Uh, the median number of legs is two. Take a set that includes the number of legs each human has and sort it into ascending order. The value right in the middle will be 2.
But you are correct in your assertion that 99%+ of the population have more than the average number of legs. When you include amputees and other unfortunates the mean number of legs would be somewhere around 1.997, and when most people think of average they are really thinking of the mean.
Somehow I suspect Google, once they've got ahold of data, will NEVER lose it again. Pity those first year university students that will be faced with embarassing videos at their retirement parties.
Perhaps it is time to stop accelerating the battle for power and influence. I have seen that we in the western hemisphere are tending towards this, even though the pressures for corporate quarterly results and the crush to get into the top ivies suggest otherwise. The trouble is that the "up and comers" such as China and India are still playing for the crown we are thinking of abdicating.
It is difficult to determine a middle path between the intensifying global competition and the mature and sustainable economy we are trending towards. But I am certain that that middle path does not include raising a generation of marginally literate children at the expense of throwing the talented and intelligent few to the wolves.
Time will tell how this plays out. My guess would be some form of global meritocracy with a strong technocratic component.
At my age (I'm 44), I am one of the few people who experienced the public education system in Canada both before and after this type of policy (NCLB) took effect. I was always a high achiever, and despite getting a late start in kindergarten (I was almost 6), I quickly learned the work and accelerated several grades. I was still 6 in grade 3.
Sometime during grade 4, I noticed something going on with the curriculum. Rather than the steadily more challenging books I was expecting, reading began to be taught using a series of cards with the simplest of prose on them. Suddenly, the reading skills being taught to grade 4 students dropped to the "run Spot run" level. And stayed there.
By the time the new curriculum had become entrenched, I was in grade 6. My teacher in that grade was obligated to spend most of his time teaching the troublemakers in the class and really had very little time left over for anyone else, especially high achievers. Since this time, it has been declared that mentally retarded (sorry, NOT developmentally delayed, NOT differently intelligent, NOT developmentally challenged, mentally retarded) must be placed in regular classrooms also, along with autistic children and almost any other child not capable of learning at a normal pace. I can only imagine what effect this has had on actual learning in school.
I was very fortunate in that my parents, firmly in the middle class, were able to find a school with excellent academics that catered exclusively to gifted students and scrape together the tuition for it. Suddenly I was learning Latin, and Shakespeare, and actual geography and history. And this school was not afraid to kick me out for lack of academic performance.
It seems obvious to me that with a policy such as NCLB, schools will focus on getting the maximum number of students to a certain level of mediocrity. Under such a program, this is the maximum result (funding wise) for the minimum effort. And as this generation of children moves up in age, results of this policy will be easy to see. We can see them now in fact. Look at the comments on social networking sites et.al.: "like i dint no u r gonna b workig their omg that is sooooooo cool".
Just think: this is the next generation, the one that is going to have to meet the competitive challenge from India, China and others in the global battle for power and influence.
You have my word on this one - can't retract it now 'cause it's on SlashDot.
If this baby works like I think it will, then it's going on SourceForge along with all my development notes. I'm not so smug as to think that there aren't hundreds of better coders out there who can run this one places I could never take it.;)
Perhaps there will need to be more chaff. Only experimentation and time will tell that. But we are talking here about 5 megabit connections degraded to the point that they are running P2P at dial-up speeds. Seems to me that my HTML could be 95% chaff and still give a five fold improvement over what my clients have now.
Also, think of the escalation in terms of additional computing resources Bell would have to commit. With this, they not only would have to look at a few pieces of the packets to determine that it is a jpeg, they would also have to evaluate the contents of the jpeg using some type of algorithm. Order of magnitude more processor work at least. And think of the consequences if they false flag something. They would wind up degrading who knows who's connection. Think they would risk an automated system that could possibly kill someone's web application session because of a few snowy image files?
I agree that if this catches on there will be a bit of an arms race, but without any doubt (in my mind at least) they either lose the race or lose HTTP as a usable protocol on their service offerings.
<html> <head> <title>Ha ha Bell - your DPI is foobar</title> </head> <body> .... big binary blob.... </body> </html>
That's why I'm using jpegs. In fact these look like perfectly valid jpegs, right down to the beginning, end and size of the files. Only thing is the part in the middle is pure binary file transfer contents - the middle 99% or more. So - think they can decide what is a legitimate jpeg that's real vs. a legitimate jpeg which is just snow? Each page uses a variable number of jpegs of differing sizes adding to a bit over 2MB for the page. The file is transferred in 2MB chunks this way. I hesitate to use the term steganography for this because this technique falls far short of the state of the art methods used to conceal data within data. If you have a good idea of what I am doing with this then there are technical bits and pieces which should be easy enough for you to fill in (expect perhaps the C&C).
I know plenty about "deep packet inspection", and the client software will be using HTTP protocol - will be spoofing a web browser in fact. The data for the file transfers will be concealed in what appear to be perfectly valid graphics files.
If this anonymous reader would care to forward along an email address to me, then I can put him/her in touch with a large managed hosting service in B.C. that is growing nicely and usually hungry for good network people. Sending a message to me via SlashDot is fine, or to panaqqa [at] gmail [dot] com.
"So this network management is, as we've stated, one of the ways to address the issue of congestion during peak periods."
This is actually an issue for several of my clients who use P2P for backup purposes, etc. So I watch what is going on in terms of throttling. I can demonstrate that Bell Canada is throttling P2P at just about any time you care to mention, including 4 A.M. Sunday morning. Does Sunday morning sound like a peak period to you? Or does this smell like more B.S. (Bovine Scatology)?
Fortunately, this issue won't be affecting my clients for much longer at all. I have nearly completed a P2P application that does all its work over port 80, and as far as the ISP is concerned, the traffic will be indistinguishable from loading a series of web pages with large graphics.
Pardon me, but these days it's the US Dollar that is weak. The Canadian Dollar has gained in value more than 10% against the USD over the last year. Interestingly, for the first time in over 30 years I have run across more than a few Canadian businesses that will not accept US cash.
As far as your Monopoly money analogy goes, well, guess who has the bigger counterfeiting problem? Hint: it's not Canada.
I am guessing that both top and bottom might represent some form of barcode encoding. Not sure of the standard, UPC, Code 39, whatever, but that's where I'd start if I were doing a serious crack attempt.
I did not mean to suggest that a competent admin would ever lose legitimate email. The problem comes in many forms, but the biggest culprit is anti-spam filters. These days it seems that everybody and their cousin wants to spam filter your email. ISPs arbitrarily apply such filters to their users accounts, often without any notification. Hosting providers and domain registrars often do the same. System admins, under pressure from management, put in place imperfect solutions and compound the issue by misconfiguration. I employ some network admins myself to help clients with server problems. The number of times I have seen a program such as "Spam Assassin" set to an incredibly aggressive setting AND to delete flagged mail without it ever hitting an inbox is surprising. I have one client right now that has not been able to email their parent company for over 6 weeks. Their messages blackhole. And it is not as if the parent is unsophisticated: they are in the financial sector and employ 17,000 people. And of course nobody in their IT department will admit that any email is being blackholed.
I personally am one of those who would like to see a new email protocol built from scratch with the spam problem as foremost consideration in the design process. I have a dislike for anything in IT that only "works most of the time", and that's where email has been for quite a while now.
It used to really bug me, that someone was sending out spam and using my legitimate email address in the From, Return-path and Envelope-from headers. I began filtering out the "Spam received from YOU" type headers years ago. But what still bugs me about this is those people who set their systems up to add me to some domain based rather than IP address based block list based on these faked headers. For more than a year I have been unable to successfully send email to my insurance company due directly to this issue.
Then again, I have never regarded email as a reliable method of communication. Everything truly important goes with a read receipt request and if I don't receive one then I phone or send snail mail. I continue to be amazed by the number of screwups I continue to hear about where someone says "I never got [such and such] email."
Perhaps you might be more productive in your comments than slinging around ad hominem attacks on people. And perhaps before you definitively state that security and legal concerns trump my $0.00078 savings you had best have a CISSP and a law degree under your belt. Oh, and the savings are a bit more than $0.00078: if we assume we'll need to scale to 500,000 users (0.2% of the adult US population) with an average of 100 tracks each (many will have more) at an average 4MB, then suddenly we are at 200TB of storage. As you are likely aware, building and maintaining a 200TB storage facility is a bit more costly than.078 cents. I would estimate the cost at $175,000 - more than 20 cents per gig due to all the support hardware and software licensing for the SAN.
Now, perhaps "shared folder" was a poor term to use. Would you prefer "shared storage area network"? Either way you still have a large chunk of storage which multiple people are accessing for the purpose of uploading and downloading mp3 files. I guess one distinction I should have made is that while we know that users will only have restricted access to the files in their own account the record companies will do their best to obfuscate this issue and imply that that is not the case - that everyone can get to everything.
Personally, I would not shed a tear if the xxAA and record labels all went bankrupt tomorrow. This whole thing is not about getting the artists what they deserve, it's about squeezing every last dollar out of their precious "IP" and feathering their own beds. If this were not the case, they wouldn't be constantly seeking to have royalty rates for artists lowered, and they would have distributed some of the proceeds from their extortion^W lawsuits to the people they allege were harmed.
If I were coding this site, complete with online backup of purchased tunes, there's no way I'd actually keep 89,227 copies of Britney Spears' latest toxic waste on my servers at 4MB (give or take) per copy. No, I'd keep a DB table of links to one master copy of the file, possibly replicated across multiple servers depending on traffic levels. This would likely be the same file that would be downloaded in the event of a purchase. Call me an old fashioned developer but despite 20 cent per gig storage, I still refuse to waste it on unneeded duplication of files.
So, almost certainly their backup service is a massive shared folder that all their backup service users have access to. Large shared folder? Multi-user access? Starting to sound a bit more like the loathed P2P the record labels love to hate, isn't it?
Funny note: CAPTCHA word for this post was "AVARICE".
While putting together ecommerce sites where the client has opted to use PayPal for payments, I noticed something interesting. PayPal treats FireFox quite differently from Internet Explorer.
If you are using IE, then the first PayPal page you see on clicking through to PayPal is a login page with a link on the left hand side which allows you to pay without a PayPal account. Clicking that link then takes you through the process of getting your payment information. If you are using FireFox, then the first PayPal page you see has a form on the left hand portion of the page to take the payment information. They impose an additional step on Internet Explorer users in other words.
My suspicion is that when PayPal deals with browsers that are not "up to snuff", there will be differences in behaviour and additional back-end security measures that may not be used with "approved" secure browsers. But I doubt they will disallow any modern browser entirely.
Perhaps it can't be reduced to 19 moves. But then again, Kociemba's algorithm has not yet provided a proof that the diameter of the cube group is indeed 20 (in face counting). We won't have such a proof until an optimal solver is used, something that could take years of run time on current hardware. Application for a grid perhaps?
Okay, time for some math now. First off, let's calculate the number of possible positions (PP) of a Rubik's Cube. At first it would seem that the number could be determined as follows:
But the cube has a "parity" of 12, and any of the following result in an unsolvable cube: two edge pieces switched in position, one edge piece flipped, one corner piece twisted. This means that if a cube is taken apart and randomly reassembled, it has 11/12 = 91.667% chance of being reassembled into an unsolvable position. But I digress.
So, taking into account parity of 12, the number of possible positions is:
Next we need the number of reachable positions (RP) after n moves. There are 18 possible ways to turn a face on each move, but after the first move we will assume 17 since the 18th would be undoing the previous move. So after n moves, the number of reachable positions is given by:
RP = 18 * 17^(n-1)
So, after how many moves does the number of reachable positions (RP) exceed the number of possible positions (PP)? That will be the lowest integer value of n where:
Take that as showing that for n = 16, the number of possible move combinations exceeds the number of all possible cube positions. So God's algorithm might take as few as 16 moves. Personally, I think that the value is likely 2 or 3 moves higher than this bare minimum. So let's say 19 moves.
Not diminishing the significance of a 25 move algorithm, but the math suggests God's algorithm is 19 moves. Guess it will take a few years to muster the brute force computing power to demonstrate this.
...after all, who is to determine whether someone purposely accessed the wireless connection. I know I have been in neighbourhoods where there were many wireless connections, and while I thought I was connecting through my host's access point, it turned out to be someone else's.
So, who it going to determine whether the access was on purpose, or the more likely alternative, accidental?
...are more like that cable reality show, "The Biggest Loser"?
After all, the **AA put people through a gruelling ordeal where they can't afford to eat properly, and at the end of it, the ones that survive all have to tighten their belts.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, the median number of legs is two. Take a set that includes the number of legs each human has and sort it into ascending order. The value right in the middle will be 2.
But you are correct in your assertion that 99%+ of the population have more than the average number of legs. When you include amputees and other unfortunates the mean number of legs would be somewhere around 1.997, and when most people think of average they are really thinking of the mean.
Okay, (working from memory here)...
;)
3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510
58209 74944 59230 78164 06286 20899 86280 34825 34211 70679
Now, let's fix your PC... I'll start by installing Debian...
Somehow I suspect Google, once they've got ahold of data, will NEVER lose it again. Pity those first year university students that will be faced with embarassing videos at their retirement parties.
Perhaps it is time to stop accelerating the battle for power and influence. I have seen that we in the western hemisphere are tending towards this, even though the pressures for corporate quarterly results and the crush to get into the top ivies suggest otherwise. The trouble is that the "up and comers" such as China and India are still playing for the crown we are thinking of abdicating.
It is difficult to determine a middle path between the intensifying global competition and the mature and sustainable economy we are trending towards. But I am certain that that middle path does not include raising a generation of marginally literate children at the expense of throwing the talented and intelligent few to the wolves.
Time will tell how this plays out. My guess would be some form of global meritocracy with a strong technocratic component.
At my age (I'm 44), I am one of the few people who experienced the public education system in Canada both before and after this type of policy (NCLB) took effect. I was always a high achiever, and despite getting a late start in kindergarten (I was almost 6), I quickly learned the work and accelerated several grades. I was still 6 in grade 3.
Sometime during grade 4, I noticed something going on with the curriculum. Rather than the steadily more challenging books I was expecting, reading began to be taught using a series of cards with the simplest of prose on them. Suddenly, the reading skills being taught to grade 4 students dropped to the "run Spot run" level. And stayed there.
By the time the new curriculum had become entrenched, I was in grade 6. My teacher in that grade was obligated to spend most of his time teaching the troublemakers in the class and really had very little time left over for anyone else, especially high achievers. Since this time, it has been declared that mentally retarded (sorry, NOT developmentally delayed, NOT differently intelligent, NOT developmentally challenged, mentally retarded) must be placed in regular classrooms also, along with autistic children and almost any other child not capable of learning at a normal pace. I can only imagine what effect this has had on actual learning in school.
I was very fortunate in that my parents, firmly in the middle class, were able to find a school with excellent academics that catered exclusively to gifted students and scrape together the tuition for it. Suddenly I was learning Latin, and Shakespeare, and actual geography and history. And this school was not afraid to kick me out for lack of academic performance.
It seems obvious to me that with a policy such as NCLB, schools will focus on getting the maximum number of students to a certain level of mediocrity. Under such a program, this is the maximum result (funding wise) for the minimum effort. And as this generation of children moves up in age, results of this policy will be easy to see. We can see them now in fact. Look at the comments on social networking sites et.al.: "like i dint no u r gonna b workig their omg that is sooooooo cool".
Just think: this is the next generation, the one that is going to have to meet the competitive challenge from India, China and others in the global battle for power and influence.
Looks like we've had our day in the sun.
You have my word on this one - can't retract it now 'cause it's on SlashDot.
;)
If this baby works like I think it will, then it's going on SourceForge along with all my development notes. I'm not so smug as to think that there aren't hundreds of better coders out there who can run this one places I could never take it.
Perhaps there will need to be more chaff. Only experimentation and time will tell that. But we are talking here about 5 megabit connections degraded to the point that they are running P2P at dial-up speeds. Seems to me that my HTML could be 95% chaff and still give a five fold improvement over what my clients have now.
Also, think of the escalation in terms of additional computing resources Bell would have to commit. With this, they not only would have to look at a few pieces of the packets to determine that it is a jpeg, they would also have to evaluate the contents of the jpeg using some type of algorithm. Order of magnitude more processor work at least. And think of the consequences if they false flag something. They would wind up degrading who knows who's connection. Think they would risk an automated system that could possibly kill someone's web application session because of a few snowy image files?
I agree that if this catches on there will be a bit of an arms race, but without any doubt (in my mind at least) they either lose the race or lose HTTP as a usable protocol on their service offerings.
As I said, I DARE them to throttle HTTP.
I know plenty about "deep packet inspection", and the client software will be using HTTP protocol - will be spoofing a web browser in fact. The data for the file transfers will be concealed in what appear to be perfectly valid graphics files.
If this anonymous reader would care to forward along an email address to me, then I can put him/her in touch with a large managed hosting service in B.C. that is growing nicely and usually hungry for good network people. Sending a message to me via SlashDot is fine, or to panaqqa [at] gmail [dot] com.
This is actually an issue for several of my clients who use P2P for backup purposes, etc. So I watch what is going on in terms of throttling. I can demonstrate that Bell Canada is throttling P2P at just about any time you care to mention, including 4 A.M. Sunday morning. Does Sunday morning sound like a peak period to you? Or does this smell like more B.S. (Bovine Scatology)?
Fortunately, this issue won't be affecting my clients for much longer at all. I have nearly completed a P2P application that does all its work over port 80, and as far as the ISP is concerned, the traffic will be indistinguishable from loading a series of web pages with large graphics.
I dare them to throttle HTTP.
Pardon me, but these days it's the US Dollar that is weak. The Canadian Dollar has gained in value more than 10% against the USD over the last year. Interestingly, for the first time in over 30 years I have run across more than a few Canadian businesses that will not accept US cash.
As far as your Monopoly money analogy goes, well, guess who has the bigger counterfeiting problem? Hint: it's not Canada.
I am guessing that both top and bottom might represent some form of barcode encoding. Not sure of the standard, UPC, Code 39, whatever, but that's where I'd start if I were doing a serious crack attempt.
I did not mean to suggest that a competent admin would ever lose legitimate email. The problem comes in many forms, but the biggest culprit is anti-spam filters. These days it seems that everybody and their cousin wants to spam filter your email. ISPs arbitrarily apply such filters to their users accounts, often without any notification. Hosting providers and domain registrars often do the same. System admins, under pressure from management, put in place imperfect solutions and compound the issue by misconfiguration. I employ some network admins myself to help clients with server problems. The number of times I have seen a program such as "Spam Assassin" set to an incredibly aggressive setting AND to delete flagged mail without it ever hitting an inbox is surprising. I have one client right now that has not been able to email their parent company for over 6 weeks. Their messages blackhole. And it is not as if the parent is unsophisticated: they are in the financial sector and employ 17,000 people. And of course nobody in their IT department will admit that any email is being blackholed.
I personally am one of those who would like to see a new email protocol built from scratch with the spam problem as foremost consideration in the design process. I have a dislike for anything in IT that only "works most of the time", and that's where email has been for quite a while now.
My 2 cents. Another 2 cents that is.
It used to really bug me, that someone was sending out spam and using my legitimate email address in the From, Return-path and Envelope-from headers. I began filtering out the "Spam received from YOU" type headers years ago. But what still bugs me about this is those people who set their systems up to add me to some domain based rather than IP address based block list based on these faked headers. For more than a year I have been unable to successfully send email to my insurance company due directly to this issue.
Then again, I have never regarded email as a reliable method of communication. Everything truly important goes with a read receipt request and if I don't receive one then I phone or send snail mail. I continue to be amazed by the number of screwups I continue to hear about where someone says "I never got [such and such] email."
Perhaps you might be more productive in your comments than slinging around ad hominem attacks on people. And perhaps before you definitively state that security and legal concerns trump my $0.00078 savings you had best have a CISSP and a law degree under your belt. Oh, and the savings are a bit more than $0.00078: if we assume we'll need to scale to 500,000 users (0.2% of the adult US population) with an average of 100 tracks each (many will have more) at an average 4MB, then suddenly we are at 200TB of storage. As you are likely aware, building and maintaining a 200TB storage facility is a bit more costly than .078 cents. I would estimate the cost at $175,000 - more than 20 cents per gig due to all the support hardware and software licensing for the SAN.
Now, perhaps "shared folder" was a poor term to use. Would you prefer "shared storage area network"? Either way you still have a large chunk of storage which multiple people are accessing for the purpose of uploading and downloading mp3 files. I guess one distinction I should have made is that while we know that users will only have restricted access to the files in their own account the record companies will do their best to obfuscate this issue and imply that that is not the case - that everyone can get to everything.
Personally, I would not shed a tear if the xxAA and record labels all went bankrupt tomorrow. This whole thing is not about getting the artists what they deserve, it's about squeezing every last dollar out of their precious "IP" and feathering their own beds. If this were not the case, they wouldn't be constantly seeking to have royalty rates for artists lowered, and they would have distributed some of the proceeds from their extortion^W lawsuits to the people they allege were harmed.
If I were coding this site, complete with online backup of purchased tunes, there's no way I'd actually keep 89,227 copies of Britney Spears' latest toxic waste on my servers at 4MB (give or take) per copy. No, I'd keep a DB table of links to one master copy of the file, possibly replicated across multiple servers depending on traffic levels. This would likely be the same file that would be downloaded in the event of a purchase. Call me an old fashioned developer but despite 20 cent per gig storage, I still refuse to waste it on unneeded duplication of files.
So, almost certainly their backup service is a massive shared folder that all their backup service users have access to. Large shared folder? Multi-user access? Starting to sound a bit more like the loathed P2P the record labels love to hate, isn't it?
Funny note: CAPTCHA word for this post was "AVARICE".
While putting together ecommerce sites where the client has opted to use PayPal for payments, I noticed something interesting. PayPal treats FireFox quite differently from Internet Explorer.
If you are using IE, then the first PayPal page you see on clicking through to PayPal is a login page with a link on the left hand side which allows you to pay without a PayPal account. Clicking that link then takes you through the process of getting your payment information. If you are using FireFox, then the first PayPal page you see has a form on the left hand portion of the page to take the payment information. They impose an additional step on Internet Explorer users in other words.
My suspicion is that when PayPal deals with browsers that are not "up to snuff", there will be differences in behaviour and additional back-end security measures that may not be used with "approved" secure browsers. But I doubt they will disallow any modern browser entirely.
Perhaps it can't be reduced to 19 moves. But then again, Kociemba's algorithm has not yet provided a proof that the diameter of the cube group is indeed 20 (in face counting). We won't have such a proof until an optimal solver is used, something that could take years of run time on current hardware. Application for a grid perhaps?
Okay, time for some math now. First off, let's calculate the number of possible positions ( PP ) of a Rubik's Cube. At first it would seem that the number could be determined as follows:
PP = 12! * 2^12 * 8! * 3^8 = 519,024,039,293,878,272,000 = 5.19 * 10^20
But the cube has a "parity" of 12, and any of the following result in an unsolvable cube: two edge pieces switched in position, one edge piece flipped, one corner piece twisted. This means that if a cube is taken apart and randomly reassembled, it has 11/12 = 91.667% chance of being reassembled into an unsolvable position. But I digress.
So, taking into account parity of 12, the number of possible positions is:
PP = ( 12! / 2 ) * ( 2^12 / 2 ) * 8! * ( 3^8 / 3 ) = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 = 4.33 * 10^19
Next we need the number of reachable positions ( RP ) after n moves. There are 18 possible ways to turn a face on each move, but after the first move we will assume 17 since the 18th would be undoing the previous move. So after n moves, the number of reachable positions is given by:
RP = 18 * 17^( n -1)
So, after how many moves does the number of reachable positions ( RP ) exceed the number of possible positions ( PP )? That will be the lowest integer value of n where:
18 * 17^( n -1) > 4.33 * 10^19
Logarithms to the rescue:
log 18 + ( n -1) * log 17 > log (4.33 * 10^19)
1.2553 + 1.2304 * ( n -1) > 19.636
1.2304 * n > 19.611
n > 15.939
Take that as showing that for n = 16, the number of possible move combinations exceeds the number of all possible cube positions. So God's algorithm might take as few as 16 moves. Personally, I think that the value is likely 2 or 3 moves higher than this bare minimum. So let's say 19 moves.
Not diminishing the significance of a 25 move algorithm, but the math suggests God's algorithm is 19 moves. Guess it will take a few years to muster the brute force computing power to demonstrate this.
I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".
...after all, who is to determine whether someone purposely accessed the wireless connection. I know I have been in neighbourhoods where there were many wireless connections, and while I thought I was connecting through my host's access point, it turned out to be someone else's.
So, who it going to determine whether the access was on purpose, or the more likely alternative, accidental?
...are more like that cable reality show, "The Biggest Loser"? After all, the **AA put people through a gruelling ordeal where they can't afford to eat properly, and at the end of it, the ones that survive all have to tighten their belts.
I'll second that. Groovy rocks!
Your sig is missing any utilization of what I will call writing's fifth symbol.