I guess I can go buy that carton of cigarettes I've been wanting now!
Add to the list the banning of trans-fats in food and we need to get to the bottom of this plastic bottle thing (that leach chemicals into their contents and then you ingest them..)
If you look at the top 500 companies in America, you'll find they share the same 1000 people as board members. The super rich get around. If you own 10% of a company, you're probably going to want to try for a board spot, so you have some say beyond just voting shares. Thus, the billionaires all run each other's companies to a certain extent. Talk about anti-trust, you'll see eventually this being exposed. Then they'll look back at the records the SEC keeps, and the state regulators and they'll find all sorts of "coincidences" that allowed these 1000 people to basically take control of 98% of the wealth in America. They control thru their influence the jobs market, the manufacturers, stock prices, etc. If they were to all get together, say in Idaho, and consort with one another on long-term goals, they could really shift the direction of the world. Not unlike the lords and dukes of earlier times.
It shouldn't be all that surprising that two major innovators in computing share a few billionaire board members, that's all.
For the Betas and dev editions, it'll be "developers, developers, developers, developers.. developers, developers, developers, developers.. developers, developers, developers, developers.. "
In the Russian version, your chair will throw you at startup, and when you try to load google.com you'll hear a clip that sounds like Steve Ballmer saying: "Google will fucking kill me".
Absolutely, I've studied lots of religions and philosophys. The root of the problem is not the believers but their leaders. The problem is that the believers are led down a path based on their beliefs which in a lot of cases involves not thinking for yourself and letting your leader think for you. Not saying it doesn't work; it's very effective. Look at the Army.
And religious nutjobs are really only following what their preacher tells them to. And when these laws get passed, the preacher gets more power. The preacher can go out and finger anyone who opposes them and just SAY they have been doing something illegal and the person gets put away.
This is not what government is for. Government is supposed to work for the people, the common man. It's not supposed to increase the power of the well-to-do, prestigious or powerful. I mean, look at fucking Iran. A theocracy. Do we want to turn into that?! We look down upon people in that country, we even HATE them because they are doing stuff that "their God" tells them to do. And then we go and do the exact same shit. We citizens shall be played into the grave.
If you look at the FACTS, religious nutjobs, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR RELIGIONS IS THE SAME. From Bhuddism to Christianity (all it's flavors) to Islam and back, it's all based on the same damn story, just distilled and rewritten and distorted by whoever happened to be in power at the time. It's all a damn accident, a bad coincidence that the poor uneducated people believed that stuff so long ago and it's been continuing ever since. There will always be people that "know" and people that "don't". As long as you are a follower, you are going to follow them right into your so-called apocalypse, which is really just a mass-suicide of humanity. And who know who's NOT going to die? That leader who sent you down the path, serving himself. WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS, FELLOW HUMANS!
Check out Jesus as a Myth, then watch this video (and the other parts), learn about how this stuff really came about.
Personally, I don't know if freer access to porn has anything to do with lower rape rates. Personally, I think it has to do with the increasing importance of women in society, access to civil and criminal systems to prosecute people, sex education in schools, etc. etc. Although people who have just whacked off are probably about the least likely segment of society to rape someone--I do give you that. Maybe it's just removing the taboo of sex from the public means that more people are going to want to have sex, women and men both, and are going to want to do it the right way and not the wrong way. Once we stop looking at it as a gross animal thing to do, it becomes a beautiful human thing and it's less stressful for all involved.
Hmm, so what you're saying is we're losing atmosphere. Could this be the cause of global warming, just less air to go around?
And the obligitory Spaceballs quote: As president of Planet Spaceball, I can assure both you and your viewers that there's absolutely no air shortage whatsoever. Yes, of course. I've heard the same rumor myself. Yes, thanks for calling and not reversing the charges. Bye-bye.
Well, Rice vs. Billary Clinton wouldn't even be a fight. I was sort of referring to Hillary in the post. I don't really know enough about her to totally decide, but she is one of the most well-connected women in politics, and the first husband certainly is familiar with the job.. I'm going to take my own advice and read up on her stuff, the senate transcripts, etc.
I look at it like this. Those people--our representatives in the government--work for US. Each of us is one of their managers and we aren't doing our job of telling them what they should do. We instead let them manage us.
We are a society of poor managers. We'd rather manage by gut feelings rather than the facts. We'd rather vote on our beliefs and what the TV preachers (fox news) tell us instead of what works. That's the real problem. And we are learning the hard way that employees left out of control are going to do what works for them, not us.
There IS an election coming up in November. I hope that people will vote not based on commericals but on facts. The problem is that the media who is supposedly providing us with facts is not doing it correctly either. I see a trend though, towards the positive. It all starts with your immediate representatives, the people who help to run your city. They work for you, tell them what you want. Then to your county government, they work for you, tell them what you want. State, federal, they work for you, tell them what you want. And if they don't do it, well, you're going to learn what all managers do: If you want it done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself. And that means, *gasp*, actually going out and getting involved.
Stop watching 60 hours of television a week and dedicate 10 hours to doing something that actually benefits you. It takes time, it takes a lot of work, but we citizens are more empowered than ever. All we have to do is TRY.
Actually it's the Neo Conservative Chicken Hawks you're referring to, not the more general "Republican".
I was thinking the other day that maybe it's about time we had a woman as president. I mean, look at the facts: She's going to FOLLOW THE LAW (something the current people have trouble with), she's going to care about our socioeconomic position in the world, and she's not going to take shit from anyone. And who better to talk about "Family Values", a former cocaine addicted ex alcoholic evangelical christian or someone's Mother? The Neo Cons are all about "putting women back in the kitchen where they belong" but sorry guys, this isn't the 50's any more. We freed the slaves a quite some time ago (sarcasm). Frankly, the reason are economy has been able to grow in a BOOM since post WWII is that WOMEN WORK.
Furthermore, our entire economy is based on feminine consumer values. America is here for the women. I don't know who said it but there's a famous quote that says, "Without women money would be worthless." Anyone with a wife knows this to be true.
And beyond that, dudes, how can she possibly fuck things up worse than they already are? Isn't it worth a shot? YES
The government CAN read your shit. Even if they maybe can't decrypt your bank password, they can just stroll into the bank and get what they need. So yeah, you are just protecting yourself from the Joe Cracker who wants credit card numbers to card shit, or an identity theft ring that wants to make ID's for illegal mexican immigrants (terrorists).
Hopefully it's not a problem if the Government reads our shit because THEY WORK FOR US (so the constitution says). If they misuse that information, it's really our own fault because we are not being good managers and checking up on our EMPLOYEES to make sure they are doing a good job. We are not FIRING the employees that break the rules. Don't be so paranoid, they can't throw you in jail for complaining, this isn't 1939 Germany, this isn't Stalinist Russia. They need good ideas, and some people need to be fired for insubordination. endrant
Anyway, the article is pretty clear that quantum noise encryption only works point to point (that is, utilizing a fiber optic as a quantum dot or line or whatever) so you are going to have vulnerability at every router along the way (when your packet hops out of quantum-land and into electron world). So as always, your security is limited by the security of the physical infrastructure. Could this be applied to RF transmissions? Perhaps. I gather the wavelengths might be a little too long though. Basically, it's time to realize that security is really about not having anything anyone can steal.
Information (messages) want to be free, they want to be copied. You can put it in an envelope, but the person you WANT to can open the envelope, someone else you DON'T can also. And in digital land, we can copy the envelope and what's inside of it without you knowing. In quantum land, we can't. But sooner or later is has to come out of quantum land into our physical reality and at that point it will ALWAYS be vulnerable.
Yeah, it's called movielink.com and cinemanow.com. When one of these companies or viacom or whatever makes a box that I plug into my TV and internet connection, with an easy remote and under $200 pricetag, I will never rent or buy a movie again. Dude, renting ONE FUCKING VIDEO usually costs me $15-20 because I forget to return them and get the late fees. Plus just going to the video store PISSES me off, because they don't have many videos.
Cinemanow and Movielink do not have very many videos either, but they would if everyone started using them. Look at netflix, they have so much crap I'm like a kid in a candy store. Go to movielink.com and order one of their.99cent videos. They have a special player app, it buffers your video up to like 10% (takes about 4-5 minutes at 200kB/s, so you can go pop the popcorn or pop out for a cigarette or whatever) and then you can start watching and it finishes the download in the background. It's already almost easy enough, but I want that 100-200 dollar box that plugs into my TV and reciever. BTW, the videos are over 640x480 which is more than enough for a regular TV, and the sound is perfect.
I'm sure the current DVR boxes can handle this also, they just need someone to write the software and someone to serve the movies. Oh, but that's right, there's huge megaconglomerates based on trucking plastic disks around and stacking them on store shelves. So until they can make $5 per rental, they aren't going to do it. Maybe some underground film should only release to one of these services, and that would be the driving force that starts the plunge.
So what you're saying is if I FILED enough patents (whether I got them or not), I'll increase the funding of a government institution enough to maybe get some influence there (by paying the filing fees)?
Though a nice tutorial on setting up a vpn among computers with dynamic IP addresses (I don't have a static IP) would be appreciated.
Try Hamachi. It works flawlessly and your IP on the VPN is determined by your login, not your actual IP. So as long as you're running it, you'll have the same IP on the VPN, regardless of the current state of your real connection. You install it, run it, choose a network name and password and that's about it. They have a central server that handles keeping a list of everyone in your network. Once it gets the list, it starts talking P2P.
torrent_link("/files/file1.mpg", "This is File 1.");
?>
You just stick the files you want in some dir, maybe have a little admin script to upload new files and manage your seeding, mysql table that has a list of the torrent info, torrent_link generates the.torrent file and an a href and you're good to go.
Yeah, I see what you're getting at. Objectify content (like is already is, as a.html file or whatever) but instead of using HTTP to transfer it, you use the torrent protocol (or whatever's faster). The problem is that.torrent takes a few minutes to get a list of everyone, then you have to wait for slots to open up. Once it gets going it rocks though (hence the "torrent"). Maybe the protocol could reoptomize itself on the fly, just like the old ZModem days, where it chooses a block (frame, whatever) size based on the original file size. Thus if you were requesting a 10K file from the server, it would look at who had the file, and request 1K from 10 people, the rarest parts first. Actually, this isn't all that bad of an idea because we all carry around websites in our cache file anyway. You'd probably need a much more robust hashing system (torrent and most p2p rely on impropability of an intersecting hash rather than true unique hashes;) Having an extra 20 billion files in hash space would maybe affect that. Of course, the seeding host could just forward a list of the last 25 visitors and you could safely assume they have the right file in the cache..
I don't know, if properly implemented as an extension to apached and firefox you might be on to something that would pretty much end the need for large scale clustering of servers for any site. You have to make it totally transparent to the user. Maybe HTTP v5.1 will have it;) Hell, if you want to get really crazy, extend IPv6 and use its multicasting capabilities along with the "get the rarest part first" capability of bittorrent to create a new protocol that automatically finds the packets needed out on the network after asking the server for a few K hash file of the content.
Phew, man, I wish I was up to speed on my statistics and fractal math. My head hurts, someone figure the rest out please.
So you could have one of these as a peripheral, and just load a "program" into it, then run whatever task you want to do on it? How long does it take to load the program, and how much faster will it encode videos, etc?
Yeah, it's smart to be in the market because you are getting the money of all the people who aren't on the market but spend money at these publicly owned businesses.
But the real growth of the economy is all based on debt, the government decides how much to lend out and that decides how big companies get and how much money there is to pay workers and stuff.
Of course, if you get too much money out there relative to other countries (like now, where the government has been printing $500B per year of new money in the form of debt), your currency falls and your money is worth less and less. You can only push so far before people begin to lose confidence. Having a good leader can really help out the confidence, both in and out of the country. But the economy is showing that it could take the huge infusion of money pretty well and we're sending it to China and they're still taking it so what do we care?
Now, what's going to happen when we move to one world currency? Well, it's going to be a long process and there's going to be a big war and eventually we'll all settle down and we can all move a bit slower. But as long as there are more people than there is available water, food, energy, etc. it will not be possible. I think we will probably hit that population number soon. I like to follow the progress of the "Euro" because that was a major major change for the world that we haven't even felt yet. In the West we have most of S. America tied to the dollar now. Since Europe is now the biggest economy in the world, once they get the kinks straightened out, free up trade between the member states and drop tax rates, they(you) are going to be a force to reckon with.
The only country with anything to fear right now is Russia; they have a huge land mass with huge resources and on the outside you have overcrowded China and Japan in the East, and Europe on the West. But I like the Russians, I think they are some of the most brilliant people. I think they will be our friends.
The problem is that a system like this would need to self-regulate. This means that it would tend to move to a static stable point wherein everyone is happy with their shares. If you designed it the other way, there would be chaos. The problem is that the market, and the economy, is based on the MOVEMENT of money. The trade of money is what happens on Wall Street. It is no longer just trading the ownership of a company. A system such as this would need to be designed to make everything as stable as possible and that would be bad for the economy.
Traders on the floor basically buy shares they think will go up and then sell them to people who want to buy them later at a higher price. The same thing happens with the big institutions. Most of the shares are controlled by big funds and banks anyway, not the individual. So really, there aren't that many people involved. When you make a "trade" online, mostly you are just moving a few digits around in your broker's computer system--the broker already has huge vats of stock bought at "wholesale rates", they just juggle around a few account numbers and that's it.
It's important to remember that in every trade there is both a seller AND a buyer, so even if a stock drops 12871% that means there's someone on the other end buying it for the new lower price. That means that the two models they are using have to be making different decisions. The problem is that data is data, and all the models will be using the same data. So you are setting up a house of cards that just requires one minor strange trend and the whole thing will fall down. A human could jump into the system, do a totally nonsensical trade and the system would not know what to think. But because the system is EVERYTHING, everyone would sell, and then the system would figure out that usually these other stocks go down when stock A goes down and so it would sell THOSE stocks, and the whole thing would crash.
So, you'd have to build the system to go for statis--stability--but the problem is that our economy DEPENDS on the movement of money and stability in trading would result in less movement. There wouldn't be any stock quotes because there wouldn't be any trade.
So I don't know, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. There's too many feelings involved in the stock market to ever make a computer that can handle it. Sometimes you do what's honorable, not just what makes you the most money. Sometimes you have to make a move to protect your countries' economy and lose in the short term to capitalize on the long.
As far as actual TRADING, that is already computer-based at every exchange, you put an order out on the exchange network and it tries to match up with a comparable order. Then there's a negotiation, sort of like an eBay auction, where buyer says, "I need 1237817 of this stock at 10" and a few sellers say, "I've got 1237817 but I want 11 for them" then the buyer comes back and says, "ok, how about 65000 at 10" and another seller says "I have 65000 but I want 10.25" yadda yadda. So it really is just a yes or no question "Take their offer (Y/N)?" Real traders are much more flexible than what you actually see at your Scottrade account.
Slashdot Mirror
Soviet Russia might that just be the next.
I think I'll moove my site over to this before I get "sent to the pasture" by my boss.
Yeah, amazon has pretty amazing fulfulment and warehousing. They carry almost everything so why not ship from them and make more money?
Hey, you should go play another game that has rules AGAINST Ponzi schemes using in game play money.
Problem solved.
I guess I can go buy that carton of cigarettes I've been wanting now!
Add to the list the banning of trans-fats in food and we need to get to the bottom of this plastic bottle thing (that leach chemicals into their contents and then you ingest them..)
If you look at the top 500 companies in America, you'll find they share the same 1000 people as board members. The super rich get around. If you own 10% of a company, you're probably going to want to try for a board spot, so you have some say beyond just voting shares. Thus, the billionaires all run each other's companies to a certain extent. Talk about anti-trust, you'll see eventually this being exposed. Then they'll look back at the records the SEC keeps, and the state regulators and they'll find all sorts of "coincidences" that allowed these 1000 people to basically take control of 98% of the wealth in America. They control thru their influence the jobs market, the manufacturers, stock prices, etc. If they were to all get together, say in Idaho, and consort with one another on long-term goals, they could really shift the direction of the world. Not unlike the lords and dukes of earlier times.
It shouldn't be all that surprising that two major innovators in computing share a few billionaire board members, that's all.
For the Betas and dev editions, it'll be "developers, developers, developers, developers.. developers, developers, developers, developers.. developers, developers, developers, developers.. "
In the Russian version, your chair will throw you at startup, and when you try to load google.com you'll hear a clip that sounds like Steve Ballmer saying: "Google will fucking kill me".
Absolutely, I've studied lots of religions and philosophys. The root of the problem is not the believers but their leaders. The problem is that the believers are led down a path based on their beliefs which in a lot of cases involves not thinking for yourself and letting your leader think for you. Not saying it doesn't work; it's very effective. Look at the Army.
And religious nutjobs are really only following what their preacher tells them to. And when these laws get passed, the preacher gets more power. The preacher can go out and finger anyone who opposes them and just SAY they have been doing something illegal and the person gets put away.
This is not what government is for. Government is supposed to work for the people, the common man. It's not supposed to increase the power of the well-to-do, prestigious or powerful. I mean, look at fucking Iran. A theocracy. Do we want to turn into that?! We look down upon people in that country, we even HATE them because they are doing stuff that "their God" tells them to do. And then we go and do the exact same shit. We citizens shall be played into the grave.
If you look at the FACTS, religious nutjobs, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR RELIGIONS IS THE SAME. From Bhuddism to Christianity (all it's flavors) to Islam and back, it's all based on the same damn story, just distilled and rewritten and distorted by whoever happened to be in power at the time. It's all a damn accident, a bad coincidence that the poor uneducated people believed that stuff so long ago and it's been continuing ever since. There will always be people that "know" and people that "don't". As long as you are a follower, you are going to follow them right into your so-called apocalypse, which is really just a mass-suicide of humanity. And who know who's NOT going to die? That leader who sent you down the path, serving himself. WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS, FELLOW HUMANS!
Check out Jesus as a Myth, then watch this video (and the other parts), learn about how this stuff really came about.
Oh well, I guess we live in a world of idiots.
You must be new here (to society).
Personally, I don't know if freer access to porn has anything to do with lower rape rates. Personally, I think it has to do with the increasing importance of women in society, access to civil and criminal systems to prosecute people, sex education in schools, etc. etc. Although people who have just whacked off are probably about the least likely segment of society to rape someone--I do give you that. Maybe it's just removing the taboo of sex from the public means that more people are going to want to have sex, women and men both, and are going to want to do it the right way and not the wrong way. Once we stop looking at it as a gross animal thing to do, it becomes a beautiful human thing and it's less stressful for all involved.
Hmm, so what you're saying is we're losing atmosphere. Could this be the cause of global warming, just less air to go around?
And the obligitory Spaceballs quote: As president of Planet Spaceball, I can assure both you and your viewers that there's absolutely no air shortage whatsoever. Yes, of course. I've heard the same rumor myself. Yes, thanks for calling and not reversing the charges. Bye-bye.
Well, Rice vs. Billary Clinton wouldn't even be a fight. I was sort of referring to Hillary in the post. I don't really know enough about her to totally decide, but she is one of the most well-connected women in politics, and the first husband certainly is familiar with the job.. I'm going to take my own advice and read up on her stuff, the senate transcripts, etc.
I look at it like this. Those people--our representatives in the government--work for US. Each of us is one of their managers and we aren't doing our job of telling them what they should do. We instead let them manage us.
We are a society of poor managers. We'd rather manage by gut feelings rather than the facts. We'd rather vote on our beliefs and what the TV preachers (fox news) tell us instead of what works. That's the real problem. And we are learning the hard way that employees left out of control are going to do what works for them, not us.
There IS an election coming up in November. I hope that people will vote not based on commericals but on facts. The problem is that the media who is supposedly providing us with facts is not doing it correctly either. I see a trend though, towards the positive. It all starts with your immediate representatives, the people who help to run your city. They work for you, tell them what you want. Then to your county government, they work for you, tell them what you want. State, federal, they work for you, tell them what you want. And if they don't do it, well, you're going to learn what all managers do: If you want it done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself. And that means, *gasp*, actually going out and getting involved.
Stop watching 60 hours of television a week and dedicate 10 hours to doing something that actually benefits you. It takes time, it takes a lot of work, but we citizens are more empowered than ever. All we have to do is TRY.
Actually it's the Neo Conservative Chicken Hawks you're referring to, not the more general "Republican".
I was thinking the other day that maybe it's about time we had a woman as president. I mean, look at the facts: She's going to FOLLOW THE LAW (something the current people have trouble with), she's going to care about our socioeconomic position in the world, and she's not going to take shit from anyone. And who better to talk about "Family Values", a former cocaine addicted ex alcoholic evangelical christian or someone's Mother? The Neo Cons are all about "putting women back in the kitchen where they belong" but sorry guys, this isn't the 50's any more. We freed the slaves a quite some time ago (sarcasm). Frankly, the reason are economy has been able to grow in a BOOM since post WWII is that WOMEN WORK.
Furthermore, our entire economy is based on feminine consumer values. America is here for the women. I don't know who said it but there's a famous quote that says, "Without women money would be worthless." Anyone with a wife knows this to be true.
And beyond that, dudes, how can she possibly fuck things up worse than they already are? Isn't it worth a shot? YES
The government CAN read your shit. Even if they maybe can't decrypt your bank password, they can just stroll into the bank and get what they need. So yeah, you are just protecting yourself from the Joe Cracker who wants credit card numbers to card shit, or an identity theft ring that wants to make ID's for illegal mexican immigrants (terrorists).
Hopefully it's not a problem if the Government reads our shit because THEY WORK FOR US (so the constitution says). If they misuse that information, it's really our own fault because we are not being good managers and checking up on our EMPLOYEES to make sure they are doing a good job. We are not FIRING the employees that break the rules. Don't be so paranoid, they can't throw you in jail for complaining, this isn't 1939 Germany, this isn't Stalinist Russia. They need good ideas, and some people need to be fired for insubordination. endrant
Anyway, the article is pretty clear that quantum noise encryption only works point to point (that is, utilizing a fiber optic as a quantum dot or line or whatever) so you are going to have vulnerability at every router along the way (when your packet hops out of quantum-land and into electron world). So as always, your security is limited by the security of the physical infrastructure. Could this be applied to RF transmissions? Perhaps. I gather the wavelengths might be a little too long though. Basically, it's time to realize that security is really about not having anything anyone can steal.
Information (messages) want to be free, they want to be copied. You can put it in an envelope, but the person you WANT to can open the envelope, someone else you DON'T can also. And in digital land, we can copy the envelope and what's inside of it without you knowing. In quantum land, we can't. But sooner or later is has to come out of quantum land into our physical reality and at that point it will ALWAYS be vulnerable.
Yeah, it's called movielink.com and cinemanow.com. When one of these companies or viacom or whatever makes a box that I plug into my TV and internet connection, with an easy remote and under $200 pricetag, I will never rent or buy a movie again. Dude, renting ONE FUCKING VIDEO usually costs me $15-20 because I forget to return them and get the late fees. Plus just going to the video store PISSES me off, because they don't have many videos.
.99cent videos. They have a special player app, it buffers your video up to like 10% (takes about 4-5 minutes at 200kB/s, so you can go pop the popcorn or pop out for a cigarette or whatever) and then you can start watching and it finishes the download in the background. It's already almost easy enough, but I want that 100-200 dollar box that plugs into my TV and reciever. BTW, the videos are over 640x480 which is more than enough for a regular TV, and the sound is perfect.
Cinemanow and Movielink do not have very many videos either, but they would if everyone started using them. Look at netflix, they have so much crap I'm like a kid in a candy store. Go to movielink.com and order one of their
I'm sure the current DVR boxes can handle this also, they just need someone to write the software and someone to serve the movies. Oh, but that's right, there's huge megaconglomerates based on trucking plastic disks around and stacking them on store shelves. So until they can make $5 per rental, they aren't going to do it. Maybe some underground film should only release to one of these services, and that would be the driving force that starts the plunge.
So what you're saying is if I FILED enough patents (whether I got them or not), I'll increase the funding of a government institution enough to maybe get some influence there (by paying the filing fees)?
Though a nice tutorial on setting up a vpn among computers with dynamic IP addresses (I don't have a static IP) would be appreciated.
Try Hamachi. It works flawlessly and your IP on the VPN is determined by your login, not your actual IP. So as long as you're running it, you'll have the same IP on the VPN, regardless of the current state of your real connection. You install it, run it, choose a network name and password and that's about it. They have a central server that handles keeping a list of everyone in your network. Once it gets the list, it starts talking P2P.
Enjoy
Yeah, I see what you're getting at. Objectify content (like is already is, as a .html file or whatever) but instead of using HTTP to transfer it, you use the torrent protocol (or whatever's faster). The problem is that .torrent takes a few minutes to get a list of everyone, then you have to wait for slots to open up. Once it gets going it rocks though (hence the "torrent"). Maybe the protocol could reoptomize itself on the fly, just like the old ZModem days, where it chooses a block (frame, whatever) size based on the original file size. Thus if you were requesting a 10K file from the server, it would look at who had the file, and request 1K from 10 people, the rarest parts first. Actually, this isn't all that bad of an idea because we all carry around websites in our cache file anyway. You'd probably need a much more robust hashing system (torrent and most p2p rely on impropability of an intersecting hash rather than true unique hashes;) Having an extra 20 billion files in hash space would maybe affect that. Of course, the seeding host could just forward a list of the last 25 visitors and you could safely assume they have the right file in the cache..
;) Hell, if you want to get really crazy, extend IPv6 and use its multicasting capabilities along with the "get the rarest part first" capability of bittorrent to create a new protocol that automatically finds the packets needed out on the network after asking the server for a few K hash file of the content.
I don't know, if properly implemented as an extension to apached and firefox you might be on to something that would pretty much end the need for large scale clustering of servers for any site. You have to make it totally transparent to the user. Maybe HTTP v5.1 will have it
Phew, man, I wish I was up to speed on my statistics and fractal math. My head hurts, someone figure the rest out please.
So you could have one of these as a peripheral, and just load a "program" into it, then run whatever task you want to do on it? How long does it take to load the program, and how much faster will it encode videos, etc?
In the end this could mean a good thing, and we can turn our attention from pure profit to things that really matters.
Like changing the world for the better. Something a computer can't do.
Yeah, it's smart to be in the market because you are getting the money of all the people who aren't on the market but spend money at these publicly owned businesses.
But the real growth of the economy is all based on debt, the government decides how much to lend out and that decides how big companies get and how much money there is to pay workers and stuff.
Of course, if you get too much money out there relative to other countries (like now, where the government has been printing $500B per year of new money in the form of debt), your currency falls and your money is worth less and less. You can only push so far before people begin to lose confidence. Having a good leader can really help out the confidence, both in and out of the country. But the economy is showing that it could take the huge infusion of money pretty well and we're sending it to China and they're still taking it so what do we care?
Now, what's going to happen when we move to one world currency? Well, it's going to be a long process and there's going to be a big war and eventually we'll all settle down and we can all move a bit slower. But as long as there are more people than there is available water, food, energy, etc. it will not be possible. I think we will probably hit that population number soon. I like to follow the progress of the "Euro" because that was a major major change for the world that we haven't even felt yet. In the West we have most of S. America tied to the dollar now. Since Europe is now the biggest economy in the world, once they get the kinks straightened out, free up trade between the member states and drop tax rates, they(you) are going to be a force to reckon with.
The only country with anything to fear right now is Russia; they have a huge land mass with huge resources and on the outside you have overcrowded China and Japan in the East, and Europe on the West. But I like the Russians, I think they are some of the most brilliant people. I think they will be our friends.
The problem is that a system like this would need to self-regulate. This means that it would tend to move to a static stable point wherein everyone is happy with their shares. If you designed it the other way, there would be chaos. The problem is that the market, and the economy, is based on the MOVEMENT of money. The trade of money is what happens on Wall Street. It is no longer just trading the ownership of a company. A system such as this would need to be designed to make everything as stable as possible and that would be bad for the economy.
Traders on the floor basically buy shares they think will go up and then sell them to people who want to buy them later at a higher price. The same thing happens with the big institutions. Most of the shares are controlled by big funds and banks anyway, not the individual. So really, there aren't that many people involved. When you make a "trade" online, mostly you are just moving a few digits around in your broker's computer system--the broker already has huge vats of stock bought at "wholesale rates", they just juggle around a few account numbers and that's it.
It's important to remember that in every trade there is both a seller AND a buyer, so even if a stock drops 12871% that means there's someone on the other end buying it for the new lower price. That means that the two models they are using have to be making different decisions. The problem is that data is data, and all the models will be using the same data. So you are setting up a house of cards that just requires one minor strange trend and the whole thing will fall down. A human could jump into the system, do a totally nonsensical trade and the system would not know what to think. But because the system is EVERYTHING, everyone would sell, and then the system would figure out that usually these other stocks go down when stock A goes down and so it would sell THOSE stocks, and the whole thing would crash.
So, you'd have to build the system to go for statis--stability--but the problem is that our economy DEPENDS on the movement of money and stability in trading would result in less movement. There wouldn't be any stock quotes because there wouldn't be any trade.
So I don't know, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. There's too many feelings involved in the stock market to ever make a computer that can handle it. Sometimes you do what's honorable, not just what makes you the most money. Sometimes you have to make a move to protect your countries' economy and lose in the short term to capitalize on the long.
As far as actual TRADING, that is already computer-based at every exchange, you put an order out on the exchange network and it tries to match up with a comparable order. Then there's a negotiation, sort of like an eBay auction, where buyer says, "I need 1237817 of this stock at 10" and a few sellers say, "I've got 1237817 but I want 11 for them" then the buyer comes back and says, "ok, how about 65000 at 10" and another seller says "I have 65000 but I want 10.25" yadda yadda. So it really is just a yes or no question "Take their offer (Y/N)?" Real traders are much more flexible than what you actually see at your Scottrade account.