When did it become illegal for an employer to filter their employees' internet access?
If your employer is the US government, it became illegal in 1781. The constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech only apply to the government. A private employer can do whatever they want, the government cannot. Note that this doesn't mean that they can't have reasonable blocks on porn and the like (as a previous poster pointed out, porn viewing opens them up to sexual harrassment charges, so the blocks serve a legitimate purpose). In this case, however, the sites banned are political in nature, so it is a clear violation of the first ammendment to censor them. The rules are different in the Military, so they may have some legal leeway, but the fact that they seem to be blatantly blocking only one side of the argument should remove any credible argument that the cansorship is legal.
It's a sad, paranoid little world you live in, my friend. Of course they care about being the best. Even if they were the only software company on the planet, there's still the little matter that you need to improve features and interface to get people to buy the next version of Office, otherwise you sell it once and your revenue stream stops dead.
To paraphrase the old saying, just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean I'm wrong. In Microsoft's 30+ year corporate history they have never, with the apparent exception of their latest development tools, released a product that the majority of users would call the best in it's field. I suppose you could argue that the newer versions of Office might be the best, but only because they have leveraged their monopoly to drive all the significant commercial competition out of business. Unfortunately, in this context, best doesn't necessarily equate to good.
The same is true of the feature race that you bring up. More features doesn't mean a better product. In fact, I suspect that many argue that Word was better several years ago. I'm not a big word processor user, but I remember Word 5.1 for the Mac as being quite a good tool-- powerful, not so complicated as to make it difficult to use, and pretty stable. Unfortunately, since Microsoft changes file formats with each upgrade, users are forced to upgrade if they want to maintain compatibility with other users, regardless of whether there is any direct benefit-- or even a disadvantage-- to doing so. As you correctly point out (presumably unintentionally, since it somewhat contradicts your point), adding features has little if anything to do with being the best, and everything to do with building marketshare. Remember, percieved value and real value are quite often very different things.
Unfortunately, I haven't used any of the tools you mention as being the best, so I cannot respond directly. But I wonder if you polled 100 qualified people, how many of them would say that those are each the best tool in their respective fields? Not a good tool, but the best. I suspect that the answer would be far from unanimous.
Yes, they'd like to be better than Google, but nobody actually thinks that they'll do that by anything but focusing on making higher quality products.
That's an absurdly naieve statement. Name one product where MS has demonstrated a desire to be the best. They don't give a crap about being best, only about being biggest. So they'll do like they have done with every other product that they have ever released & make a search engine that's Just Good Enough (If that's not a MS trademark, it should be). Then they'll make it so that every time you use IE it will "accidentally" reset your default search engine back to MS Search. The results will be good enough that after a few months of constantly resetting it, most users will just give up & go along. So Mr' Holloway's prediction of being the most "relevant" will be true with basically no effort on the part of Microsoft. Aren't monopolies wonderful?
Sorry, but without deformable body the whole "concept" is just a blimp with wings attached...
Um, no. I know it's absurd to expect an AC to RTFA, but please, RTFA. Blimps are lighter then air. The Dynalifter is heavier then air. Basically, the Dynalifter is an airplane, but it uses helium to reduce it's overall weight giving it a much greater hauling capacity for its weight and fuel consumption.
To answer you question that is just a statement followed by a question mark, at this time they shouldn't. But, looking ahead a few incarnations of the technology never hurt anybody.
"why spend..." is a question. Granted, it is a rhetorical one, but gramatically it still requires a question mark. I'm not an English major, but that's my understanding of things at least.
As for the second part, that's exactly what I said. "It's entirely possible that the addition of a deformable body could provide additional benefits to a later version, but it would require a much larger technical breakthrough to achieve." You may be right that the technical breakthrough required may not be as large as I'm presuming, but my point still stands: It's silly to criticize them for not including every conceivable technical advance in the first version. A venture like this is risky enough, why overcomplicate it?
Ummm... Unless I'm completely misunderstanding you, the machine you describe is sometimes known as a blimp. It's nothing new.
But even if I am misunderstanding you, I think you (and the parent) are missing one fundamental point: While a deformable body certainly would seem to have advantages, it's not what they have invented. It's kind of like asking the Wright brothers why they didn't invent the 747, when it clearly has numerous advantages over the Wright Flyer. The Dynalifter has several very distinct advantages over current technologies, and those advantages do not require the use of a deformable body. It's entirely possible that the addition of a deformable body could provide additional benefits to a later version, but it would require a much larger technical breakthrough to achieve. The current idea is basically ready to go, so why spend several more years and hundreds of thousands-- or more likely millions-- more dollars working to achieve the ideal solution, when the current one is still pretty damn good?
Don't apologize for thinking. Apologize for being wrong-- assuming of course you are. On the other hand, if I'm wrong, I'd be interested in knowing it. I'm opinionated, but I'm willing to change my mind if you can make a convincing argument to the contrary. But cite examples, not "millions of jobs will be lost". If I am wrong I have no (well, ok, little) problem admitting it, but blind assertions that I'm wrong won't do it.
There are likely hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of jobs that would be either "downgraded" or eliminated.
It's possible, but your statement without any support does little to convince me. The parent isn't suggesting that we no longer make movies, just that they be distributed digitally. The production jobs would remain, though certainly the dynamics of the industry would change. One area that I didn't mention potential job losses are in shipping. No doubt there would be fewer jobs in the shipping industry, but I can't imagine that the distribution of DVD's makes up such a large of a percentage of US shipping volume that the overall effect would be that devastating. So what am I missing that would account for millions of jobs lost?
Political/economic question: what happens to all the entertainment industry-related jobs that were just eliminated overnight in your scenario?
I'm not sure I buy the parent's entire premise either (his economics seem a bit off) but I don't see a problem with his basic concept. First, not that many American jobs would be elimnated by such a switch. Manufacturing is presumably largely automated, but regardless is almost entirely done overseas. A few distribution jobs may be lost, but most distributors handle more than one product line, so losing one won't be catastrophic. Retail would be the hardest hit, so we'll probably lose a bunch of minimum wage video store clerk jobs, but the overall economic impact would be relatively minor.
Second, contrary to what the RIAA wants you to believe, it's not the government's job to prevent people's jobs from being obsoleted. Technology advances, and unfortunately, that occasionally means that old jobs are no longer needed. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the government has no obligation to the people, only that it's obligation is a broad one, and stifling innovation to protect a single industry group is not part of that obligation.
For reference, the latest list of non-signatories that I could find is: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, Oman, San Marino, Tonga and Yemen. I would not want to live in any of these countries, and the ability to pirate music to my heart's content would not make up for the other issues. Others may feel differently.
What a wonderfully fallacious argument! Obviously, the fact that those particular government's have not signed the Berne Convention is the only reason that they are less then ideal places to live. There's clearly no other possible explanation for the correlation other then causation.
You seem to have -completely- missed my point. Of course, this system won't make dumb criminals smart. But are the british cops really so incompetent that they can't catch crooks dumb enough to commit a robbery without a mask in the most surveiled country in the world?
My point wasn't that this system was useless. My point was that this system was usless for it's advertised purpose. As I pointed out, a revolving license plate is but one of many easy ways to foil this system. The only advantage of such a system is that you could change plates while moving. In reality, I can't imagine anyone actually bothering with something this complicated when manually swapping plates would be so simple. Regardless of the method of swapping the plates, though, the point is the same: A person who has an interest in foiling the system can easily foil the system. Will the system stop dumb crooks? Yes. Speeders? Yes. Terrorists? Nope. They'll have absolutely no problem getting around it. I'm not in Britain, but I'm willing to bet that the advertised target of this system isn't speeders, but terrorists.
As I said, "different people in different situations will sometimes choose different tools". For some jobs, Programmer A will choose Ruby, for others, he'll choose Java, for still others he may choose C++, Perl, or PHP. Another programmer in the same position might choose a different language for the same job. That doesn't mean that either of them were wrong, just that they have different preferences and priorities.
You're right that Java has certain advantages that show up in certain domains of programming, just as Ruby does in others. That doesn't mean that it's a better language. Better, at least in this context, is absolutely subjective.
And I just remembered another easy way to defeat this. In the movie Cannonball Run (1981) one of the cars had a simple system rigged up with three or four license plates mounted on a spindle. Just press a button & you have new plate numbers. Get a white van with a spindle like that and a vareity of magnetic signs to attach to the side of your van and you could easily cover quite a distance without being easily traced.
You seem to be assuming that the people who want to make a counterfeit plate are without resources. It's no harder to counterfeit a license plate then it is to counterfeit a CD, and look at how well the efforts to crack down on those have gone. At the most primitive, any color printer can make a fake license plate that will fool a simple (or even not so simple) optical recognition system. It probably wouldn't fool a human, but for many things that's not a big deal, especially if you don't need the ruse to last very long. If you need something that will last longer, it will require a bigger investment, but certainly not an investment that any crime syndacite or terrorist organization would have trouble acheiving.
And of course, don't forget that the simplest form of misdirection doesn't require counterfeiting plates at all. Just steal one from a similar make & model & swap it out someplace outside of the view of the cameras. If you attach the plate with Velcro, you can swap out the plate in probably 15 seconds.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is -exactly- like CD copy protection. It does little, if anything, to stop the purported targets (organized pirates, terrorists), but is very effective at it's real goal (forcing people to buy multiple copies of their favorite CD's, control the masses & collect revenue from speeders). Hopefully the scheme will backfire as badly for the British government as it has for Sony.
Sure people criticize the government, as the constitution allows. But that doesn't stop the right wing from yelling "Treason!" anytime they are criticized. Hell, just this week Bush described the person who leaked what could turn out to be the single most important news story since Watergate as "shameful". Personally, I find the presidents absolute contempt for the most fundamental laws of our land far, far more shameful.
You're partly correct. Both sides in the debate are absolutely convinced they're right, so it's an unwinnable debate. But what everyone seems to miss in these debates sometimes is that both sides are correct. Bungle is right that for him, Java is more maintainable. It fits his programming style better. The Ruby proponents are right that Ruby is more maintainable for them for the same reason. Can we all just agree that their can be more then one best language-- that different people in different situations will sometimes choose different tools-- and that that's a good thing?
Ruby makes it very easy to write maintainable code, but in the end it's the programmers responsibility to do so. A bad programmer can write unmaintainable code in pretty much any language. Some languages make it harder to do so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their code is inherently more maintainable.
Well, maybe if you followed the link, you'd be able to figure out the defionition on your own. Failing that, there's an obscure site called "Google" that I've found very helpful when I need to find information. Hopefully Google will someday become more widely known, but in the meantime I can certainly understand how you might not know about it.
You can create the homemade equivalent of a Cooper Cooler with simply a cooler or bucket of ice (or better yet the ice water/salt mix recommended by the Mythbusters), a wire coat hanger & a cordless drill. Straighten the coat hanger, bend one end through the tab of the beer or wrap it around & tape it to the top of the bottle. Insert the other end into the drill. Spin the beer rapidly in the ice for 1-2 minutes. Works great & basically free if you already have the drill.
Re:You'll love this site--ain't retirement great?
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Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 1
As shown in the previous link, a perpendicular strike through water causes uniform bullet expansion, not fragmentation.
Ummm... I'm not a gun nut, but the link that you point out seems to show that -hollow-point- bullets expand uniformly. This in no way disproves the Mythbusters findings. In fact, contrary to what you say, the only bullets that fragmented were fired from high-powered rifles. The bullets shot from handguns consistently reached much deeper depths.
You're right, the Mythbusters are notorious for playing a little fast and loose with the scientific method. But before you point to evidence that the Mythbusters are wrong, you should make sure that the evidence is actually relevant. Their conclusion may be wrong, but your evidence does nothing to prove it.
Don't worry about sounding racist, it's simple economics. The annual per capita income of India is $3,100. You're not likely to find many Americans-- except perhaps the occasional high school student-- who would be willing to compete with someone on that sort of a pay scale. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with being able to live on $260 a month
I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong direction. Rather then simply looking for a better way of delivering the content, I'd suggest looking at a better way of selling the images. I don't know how you currently market your images, but if you had a shopping cart system to actually sell the images online, you would probably increase your sales.
I'd strongly recommend that you look at the various off-the-shelf shopping cart systems out there. I'm willing to bet that at least one of them gracefully supports delivery of digital content. This will probably be more complicated then just writing a quick PHP script, but in the long run I bet you'll be much happier with the result.
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When did it become illegal for an employer to filter their employees' internet access?
If your employer is the US government, it became illegal in 1781. The constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech only apply to the government. A private employer can do whatever they want, the government cannot. Note that this doesn't mean that they can't have reasonable blocks on porn and the like (as a previous poster pointed out, porn viewing opens them up to sexual harrassment charges, so the blocks serve a legitimate purpose). In this case, however, the sites banned are political in nature, so it is a clear violation of the first ammendment to censor them. The rules are different in the Military, so they may have some legal leeway, but the fact that they seem to be blatantly blocking only one side of the argument should remove any credible argument that the cansorship is legal.
It's a sad, paranoid little world you live in, my friend. Of course they care about being the best. Even if they were the only software company on the planet, there's still the little matter that you need to improve features and interface to get people to buy the next version of Office, otherwise you sell it once and your revenue stream stops dead.
To paraphrase the old saying, just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean I'm wrong. In Microsoft's 30+ year corporate history they have never, with the apparent exception of their latest development tools, released a product that the majority of users would call the best in it's field. I suppose you could argue that the newer versions of Office might be the best, but only because they have leveraged their monopoly to drive all the significant commercial competition out of business. Unfortunately, in this context, best doesn't necessarily equate to good.
The same is true of the feature race that you bring up. More features doesn't mean a better product. In fact, I suspect that many argue that Word was better several years ago. I'm not a big word processor user, but I remember Word 5.1 for the Mac as being quite a good tool-- powerful, not so complicated as to make it difficult to use, and pretty stable. Unfortunately, since Microsoft changes file formats with each upgrade, users are forced to upgrade if they want to maintain compatibility with other users, regardless of whether there is any direct benefit-- or even a disadvantage-- to doing so. As you correctly point out (presumably unintentionally, since it somewhat contradicts your point), adding features has little if anything to do with being the best, and everything to do with building marketshare. Remember, percieved value and real value are quite often very different things.
Unfortunately, I haven't used any of the tools you mention as being the best, so I cannot respond directly. But I wonder if you polled 100 qualified people, how many of them would say that those are each the best tool in their respective fields? Not a good tool, but the best. I suspect that the answer would be far from unanimous.
Yes, they'd like to be better than Google, but nobody actually thinks that they'll do that by anything but focusing on making higher quality products.
That's an absurdly naieve statement. Name one product where MS has demonstrated a desire to be the best. They don't give a crap about being best, only about being biggest. So they'll do like they have done with every other product that they have ever released & make a search engine that's Just Good Enough (If that's not a MS trademark, it should be). Then they'll make it so that every time you use IE it will "accidentally" reset your default search engine back to MS Search. The results will be good enough that after a few months of constantly resetting it, most users will just give up & go along. So Mr' Holloway's prediction of being the most "relevant" will be true with basically no effort on the part of Microsoft. Aren't monopolies wonderful?
Now THAT's an improvemnt that I would like to see.
Sorry, but without deformable body the whole "concept" is just a blimp with wings attached ...
Um, no. I know it's absurd to expect an AC to RTFA, but please, RTFA. Blimps are lighter then air. The Dynalifter is heavier then air. Basically, the Dynalifter is an airplane, but it uses helium to reduce it's overall weight giving it a much greater hauling capacity for its weight and fuel consumption.
To answer you question that is just a statement followed by a question mark, at this time they shouldn't. But, looking ahead a few incarnations of the technology never hurt anybody.
"why spend..." is a question. Granted, it is a rhetorical one, but gramatically it still requires a question mark. I'm not an English major, but that's my understanding of things at least.
As for the second part, that's exactly what I said. "It's entirely possible that the addition of a deformable body could provide additional benefits to a later version, but it would require a much larger technical breakthrough to achieve." You may be right that the technical breakthrough required may not be as large as I'm presuming, but my point still stands: It's silly to criticize them for not including every conceivable technical advance in the first version. A venture like this is risky enough, why overcomplicate it?
Ummm... Unless I'm completely misunderstanding you, the machine you describe is sometimes known as a blimp. It's nothing new.
But even if I am misunderstanding you, I think you (and the parent) are missing one fundamental point: While a deformable body certainly would seem to have advantages, it's not what they have invented. It's kind of like asking the Wright brothers why they didn't invent the 747, when it clearly has numerous advantages over the Wright Flyer. The Dynalifter has several very distinct advantages over current technologies, and those advantages do not require the use of a deformable body. It's entirely possible that the addition of a deformable body could provide additional benefits to a later version, but it would require a much larger technical breakthrough to achieve. The current idea is basically ready to go, so why spend several more years and hundreds of thousands-- or more likely millions-- more dollars working to achieve the ideal solution, when the current one is still pretty damn good?
I apologize for thinking.
Don't apologize for thinking. Apologize for being wrong-- assuming of course you are. On the other hand, if I'm wrong, I'd be interested in knowing it. I'm opinionated, but I'm willing to change my mind if you can make a convincing argument to the contrary. But cite examples, not "millions of jobs will be lost". If I am wrong I have no (well, ok, little) problem admitting it, but blind assertions that I'm wrong won't do it.
There are likely hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of jobs that would be either "downgraded" or eliminated.
It's possible, but your statement without any support does little to convince me. The parent isn't suggesting that we no longer make movies, just that they be distributed digitally. The production jobs would remain, though certainly the dynamics of the industry would change. One area that I didn't mention potential job losses are in shipping. No doubt there would be fewer jobs in the shipping industry, but I can't imagine that the distribution of DVD's makes up such a large of a percentage of US shipping volume that the overall effect would be that devastating. So what am I missing that would account for millions of jobs lost?
Political/economic question: what happens to all the entertainment industry-related jobs that were just eliminated overnight in your scenario?
I'm not sure I buy the parent's entire premise either (his economics seem a bit off) but I don't see a problem with his basic concept. First, not that many American jobs would be elimnated by such a switch. Manufacturing is presumably largely automated, but regardless is almost entirely done overseas. A few distribution jobs may be lost, but most distributors handle more than one product line, so losing one won't be catastrophic. Retail would be the hardest hit, so we'll probably lose a bunch of minimum wage video store clerk jobs, but the overall economic impact would be relatively minor.
Second, contrary to what the RIAA wants you to believe, it's not the government's job to prevent people's jobs from being obsoleted. Technology advances, and unfortunately, that occasionally means that old jobs are no longer needed. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the government has no obligation to the people, only that it's obligation is a broad one, and stifling innovation to protect a single industry group is not part of that obligation.
Porter Cable's wireless router would work great, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't run Linux.
For reference, the latest list of non-signatories that I could find is: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, Oman, San Marino, Tonga and Yemen. I would not want to live in any of these countries, and the ability to pirate music to my heart's content would not make up for the other issues. Others may feel differently.
What a wonderfully fallacious argument! Obviously, the fact that those particular government's have not signed the Berne Convention is the only reason that they are less then ideal places to live. There's clearly no other possible explanation for the correlation other then causation.
You seem to have -completely- missed my point. Of course, this system won't make dumb criminals smart. But are the british cops really so incompetent that they can't catch crooks dumb enough to commit a robbery without a mask in the most surveiled country in the world?
My point wasn't that this system was useless. My point was that this system was usless for it's advertised purpose. As I pointed out, a revolving license plate is but one of many easy ways to foil this system. The only advantage of such a system is that you could change plates while moving. In reality, I can't imagine anyone actually bothering with something this complicated when manually swapping plates would be so simple. Regardless of the method of swapping the plates, though, the point is the same: A person who has an interest in foiling the system can easily foil the system. Will the system stop dumb crooks? Yes. Speeders? Yes. Terrorists? Nope. They'll have absolutely no problem getting around it. I'm not in Britain, but I'm willing to bet that the advertised target of this system isn't speeders, but terrorists.
As I said, "different people in different situations will sometimes choose different tools". For some jobs, Programmer A will choose Ruby, for others, he'll choose Java, for still others he may choose C++, Perl, or PHP. Another programmer in the same position might choose a different language for the same job. That doesn't mean that either of them were wrong, just that they have different preferences and priorities.
You're right that Java has certain advantages that show up in certain domains of programming, just as Ruby does in others. That doesn't mean that it's a better language. Better, at least in this context, is absolutely subjective.
I'm sure you do.
And I just remembered another easy way to defeat this. In the movie Cannonball Run (1981) one of the cars had a simple system rigged up with three or four license plates mounted on a spindle. Just press a button & you have new plate numbers. Get a white van with a spindle like that and a vareity of magnetic signs to attach to the side of your van and you could easily cover quite a distance without being easily traced.
You seem to be assuming that the people who want to make a counterfeit plate are without resources. It's no harder to counterfeit a license plate then it is to counterfeit a CD, and look at how well the efforts to crack down on those have gone. At the most primitive, any color printer can make a fake license plate that will fool a simple (or even not so simple) optical recognition system. It probably wouldn't fool a human, but for many things that's not a big deal, especially if you don't need the ruse to last very long. If you need something that will last longer, it will require a bigger investment, but certainly not an investment that any crime syndacite or terrorist organization would have trouble acheiving.
And of course, don't forget that the simplest form of misdirection doesn't require counterfeiting plates at all. Just steal one from a similar make & model & swap it out someplace outside of the view of the cameras. If you attach the plate with Velcro, you can swap out the plate in probably 15 seconds.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is -exactly- like CD copy protection. It does little, if anything, to stop the purported targets (organized pirates, terrorists), but is very effective at it's real goal (forcing people to buy multiple copies of their favorite CD's, control the masses & collect revenue from speeders). Hopefully the scheme will backfire as badly for the British government as it has for Sony.
Sure people criticize the government, as the constitution allows. But that doesn't stop the right wing from yelling "Treason!" anytime they are criticized. Hell, just this week Bush described the person who leaked what could turn out to be the single most important news story since Watergate as "shameful". Personally, I find the presidents absolute contempt for the most fundamental laws of our land far, far more shameful.
You're partly correct. Both sides in the debate are absolutely convinced they're right, so it's an unwinnable debate. But what everyone seems to miss in these debates sometimes is that both sides are correct. Bungle is right that for him, Java is more maintainable. It fits his programming style better. The Ruby proponents are right that Ruby is more maintainable for them for the same reason. Can we all just agree that their can be more then one best language-- that different people in different situations will sometimes choose different tools-- and that that's a good thing?
Ruby makes it very easy to write maintainable code, but in the end it's the programmers responsibility to do so. A bad programmer can write unmaintainable code in pretty much any language. Some languages make it harder to do so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their code is inherently more maintainable.
Screencasts? ANOTHER new word? Definition anyone?
Well, maybe if you followed the link, you'd be able to figure out the defionition on your own. Failing that, there's an obscure site called "Google" that I've found very helpful when I need to find information. Hopefully Google will someday become more widely known, but in the meantime I can certainly understand how you might not know about it.
You can create the homemade equivalent of a Cooper Cooler with simply a cooler or bucket of ice (or better yet the ice water/salt mix recommended by the Mythbusters), a wire coat hanger & a cordless drill. Straighten the coat hanger, bend one end through the tab of the beer or wrap it around & tape it to the top of the bottle. Insert the other end into the drill. Spin the beer rapidly in the ice for 1-2 minutes. Works great & basically free if you already have the drill.
As shown in the previous link, a perpendicular strike through water causes uniform bullet expansion, not fragmentation.
Ummm... I'm not a gun nut, but the link that you point out seems to show that -hollow-point- bullets expand uniformly. This in no way disproves the Mythbusters findings. In fact, contrary to what you say, the only bullets that fragmented were fired from high-powered rifles. The bullets shot from handguns consistently reached much deeper depths.
You're right, the Mythbusters are notorious for playing a little fast and loose with the scientific method. But before you point to evidence that the Mythbusters are wrong, you should make sure that the evidence is actually relevant. Their conclusion may be wrong, but your evidence does nothing to prove it.
Don't worry about sounding racist, it's simple economics. The annual per capita income of India is $3,100. You're not likely to find many Americans-- except perhaps the occasional high school student-- who would be willing to compete with someone on that sort of a pay scale. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with being able to live on $260 a month
I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong direction. Rather then simply looking for a better way of delivering the content, I'd suggest looking at a better way of selling the images. I don't know how you currently market your images, but if you had a shopping cart system to actually sell the images online, you would probably increase your sales.
I'd strongly recommend that you look at the various off-the-shelf shopping cart systems out there. I'm willing to bet that at least one of them gracefully supports delivery of digital content. This will probably be more complicated then just writing a quick PHP script, but in the long run I bet you'll be much happier with the result.