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The majority of service providers for mobile data services charge users on the amount of data they transfer, either by the Gigabyte, Megabyte or kilobyte.
In the end, you pay for what you use on a byte by byte basis.
However, there is an inherent element of unfairness in this system, for if a user
is charged "per byte", all bytes are charged at the same rate; yet not all bytes are the same; many contain significantly more 0s than 1s.
So, whether a user transfers 0x00, 0x7F, 0x10 or 0xAA, they pay the same charge.
We suggest that users should be charged on the actual number of 1s transferred, and not for the 0s. Thus, if the maximum charge per byte is x, 0x0F will attract a charge of x/2, 0x30 will be x/4, and so on.
This is a much more rational system than the one now in general use.
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I know it makes sense, also funny. I bet programmers can make data consisting of more 0's to accomodate this. |
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Ah well, simply make numeric fields longer, pad text fields with nulls instead of spaces, use unicode, etc.: that'll get your 0:1 ratio right up there. |
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Isn't the "1" associated with current or magnetism being turned on? Certainly it costs more to make a 1 than a 0. |
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But a 0 uses up pi times as much silicon to draw as a 1. And 1 fits down wires better, 'cause it's skinnier. |
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For ease of pricing, data packets should be re-packaged so that all the 1-bits are grouped together at the beginning. The current scattering of 1-bits throughout the message is just untidy. |
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Taking this seriously for a second, in a given electrical or
magnetic medium, is there a difference in energy expenditure
between zeroes and ones such that energy could be saved by
storing in a particular binary format, or would that be cancelled
out by processing? Is there a thermodynamic-like relationship? |
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[nineteenthly], yes, the past few decades have seen an increase of evidence for something that can be called "The Law of Conservation of Information", and which may actually be **more** fundamental than the Energy Conservation Law. There is indeed a minimum energy always associated with flipping a bit. |
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//is there a difference in energy expenditure// I seem to remember, back in the days of RLL hard drives, that not only did too many sequential bits in the same direction lead to the possibility of the read-head losing track of the count, there was also concern that too many high-bit magnetized domains stuffed together would magnetize the surrounding media. |
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If you hooked up a NOT gate, you could get
unlimited data for free. |
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The premise is fundamentally flawed. "0"s don't cost any
less to transmit than "1"s. In fact, it's the other way
around. Since "0" represents the ground state, where
there's no potential diference between the sender and
receiver, it's actually impossible to transmit a "0" directly.
Instead, normal practice is to transmit a "1", followed by
an inversion bit that signifies that the preceding bit should
be flipped by the recipient. So a "0" actually ends up
costing twice as much as a "1" to send. |
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I have an unlimited data plan, so I paying the same however many 0s or 1s I consume, which seem fair enough to me. |
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