it only makes sonic booms passing through Mach 1 when accellerating or decelerating
Not true - it makes the sonic boom all the time.
Ever stand by the road wwneh a large truck passes going fast? The is quite a blast of air pushing you over. But with a truck, because the air can get out of the way at the speed of sound, that blast of air has a smooth rise and fall. When you reach the speed of sound, that blast of air comes all at once.
The size of the boom rises with the size of the aircraft. Concorde is bigger than the SR-71, so makes a bigger boom. The SR-71 probably flies even higher than Concorde. And people will let you get away with one boom for a record, but will object to several a day, 7 days a week.
That said, new developments are being made to smooth out the boom and make it much less objectionable.
But - without the Concorde the Airbus Consortium - and today Airbus Industries would never have come to the market. We would have no alternative to Boeing nowadays.
Not sure about that; I think that without Airbus, either Lockheed would have stayed in the airliner industry, or McDonnel Siuclas would have kept going. I think it is simply that large airliners are so expensive that there is room for only two manufacturers in the world. One was always going to be Boeing, but the others could probably have survived in a 2-way split, even if not a three way. Apart from anything else, if no Airbus, would the anti-trust people have lent B take ove McD-D? I doubt it.
Re:An idea that really wasn't ready for prime time
on
Farewell To The Concorde
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
making it only useful for transoceanic flights
And it didn't have the range for trans-Pacific, where the time saving would actually be worthwhile. You onlysave 3 hours trans-Atlantic; the biggest savings are probably the express speed check-in.
But, in terms of crashes per flying hour, that one crash took Concorde from the worlds safest airliner to the wqorlds most dangerous. Boeing has about 10,000 aircraft which probably have an average utilisation over 12hr/day. Concorde had about 12 aircraft with an average utilisation about 2 hr/day. It is not surprising if Boeing have three or four crashes per year - they are piling theo hours on 100,000 times faster.
New Scientist had a small series about false positives in net filters. Their "winner" was a high school which bannded it own homw page for too many references to high - obviously drugs related. And someone who got caught searching for X-Rays - obvously part of X-rated. And an amateur astronomy site banned for too many naked eye observations.
this is 7 times the cost (and a quarter of the power) of Apple's cluster
The article describes this as a 50-year deal. That surely isn't just for the purchase of 600 servers and associated clobber. This sounds more like a 5-year build-and-manage deal. Probably some building costs, certainly some installatiopns costs, and five years wirth of (probably 24/7) sysadm. The Apple was just the hardware, IIRC
Which will make you more visible to this technology, not less. This is about reflecting radiation from outside, not emitting it from you or your equipment. A Faraday Cage will probably make an excellent radar reflector, whereas (as the article says) the human body is a rather poor reflector and hance rather difficult to see with radar.
There is a much bigger transmitter of higher frequency (hence more accurate) radiation already in place. It beams signals which can be used, by means of very similar secondary sensors, not only to track vehicles and people, but to detect identifying markers and distinctive patterns, allowing both vehicles and individuals to be uniquely identified.
This transmitter is called "the sun" and the secondary sensors which use its radiation are called "eyes" and "cameras". When "the sun" fails, local governments have installed hundreds of millions of small-area transmitters called "streetlights". Voters petition to have these privacy-invading devices installed, despite the fact that it infringes their freedom to skulk in and out of their homes unobserved, and lurk in wait unobtrusively in "dark alleys".
This technology does not identify individuals. It is no more intrusive than CCTV, and probably less so, because it cannot identify people/vehicles: it can only track them. Not that endemic CCTV is without its problems, but there is nothing new here.
As the article says, it will be difficult to track humans, because of their porr reflectivity. But it will probably track tinfoil helmets quite well.
RTFA. It works if your vehicle reflects the enetgy transmitted from the cellphone tower. It has absolutely nothing to do with the cellphone in your pocket. It is treating the cellphone tower system as a country-wide array of searchlights detecting anything which reflects their signals.
This as been the case in the UK for a year or so. As you would expect, the phone companies have put as many obstacles in the way of changers as they could - even to the extent of shop staff telling outright lies (not saying this is corporate policy, just individual staff).
But even allowing for this, they hasn't been much churn. Most people "use up" their current phone. When they get a new phone, they may well changfe providers - and put up with the trouble of changed numbers. Those who really don't want their nunmber changed are usually ther fairly conservatibve types who will stay with theur phone an dtheir telco unless really srewed around with. It has probaly led to a flattening out of services: once you examin the small print, there isn't that much to choose between the different schemes on offer, so why change?
That is the way of the world in everything: the rich travel in cars, the poor use public transport. The rich live in leafy suburbs, the poor in inner city slums. The rich hire private security guards, the poor get mugged in the alleys. The rich get all the medicine that technology can create, the poor go broke paying for minimal treatment. Why is electricity a special case?
I am not against supporting the poor - in fact, from distinctly mopre socialist Britain, I am all for it. But I don't think you should do it by fiddling with the electricity distribution scheme, or any other indirect mechanism. By all means give more to the poor, or tax them less. But do it via honest taxation, not through concealed taxation from a distorted electricity distribution scheme.
Apart from anything else, subsidy reduces liberty. You are saying to the poor that, of the money available to them, you have chosen that some of it shall be spent on electricity. You don't offer them the option of buying thicker clothes or whatever they may choose.
Market distortions to favour this, that or the other groups are just hidden taxes. Politically more acceptable, because not so visible to the voters. But, by the same token, less controllable and more corrupting.
What you desctribe is the system already at work. Those companies with standby generators have paid their reliability premium. All I am doing is offering private individuals the same options companies have.
Generally I am a fan of the market system. Historically, market systems have outperformed regulated systems over and over again. But, as this excellent articla shows, in this case the market system has failed us. I would like to examine why this is so.
As I see it, we are buying two commodities for price. We are buing raw power and security of supply. But the prices are set only for raw power. The electricity companies could justifialby say that they had plenty of power available the day before the blackout, and the day after, and you chose not to take it. But, you cry, I wanted a continuous supply I could depend on. They reply, where did you pay for that continuity of supply? You only paid us for power, not continuity of power.
In any business, there is a cost to reliability. An airline may have a spare plane, so that if one develops a fault, they can still fly. But if two develop a fault, there are going to be cancellations. They choose to accept some level of risk rather than run an infinite fleet to take occare of very rare multiple failures.
If there is one day of power cuts, the power companies lose 1/365 of their annual revenue; perhaps a bit more, because it is likely to happen at the peak, most lucrative, period; say 1/200. How much capital, in a free market system, are they going to invest to squeeze that last 0.5% of revenue? I think they would realistically set an acceptable level of power cuts and just say "You get that" to consumers.
So what we need to is to monetize security of supply, and make a market in it. Get the domestic meter updated so that it can be switched off remotely (my system already does that for overnight heating, using a signal embedded in a long-wave radio station). Require the utilities to offer, at a price that they choose, to offer at least two levels of reliability. Thise who choose the lower level can be cut off when they system approaches failure, leaving more power for those who have chosen to pay more for greater reliability. Those who choose the higher level are providing the funding to pay for reliability improvements. If nearly everybody chooses one level or the other, the market has sent a signal to the system, and a new higher or lower level should be created.
Somewhat the British system. The National Grid is owned and managed by the National Grid company as a single unit. I think that it is in turn owned by the big power companies, with some government input
That is almost exactly what I said, roughly, except that I generalised it for events with more than two competitors.
What you say is true, exept that they adjust for an equal *weight* of bets - money*bookmakers estimate of true odds. If an ace team meets a second rate one, they *don't* want the money to split evenly. If the bookie reckons the aces are 90% likely to win, what they want is 10% of betters to back the aces and 90% to back the outsiders. If everybody backs the "sensible" winner, the bookie loses. They have to have somebody backing the other side to get the money to pay those who back the favourite, so they give better odds on the outsider and really bad odds on the near cert.
So far, so boring. The bookmaker balances everything out, and the punters gently lose the commission, as you say.
But suppose everybody backs the outsider because their lead player just married a film star. Now far more monsy is going, stuupidly, on the outside. The seesaw tips, and the booky changes the odds from 8:1 (remember, they have only a 10% chance of winning, so that has margin for the bookie) to, say, 3:1. This still means that, if they do manage to win against the odds, he has a big payout problem. So he lengthens the odds on the unsexy, but high performing aces - from 11:10 to, say, 2:1, so as to get more money on the other end of the see-saw. Which means that someone betting the unpopular team gets a 90% chance of a 2:1 payoff - which is good gambling.
As you point out, the bookie always wins. And, as I said, the only opportunity for savvy punter to beat the sytem as a whole (not beat the bookie, who always wins) is when a lot of people are betting foolishly. As long as all punters are betting reasonably rationally, there is no way to win. But when a *large* number of idiots are betting, the bookie will *deliberately* adjust the odds so that a cool professional can make a profit. He doesn't care - he is too busy skinning the fools.
And only a few people can do this. the moment there are too many of them, they level the balance and no-one other than the bookie can win.
But my point is that to win, you don't look at the horses or the teams, you look at the crowd. And if you see them all running one way, you run the other. The bookie will do all the hard work for you.
In any sports-style betting where there are a large number of ill-informed betters, a well informed better can extract a profit from their ignorance.
Somewhere in hyperspace thate is a "perfect" set of odds for any event. In a fully informed world, the bookmaker and the betters would know this, the bookmaker would set odds that reflected this (minus a cut for his profit) and the betters would lose money at a steady rate.
In the real world, however, some betters will bet unreasonably - because they like the horses name or owners, because the team has a celebrity player, because even it is a bad team it is their team, etc. This means that the weight of bets is such that, if that horse/team does win, the bookmaker will have to pay out a lot. So the bookmaker responds by shortening the odds on this horse/team (knowing that the suckers will still bet emotionally) and lengthen the odds on the competing horses/teams. This means that anybody backing the competing horses/teams has an unfair advantage. Not that they will win any more often, but when they win, the payout will be bigger than it "ought" to be.
The bookmaker doesn't mind - effectively he is buying insurance. If the favourite wins, he has got a bit more income to set against the big payout he has had to make. If the favourite loses, he doesn't mind paying out a few smart gamblers from the big pot he has taken from the suckers. He makes his cut either way.
So it doesn't require absolute knowledge of an event, just relative knowledge. You have to know when the crowd are betting emotionally. And it is only worth betting when the weight of emotional betting is enough to counteract the bookies slice: if the effect is small, you won't take enough to cover the steady drain of the bookie.
As far as the bookie is concerned, the well-informed punter's money is increasing his capital: if he has enough canny punters, he can take more bets off the suckers. And since his profit is from volume, that means he makes more money. Which is nice.
I think you are right, but unfunny. The alternative version is that NMR sounds exactly the same as "Enema", and a patient saying they had come in for an NMR could get quite a surprise.
Often data recovery is used because of intentional "user" actions.
Like the time in one of our overseas offices when an employee was given the boot by his girlfriend and was so upset that he went into the office and threw the main server into the canal. (Don't ask me why). And, being a small overseas office, no-one was very IT savvy and the backups were way out of date. A recovery company got the data back.
Regrettably, I don't think they are. Newscasters are dependent upon their editors for the stories they have to tell. Certainly the Big Name newscasters have a certain control over there editors, but the floold of data is such that they con only excercise it occasionally.
TH news has, in my opinion, lost site of the wood in the trees. Because it has become technically possible to deliver news from anywhere in the world near instantaneously, they feel that they must do so. So they dispatch crews all over the place at considerable cost, then in order to justify the cost, they have to put on air whatever those crews report. They are so obsessed with their ability to report a politicians soundbite beofre his mouth has closed that they lose sight of the fact that it is actually a worthless PR puff. Of course, just occasionally, they do relay news of importance at impressive speeds. But most of the time, I wonder if you would have lost anything if that soundbite had been delayed for three hours - or even dropped altogether on more careful consideration.
I am somewhet embarrased here, because my employer makes some of the equipment the TV stations use for this sort of think. As I say, it does show its value occasionally - bue most uses seem to me to cheapen, not enhance, news reporting.
One problem with this is the ability of some idiot to absorba an almost infinite amount of processing time if it is available. Like trying to find primes using the Sieve of Eratosthenes in a half-baked implementation across the whole net. The current difficulty of Grid computing means that people trying to do it a re serious about it and optimise their algorithms and test before launching across a million PCs. Make it easy, and peope will kaunce "while (1 == 0)" across all the PC in the world and wonder why it doesn't terminate.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the stretch caused by drag? Or has Einstein got anything to do with it? ;-)
Heat. Metal expands when heated. Concorde's fuselage got very hot.
it only makes sonic booms passing through Mach 1 when accellerating or decelerating
Not true - it makes the sonic boom all the time.
Ever stand by the road wwneh a large truck passes going fast? The is quite a blast of air pushing you over. But with a truck, because the air can get out of the way at the speed of sound, that blast of air has a smooth rise and fall. When you reach the speed of sound, that blast of air comes all at once.
The size of the boom rises with the size of the aircraft. Concorde is bigger than the SR-71, so makes a bigger boom. The SR-71 probably flies even higher than Concorde. And people will let you get away with one boom for a record, but will object to several a day, 7 days a week.
That said, new developments are being made to smooth out the boom and make it much less objectionable.
But - without the Concorde the Airbus Consortium - and today Airbus Industries would never have come to the market. We would have no alternative to Boeing nowadays.
Not sure about that; I think that without Airbus, either Lockheed would have stayed in the airliner industry, or McDonnel Siuclas would have kept going. I think it is simply that large airliners are so expensive that there is room for only two manufacturers in the world. One was always going to be Boeing, but the others could probably have survived in a 2-way split, even if not a three way. Apart from anything else, if no Airbus, would the anti-trust people have lent B take ove McD-D? I doubt it.
making it only useful for transoceanic flights
And it didn't have the range for trans-Pacific, where the time saving would actually be worthwhile. You onlysave 3 hours trans-Atlantic; the biggest savings are probably the express speed check-in.
But, in terms of crashes per flying hour, that one crash took Concorde from the worlds safest airliner to the wqorlds most dangerous. Boeing has about 10,000 aircraft which probably have an average utilisation over 12hr/day. Concorde had about 12 aircraft with an average utilisation about 2 hr/day. It is not surprising if Boeing have three or four crashes per year - they are piling theo hours on 100,000 times faster.
New Scientist had a small series about false positives in net filters. Their "winner" was a high school which bannded it own homw page for too many references to high - obviously drugs related. And someone who got caught searching for X-Rays - obvously part of X-rated. And an amateur astronomy site banned for too many naked eye observations.
this is 7 times the cost (and a quarter of the power) of Apple's cluster
The article describes this as a 50-year deal. That surely isn't just for the purchase of 600 servers and associated clobber. This sounds more like a 5-year build-and-manage deal. Probably some building costs, certainly some installatiopns costs, and five years wirth of (probably 24/7) sysadm. The Apple was just the hardware, IIRC
we'll really need is the personal Faraday Cage.
Which will make you more visible to this technology, not less. This is about reflecting radiation from outside, not emitting it from you or your equipment. A Faraday Cage will probably make an excellent radar reflector, whereas (as the article says) the human body is a rather poor reflector and hance rather difficult to see with radar.
There is a much bigger transmitter of higher frequency (hence more accurate) radiation already in place. It beams signals which can be used, by means of very similar secondary sensors, not only to track vehicles and people, but to detect identifying markers and distinctive patterns, allowing both vehicles and individuals to be uniquely identified.
This transmitter is called "the sun" and the secondary sensors which use its radiation are called "eyes" and "cameras". When "the sun" fails, local governments have installed hundreds of millions of small-area transmitters called "streetlights". Voters petition to have these privacy-invading devices installed, despite the fact that it infringes their freedom to skulk in and out of their homes unobserved, and lurk in wait unobtrusively in "dark alleys".
This technology does not identify individuals. It is no more intrusive than CCTV, and probably less so, because it cannot identify people/vehicles: it can only track them. Not that endemic CCTV is without its problems, but there is nothing new here.
As the article says, it will be difficult to track humans, because of their porr reflectivity. But it will probably track tinfoil helmets quite well.
RTFA. It works if your vehicle reflects the enetgy transmitted from the cellphone tower. It has absolutely nothing to do with the cellphone in your pocket. It is treating the cellphone tower system as a country-wide array of searchlights detecting anything which reflects their signals.
This as been the case in the UK for a year or so. As you would expect, the phone companies have put as many obstacles in the way of changers as they could - even to the extent of shop staff telling outright lies (not saying this is corporate policy, just individual staff).
But even allowing for this, they hasn't been much churn. Most people "use up" their current phone. When they get a new phone, they may well changfe providers - and put up with the trouble of changed numbers. Those who really don't want their nunmber changed are usually ther fairly conservatibve types who will stay with theur phone an dtheir telco unless really srewed around with. It has probaly led to a flattening out of services: once you examin the small print, there isn't that much to choose between the different schemes on offer, so why change?
That is the way of the world in everything: the rich travel in cars, the poor use public transport. The rich live in leafy suburbs, the poor in inner city slums. The rich hire private security guards, the poor get mugged in the alleys. The rich get all the medicine that technology can create, the poor go broke paying for minimal treatment. Why is electricity a special case?
I am not against supporting the poor - in fact, from distinctly mopre socialist Britain, I am all for it. But I don't think you should do it by fiddling with the electricity distribution scheme, or any other indirect mechanism. By all means give more to the poor, or tax them less. But do it via honest taxation, not through concealed taxation from a distorted electricity distribution scheme.
Apart from anything else, subsidy reduces liberty. You are saying to the poor that, of the money available to them, you have chosen that some of it shall be spent on electricity. You don't offer them the option of buying thicker clothes or whatever they may choose.
Market distortions to favour this, that or the other groups are just hidden taxes. Politically more acceptable, because not so visible to the voters. But, by the same token, less controllable and more corrupting.
What you desctribe is the system already at work. Those companies with standby generators have paid their reliability premium. All I am doing is offering private individuals the same options companies have.
Indeed - if she uses it, she is liable for debts incurred with a card she knew to be false.
However, if she gave the card to the nearest lowlife?
Generally I am a fan of the market system. Historically, market systems have outperformed regulated systems over and over again. But, as this excellent articla shows, in this case the market system has failed us. I would like to examine why this is so.
As I see it, we are buying two commodities for price. We are buing raw power and security of supply. But the prices are set only for raw power. The electricity companies could justifialby say that they had plenty of power available the day before the blackout, and the day after, and you chose not to take it. But, you cry, I wanted a continuous supply I could depend on. They reply, where did you pay for that continuity of supply? You only paid us for power, not continuity of power.
In any business, there is a cost to reliability. An airline may have a spare plane, so that if one develops a fault, they can still fly. But if two develop a fault, there are going to be cancellations. They choose to accept some level of risk rather than run an infinite fleet to take occare of very rare multiple failures.
If there is one day of power cuts, the power companies lose 1/365 of their annual revenue; perhaps a bit more, because it is likely to happen at the peak, most lucrative, period; say 1/200. How much capital, in a free market system, are they going to invest to squeeze that last 0.5% of revenue? I think they would realistically set an acceptable level of power cuts and just say "You get that" to consumers.
So what we need to is to monetize security of supply, and make a market in it. Get the domestic meter updated so that it can be switched off remotely (my system already does that for overnight heating, using a signal embedded in a long-wave radio station). Require the utilities to offer, at a price that they choose, to offer at least two levels of reliability. Thise who choose the lower level can be cut off when they system approaches failure, leaving more power for those who have chosen to pay more for greater reliability. Those who choose the higher level are providing the funding to pay for reliability improvements. If nearly everybody chooses one level or the other, the market has sent a signal to the system, and a new higher or lower level should be created.
Somewhat the British system. The National Grid is owned and managed by the National Grid company as a single unit. I think that it is in turn owned by the big power companies, with some government input
And if you want to go back further, thalers were so named becausee they were made with silver mined at Thal.
I see, I'm reading a posting about an article about another article about information gleaned from a website.
You're reading Slashdot - what did you expect?
That is almost exactly what I said, roughly, except that I generalised it for events with more than two competitors.
What you say is true, exept that they adjust for an equal *weight* of bets - money*bookmakers estimate of true odds. If an ace team meets a second rate one, they *don't* want the money to split evenly. If the bookie reckons the aces are 90% likely to win, what they want is 10% of betters to back the aces and 90% to back the outsiders. If everybody backs the "sensible" winner, the bookie loses. They have to have somebody backing the other side to get the money to pay those who back the favourite, so they give better odds on the outsider and really bad odds on the near cert.
So far, so boring. The bookmaker balances everything out, and the punters gently lose the commission, as you say.
But suppose everybody backs the outsider because their lead player just married a film star. Now far more monsy is going, stuupidly, on the outside. The seesaw tips, and the booky changes the odds from 8:1 (remember, they have only a 10% chance of winning, so that has margin for the bookie) to, say, 3:1. This still means that, if they do manage to win against the odds, he has a big payout problem. So he lengthens the odds on the unsexy, but high performing aces - from 11:10 to, say, 2:1, so as to get more money on the other end of the see-saw. Which means that someone betting the unpopular team gets a 90% chance of a 2:1 payoff - which is good gambling.
As you point out, the bookie always wins. And, as I said, the only opportunity for savvy punter to beat the sytem as a whole (not beat the bookie, who always wins) is when a lot of people are betting foolishly. As long as all punters are betting reasonably rationally, there is no way to win. But when a *large* number of idiots are betting, the bookie will *deliberately* adjust the odds so that a cool professional can make a profit. He doesn't care - he is too busy skinning the fools.
And only a few people can do this. the moment there are too many of them, they level the balance and no-one other than the bookie can win.
But my point is that to win, you don't look at the horses or the teams, you look at the crowd. And if you see them all running one way, you run the other. The bookie will do all the hard work for you.
In any sports-style betting where there are a large number of ill-informed betters, a well informed better can extract a profit from their ignorance.
Somewhere in hyperspace thate is a "perfect" set of odds for any event. In a fully informed world, the bookmaker and the betters would know this, the bookmaker would set odds that reflected this (minus a cut for his profit) and the betters would lose money at a steady rate.
In the real world, however, some betters will bet unreasonably - because they like the horses name or owners, because the team has a celebrity player, because even it is a bad team it is their team, etc. This means that the weight of bets is such that, if that horse/team does win, the bookmaker will have to pay out a lot. So the bookmaker responds by shortening the odds on this horse/team (knowing that the suckers will still bet emotionally) and lengthen the odds on the competing horses/teams. This means that anybody backing the competing horses/teams has an unfair advantage. Not that they will win any more often, but when they win, the payout will be bigger than it "ought" to be.
The bookmaker doesn't mind - effectively he is buying insurance. If the favourite wins, he has got a bit more income to set against the big payout he has had to make. If the favourite loses, he doesn't mind paying out a few smart gamblers from the big pot he has taken from the suckers. He makes his cut either way.
So it doesn't require absolute knowledge of an event, just relative knowledge. You have to know when the crowd are betting emotionally. And it is only worth betting when the weight of emotional betting is enough to counteract the bookies slice: if the effect is small, you won't take enough to cover the steady drain of the bookie.
As far as the bookie is concerned, the well-informed punter's money is increasing his capital: if he has enough canny punters, he can take more bets off the suckers. And since his profit is from volume, that means he makes more money. Which is nice.
I think you are right, but unfunny. The alternative version is that NMR sounds exactly the same as "Enema", and a patient saying they had come in for an NMR could get quite a surprise.
Often data recovery is used because of intentional "user" actions.
Like the time in one of our overseas offices when an employee was given the boot by his girlfriend and was so upset that he went into the office and threw the main server into the canal. (Don't ask me why). And, being a small overseas office, no-one was very IT savvy and the backups were way out of date. A recovery company got the data back.
Regrettably, I don't think they are. Newscasters are dependent upon their editors for the stories they have to tell. Certainly the Big Name newscasters have a certain control over there editors, but the floold of data is such that they con only excercise it occasionally.
TH news has, in my opinion, lost site of the wood in the trees. Because it has become technically possible to deliver news from anywhere in the world near instantaneously, they feel that they must do so. So they dispatch crews all over the place at considerable cost, then in order to justify the cost, they have to put on air whatever those crews report. They are so obsessed with their ability to report a politicians soundbite beofre his mouth has closed that they lose sight of the fact that it is actually a worthless PR puff. Of course, just occasionally, they do relay news of importance at impressive speeds. But most of the time, I wonder if you would have lost anything if that soundbite had been delayed for three hours - or even dropped altogether on more careful consideration.
I am somewhet embarrased here, because my employer makes some of the equipment the TV stations use for this sort of think. As I say, it does show its value occasionally - bue most uses seem to me to cheapen, not enhance, news reporting.
Since the concept of karma comes form an Indian religion. it is hardly surprising that someone who sneers at Indians has little of it.
Nasa wasted millions developing a zero-G ballpoint, whereas the Russians used pencils.
Urban Legend
One problem with this is the ability of some idiot to absorba an almost infinite amount of processing time if it is available. Like trying to find primes using the Sieve of Eratosthenes in a half-baked implementation across the whole net. The current difficulty of Grid computing means that people trying to do it a re serious about it and optimise their algorithms and test before launching across a million PCs. Make it easy, and peope will kaunce "while (1 == 0)" across all the PC in the world and wonder why it doesn't terminate.