[CrackMonkey] Open Source Delusions Project

[Seth David Schoen]

Don Marti writes:

> So, how do we get the schizophrenics to start having delusions
> about FREE software, dammit?
> 
> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/technology/archive/2000/11/07/overload.dtl&type=printable

	But this hail isn't ice, it's words -- millions of words,
	thousands of bits of information the average person is
	confronted with each day.

Wait: millions of words, thousands of bits?

It's hard to imagine that the average word we see has an information
content on the order of 1/1000 bit, or even less than 1 bit.

This is conceivably true of advertising, but most communications have
a much higher information content.

If all the verbal communication that you took in in an entire day had
only a thousand bits of information, the probability of that
particular set of verbal information (as opposed to any other) would
be fully

.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
00000000000000000000000000000093326

That is nearly one in ten googol googol googol, an inconceivably high
probability!

To put it another way, if the story is right, then you have an average
verbal bandwidth (receive-only) of on the order of .002 bytes/second
while you are awake.  Doesn't that sound a little low?

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5