Looking at the photo it looks like the blade pitch is fixed and the braces look like the hold the shaft at a fixed angle. It is thus hard to figure out how it gets any forward motion, or how he would compensate for a tilt in the aircraft. Not sure how this works.
There's a perpetual argument on slashdot that goes like this: Lin/Win: Macs are more expensive. Mac: No they are not if you configure them Identically Lin/Win: okay here's a Dell thats comparable and it costs $100 less Mac: You are overlooking the value of a system that works. It's only cheaper if your time has no value. Lin/Win: Well I get to choose with my PC, Mac forces me to pay the mac tax whether I want to or not.
So apparently there's a large number of people, larger than the max zealots, for which saving a dime at the expense of time and frustration is really a consideration. United is catering to that large segment. It's what they want.
What I don't like about this is that it is going to turn into what economists refer to as "driving the good apples out". This is when one is in a price comparison situation where one does does not have enough information ahead of time to discern on the basis of quality. It refers to why there are more bad tasting apples than good tasting ones in the super market, and it's classic application was to the Used Car industry.
So when you go to book a ticket on SABRE then you will see united has the cheap flight. It forces the other players to follow unless they can somehow differentiate their service levels. This is why luxury brands never offer a cheap version. They have to maintain a public image that when you buy the luxury brand that you never ever get a bad apple.
This happens in the cell phone market where players like qwest and verizon advertise the cost without all the fees they lard on it and others advertise the final price (e.g. any pay as you go plan). I'm looking a sunday newspaper and I see qwest is advertising that my internet connection can be just $26/mo (going rate in my rural market is $49). Then the fine print says "with Bundle". And when you add in the bundle you realized they just moved the cost over to another service (3 way calling a value at $10/mo!).
So there problem with parcelling and bundling services is it can distort the market for quality when the buyer has a hard time or lacks the time to find out if it's a bad apple before they buy.
The famed economic analysis's conclusion was not that good apples wind up costing more but that the distortion is so severe that good apples leave the market and are not available.
Replying to myself. There's another good example of legal vote "buying" in the US and this was the "Nader Trading" that went on. People were trading their vote for nader in one state in return for a vote for another candidate in another state. (the goal was to boost nader's numbers while avoiding the spoiler effect in tight races). Some states did shut down websites doing voteswapping but others did not (oregon for example) . There's a very well research discussion of the legality issue here
Additionally there's the question of how much is a vote worth? You might be thinking well not much so no one is going to pay for votes. But if you look at the amount of campaign cash spent in places like florida where the elections were close you can compute that votes in such races are worth thousands of dollars given the millions spent for swings of less than a thousand votes. Thus offering 10 to 100 per vote might be quite economical if you could assure that ateleast 10% of the votes you purchased were "new" votes in the sense that someone either changed their vote or a person who voted who was not planning to vote.
The latter category of voter motivation is probably the larger one and most easy to assure. For example this is exactly what get-out-the-vote drives that provide van services and coffee to get people in undervoting neighborhoods target. One could target such demographics for example by offering non-monetary rewards that appeal to certain demographics. e.g. A limited edition U2 T-shirt. Or Concert tickets to Wayne Newton. An american flag. A signed copy of the president of Venezuela's works. Extra Gas-ration cards for the family you left back in burma.
No It's not illegal in the US
on
eBay The Vote
·
· Score: 1
Buying and selling a vote before the election might be illegal, but after the you voted there's all sorts of perks. For example, Candidates hold election night parties for their supporters.
Now if there were only some way to prove how you voted then this market could really take off. And that's the problem with most of the cryptographic and paper tape voting systems. With nearly every one of these systems yet invented if one were to snap a camera phone picture of the screen or tape at the right moment then one can prove how they voted.
For example, With the sequoia paper tape system, you preview of your impending votes are displayed on the paper tape (about 1 foot high cash register receipt.) If press the CAST vote button then it writes a bar code below this list marking it as a valid vote. If you press CHANGE vote, then it marks the precceeding preview list as being void and you can start over.
A cell phone picture taken after the bar code is written, but before the list scrolls slowly off screen would be proof of vote. You could then look online for offers of say concert tickets, cash etc, in return for that photo. The people buying it could be off shore where not only would it not be illegal for them, but heck it might be some foreign government itself doing the buying.
The same problem is true of many crytographic voting schemes. For example many of the zero-knowledge two-part or three-part voting systems where you keep one part as a receipt and the other is retained that you can check on later, suffer from the same problem that a cell phone camera can allow a proof of vote after the fact even though the bare receipt by itself cannot.
Hand marked paper ballots do not suffer from this issue as one can easily fake photos of ballots by marking and then discarding them.
When I hear things like that I always wonder how they handle past customer data. Those folks are not being given any "opt out" provision. Same as when companies get bought or sold off for parts. Current customers of course are respected since they have value but past customers are only worth the data you can mine out of them.
Crypto and now Quantum Crypto--theve voting machine folks just never get. Too wrapped in the forest of their own cleverness to see the trees. All these assertions of provable voting miss the entire point of transparency. Voters need to be able to see how it all works. You don't wrap it up in a trust-me-the-math-proves-it burrito and call it transparent. All that does is exclude participation in the process and every time you centralize the cryto it means it takes fewer and fewer people to exploit the hole they forgot to close and don't know about yet. The real solution is to spread the problem out in the sunshine so that even if it allows more people access to fudging things it also takes more people to achieve a significant fudge and the risk of getting caught is higher.
The key thing about voting is this: it's actually unlikely anyone will cheat but every wants to be sure it did not happen. Voting is about convincing the losers they lost not proving who won. it has to be convincing.
No one is likely to sue "linux" since it has no deep pockets. Instead they can sue or threaten to sue companies that use linux or people who re-sell linux. So SCO suing IBM does not apply because they were suing IBM for contributing what they alledge was SCO owned code to Linux. Linux itself was not sued. But SCO also threatened major corporations that were using Linux without an SCO lic.
The latter is the one that matters. If companies can be sued for using linux then they are at risk.
The real question is does the same concept apply to Windows. Windows has be accused of and even lost lawsuits for infringing on other peoples code or patents (Stacker, Eolas, etc...) Indeed they are legendary for this. Now could someone sue a customer of MS or get an injunction against customers using MS software on the basis of the code contianing others IP. MS has said they will indemnify companies, but I doubt that covers lost revenues.
It is also true I beleive that Windows contains a fair amount of LGPL or BSD code inside it. That's legal under those lic. But what if someone, say SCO, were to say that the code in the LGLP lic was theirs? Then If it makes sense to sue users of Linux it would make sense to sue users of MS.
So if GNU is at risk of containing other people's IP then since MS uses GNU they are too.
So does this mean I will live forever, but die if I go too far from where I started? If I can't ever go back in time now, can I then never go back in space? We all march through time at the same "rate" (what ever that unitless velocity means!), does this mean we will now all have to move through space at the same velocity?
And the biggest question: Right now I'm a single entity that exists as collection points in 3 dimensions, and a collection of lines connecting them through time. If my points in space diverge I atomize. If there's no time how do I move in space?
check/tmp isn't mounted executable...that kind of thing. What does that mean? why would/tmp be a mount. And if it's a directory it has to be executable right?
Black Pink Charteruse Maroon
on
ZOMG New Zunes
·
· Score: 1
So can I redistribute those 3? or can I copy those 3? If I could copy them 10 times them squirt the ten copies to a friend that would be 30 plays. Might be enough for many people.
No brown on the big guy, just Black Pink Charteruse Maroon. (blech who thinks of these colors) and the little guy still comes in brown. Perfect for hiding up your ass in a prison camp.
As you say, a real VM does execute instructions directly and either traps memory calls in hardware or traps all the system calls or both, it's not emulation. Stacking one virtual machine inside another one is quite thinkable since even two steps down the machine is still executing native instructions not emulating them so the speed loss is not multaplicative
For that reason I fully expect in the not too distant future that we will have virtual machines running inside virtual machines. That is there will be a move towards more compartmentalization. OS's will spawn virtual machines for any untrusted process, maybe all of them. And then pass messages between them. It's reasonable to assume the OS may in turn sit on top of some lightweight virtual machine. Perhaps embedded systems will use some stripped down real-time OS on the bottom for guaranteed execution perfromance and then also host virtual machines to allow richer application contexts for more sophisticated apps than the real-time OS will support.
Indeed anyone who has ran a virtual machine after getting hit with the Sony root kit was in fact already running a virtual machine within a virtual machine. People who timeshare on racked servers may well already be renting a virtual machine and they in turn maybe instantiating virtual machines.
At this point all the detection modalities in the paper go out the window. The only part of the system that can actually have a shot at detecting it is not retro-VMed by a virus is the bottom one and that may not be one even the machine owner is allowed to touch. For example, perhaps some form of trusted computing will emerge where the primary OS that is simply a virtual bios that hosts the OS will be be burned into the hardware itself.
Thinking about this some more. I now wonder if you nailed the entire gambit. It's win for amazon and win for the record companies if they can drive people back from single song sales to album sales. What better way to do that than to give free instant downloads for each physical media purchase. To get that of course you are buying the album. That would be a reason for the record companies to be willing to give amazon a lower price--especially temporarily.
They're so close to getting it right though; why not, when you order the CD from Amazon, allow you to download the MP3 while you're waiting for the 'couple of days' shipping? Wow. That's a killer idea. I hope they steal it.
The problem with that, and maybe with the whole amazon gig is the profit margin issue. My impression, perhaps I'm wrong, was that apple was pocketing less than a dime a song for itunes music store. I suppose that varies a lot with the rate songs are sold since there are many fixed costs. If that dime a song margin is accurate then amazon must be running on fumes since they are underselling Apple. Presumably this is not too server lite either since I'm guessing the songs are watermarked with your ID and then MP3 compressed.
So assuming amazon is not getting a better deal than apple it's hard to see how these low rates will last. Recall the record companies wanted apple to 1) share Ipod revenues with them and 2) raise prices on new releases.
Given that I'd say either the record comapnies have decided to sell music for less (ha ha ha) or these are teaser rates. Does anyone think Amazon is giving them a cut of music player sales.... So it makes not sense for the record companies to move away from apple to accept even less (unless they were incredibly freakin' scared).
So getting back to the CD shipping. That would mean even less profit perhaps or perhaps they could charge $1 for the instant album download option.
I think the distinction here is that while one is free to speak, anonymously or not, the protection is on the speech not the anonymity. That is there is no right to expect your anonymity will be preserved or that anyone will be denied the right to expose or seek to expose your identity. You may certainly publish your pamphlet, and the fact that you try to do so anonymously may not restrict the act of publishing. ( I realize There are legal situations where the act of exposure might itself be illegal--e.g. a protected witness or CIA operative. But that's an exception).
Your case dooes however raise a different issue. One of prior restraint on the attempt to publish anonymously. prior to reading the case you cite I would have believed that it might be legal for the government to enforce a ban on anonymous speech. Now I see that they can't apriori do so. THey can expose you after the fact or perhaps compel other to do so. But they cannot prevent your speech in the first place because it is anonymously authored.
Were assured free speech by our constitution but that is emphatically not an assurance of anonymous speech. If there's one thing that we can conclude from seeing the chilling effect in action, it is that anonymous speech is the only truly free speech. Right that's why we need to go to the east german system of informants, secret accusations, and secret witness testimony. That assures proper conduct.
Whistleblowers serve the public interest. They should be encouraged to speak up and shielded in any way which is just. No they should be encouraged any way that is within the law. If you feel the law is inadequate then that is where you begin.
All you say is true but so what. Why should people who criticize have an expectation of anonymity or escape libel charges? Were assured free speech by our constitution but that is emphatically not an assurance of anonymous speech. We (in the US) are free to associate with whom we please and exclude reporters. But if we do say something publicly it becomes public.
The fact that someone might fear retribution does not hold. People are obligated to testify in trials even though they might fear retribution. They don't testify anonymously. We do recognize extreme circumstances and conditions liable for abuse. That's why there's such things as the whistleblower protections laws and witness protection programs. But those are not for everyone.
So then I guess you are saying that since bittorrent comsumes about 50% of the internet bandwith it consumes perhaps half 4% of the power. Of course since bit torrent can be an edge network this might be more or less than 50% of power depending on if the edge is more or less efficient thant the backbone. My guess is that it is less efficient but that's arguable. One factor is if you want your home heated or not. That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes. The opposite is true if you had the AC on. On the backbone all waste heat is working against the AC.
By the same token spam is also a major consume of world power. Now that would be a good reason to go against that!
If we assume most traffic is one the backbone and that the backbone scales as the number of servers running it. Then we only have a few more years before the power consumed by the internet will be larger than todays total power budget. This seems impossible. Ergo the traffic must be out on the edges. And there the scaling may be different with power.
oops, Here's the link. Also a word of advice: you can embed XML without modification in YAML just by indenting it. So you can have both in the same document. Unlike XML, YAML allows for some (limited) relational hierarchy and for type casting as part of the language itself. You can use this to simplify a highly nested XML document with lots of redundant entries. just make an !!xml type-def.
If I understand the question right, how to present structured documents within human readable text then closest you will ever come to a right answer is YAML. look it up at wiki pedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the photo it looks like the blade pitch is fixed and the braces look like the hold the shaft at a fixed angle. It is thus hard to figure out how it gets any forward motion, or how he would compensate for a tilt in the aircraft. Not sure how this works.
There's a perpetual argument on slashdot that goes like this:
Lin/Win: Macs are more expensive.
Mac: No they are not if you configure them Identically
Lin/Win: okay here's a Dell thats comparable and it costs $100 less
Mac: You are overlooking the value of a system that works. It's only cheaper if your time has no value.
Lin/Win: Well I get to choose with my PC, Mac forces me to pay the mac tax whether I want to or not.
So apparently there's a large number of people, larger than the max zealots, for which saving a dime at the expense of time and frustration is really a consideration. United is catering to that large segment. It's what they want.
What I don't like about this is that it is going to turn into what economists refer to as "driving the good apples out". This is when one is in a price comparison situation where one does does not have enough information ahead of time to discern on the basis of quality. It refers to why there are more bad tasting apples than good tasting ones in the super market, and it's classic application was to the Used Car industry.
So when you go to book a ticket on SABRE then you will see united has the cheap flight. It forces the other players to follow unless they can somehow differentiate their service levels. This is why luxury brands never offer a cheap version. They have to maintain a public image that when you buy the luxury brand that you never ever get a bad apple.
This happens in the cell phone market where players like qwest and verizon advertise the cost without all the fees they lard on it and others advertise the final price (e.g. any pay as you go plan). I'm looking a sunday newspaper and I see qwest is advertising that my internet connection can be just $26/mo (going rate in my rural market is $49). Then the fine print says "with Bundle". And when you add in the bundle you realized they just moved the cost over to another service (3 way calling a value at $10/mo!).
So there problem with parcelling and bundling services is it can distort the market for quality when the buyer has a hard time or lacks the time to find out if it's a bad apple before they buy.
The famed economic analysis's conclusion was not that good apples wind up costing more but that the distortion is so severe that good apples leave the market and are not available.
Replying to myself. There's another good example of legal vote "buying" in the US and this was the "Nader Trading" that went on. People were trading their vote for nader in one state in return for a vote for another candidate in another state. (the goal was to boost nader's numbers while avoiding the spoiler effect in tight races). Some states did shut down websites doing voteswapping but others did not (oregon for example) . There's a very well research discussion of the legality issue here
Additionally there's the question of how much is a vote worth? You might be thinking well not much so no one is going to pay for votes. But if you look at the amount of campaign cash spent in places like florida where the elections were close you can compute that votes in such races are worth thousands of dollars given the millions spent for swings of less than a thousand votes. Thus offering 10 to 100 per vote might be quite economical if you could assure that ateleast 10% of the votes you purchased were "new" votes in the sense that someone either changed their vote or a person who voted who was not planning to vote.
The latter category of voter motivation is probably the larger one and most easy to assure. For example this is exactly what get-out-the-vote drives that provide van services and coffee to get people in undervoting neighborhoods target. One could target such demographics for example by offering non-monetary rewards that appeal to certain demographics. e.g. A limited edition U2 T-shirt. Or Concert tickets to Wayne Newton. An american flag. A signed copy of the president of Venezuela's works. Extra Gas-ration cards for the family you left back in burma.
Buying and selling a vote before the election might be illegal, but after the you voted there's all sorts of perks. For example, Candidates hold election night parties for their supporters.
Now if there were only some way to prove how you voted then this market could really take off. And that's the problem with most of the cryptographic and paper tape voting systems. With nearly every one of these systems yet invented if one were to snap a camera phone picture of the screen or tape at the right moment then one can prove how they voted.
For example, With the sequoia paper tape system, you preview of your impending votes are displayed on the paper tape (about 1 foot high cash register receipt.) If press the CAST vote button then it writes a bar code below this list marking it as a valid vote. If you press CHANGE vote, then it marks the precceeding preview list as being void and you can start over.
A cell phone picture taken after the bar code is written, but before the list scrolls slowly off screen would be proof of vote. You could then look online for offers of say concert tickets, cash etc, in return for that photo. The people buying it could be off shore where not only would it not be illegal for them, but heck it might be some foreign government itself doing the buying.
The same problem is true of many crytographic voting schemes. For example many of the zero-knowledge two-part or three-part voting systems where you keep one part as a receipt and the other is retained that you can check on later, suffer from the same problem that a cell phone camera can allow a proof of vote after the fact even though the bare receipt by itself cannot.
Hand marked paper ballots do not suffer from this issue as one can easily fake photos of ballots by marking and then discarding them.
Yeah then we can use google's sidewalk view to zoom in, look in your window, and check the specimen (you) out.
if the stores are all closed, with a click she can get what she came for.
ooh, ooh she's buying a ringtone from Verizon
Amazon patents notwithstanding
There's a Lock on the browser, but she wants to be secure.
Cause you know sometimes sites can be phishing
Amazon patents notwithstanding
When I hear things like that I always wonder how they handle past customer data. Those folks are not being given any "opt out" provision. Same as when companies get bought or sold off for parts. Current customers of course are respected since they have value but past customers are only worth the data you can mine out of them.
Crypto and now Quantum Crypto--theve voting machine folks just never get. Too wrapped in the forest of their own cleverness to see the trees. All these assertions of provable voting miss the entire point of transparency. Voters need to be able to see how it all works. You don't wrap it up in a trust-me-the-math-proves-it burrito and call it transparent. All that does is exclude participation in the process and every time you centralize the cryto it means it takes fewer and fewer people to exploit the hole they forgot to close and don't know about yet. The real solution is to spread the problem out in the sunshine so that even if it allows more people access to fudging things it also takes more people to achieve a significant fudge and the risk of getting caught is higher.
The key thing about voting is this: it's actually unlikely anyone will cheat but every wants to be sure it did not happen. Voting is about convincing the losers they lost not proving who won. it has to be convincing.
No one is likely to sue "linux" since it has no deep pockets. Instead they can sue or threaten to sue companies that use linux or people who re-sell linux. So SCO suing IBM does not apply because they were suing IBM for contributing what they alledge was SCO owned code to Linux. Linux itself was not sued. But SCO also threatened major corporations that were using Linux without an SCO lic.
The latter is the one that matters. If companies can be sued for using linux then they are at risk.
The real question is does the same concept apply to Windows. Windows has be accused of and even lost lawsuits for infringing on other peoples code or patents (Stacker, Eolas, etc...) Indeed they are legendary for this. Now could someone sue a customer of MS or get an injunction against customers using MS software on the basis of the code contianing others IP. MS has said they will indemnify companies, but I doubt that covers lost revenues.
It is also true I beleive that Windows contains a fair amount of LGPL or BSD code inside it. That's legal under those lic. But what if someone, say SCO, were to say that the code in the LGLP lic was theirs? Then If it makes sense to sue users of Linux it would make sense to sue users of MS.
So if GNU is at risk of containing other people's IP then since MS uses GNU they are too.
There's an ENTERPRISE rent-a-car on Pike Street.
Plus it's a converted Datsun, comes with a golden gun/cigarette lighter, and a midget bartender.
So does this mean I will live forever, but die if I go too far from where I started?
If I can't ever go back in time now, can I then never go back in space?
We all march through time at the same "rate" (what ever that unitless velocity means!), does this mean we will now all have to move through space at the same velocity?
And the biggest question: Right now I'm a single entity that exists as collection points in 3 dimensions, and a collection of lines connecting them through time. If my points in space diverge I atomize. If there's no time how do I move in space?
So can I redistribute those 3? or can I copy those 3? If I could copy them 10 times them squirt the ten copies to a friend that would be 30 plays. Might be enough for many people.
No brown on the big guy, just Black Pink Charteruse Maroon. (blech who thinks of these colors) and the little guy still comes in brown. Perfect for hiding up your ass in a prison camp.
As you say, a real VM does execute instructions directly and either traps memory calls in hardware or traps all the system calls or both, it's not emulation. Stacking one virtual machine inside another one is quite thinkable since even two steps down the machine is still executing native instructions not emulating them so the speed loss is not multaplicative
For that reason I fully expect in the not too distant future that we will have virtual machines running inside virtual machines. That is there will be a move towards more compartmentalization. OS's will spawn virtual machines for any untrusted process, maybe all of them. And then pass messages between them. It's reasonable to assume the OS may in turn sit on top of some lightweight virtual machine. Perhaps embedded systems will use some stripped down real-time OS on the bottom for guaranteed execution perfromance and then also host virtual machines to allow richer application contexts for more sophisticated apps than the real-time OS will support.
Indeed anyone who has ran a virtual machine after getting hit with the Sony root kit was in fact already running a virtual machine within a virtual machine. People who timeshare on racked servers may well already be renting a virtual machine and they in turn maybe instantiating virtual machines.
At this point all the detection modalities in the paper go out the window. The only part of the system that can actually have a shot at detecting it is not retro-VMed by a virus is the bottom one and that may not be one even the machine owner is allowed to touch. For example, perhaps some form of trusted computing will emerge where the primary OS that is simply a virtual bios that hosts the OS will be be burned into the hardware itself.
I'll wank to that!
Thinking about this some more. I now wonder if you nailed the entire gambit. It's win for amazon and win for the record companies if they can drive people back from single song sales to album sales. What better way to do that than to give free instant downloads for each physical media purchase. To get that of course you are buying the album. That would be a reason for the record companies to be willing to give amazon a lower price--especially temporarily.
The problem with that, and maybe with the whole amazon gig is the profit margin issue. My impression, perhaps I'm wrong, was that apple was pocketing less than a dime a song for itunes music store. I suppose that varies a lot with the rate songs are sold since there are many fixed costs. If that dime a song margin is accurate then amazon must be running on fumes since they are underselling Apple. Presumably this is not too server lite either since I'm guessing the songs are watermarked with your ID and then MP3 compressed. So assuming amazon is not getting a better deal than apple it's hard to see how these low rates will last. Recall the record companies wanted apple to 1) share Ipod revenues with them and 2) raise prices on new releases. Given that I'd say either the record comapnies have decided to sell music for less (ha ha ha) or these are teaser rates. Does anyone think Amazon is giving them a cut of music player sales.... So it makes not sense for the record companies to move away from apple to accept even less (unless they were incredibly freakin' scared). So getting back to the CD shipping. That would mean even less profit perhaps or perhaps they could charge $1 for the instant album download option.
I think the distinction here is that while one is free to speak, anonymously or not, the protection is on the speech not the anonymity. That is there is no right to expect your anonymity will be preserved or that anyone will be denied the right to expose or seek to expose your identity. You may certainly publish your pamphlet, and the fact that you try to do so anonymously may not restrict the act of publishing. ( I realize There are legal situations where the act of exposure might itself be illegal--e.g. a protected witness or CIA operative. But that's an exception).
Your case dooes however raise a different issue. One of prior restraint on the attempt to publish anonymously. prior to reading the case you cite I would have believed that it might be legal for the government to enforce a ban on anonymous speech. Now I see that they can't apriori do so. THey can expose you after the fact or perhaps compel other to do so. But they cannot prevent your speech in the first place because it is anonymously authored.
All you say is true but so what. Why should people who criticize have an expectation of anonymity or escape libel charges? Were assured free speech by our constitution but that is emphatically not an assurance of anonymous speech. We (in the US) are free to associate with whom we please and exclude reporters. But if we do say something publicly it becomes public.
The fact that someone might fear retribution does not hold. People are obligated to testify in trials even though they might fear retribution. They don't testify anonymously. We do recognize extreme circumstances and conditions liable for abuse. That's why there's such things as the whistleblower protections laws and witness protection programs. But those are not for everyone.
So then I guess you are saying that since bittorrent comsumes about 50% of the internet bandwith it consumes perhaps half 4% of the power. Of course since bit torrent can be an edge network this might be more or less than 50% of power depending on if the edge is more or less efficient thant the backbone. My guess is that it is less efficient but that's arguable. One factor is if you want your home heated or not. That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes. The opposite is true if you had the AC on. On the backbone all waste heat is working against the AC.
By the same token spam is also a major consume of world power. Now that would be a good reason to go against that!
If we assume most traffic is one the backbone and that the backbone scales as the number of servers running it. Then we only have a few more years before the power consumed by the internet will be larger than todays total power budget. This seems impossible. Ergo the traffic must be out on the edges. And there the scaling may be different with power.
oops, Here's the link. Also a word of advice: you can embed XML without modification in YAML just by indenting it. So you can have both in the same document. Unlike XML, YAML allows for some (limited) relational hierarchy and for type casting as part of the language itself. You can use this to simplify a highly nested XML document with lots of redundant entries. just make an !!xml type-def.
If I understand the question right, how to present structured documents within human readable text then closest you will ever come to a right answer is YAML. look it up at wiki pedia.