benguino

-Food. Find the cheapest food you can find that you don't have to cook. Every day, before you sleep, put the food in the basement. To be cost-efficient, you'll only want to give them enough to barely survive (but enough to reliably remember numbers). The children can partition the food themselves. They should only eat while you're asleep since eating while you are using your computer will only slow them down. If you get tired of giving them food everyday, just leave them a bunch of food every week instead. Don't stagger the food offerings too much however, because the children could easily mis-partition the food throughout the time period, essentially eating too much in the beginning of the time period and then starving to death towards the end of the time period.

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-Motivation. You have to get these children to be cooperative. One way, although more expensive, is to give the children candy instead of other types of food. Also, tell them that mommy/daddy are going to pick them up soon. Keep making up excuses for why they haven't come yet, but leave it on a positive note (e.g. "Daddy decided to drive across the continent to pick up the world's best candy just for you!")

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-Also, just notice that a lot of these problems you don't have to deal with assuming that you have a regular supply of children coming in. More children means you can store more data and that you can distribute the data to more children (then lessening the amount they have to remember making reads/writes quicker and more reliable).

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-Alternatively, you can keep the issues above and get rid of other issues such as having to buy more monitors/keyboards/buckets by just letting the children die and replacing them as needed. Just make sure you do a data transfer between the near-dead child and a healthy child before the near-dead child dies. Also, this means you don't need to buy them food anymore (since you're letting them die). Just make sure you set things up so that the children don't know that other children are dying, that'll cause their motivation to crash.

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-For the above, that means the children can't see each other. Perhaps you could put them in super-tall cubicles that have a timer-based lock. You can have a program unlock their doors sequentially so they can do things such as emptying their buckets.

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-As for whose children to kidnap. That's a choice YOU have to make...I don't know the children in your area and thus can't decide for you. I recommend choosing children young enough that's too naive to understand what's going on, but old enough that they can remember a considerable amount of numbers.

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I hope this answers your question.

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-Also, you have to realize that the children will have an easier time remembering numbers they just memorized, but they'll have trouble with remembering numbers you asked them to remember 2 years ago. This can be remedied a bit, see the next point.

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-While any particular child is not doing an active read/write, you'll want to reinforce the numbers they have to remember. So you'll want your program to constantly quiz them on the numbers they have to remember. The frequency in which you quiz certain numbers can correspond to how long ago they had to remember it. However, the data for the numbers the child has to remember needs to be stored elsewhere in order to quiz them. What you could do is have one or two other children remember the numbers as well so they can indirectly quiz each other. Doing this will also allow you to occasionally read through all the children and do some error checking. So while you sleep, you can sleep in comfort knowing the children are working hard to remember your numbers.

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-These children have basic human needs. The cost of these needs are likely to exceed the cost of your external hard drive. Also, if they are satisfying one of their human needs, you can expect a longer read/write time. This can be countered by having more than one child remember the same number as noted above.

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-Let's talk about each need in detail. First: sleep. You want your children asleep as least as possible. I recommend the Uberman sleep schedule, they sleep for a combined 2 hours a day through the use of staggered naps throughout the day. Don't expect the children to be too reliable when they first start, it'll take awhile to adjust. You'll want to wait at least a week or two before loading information into him/her if you want to be safe.

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-Restroom needs. You don't want the children to be going to the bathroom frequently, that'll make your read/write operations slow if they are taking care of their business. Ideally, you'll want the children at their computers, sitting on devices that captures they're urine/feces and directs it straight to the sewer/septic system. This is expensive to implement though. Instead, a cheaper route would be to make them sit at their computers on a bucket with a hole on the lid. They can empty it themselves on a daily basis in the basement bathroom while you're asleep (a time when you don't have to worry about read/write operations).

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-I lied...see part 3.

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I think this is a terrible idea. But let's say we were to go through with it.
-You can't expect these children to memorize terabytes worth of binary numbers.
-Also, you have to realize that these are children, they will most likely have an easier time remembering numbers in base 10.
-And it's not only a matter of remembering these numbers, they need to remember the order of these numbers too and must be able to remember which number is in which position in the list.
-Also, if you have multiple children, you have the issue of knowing how to split up the information amongst children. Can you imagine defragging? The children would have to work together to switch numbers between each other. It's be awful and slow!
-You'd need to do the equivalent of "reading and writing to a hard drive". Thus, you'll have to find a way to relay the information between the children and your computer. What I would recommend is giving each child a monitor and a keyboard and hook up everything to a large network that connects to your computer.
-When you want to save things to the children, you have a program take the thing you want to save, turn it into a base 10 number, run an algorithm that determines which child to send it to, display the number to the child's monitor and make the child hit 'enter' once they've memorized the number. That confirmation then gets relayed back to your computer so you know that the operation was successful. For increased reliability, your program could quiz the child after they hit enter to ensure that they actually memorized it.
-For reading, your program should have an algorithm for determining which child has the data you need. Your program sends the memory address that you want read to the child's terminal in a format the child can understand. The child then types the number/data that he/she remembers belongs to that memory address. And then that data is relayed back to your computer.
-Note however that the above process makes reading/writing to your children extremely slow. That's why I wouldn't recommend this idea: you won't get much memory, you'll have to setup hardware and software to read/write from these children, and the read/write is going to be extremely slow. Also, the cost of the monitors/keyboards you have to give these children is probably more than the external hard drive you would have bought anyways. There might cheaper alternatives, but in any case, you'll still have the same issues.
-Also note that there are issues when you ask the children to memorize more and more numbers. The more numbers they have stored, the longer it's going to take them to remember the number and the longer it's going to take them to memorize a number, thus increasing the length of the read/write operations.
-Also, you can bet on having decreased reliability as you ask them to remember more and more numbers: the more numbers the have the remember, the higher the chances are of messing up at least one of them and mixing them up.
-See Part 2

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This would boil down to what I would speculate is the expected amount of time you're able to hold your breath underwater. I don't know much about you as a person in particular and your level of fitness though, so this makes this difficult. I couldn't find very good statistics on what the average amount of time someone is able to hold their breath underwater, but I've found sources saying that a healthy adult should be able to hold their breath for two minutes (although I'm not sure if I'm capable of doing this myself, then again, I really haven't pushed my limits on holding my breath) but that someone that has trained themselves could go up to double that.

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I do have reason to believe that you would hold your breathe for longer than two minutes though:
-a desire to make your money back
-the fact that people that initiate bets like these usually do them because they assume people will underestimate their ability to do some particular task
-by me mentioning that it's possible to train for something like this, I have reason to believe you'd go out of your way to train for it.

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In addition, I am super broke right now, so I need to protect myself in the case that you are several standard deviations away from the mean in holding your breath because I do not want to risk going broke. (If this were a game where every trial, a random person was selected on Earth to be the one to hold their breath, and if I was able to play this game as many times as I wanted without worrying about the possibility of running out of money, then I wouldn't be as conservative with my money).

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Based on my awful sense of judgement...I doubt that you would be able to hold your breath for 5 minutes = 300 seconds so I'll just say $300. That number might be a bit lower if you catch me in a more optimistic mood though.

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Imagine that all of a sudden that everyone on Earth except you just disappeared. For some people, perhaps those that cringe at the phrase "social interaction", this seems like it'd be a blessing. That is until you realize that the goods and services you desire, such as food and *le gasp* the internet, are no longer easily available to you. Hopefully such a thought experiment has inspired you to appreciate the actions of others. So next time you see the janitor at your workplace or school or the cashier behind the register or anyone really for that matter, give them a smile; they are either directly or indirectly making the world you live in a little bit better (^)> (There's the case where people try to make your world or the world in general a worse place, but that's for another post).

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Now take the flip-side. If you have all these people that are ever so slightly contributing to make your world a little bit better, what are you doing to make the world just a little bit better? As for me, I like being helpful to others. Even if it's just answering a simple question or helping someone with a small task, the smile I see on their face or the words of gratification that they type makes it worth it. Also, keeping the butterfly effect in mind, your help/actions could resonate forward having a greater impact than what you may think. For example, I recently helped this one guy who was training to become a diving instructor how to read the dive chart he handed to me; it has information on dive depth vs time elasped vs nitrogen levels and stuff. Anyways, by helping him understand that, he can now use that knowledge for when he does become a diving instructor, perhaps preventing serious injury due to "the bends."

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Lastly, sometimes helping others means helping yourself. You can't help anybody if you don't eat and starve to death. Moving on from the extreme example, one should find the time to not only take care of their basic needs, but to also satisfy other personal desires (especially those that involve self-improvement). This is a hard thing for many people, myself included; I don't even know what I want. I find satisfaction in self-improvement and in social interaction, so I spend a lot of time doing school stuff and chatting with friends (whether it be online or irl).

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I probably have a million more philosophies, but I couldn't possibly put all of them, "life" is a big topic, haha. I hope I answered your question (n)>

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Yes...
(pauses for an obscene amount of time to make you think that I was going to give a short reply)
...haha. But yes, my replies are long. That's how I talk to people. If I have something to say, I'm going to say it. With that said, I guess I have a lot of things to say (as well as a lot of things on my mind...). Anyways, I sincerely thank you for the careful phrasing of your "question", I noticed that you didn't phrase it as "Ur replies are too long." The fact that you omitted the word "too" shows that you don't think there is anything inherently wrong about my lengthy replies. It doesn't say you're a big fan of them either, but I can live with that :P Anyways, I'm going to continue to answer questions in a fashion where I'll type whatever I have to say at that moment, whether that be short or long (although knowing me it's going to be long).

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