Remember - it's not illegal if you're not a monopoly, and it's not illegal to be a monopoly. It's just that certain things *become* illegal when you're a legally defined monoply.
Wonderful summary! They never managed to be that clear in my (few!) law classes.
Most monopolies like utilities (power, water, phone, cable), just kowtow to heavy regulation and limited profits to maintain their monopoly.
Note those monopolies are or were government granted monopolies, that is they convinced the government to bar any competitors (that sort of stopped for phone companies in the 80s, and sort of for some power companies recently, but is still largely true of cable in most places in the USA, a few places the local governments granted two companies hte rights and they have much better and cheaper service then avg, and fewer small dish users...I think water is still a monopoly everywhere...).
P.S. the above applies to the USA, it's a big world, and I'm sure other countries do things other ways...
The supreme court is regulated by congress which can even go so far as to make exceptions to it's jurisdiction by simply writing a law to that effect - a simple majority is all they need.
Do you remember which part of the constitution allows that? Or is this a theory that without support from the constitution they could make a "normal" law that would alter what the supreme court can hear? (maybe we are lucky in a few ways that there aren't more programmers in congress...)
There should also be provisions for abandonment. For example, if a copyrighted work is not available for sale (including for $0.00) from its copyright holder to the public for a total of ten years, then it is considered to be abandoned.
While that's a nice idea, it has a lot of holes in it. Have you ever seen a professional photographer work? They take a lot of pictures in the field (or even studio) later they go over them very carefully and select the best ones for publication (or to try to sell as stock). It's not uncommon to have less then one "keeper" in a roll of film (i.e. less then one out of 36). A lot of that is because several shots are of basically the same thing but the exposure, angle, or other things are just a little different. There isn't a lot of point to trying to sell all of those, just pick the best one and be done with it. Under your scheme the "almost perfect" shots not being available to the public have been abandoned, and after ten years anyone can use them. Even if the one selected image is a very valuable piece of stock, and the alternate is almost as good... (yes it would require a bit of dumpster diving to get the rejects, but it can happen; and no digital cameras won't solve this since many pros write all their stuff to CD before they sort -- who knows when a "discard" shot of an unknown woman hugging the President may come in handy months after the fact when the woman hits the news...)
Or in a less commercial realm, what if you take pictures of your wife or girlfriend that you (and she!) don't want anyone else to have? Since they are not available to the public at any price the guy at the lab who made an extra copy ten years ago can now sell it...(yes digital cameras make this exact story less likely, but you can get to the same bad place via a different route...)
Ah! On a more geeky note WoTC removed a number of cards from Magic because they were too powerful. Just wait ten years and they can come right back!
Copyright is used for more then just sucking money out of people.
Maybe this will mean copyrights will no longer be enforced after authors are dead
Yeah, because the wives of Jazz players and photographers should be broke as well as breved after their husbands die. Come on, there are good reasons for copyright to run past the lives of the originators, 70+ years after really is too long, but 0 years would be too short in many cases!
The reason they didn't even try to make them backwards compatable is that the technology is entirely dependent on using blue lasers for reading, something which current DVD's don't have. So they would have had to sacrifice most, if not all, of the increased density to make them readable in current DVD players.
Backwards compatibility would be the new drive being able to play old DVDs and CDs (probably with a cartrage you have to put the old disk in), not being able to play the new media in an old drive. Much like current DVD players are (mostly) backwards compatible with CDs and (sometimes) CD-R and CD-RW.
Currently, my only solution for backups of my drives are other drives. Sure, tapes work, but they take far too long. Being able to dump the essentials from my hard drive (being a 3D designer, that's easily 30 gigs of textures, models, etc) onto one disc would be a lifesaver.
If the media is large enough to hold one full set of your data and it doesn't take more then about 12 hours to write, why don't you start the backup before you go home and then it'll be ready in the morning?
Large Unix sites use to pay "operators" to swap tapes overnight, they may now use tape jukebox systems, but they sure don't expect the users to hang out and deal with it.
It's impossible to be backwards compatible... this new specification uses Cartridges! (Read the spec.) Which makes inexpensive out of the question.
The early CD-ROMs (at least many of them) used cartridges. The CD-ROM would fit in them. You could get empty cartridges to put normal CDs into. They were sort of pricy like $17 or so, but they were a low volume item. I expect a similar thing could be done here too.
But I mainly say that from the standpoint that HP's PA people were involved in the design as well, and the Itanium looks like it has a fair amount of influence from the PA.
It doesn't seem to be any more like an HP-PA then anything else. Actually I would say it is more like a Multiflow then anything else. Ok, I mean yes it is a three register ISA like the HP-PA (but also like most other modern CPUs!), but almost none of the HP-PA addressing modes, and very few of the HP-PA quirks (the bit mangling instructions may have been from there, but I'm not sure, and they are a pretty small part of the IA64 anyway).
I don't know of any that were in the general purpose CPU market that were successful though.
OK, I didn't realize that you were concerned with how they were marketed rather then designed. The i860 was in a modestly successful Unix machine in Japan, and a woefully under successful one in the USA (same box, the OkiData 8500 and one or two other models). It had better SPECfp numbers then most of the other Unix boxes at the time too (I think it predated the Alpha, but can't remember, it didn't beat the RS/6000, but it beat the DECStation and was way way way faster then the SPARCs of the era). Hmmmm, come to think of it maybe it was (a little) after the Alpha, it was slower then the Alpha.
The data books definitely read like it was intended to be a GP CPU. Mine are packed so I can't say for sure if they used the phrase "General Purpose CPU" or not though.
The i960 was more targeted towards the embedded controller market, or at least that is where it had most of its success. I don't know of any general purpose computer that used it as its primary CPU
Me neither, they could have though, some of them had MMUs, but none of the fast ones did. Closest to being in a GP computer was being the controller on the I2O bus (and I think it might have made a decent PDA CPU though, but the StrongARM makes a better one, as does the CPU32+ both for different reasons).
I think a lot of people are too overconfident that Itanium is going to be successful, let alone quickly. It is going to require a lot of changes to software in order to take advantage of it because it isn't just a 64 bit x86, it is a whole new architecture, one more closely related to HP PA-RISC than x86.
It isn't really any closer to the HP-PA then it is to the x86 (unless you count "only" having 16 times as many GP registers rather then 64 times as many...).
[...]
The last time Intel made a big push (with the i432) to create a whole new non-x86 processor family, it was less than successful.
Intel has done a lot of non-x86 CPUs since the i432 (and "less than successful" is an understatement). They did the i960 which while I didn't like was a real winner in the embedded (esp. military) market. They also did the i960 which I did like and was only modestly successful, I think mostly because they end of lifed it so fast (it was doing fairly well in the market until they EOLed it). They are also doing ARMs, but they didn't design the ISA there.
Think for a minute how long we've been using 32-bit processors. If (and when) 64-bit becomes mainstream, I imagine it will be around for a LONG time, as it becomes standardized and slowly takes over a majority of the market. Also, we'll have the other contenders butting in with equivalent and cheaper options, like Cyrix (tried) and AMD (did).
Not really. A good rule of thumb is the address space increases about a bit a year. Partly because the amount of memory goes up (as price goes down) so anyone looking at size/speed trade offs, or even size ease of coding trade offs go more towards size.
I'm typing this on a laptop with 1Gbyte of RAM. In two years it'll be 4G (well whatever laptop I have then). While you can address more then 4G with only 32 bits, plus some hackery it is just a big pain.
If this trend continues to be true we have about 32 years of 64 bit address space to look forward to...
...of corse that discounts the use of anything like a capability based OS which needs much much larger address spaces (I think the AS/400 has a 256 bit address space).
Scanners haven't had to do multiple passes for a few years now. In fact, I challange you to find a consumer or pro level new scanner that is not single-pass
I didn't say they did, I said they could (or at least that was what I intended to say). However if you want an example of a scanner that does multiple passes look at the Nikon CoolScan 4000, or the Canon CannoScan 4000...
The current highest-end I think is 5 Megapixels. There are actually 15 Million individual sensors on that camera. Now each one can record the exact color individually, so thoretically, we should see cameras with this Foveon sensor, at least 10+ Megapixel for higher end
All the 5Mpixel stuff on the market, like the CoolPix 5000 mean 5 million sensors, not 5 million of each sensor. Really. Go check some of the spec pages on dpreview if you don't believe me.
It makes a lot less difference then you would think, but it does make some difference.
Question though: Why does someone (Nikon) not produce a truly modular upgradable digital SLR camera?
I think you can't really replace the sensor without replacing the CPU and it's memory unless you seriously overspec the CPU and buffer size (enough CPU to JPEG 4Mpixel images at 5 fps won't handle 6Mpixel images at 12 fps! Nor will the buffer keep up!). If you replace the sensor plus the imager you are talking about replacing most of the value of the camera. I'm not sure what body the $5000 D1X is based on, but I would be surprised if it was more then $1000 or so. I know the D30 (originally $3000, now down to $1450) is based on a $300 body. In both cases the resale value of a still working old one will normally be worth more then the body.
Also since you need to carefully line up the imager with the "film" plane you are going to need to get a repair shop to do it, which eats into your savings.
As if that wasn't enough the newer imagers may allow more features, but you want controls for them, so you might want to change the body anyway. You may also want to throw in a better autofocus system or faster shutter to help lure new customers in...
Due to the sensor thickness, is depth of field going to be restricted to smaller stops in order to have the entire thickness of the sensor in focus?
Not likely, the different layers of the sensor are still likely to be closer together then the "plane" of the film in all but the vacuum back cameras, and even there pretty much all color film has 3 or more layers (and some B&W film as well!).
There are already some (very high-end) digital cameras using CMOS technology, and judging on the sample images I've seen, they are awesome. Take a look at the review of Canon's EOS-D30 [dcresource.com], for example.
Note that the EOS-D30 is not a "very high end" camera. It is very nice, but it's AF sucks, it has a fairly low frame rate and a small buffer (it's 3ish mega pixels on the other hand tend to crank out better images then all the 5 mega pixel $1000 cameras). The EOS-1D, Nikon D1h/D1x, and Kodak 760 are more like high end cameras (costing from $4000 to $8000), and medium format digital backs are even more expensive...
That's not to disparage the D30 though, it is a great camera, I own one, and enjoy it quite a bit. It is just far from "very high end"...
It isn't really the resolution that matters right now, it is the color. Current digital cameras suck
Interesting. The first thing I noticed switching from APS to a mid-range digital was the much better color from digital. When I switched to a film SLR I noticed much worse color until I discovered that you could buy more the Kodak Gold. When I went back to digital (this time a DSLR) the color was still pretty good, better then most films, but not better then say Fuji Relia.
I think this is going to depend a lot on the camera, your monitor, and whatever you print it on.
Hmm, Foveon. Doesn't that name ring a bell with me? Isn't this the same company that for years has been claiming that their breakthrough CMOS sensors will kill CCD, but never delivered -- at least didn't deliver anything that fit into a standard camera body, as they wanted to.
About two years, yes. As far as I know the Sigma will be the first camera using their stuff that costs less then $50,000 or so. (Assuming the Sigma doesn't meet the fate of the Pentax 6Mpixel full frame digital...)
On the other hand Sigma seems pretty sure of when they will release, and Phil did shoot a prototype camera using the chip... so not totally vapor.
Doesn't mention if this also means the range it captures is any greater (whats the technical term for that again?), but i'd like to have a camera that acts like ISO 3200
It doesn't look like it since Sigma's X3 using camera (is it the SA-9 or SD-9?) only offers ISO 100, 200, 400 and can "push" to 800 and 1600. That more or less matches what the two year old EOS-D30 can do, so I imagine that has more to do with sensor well size (the D30's sensors are just a little bigger I think).
Also, this technology has less artifacts because it does not need to do any interpolation. I think that the higher response rate will be a great benefit too; i use a nikon 990 and the wait after taking a shot is crazy.
That probbably has more to do with JPEGing it, or writing it to the CF card (esp those huge TIFF images).
Personally, i'd love to have a lot more resolution so's i can crop like crazy when necessary. That and i like my Good photos printed out 20x30
Maybe you should give film a try then:-) Try Kodak techpan, or Ilford Pan F, or if you want color Fuji Velvia. Bring a tripod though.
More resolution, while nice, is not what digital photography primarily lacks. Light and shadow sensitivity is what really sucks with digital cameras. Film has a logarithmic sensitivity to light, while a digital sensor has a linear sensitivity
That depends a lot on the camera and the output mode you use. For example look at the Nikon D1H in NEF mode, or the Canon D30 or D1 in RAW (or is that CRW?) mode.
While cameras are the 'killer app' for this tech, I think we'll probably see it show up in flatbed document scanners first.
Why? A flatbed can "just" make multiple passes with different color filters (that is how most film scanners work, an R pass, G pass, B pass, and an IP pass to find the dust and scratches). This is much more useful for something capturing the moving world...
In the opinion of many people, an expertly shot film image is still superior to an expert digital camera image. This will be the test of that supposition.
Yes, but that frequently has more to do with depth of field and quality of the digital camera. If you look in Sports Illustrated or Time magazine for example you will be very hard pressed to identify the Nikon D1/D1H/D1X shots, or the Canon D30/1D shots because they are of very high quality and offer the same creatave control over depth of field. Except for the D30 they also cost 2 to 3 times as much as a high end film body (and a high end film body at $2000 costs far more then an intro level SLR which can make the same images, just slower).
There are still plenty of areas film wins though, very slow and very fast films get results you normally can't get with digitals, and even at more normal speeds if you enlarge past 8x10 or at least past 16x10 (the D1X has done "double truck" images in SI for example) film will win again. Of corse at those sizes you almost always need a tripod, and seldom use 35mm film...
When I want to feel slightly more secure in some connection I am about to make, etc., I hang up the modem and redial. I almost always am reassigned a new IP address. Granted it's usually within the same subnet range, but here in a heavily populated area and on a large ISP, it's somewhat effective.
Don't feel too secure, the last ISP I worked for can take a timestamp and an IP address and turn it into an account name in under a second (I had a hand in the software, or at least a light touch, my office mate did pretty much the whole thing). Of corse it normally takes search warrant, and a trip through the abuse department, but the software that does it can find you in under a second (and it is picking you out of millions and millions and millions of calls a day).
I expect all the other dial up ISPs do as well, and maybe even the cable cos...
It will make it harder for anyone that isn't the ISP, and can't convince the ISP to tell them who you are though (unless your talking about browsing the web, and left cookies on...).
we got cable, dsl (why would u get it, cable here is very fast, I can see if the cable co had crappy service, but it is good here
While not universal, cable tends not to sell fixed addresses or officially allow servers (which is kind of hard, but not impossible, with floating addresses); on the other hand DSL ISPs frequently (but not always) have (normally as a slightly more expensive option) fixed IP addresses and allow servers.
In my area while I could still get it DSL let me have not only some fixed addresses, but a class C that I (well a friend) had obtained when it was still easy to get portable class C space. After Rythms went bankrupt I couldn't get a new provider that would go to 18k feet (even as IDSL), so I'm on cable. The cable is actually more reliable, and faster, and cheaper. I can't get fixed IP addresses though, and and prohibited from running servers:-(
I would pay extra for fixed addresses and the right to run servers...
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Wonderful summary! They never managed to be that clear in my (few!) law classes.
Note those monopolies are or were government granted monopolies, that is they convinced the government to bar any competitors (that sort of stopped for phone companies in the 80s, and sort of for some power companies recently, but is still largely true of cable in most places in the USA, a few places the local governments granted two companies hte rights and they have much better and cheaper service then avg, and fewer small dish users...I think water is still a monopoly everywhere...).
P.S. the above applies to the USA, it's a big world, and I'm sure other countries do things other ways...
Do you remember which part of the constitution allows that? Or is this a theory that without support from the constitution they could make a "normal" law that would alter what the supreme court can hear? (maybe we are lucky in a few ways that there aren't more programmers in congress...)
While that's a nice idea, it has a lot of holes in it. Have you ever seen a professional photographer work? They take a lot of pictures in the field (or even studio) later they go over them very carefully and select the best ones for publication (or to try to sell as stock). It's not uncommon to have less then one "keeper" in a roll of film (i.e. less then one out of 36). A lot of that is because several shots are of basically the same thing but the exposure, angle, or other things are just a little different. There isn't a lot of point to trying to sell all of those, just pick the best one and be done with it. Under your scheme the "almost perfect" shots not being available to the public have been abandoned, and after ten years anyone can use them. Even if the one selected image is a very valuable piece of stock, and the alternate is almost as good... (yes it would require a bit of dumpster diving to get the rejects, but it can happen; and no digital cameras won't solve this since many pros write all their stuff to CD before they sort -- who knows when a "discard" shot of an unknown woman hugging the President may come in handy months after the fact when the woman hits the news...)
Or in a less commercial realm, what if you take pictures of your wife or girlfriend that you (and she!) don't want anyone else to have? Since they are not available to the public at any price the guy at the lab who made an extra copy ten years ago can now sell it...(yes digital cameras make this exact story less likely, but you can get to the same bad place via a different route...)
Ah! On a more geeky note WoTC removed a number of cards from Magic because they were too powerful. Just wait ten years and they can come right back!
Copyright is used for more then just sucking money out of people.
Yeah, because the wives of Jazz players and photographers should be broke as well as breved after their husbands die. Come on, there are good reasons for copyright to run past the lives of the originators, 70+ years after really is too long, but 0 years would be too short in many cases!
Backwards compatibility would be the new drive being able to play old DVDs and CDs (probably with a cartrage you have to put the old disk in), not being able to play the new media in an old drive. Much like current DVD players are (mostly) backwards compatible with CDs and (sometimes) CD-R and CD-RW.
If the media is large enough to hold one full set of your data and it doesn't take more then about 12 hours to write, why don't you start the backup before you go home and then it'll be ready in the morning?
Large Unix sites use to pay "operators" to swap tapes overnight, they may now use tape jukebox systems, but they sure don't expect the users to hang out and deal with it.
The early CD-ROMs (at least many of them) used cartridges. The CD-ROM would fit in them. You could get empty cartridges to put normal CDs into. They were sort of pricy like $17 or so, but they were a low volume item. I expect a similar thing could be done here too.
It doesn't seem to be any more like an HP-PA then anything else. Actually I would say it is more like a Multiflow then anything else. Ok, I mean yes it is a three register ISA like the HP-PA (but also like most other modern CPUs!), but almost none of the HP-PA addressing modes, and very few of the HP-PA quirks (the bit mangling instructions may have been from there, but I'm not sure, and they are a pretty small part of the IA64 anyway).
OK, I didn't realize that you were concerned with how they were marketed rather then designed. The i860 was in a modestly successful Unix machine in Japan, and a woefully under successful one in the USA (same box, the OkiData 8500 and one or two other models). It had better SPECfp numbers then most of the other Unix boxes at the time too (I think it predated the Alpha, but can't remember, it didn't beat the RS/6000, but it beat the DECStation and was way way way faster then the SPARCs of the era). Hmmmm, come to think of it maybe it was (a little) after the Alpha, it was slower then the Alpha.
The data books definitely read like it was intended to be a GP CPU. Mine are packed so I can't say for sure if they used the phrase "General Purpose CPU" or not though.
Me neither, they could have though, some of them had MMUs, but none of the fast ones did. Closest to being in a GP computer was being the controller on the I2O bus (and I think it might have made a decent PDA CPU though, but the StrongARM makes a better one, as does the CPU32+ both for different reasons).
It isn't really any closer to the HP-PA then it is to the x86 (unless you count "only" having 16 times as many GP registers rather then 64 times as many...).
Intel has done a lot of non-x86 CPUs since the i432 (and "less than successful" is an understatement). They did the i960 which while I didn't like was a real winner in the embedded (esp. military) market. They also did the i960 which I did like and was only modestly successful, I think mostly because they end of lifed it so fast (it was doing fairly well in the market until they EOLed it). They are also doing ARMs, but they didn't design the ISA there.
Not really. A good rule of thumb is the address space increases about a bit a year. Partly because the amount of memory goes up (as price goes down) so anyone looking at size/speed trade offs, or even size ease of coding trade offs go more towards size.
I'm typing this on a laptop with 1Gbyte of RAM. In two years it'll be 4G (well whatever laptop I have then). While you can address more then 4G with only 32 bits, plus some hackery it is just a big pain.
If this trend continues to be true we have about 32 years of 64 bit address space to look forward to...
...of corse that discounts the use of anything like a capability based OS which needs much much larger address spaces (I think the AS/400 has a 256 bit address space).
Wow! That's a lot more then the EOS-1V...wait that's MSRP, what is the street price?
Nice camera, pity I can't fit my lenses on it :-) Had one the last place I worked, used it for a few hours, very very nice.
I didn't say they did, I said they could (or at least that was what I intended to say). However if you want an example of a scanner that does multiple passes look at the Nikon CoolScan 4000, or the Canon CannoScan 4000...
All the 5Mpixel stuff on the market, like the CoolPix 5000 mean 5 million sensors, not 5 million of each sensor. Really. Go check some of the spec pages on dpreview if you don't believe me.
It makes a lot less difference then you would think, but it does make some difference.
I think you can't really replace the sensor without replacing the CPU and it's memory unless you seriously overspec the CPU and buffer size (enough CPU to JPEG 4Mpixel images at 5 fps won't handle 6Mpixel images at 12 fps! Nor will the buffer keep up!). If you replace the sensor plus the imager you are talking about replacing most of the value of the camera. I'm not sure what body the $5000 D1X is based on, but I would be surprised if it was more then $1000 or so. I know the D30 (originally $3000, now down to $1450) is based on a $300 body. In both cases the resale value of a still working old one will normally be worth more then the body.
Also since you need to carefully line up the imager with the "film" plane you are going to need to get a repair shop to do it, which eats into your savings.
As if that wasn't enough the newer imagers may allow more features, but you want controls for them, so you might want to change the body anyway. You may also want to throw in a better autofocus system or faster shutter to help lure new customers in...
Not likely, the different layers of the sensor are still likely to be closer together then the "plane" of the film in all but the vacuum back cameras, and even there pretty much all color film has 3 or more layers (and some B&W film as well!).
Note that the EOS-D30 is not a "very high end" camera. It is very nice, but it's AF sucks, it has a fairly low frame rate and a small buffer (it's 3ish mega pixels on the other hand tend to crank out better images then all the 5 mega pixel $1000 cameras). The EOS-1D, Nikon D1h/D1x, and Kodak 760 are more like high end cameras (costing from $4000 to $8000), and medium format digital backs are even more expensive...
That's not to disparage the D30 though, it is a great camera, I own one, and enjoy it quite a bit. It is just far from "very high end"...
Interesting. The first thing I noticed switching from APS to a mid-range digital was the much better color from digital. When I switched to a film SLR I noticed much worse color until I discovered that you could buy more the Kodak Gold. When I went back to digital (this time a DSLR) the color was still pretty good, better then most films, but not better then say Fuji Relia.
I think this is going to depend a lot on the camera, your monitor, and whatever you print it on.
About two years, yes. As far as I know the Sigma will be the first camera using their stuff that costs less then $50,000 or so. (Assuming the Sigma doesn't meet the fate of the Pentax 6Mpixel full frame digital...)
On the other hand Sigma seems pretty sure of when they will release, and Phil did shoot a prototype camera using the chip... so not totally vapor.
Sure, the front page of dpreview has 3 pointers to X3 stuff, including the Sigma camera. More info in the forums, but you have to dig for that.
It doesn't look like it since Sigma's X3 using camera (is it the SA-9 or SD-9?) only offers ISO 100, 200, 400 and can "push" to 800 and 1600. That more or less matches what the two year old EOS-D30 can do, so I imagine that has more to do with sensor well size (the D30's sensors are just a little bigger I think).
That probbably has more to do with JPEGing it, or writing it to the CF card (esp those huge TIFF images).
Maybe you should give film a try then :-) Try Kodak techpan, or Ilford Pan F, or if you want color Fuji Velvia. Bring a tripod though.
That depends a lot on the camera and the output mode you use. For example look at the Nikon D1H in NEF mode, or the Canon D30 or D1 in RAW (or is that CRW?) mode.
Why? A flatbed can "just" make multiple passes with different color filters (that is how most film scanners work, an R pass, G pass, B pass, and an IP pass to find the dust and scratches). This is much more useful for something capturing the moving world...
Yes, but that frequently has more to do with depth of field and quality of the digital camera. If you look in Sports Illustrated or Time magazine for example you will be very hard pressed to identify the Nikon D1/D1H/D1X shots, or the Canon D30/1D shots because they are of very high quality and offer the same creatave control over depth of field. Except for the D30 they also cost 2 to 3 times as much as a high end film body (and a high end film body at $2000 costs far more then an intro level SLR which can make the same images, just slower).
There are still plenty of areas film wins though, very slow and very fast films get results you normally can't get with digitals, and even at more normal speeds if you enlarge past 8x10 or at least past 16x10 (the D1X has done "double truck" images in SI for example) film will win again. Of corse at those sizes you almost always need a tripod, and seldom use 35mm film...
Don't feel too secure, the last ISP I worked for can take a timestamp and an IP address and turn it into an account name in under a second (I had a hand in the software, or at least a light touch, my office mate did pretty much the whole thing). Of corse it normally takes search warrant, and a trip through the abuse department, but the software that does it can find you in under a second (and it is picking you out of millions and millions and millions of calls a day).
I expect all the other dial up ISPs do as well, and maybe even the cable cos...
It will make it harder for anyone that isn't the ISP, and can't convince the ISP to tell them who you are though (unless your talking about browsing the web, and left cookies on...).
I can beleve that, most people don't really want to run servers. It is nice to be able to make a choice and do it though.
While not universal, cable tends not to sell fixed addresses or officially allow servers (which is kind of hard, but not impossible, with floating addresses); on the other hand DSL ISPs frequently (but not always) have (normally as a slightly more expensive option) fixed IP addresses and allow servers.
In my area while I could still get it DSL let me have not only some fixed addresses, but a class C that I (well a friend) had obtained when it was still easy to get portable class C space. After Rythms went bankrupt I couldn't get a new provider that would go to 18k feet (even as IDSL), so I'm on cable. The cable is actually more reliable, and faster, and cheaper. I can't get fixed IP addresses though, and and prohibited from running servers :-(
I would pay extra for fixed addresses and the right to run servers...