You're right...there is no comparison. I haven't tried DAZ|Studio myself because of the fsck'd up download process, but judging from a lot of posts here it's something akin to Poser and the Sims;-)... because you are supposed to buy expansion packs contataining material that's impossible to make yourself in this "3D package".
Blender is the total 3D package. It's got nearly all state-of-the art modeling and (paired with Yafray rendering features, it's not the baddest 3D software out there but it's free as in (beer|speech) and with DAZ|Studio there is no comparison. Blender is very useful and practical, but like Photoshop it takes some skills and understanding of principles to create decent output. I worked my way up from the likes of Bryce and Infini-D and after getting proficient at Cinema4D, Blender wasn't that much of a challenge. But I know it is complicated and totally non-standard. Unfortunately that is partially true for any pro 3D package.
DAZ seems to be a toy, much like Bryce. Toys are nice, easy and always fun. Probably a necessary introduction to grasp basic 3D. I welcome this addition to free 3D products but it really does not alter in any way Blender's position as top free 3D package.
My advice: give it another try. I tried Blender for the first time about 2 years ago and was baffled by the weird UI (and lacking features like raytracing)
Then I gave it another shot a year later, and it had improved a lot, to the point where I tried using it for some small projects. And now I'm hooked!
It's true that the interface is weird, say the first hour of using it or so, but it's also very customiseable. Free upgrades roughly every month, with new features and improvements. Recently with Google's Summer of Code projects. And don't forget the game engine!
This was very short sighted of them, honestly. They built in *ZERO* facility for extending the format in a usable way, and in fact made it all but impossible by not requiring implementations to maintain foreign elements.
Simple ways you might want to extend the format include new styles, new parameters to styles, totally new elements, etc...
A standard is fine as long as it covers a finite set of functionality, but any standard that is intended to cover something as broad as "office documents" has to be extensible, which OpenDocument is not, at least not in any realistiic way.
A thing you might consider when developing office document standards is competing formats. There is one other, the programs are called like Sentence, CleverPoint and Enlight or something. I forgot who the vendor is but supposedly some company around Seattle.
Anyway, and with less sarcasm: that company has made a big name in the industry by embracing, then corrupting file formats. IE-specific HTML is the textbook example. With the Office formats they just didn't have to embrace in the first place. The way OO docs are designed they absolutely have to maintain backwards usability, and any extension must rely on community consensus to get a foothold. This might just prevent SmallProgs (or whatzername) from eee:ing the OpenOffice doc standard. For that, lowest common denominator features is a price I am willing to pay.
Besides, we know 80% of Office users use only 20% of the features - and embedded multimedia is not among those.
Word already shows a warning like this for any non-MS format such as RTF. Wait, they support RTF and it does not allow for multimedia content. And OpenOffice has support for multimedia, indeed!
Could MS be insincere about the reason for not support OpenOffice? Nah, not possible...
Microsoft could propose a new format the specifications of which they intend to make freely availible at no charge and they'd be excoriated faster than you can Slashdot Effect a Packard Bell running NT 3.51.
Oh yeah. That must be why they haven't proposed a truly open format yet.
I'd love to see copyright law enforced against the people who compose "music" based on sound samples from other popular songs, for example. I want to see new popular songs based on fresh ideas, not songs created from old popular songs
But did you notice that is not happening? The current mega-corp system actually promotes creation of new hits from the guts of old ones. The only person who would possibly argue against unjust sampling (there are uses of song samples where the new stuff isn't clearly piggybacking on the old, mind you) is the artist h(im|er)self.
Unfortunately, because of copyright transfer practices the only body in charge of saying "stop!" is the megacorp record co. Doing that they would reduce their profits since copyright law gives them $$ from the sampling track. So they tend not to.
I dunno, can they really be that dumb? Do they not realize that the success of the iTMS hinges on two things, simplicity and the iPod. They can't duplicate the iPod, and they seem to be going against the simplicity aspect.
All the reiteration that iPods are "all about looks" seems to indicate that, indeed they do not realize that. And the same may well go for the iTunes music store.
Comparing ITMS to other online music offerings paints a picture of a certain Mr. Jobs who despite HW lock-ins and all the other Apple turn-offs actually seems to like music and make decisions in line with that. We all know that is not true for the major labels, so it's kind of nice to have someone like Jobs set some ground rules for this business. Til now, at least.
Personally, I want a low enough price per song so I can afford to get the less popular tracks. As it stands, I've downloaded one iTunes songs so that I san say I downloaded an iTunes song. As it stands, I am priced out of their fixed price model.
Why is everybody interpreting this into lower prices? I see the current iTunes pricing as a guarantee of a max price, now the record companies want to squeeze some more out of their customers by increasing prices on the things people actually buy.
Furthermore, while the "put sale stickers on old impopular stuff" works for physical media, the costs don't scale the same way with downloads. This is nothing more than a way for major labels to leverage price increases...
Women bitch about this because it actually is unfair. Unfair because, while women may indeed have lower average whatever (while of course higher average verbal whatother, so dearly valued) it's got a totally lousy prediction value. For most (all) sex-differentiated abililities the variance for each sex is waaay bigger than the average difference.
Results like this have been shown repeatedly, but it has never meant that randomly picked woman A is better/worse than randomly picked man B at any task. Unfortunately it's always interpreted like that, probably because average difference seems intuitive but is really a hard concept to grasp for a lot of people.
The limited usefulness of average differences between groups stems from the fact that humans only come in individual servings. Groups do not suffer from discrimination, individuals do. Once more: you can't use test averages like this to say anything about individuals. The above-male-IQ-average women out there are just as smart as the men as far as IQ goes, and they aren't exactly few. You never know when you are running into one on the street and thus this does not say anything "about women".
You may however use the average to argue for any skew proportions like male/female programmers or afro/caucasian college students. But since nearly every kind of historical oppression has employed this kind defense of the status quo and later turned out to be wrong, it's a weak argument.
Clarification: MS10 and SQ10 are Korg models, although of the same popular analog design as Moog's pioneering equipment about 10 years earlier.
Regarding I Feel Love (1977), it's likely the first sequencer track heard by the big audience, and yet today it's got an interesting balance between catchiness and experimentation. Also uncannily true to later formulations of techno...
Aren't we forgetting the hordes of technically talented guitarists, bassoon players and whatnot spewing out album after album of bland chords and scales with no artistic content?
The synthesizer (or actually the sequencer) disconnected technical quality from talent, but to this day creativity has very little to do with neither electronics nor fast fingers.
Then consider this: guitars and drums make anyone look cool playing them, thus no need for worthwhile music being played. Synths (or laptops...it's the 2000s now ya'know) on the other hand, look so geeky that the creative output will be judged (more fairly) by ears alone.
I agree. The correct way is a Live DVD that can't run from the HD but lets you access the network, play in iCal and maybe iLife apps, and more. THAT would get converts. Especially if it was free or $5 or something like that.
Oh, and unlike what this article is about that popular, ubiquitous DVD would never be cracked. Never!
Case in point: Apple's DRM model basically means you rent the music for a one time charge.
Huh? In my day, we used to call that "buying", not "renting".
Times change, dude. With the ITMS you have to connect to Apple whenever you switch computer. Without Apple's servers saying yes and supplying the magic code, "your" music just sits there on the hard drive taking up space. Furthermore, Apple reserves the right to change the rules at any time:
You acknowledge that some aspects of the Service, Products, and administering of the Usage Rules entails the ongoing involvement of Apple. Accordingly, in the event that Apple changes any part of the Service or discontinues the Service, which Apple may do at its election, you acknowledge that you may no longer be able to use Products to the same extent as prior to such change or discontinuation, and that Apple shall have no liability to you in such case
And more to the point:
Termination of the Service. Apple reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service (or any part or content thereof) at any time with or without notice to you, and Apple will not be liable to you or to any third party should it exercise such rights.
In this case termination means that you are not allowed to play "your" music anymore, Apple device or not. In contrast, when you actually buy stuff the manufacturer does not reserve the right to take it back. Bet you didn't think of it that way - we tend not to but instead expect certain minimal freedoms with things we buy. I guess that's fair use, and it's not necessarily a legal definition.
Luckily, such between-friends copying tends to be well under the radar of most copyright holders, so it's one of those tree-falls-in-the-forest things. It's when one puts a track in one's P2P share directory for thousands of "friends" on the Internet that copyright holders tend to take notice.
in the 80s and early 90s it was under the radar. Nowadays the RIAA are using the fight against filesharing and whatnot to push technology into a situation where you won't be able to copy between friends, not because of legislation but due to DRM.
Because they're evil? In a way. Because they can make more money that way? Absolutely. DRM of today tend to guarantee (within the limits of the technology) that the media isn't unauthorisedly copied, which means not copied at all most of the time. This leaves the rightsholders (the only people alllowed to copy) in charge of backups, but are they taking up on this responsibility? No.
Case in point: Apple's DRM model basically means you rent the music for a one time charge. They could just register who's bought what and let s/he dowload this again if the file is damaged or lost. But they don't. And Apple isn't even the baddest of the bunch in terms of fair use.Razor-sharp DRM requires a new similarily well-defined fair use right. We don't have that yet and won't get it short of a lot of ranting on the right people.
Your post really points out an oft-cited feature of nuclear WMDs of the last 50 years: they are too big, too effective in a way that amplifies the futile nature of war in the first place. (is there, BTW, any historical example of an 'ideal' war where fighting only rendered the desired consequences of conflict solving?)
Actually nukes have really limited use. They won't stop protesting citizens on the town square, (they're in fact pretty good at causing protest;-) they are just about useless against anonymous terrorists. They won't even force people into working for you. On the other hand, guns and tear gas and even plain clubs do the trick.
We saw this in WW2 Japan; the wartime government (who were particularily nuts, but still...) witnessed 100.000 people killed instantly and yet did not take this in itself as damaging enough (enter Nagasaki). Now imagine (however terrifying) putting these hundred thousands of poor people in a line and shooting them one by one until the emperor decides to say "stop".
If I were to pick just one weapon to plague human society (hypothetically...), I would choose nukes anytime.
"The scroll wheel doesn't generalize as a pointing device. A wheel is better at scrolling, not everything. Similarly, a keyboard can be used to handle a graphical interface, but expediency leads us towards the mouse because it's so much better at what it does that it would be stupid to use anything else."
I find the scroll wheel/ball handy too, actually. What I meant was that adding more wheels/buttons to the mouse feels wrong...we're just sooo close to interfaces that REQUIRE a scroll wheel mouse. Take Blender for instance, where the wheel is expected to such a degree that using a stylus instead of a mouse (otherwise great precision and all, quite common graphics/CAD device) gets quirky.
Basically the same point as with single/multiple buttons: with clever developers this wouldn't ever be a problem, unfortunately some developers are not that clever when it comes to UI design and need some (artificial) restrictions.
"Mac's are only good for video editing, music editing, graphic's and i think thats pretty much it"
You forgot that Macs don't have floppy disks - I mean, how are you really supposed to do without those in today's demanding corporate environment?
Fast forward to 2005: there is something called Mac OS X - you may have heard of it. It's good for a few more things than the "niche" market as defined by Apple's competitors.
Scroll bars are a ubiquitous UI component. There's not really any way around them because we need to display more information than can fit on a screen. But they're terrible from an HCI standpoint, because the misstep rate is high and they're a difficult target to hit with a mouse.
Since they're terrible and they can't be avoided, improvements are welcome. Scroll wheels are rediculously easy to use and the misstep rate is very low. They're very intuitive, almost as intuitive as a mouse itself. Therefore, they're a good idea.
You are right, scrolling is unavoidable in some circumstances (such as editing printout documents) but the scroll wheel rings too loud on the "add another poorly integrated feature" bell. I propose the much simpler solution of using the "hand" cursor to move around, in any read-only document like web pages it should be the default tool. And before anyone says the scroll wheel/ball is easier: why do we retain that mouse underneath the scroll wheel then?
On another note: if you're gonna buy the MM for Linux use, make sure the drivers support 2-dimensional scrolling since it's reportedly not functioning in windows.
You said it. A configurable multi-button mouse is a great tool for the power user. But with mandatory context menus á la Windows, the configurability is lost - or even more buttons are required.
The mac, relying on one click mode alone, offers more options because of conventions like option-click = copy/do different or command-click = new window as well as the Windows-common shift click for multiple selection. As long as Apple stick to their policy, all of these are free for those second, third and fourth buttons. Not to mention key presses!
I for one, when doing graphic design find it convenient to use option-click for the right button to easily duplicate graphic objects.
Though currently I'm with the no-button pro mouse. It's nice too...
The important issue is the (until now) lack of a scroll wheel. To argue against PC-style mice is to argue against scroll wheels, and that is a very difficult position to take. They're as intuitive as the mouse itself, and they make scrolling operations vastly easier. This omission is what has been making Apple mice inferior, and what continues to make non-premium mice inferior.
Then, isn't arguing against the Mighy Mouse (and for regular Logitechs) is to argue that you don't need to scroll in both directions)
I would say that to argue against scroll wheels is sensible, like defending a single mouse button, the need for a scroll wheel is just a symptom of poor interface design.
So what do plan on doing? Asking each company nicely "Can you tell us if you sent us this spam so we can launch a denial of service attack on your website?" and if they respond "No, wasn't us, I swear", you just go on your daily business? I've seen smaller holes in tax exemption laws.
Well uhhh I dunno, maybe you can let the company name and actual products advertised on the site weigh in. I believe Pfizer has a better case than offshore-viagra.com.
And even if those nasty spammer renegades do this trick all the time, their own spam will still generate the response. Which brings us back to the real point, that they won't keep on if the cashflow dries out.
I'm a disgruntled former employee or customer, who knows) I don't like Company A. I can just get a spammer to send out a chain of spam emails in the name of Company A. When people receive these emails they get pissed off
You are right in that this will certainly happen. But it can be managed, again because of the principal differences between legit and illegit businesses. Spammers are notriously impossible to reach in any other errand than ordering their products. Legit companies are way easier to reach, and have many ways of proving their legitimacy. Thus they can be white-listed or something.
From BBC News:
Mr Reshef [of Blue security] defended the idea against accusations that it was vigilantism or a type of Denial-of-Service attack aimed at knocking websites offline. Spam sites were warned before complaints were sent, said Mr Reshef.
You will also have to understand that spammers put the effort into what they do because there is money in it. They are likely much less into "ensure justice" than the average angry spam victim. If the reply part of this works anything like it's supposed to, the money will run out of spamming and spammers will retreat to pushing pills in street corners or whatever (I suppose cutting your hair and getting a real job is out of the question) Meaning: if the countermeasures you describe can just be handled in the short time, there will be no long time to speak of.
so we spam the spammers sending spam...wait..what? This is some strange paradox that i can't understand at 7am EST..
So you are saying that we are using lists of the private or work mail addresses of millions and millions of spammers who haven't contacted us previously or requested a reply any other way?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right...there is no comparison. I haven't tried DAZ|Studio myself because of the fsck'd up download process, but judging from a lot of posts here it's something akin to Poser and the Sims ;-) ... because you are supposed to buy expansion packs contataining material that's impossible to make yourself in this "3D package".
Blender is the total 3D package. It's got nearly all state-of-the art modeling and (paired with Yafray rendering features, it's not the baddest 3D software out there but it's free as in (beer|speech) and with DAZ|Studio there is no comparison. Blender is very useful and practical, but like Photoshop it takes some skills and understanding of principles to create decent output. I worked my way up from the likes of Bryce and Infini-D and after getting proficient at Cinema4D, Blender wasn't that much of a challenge. But I know it is complicated and totally non-standard. Unfortunately that is partially true for any pro 3D package.
DAZ seems to be a toy, much like Bryce. Toys are nice, easy and always fun. Probably a necessary introduction to grasp basic 3D. I welcome this addition to free 3D products but it really does not alter in any way Blender's position as top free 3D package.
My advice: give it another try. I tried Blender for the first time about 2 years ago and was baffled by the weird UI (and lacking features like raytracing)
Then I gave it another shot a year later, and it had improved a lot, to the point where I tried using it for some small projects. And now I'm hooked!
It's true that the interface is weird, say the first hour of using it or so, but it's also very customiseable. Free upgrades roughly every month, with new features and improvements. Recently with Google's Summer of Code projects. And don't forget the game engine!
To sum it up, Belnder is teh roxxorz!
Anyway, and with less sarcasm: that company has made a big name in the industry by embracing, then corrupting file formats. IE-specific HTML is the textbook example. With the Office formats they just didn't have to embrace in the first place. The way OO docs are designed they absolutely have to maintain backwards usability, and any extension must rely on community consensus to get a foothold. This might just prevent SmallProgs (or whatzername) from eee:ing the OpenOffice doc standard. For that, lowest common denominator features is a price I am willing to pay.
Besides, we know 80% of Office users use only 20% of the features - and embedded multimedia is not among those.
Word already shows a warning like this for any non-MS format such as RTF. Wait, they support RTF and it does not allow for multimedia content. And OpenOffice has support for multimedia, indeed!
Could MS be insincere about the reason for not support OpenOffice? Nah, not possible...
But did you notice that is not happening? The current mega-corp system actually promotes creation of new hits from the guts of old ones. The only person who would possibly argue against unjust sampling (there are uses of song samples where the new stuff isn't clearly piggybacking on the old, mind you) is the artist h(im|er)self.
Unfortunately, because of copyright transfer practices the only body in charge of saying "stop!" is the megacorp record co. Doing that they would reduce their profits since copyright law gives them $$ from the sampling track. So they tend not to.
All the reiteration that iPods are "all about looks" seems to indicate that, indeed they do not realize that. And the same may well go for the iTunes music store.
Comparing ITMS to other online music offerings paints a picture of a certain Mr. Jobs who despite HW lock-ins and all the other Apple turn-offs actually seems to like music and make decisions in line with that. We all know that is not true for the major labels, so it's kind of nice to have someone like Jobs set some ground rules for this business. Til now, at least.
Furthermore, while the "put sale stickers on old impopular stuff" works for physical media, the costs don't scale the same way with downloads. This is nothing more than a way for major labels to leverage price increases...
Women bitch about this because it actually is unfair. Unfair because, while women may indeed have lower average whatever (while of course higher average verbal whatother, so dearly valued) it's got a totally lousy prediction value. For most (all) sex-differentiated abililities the variance for each sex is waaay bigger than the average difference.
Results like this have been shown repeatedly, but it has never meant that randomly picked woman A is better/worse than randomly picked man B at any task. Unfortunately it's always interpreted like that, probably because average difference seems intuitive but is really a hard concept to grasp for a lot of people.
The limited usefulness of average differences between groups stems from the fact that humans only come in individual servings. Groups do not suffer from discrimination, individuals do. Once more: you can't use test averages like this to say anything about individuals. The above-male-IQ-average women out there are just as smart as the men as far as IQ goes, and they aren't exactly few. You never know when you are running into one on the street and thus this does not say anything "about women".
You may however use the average to argue for any skew proportions like male/female programmers or afro/caucasian college students. But since nearly every kind of historical oppression has employed this kind defense of the status quo and later turned out to be wrong, it's a weak argument.
Speaking of age of abstract objects, AppleScript is about to turn twelve!
Clarification: MS10 and SQ10 are Korg models, although of the same popular analog design as Moog's pioneering equipment about 10 years earlier.
Regarding I Feel Love (1977), it's likely the first sequencer track heard by the big audience, and yet today it's got an interesting balance between catchiness and experimentation. Also uncannily true to later formulations of techno...
Aren't we forgetting the hordes of technically talented guitarists, bassoon players and whatnot spewing out album after album of bland chords and scales with no artistic content?
The synthesizer (or actually the sequencer) disconnected technical quality from talent, but to this day creativity has very little to do with neither electronics nor fast fingers.
Then consider this: guitars and drums make anyone look cool playing them, thus no need for worthwhile music being played. Synths (or laptops...it's the 2000s now ya'know) on the other hand, look so geeky that the creative output will be judged (more fairly) by ears alone.
I agree. The correct way is a Live DVD that can't run from the HD but lets you access the network, play in iCal and maybe iLife apps, and more. THAT would get converts. Especially if it was free or $5 or something like that.
Oh, and unlike what this article is about that popular, ubiquitous DVD would never be cracked. Never!
Indeed. And in my eyes this calls for legal rights of the consumer of which there are currently none relating to the world of DRM.
Times change, dude. With the ITMS you have to connect to Apple whenever you switch computer. Without Apple's servers saying yes and supplying the magic code, "your" music just sits there on the hard drive taking up space. Furthermore, Apple reserves the right to change the rules at any time:
In this case termination means that you are not allowed to play "your" music anymore, Apple device or not. In contrast, when you actually buy stuff the manufacturer does not reserve the right to take it back. Bet you didn't think of it that way - we tend not to but instead expect certain minimal freedoms with things we buy. I guess that's fair use, and it's not necessarily a legal definition.
in the 80s and early 90s it was under the radar. Nowadays the RIAA are using the fight against filesharing and whatnot to push technology into a situation where you won't be able to copy between friends, not because of legislation but due to DRM.
Because they're evil? In a way. Because they can make more money that way? Absolutely. DRM of today tend to guarantee (within the limits of the technology) that the media isn't unauthorisedly copied, which means not copied at all most of the time. This leaves the rightsholders (the only people alllowed to copy) in charge of backups, but are they taking up on this responsibility? No.
Case in point: Apple's DRM model basically means you rent the music for a one time charge. They could just register who's bought what and let s/he dowload this again if the file is damaged or lost. But they don't. And Apple isn't even the baddest of the bunch in terms of fair use.Razor-sharp DRM requires a new similarily well-defined fair use right. We don't have that yet and won't get it short of a lot of ranting on the right people.
Your post really points out an oft-cited feature of nuclear WMDs of the last 50 years: they are too big, too effective in a way that amplifies the futile nature of war in the first place. (is there, BTW, any historical example of an 'ideal' war where fighting only rendered the desired consequences of conflict solving?)
;-) they are just about useless against anonymous terrorists. They won't even force people into working for you. On the other hand, guns and tear gas and even plain clubs do the trick.
Actually nukes have really limited use. They won't stop protesting citizens on the town square, (they're in fact pretty good at causing protest
We saw this in WW2 Japan; the wartime government (who were particularily nuts, but still...) witnessed 100.000 people killed instantly and yet did not take this in itself as damaging enough (enter Nagasaki). Now imagine (however terrifying) putting these hundred thousands of poor people in a line and shooting them one by one until the emperor decides to say "stop".
If I were to pick just one weapon to plague human society (hypothetically...), I would choose nukes anytime.
"The scroll wheel doesn't generalize as a pointing device. A wheel is better at scrolling, not everything. Similarly, a keyboard can be used to handle a graphical interface, but expediency leads us towards the mouse because it's so much better at what it does that it would be stupid to use anything else."
I find the scroll wheel/ball handy too, actually. What I meant was that adding more wheels/buttons to the mouse feels wrong...we're just sooo close to interfaces that REQUIRE a scroll wheel mouse. Take Blender for instance, where the wheel is expected to such a degree that using a stylus instead of a mouse (otherwise great precision and all, quite common graphics/CAD device) gets quirky.
Basically the same point as with single/multiple buttons: with clever developers this wouldn't ever be a problem, unfortunately some developers are not that clever when it comes to UI design and need some (artificial) restrictions.
"Mac's are only good for video editing, music editing, graphic's and i think thats pretty much it"
You forgot that Macs don't have floppy disks - I mean, how are you really supposed to do without those in today's demanding corporate environment?
Fast forward to 2005: there is something called Mac OS X - you may have heard of it. It's good for a few more things than the "niche" market as defined by Apple's competitors.
You are right, scrolling is unavoidable in some circumstances (such as editing printout documents) but the scroll wheel rings too loud on the "add another poorly integrated feature" bell. I propose the much simpler solution of using the "hand" cursor to move around, in any read-only document like web pages it should be the default tool. And before anyone says the scroll wheel/ball is easier: why do we retain that mouse underneath the scroll wheel then?
On another note: if you're gonna buy the MM for Linux use, make sure the drivers support 2-dimensional scrolling since it's reportedly not functioning in windows.
You said it. A configurable multi-button mouse is a great tool for the power user. But with mandatory context menus á la Windows, the configurability is lost - or even more buttons are required.
The mac, relying on one click mode alone, offers more options because of conventions like option-click = copy/do different or command-click = new window as well as the Windows-common shift click for multiple selection. As long as Apple stick to their policy, all of these are free for those second, third and fourth buttons. Not to mention key presses!
I for one, when doing graphic design find it convenient to use option-click for the right button to easily duplicate graphic objects.
Though currently I'm with the no-button pro mouse. It's nice too...
I would say that to argue against scroll wheels is sensible, like defending a single mouse button, the need for a scroll wheel is just a symptom of poor interface design.
And even if those nasty spammer renegades do this trick all the time, their own spam will still generate the response. Which brings us back to the real point, that they won't keep on if the cashflow dries out.
You are right in that this will certainly happen. But it can be managed, again because of the principal differences between legit and illegit businesses. Spammers are notriously impossible to reach in any other errand than ordering their products. Legit companies are way easier to reach, and have many ways of proving their legitimacy. Thus they can be white-listed or something.
From BBC News:
You will also have to understand that spammers put the effort into what they do because there is money in it. They are likely much less into "ensure justice" than the average angry spam victim. If the reply part of this works anything like it's supposed to, the money will run out of spamming and spammers will retreat to pushing pills in street corners or whatever (I suppose cutting your hair and getting a real job is out of the question) Meaning: if the countermeasures you describe can just be handled in the short time, there will be no long time to speak of.
So you are saying that we are using lists of the private or work mail addresses of millions and millions of spammers who haven't contacted us previously or requested a reply any other way?