You should see all the things sold by my localhost server. Ads from dozens of different ad networks get served from there while using my home network.
Wait, your ad blocking localhost violates my trrademark on localhost! How dare you usurp the time-honored name! My lawyers will be contacting you shortly (and laughing, no doubt).
Cash back cards always cost merchants more. That's the value proposition, more sales but it costs more. It's actually more an enticement for merchants to accept one card over the other, diversion, than it is anything else, and a perfect storm of promotion. Cash back, reward points, whatever you call it, you pay for it somewhere. Let's remember, in the real world, you do in fact pay for it all.
Actually, no, they don't cost the merchants more. The fee a merchant pays for taking credit cards is exactly the same whether it's a cash back card, a debit card used as a credit card, or any other type of card. That rate is defined by their merchant account agreement, and depends solely on A. the type of merchant, B. the volume of transactions that merchant performs, and C. which of at least a few dozen credit card processors they are using.
Whoa. $5-$10 restaurants are probably QSRs (quick-service, Mcdonald's/Starbucks, etc), and they love non-cash transactions because they inspire impulse purchases.
Depends. I was speaking from the perspective of a single person. The average price for a sit-down meal for me at any of dozens of decent restaurants is somewhere right around the $10 per person mark, sometimes including tip, sometimes not. If you expand that out to $5-15, it covers almost every restaurant out there. Obviously it's higher when you're paying for a family, but there are still far more people buying meals alone than buying meals as a family, particularly when you think about office workers at lunch. I maintain that the average payment at most restaurants is probably somewhere in the $5-15 range for this reason, with the exception of restaurants that refuse to split the check.
It's not money out of the CC companies' pockets, or your bank. It was YOUR money to start with. think of it as a discount on purchases. If you buy something you would not ordinarily buy because of the 'cash back', you lost. If you use a card instead of cash, you're making a decision AND enriching the CC companies. It's a choice, so lets be honest.
I am being honest. Yes, it is essentially a discount on purchases. My point was that the vast majority of people are going to pick the credit card whether you do or not. Therefore, your decision not to accept the discount is insignificant. In effect, your choices are:
Pay cash. The money ends up in the pockets of the store. No matter how many times you choose to pay this way, you won't be a significant enough percentage of the store's transactions to lower your costs significantly.
Pay by non-cash-back credit card. The money ends up in the pockets of the credit card company shareholders. No matter how many times you choose to pay this way, you won't be a significant enough percentage of the store's transactions to raise your costs significantly.
Pay by cash-back credit card. Some of the money ends up in the pockets of the credit card company shareholders, some of it ends up in your pocket.
As for your argument that purchasing something because of cash back is a loss, let's be clear here. I'm not saying that it is a good idea to choose to purchase something to get cash back. That would be idiotic. I'm saying that by choosing to get cash back on a purchase you would have made anyway, you now have additional funds that you otherwise would not have had, and that this money will either be saved or spent. Some of it, statistically speaking, will be spent, and this helps drive our economy. More to the point, you, as a consumer, will statistically spend more of it than someone higher up in the food chain---a CEO of a restaurant chain, a shareholder of a credit card company, etc.---would spend, so the best thing you can do to drive our economy is to take the cash back.
The reality is that there's not a snowball's chance in you-know-where that we're going to get the vast majority of consumers to stop using
It's not that debit card transactions cost less necessarily, but rather that VISA doesn't get a cut of the debit side at all. Debit card transactions (when used as debit cards) go through a EFT network like Star, Cirrus, PLUS, Interlink, etc. rather than through VISA.
Also, many businesses pass on the debit card overhead to you as an additional fee on the transaction total, whereas in general, VISA/MC/Amex won't let them do that. In that case, yeah, it is cheaper for the business, but you get screwed.
Finally, debit card transactions may or may not cost the business less, depending on the transaction amount and the merchant account agreement details. As I understand it, an ATM-style transaction with PIN costs the merchant a flat transaction fee in the ballpark of $0.35-$0.55. A CC transaction usually costs some base amount plus a percent, and the details vary widely. That base transaction fee is usually considerably less than the transaction fee for an ATM card. So for transactions under... say eight or ten dollars, the CC transaction probably costs the business less than the debit transaction. For larger transactions, it costs them more. And, of course, the details vary widely depending on what sort of merchant accounts the store has, so you can't really generalize that number. The break-even point could be $0 or it could be $50.
By using a debit card (or, for that matter, any credit card that doesn't pay cash back), you are only hurting yourself. The store builds those transaction fees into the costs of goods. Thus, if you don't cost them that transaction fee, you're still paying the higher cost as though you were, plus you're missing the opportunity to get some of those transaction fees back at the end of the month or whatever. Thus, in effect, you are subsidizing the meals of people who pay with methods that cost the store more and pay them cash back. Those extra few cents you gave to the restaurant go towards reducing the average cost paid, which means you get back a tiny fraction of what you put in. By contrast, if you use the cash back credit card, you get back a much larger chunk of what you put in.
No matter what payment method you choose, the transaction fees are not going to have a significant impact on the store's bottom line or on their prices, but getting cash back does make a significant impact on your finances, which you can then use to put more money into the economy. In the long run, it is best if stores make as close as possible to the minimum amount of money that they can survive on, thus concentrating the least amount of money in the hands of the people at the top of corporate food chains. Obviously this is less true when you're talking about sole proprietorships with single-digit employees. On the other hand, most of those sorts of shops are restaurants, and the average transactions at such shops are in a range ($5-10) that costs about the same amount of money for CC or PIN-based transactions anyway. Thus, you might as well take the cash back; it is effectively a way to take money out of your CC company's pocket, and it's hard to argue that this is a bad thing.
You're incorrectly assuming that the key must have been leaked. HDCP is so weak that it is possible to derive any arbitrary private key, including the master key, from a fairly small number of device public keys that are freely given out by the devices. I don't know the details behind how to derive the master key rather than merely deriving an arbitrary device key, but I've heard many people claim that it is mathematically possible to do so.
Thus, it is entirely possible, even likely, that this key was released by someone with no ties to the industry at all, having merely obtained the public keys from a number of devices. You'd need little more than an FPGA to perform an HDCP handshake with a TV or Blu-Ray player (and the handshake need not succeed to obtain the public key...). Honestly, I'm surprised this didn't happen several years ago. The trivial ease with which HDCP can be broken has been known for some time.
Well, ultimately that's the way most of your basic compression algorithms work. It's not computationally infeasible. It's pretty trivial to perform a series of checksums on various parts of a file, and with a little knowledge of the file format, it should be possible to improve the search patterns significantly. The hard part ends up being that the storage for all the potentially interesting checksums might well exceed the space savings, depending on the nature of the data set..
Either way, without that level of introspection, I would expect a block-level de-duplication algorithm to nod do much better than a very basic whole-file de-duplication algorithm except when you're working with very specialized and unusual data sets. *shrugs* Maybe I'm just too cynical.
I think that breaking down starch into its constituent sugars fits the definition of metabolism pretty accurately. It's basically metabolism, just outside your body. Either way, we're splitting hairs here.
I wasn't aware of that. I had assumed they used the juice from the corn stalks (which, now that I think about it, is probably sucrose rather than glucose).
So the question becomes this: how many times can something be metabolized and still be called "corn".
I think it depends on which scheme you're talking about.
Basic de-duplication techniques might focus only on blocks being identical. That would work for eliminating actual duplicated files, but would be nearly useless for eliminating portions of files unless those files happen to be block-structured themselves (e.g. two disk images that contain mostly the same files at mostly the same offsets).
De-duplicating the boilerplate content in two Word documents, however, requires not only discovering that the content is the same, but also dealing with the fact that the content in question likely spans multiple blocks, and more to the point, dealing with the fact that the content will almost always span those blocks differently in different files. Thus, I would expect the better de-duplication schemes to treat files as glorified streams, and to de-duplicate stream fragments rather than operating at the block level. Block level de-duplication is at best a good start.
What de-duplication should ideally not be concerned with (and I think this is what you are asking about) are the actual names of the files or where they came from. That information is a good starting point for rapidly de-duplicating the low hanging fruit (identical files, multiple versions of a single file, etc.), but that doesn't mean that the de-duplication software should necessarily limit itself to files with the same name or whatever.
The problem is, regular corn syrup more rightfully deserves the name "corn sugar". However, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup are completely different animals.
Taking the word "fructose" out suggests that HFCS is somehow a natural sugar obtained from corn, then processed into granular form, much as sugar is formed by filtering out everything but the sucrose from sugar cane syrup and leaving the remaining granular sucrose. Such an implication would be an outright deception. Corn syrup, as it comes out of the plant, does not contain significant amounts of fructose. It is basically glucose syrup. High fructose corn syrup, by contrast, is corn syrup in which much of the glucose has been enzymatically converted into fructose. It resembles corn syrup about as closely as a plastic toy resembles its original form after you soak it in gasoline for a few hours.
Having the word "fructose" in the name of this ingredient is key to explaining how this differs from corn syrup. Eliminating the word "fructose" would have the potential to cause significant confusion, and any such proposal should be soundly rejected. I'd be okay with them calling it "high fructose corn sugar" if they would prefer, or maybe even "fructose-enhanced corn sugar", but if they think they can get away with concealing fructose as an ingredient, they have another thing coming. Either way, you know something is very wrong when an industry attempts to conceal its activities through name changes. That's tantamount to admitting guilt.
Yes and no. Compression generally does involve reduction of duplication of information in one form or another, but does so at a finer level of granularity. With a compressed filesystem, you'll generally see compression of the data within a block, maybe across multiple blocks to some degree, but for the most part, you'd expect the lookup tables to be most efficient at compressing when they are employed on a per-file basis. The more data that shares a single compression table, the closer your input gets to being essentially random, and the lower your overall compression rate typically is.
Deduplication, as I understand it (and I've read very little about this, so I could be misunderstanding) takes this a step further, taking advantage of the fact that multiple copies and/or multiple generations of a given file often exist in storage, and that when compressing two files results in very similar or identical compression tables, you can easily throw away one copy and express the other copy relative to the first.
Although this is conceptually related to the way many compression schemes work (Huffman coding and LZW in particular), the mechanism for doing so must inherently be a lot smarter. Arbitrarily combining random or contiguous chunks of such large data sets would result in expansion, not compression. Thus, the deduplication algorithms use various techniques to determine how similar two files are before deciding to try to express one in terms of the other.
It naturally follows that the ISPs should have a say in how much total money should be spent on copyright enforcement. Otherwise it's taxation without representation....or is that exclusively an 18th century American concept?
Corporations should have zero rights. The people INSIDE the corp has all the various right due a human being, but a corporation should have no more rights than a rock or tree or cow.
So what you're saying, then, is that UK ISP users should have a say in the total amount of money spent on copyright enforcement.
It's also worth noting that other high-profile CEOs (Larry Ellison) have run into issues with the Japanese authorities regarding export and carrying of Japanese bladed weaponry....
Cue the rumors that Jobs and Ellison are preparing for a throwing star battle to the death....
Opening Google Maps and zooming out to show the South Bay to check traffic took about half a meg, and that's with some data presumably cached from previous use. Getting a route from work to my house (a 15 minute drive with only 10 steps) took another 1.2 megs or so.
Launching the Facebook app, letting it load my live feed, scrolling to the bottom (loading all the profile pics on the left side), clicking read more, and scrolling to the bottom again soaked up a third of a meg.
So in the course of two minutes, that's 1% of your monthly allocation. Heaven help you if you download updates to applications. It's really easy to rack up gigabytes of traffic, particularly if you accidentally disable Wi-Fi and leave it off for a month. Even if we're just talking about people who just check their mail once a day and never browse the web and never use mapping and never use Facebook, I still can't imagine how you could reliably limit yourself to only 100-200 MB per month without a herculean effort.
It's not really idiotic. It's cost effective. These design patterns didn't evolve in a vacuum, and the reasons for them are not purely decorative. There are good reasons that most construction uses a sloped roof with largely nonreflective roofing materials, and barring those reasons somehow ceasing to be important, I would not expect construction to move away from traditional peaked roofs. Some of the key reasons include:
A roof with vegetation on it is relatively expensive, both in terms of the additional structure needed to support the weight and in terms of long-term upkeep whenever parts of the roof start to fail due to root infiltration (assuming you're talking about a green roof and not just planter boxes up on top of the roof).
A flat roof, whether used as a living space or not, is more prone to leaks than a peaked roof. On the average, the commercial building flat roofs I've seen have required significant maintenance about every five years (and some more often than that). On the average, a peaked roof needs to be reshingled every 20 years.
When leaks do occur, it is far more difficult to locate and repair the leaks because a leak that appears in drywall on the ceiling might well have run several feet across the underside of the roofing material before dripping off at the lowest point. These days, even smaller commercial buildings are moving away from flat roofs for this reason. Too many buildings with flat roofs end up with serious mold problems before anyone realizes that the roof was installed incorrectly. At that point, the cost to repair it is exorbitant, and guess what.... Insurance generally doesn't cover mold abatement.
A high albedo sloped roof impedes visibility while walking, driving, or flying nearby.
So although your suggestions are good in principle, they are not realistic in practice, and I'd be very, very surprised if building trends went the way you want them to. If anything, all the trends I'm seeing are going the exact opposite way....
You can patent a game, or get a design patent for the distinctive board design. That's why free Scrabble games don't have a board layout identical to the original game.
If anything is protecting Scrabble's board design, it would have to be copyright law. A design patent would have expired almost half a century ago....
Slashdot Mirror
I've never heard of a raccoon that was afraid of people, or at least not recently. That sort of behavior seems to be the norm for them.
You should see all the things sold by my localhost server. Ads from dozens of different ad networks get served from there while using my home network.
Wait, your ad blocking localhost violates my trrademark on localhost! How dare you usurp the time-honored name! My lawyers will be contacting you shortly (and laughing, no doubt).
Guess it's true. One man's funny is another man's troll. *sigh*
How do explain Windows, then?
Actually, no, they don't cost the merchants more. The fee a merchant pays for taking credit cards is exactly the same whether it's a cash back card, a debit card used as a credit card, or any other type of card. That rate is defined by their merchant account agreement, and depends solely on A. the type of merchant, B. the volume of transactions that merchant performs, and C. which of at least a few dozen credit card processors they are using.
Depends. I was speaking from the perspective of a single person. The average price for a sit-down meal for me at any of dozens of decent restaurants is somewhere right around the $10 per person mark, sometimes including tip, sometimes not. If you expand that out to $5-15, it covers almost every restaurant out there. Obviously it's higher when you're paying for a family, but there are still far more people buying meals alone than buying meals as a family, particularly when you think about office workers at lunch. I maintain that the average payment at most restaurants is probably somewhere in the $5-15 range for this reason, with the exception of restaurants that refuse to split the check.
I am being honest. Yes, it is essentially a discount on purchases. My point was that the vast majority of people are going to pick the credit card whether you do or not. Therefore, your decision not to accept the discount is insignificant. In effect, your choices are:
As for your argument that purchasing something because of cash back is a loss, let's be clear here. I'm not saying that it is a good idea to choose to purchase something to get cash back. That would be idiotic. I'm saying that by choosing to get cash back on a purchase you would have made anyway, you now have additional funds that you otherwise would not have had, and that this money will either be saved or spent. Some of it, statistically speaking, will be spent, and this helps drive our economy. More to the point, you, as a consumer, will statistically spend more of it than someone higher up in the food chain---a CEO of a restaurant chain, a shareholder of a credit card company, etc.---would spend, so the best thing you can do to drive our economy is to take the cash back.
The reality is that there's not a snowball's chance in you-know-where that we're going to get the vast majority of consumers to stop using
It's not that debit card transactions cost less necessarily, but rather that VISA doesn't get a cut of the debit side at all. Debit card transactions (when used as debit cards) go through a EFT network like Star, Cirrus, PLUS, Interlink, etc. rather than through VISA.
Also, many businesses pass on the debit card overhead to you as an additional fee on the transaction total, whereas in general, VISA/MC/Amex won't let them do that. In that case, yeah, it is cheaper for the business, but you get screwed.
Finally, debit card transactions may or may not cost the business less, depending on the transaction amount and the merchant account agreement details. As I understand it, an ATM-style transaction with PIN costs the merchant a flat transaction fee in the ballpark of $0.35-$0.55. A CC transaction usually costs some base amount plus a percent, and the details vary widely. That base transaction fee is usually considerably less than the transaction fee for an ATM card. So for transactions under... say eight or ten dollars, the CC transaction probably costs the business less than the debit transaction. For larger transactions, it costs them more. And, of course, the details vary widely depending on what sort of merchant accounts the store has, so you can't really generalize that number. The break-even point could be $0 or it could be $50.
By using a debit card (or, for that matter, any credit card that doesn't pay cash back), you are only hurting yourself. The store builds those transaction fees into the costs of goods. Thus, if you don't cost them that transaction fee, you're still paying the higher cost as though you were, plus you're missing the opportunity to get some of those transaction fees back at the end of the month or whatever. Thus, in effect, you are subsidizing the meals of people who pay with methods that cost the store more and pay them cash back. Those extra few cents you gave to the restaurant go towards reducing the average cost paid, which means you get back a tiny fraction of what you put in. By contrast, if you use the cash back credit card, you get back a much larger chunk of what you put in.
No matter what payment method you choose, the transaction fees are not going to have a significant impact on the store's bottom line or on their prices, but getting cash back does make a significant impact on your finances, which you can then use to put more money into the economy. In the long run, it is best if stores make as close as possible to the minimum amount of money that they can survive on, thus concentrating the least amount of money in the hands of the people at the top of corporate food chains. Obviously this is less true when you're talking about sole proprietorships with single-digit employees. On the other hand, most of those sorts of shops are restaurants, and the average transactions at such shops are in a range ($5-10) that costs about the same amount of money for CC or PIN-based transactions anyway. Thus, you might as well take the cash back; it is effectively a way to take money out of your CC company's pocket, and it's hard to argue that this is a bad thing.
You're incorrectly assuming that the key must have been leaked. HDCP is so weak that it is possible to derive any arbitrary private key, including the master key, from a fairly small number of device public keys that are freely given out by the devices. I don't know the details behind how to derive the master key rather than merely deriving an arbitrary device key, but I've heard many people claim that it is mathematically possible to do so.
Thus, it is entirely possible, even likely, that this key was released by someone with no ties to the industry at all, having merely obtained the public keys from a number of devices. You'd need little more than an FPGA to perform an HDCP handshake with a TV or Blu-Ray player (and the handshake need not succeed to obtain the public key...). Honestly, I'm surprised this didn't happen several years ago. The trivial ease with which HDCP can be broken has been known for some time.
Well, ultimately that's the way most of your basic compression algorithms work. It's not computationally infeasible. It's pretty trivial to perform a series of checksums on various parts of a file, and with a little knowledge of the file format, it should be possible to improve the search patterns significantly. The hard part ends up being that the storage for all the potentially interesting checksums might well exceed the space savings, depending on the nature of the data set..
Either way, without that level of introspection, I would expect a block-level de-duplication algorithm to nod do much better than a very basic whole-file de-duplication algorithm except when you're working with very specialized and unusual data sets. *shrugs* Maybe I'm just too cynical.
I think that breaking down starch into its constituent sugars fits the definition of metabolism pretty accurately. It's basically metabolism, just outside your body. Either way, we're splitting hairs here.
I wasn't aware of that. I had assumed they used the juice from the corn stalks (which, now that I think about it, is probably sucrose rather than glucose).
So the question becomes this: how many times can something be metabolized and still be called "corn".
By definition, alcohols are the result of fermenting sugars, so yes, safe to say.
I don't know, but maybe it was made by Altria Group.
(Hint to editors: Altria Group changed their name because of the negative connotations of their previous name, Philip Morris.)
I think it depends on which scheme you're talking about.
Basic de-duplication techniques might focus only on blocks being identical. That would work for eliminating actual duplicated files, but would be nearly useless for eliminating portions of files unless those files happen to be block-structured themselves (e.g. two disk images that contain mostly the same files at mostly the same offsets).
De-duplicating the boilerplate content in two Word documents, however, requires not only discovering that the content is the same, but also dealing with the fact that the content in question likely spans multiple blocks, and more to the point, dealing with the fact that the content will almost always span those blocks differently in different files. Thus, I would expect the better de-duplication schemes to treat files as glorified streams, and to de-duplicate stream fragments rather than operating at the block level. Block level de-duplication is at best a good start.
What de-duplication should ideally not be concerned with (and I think this is what you are asking about) are the actual names of the files or where they came from. That information is a good starting point for rapidly de-duplicating the low hanging fruit (identical files, multiple versions of a single file, etc.), but that doesn't mean that the de-duplication software should necessarily limit itself to files with the same name or whatever.
Does that answer the question?
The problem is, regular corn syrup more rightfully deserves the name "corn sugar". However, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup are completely different animals.
Taking the word "fructose" out suggests that HFCS is somehow a natural sugar obtained from corn, then processed into granular form, much as sugar is formed by filtering out everything but the sucrose from sugar cane syrup and leaving the remaining granular sucrose. Such an implication would be an outright deception. Corn syrup, as it comes out of the plant, does not contain significant amounts of fructose. It is basically glucose syrup. High fructose corn syrup, by contrast, is corn syrup in which much of the glucose has been enzymatically converted into fructose. It resembles corn syrup about as closely as a plastic toy resembles its original form after you soak it in gasoline for a few hours.
Having the word "fructose" in the name of this ingredient is key to explaining how this differs from corn syrup. Eliminating the word "fructose" would have the potential to cause significant confusion, and any such proposal should be soundly rejected. I'd be okay with them calling it "high fructose corn sugar" if they would prefer, or maybe even "fructose-enhanced corn sugar", but if they think they can get away with concealing fructose as an ingredient, they have another thing coming. Either way, you know something is very wrong when an industry attempts to conceal its activities through name changes. That's tantamount to admitting guilt.
I'm pretty sure in Newspeak, it would be referred to as HiCorn.
Yes and no. Compression generally does involve reduction of duplication of information in one form or another, but does so at a finer level of granularity. With a compressed filesystem, you'll generally see compression of the data within a block, maybe across multiple blocks to some degree, but for the most part, you'd expect the lookup tables to be most efficient at compressing when they are employed on a per-file basis. The more data that shares a single compression table, the closer your input gets to being essentially random, and the lower your overall compression rate typically is.
Deduplication, as I understand it (and I've read very little about this, so I could be misunderstanding) takes this a step further, taking advantage of the fact that multiple copies and/or multiple generations of a given file often exist in storage, and that when compressing two files results in very similar or identical compression tables, you can easily throw away one copy and express the other copy relative to the first.
Although this is conceptually related to the way many compression schemes work (Huffman coding and LZW in particular), the mechanism for doing so must inherently be a lot smarter. Arbitrarily combining random or contiguous chunks of such large data sets would result in expansion, not compression. Thus, the deduplication algorithms use various techniques to determine how similar two files are before deciding to try to express one in terms of the other.
That would be the Very Intense Strategic Tokamak Array.
Followed shortly by the High Output Lepton Emitter.
So what you're saying, then, is that UK ISP users should have a say in the total amount of money spent on copyright enforcement.
Cue the rumors that Jobs and Ellison are preparing for a throwing star battle to the death....
Some hard numbers:
So in the course of two minutes, that's 1% of your monthly allocation. Heaven help you if you download updates to applications. It's really easy to rack up gigabytes of traffic, particularly if you accidentally disable Wi-Fi and leave it off for a month. Even if we're just talking about people who just check their mail once a day and never browse the web and never use mapping and never use Facebook, I still can't imagine how you could reliably limit yourself to only 100-200 MB per month without a herculean effort.
You must be using a Wi-Fi network most of the time. Try turning Wi-Fi off for a month and watch what happens to those numbers.
It's not really idiotic. It's cost effective. These design patterns didn't evolve in a vacuum, and the reasons for them are not purely decorative. There are good reasons that most construction uses a sloped roof with largely nonreflective roofing materials, and barring those reasons somehow ceasing to be important, I would not expect construction to move away from traditional peaked roofs. Some of the key reasons include:
So although your suggestions are good in principle, they are not realistic in practice, and I'd be very, very surprised if building trends went the way you want them to. If anything, all the trends I'm seeing are going the exact opposite way....
If anything is protecting Scrabble's board design, it would have to be copyright law. A design patent would have expired almost half a century ago....
Hmm. I would have said you could not copyright a building, but it seems I'm twenty years behind the times. *sigh*
Every day, I think copyright law can't be any more screwed up, and every day I learn a new horror that proves that belief wrong.
Yes.