; this anonymity is a big reason why a lot of ships fly the Liberian flag - less personal liability to the owner.
All you'd need to do is register a Liberian corporation (which does not require citizenship or even residency), get an account with a Liberian ISP, and spam to your heart's content. The Liberian government wouldn't provide your name or any other information to you, even with a US demand.
There has to be a way to put a stop to that possibility.
Those were the good old days.
Back when Usenet was still useful. Back when you could put up your e-mail address on a webpage that would be viewed by either Lynx or Mosaic exclusively. Back when my e-mail took seconds to download, even with my old acoustic-coupled 300 baud modem...
<sigh>
The only solution that would do this is to declare war on spammers, and attempt to hack all of their systems to their knees. But, legislation would have to be in place that respects the self-governing nature of the Internet and ensures that acts of electronic vigilantism like this are only allowed to be directed at those who are, indeed, by legal definition, guilty of spamming. We don't want to legalize DDoS attacks agains Yahoo, etc.
Re:The Ultimate Solution to spam...
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Off topic, I know, but forgive me for evangelizing.
Hey. I happen to really like my foreskin.
So did I. Then I had a zipper accident in 1996. It was May 18th, 1996, at about 10:30AM. I was in a rush to get somewhere, and finished up at the urinal too quickly.
I'm grateful for the accident, for that day, I learned two lessons:
1. The Jews are very smart people. They've been doing circumcisions for over 5,000 years, most of that time with people thinking that they're weird for it.
2. Always wear button flies if you're uncircumcised. (You're less likely to get caught if you are cut.)
A few weeks after the accident, I learned how much better sex is when foreskin doesn't cover your head up on the "out" stroke. To say nothing of how good silk boxers feel now...
The only way we can reduce spam is by making it cost something to send it out... and a complaint is not considered much of a cost to the sort people that use spam.
So, you're essentially advocating that I use electronic stamps to send e-mail? How else would it work?
The problem is that spammers either pick up an AOL trial disk, set up the account, and send messages until the account gets canned, or they find myriad different ways of breaking into existing user accounts. Very few spammers legitimately call the ISP, ask for an exclusively e-mail account and a broadband connection, because fewer ISPs would accomodate them.
As such, the costs of doing such a thing would be borne by the general internet populace in the form of a per-e-mail charge.
Do you really want that?
What about mailing lists, an early and still popular form of internet discussion? Are we ready to see that die, or will they be financed somehow?
What if someone hacks your e-mail account and sends 100,000 spams out? You'll end up footing the bill, the spammer would be long gone to someone else's account.
The only way to control spam is to make it very undesireable for spammers to do so.
I make a point of running up the toll-free long distance time on the phone numbers they advertise, or of sending a copy of the spam to the hosting provider of every website they advertise. Most of the hosting providers are happy to know and delete the account immediately.
A few people taking small measures like this can make huge hits to their bottom line.
Re:Does spam actually work?
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I think the two most popular peices I get are "new mortage for your home" and "buy an email list." Neither of which seem to relate to me. (I love the mortage ones because I get them to my UNIVERSITY account.... yeah, as if I have a home to refinance anyway).
I have an old National Capital Freenet account that I've held for about ten years. All my mail from there is forwarded to my main mail account, as is the slant6mopar one above.
Anyhow, despite the fact that the e-mail address to which they're sending stuff is "@freenet.carleton.ca" and hasn't sent one outgoing message in seven years, I'm still inundated with messages coming in on that address of "Loans! Available no matter what your income! Offer valid in USA only!".
If you buy enough lottery tickets, you'll evenutally win, I guess.
Re:I like spam (the email kind)
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Been there, done that, forgot to turn off the send myself a copy feature.
I hope you had a broadband ISP with a good, fast mailserver and sysadmins who're too lazy to keep good logs....
<grin>
Re:Does spam actually work?
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Is it possible to actually sell stuff through spam drops? Is there any evidence that anyone can actually make cash through it? It seems to me that almost all the spam I get is just offers for buying more spam lists.
You know, I'm sure their sales rate per 100,000 impressions is so low that spammers look longingly at banner ads.
I'm sure a lot of people avoid buying from spam ads, not just because of the frustration of the intrusion, but also at the simple volume of intrustion.
Then the spelling is so bad, the offers are so shady, the products are so useless, and the website links that they send you to seldom actually work...
(I've tried following the links so that I can warn the hosting provider, not because I'd ever encourage spamming by buying a product advertised that way.)
Re:The Ultimate Solution to spam...
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Let's trace down every spammer one by one and cut some wires...
Wires? Who're you kidding?
Scrotums. We have to cut off their scotums.
Re:I like spam (the email kind)
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Hmm... I'm sorry someone, who obviously has a very minimalist sense of humor, moderated you down.
I actually collect all my spam, too. I'm almost at the point where I can burn a CD full of it. I'll send a copy to the IRS so that they can evaluate the legitimacy of all the businesses advertised, from a tax standpoint, of course.
Since most of these businesses seem to have telephone numbers in Florida, I think I'll also send copies to Florida's Better Business Bureau.
And then, maybe I'll write a script to extract all the company names and telephone numbers given and post them onto a webpage so that people may run up the toll-free bills of the advertisers.
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Actually, *any* old TBC is great to have around the house, period.
Some TV stations have been known to sell old equipment from their "graveyards" to staff. I once picked up a complete old RCA Image-Orthicon color studio camera. (Circa 1963? 1964?) I was in high school at the time, working on the side as a cameraman for a local TV station. I used to hop onto my bike after school and head right over to the TV station down the road and do the dinnertime newscast. So, one day when one of the older techs there dropped me off after work, with my bike, schoolbag and a 400-lb studio camera in the back of his van, my mother flipped. <sigh> I wish I'd been allowed to keep that thing. It was so cool.
Anyway, I did get to keep a couple of early digital TBCs. They were free-standing, 19" wide rack-mount, occupying three units on the rack. Made by Grass Valley, about 7 or 8 years old when they were retired off one of the mobile trucks in 1991. No computer required, but they were full of 1Kx4 static RAMs. Plug in the video, bring the level up until the SAT light flashes during bright scenes, then crank it back a bit. Run the output video to whatever you want.
Once you have a TBC, you can run a VCR through the TBC, run the TBC's sync output into a good camera (most security cameras have sync in jacks, so that you can run dozens of them on the same display), and then do dissolves and stuff back and forth from the camera to the VCR. To say nothing of dubbing rental movies (but it's easier if you have any non-VHS VCRs kicking around).
And TBCs are great if you like to freeze-frame video: most of them will hold a picture in static RAM if the signal is lost. (Notice sometimes on live news coverage, if the satellite feed is flaky, the announcer will appear to freeze momentarily? That's a TBC freeze, hiding a screen full of static.)
Nowadays, of course, you can do all this on your home computer. But having a few 3/4" VTRs, an old Amiga 500, a couple of TBCs and a home-built genlock gave me a tiny little TV studio a full decade before the iMac.
Quality at its finest, huh?
You know, these days, with the manufacturing and sales margins on consumer electronics (especially cheap off-brand stuff), there's no attention to quality. Save $0.05 per unit by not putting a heat sink on a transistor. If you're making 100,000 units, that adds up on the bottom line. Especially an off-brand like an Apex, which everyone is going to buy anyway just for the hidden features...
Once the 90-day warranty is up (and even before, if you feel brave), flip off the lid and feel for anything that gets hot (be careful not to get killed; if you don't know what's live, don't do it). If you've got access to any kind of thermal imaging equipment, use it. (I use an military AMIRIS system at work to find hot spots.)
Stuff to look for is output transistors for the spindle, since they'll be running the whole time the DVD player is on, and they're going to be running between off and full saturation, so they're dissipating electricity as heat in resistive mode. Look also for regulator ICs and switching transistors in the power supply, stuff like that. Pretend you're an overclocker, wanting to get the heat off a CPU chip - don't go so far as water cooling, I'm sure it's unnecessary - but it's exactly the same thing. Lots of black anodized aluminum heatsinks, lots of surface area, lots of non-conductive thermal transfer grease.
Every 10c drop in temperature can double the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of a semiconductor.
Look also for under-rated capacitors, both thermally and voltage-wise. Electrolytic and tantalum capacitors are expensive power supply components; to save money, the manufacturers often skimp on the voltage rating. ie. 6V capacitor on the 5V bus. Not much of a tolerance. Go to Radio Shack, and replace the capacitor with one with at least double the voltage rating (but the same capacitance value). Remember to get the polarity right, and I hope your multilayer board and surface-mount soldering skills are good.
My worst one was at work: we made the mistake of buying a Daytek (Daewoo) monitor. Three warranty replacements later, the current one came in. I'd have bought an NEC myself, but we couldn't return the Daytek by this point. First thing I did was take off the back cover, toss it in front of the AMIRIS, and find the horizontal output transistor was lit up like the sun. Pulled it out, put a huge heatsink under it ($3.95 at a local electronics parts shop), and dropped the temperature of it by 40c.
The monitor has been fine now for 2 years. However, it did have a sibling that was bought at the same time, and lasted three weeks out of the warranty period before the Horizontal Output blew up and took the flyback transformer with it. Sadly, I never got to get into that one and retrofit it with the heatsink that it should have had.
My replacement doesnt seem to have macrovision, Ive been able to record to tape and video in on my computer flawlessly.Yeah. I'm not sure how different video cards set "record levels", basically the automatic gain control for the input stage of the Analog to Digital converter.
If I were designing one, I'd probably use one of the AGC chips readily available for VHS VCRs - they're cheap, easy to use and easy to find. However, not only are they the reason that Macrovision works only against VHS VCRs, but since computer hardware makes consumer electronics pale in its pursuit for the elusive and almighty buck, I'm sure that I'd have the software gurus do it.
If you're using a 16 bit A/D converter to sample the incoming stream, no one would ever notice if the A/D luminance resolution was a little low: the software can easily be made to pad the data if it determines that the sync pulses or whatever are too high or too low. So, some video cards may be immune to Macrovision, and some may not. It might even be possible for drivers to be written to scrub Macrovision from the incoming video signal on those cards that leave the video level setting up to a software number-crunch.
Keep in mind that Macrovision is entirely an analog "feature" of the outgoing signal from the DVD deck. If the vertical blanking interval is recorded on the DVD (unlikely, but I don't know, since I don't yet have a DVD player and therefore haven't played with them much), then your DVD player will send it out unless it specifically scrubs it. But it's more likely it's not in the movie, but a concession by the electronics industry to the MPAA, and the disc simply turns on or off the Macrovision circuits in the DVD player. So, it fails to turn on the Macrovision circuits sometimes....
Has anyone ever tried running a DVD player on a computer with an ATI Xpert@Play98 or similar card equipped with a video output jack? Does Macrovision exist on those? I'm sure the video converter chip on those doesn't actually get Macrovision commands from the video card driver.
And it plays mp3 cds.Yeah, someone at Apex really likes to ruffle feathers with intellectual property owners. :)
I understand the excitement about getting rid of the region coding on the DVD system. But I wouldn't get too enthused about getting rid of Macrovision; you can do that yourself with a soldering iron and about $20 in Radio Shack parts. And no, I don't have a schematic to share, but if you're interested, I'll tell you how it works.
Unlike most of the discussions here which revolve around digital systems and digital technology, Macrovision is analog.
VCRs, just like cassette decks, have to have a recording level set, so that the tape is neither under-recorded or oversaturated. The appropriate recording level varies by scene and by source; all video signals should in theory have a specific level, but in practice, they don't. Therefore, there must be some compensating mechanism.
VHS VCRs (but not Beta, 3/4" or other professional formats) set their recording level using the black level in the "vertical interval", which is the black bar that you see when your vertical hold control is set wrong. There are scan lines there, and they contain a sub-black pulse that is sent to the vertical oscillator in the TV set to reset it to the top of the frame. But, a lot of the vertical interval is just video black, and is there because early TV sets needed a couple of lines to recover from the vertical reset.
As TV sets became more advanced and the need arose to hide more stuff into a TV picture, the vertical blanking interval has been used for lots of extra things: most notably, closed captioning, pay TV decoder controls, and setting record levels on home VCRs.
Try rolling your picture sometime and see if you can get it to stay on the vertical interval. You'll see a couple of bars flashing around for closed-captioning, and a couple of other bars flashing around that would provide digital signals to turn on and off older addressable analog pay-TV decoders (if your cable company uses them). (Usually, this stuff is in lines 19 and 21, odd fields only, but this depends on the cable company.)
VHS VCRs use black lines to set the record level. I can't remember the line numbers specifically, but it's line numbers in the teens.
If you want to prevent a VHS VCR from recording properly, therefore, all you need to do is screw with the blackness that should be present. If you replace it with white bars and stripes, the VCR will set its recording level low, and the rest of the frame of video will appear dark when you play it back. If you flash it on and off, the VCR will compensate during recording and flash the image bright (normal) and dim. Macrovision also screws with the recorded color indirectly; because the chrominance information's record level is generally set by the amplitude of the colorburst pulse at the start of each scan line, it will appear that the colors get to be too intense (saturated) for the given brightness (luminance) of the picture.
Okay, that's how it works. And, only VHS VCRs are vulnerable (and older/cheaper TV sets that don't properly deal with having crap in the vertical interval). So, how do we kill it?
Simple. What you need to do is detect the Horizontal and Vertical sync pulses, and make sure they always get through to the TV set. That's easy, they're the only things that should be between 0 and 0.3V (out of 1 volt of video). So, selectively filter out anything above 0.3V.
Set up a PLL or something to watch for the 60Hz pulse in that sync stream you've just found. A good chip to do this is the National Semiconductors LM1881 Sync Separator chip. Pin 3 will give you an output that you can use to reset a counter. Throw together a counter circuit using TTL or CMOS logic that will count 23 horizontal sync pulses (pin 1) after the vertical pulse from Pin 3. Once the counter has counted that many lines, you need to make it pass the video. You've now made a 23-line-long vertical pulse - your TV might or might not cope with it, your VHS VCR definately won't (but it won't hurt anything).
Now, all you need to do is, in the time that the counter is counting those 23 lines after reset, you hold the video output to your VCR to 0.3V. Congratulations, you've just scrubbed Macrovision from your video.
I figure about four commonly-available chips and a small power supply. I tried it myself a few years ago using just the LM1881, a counter, and about 6 transistors. I built my Macrovision scrubber not to make VHS copies of movies, but because I collect 1950s and 1960s TV sets, and many of them don't play well with Macrovision, and I still want to be able to watch rented movies on them.
Another trick that works sometimes is to just run the video into the video in jacks on a Beta VCR, and run the recovered video out. Most VCRs, while they're just idling, rebuild the sync pulses and intervals (this is why a lot of older VCRs don't pass closed captioning info to your TV). Since Beta VCRs set their recording level a different way, they're immune to Macrovision.
Actually, the reason VHS vs. Beta turned out the way it did wasn't because of any technical superiority on the part of the VHS format. It was purely price.
In fact, Betamax is a direct descendant of the popular (though old) broadcast format, U-Matic (3/4"). It's the same thing; as video tape head technology moved along and the head gaps could be made smaller, the whole thing could be scaled down in size.
To this day, Beta mechanisms, exactly the same as any old Beta VCR, are the foundation of the Betacam format, which is used in TV stations worldwide, especially for ENG work.
Beta tape is threaded out of the cassette through a much simpler "U"-load system than VHS's "M"-loading system, which basically looks like a Rube Goldberg invention. Instead of a cumbersom system of posts and hacked-up bicycle chain, U-Load systems use a loading ring, which just powers the tape around the head drum with less than half the moving parts of VHS's M-load. The design of the ring-based U-load system is centered around leaving the tape loaded during rewind and fast forward. That way, while you're fast forwarding or rewinding a Beta or 3/4" cassette, you can just hit the REW/FF button and have the picture come up on the screen so that you can see where you are in the tape. With VHS machines, the closest you can come to this is to hit FF/REW while you're playing, and the machine will scan ahead/behind faster. You miss out on the full rewind/fast forward speed.
Beta HiFi isn't a kludge the way VHS's high fidelity sound system is: rather than needing the separate "depth multiplex" hi-fi heads that VHS uses, the Betamax recording spectrum allocated space to FM modulate the sound and record it in between the luminance (brightness) and chrominance (color phase) parts of the signal. This means lower cost and better reliability.
Further, Beta allocates more space on the recording spectrum to allow better encoding of chrominance information. That's why, if you compare a similar vintage VHS machine with a similar vintage Beta, the colors will appear to be more real and usually with less chroma shift (tint change).
Beta's electronic design is such that the HQ system added to VHS playback circuits isn't required: VHS HQ doesn't have a Beta counterpart; Beta is HQ from the drawing board up.
Beta's head drum is a clamshell design, similar to most of the better 3/4" VTRs. The top and bottom of the head drum is stationary, with a small slot that allows the heads to poke through for tape contact. VHS (and cheaper 3/4" VTRs) use a spinning upper head drum. The idea is that the tape will ride on a cushion of air above the spinning head drum, and it reduces tape wear a little bit. But the spinning head drum causes stability issues that reduce the picture quality.
Beta was also designed so that at all recording speeds, the VCR uses the same head azimuth. VHS doesn't do that; for good picture quality (especially in EP mode), you need a four-head VCR, since a two-head VCR is optimized for SP playback/recording. When you hit pause or slow-mo, the VHS VCR turns on its tracking adjustment circuitry and inches the capstan to a complete frame, then it switches to its EP heads, which usually have a better azimuth angle for static display. This is why a 4-head VHS machine is required for a clean pause. Beta VCRs only need two heads to do it, but will only do it if they're equipped to fine-adjust the capstan position.
Want a neat piece of trivia? VHS stands for "Video Home System", and it was designed by JVC (Japanese Victor Company) as their entry into the home VCR market. The Beta format was originally designed as a compact 3/4" professional machine, with the word "Beta" being a Japanese word for "close" - because the Beta video tracks were closer together than 3/4". Beta cassettes, initially, weren't very long: as a professional format, most videocassettes were 20 minutes to 1/2 hour.
VHS is just a knock-off format that does the same thing as Beta, but without infringing on any of Sony's patents for helical video recording, automatic tape (as opposed to cassette) loading, signal processing, etc.
It saddens me that VHS won. Unfortunately, it's gotten to be pretty damned hard to rent a Beta video at Blockbuster, so I run VHS at home, too.
Actually, I've got a bunch of early VTRs, including a Sony 3600 open-reel 1/2" VTR, several of the very eariest Beta and VHS machines, and several 3/4" professional decks. Oh, and a 1967 Ampex Cross-Track open reel deck. Lemme tell you, compare the impotent little plastic noises that today's VCR's make with one of my old 3/4" editing decks, it's just incredible. Hit the play button, and there's a sound of a big motor starting up as the head drum is brought up to speed, and the a good succession of solenoids being turned on and off... "snap... snap... CLUNK!" as the machine engages the play mode.
It's like the difference in sound between a Honda Civic's 1.5L engine, and a Chevy 454 V8.
And man, a 1975 Sony 3/4" professional deck will produce an image that will blow the doors off the best of today's home video equipment.
What you don't realize is the different value system and civil rights afforded in different societies. Try travelling a little. Visit the middle east sometime. Go to China, take a look around. Kick around in India for a few weeks. The world is a little broader than you seem to understand.
Bitch at the countries that allow this to occur, don't go after Nike - they're just making smart business decisions (ie. cheap labor).
I don't think it's right, either. And I'm not especially interested in buying Nike sneakers, but not for this reason.
Ask yourself this: why haven't the people of these countries fought off their governments and uprisen against the trampling of their civil rights? Is it my fault that they're not capable of doing this?
Now, sit back, think about your American citizenship, everything your forefathers fought the Revolutionary War for, and be grateful that for you, this part of history happened over 200 years ago.
Gotta be careful, or the US will turn into Canada, and then I'll have no place to go to escape the help-the-poor-before-you-buy-a-Mercedes-and-enjoy- the-success-you've-worked-hard-for Canadian attitude, political system and tax structure.
If nVidia uses strongarm tactics against reviewers, that's fine and dandy. Post on your website your story about nVidia, indicate that you won't review any of their products until their policies change, editorialize about how you feel nVidia may be feeling a little insecure in the face of [insert competitor's name here]'s product.
Sit back and let capitalism work. nVidia's tactics will soon change.
Above all, consult with your lawyer to see what you can and cannot say without incurring slander or libel suits.
Listen, sorry to be posting this here, because it's quite blatantly off-topic, and I'll happily take the karma hit that moderators will assess on me. It's just that this is about the only forum I can think of where I'll get intelligent "yup, I know what you mean" kinds of answers.
I support a number of Winblows 9x systems with ATI graphics cards of varying descriptions. Some of them at ATI 3D Chargers, some of them are Xpert@Play, Xpert@Play98, All-in-Wonder Pro, and All-in-Wonder 128, etc. Most of them are based on either the Rage Pro or the Rage 128 chipset.
And I can't get over how many driver problems I have with these things! I'm not an idiot, I know how to install drivers, and, in fact, I've gone so far as reading ATI's docs. (When in doubt, read the docs.)
One particular case, 16 identical machines running Win 95B (OSR2) and equipped with Xpert@Play98 (Rage Pro) PCI, *every last one of them* after I installed the drivers kept on starting up with "New Hardware Found - PCI VGA Adapter". Again, you'll note, this was after ATI's drivers were installed.
Those machines around the office with the All-In-Wonder cards have frequent crashes, showing invalid page faults in the video drivers.
Since ATI is a hometown company and seems to offer products that suit our needs, we've always used them, but I'm really convinced that their software people couldn't find their own rectal cavities with both hands and a flashlight.
Anyone else have similar experiences with their Windows drivers? How are the Linux and Mac drivers?
If your brain is, indeed, a muscle, it's easily understandable how you might be unable to pat and rub your belly at the same time.
Disney is the devil
Hahaha... Well, getting back to NBC for a second, I'm a Will & Grace fan. Sorry.
<BigBlockMopar slaps Kailden around with a large, partially-rotten trout.>
Be sure to do this at pay phones. Extra $0.35 or so charge to the bill.
Ooh, good idea!
And, how many of you have sent bills to the spammers and then taken them to small claims court when they didn't pay?Sadly, I'm in Canada, so while it's been tempting, it would be rather hard to collect and even more difficult to bring a court case, since most of the spam I get comes from American spammers...
Journalistic integrity at NBC? I don't think so. Dateline NBC is almost as sensationalist as Extra or any of the other video editions of supermarket tabloids.
With the MSNBC partnership, I feel I can trust their reporting of Microsoft news about as well as I can trust the CBC's reporting of the state of the Canadian federal government.
Never leave the fox guarding the henhouse.
I'll stick with ABC. World News Tonight is great, Nightline is excellent, and they're in league with Disney, not with the devil.
this site is for people smart enough to use linux.
Maybe he wants to learn how to install and use Linux, but he has to spend so much time administering Windows clients that he can't get around to it?
Applaud him for sparing the time to at least get away from Outlook, for which all the exploits seem to be well known.
Time was, and still is, my problem; even after five years of experience with UNIX as a user, learning administering my first Linux box is still quite an uphill battle.
However, you'll be pleased to note that I now type "ls -l" accidentally and frequently at DOS command prompts.
Go easy on the Linux newbie, for together, we will all be Bill Gates' demise.
I'm very surprised it took so long for this bug to be discovered!
Yup.
I have no problem with doubleclick.net and stuff like that building huge anonymous user-tendencies. It increases user clickthrus, meaning more money for the website, and ads that are more likely to reflect my interests and maybe even solve a problem that I have.
But when they cross the line and connect that with personal information that identifies me as more than just a cookie number in a browser cache, I resist it just as strenuously as you do.
Of course, all my doubleclick.net cookies have modified user names and are now write-protected to provide me a bit of anonymity again.
Does this mean that if I have an open SMTP server I can be held liable for junk e-mails flowing through my system?
I'm not a lawyer, but I think this says that if you know you're relaying spam, you're liable. If you don't know, you don't know, and won't be held liable. (But it would be a pretty damned good idea to make sure your servers are secure, anyway.)
Actually, more importantly is the cost of the legal representation, because you can bet the spammer isn't going to be getting into the habit of passing out $500 to everyone who complains.
More likely, it'll mean that the spammers will just work harder to cloak themselves better, or move offshore.
It's not going away, folks.
Yup. Unfortunately, spammers don't play by the rules. They frequently break into e-mail accounts, or coerce the gullible neophyte to provide an account name and password. Therefore, forgive my skepticism, I doubt there's much that the government can do about it.
Lots of spam originates from XXX websites, and from people selling CD-ROMs of e-mail addresses. There's absolutely nothing to stop you setting that up offshore. Liberia, for instance, has laws that protect the anonymity of company owners; this anonymity is a big reason why a lot of ships fly the Liberian flag - less personal liability to the owner.
All you'd need to do is register a Liberian corporation (which does not require citizenship or even residency), get an account with a Liberian ISP, and spam to your heart's content. The Liberian government wouldn't provide your name or any other information to you, even with a US demand.
There has to be a way to put a stop to that possibility.
Those were the good old days.Back when Usenet was still useful. Back when you could put up your e-mail address on a webpage that would be viewed by either Lynx or Mosaic exclusively. Back when my e-mail took seconds to download, even with my old acoustic-coupled 300 baud modem...
<sigh>
The only solution that would do this is to declare war on spammers, and attempt to hack all of their systems to their knees. But, legislation would have to be in place that respects the self-governing nature of the Internet and ensures that acts of electronic vigilantism like this are only allowed to be directed at those who are, indeed, by legal definition, guilty of spamming. We don't want to legalize DDoS attacks agains Yahoo, etc.
Off topic, I know, but forgive me for evangelizing.
Hey. I happen to really like my foreskin.So did I. Then I had a zipper accident in 1996. It was May 18th, 1996, at about 10:30AM. I was in a rush to get somewhere, and finished up at the urinal too quickly.
I'm grateful for the accident, for that day, I learned two lessons:
1. The Jews are very smart people. They've been doing circumcisions for over 5,000 years, most of that time with people thinking that they're weird for it.
2. Always wear button flies if you're uncircumcised. (You're less likely to get caught if you are cut.)
A few weeks after the accident, I learned how much better sex is when foreskin doesn't cover your head up on the "out" stroke. To say nothing of how good silk boxers feel now...
Even if I could, I'd never want to go back.
Check this website out.
So, you're essentially advocating that I use electronic stamps to send e-mail? How else would it work?
The problem is that spammers either pick up an AOL trial disk, set up the account, and send messages until the account gets canned, or they find myriad different ways of breaking into existing user accounts. Very few spammers legitimately call the ISP, ask for an exclusively e-mail account and a broadband connection, because fewer ISPs would accomodate them.
As such, the costs of doing such a thing would be borne by the general internet populace in the form of a per-e-mail charge.
Do you really want that?
What about mailing lists, an early and still popular form of internet discussion? Are we ready to see that die, or will they be financed somehow?
What if someone hacks your e-mail account and sends 100,000 spams out? You'll end up footing the bill, the spammer would be long gone to someone else's account.
The only way to control spam is to make it very undesireable for spammers to do so.
I make a point of running up the toll-free long distance time on the phone numbers they advertise, or of sending a copy of the spam to the hosting provider of every website they advertise. Most of the hosting providers are happy to know and delete the account immediately.
A few people taking small measures like this can make huge hits to their bottom line.
I have an old National Capital Freenet account that I've held for about ten years. All my mail from there is forwarded to my main mail account, as is the slant6mopar one above.
Anyhow, despite the fact that the e-mail address to which they're sending stuff is "@freenet.carleton.ca" and hasn't sent one outgoing message in seven years, I'm still inundated with messages coming in on that address of "Loans! Available no matter what your income! Offer valid in USA only!".
If you buy enough lottery tickets, you'll evenutally win, I guess.
I hope you had a broadband ISP with a good, fast mailserver and sysadmins who're too lazy to keep good logs....
<grin>
You know, I'm sure their sales rate per 100,000 impressions is so low that spammers look longingly at banner ads.
I'm sure a lot of people avoid buying from spam ads, not just because of the frustration of the intrusion, but also at the simple volume of intrustion.
Then the spelling is so bad, the offers are so shady, the products are so useless, and the website links that they send you to seldom actually work...
(I've tried following the links so that I can warn the hosting provider, not because I'd ever encourage spamming by buying a product advertised that way.)
Wires? Who're you kidding?
Scrotums. We have to cut off their scotums.
Hmm... I'm sorry someone, who obviously has a very minimalist sense of humor, moderated you down.
I actually collect all my spam, too. I'm almost at the point where I can burn a CD full of it. I'll send a copy to the IRS so that they can evaluate the legitimacy of all the businesses advertised, from a tax standpoint, of course.
Since most of these businesses seem to have telephone numbers in Florida, I think I'll also send copies to Florida's Better Business Bureau.
And then, maybe I'll write a script to extract all the company names and telephone numbers given and post them onto a webpage so that people may run up the toll-free bills of the advertisers.