The rough answer is yes you can, but there are probably questions about how much you are willing to screw up the environment and whether or not you can get licensed:
(I'm not asserting anything about how much heat the Presque Isle Plant releases into Lake Superior or about how much damage that heat does, but it probably releases a significant amount of heat, and it probably has some sort of license)
I didn't believe you, so I checked. If you wave your hands in the air and assume that IQ is a perfect measure and that it is a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, my calculation says that 12% of the population falls below an IQ of 83.3752 (this is according to R, the command is `qnorm(0.12, 100, 15)`, or `qnorm(0.12, mean=100, sd=15)` if you prefer clarity).
Wolfram Alpha can also come up with the answer, I'm not sure I like the form of the input (but maybe there is a clearer way; the Mathematica form on the resulting page certainly makes more sense to me, but Alpha doesn't like it):
In pedantic land, a median that is representative of a set of values is an average. The average most people are talking about when they say average is the mean.
The mode can also be an average. Along with all sorts of other measures.
No error checking, not well tested, I forgot to use the filename given in the torrent as the output file instead of the shorter name I was using to simply comparisons, etc.
But I don't think they have quite the same coverage as the networks (I know they use Sprint's network, but I'm not sure if they have any roaming agreements with Verizon; if they do not, they would not have equivalent coverage to Sprint).
PNG is 25.5 KB, torrent is 22.1 KB (I haven't decoded the PNG to make sure that I have the correct torrent, but I'm pretty sure I do, and besides, most of the OO torrents should just be for 1 file).
It might be harder to detect variations, but all that is needed to detect this is to pop open the image and scan for a magic sequence that is used to mark the data.
It isn't that big a whoops, especially for free image hosting services.
If they consistently filter legit images, to the point where people feel hassled, it would be an issue, but 1 in 1000 isn't going to hurt them any.
Still, people running free content hosting, of any type, have plenty of other headaches to deal with. Like hiding encoded data in Wikipedia's edit history:
The 'primary' version is a bookmarklet (they built a Firefox plugin because the Firefox file save dialog won't accept a nice filename for the torrent). The core functionality is 250 lines (sort of, much of it is whitespace or other noise):
I'm just pointing out that your assertion was ridiculous. It is reasonable to assume that the most they have saved from those firings was 3 or 4 hundred million dollars (certainly nothing to sneeze at), so saying that they did it to 'continue providing positive figures' when they actually earned more than 20 times that amount doesn't make any sense.
That they may still be reporting earning generated by production done by those employees simply isn't relevant.
There is nothing stopping the ISP from advertising 0.1 or 0.5 or 1 megabit guaranteed with 5 megabit burst, it wouldn't confuse their average customer anymore than their current advertising, and it would be somewhat more likely to be true.
So I don't expect the same service as someone paying more than I pay, but I do want some reasonable statement of the actual service being provided, not something that is very nearly a lie.
If you spread the $8.5 billion they earned in the last 6 months over those 5,000 employees, they apparently would have spent $1.7 million per employee for the six months, or an annual rate of $3.4 million per employee.
'having to fire 5000 employees in order to continue providing positive figures' clearly is not the correct characterization of the situation. I would propose that they fired people to save money, but it wasn't a case of need, it was a case of having a good excuse to get rid of some dead weight.
Why? Is the output of practical fusion generators predicted to be orders of magnitude larger than current power stations, with no hope of scaling down?
There is some chance that a bug simply hasn't been filed. Mozilla does keep security related bugs private (or so I understand it, I'm not in that club) until they consider them resolved (which often means releasing an update). Full disclosure generally refers to whoever found the bug telling the public about it, so no need for the "or what?", the bug has been disclosed.
Human energy utilization is on the order of 15 terawatts. The sun hits an earth size disc at the earth's orbit with more than 100 petawatts (I would guess that at least 30 or 50 petawatts actually make it to the ground).
There is some chance that it will cause problems, but we don't have the capacity to build up fast, so we are going to have quite some time where we are harnessing 1/10,000 of the Sun's energy. We can use that experience to decide if 1/1,000 of it poses some risk to the environmental conditions that we like to live in.
Slashdot Mirror
Paint chips and hammers and fragments of exploding bolts and fragments of exploding satellites?
Not worth anything.
The rough answer is yes you can, but there are probably questions about how much you are willing to screw up the environment and whether or not you can get licensed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presque_Isle_Power_Plant
(I'm not asserting anything about how much heat the Presque Isle Plant releases into Lake Superior or about how much damage that heat does, but it probably releases a significant amount of heat, and it probably has some sort of license)
The Russian mobsters killed anyone they perceived as competition, so it didn't help the situation for us any.
Dictionary attacks.
I didn't believe you, so I checked. If you wave your hands in the air and assume that IQ is a perfect measure and that it is a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, my calculation says that 12% of the population falls below an IQ of 83.3752 (this is according to R, the command is `qnorm(0.12, 100, 15)`, or `qnorm(0.12, mean=100, sd=15)` if you prefer clarity).
Wolfram Alpha can also come up with the answer, I'm not sure I like the form of the input (but maybe there is a clearer way; the Mathematica form on the resulting page certainly makes more sense to me, but Alpha doesn't like it):
http://www10.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Quantile+12+Normal+Distribution+100+15
The huge number even has the advantage of being highly noticeable.
Much worse to get screwed for $150 and not realize it than have to call your bank and tell them that their computer puked.
In pedantic land, a median that is representative of a set of values is an average. The average most people are talking about when they say average is the mean.
The mode can also be an average. Along with all sorts of other measures.
Here's a sketch of a command line version in python:
http://pastebin.com/f36d1639b
No error checking, not well tested, I forgot to use the filename given in the torrent as the output file instead of the shorter name I was using to simply comparisons, etc.
If you are at gunpoint and everything gets locked down, you are no longer useful.
At least something to take into account when dealing with people willing to point a gun at you.
Aren't most of the Fav5 plans within about $20 of the unlimited plan from the phone company?
Looking, Alltel starts friends and family at $40 (for a local plan) and it look like a mostly unlimited national plan is $90.
Boost mobile has unlimited for $50:
http://plans.boostmobile.com/monthlyunlimited.aspx
But I don't think they have quite the same coverage as the networks (I know they use Sprint's network, but I'm not sure if they have any roaming agreements with Verizon; if they do not, they would not have equivalent coverage to Sprint).
PNG is 25.5 KB, torrent is 22.1 KB (I haven't decoded the PNG to make sure that I have the correct torrent, but I'm pretty sure I do, and besides, most of the OO torrents should just be for 1 file).
It might be harder to detect variations, but all that is needed to detect this is to pop open the image and scan for a magic sequence that is used to mark the data.
It isn't that big a whoops, especially for free image hosting services.
If they consistently filter legit images, to the point where people feel hassled, it would be an issue, but 1 in 1000 isn't going to hurt them any.
Still, people running free content hosting, of any type, have plenty of other headaches to deal with. Like hiding encoded data in Wikipedia's edit history:
http://pauldotcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/03/hiding-inside-wikipedia.html
The 'primary' version is a bookmarklet (they built a Firefox plugin because the Firefox file save dialog won't accept a nice filename for the torrent). The core functionality is 250 lines (sort of, much of it is whitespace or other noise):
http://github.com/mnutt/hid.im/blob/ce9750f16c2e12f8f93e97ea7f73edb0e302b22e/public/javascripts/read_png.js
So I would think that the availability of tools will be pretty good if the concept catches on much.
I'm just pointing out that your assertion was ridiculous. It is reasonable to assume that the most they have saved from those firings was 3 or 4 hundred million dollars (certainly nothing to sneeze at), so saying that they did it to 'continue providing positive figures' when they actually earned more than 20 times that amount doesn't make any sense.
That they may still be reporting earning generated by production done by those employees simply isn't relevant.
There is nothing stopping the ISP from advertising 0.1 or 0.5 or 1 megabit guaranteed with 5 megabit burst, it wouldn't confuse their average customer anymore than their current advertising, and it would be somewhat more likely to be true.
So I don't expect the same service as someone paying more than I pay, but I do want some reasonable statement of the actual service being provided, not something that is very nearly a lie.
Nice of you to drop by Mr. Branson.
If you spread the $8.5 billion they earned in the last 6 months over those 5,000 employees, they apparently would have spent $1.7 million per employee for the six months, or an annual rate of $3.4 million per employee.
'having to fire 5000 employees in order to continue providing positive figures' clearly is not the correct characterization of the situation. I would propose that they fired people to save money, but it wasn't a case of need, it was a case of having a good excuse to get rid of some dead weight.
Why? Is the output of practical fusion generators predicted to be orders of magnitude larger than current power stations, with no hope of scaling down?
Human generation is a bad joke compared to the amount of heat that the sun pumps into the earth on a continuous basis.
If the earth wasn't radiating all that heat away, the temperature would go up pretty fast (I mean day to day here, not year to year).
Thank the lord for the magic buckets that scoop water out of the oceans and dumps it out on the mountains so that we can have hydroelectric power.
Oh wait, the sun does that. Nice job being all ranty though.
There is some chance that a bug simply hasn't been filed. Mozilla does keep security related bugs private (or so I understand it, I'm not in that club) until they consider them resolved (which often means releasing an update). Full disclosure generally refers to whoever found the bug telling the public about it, so no need for the "or what?", the bug has been disclosed.
18 trillion kilowatt hours is 18 petawatt hours, or 18,000 terawatt hours.
Human energy utilization is on the order of 15 terawatts. The sun hits an earth size disc at the earth's orbit with more than 100 petawatts (I would guess that at least 30 or 50 petawatts actually make it to the ground).
There is some chance that it will cause problems, but we don't have the capacity to build up fast, so we are going to have quite some time where we are harnessing 1/10,000 of the Sun's energy. We can use that experience to decide if 1/1,000 of it poses some risk to the environmental conditions that we like to live in.
For longer lines, HVDC is probably better than AC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission