The energy for the plants comes from light of course, but it doesn't have to come from the sun. Any light source emitting the appropriate wavelength(s) will do. Resource have other uses then energy such as lumber, paper, thread, drugs, etc. If we ever figure out controlled sustainable fusion we'll no longer be dependent on the sun as our primary energy source. I also didn't say that renewable resources were infinite, I merely said that we currently have the ability to replace those that we use which is something we can do for coal and oil but not for the sun. I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say...
Synthesized oil or coal are not energy sources, they are ways to store energy. Energy for the synthetication must come from some actual energy source. Fossil oil and coal are energy sources for humans, but they are non-renewable because more of them will not appear from anywhere (not in human time-scales anyway), and they get less and less as we use them. And even though the energy for the fossil fuels came from the Sun, we are harvesting it from the fossil fuel, so the fossil fuel is considered to be the energy source for us (and same with wind power etc), even if it is originally the Sun's energy (which is originally energy from the Big Bang, which got it's energy from nobody-really-knows-where).
Also, plants grown with other than sun light aren't energy sources. Then the energy source is whatever is used to power the artifical lights for growing them.
Fusion energy will not be renewable either, because the more we use it, the less of it there is left. There's just so much of it (except usable reserves of the "ultimate fusion fuel", Helium-3, may be limited within our solar system) that we won't run out.
Sun's enegy output is the only known renewable origin of energy in our solar system, because it doesn't matter if we use it or not, there won't be any more or any less of it left, no matter how much solar energy we collect. Also, any energy source that uses the Sun's energy and grows/accumulates back in human time-scales, is considered renewable, such as wind or naturally (without non-renewable fossil fuel based fertilizers) grown biomass. They "come back" quite fast, and if we use it at most at that rate, we will never run out.
No she was not right. A renewable resource is one that we humans can currently cause to be renewed through our own actions. For example when we harvest plants we can plant new ones in their place. Wind, hydro, and solar power all come from the sun. And just where do you think the energy for the plant to grow (form organic molecules for structure and energy storage) comes from?
There is no *real* renewable energy, laws of ethropy make that an impossible thing. A perpetual motion machine is impossible (as far as we know). That's why "renewable energy" means something else, basically an energy source that is not permanently depleted by us humans using it.
It's a bit of a definition issue really. For example there is some controversy wether peat should be considered renewable or non-renewable, as it takes hundreds or thousands of years for a peat swamp to accumulate. Still, if you count all the peat accumulated over a year, you can harvest an awful lot of it without taking more than is accumulated back.
So the teacher was right, but apparently she was unable to explain or understand the conecpt properly, which isn't very good either.
File formats are merely blocks of data. Executable programs are merely blocks of data, too.
sounds like it's office 2003 which is insecure if they can't implement a way to read that data without offering chunnel sized holes to exploit. True, but you make it sound like it'd be easy to securely handle blocks of data. Not so, and it also does have a lot to do with the file format, not only the program handling it.
Handling a plain text file or a raw binary data file without internal structure 100% securely is perhaps practially possible (but certainly not automatic, all it takes is one tiny bug at one suble branch of code...). A binary executable is almost impossible to handle securely. Everything else falls somewhere in between.
Ah, yes. Kill 'em all, God will know his own. Isn't that how it has happened just about everywhere? Just think about the the amount of killing done in "the Western World" for example after the invention of efficient firearms... It's either people killing each other inside a region, or "outsiders" killing people of a region as a side effect of imposing their version of "peace". It's pretty universal human history... I'm not very hopeful that the humanity will ever get completely rid of this kind of barbarism.
When it's a choice between that and your own urine, which has been reprocessed through the spaceship urine reprocessing system 700 times, the dirty ice will start to look mighty appealing. Yes, because, you know, repeated artificial reprosessing of waste will wear out the water molecules. The electrons get all fractured, H-atoms may te twisted to wrong angles, little feces and urine particles may get stuck between the two H-atoms, and so on. Natural prosesses are much better because then the power of the Gaia (in this case the Martian Gaia) will be able to heal the damage in water molecules. And healthy water molecules will have the energy and will to keep themselves clean too, just like cats do.
Colonization is not even a concept understood or appreciated by YOUR whole planet, not to mention a totally alien one. Us Xenians like to stay close to home. Why would we want to go to a marginally hospitable planet? You are propagating a false stereotype of us Xenians. There are some of us who will colonize the galaxy! You evolutionarily doomed rejects will be left behind, or annihilated if you try to stop us! We'll have to rule the galaxy before the still puny humans can do it, or they will surely make us go the way of the dodo.
Well, it is actually, literally, nothing to see - robotlike insects flying near a big crowd and nobody took any pics? Well, that depends... Maybe some people got photographs. And maybe the dragonflies saw who took the pictures... And maybe, just maybe, those people have now been erased... Mayb...
Ah, sorry. My tinfoil cap was just too tight. No, please, there was nothing to see there, no sir!
The $ amount is scary, but what is even more scary is the White House praising that a woman's life was destroyed, saying that this is how it was supposed to work, too. Mindboggling. Good thing I don't live there...
Now, excuse me while I go and see what I can do to support local "EFF" organization, so that kind of crap won't ever go through here.
Quantum computation isn't a different tradeoff. It prevents you from playing this computing-power race and always winning. This means that increasing your key size will do nothing for you. Increasing quantum computer size linearily may well be more difficult, than increasing classical computer power exponentially... You're just fighting different physical limitations with quantum computers (decoherence). It's even possible that (in our universe, using this particular algorithm, with current kind of quantum hardware) it's impossible to build a quantum computer able to factor a 4096 bit RSA key.
Europe (including Germany) is generally notably tolerant towards Religion and personal confessional preference, but just as humorless when it comes to defending that tolerance and freedom. Belgian officials making this move toward the Scientology Organisation comes as no suprise to me. Make that modern/current Europe... Let's not forget the history *cough*inquisition*cough*holocaust*cough*, so we might avoid repeating it...
(And before the 'mericans get too comfortable, remember that inquisition is part of their history as well...)
I was talking more about making fuel from cellulose. If I understand correctly, then it does not matter that much what plants you grow, or at least you have a lot wider selection of suitable plants. So you can have more biodiversity to optimally utilize all nutrients in the soil, and you can select plants that are not too fussy about soil quality.
Also, even with sugar cane and other sugar producing plants, if putting the biofuel extraction residue directly back to the fields does not work, then just pile it up and let it decompose for a few years. And *then*, when it's ready-made fertile new soil, then put it back (possibly adding suitable material like chalk to adjust pH). So you'd need enough space for a few years worth of decomposing residue piles, which I don't think would be a problem.
if you were going to farm for bio fuel, it's not going to happen in a forrest which has an eco system to support your 1000 year old tree. Its going to happen on a large plantation with nothing but the most optimal plant you can grow for your purpose, in an attempt to get the max yield per square metre. ...and you yourself just stated, that soon you don't get any yield, if you just grow one plant, harvest it, and don't fertilize. So it doesn't exactly sound as the optimal production method.
Have you considered, that the only elements that we want to extract from biofuel plants are carbon and hydrogen (and oxygen, if ethanol production doesn't use atmospheric O2, I'm not sure how it is). All these come from water and carbon dioxide, which plantes take from the atmosphere, not the soil material (water as rain to the soil first, of cousre.)
Now, if you harvest the plants, put the biomass through ethanol or biodiesel creation process, and return the residue to the soil, then nothing is removed from the soil, so you can keep the production up indefinitely without extra fertilizers (as long as sun is shining, (rain)water is available, and there's CO2 in the atmosphere).
Ideally, the biofuel creation process would add some atmospheric nitrogen to the residue, so the residue would work as a fertilizer directly. This is probably doable in a way that increases total production, even if the nitrogen adding step itself is endothermic.
Also, if some biodiversity increases the fuel-convertable biomass production, then certainly biodiversity will be allowed and optimized to get the maximum production.
In summary, you are wrong. Even if growing plants for food can deplete the soil (because material from the soil is eaten), growing biomass for biofuel does not, as long residue is returned to the fields.
No, we are not humanoid because it is efficient, we are humanoid because that's just the way it turned out, and it wasn't detrimental to breeding. Yes, we're still humanoid because it is efficient. If it weren't efficient, we would have been eaten by predators or starved to death by other species eating our food. Of course there might be other efficient body plans for intelligent, technology-capable species, but ours is certainly a very efficient compromise between conflicting requirements.
What would you change to make it more efficient and visibly "non-humanoid"?
Similar patterns have consistently independently arisen Such as?
Sure, eg. flight as arisen independently a few times (insects, petrosaurs, birds, bats), and there are a few species which might yet develop flying (gliding squirrels, lizards and fishes). But you can see that they're all independent solutions, in my opinion quite varied considering the limits set by physical world (such as lift versus weight, oxygen supply versus energy production requirements, etc).
Same could be said about eyes, developed many times, superfically similar, but clearly not using the same pattern, only adapting to same limits and rules set by the physical world (for example, there must be some sort of a lens if you want a sharp image, there's no way around that).
yet these can not be the only patterns that are capable of surviving and reproducing. Of course they're not the only patterns possible, but perhaps they are the best patterns. For example, you can only have N-symmetry, where N is a smallish integer. Clearly one or at most few of the possible values of N are best for a given environment and lifestyle, and will outcompete and make extinct other possibilities (or prevent them from developing in the first place).
But perhaps you have a concrete example of a pattern that has risen independetly several times, even though it is not forced to be so by the physical reality?
The funny thing is that the one impetus that would absolutely, positively guarantee that the US would build a space elevator is if the EU, Russia, or China started work on one. Have no doubt: no-one on the planet will be permitted to build a space-elevator before the US or without US involvement; the federal/military complex in this nation wouldn't permit it. By the time building a space elevator is a practical possibility, I doubt US is in a position to prevent other world powers from doing anything much (except by starting WW3, which I don't think is an option, because the rich bastards at the top really do not want to live in a private luxury radiation shelters for the rest of their lives). The balance of economic power is shifting to the east, and I don't see that development reversing without a major worldwide crisis, and then building a space elevator would probably not be a high priority for anybody... And with economic power goes the power to meddle with other nations' business, such as building a space elevator.
But if we end up with a "bipolar" cold war world, then you're right. Obiviously if one block starts to build an elevator, the other block has no option but to start building one as well, and certainly US will still exist and be in one of the blocks by the time we can practically build one. Of course there's no guarantee that the block with US would get their elevator finished first, but I don't think that really matters as long as both blocks would get their elevators working in the same decade or so. Considering the possible problems that won't be discovered until the elevator is finished, it might even be desirable to be the 2nd, a few years behind, so that there's still time to alter the design if some unforeseen problem is discovered by the 1st.
The Integral Fast Reactor would do about 99.5%. Nope, that's just the amount of uranium that undergoes fission in IFR. But still, only 0.1% (or thereabouts) of that 99.5% of the fuel mass is converted into energy, 99.9% of the mass remains matter. The grandparent post is talking about converting more than 0.1% of the mass into energy, and that is impossible with fusion or fission
There just isn't that much binding energy in atomic nucleus, most of the energy is in the mass of neutrons and protons, not in their binding energy... By definition, fusion or fission can't convert more than this.
But perhaps quantum physics (or something) will give us a way to convert matter into energy in a more efficient way... Of course, at that point we'll probably generate a gamma ray burst or something, obliterate our entire solar system, and finally find out the answer to the Fermi paradox;-)
Since the two processes are in series, their efficiencies would multiply, not add. As far as I can see, they are not in series, but in a star formation. Hot heat reservoirs, cold reservoir, and one energy storage, all connected with heat pump.
First the pump lets 100 units of energy to flow from hot to cold reservoir, extracting and storing 2.99 units of energy, while actually transferring 96.9 units to cold reservoir.
Then it reverses, using 2.98 units of stored energy left to force that 96.9 units back from cold to hot reservoir.
Now, if you change that 2.99 units to 3.99 units, without chaning the other numbers accordingly, you end up with almost 1 unit of free energy. No can do.
Let's say that for a given heat gradient, the Carnot efficiency is 3%. Are you saying that if I had some magical process that was 4% efficient for the same heat gradient that I could build a perpetual motion machine? As far as I understand (I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong), if theoretical maximum efficiency to one direction is 3%, then to the other direction it would be 97%. Now if you do the first direction at 4%, and can still manage the other direction at (close to) that 97% efficiency, you'd get more than 100%.
As I have said in other posts, it is my opinion that a lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy in public does not mean one has no right to not get stalked in public. If I was being stalked in public by a police office, I most certainly would like that office to have a camera to record that the officer is indeed stalking me! That means that I'd have documentation to go after the officer for stalking, and he'd have a hell to explain if that record was lost or incomplete...
Do you really think it would be hard to block your access to foreign news broadcasts via DRM? DRM will not change the current situation one bit.
If foreign news are being broadcast, then surely the broadcaster will make sure the proper DRM bits are set. If you mean the orignal broadcast in foreign country, you can't watch that in any case (different cable network/different satellite/too far for normal on-air broadcast). If it's illegal to broadcast some foreign news, then no DRM is needed for that either. And if you are thinking, that every video clip (home video or news capture or whatever) in the Internet would have to be approved and DRM'd somewhere internationally, before people could watch it on their PC's... doesn't that sound a bit absurd to you?
So yes, I think it would be hard to use DRM to block foreign news any more than they can be blocked without DRM. Feel free to enlighten me on how it could be done, though.
The mere existence of this broadcast flag threatens your ability to record the present and document the past. It drives a nail through some of the more basic requirements for a democracy, which is the right and need to be and stay well informed. You know, democracy was developed in a time without any audio or video recording equipment... I'd be more concerned with self-disintegrating paper, introduced in the name of recycling, that would disintegrate in 20 years... Once somebody proposes that, then you know you should be scared (and I'm not saying this merely as a joke...).
And you think that -- just because you're paying for the content -- they won't attempt to get more revenue by including advertising? Of course, once it's all DRM-protected, you won't be able to get rid of the advertisements. Why on Earth would I want to pay for content with intrusive advertising in it? There are multiple ways to get rid of the ads, starting from going to the fridge, ending in dropping the TV from a great height and watching the shards fly...
Only reason I'm watching TV at all these days, is that I can record the shows, and then watch at my convenience, while skipping the ads. I'm willing spend my money for fun, but I'm not willing to waste my time (ie watch ads, search the torrent channel for right episodes) for fun. My money, I can control that, but the damn clock just keeps ticking away, no matter what I do.
I pity those who feel they're "slaves" to the entertainment industry, those who will have to choose between DRM and legality and convenience. I can choose to turn of the TV, and just wait for the day when enough people realize they can do the same, if the entertainment industry tries to enslave us instead of serving us.
Its sole purpose is to keep you from using the media you would otherwise have rightful access to in any way other than what the copyright holder explicitly wants.
In short, its sole purpose is, ultimately, to make you pay every time you make use of the media, and to control the flow of information. I personally look forward to the day, when I can get *any* movie or TV series episode for one-time (or one-day or whatever) viewing for a few euros, legally. I'm also looking forward for the day when I can get *any* piece of music playing once for a few cents, preferably with heuristic music selection service ("people who liked the songs you listen also liked these songs, add to your playlist?").
I don't need to *own* that music, or those TV shows, or those movies. I just want to have access to them, any time I want. And I don't mind paying more for items I want to hear/watch often. Actually, now that I think about it, quite the opposite: I'm more than happy to pay little for one viewing/listening, and more for those I like enough to listen/view many times.
If only somebody at entertainment industry had the vision *and* the power to make that happen, offer that feature integrated into a set-top box type device, he'd make trillions. DRM is not really an issue, ease of use is the issue. Of course that might be the beginning of the end for regular TV and radio programming, so there are powerful players who'll oppose this at all costs.
And I don't see the problem of information control. Quite the opposite, if you have the freedom to view any news broadcast from all over the world with a click (well, that's reality even now, I think), there's no control. If people want information, they'll get it easily (well, at least here in the free world). If they don't want it, no DRM is going to make them want it.
Since it's based on proportions of human body, I'd have to guess it's Imperial...
I believe the correct metric unit would be Mole, since different pressures make it difficult to use mass or volume units. Of course Mole is rather an inconvenient unit, which is probably why "crapload" is still in such a wide use even in "metric" countries.
Does anyone know the conversion formula between moles and craploads?
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Synthesized oil or coal are not energy sources, they are ways to store energy. Energy for the synthetication must come from some actual energy source. Fossil oil and coal are energy sources for humans, but they are non-renewable because more of them will not appear from anywhere (not in human time-scales anyway), and they get less and less as we use them. And even though the energy for the fossil fuels came from the Sun, we are harvesting it from the fossil fuel, so the fossil fuel is considered to be the energy source for us (and same with wind power etc), even if it is originally the Sun's energy (which is originally energy from the Big Bang, which got it's energy from nobody-really-knows-where).
Also, plants grown with other than sun light aren't energy sources. Then the energy source is whatever is used to power the artifical lights for growing them.
Fusion energy will not be renewable either, because the more we use it, the less of it there is left. There's just so much of it (except usable reserves of the "ultimate fusion fuel", Helium-3, may be limited within our solar system) that we won't run out.
Sun's enegy output is the only known renewable origin of energy in our solar system, because it doesn't matter if we use it or not, there won't be any more or any less of it left, no matter how much solar energy we collect. Also, any energy source that uses the Sun's energy and grows/accumulates back in human time-scales, is considered renewable, such as wind or naturally (without non-renewable fossil fuel based fertilizers) grown biomass. They "come back" quite fast, and if we use it at most at that rate, we will never run out.
There is no *real* renewable energy, laws of ethropy make that an impossible thing. A perpetual motion machine is impossible (as far as we know). That's why "renewable energy" means something else, basically an energy source that is not permanently depleted by us humans using it.
It's a bit of a definition issue really. For example there is some controversy wether peat should be considered renewable or non-renewable, as it takes hundreds or thousands of years for a peat swamp to accumulate. Still, if you count all the peat accumulated over a year, you can harvest an awful lot of it without taking more than is accumulated back.
So the teacher was right, but apparently she was unable to explain or understand the conecpt properly, which isn't very good either.
Handling a plain text file or a raw binary data file without internal structure 100% securely is perhaps practially possible (but certainly not automatic, all it takes is one tiny bug at one suble branch of code...). A binary executable is almost impossible to handle securely. Everything else falls somewhere in between.
Ah, sorry. My tinfoil cap was just too tight. No, please, there was nothing to see there, no sir!
See, that's just the problem with English language... Not enough swear words.
The $ amount is scary, but what is even more scary is the White House praising that a woman's life was destroyed, saying that this is how it was supposed to work, too. Mindboggling. Good thing I don't live there...
Now, excuse me while I go and see what I can do to support local "EFF" organization, so that kind of crap won't ever go through here.
(And before the 'mericans get too comfortable, remember that inquisition is part of their history as well...)
I was talking more about making fuel from cellulose. If I understand correctly, then it does not matter that much what plants you grow, or at least you have a lot wider selection of suitable plants. So you can have more biodiversity to optimally utilize all nutrients in the soil, and you can select plants that are not too fussy about soil quality.
Also, even with sugar cane and other sugar producing plants, if putting the biofuel extraction residue directly back to the fields does not work, then just pile it up and let it decompose for a few years. And *then*, when it's ready-made fertile new soil, then put it back (possibly adding suitable material like chalk to adjust pH). So you'd need enough space for a few years worth of decomposing residue piles, which I don't think would be a problem.
Have you considered, that the only elements that we want to extract from biofuel plants are carbon and hydrogen (and oxygen, if ethanol production doesn't use atmospheric O2, I'm not sure how it is). All these come from water and carbon dioxide, which plantes take from the atmosphere, not the soil material (water as rain to the soil first, of cousre.)
Now, if you harvest the plants, put the biomass through ethanol or biodiesel creation process, and return the residue to the soil, then nothing is removed from the soil, so you can keep the production up indefinitely without extra fertilizers (as long as sun is shining, (rain)water is available, and there's CO2 in the atmosphere).
Ideally, the biofuel creation process would add some atmospheric nitrogen to the residue, so the residue would work as a fertilizer directly. This is probably doable in a way that increases total production, even if the nitrogen adding step itself is endothermic.
Also, if some biodiversity increases the fuel-convertable biomass production, then certainly biodiversity will be allowed and optimized to get the maximum production.
In summary, you are wrong. Even if growing plants for food can deplete the soil (because material from the soil is eaten), growing biomass for biofuel does not, as long residue is returned to the fields.
What would you change to make it more efficient and visibly "non-humanoid"?
Sure, eg. flight as arisen independently a few times (insects, petrosaurs, birds, bats), and there are a few species which might yet develop flying (gliding squirrels, lizards and fishes). But you can see that they're all independent solutions, in my opinion quite varied considering the limits set by physical world (such as lift versus weight, oxygen supply versus energy production requirements, etc).
Same could be said about eyes, developed many times, superfically similar, but clearly not using the same pattern, only adapting to same limits and rules set by the physical world (for example, there must be some sort of a lens if you want a sharp image, there's no way around that). yet these can not be the only patterns that are capable of surviving and reproducing. Of course they're not the only patterns possible, but perhaps they are the best patterns. For example, you can only have N-symmetry, where N is a smallish integer. Clearly one or at most few of the possible values of N are best for a given environment and lifestyle, and will outcompete and make extinct other possibilities (or prevent them from developing in the first place).
But perhaps you have a concrete example of a pattern that has risen independetly several times, even though it is not forced to be so by the physical reality?
But if we end up with a "bipolar" cold war world, then you're right. Obiviously if one block starts to build an elevator, the other block has no option but to start building one as well, and certainly US will still exist and be in one of the blocks by the time we can practically build one. Of course there's no guarantee that the block with US would get their elevator finished first, but I don't think that really matters as long as both blocks would get their elevators working in the same decade or so. Considering the possible problems that won't be discovered until the elevator is finished, it might even be desirable to be the 2nd, a few years behind, so that there's still time to alter the design if some unforeseen problem is discovered by the 1st.
There just isn't that much binding energy in atomic nucleus, most of the energy is in the mass of neutrons and protons, not in their binding energy... By definition, fusion or fission can't convert more than this.
But perhaps quantum physics (or something) will give us a way to convert matter into energy in a more efficient way... Of course, at that point we'll probably generate a gamma ray burst or something, obliterate our entire solar system, and finally find out the answer to the Fermi paradox
First the pump lets 100 units of energy to flow from hot to cold reservoir, extracting and storing 2.99 units of energy, while actually transferring 96.9 units to cold reservoir.
Then it reverses, using 2.98 units of stored energy left to force that 96.9 units back from cold to hot reservoir.
Now, if you change that 2.99 units to 3.99 units, without chaning the other numbers accordingly, you end up with almost 1 unit of free energy. No can do.
If foreign news are being broadcast, then surely the broadcaster will make sure the proper DRM bits are set. If you mean the orignal broadcast in foreign country, you can't watch that in any case (different cable network/different satellite/too far for normal on-air broadcast). If it's illegal to broadcast some foreign news, then no DRM is needed for that either. And if you are thinking, that every video clip (home video or news capture or whatever) in the Internet would have to be approved and DRM'd somewhere internationally, before people could watch it on their PC's... doesn't that sound a bit absurd to you?
So yes, I think it would be hard to use DRM to block foreign news any more than they can be blocked without DRM. Feel free to enlighten me on how it could be done, though. The mere existence of this broadcast flag threatens your ability to record the present and document the past. It drives a nail through some of the more basic requirements for a democracy, which is the right and need to be and stay well informed. You know, democracy was developed in a time without any audio or video recording equipment... I'd be more concerned with self-disintegrating paper, introduced in the name of recycling, that would disintegrate in 20 years... Once somebody proposes that, then you know you should be scared (and I'm not saying this merely as a joke...).
Of course, once it's all DRM-protected, you won't be able to get rid of the advertisements. Why on Earth would I want to pay for content with intrusive advertising in it? There are multiple ways to get rid of the ads, starting from going to the fridge, ending in dropping the TV from a great height and watching the shards fly...
Only reason I'm watching TV at all these days, is that I can record the shows, and then watch at my convenience, while skipping the ads. I'm willing spend my money for fun, but I'm not willing to waste my time (ie watch ads, search the torrent channel for right episodes) for fun. My money, I can control that, but the damn clock just keeps ticking away, no matter what I do.
I pity those who feel they're "slaves" to the entertainment industry, those who will have to choose between DRM and legality and convenience. I can choose to turn of the TV, and just wait for the day when enough people realize they can do the same, if the entertainment industry tries to enslave us instead of serving us.
...and what DRM is for.Its sole purpose is to keep you from using the media you would otherwise have rightful access to in any way other than what the copyright holder explicitly wants.
In short, its sole purpose is, ultimately, to make you pay every time you make use of the media, and to control the flow of information. I personally look forward to the day, when I can get *any* movie or TV series episode for one-time (or one-day or whatever) viewing for a few euros, legally. I'm also looking forward for the day when I can get *any* piece of music playing once for a few cents, preferably with heuristic music selection service ("people who liked the songs you listen also liked these songs, add to your playlist?").
I don't need to *own* that music, or those TV shows, or those movies. I just want to have access to them, any time I want. And I don't mind paying more for items I want to hear/watch often. Actually, now that I think about it, quite the opposite: I'm more than happy to pay little for one viewing/listening, and more for those I like enough to listen/view many times.
If only somebody at entertainment industry had the vision *and* the power to make that happen, offer that feature integrated into a set-top box type device, he'd make trillions. DRM is not really an issue, ease of use is the issue. Of course that might be the beginning of the end for regular TV and radio programming, so there are powerful players who'll oppose this at all costs.
And I don't see the problem of information control. Quite the opposite, if you have the freedom to view any news broadcast from all over the world with a click (well, that's reality even now, I think), there's no control. If people want information, they'll get it easily (well, at least here in the free world). If they don't want it, no DRM is going to make them want it.
Since it's based on proportions of human body, I'd have to guess it's Imperial...
I believe the correct metric unit would be Mole, since different pressures make it difficult to use mass or volume units. Of course Mole is rather an inconvenient unit, which is probably why "crapload" is still in such a wide use even in "metric" countries.
Does anyone know the conversion formula between moles and craploads?