Sheeplet

The Origin of Money Trees The Elusive History of an Equally Elusive Plant Money trees have, throughout history, been mostly discarded as myth. Today, they predominantly appear to exist in the phrase "Money doesn't grow on trees". This is not the case, has never been the case, but may one day be the case if we do not commit ourselves to saving our money. Cash, as not popularly believed, does not come from the French word "caisse", meaning cash register. Cash comes from the money tree, a plant grown worldwide but kept in secrecy due to its nature. A different species of money tree is used in every country with printable currency, and several species can often be used to denote differing values. Scientists have recently been experimenting with money trees in order to increase their yield, in the US, this resulted in the nemus centumviaticus, variants of which exist in Australia, America, and Canada. It is one of the first-known examples of scientists altering a species by changes in its environment. Environment, however, is not the only thing that can change the appearance of our beloved nemus centumviaticus. Banks frequently have to change to new forms of their currency due to hitherto-unknown fluctuations in the tree, which change the appearance of the fruit created by money trees. But what causes this? Scientists are not sure, but theorise it may have something to do with the unique ability of the plants to detect changes in the economy - A gift believed to be bestowed on them by the use of their fruit in our own economic systems. It is thought that once too much of a note enters circulation, the plant is able to realise this and adapt. The leading theory suggests that this is a defence mechanism designed to stop exploitation of the more valued variants of the nemus centumviaticus. Money trees are thought to have come into existence only recently, possibly as recently as within the past millennium. Due to the degree to which these trees are considered secret, not much information exists on population counts for these, and estimates vary wildly. One report suggests that the increasing circulation of money within our society is an indication that the population is growing. Under the guise of an unrelated study, the New York Times stated "family income [..] -- drives both." regarding the growth of population. However, others are more worried. The BBC ran an article suggesting that digital banking is an indication that the money tree population is at risk, even going as far as to say that "Although nobody (but the banks involved) suffered any financial damage, customers will wonder what else can go wrong". But with almost every country having multiple varieties of money tree, it is questionable to what degree the problem is. Are there too many trees, or are there not enough? Should we continue to exploit the nemus centumviaticus for use in our own systems, or is it time to make the switch to other forms of currency? One possible answer comes from the nature of the trees themselves. Given that the trees are subject to extreme adaptation, it is difficult for any bank to rely on a specific variety of the plant to consistently produce their own forms. However, the past few years indicate that the tree may be adapting towards a singular, specific form of currency, which would have far-reaching implications on our world economy. With the introduction of the "Euro" variety of the plant to the public in the year 2001, it became clear that a single, unified variety of the plant has independently developed. With more and more countries adopting these "Euro" plants, is it a sign of a more unified variety of money tree? Whilst all we can say with any certain terms is that the money tree is one of the most popular plants believed not to exist by most, it is perhaps time we considered taking more care of the tree. It is clear that whilst we cannot determine whether the plant is at risk, we must take action by cutting down on our use of their fruit. For if we act, and find that the population is plentiful, the result will be far better than if we were not to act and find that our money tree ceases to exist. -- Wrote it for your "Nothing", thread, but then didn't want to revive it. Now that I've written it, I've nowhere else to put it. - An old forgotten lurker :)

An interesting approach, certainly. But it doesn't actually solve any of the issues of a standard 'CAPTCHA', if you ask me. It's still an image-based idea. It's just a more complex way of rendering the image. It's rather like saying that writing it in SVG (w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ - Enter it in the address bar, as I lack the post count to post a link) isn't using images. It's simply a different approach to drawing the same picture. It's still highly obscure to an end user, and possibly even more so. The reason it might be more so is because it now relies on browser rendering to be written in the standardised way. On the counter, both Firefox and IE rendered the image correctly. Both of them, however, will make a Lynx user cry. :P You may argue that it could be harder for a bot to crack. But I would say, probably not. If you saw the image rendered properly, you know there are engines that are capable of putting the "image" together. You also therefore know that it's capable of taking a picture of the result - And upon doing so, you're right back where you started in terms of cracking complexity. It must be said however, that this is certainly an interesting approach to the problem,and I doubt it was designed to get around the limitations of a standard CAPTCHA. Even so, it won't be a method I personally will be employing in my web dev work. ;)

I can only comment on what I know or have heard, and what I know happens to be scattered amounts of European language. But there's a lack of similarity in some places and a startling similarity in others, in my opinion. My studies in French can only help me so far in Finnish, for example. Whilst French has many tenses which change the ending of the verb, Finnish has many cases that change the ending of the noun - Corresponding to prepositions in English. In fact, from what I know, there aren't many prepositions in Finnish and postpositions are far more common (I'm not a native/good speaker of Finnish though and I'd welcome anyone to correct me on this). You would probably think that all languages changed the verb for tenses, for example: "He runs", "He will run", "He ran" respectively mark the present, future and past tenses (Eh, my brain isn't speaking in a logical order today). However, I recently overheard a conversation between a few language specialists who were saying how Chinese has no tenses in the language. His example being "Today I go to shop" as the literal translation. So not even that is similar. But one thing I do recall being similar between a surprising number of languages is the meaning of the verb "To play". I can no longer find the source, but I recall a list of verbs for "To play a game", "To play an instrument", and "To play a role". Interestingly, even languages that have highly distant origins seemed to share the notion that the same verb should be used. There were exceptions, but it wasn't at all where I expected it to be. So I guess that the similarities in languages lie in the instinctive logic of the human race, rather than anything else. Unfortunately, I can't offer much proof for what I've said, and I can't speak for the entire planet as a whole. I can't think of any other ways to represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives in spoken languages though. And if they exist, they're probably still regarded as nouns, verbs and adjectives. My two cents.

That's the sort of thing that'd work best actually. Typically, if you were a spammer/whatnot who wanted a CAPTCHA cracking, you would send a CAPTCHA to a user without any text from the webpage it originated on (Can't have the user seeing "To complete your membership at THISISMYWEBSITE" ;)). Therefore, they wouldn't have the information they needed to complete the CAPTCHA and as such, they enter the wrong thing. What I'd really like to see is something that doesn't hassle the user, but cripples the bots. That's why I like the "hidden form" idea. Flawed, but so are CAPTCHAs.

I thought I'd give an insight into my thoughts on this, some things may have been replied to and I missed them, so bear with me. :) Unlikely. It's already been said that these images are generated "on the fly", i.e. as the web page loads. Strings are typically random (You can get word CAPTCHAS which likely would use a database, but that's a slightly different method to random letters), and it simply wouldn't make sense to crack your own "CAPTCHA". I think the easiest way to understand how something works is to make one yourself. How I/others have done it in the past is to use "sessions", in simplicity - This is how the web server can track you across a site, knowing your login name and such. The sessions are stored on the server, so only the server has control over what they say and what can be read. Therefore, you can store the CAPTCHA information in this session and it'll only be seen by the server, apart from in a distorted form in an image. Hopefully that makes sense. That's one method. Another is similar to MICR/OCR/other ink-reading techniques. That technology has probably been around longer than I have. It simply tries to read what the image says. If it can't crack it, then that's the method they're likely to employ. Save the difficult ones for that, I guess. A bot can't, but a malicious website might. You can use JavaScript to check the position of a mouse when it is clicked on the page, which can be used for "passkeys" where you click a picture in certain places as your password, rather than enter it in plain text...Anyway, you can track mouse clicks or pretty much anything if you wish to. ------------ CAPTCHAs are a temporary solution to a permanent problem though, if you ask me. Though there's no real alternative. The cleverest I've seen so far is a method by which some parts of the site are only visible to bots, and those bots will try and fill in those parts. Clever thing is, when the bot tries to send the information to the site, the website will know it's a bot, because there's information sent that only bots would send. Sorry, I tend to go on and on about these things. I'll go lock myself in a room now. :cup:

I've been lurking for over a year, so I guess I'll start with an apology for not doing this sooner. :) So yeah, I'm me. I'm a web designer by trade and a scientist by nature. I check this place about twice per day, normally just looking for news articles of interest to me, but I figure I need some place to relax since the online construction workers bulldozed my old house to make way for a big gap in the interweb. So I thought I'd say hi. Seemed the polite thing to do. :cup: