Manure isn't a pesticide. And you don't slather it all over the plants anyway*
*Mushrooms, excluded. Technically you don't slather them with manure, but think about it: if the whole mushroom is feeding on the manure, then it must be sucking up some by capillary action to the upper parts. It doesn't matter how much you rinse the outside.
And it's not really poop anyway. At least, not the way we understand it. It's herbivore elimination, so it's mostly just partially digested grasses. If they were efficient about extracting nutrients (or, like us, had chosen a higher energy food source), they wouldn't need to be so big.
No, hydrogen is worse. Like helium, if you release it, it's gone. You have to pray that it combines with something before it reaches the thermosphere, because after that it's solar wind city.
And, if that's not bad, when fossil sources run out, you have to crack it from the very compound you need the most.
Lithium is just an "ease of extracting" problem. It's the most common element in the earth's crust, so it's not that you can't find it literally everywhere, it's just that some of it is bound up in compounds that would be expensive to break apart.
For one thing, that only works if most of the movies are DVD-5 and not DVD-9, which simply isn't true. So you'd have to transcode them down to get 200 DVD movies out of that.
For the next, DVD is dead. Blu-Ray is the new format. You can only save 20 of those on your vaunted 1TB drive.
For the next, You can download movies from netflix "instantly". They don't have the whole catalog yet, but the ones you can download, you can download as often as you want.
Plug that into your model. And the fact that you can't just save "the good ones" because the good ones might not be the ones you want to repeat-watch.
I don't think there's any benefit. But if there is, it's so miniscule that even a tiny chance of getting caught bumps it over into the too costly range.
The only people "backing up" from netflix are pack rats who haven't done the math yet.
Uh why not just make it "Y years from first publication" regardless of when the author dies?
And frankly, I think depending on the work, the term should be from 3 years (graphics hardware and printer drivers) to, say, seven, with no more than three renews, which require payment. But we can argue about the numbers.
Actually, I wouldn't mind if the term was indefinite, as long as you had to declare a value that you a) pay copyright taxes on and b) must sell for if offered by an organization that buys IP into the public domain. I don't like the idea of all the government revenue, but I do like the idea of not over-valuing IP. Also, there ought to be a grace period depending on industry for determining value.
Hmm.. On second thought.. I think I know what how to handle the revenue. The copyright tax should be somewhat different from a regular tax, in that it never hits the general fund. The copyright office itself should be an organization charged with buying works into the public domain, and they should spend 100% of the "copyright tax" money on that every year. It will be easy to figure out, since they would have a database of the buy-prices for everything.
The tax would begin after the Nth year (where N is some number that we will certainly argue about), and the office could take it's administrative costs out of the initial fees for the first issuance.
If you really did have an unlimited blockbuster or netflix account, you'd have long since realized that even at $1 apiece, it's just not worth it to "back up" your rentals.
$17 per month, (which fluctuates, but the deal keeps getting better so far), you can watch 3 films at a time, and reasonably expect to get 3 per week. If you're super diligent, you could watch more, but let's just go with about 14 films per month for the sake of argument.
Are you really going to watch all 14 multiple times?
Further, keep in mind that your media costs would be almost as much as your monthly netflix cost. Every month of "backups" could be spent instead on nearly an additional month of netflix service. And it would be more than an month when you factor in opportunity cost over the long-term.
An additional month where you could re-watch any of the films you've already watched, or any of the films offered that you haven't yet watched. Or the same films, but in a more advanced format than you had the first time around.
Lemme get this straight, your three-pronged plan for preventing domestic unrest has, as two of the three prongs, policies that affect only foreigners?
As for C, the question is who's being greedy. Is it the people gaining wealth through enterprise, the people who simply have wealth, or the people taking the wealth from the other two?
Really, I don't get it. You say that torturing is wrong, and yet we have as a policy set forth by the commander in chief of not torturing for any reason. Then you bring up arguments about the fourth and fifth amendments (I assume you mean fifth and eighth though, as pertains to your principle objection) despite none of the ten amendments in the bill of rights really pertaining to the disposition of enemy spies and saboteurs during an armed conflict, and the other presumption that torture was as punishment and not as intelligence gathering effort.
Wow, so it's actually a possibility then. I hadn't realized we were that close. Or the human energy use thing: at only 5x the power usage of the entire human race, that means that the total yearly energy is actually quite a bit less than the total human energy usage.
"we" definitely know how to build 10 MT bombs in volume. The only question is how many you'd need to effect a positive outcome for a given storm.
Yeah, but those "other values" were intellectual property. Stories, "holonovellas," part designs, scholarly articles about history. Authors, engineers, researchers, etc. were held in high honor, and the DRM was atrocious. Just look at all the difficulty the voyager crew had because they couldn't copy the doctor program. They couldn't even make a tape backup, and when the program became corrupted due to excessive seg faults, they had to mangle the only backup they did have.. they could only use it once.
Uh.. That's not proportional voting at all. In fact, that's atrocious compared to what we have in the US. In the system you've described, it's still a plurality, and the executive is guaranteed to be the same party as the majority.
That lack of gridlock is a problem. Legislating should not be efficient or it'll be even more susceptible to the trap of "we have to do something, this is something, therefore we should do this" ballooning the budget by 80% and establishing new obligations that will not be as easily shed as they were passed.
Because we like to maintain our illusion that we vote for the person, not for the party.
Americans believe that the parties are corrupt, but individuals might not be, so we delude ourselves into thinking we're "voting for the [wo/]man not the party." Proportional vote wrecks this because either the party or some other entity gets to choose how to allocate the seats it gets, so it won't get much support for the time being.
The problem is that we also believe that although both parties are pretty evil the other party is a lot more evil and also eats puppies! So "sometimes" it's necessary to "vote against" them by voting for "our" party that's slightly less evil (they only eat kittens, after all).
Charge a fee. It doesn't have to be money. It could be cycles.
Have the client hash the message append some random characters to the end of the message. Have it change vary the characters until the hash matches some pre-defined pattern before sending. Cheap to verify on the incoming machine (just one hash), arbitrarily expensive on the sending machine. Your requirement can be for a certain number of characters or a specific sequence of bits, all the way up to the bitlength of the hash.
It doesn't answer the question of "is the sender a human" but it does answer the question of "how much is this message worth to the sender." The beauty of it is that that is sufficient.
If the spammer is using a dedicated server, you can limit the amount of spam they can send arbitrarily. Imagine how profitable a spam server would be if it cost $3k to send 86,400 messages per day? If the spammer is using a botnet, that scales a little better for them, but since it chews up cycles, it's going to make their operation noticeable to users.
There are probably better ways even than that, and someone will eventually find one that is more deterministic (it's unlikely, but there's a chance that someone could just be unlucky enough to never be able to chance on the right sequence using a psuedorandom perturbation approach)
I didn't think of this though, so there might be some patents. Google for message digest spam control or something like that to see some papers.
Frankly, I'd much rather have inertial dampers than inertial dampeners. One keeps your body from turning to goo at high acceleration and one makes you moist, presumably with some relationship to your momentum.
With set-top PCs and lots of bandwidth, the distribution and billing problem is solved. We don't need advertising supported television any more.
Let's be generous while discussing:
on iTunes, you can get an episode of Scrubs for $3. That's less than 22 minutes of show; You'd watch 8 minutes of ads for three dollars worth of entertainment, so in essence they're paying you $21.82 / hour to watch ads.
But it gets worse.
Suppose you buy in bulk, and you get longer shows?
A season pass for LOST on iTunes is $50, for 22 ~43 minute episodes, so they're only paying you $8/hour to watch the ads, and that's assuming that those prices are reasonable and not, you know, early adopter premium prices. If everybody bought every episode a la carte, I think things might be very different.
That surely only matters if you're too retarded to enlarge your font size (which you can do even on windoze nowadays, though by default windoze does some dumb shit compared to linux/x11 or macosx, you have to reconfigure it).
I can't figure out how to make the menu fonts any bigger without breaking everything else.
For instance, if you use AppleDisplayScaleFactor, raster images get uglified and the mouse pointer breaks. Back in windows (XP), the I could just go through the display settings and "use large fonts" (and extra large, I think. In factors of roughly root 2) and all it would break annoyingly frequently, but still only occasionally, was the odd modal dialog's text flow in a usually still usable way.
"Is it human" is a hard question, and sometimes even ambiguous.
A better question is, "How much is it [my site] worth to them [the user]?"
And that can be answered with either actual payment, or payment in time using message digest techniques:
Just have the client add random garbage to their submission until the md5 or sha or whatever is popular hash has a certain number of zeros, consecutive zeros, or an arbitrary string. Choose the number of bits you require so it takes non-trivial time to find. Obviously, you'll need more bits over the years due to moore's law. People with 10yr old machines will just have to put up with the extra wait or sign up for accounts or something.
Only botnets have any kind of resistance to this, and even they would be slowed down a *lot*. And if they used enough resources to get noticed by the owners, they'd be slowed down even more.
Is there a patent somewhere or something preventing this from popping up everywhere?
In the absence of sufficient information, the price can be used as a metric for guessing quality. It better the hell not be your only metric, but the statement that "things that are free" are of lower quality than "things that require stuff in exchange" is not false or even often false.
The count of "things that are free" that are also better quality than "things that have price" is quite small. Software is one of the few areas where they exist at all, but let's be honest: the vast majority of software being offered "at no cost" is worthless crap or demos of worthless crap with a price.
It's probably for dividing up plots and things. It's nice to be able to evenly divide things into other things. Without the "funny measurements" you end up with lots of fractions, which were much less easy to deal with in the days when a calculator was a person, and most normal people were lucky if they could read.
Note also that an acre is 10 square chains, and 10 acres is a square furlong.
What is a mile? It's a least-common-multiple(ish) of several smaller measurements which happens to be a convenient size for people traveling on foot. The km is also a convenient size for foot travel, but you can only divide it by 2s and 5s without resorting to fractions.
Slashdot Mirror
Manure isn't a pesticide. And you don't slather it all over the plants anyway*
*Mushrooms, excluded. Technically you don't slather them with manure, but think about it: if the whole mushroom is feeding on the manure, then it must be sucking up some by capillary action to the upper parts. It doesn't matter how much you rinse the outside.
And it's not really poop anyway. At least, not the way we understand it. It's herbivore elimination, so it's mostly just partially digested grasses. If they were efficient about extracting nutrients (or, like us, had chosen a higher energy food source), they wouldn't need to be so big.
You can fill them in, but you'll have to print them. You can't use it to submit forms.
No, hydrogen is worse. Like helium, if you release it, it's gone. You have to pray that it combines with something before it reaches the thermosphere, because after that it's solar wind city.
And, if that's not bad, when fossil sources run out, you have to crack it from the very compound you need the most.
Lithium is just an "ease of extracting" problem. It's the most common element in the earth's crust, so it's not that you can't find it literally everywhere, it's just that some of it is bound up in compounds that would be expensive to break apart.
For one thing, that only works if most of the movies are DVD-5 and not DVD-9, which simply isn't true. So you'd have to transcode them down to get 200 DVD movies out of that.
For the next, DVD is dead. Blu-Ray is the new format. You can only save 20 of those on your vaunted 1TB drive.
For the next, You can download movies from netflix "instantly". They don't have the whole catalog yet, but the ones you can download, you can download as often as you want.
Plug that into your model. And the fact that you can't just save "the good ones" because the good ones might not be the ones you want to repeat-watch.
I don't think there's any benefit. But if there is, it's so miniscule that even a tiny chance of getting caught bumps it over into the too costly range.
The only people "backing up" from netflix are pack rats who haven't done the math yet.
Uh why not just make it "Y years from first publication" regardless of when the author dies?
And frankly, I think depending on the work, the term should be from 3 years (graphics hardware and printer drivers) to, say, seven, with no more than three renews, which require payment. But we can argue about the numbers.
Actually, I wouldn't mind if the term was indefinite, as long as you had to declare a value that you a) pay copyright taxes on and b) must sell for if offered by an organization that buys IP into the public domain. I don't like the idea of all the government revenue, but I do like the idea of not over-valuing IP. Also, there ought to be a grace period depending on industry for determining value.
Hmm.. On second thought.. I think I know what how to handle the revenue. The copyright tax should be somewhat different from a regular tax, in that it never hits the general fund. The copyright office itself should be an organization charged with buying works into the public domain, and they should spend 100% of the "copyright tax" money on that every year. It will be easy to figure out, since they would have a database of the buy-prices for everything.
The tax would begin after the Nth year (where N is some number that we will certainly argue about), and the office could take it's administrative costs out of the initial fees for the first issuance.
Wait.. Paper-pushers amount to 22% of the economy? (23, when you add in tax preparers...)
In the words of Jamie Hyneman, "Well, There's your problem."
If you really did have an unlimited blockbuster or netflix account, you'd have long since realized that even at $1 apiece, it's just not worth it to "back up" your rentals.
$17 per month, (which fluctuates, but the deal keeps getting better so far), you can watch 3 films at a time, and reasonably expect to get 3 per week. If you're super diligent, you could watch more, but let's just go with about 14 films per month for the sake of argument.
Are you really going to watch all 14 multiple times?
Further, keep in mind that your media costs would be almost as much as your monthly netflix cost. Every month of "backups" could be spent instead on nearly an additional month of netflix service. And it would be more than an month when you factor in opportunity cost over the long-term.
An additional month where you could re-watch any of the films you've already watched, or any of the films offered that you haven't yet watched. Or the same films, but in a more advanced format than you had the first time around.
Lemme get this straight, your three-pronged plan for preventing domestic unrest has, as two of the three prongs, policies that affect only foreigners?
As for C, the question is who's being greedy. Is it the people gaining wealth through enterprise, the people who simply have wealth, or the people taking the wealth from the other two?
Really, I don't get it. You say that torturing is wrong, and yet we have as a policy set forth by the commander in chief of not torturing for any reason. Then you bring up arguments about the fourth and fifth amendments (I assume you mean fifth and eighth though, as pertains to your principle objection) despite none of the ten amendments in the bill of rights really pertaining to the disposition of enemy spies and saboteurs during an armed conflict, and the other presumption that torture was as punishment and not as intelligence gathering effort.
So, you're going to cripple a 35 kW heat engine to make a 4 W heat engine more efficient?
Katrina was a cat 3 storm by the time it reached New Orleans. How small do you want it?
Wow, so it's actually a possibility then. I hadn't realized we were that close. Or the human energy use thing: at only 5x the power usage of the entire human race, that means that the total yearly energy is actually quite a bit less than the total human energy usage.
"we" definitely know how to build 10 MT bombs in volume. The only question is how many you'd need to effect a positive outcome for a given storm.
Yeah, but those "other values" were intellectual property. Stories, "holonovellas," part designs, scholarly articles about history. Authors, engineers, researchers, etc. were held in high honor, and the DRM was atrocious. Just look at all the difficulty the voyager crew had because they couldn't copy the doctor program. They couldn't even make a tape backup, and when the program became corrupted due to excessive seg faults, they had to mangle the only backup they did have.. they could only use it once .
Uh.. That's not proportional voting at all. In fact, that's atrocious compared to what we have in the US. In the system you've described, it's still a plurality, and the executive is guaranteed to be the same party as the majority.
That lack of gridlock is a problem. Legislating should not be efficient or it'll be even more susceptible to the trap of "we have to do something, this is something, therefore we should do this" ballooning the budget by 80% and establishing new obligations that will not be as easily shed as they were passed.
No, it's easy. Just open up picasa, click the "show only movies" button, select everything and use the built-in tools to upload to the...
Copyright(c) 2003-2008 Google, Inc.
Well, crap.
Because we like to maintain our illusion that we vote for the person, not for the party.
Americans believe that the parties are corrupt, but individuals might not be, so we delude ourselves into thinking we're "voting for the [wo/]man not the party." Proportional vote wrecks this because either the party or some other entity gets to choose how to allocate the seats it gets, so it won't get much support for the time being.
The problem is that we also believe that although both parties are pretty evil the other party is a lot more evil and also eats puppies! So "sometimes" it's necessary to "vote against" them by voting for "our" party that's slightly less evil (they only eat kittens, after all).
Charge a fee. It doesn't have to be money. It could be cycles.
Have the client hash the message append some random characters to the end of the message. Have it change vary the characters until the hash matches some pre-defined pattern before sending. Cheap to verify on the incoming machine (just one hash), arbitrarily expensive on the sending machine. Your requirement can be for a certain number of characters or a specific sequence of bits, all the way up to the bitlength of the hash.
It doesn't answer the question of "is the sender a human" but it does answer the question of "how much is this message worth to the sender." The beauty of it is that that is sufficient.
If the spammer is using a dedicated server, you can limit the amount of spam they can send arbitrarily. Imagine how profitable a spam server would be if it cost $3k to send 86,400 messages per day? If the spammer is using a botnet, that scales a little better for them, but since it chews up cycles, it's going to make their operation noticeable to users.
There are probably better ways even than that, and someone will eventually find one that is more deterministic (it's unlikely, but there's a chance that someone could just be unlucky enough to never be able to chance on the right sequence using a psuedorandom perturbation approach)
I didn't think of this though, so there might be some patents. Google for message digest spam control or something like that to see some papers.
What about the inertial dampeners, bitches?
Frankly, I'd much rather have inertial dampers than inertial dampeners. One keeps your body from turning to goo at high acceleration and one makes you moist, presumably with some relationship to your momentum.
With set-top PCs and lots of bandwidth, the distribution and billing problem is solved. We don't need advertising supported television any more.
Let's be generous while discussing:
on iTunes, you can get an episode of Scrubs for $3. That's less than 22 minutes of show; You'd watch 8 minutes of ads for three dollars worth of entertainment, so in essence they're paying you $21.82 / hour to watch ads.
But it gets worse.
Suppose you buy in bulk, and you get longer shows?
A season pass for LOST on iTunes is $50, for 22 ~43 minute episodes, so they're only paying you $8/hour to watch the ads, and that's assuming that those prices are reasonable and not, you know, early adopter premium prices. If everybody bought every episode a la carte, I think things might be very different.
Rather, ambiguity:
Has Honda developed an interface by which brains can control robots, or the other way around?
That surely only matters if you're too retarded to enlarge your font size (which you can do even on windoze nowadays, though by default windoze does some dumb shit compared to linux/x11 or macosx, you have to reconfigure it).
I can't figure out how to make the menu fonts any bigger without breaking everything else.
For instance, if you use AppleDisplayScaleFactor, raster images get uglified and the mouse pointer breaks. Back in windows (XP), the I could just go through the display settings and "use large fonts" (and extra large, I think. In factors of roughly root 2) and all it would break annoyingly frequently, but still only occasionally, was the odd modal dialog's text flow in a usually still usable way.
No, it's ok as long as you fill up the gpu with processing chores so there isn't much left for painting pixels.
They don't answer the question you want answered.
"Is it human" is a hard question, and sometimes even ambiguous.
A better question is, "How much is it [my site] worth to them [the user]?"
And that can be answered with either actual payment, or payment in time using message digest techniques:
Just have the client add random garbage to their submission until the md5 or sha or whatever is popular hash has a certain number of zeros, consecutive zeros, or an arbitrary string. Choose the number of bits you require so it takes non-trivial time to find. Obviously, you'll need more bits over the years due to moore's law. People with 10yr old machines will just have to put up with the extra wait or sign up for accounts or something.
Only botnets have any kind of resistance to this, and even they would be slowed down a *lot*. And if they used enough resources to get noticed by the owners, they'd be slowed down even more.
Is there a patent somewhere or something preventing this from popping up everywhere?
In the absence of sufficient information, the price can be used as a metric for guessing quality. It better the hell not be your only metric, but the statement that "things that are free" are of lower quality than "things that require stuff in exchange" is not false or even often false.
The count of "things that are free" that are also better quality than "things that have price" is quite small. Software is one of the few areas where they exist at all, but let's be honest: the vast majority of software being offered "at no cost" is worthless crap or demos of worthless crap with a price.
Damn dude.
They used weight to describe a force, which puts them lightyears worth of miles ahead of every other tech-writer that makes it into the popular press.
It's probably for dividing up plots and things. It's nice to be able to evenly divide things into other things. Without the "funny measurements" you end up with lots of fractions, which were much less easy to deal with in the days when a calculator was a person, and most normal people were lucky if they could read.
Note also that an acre is 10 square chains, and 10 acres is a square furlong.
What is a mile? It's a least-common-multiple(ish) of several smaller measurements which happens to be a convenient size for people traveling on foot. The km is also a convenient size for foot travel, but you can only divide it by 2s and 5s without resorting to fractions.