You remarked how Discovery channel looks the best, compared to other HD. In regards to cable HD.. Not all HD is created equal. Or rather, not all HD is/encoded/ equal.
Content providers (DirecTV, Viacom, COX, whatever) only have so much bandwidth to work with. Sadly enough.. a lot of times it's a formula like this..
"will we make more money / gain subscribers if we A: play 6 channels of 'full quality HD' content, or B: half the bitrate of those channels and now we can play 12!!"
usually, dumb consumers can't tell much difference between HD.. so obviously the network with the "most HD content evar!" has the best marketing ploy, versus the poor guy who wont easily be able to market "the highest bitrate available!" hehe.
As an aside, most movies (as stated by others) are already shot on film (35mm). Several tvshows are shot on film as well. Now, 35mm film can be scanned at a res of approx 4096 horizontal pixels.. although 2k (2048) is much more common. 2k is approx. equiv. to 1920x1080 HD quality. However, this may be the inital scan of the negative from shooting. After several prints, color timing, editing, to arrive at an OCN (final print), and then make individual prints from there, the resultion can actually degrade (estimated) into the range of 1000 pixels horiz. Now, the DVD transfer scan would be done from the OCN, which will be better than 1000 pixels, but probably not very close to the original 2k scan either.. so, the adoption of HD format may see studios doing DI processing a lot more, whereby what would have been an analog process (chemical color timing via reprinting, etc) may now be done more often in the digital realm, preserving resolution. I dunno how much of an impact this format will have on studios decisions to use DI (digital intermediary), but one can hope.. since the trend is already starting to get pretty big, and companies like Quantel and Discreet are marketing heavily in that direction, not to mention other players who were traditionally analog.
(i may have rambled, sorry if none of this made any sense.. busy at work, but really wanted to write this post)
never meaning atleast untill SD is no longer supported widely.
why you ask?
1: porn stars look.. skanky. and that's at 720x486.. just imagine them at 1920x1080.
2: porn is cheap to shoot. a lot of porn nowadays is shot on either DV (where camera range from $200 to $3000), or on perhaps betaSP. My personal experience is limited to DV, so i can't speak to how many people are using beta.. but i would say it's the vast minority. When your production costs include a motel room ($50), an actress or two ($500/each), a miniDV camera you can reuse over and over ($2k), tapes ($4/each), and a basic PC to edit on ($1-2k)... porn production is cheap. In contrast, HD format is very expensive to shoot (compared to dv).. at $30k (or more)/camera.. and editing systems being fairly pricey too.. not to mention $50-100 per tape.. i dont see a lot of the amateur producers making the switch.
Some major studios (vivid, etc), no doubt, will try to appeal to this niche market.. but it's going to take a lot of funds to do it right, and i also suspect a lot of post production and lighting magic to make the girls not look like disease infested burlap sacks.
The only exception i see is HDV, which is relatively cheap to shoot.. but there arent many HDV cameras on the market (and those that are, tend to suck, being single chippers).. so i wouldnt bet the farm on too many people adopting with HDV (although surely a few will)
if their TOS says they have the right to remove content or cancel accounts solely at their discretion.. we shouldnt make laws to stop that. they pay the money for the bandwidth, and then offer their services.. if you dont like their policy, look for another provider (or become one yourself).. don't legistlate them into compliance with your beliefs. (*THIS IS ALL JUST MY STUPID OPINION.. MAY BE RIGHT, MAY BE WRONG)
Next would be digital audio/photo/video, and that is all pretty much wrapped up by PowerMacs. You don't need to sell to those professionals and they generally have the money to fork out 4 or 5 grand for a dualie Mac every other year. Afterall, its how they earn their living!
Hmm, i do video production for a living, and I dont use a mac. Not everyone in the video world worships the apple.
Heck, i can lock up 3+GHZ P4's to the point of every second of video taking 20+mins to render.. just with normal compositing in afx (20-30 layers, + color correction and deinterlacing).
for web surfing.. use whatever. but for any type of real video crunching, speed is everything.. most new "nice" computers probably cant even/PLAY/ 601 SD video in realtime.
depends on what aspect of photography you're looking at, but (for instance) photoshop's dodge and burn tools come from REAL WORLD use of dodging and burning in film developing. photographers have been "doctoring" their pics for decades, cropping, adjusting saturation and contrast, etc. the digital ability to easily retouch unwanted stuff out, or recompose the photo, is a natural extension of what has already been occuring for a long while.
but, where it applies to 95% of the photos they bring me at work that need to be in a press release and ask me to remove 4 people from the background, i sure with they would have taken an extra 15 seconds to compose the photo properly, instead of expecting me to sacrifice an hour to fix it digitally.
shutter lag is the term you're looking for. and yes, everything short of DSLRs that i've used, seems to suck to varying degrees at this.
however, you can get VERY good at shooting action, even with lag. for a long time, my friend Pete was shooting semi-pro photos at rallies.. using only a coolpix 5000. he eventually made the switch to DSLR. if you look at some of his old stuff, he can pan perfectly in time with a car 50 feet away going 100mph.. of course, pete isn't your average digicam user either;)
DOH. used a carat in my post (didn't realize/. failed to parse them into plaintext). real post here:
honestly, i always hear how "crappy" the patches are, and how they break all these machines. and i am sure, on a network of say, 10000 machines, you would probably have an acceptable level of attrition no matter what (i.e. 5 machines, or.05% incompatibility).. or perhaps, look at it from a standpoint that.05% of programs used may not be compatible with the patch (which might mean 1 program that is installed on all 10000 machines if you're unlucky), but from a personal computing standpoint (and the small office networks (less than 100 pc's)m i generally deal with) i have never seen a machine get hosed.
how often does this [broken machines due to MS patch] REALLY happen? i dislike MS (sometimes) as much as the next guy, but a lot of the time i think stuff that people say can be as much propaganda as it is truth.
honestly, i always hear how "crappy" the patches are, and how they break all these machines. and i am sure, on a network of say, 10000 machines, you would probably have an acceptable level of attrition no matter what (i.e. 5 machines, or.05% incompatibility).. or perhaps, look at it from a standpoint that.05% of programs used may not be compatible with the patch (which might mean 1 program that is installed on all 10000 machines if you're unlucky), but from a personal computing standpoint (and the small office
how often does this [broken machines due to MS patch] REALLY happen? i dislike MS (sometimes) as much as the next guy, but a lot of the time i think stuff that people say can be as much propaganda as it is truth.
overall, i will grant that all of the instances of unwanted advertising that occur to me (or 99% of them) are offers as a caveat (or rather, extortion) with an existing service that the consumer desires or has signed up for...unlike spam, which is a special undesireable service all of it's own.. although in some/many cases, the spam is actually coming to you from people with whom you have actually registered for a service, and were also dumb enough (or forced) to register your email address as well. so, in the instance of companies that spam their own customers (or sell off their customers contact info), i think the "bad stuff that comes with an otherwise good service/product" analogy holds water to an extent. in the instance of Jimmy Chan in China who just happens to buy a bulk list of 8593495 email addys and find a few open relays.. no, he doesnt offer you any legit service, except indirectly testing the storage capacity of your email account maybe;)
however, i think the problem lies within the model of the way the smtp model is constructed.. a solution can lie only (imo) within either entirely revamping this model, or in legislating spam in such a way that spammers will be detered. obviously, due to the difficulty of legislating anyone's actions abroad (at least, in the "naughty haven" places abroad, i.e. eastern europe, eurasia, africa, etc), modifying the current smtp sending/acceptance model is almost certainly a necessity.
my original point (thought?) was that 1: new laws ARE needed.. old laws cannot adapt 100%.. and 2: that if new laws arent/werent enacted, spammers will have no reason to hide.
I think you're probably correct, in that they do something that is inherently taboo (and illegal or not, very much unwanted by anyone who owns the pipes/routers/servers processing their traffic), and thus they do hide regardless. i guess that (their not needing to hide, if legal) was a misconception on my part
I also think that you lack a full understanding of the problem that is email spamming.
yes, and no. i get 500+ spams a day.. so i am keenly aware of some of the aspects of spamming. from the server end of it, i'm less aware, as i've never worked at an ISP. i do, however, have a friend who was an admin in a NOC for a CA-based ISP.. and after hearing him (an otherwise quiet nerd) state multiple times how we would like to "KILL ALL SPAMMERS" I can only assume that I have even the tiniest of an inkling how annoying dealing with spammers must have been for him.
"they force unwanted, unsolicited advertising messages onto people"
many, many, many companies force things on you that you dont want. hell, everytime i go to the movies, i am forced to sit through an endless parade of coca-cola commercials, wasting my valuable time ($time == $money). cellphone companies force stuff on you that you dont want. car salesmen do it. doctors' offices do it. that is the nature of capitalism. car salesmen get a bad rap.. many are thought as as sleazy, shifty people. I used to work as a tech at a used auto dealer, and let me tell you, the owner was a shifty sleazy dude. but that isn't to say that there aren't car salesmen who just dont see the harm in selling people cars that they maybe can or cant afford, in order to bring home a paycheck every month.
my suggestion (in the last two posts) is that there is a BIGGGGG gray area in any sector of employment.. including spam. many people who are total dirtbags, but also many who are just average joes who are too stupid to see the harm, turn a blind eye, or maybe just don't feel that it is harmful.. much in the same way if you willingly have a public email account, you willingly subject yourself to their emails, much like i willingly subject myself to crappy advertising just so i can see Kill Bill v2. now, i could come into the movie 10 minutes late and hope i sit down at the right exact moment and get a good seat, much like you coul configure spam assasin, or use an ISP that has built in spam filtering.
my suggestion (in the first post) was that if this is "such a bad thing" and divergent somehow from other forms of unwanted advertising, gimmicks, etc.. then we DO need laws to illegalize it, otherwise it IS NOT seperated from any other form of advertising. telemarkters waste my time, bother me at all hours of the day, and worst of all i never asked to recieve any of their calls (and i think 99% of people are in my shoes here too), but unlike the parent post suggested (that "OLD" laws could adapt).. in that form of phone-spam, they can't. my suggestion (or suspeicion?) was that if spam is perfectly legitimate (i.e. we dont make any laws against it), that spammers will not need to hide their identities any more than telemarketers, et al.. and that it will continue unchecked untill the people stop standing for it.
i hope you can see what i'm trying to say objectively here.. i know i ramble a bit, apologies (been a long day).
i know at least one person who made a living as a developer at a spam company. he was a developer, and that's it. spent 3-5yrs (i dunno exactly, i am approximating) working there, and eventually found a "better" dev. job that also didnt have all of his friends lambasting him for his career choice.
to say that all spammers are criminals.. i dont think so. at least, not criminal-minded. we could legislate posting on/. a criminal activity, but that wouldnt make me a criminal at heart, just someone in violation of the law. i guess my point is.. yes, there are probably a LOT of shady scammers out in russia etc doing spam-trade. i suspect there are also a lot of semi-normal people elsewhere (us, canada, etc) who just happen to have some lax moral interpretations of what is right and wrong as far as bulk emailing goes. I spent 2 yrs as an admin for an adult dotcom. doesn't make me a disgusting pervert (like most of the clients of the site haha;).. just a guy who wasnt bothered by the site content, and wanted a steady paycheck + the ability to telecommute.
i will lookup the case you cited, when i am less busy.
HSF and exhaust fan running full blast, plus a 24" box fan blowing into the case to keep the drives cool. actually helps me sleep.. if the box fan is off, i find it harder to sleep.
If we didnt have anitpsma laws in the works, would he have found the need to steal identities to get fraudlent email accounts to send from?
not trolling, serious question.. i dont know the answer to this. it *seems* to me, if there were no laws against spam (which it again, SEEMS you are saying we dont need them), then he could just open XXXX number of free aol accounts and send spam that way all day long. so, afai,, we still need spam laws. am i offtrack here?
artists dont make very much money from their CD sales.. at least, on the whole.. there are exceptions. but Johnny-Punk-Band makes very little off of the CD's.. so if piracy helps his career, he's doing 2x as well.. now he's playing a lot more live shows (where he makes the majority of his cash), has potential for endorsement deals, etc.
meanwhile, the record label that paid for all his studio time, all the A&R exec's salaries, all the promotional campaigns, for every album less they sell due to piracy, even if it doesnt hurt the artist, it hurts them. now, i can't tell you the equation for how many $SONGS_DOWNLOADED equates to N(); lost $RECORD_SALE.. but i can tell you that this is the light record companies view piracy in.
if you owned a bread company that made really amazing bread, and you kept the recipes secret to that everytime someone wanted to try a loaf of your latest recipe they'd have to come to you.. and suddenly you found out that people had the recipe and were making their own loaves, for FREE, while you had a lease to pay, and the cost of that snazzy yellowpages ad, and don't forget your secretary and the guy's who wash the dishes, and there's the garbage bill and the phone bill.. i mean, sure, business is still good, but look at all those people across the street eating bread.. i bet some of those guys used your recipe, damn them.. they should have to come to you if they want tasty bread.. now you're going to go broke../ANALOGY
here in las vegas, let me tell you.. this phenomenon is at it's worst.
i ride a motorcycle, so it makes no difference to me (i can share a lane with a car, if need be, so a bike or scooter isnt a problem).. but i see, on my daily 15 mile commute (approx 7mi each way), at least 1-2 bicycles, and usually between 5-10 50cc gas powered scooters.. and i'm not talking like, "honda" scooter.. i mean, a kid's scooter (the kind you use leg-power to push) with a 50cc motor bolted to the back. then there are always between 5 and 10 REAL scooters (the kind made by honda, etc). the problem with all these vehicles, is that the people on them 85% of the time are in the road (and not always in the right lane even), clogging up traffic, unable to accellerate beyond 20-30mph, and very few of these people wear helmets or seem to be aware of safety concerns. at least once a week, i see something on the news here about someone on a scooter or moped getting killed/hit.. a week or two ago it was two 10 y/o girls, both of whom are/were in critical condition.
not sure how that relates to the/. cyclists experiences, but if you ride anything in the road, at sub-limit speeds.. i would say to expect inattentive motorists to evcentually cause you harm.
i dunno about you, but 90% of the halfway (or more so) serious jobs i've ever had, have been ina field that i went into because i specifically enjoyed whatever it was. When i did stricly IT stuff, i liked networking and tech, and that's why i went into that arena. Much like the pro-gamer route you imagin, it started to become "work" and not "fun playing with computers."
I work handling video production for a music label now. Film/video was (and is) a serious passion of mine, and now i do that 5 days a week for a paycheck (And 7 days a week on my own time).. but it's still work. I'm sitting here keying BMP series exports of music videos.. somebody hold me back from the excitement!
I guess my point is.. work will always be work. If you're lucky, it can also, at times, be something fun that you originally got into because you loved it not for the money, but for some other (hopefully better) reason. The more successful you are in that field, hopefully the more shifted the balance of fun/challenge/innovation to "work" (i.e. a Sen. Net. Engineer has more liklihood to do challenging innovative stuff, vs a Lvl 1 tech support guy).. but there will always be that balance.
some of use think "stuff that matters" can actually extend beyond who has the largest memory bus for under $300, or whatever story this week about how SCO is ruining the world
in a related, and on-topic note, my girlfriend's mom has (what i am told) is "Narcisstic Schizophrenia".. although some google searching shows me that it's probably actually not a form of schizophrenia, but some other type of similarly related schizoid disorder. from my girlfriend's experience (albeit somewhat unrelated), all i can say is that from what i know, medication the best bet of probably controlling things.
thanks for the informative reply to what is obviously a serious question.. wish i had more to contribute.
every day i see the fax machine out by the server room near my office, spitting out worthless faxes about vacations to tahiti and MCSE bootcamps.
not calling you a liar, just saying i wasnt aware that this practice (junk faxing) was illegal.. and if it really is, how come every business i've worked at that has a publically accessable fax machine, seems to get these faxes everyday (i.e. why isnt the law being enforced). i dont/expect/ you to necessarily know the answer haha.. but does someone? =D
for me, being veg*n (or any form of strong belief) is about finding a middle ground you're comfortable with. nothing in life is black and white (well, very little).. so most of what we (read: i) do is trying to navigate the gray area as best i can. if you wear shoes or comercially produced clothes or drive a car or do anything but essentially live in a commune, you can never be 100% vegan. do what you can, so that you can live your life and be comfortable with who you are.
1: we dont need animal flesh to survive. i've been veg*n for more than 5 years, and i'm perfectly healthy. checkout the lists of vegan/veggie bodybuilders, marathon runners, etc etc. it's EASIER to survive on plants and animal flesh, but not necessary. and, if you want to go for the long term numbers, i'd be willing to be that vegetarians live much longer lives (aggregrate) than meat-eaters (think McD's big mac and it's 5869495 grams of fat).
2: PETA fanatics don't blow people up. PETA might be out on a limb sometimes (i agree with some of what they do, and other times i think their tactics are mismanaged at best).. but they arent murderers (afaik). I think you're thinking of ELF, which has a more "hands-on, burn-your-house-down-with-you-in-it" type approach.
avid offers a lot of stuff for windows, and afaik [i do not edit with avid products] all of their mac/pc based suites will work with a variety of video formats.
as far as "most" or "a lot" of professional quality video suites being for mac, and biased towards quicktime.. actually.. um, top level stuff isnt released on mac. about the only three worthwhile mac programs i can think of are FCP, shake, and protools. if you get into any high end stuff (i.e. $30k+) it's usually linux or sgi based.
why this stuff is released on quicktime.. beats me. someone is in bed with someone else, i suppose. releasing to AVI or mpeg would be just as efficient.. if not moreso, as i generally find quicktime codecs (for web quality dist. etc) to be pretty bloated in output compared to more pc friendly stuff.
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You remarked how Discovery channel looks the best, compared to other HD. In regards to cable HD.. Not all HD is created equal. Or rather, not all HD is /encoded/ equal.
Content providers (DirecTV, Viacom, COX, whatever) only have so much bandwidth to work with. Sadly enough.. a lot of times it's a formula like this..
"will we make more money / gain subscribers if we A: play 6 channels of 'full quality HD' content, or B: half the bitrate of those channels and now we can play 12!!"
usually, dumb consumers can't tell much difference between HD.. so obviously the network with the "most HD content evar!" has the best marketing ploy, versus the poor guy who wont easily be able to market "the highest bitrate available!" hehe.
As an aside, most movies (as stated by others) are already shot on film (35mm). Several tvshows are shot on film as well. Now, 35mm film can be scanned at a res of approx 4096 horizontal pixels.. although 2k (2048) is much more common. 2k is approx. equiv. to 1920x1080 HD quality. However, this may be the inital scan of the negative from shooting. After several prints, color timing, editing, to arrive at an OCN (final print), and then make individual prints from there, the resultion can actually degrade (estimated) into the range of 1000 pixels horiz. Now, the DVD transfer scan would be done from the OCN, which will be better than 1000 pixels, but probably not very close to the original 2k scan either.. so, the adoption of HD format may see studios doing DI processing a lot more, whereby what would have been an analog process (chemical color timing via reprinting, etc) may now be done more often in the digital realm, preserving resolution. I dunno how much of an impact this format will have on studios decisions to use DI (digital intermediary), but one can hope.. since the trend is already starting to get pretty big, and companies like Quantel and Discreet are marketing heavily in that direction, not to mention other players who were traditionally analog.
(i may have rambled, sorry if none of this made any sense.. busy at work, but really wanted to write this post)
seriously, you should considering flashing your firmware to the current book 2.1 beta candidate.
book 1.0 tends to yellow pages after about 5-10 years, and no one has been able to write a patch yet to fix the bug.
never meaning atleast untill SD is no longer supported widely.
why you ask?
1: porn stars look.. skanky. and that's at 720x486.. just imagine them at 1920x1080.
2: porn is cheap to shoot. a lot of porn nowadays is shot on either DV (where camera range from $200 to $3000), or on perhaps betaSP. My personal experience is limited to DV, so i can't speak to how many people are using beta.. but i would say it's the vast minority. When your production costs include a motel room ($50), an actress or two ($500/each), a miniDV camera you can reuse over and over ($2k), tapes ($4/each), and a basic PC to edit on ($1-2k)... porn production is cheap. In contrast, HD format is very expensive to shoot (compared to dv).. at $30k (or more)/camera.. and editing systems being fairly pricey too.. not to mention $50-100 per tape.. i dont see a lot of the amateur producers making the switch.
Some major studios (vivid, etc), no doubt, will try to appeal to this niche market.. but it's going to take a lot of funds to do it right, and i also suspect a lot of post production and lighting magic to make the girls not look like disease infested burlap sacks.
The only exception i see is HDV, which is relatively cheap to shoot.. but there arent many HDV cameras on the market (and those that are, tend to suck, being single chippers).. so i wouldnt bet the farm on too many people adopting with HDV (although surely a few will)
if their TOS says they have the right to remove content or cancel accounts solely at their discretion.. we shouldnt make laws to stop that. they pay the money for the bandwidth, and then offer their services.. if you dont like their policy, look for another provider (or become one yourself).. don't legistlate them into compliance with your beliefs. (*THIS IS ALL JUST MY STUPID OPINION.. MAY BE RIGHT, MAY BE WRONG)
Next would be digital audio/photo/video, and that is all pretty much wrapped up by PowerMacs. You don't need to sell to those professionals and they generally have the money to fork out 4 or 5 grand for a dualie Mac every other year. Afterall, its how they earn their living!
Hmm, i do video production for a living, and I dont use a mac. Not everyone in the video world worships the apple.
Heck, i can lock up 3+GHZ P4's to the point of every second of video taking 20+mins to render.. just with normal compositing in afx (20-30 layers, + color correction and deinterlacing).
/PLAY/ 601 SD video in realtime.
for web surfing.. use whatever. but for any type of real video crunching, speed is everything.. most new "nice" computers probably cant even
depends on what aspect of photography you're looking at, but (for instance) photoshop's dodge and burn tools come from REAL WORLD use of dodging and burning in film developing. photographers have been "doctoring" their pics for decades, cropping, adjusting saturation and contrast, etc. the digital ability to easily retouch unwanted stuff out, or recompose the photo, is a natural extension of what has already been occuring for a long while.
but, where it applies to 95% of the photos they bring me at work that need to be in a press release and ask me to remove 4 people from the background, i sure with they would have taken an extra 15 seconds to compose the photo properly, instead of expecting me to sacrifice an hour to fix it digitally.
shutter lag is the term you're looking for. and yes, everything short of DSLRs that i've used, seems to suck to varying degrees at this.
;)
however, you can get VERY good at shooting action, even with lag. for a long time, my friend Pete was shooting semi-pro photos at rallies.. using only a coolpix 5000. he eventually made the switch to DSLR. if you look at some of his old stuff, he can pan perfectly in time with a car 50 feet away going 100mph.. of course, pete isn't your average digicam user either
i'm attacking the darkness!
DOH. used a carat in my post (didn't realize /. failed to parse them into plaintext). real post here:
.05% incompatibility).. or perhaps, look at it from a standpoint that .05% of programs used may not be compatible with the patch (which might mean 1 program that is installed on all 10000 machines if you're unlucky), but from a personal computing standpoint (and the small office networks (less than 100 pc's)m i generally deal with) i have never seen a machine get hosed.
honestly, i always hear how "crappy" the patches are, and how they break all these machines. and i am sure, on a network of say, 10000 machines, you would probably have an acceptable level of attrition no matter what (i.e. 5 machines, or
how often does this [broken machines due to MS patch] REALLY happen? i dislike MS (sometimes) as much as the next guy, but a lot of the time i think stuff that people say can be as much propaganda as it is truth.
honestly, i always hear how "crappy" the patches are, and how they break all these machines. and i am sure, on a network of say, 10000 machines, you would probably have an acceptable level of attrition no matter what (i.e. 5 machines, or .05% incompatibility).. or perhaps, look at it from a standpoint that .05% of programs used may not be compatible with the patch (which might mean 1 program that is installed on all 10000 machines if you're unlucky), but from a personal computing standpoint (and the small office
how often does this [broken machines due to MS patch] REALLY happen? i dislike MS (sometimes) as much as the next guy, but a lot of the time i think stuff that people say can be as much propaganda as it is truth.
overall, i will grant that all of the instances of unwanted advertising that occur to me (or 99% of them) are offers as a caveat (or rather, extortion) with an existing service that the consumer desires or has signed up for. ..unlike spam, which is a special undesireable service all of it's own.. although in some/many cases, the spam is actually coming to you from people with whom you have actually registered for a service, and were also dumb enough (or forced) to register your email address as well. so, in the instance of companies that spam their own customers (or sell off their customers contact info), i think the "bad stuff that comes with an otherwise good service/product" analogy holds water to an extent. in the instance of Jimmy Chan in China who just happens to buy a bulk list of 8593495 email addys and find a few open relays.. no, he doesnt offer you any legit service, except indirectly testing the storage capacity of your email account maybe ;)
however, i think the problem lies within the model of the way the smtp model is constructed.. a solution can lie only (imo) within either entirely revamping this model, or in legislating spam in such a way that spammers will be detered. obviously, due to the difficulty of legislating anyone's actions abroad (at least, in the "naughty haven" places abroad, i.e. eastern europe, eurasia, africa, etc), modifying the current smtp sending/acceptance model is almost certainly a necessity.
my original point (thought?) was that 1: new laws ARE needed.. old laws cannot adapt 100%.. and 2: that if new laws arent/werent enacted, spammers will have no reason to hide.
I think you're probably correct, in that they do something that is inherently taboo (and illegal or not, very much unwanted by anyone who owns the pipes/routers/servers processing their traffic), and thus they do hide regardless. i guess that (their not needing to hide, if legal) was a misconception on my part
I also think that you lack a full understanding of the problem that is email spamming.
yes, and no. i get 500+ spams a day.. so i am keenly aware of some of the aspects of spamming. from the server end of it, i'm less aware, as i've never worked at an ISP. i do, however, have a friend who was an admin in a NOC for a CA-based ISP.. and after hearing him (an otherwise quiet nerd) state multiple times how we would like to "KILL ALL SPAMMERS" I can only assume that I have even the tiniest of an inkling how annoying dealing with spammers must have been for him.
"It prevides enhanced 911 services or it gets the hose again!"
"they force unwanted, unsolicited advertising messages onto people"
many, many, many companies force things on you that you dont want. hell, everytime i go to the movies, i am forced to sit through an endless parade of coca-cola commercials, wasting my valuable time ($time == $money). cellphone companies force stuff on you that you dont want. car salesmen do it. doctors' offices do it. that is the nature of capitalism. car salesmen get a bad rap.. many are thought as as sleazy, shifty people. I used to work as a tech at a used auto dealer, and let me tell you, the owner was a shifty sleazy dude. but that isn't to say that there aren't car salesmen who just dont see the harm in selling people cars that they maybe can or cant afford, in order to bring home a paycheck every month.
my suggestion (in the last two posts) is that there is a BIGGGGG gray area in any sector of employment.. including spam. many people who are total dirtbags, but also many who are just average joes who are too stupid to see the harm, turn a blind eye, or maybe just don't feel that it is harmful.. much in the same way if you willingly have a public email account, you willingly subject yourself to their emails, much like i willingly subject myself to crappy advertising just so i can see Kill Bill v2. now, i could come into the movie 10 minutes late and hope i sit down at the right exact moment and get a good seat, much like you coul configure spam assasin, or use an ISP that has built in spam filtering.
my suggestion (in the first post) was that if this is "such a bad thing" and divergent somehow from other forms of unwanted advertising, gimmicks, etc.. then we DO need laws to illegalize it, otherwise it IS NOT seperated from any other form of advertising. telemarkters waste my time, bother me at all hours of the day, and worst of all i never asked to recieve any of their calls (and i think 99% of people are in my shoes here too), but unlike the parent post suggested (that "OLD" laws could adapt).. in that form of phone-spam, they can't. my suggestion (or suspeicion?) was that if spam is perfectly legitimate (i.e. we dont make any laws against it), that spammers will not need to hide their identities any more than telemarketers, et al.. and that it will continue unchecked untill the people stop standing for it.
i hope you can see what i'm trying to say objectively here.. i know i ramble a bit, apologies (been a long day).
i know at least one person who made a living as a developer at a spam company. he was a developer, and that's it. spent 3-5yrs (i dunno exactly, i am approximating) working there, and eventually found a "better" dev. job that also didnt have all of his friends lambasting him for his career choice.
/. a criminal activity, but that wouldnt make me a criminal at heart, just someone in violation of the law. i guess my point is.. yes, there are probably a LOT of shady scammers out in russia etc doing spam-trade. i suspect there are also a lot of semi-normal people elsewhere (us, canada, etc) who just happen to have some lax moral interpretations of what is right and wrong as far as bulk emailing goes. I spent 2 yrs as an admin for an adult dotcom. doesn't make me a disgusting pervert (like most of the clients of the site haha ;).. just a guy who wasnt bothered by the site content, and wanted a steady paycheck + the ability to telecommute.
to say that all spammers are criminals.. i dont think so. at least, not criminal-minded. we could legislate posting on
i will lookup the case you cited, when i am less busy.
HSF and exhaust fan running full blast, plus a 24" box fan blowing into the case to keep the drives cool. actually helps me sleep.. if the box fan is off, i find it harder to sleep.
i'm not everyone though.
If we didnt have anitpsma laws in the works, would he have found the need to steal identities to get fraudlent email accounts to send from?
not trolling, serious question.. i dont know the answer to this. it *seems* to me, if there were no laws against spam (which it again, SEEMS you are saying we dont need them), then he could just open XXXX number of free aol accounts and send spam that way all day long. so, afai,, we still need spam laws. am i offtrack here?
artists dont make very much money from their CD sales.. at least, on the whole.. there are exceptions. but Johnny-Punk-Band makes very little off of the CD's.. so if piracy helps his career, he's doing 2x as well.. now he's playing a lot more live shows (where he makes the majority of his cash), has potential for endorsement deals, etc.
/ANALOGY
meanwhile, the record label that paid for all his studio time, all the A&R exec's salaries, all the promotional campaigns, for every album less they sell due to piracy, even if it doesnt hurt the artist, it hurts them. now, i can't tell you the equation for how many $SONGS_DOWNLOADED equates to N(); lost $RECORD_SALE.. but i can tell you that this is the light record companies view piracy in.
if you owned a bread company that made really amazing bread, and you kept the recipes secret to that everytime someone wanted to try a loaf of your latest recipe they'd have to come to you.. and suddenly you found out that people had the recipe and were making their own loaves, for FREE, while you had a lease to pay, and the cost of that snazzy yellowpages ad, and don't forget your secretary and the guy's who wash the dishes, and there's the garbage bill and the phone bill.. i mean, sure, business is still good, but look at all those people across the street eating bread.. i bet some of those guys used your recipe, damn them.. they should have to come to you if they want tasty bread.. now you're going to go broke..
here in las vegas, let me tell you.. this phenomenon is at it's worst.
/. cyclists experiences, but if you ride anything in the road, at sub-limit speeds.. i would say to expect inattentive motorists to evcentually cause you harm.
i ride a motorcycle, so it makes no difference to me (i can share a lane with a car, if need be, so a bike or scooter isnt a problem).. but i see, on my daily 15 mile commute (approx 7mi each way), at least 1-2 bicycles, and usually between 5-10 50cc gas powered scooters.. and i'm not talking like, "honda" scooter.. i mean, a kid's scooter (the kind you use leg-power to push) with a 50cc motor bolted to the back. then there are always between 5 and 10 REAL scooters (the kind made by honda, etc). the problem with all these vehicles, is that the people on them 85% of the time are in the road (and not always in the right lane even), clogging up traffic, unable to accellerate beyond 20-30mph, and very few of these people wear helmets or seem to be aware of safety concerns. at least once a week, i see something on the news here about someone on a scooter or moped getting killed/hit.. a week or two ago it was two 10 y/o girls, both of whom are/were in critical condition.
not sure how that relates to the
i dunno about you, but 90% of the halfway (or more so) serious jobs i've ever had, have been ina field that i went into because i specifically enjoyed whatever it was. When i did stricly IT stuff, i liked networking and tech, and that's why i went into that arena. Much like the pro-gamer route you imagin, it started to become "work" and not "fun playing with computers."
I work handling video production for a music label now. Film/video was (and is) a serious passion of mine, and now i do that 5 days a week for a paycheck (And 7 days a week on my own time).. but it's still work. I'm sitting here keying BMP series exports of music videos.. somebody hold me back from the excitement!
I guess my point is.. work will always be work. If you're lucky, it can also, at times, be something fun that you originally got into because you loved it not for the money, but for some other (hopefully better) reason. The more successful you are in that field, hopefully the more shifted the balance of fun/challenge/innovation to "work" (i.e. a Sen. Net. Engineer has more liklihood to do challenging innovative stuff, vs a Lvl 1 tech support guy).. but there will always be that balance.
some of use think "stuff that matters" can actually extend beyond who has the largest memory bus for under $300, or whatever story this week about how SCO is ruining the world
.. although some google searching shows me that it's probably actually not a form of schizophrenia, but some other type of similarly related schizoid disorder. from my girlfriend's experience (albeit somewhat unrelated), all i can say is that from what i know, medication the best bet of probably controlling things.
in a related, and on-topic note, my girlfriend's mom has (what i am told) is "Narcisstic Schizophrenia"
thanks for the informative reply to what is obviously a serious question.. wish i had more to contribute.
every day i see the fax machine out by the server room near my office, spitting out worthless faxes about vacations to tahiti and MCSE bootcamps.
/expect/ you to necessarily know the answer haha.. but does someone? =D
not calling you a liar, just saying i wasnt aware that this practice (junk faxing) was illegal.. and if it really is, how come every business i've worked at that has a publically accessable fax machine, seems to get these faxes everyday (i.e. why isnt the law being enforced). i dont
thank you, kevin. very well put.
for me, being veg*n (or any form of strong belief) is about finding a middle ground you're comfortable with. nothing in life is black and white (well, very little).. so most of what we (read: i) do is trying to navigate the gray area as best i can. if you wear shoes or comercially produced clothes or drive a car or do anything but essentially live in a commune, you can never be 100% vegan. do what you can, so that you can live your life and be comfortable with who you are.
1: we dont need animal flesh to survive. i've been veg*n for more than 5 years, and i'm perfectly healthy. checkout the lists of vegan/veggie bodybuilders, marathon runners, etc etc. it's EASIER to survive on plants and animal flesh, but not necessary. and, if you want to go for the long term numbers, i'd be willing to be that vegetarians live much longer lives (aggregrate) than meat-eaters (think McD's big mac and it's 5869495 grams of fat).
2: PETA fanatics don't blow people up. PETA might be out on a limb sometimes (i agree with some of what they do, and other times i think their tactics are mismanaged at best).. but they arent murderers (afaik). I think you're thinking of ELF, which has a more "hands-on, burn-your-house-down-with-you-in-it" type approach.
avid offers a lot of stuff for windows, and afaik [i do not edit with avid products] all of their mac/pc based suites will work with a variety of video formats.
as far as "most" or "a lot" of professional quality video suites being for mac, and biased towards quicktime.. actually.. um, top level stuff isnt released on mac. about the only three worthwhile mac programs i can think of are FCP, shake, and protools. if you get into any high end stuff (i.e. $30k+) it's usually linux or sgi based.
why this stuff is released on quicktime.. beats me. someone is in bed with someone else, i suppose. releasing to AVI or mpeg would be just as efficient.. if not moreso, as i generally find quicktime codecs (for web quality dist. etc) to be pretty bloated in output compared to more pc friendly stuff.
i'm rambling. time to finish my lunch.