litchralee

The simple answer is probably no, because even where those experts aren't driven solely by the pursuit of money -- as in, they might actually want to improve the state of the art, protect people from harm, prevent the encroachment of the surveillance state, etc... -- they are still only human. And that means they have only so much time on this blue earth. If they spend their time answering simple questions that could have been found on the first page of a web search, that's taking time away from other pursuits in the field.

Necessarily then, don't be surprised if some experts ask for a minimum consultation fee, as a way to weed out the trivial stuff. If nothing else, if their labor is to have any meaning at all when they do their work professionally, they must value it consistently as a non-zero quantity. Do not demand that people value their labor at zero.

With that out of the way, if you do have a question that can't be answered by searching existing literature or the web, then the next best is to ask in an informal forum, like here on Lemmy. Worst case is that no one else knows. But best case is that someone works in the field and is bored on their lunch break, so they'll help point you in the right direction. They may even connect you to a recognized expert, if the question is interesting enough.

Above all, what you absolutely must not do is something like emailing a public mailing list for cryptography experts, gathered to examine the requirements of internet security, to look at your handmade data encryption scheme, which is so faulty that it causes third-party embarrassment when read a decade later.

You were in fact lucky that they paid any attention at all to your proposal, and they've already given you many hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of free consultancy between them

Don't be the person that causes someone to be have to write this.

There are separate criminal and civil offenses when it comes to copyright infringement, assuming USA. Very generally, under criminal law, it is an offense to distribute copyrighted material without the right or license to do so. Note the word "distribute", meaning that the crime relates to the act of copying and sharing the work, and usually does not include the receiving of such a work.

That is to say, it's generally understood that mere possession of a copyrighted work is not sufficient to prove that it was in your possession for the purpose of later distribution. A criminal prosecution would have to show that you did, in fact, infringe the copyright by distributing a copy to someone or somewhere else.

Separately, civil penalties can be sought by the copyright owner, against someone found either distributing their work, or possessing the work without a license. In this case, the copyright owner has to do the legwork to identify offenders, and then would file a civil lawsuit against them. The government is uninvolved with this, except to the extent that the court is a branch of the federal government. The penalty would be money damage, and while a judgement could be quite large -- due to the insanity of minimum damages, courtesy of the DMCA -- there is no prospect of jail time here.

So as an example, buying a bootleg DVD for $2 and keeping it in your house would not accrue criminal liability, although if police were searching your house -- which they can only do with a warrant, or your consent -- they could tip-off the copyright owner and you could later receive a civil lawsuit.

Likewise, downloading media using Megaupload, usually also doesn't meet the "distribution" requirement in criminal law, but still opens the door to civil liability if the copyright owner discovers it. However, something like BitTorrent which uploads to other peers, that would meet the distribution requirement.

To that end, if officers searching your home -- make sure to say that you don't consent to any searches -- find a running BitTorrent server and it's actively sharing copyrighted media, that's criminal and civil liability. But if they only find the media but can't find evidence of actual uploading/distributing, and can't get evidence from the ISP or anyone else, then the criminal case would be non-existent.

That said, in a bygone era, if multiple physical copies of the same copyrighted media were found in your house, such as officers finding a powered-off DVD copy machine that has sixty handwritten discs all labeled "Riven: The Sequel to Myst" next to it, then the criminal evidence is present. Prosecutors can likely convince a jury that you're the one who operated the machine to make those copies -- because you had the ability (the machine) -- and that nobody would make so many copies as personal backups. The quantity can only suggest an intent to distribute. This is not unlike how a huge amount of marijuana is chargeable as "possession with intent to distribute", although drug laws have a different type of illogical-ness.

This logic does not apply when dealing with digital files, because computers naturally keep copies as part of handling files. A cache file temporarily created by VLC does not turn people into copyright criminals.

TL;DR: when the police are searching your house, tell them: 1) you do not consent to any searches, 2) you want a copy of their warrant, which should be signed by a judicial judge, and 3) do not volunteer info to the police; call and talk to a lawyer

If this is about that period of human history where we had long-distance transportation (ie railroads) but didn't yet have mass communication infrastructure that isn't the postal service -- so 1830s to 1860s -- then I think the answer is to just plan to meet the other person at a certain place every month.

To use modern parlance, put a recurring meeting on their calendar.

It can be, although the example I've given where each counter is a discrete part is probably no longer the case. It's likely that larger ICs which encompass all the requisite functionality can do the job, at lower cost than individual parts.

But those ICs probably can't do 4:20:69, so I didn't bother mentioning that.

I should point out that for the hour counter, it's only a 5 bit counter, since the max value for hours is 23, which fits into 5 bits.

So 566 is not quite the devil's work, but certainly very close.

(I'm going to take the question seriously)

Supposing that you're asking about a digital clock as a standalone appliance -- because doing the 69th second in software would be trivial, and doing it with an analog clock is nigh impossible -- I believe it can be done.

A run-of-the-mill digital clock uses what's known as a 7-segment display, one for each of the digits of the time. It's called 7-segment (or 7-seg) because there are seven distinct lines that can be lit up or darkened, which will write out a number between 0 to 9.

In this way, six 7seg displays and some commas are sufficient to build a digital clock. However, we need to carefully consider whether the 7seg displays have all seven segments. In some commercial applications, where it's known that some numbers will never appear, they will actually remove some segments, to save cost.

For example, in the typical American digital clock, the time is displayed in 12-hour time. This means the left digit of the hour will only ever be 0 or 1. So some cheap clocks will actually choose to build that digit using just 2 segments. When the hour is 10 or greater, those 2 segments can display the necessary!number 1. When the hour is less than 10, they just don't light up that digit at all. This also makes the clock incapable of 24-hour time.

Fortunately though, to implement your idea of the 69th second, we don't have this problem. Although it's true that the left digit of the seconds only goes from 0 to 5 inclusive, the fact remains that those digits do actually require all 7 segments of a 7seg display. So we can display a number six without issue.

Now, as for how to modify the digital clock circuitry, that's a bit harder but not impossible. The classic construction of a digital clock is as follows: the 60 Hz AC line frequency (or 50 Hz outside North America) is passed from the high-voltage circuitry to the low-voltage circuitry using an opto-isolator, which turns it into a square wave that oscillates 60 times per second.

Specifically, there are 120 transitions per second, with 60 of them being a low-to-high transition and the other 60 being a high-to-low transition. Let's say we only care about the low-to-high. We now send that signal to a counter circuit, which is very similar to a mechanical odometer. For every transition of the oscillating signal, the counter advances by one. The counter counts in binary, and has six bits, because our goal is to count up to 59, to know when a full second has elapsed. We pair the counter with an AND circuit, which is checking for when the counter has the value 111011 (that's to in decimal). If so, the AND will force the next value of the counter to 000000, and so this counter resets every 1 second. This counter will never actually register a value of 60, because it is cut off after 59.

Drawing from that AND circuit that triggers once per second, this new signal is a 1 Hz signal, also known as 1PPS (pulse per second). We can now feed this into another similar counter that resets at 59, which gives us a signal when a minute (60 seconds) has elapsed. And from that counter, we can feed it into yet another counter, for when 1 hour (60 minutes) has passed. And yet again, we can feed that too into a counter for either 12 hours or 24 hours.

In this way, the final three counters are recording the time in seconds, minutes, and hours, which is the whole point of a clock appliance. But these counters are in binary; how do we turn on the 7seg display to show the numbers? This final aspect is handled using dedicated chips for the task, known as 7seg drivers. Although the simplest chips will drive only a single digit, there are variants that handle two adjacent digits, which we will use. Such a chip accepts a 7 bit binary value and has a lookup table to display the correct pair of digits on the 7seg displays. Suppose the input is 0101010 (42 in decimal), then the driver will illuminate four segments on the left (to make the number 4) and five segments on the right (to make the number 5). Note that our counter is 6 bits but the driver accepts 7 bits; this is tolerable because the left-most bit is usually forced to always be zero (more on this later).

So that's how a simple digital clock works. Now we modify it for 69th second operation. The first issue is that our 6-bit counter for seconds will only go from 0-59 inclusive. We can fix this by replacing it with a 7 bit counter, and then modifying the AND circuit to keep advancing after 59, but only when the hour=04 and minute=20. This way, the clock works as normal for all times except 4:20. And when it's actually 4:20, the seconds will advance through 59 and get to 60. And 61, 62, and so on.

But we must make sure to stop it after 69, so we need another AND circuit to detect when the counter reaches 69. And more importantly, we can't just zero out the counter; we must force the next counter value to be 10, because otherwise the time is wrong.

It's very easy to zero out a counter, but it takes a bit of extra circuitry to load a specific value into the counter. But it can be done. And if we do that, we finally have counters suitable for 69th second operation. Because numbers 64 and higher require 7 bits to represent in binary, we can provide the 7th bit to the 7seg driver, and it will show the numbers correctly on the 7seg display without any further changes.

TL;DR: it can absolutely be done, with only some small amount of EE work

as someone has to lead

At this particular moment, the people of Minnesota are self-organizing the resistance against the invasion of their state, with no unified leadership structure in place. So I wouldn't say it's always mandatory.

Long live l'etoile du nord.

An indisputable use-case for supercomputers is the computation of next-day and next-week weather models. By definition, a next-day weather prediction is utterly useless if it takes longer than a day to compute. And is progressively more useful if it can be computed even an hour faster, since that's more time to warn motorists to stay off the road, more time to plan evacuation routes, more time for farmers to adjust crop management, more time for everything. NOAA in the USA draws in sensor data from all of North America, and since weather is locally-affecting but globally-influenced, this still isn't enough for a perfect weather model. Even today, there is more data that could be consumed by models, but cannot due to making the predictions take longer. The only solution there is to raise the bar yet again, expanding the supercomputers used.

Supercomputers are not super because they're bigger. They are super because they can do gargantuan tasks within the required deadlines.

I don't think you've listed what you (and your partner's?) financial timeline is. The number of years you have until needing to draw upon the nestegg is crucial for any discussion that involves retirement savings.

Also, I may want to also post to !personalfinance@lemmy.ml

In the spirit of c/nostupidquestion's Rule 1, asking two unrelated questions does not seem like it would accrue high-quality answers to either. And I see you've already added another post focusing on the first question.

Since it doesn't cost 50 cents to make an additional post, I would suggest giving each question its own post. It would keep the discussion more focused, and actual answers should result.

Consider the following three types of monopolies:

There are monopolies where a single entity has entrenched their position by having the categorically superior product, so far ahead of any competition and while no barriers are erected to prevent competitors, there simply is no hope and they will all play second fiddle. This type of monopoly doesn't really exist, except for a transient moment, for if there initially wasn't a barrier, there soon will be: as market leader, the monopolist accumulates capital that at best is unavailable to the competitors (ie zero sum resources, like land or labor), and at worst stands in the way of free competition (eg brand recognition, legally -recognized intellectual property).

The second type is the steady-state scenario following the first, which is a monopoly that benefits from or actively enforces barriers against their competitors. Intellectual property (eg Disney) can be viewed as akin to the conventional means of production (land, labor, capital), so the monopolist that controls the usable land or can hire the best labor will cement their position as monopolist. In economic terms, we could say that the cost to overturn the monopolist is very high, and so perhaps it's economically reasonable to be a second-tier manufacturer rather than going up against the giant. The key ingredient for the monopolist is having that structure in place, to keep everyone else at bay.

The third type is the oddball, for it's what we might call a "natural" or "practical" monopoly. While land, labor, and capital are indeed limited, what happens when it's actually so limited that there's basically only one? It's a bit hard to conceptualize having just one plot of land (maybe an island?) or having just one Dollar, but consider a single person who has such specialized knowledge that she is the only such person in the world. Do we say she is a monopolist because she can command whatever price she wants for her labor? Is she a monopolist because she does not share her knowledge-capital? What if she physically can't, for the knowledge is actually experience, honed over a lifetime? If it took her a lifetime to develop, then she may already lack the remaining lifetime to teach someone else for their lifetime.

I use this example to segue to the more-customary example of a natural monopoly: the local electricity distribution system, not to be confused with the electric grid at-large, which also includes long-distance power lines. The distinction is as follows: the big, long power lines can compete with each other, taking different routes over terrain, under water, or sometimes even partially conducting through the earth itself. But consider that at a local level, on a residential street, there can practically only be a single distributor circuit for the neighborhood.

I cannot be served by Provider X's wires while Co-Op Y's wires serve my neighbor, and Corpo Z's wires serve the school down the road. Going back to the convention means of production, we could say there is only one plot of land available to run these distributor circuits. So at most one entity can own and operate those wires.

Laying all that background, let's look at your titular question. For monopoly types 1 and 2, it's entirely feasible to divide and collectivize those monopolies. But it's the natural monopolies that are problematic: if you divide them up (let's say geographically) and then collectivize them, there will still only ever be one "owner" of the distribution lines. You cannot have Collective A own a few meters of wire, and then Collective B owns a few meters in between, all while Collective C is connected at the end of the street. The movement of electric power is not amenable to such granular collectivization.

To that end, the practical result is the same no matter how you examine it: a natural monopoly is one which cannot feasibly be split up, even when there's the will to do so. Generalizing quite a lot, capitalists would approach a natural monopoly with intent to exploit it for pure profit, while social democrats would seek to regulate natural monopolies (eg US State's public utilities commissions), and democratic socialists would want to push for state ownership of all natural monopolies, while communists would seek the dissolution of the state and have the natural monopoly serve everyone "according to their need". But the monopoly still exists in all these scenarios, for it can't be done any other way.

Other natural monopolies exist, but even things like radio spectrum are relatively plentiful compared to local power lines, for which there really is just one place to build them. We don't have wireless power yet.