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Heh, my economics degree sits unused as I work for a living (little joke there).

However, there is some reading available for those with time.

Here is a paper that talks about some of the problems with picking firm employment/inflation ratios:
http://www.nber.org/papers/W6518

And here is (IMO) the best model of what is going on, though clearly there isn't consensus about this that I have found in the economic community:
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w5735

With specific regard to the wurbles problem as a metaphore for skilled employment in the US Market, you are holding all kinds of micro-level variables constant. For example, you can't just bump the wage of employees arbitrarily and assume that the same number of positions will be available. Wurble manufacturers are facing a real labor market with its own supply and demand, different elasticities and inefficiencies. Then, assuming infinitely elastic supply of employment and infinitely inelastic demand of employment, you make assumptions about the market pricing of wurbles (namely, that demand of wurbles is infinitely inelastic, and 100% of the wage increase is pushed into price).

Like I said, all of this is fine- a universal wage increase will very likely lead to some inflation (though not necessarily 100% of the wage increase will be translated). But it is not necessarily true, and people who haven't studied the results of relaxing assumptions of models can be easily mislead. A more relevant question would be "will raising the current minimum wage yeild an increase in inflation in the current American economy?"... I tend to think not, both because of the relative size of the minimum wage labor pool vs. size of the national labor pool, and the guess that the current labor market for the minimum wage segment is highly inefficient (this is a topic about economic migration of all things).

Your username suggests you are interested in econ, and I suspect classicly trained, so I'm sure you are aware of all of this.

Yeah, really. The Gutmann paper, for all its fancy words, is bollocks.

There's a lot of theory out there, but no proof. That's because recovery of remanent data is impossible in practice. Oh, you might get a few bits; but you'd get just as good a result, if not better, by guessing. You won't find any company willing to take on the job of undoing DBAN. If they could do it, they'd be shouting it out loud ..... but they can't. And as I said, the phenomenon has not been exploited commercially -- except as a gimmick, and a poor one at that.

Good god. They're probably also responsible for the rise of the idiocy of the "evolution debate." I imagine a science-illiterate, god-trusting nation of ignoramuses would make it far easier to sell cigarettes.

Please understand that trading is not for the faint of heart. The pressure is high, numbers are big and the stress level can down right kill you. However, if you want to be a good at trading, most of the traders I knew in NY and HK told me that certain amount of killer instinct is required to be good at it. Please see this interesting article: http://www.nber.org/digest/mar02/w8508.html

The acutal paper is from 2000. This has been tought for the past 3 years in an undergraduate eCommerce course.

The paper has an interesting comparison between eBay and Amazon, for two distinct cases: common value and private value.

At first I didn't believe you but there is a link supporting your claim.

Our worker productivity isn't simply a measure of how hard we work. It's also dependant on how many hours we're willing to work in a given day. Our high worker productivity is largely due to the fact that we have a low marginal tax rate. Much of Western Europe had high productivity after WWII, back when they had lower tax rates. As taxes increased, however, worker productivity decreased. See Prescott's "Why do Americans Work so Much More than Europeans?" for the full explanation. Puritansim probably plays some minor part, but money is the primary incentive to work hard.

Wanna bet?
There is a good article at http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gut tman.html that discusses this, but the upshot is that you would have a better chance of seeing a realistic CSI script than some agency recovering useful info from a Gutmann or PRNG deleted disk.

Frankly, in a criminal investigation, who would bother? Lets face it, you are some investigative agency on a budget, and you can either waste many man years on recovering evidence or just write and erase some of your own in a few seconds... I mean, the jury's gonna be able to tell the difference?

It is only useful if you are doing something like a seized terrorist hard disk, and most likely, they are probably using USB thumbdrives these days, anyhow.

GDP is a pretty damn poor measure of economic peformance. GDP is a measure of aggregate economic activity, with no description of how that economic activity (income) is spread out amongst the population. Not to mention that it doesn't show how income is produced - is a service job at Wal-Mart as good for our economy as a job at GM producing cares? There are far more problems with using GDP as your golden measure.

What has effectively happened in our economy- and you probably know this considering you spat out a trend from 1970 to 2004 is that real income per person has remained fairly flat. In other words, the economy has grown but the normal worker has not seen the benefits. Go read Krugman over at the NY Times. Or better yet, read the source material Where did the productivity go? which describes what's happened to our economy.

You should damn well listen to the refrain and understand the numbers - something is going seriously wrong in America. The middle class is falling apart under increasing costs (college, health care, no pensions) while the absolute top has received nearly all of the benefits of outsourcing, increased productivity, and the last thirty years of economic growth.

Actually the chance of losing two disks at once is pretty high. Here is the explanation from my posting at http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html

=====

Most of the drives in our NAS boxes and drive arrays claim a MTBF of 500,000 hours. That's about 2% per year. With three drives the chance of at least one failing is a little less than 6%. (1-(1-.98)^3). Our experience is that such numbers are at least a reasonable approximation of reality.

Suppose you have three drives in a RAID 5. If it takes 24 hours to replace and reconstruct a failed drive, one is tempted to calculate that the chance of a second drive failing before full redundancy is established is about .02/365, or about one in a hundred thousand. The total probability of a double failure seems like it should be about 6 in a million per year.

Our double failure rate is about 5 orders of magnitude worse than that - the majority of single drive failures are followed by a second drive failure before redundancy is established. This prevents rebuilding the array with a new drive replacing the original failed drive, however you can probably recover most files if you stay in degraded mode and copy the files to a different location. It isn't that failures are correlated because drives are from the same batch, or the controller is at fault, or the environment is bad (common electrical spike or heat problem). The fault lies with the Linux md driver, which stops rebuilding parity after a drive failure at the first point it encounters a uncorrectable read error on the remaining "good" drives. Of course with two drives unavailable, there isn't an unambiguous reconstruction of the bad sector, so it might be best to go to the backups instead of continuing. At least that is the apparently the reason for the decision.

Let's repeat the reliability calculation with our new knowledge of the situation. In our experience perhaps half of drives have at least one unreadable sector in the first year. Again assume a 6 percent chance of a single failure. The chance of at least one of the remaining two drives having a bad sector is 75% (1-(1-.5)^2). So the RAID 5 failure rate is about 4.5%/year, which is .5% MORE than the 4% failure rate one would expect from a two drive RAID 0 with the same capacity. Alternatively, if you just had two drives with a partition on each and no RAID of any kind, the chance of a failure would still be 4%/year but only half the data loss per incident, which is considerably better than the RAID 5 can even hope for under the current reconstruction policy even with the most expensive hardware.

...the RIAA should have to be forced to show the actual loss in revenue from each song, and where do they come up with the numbers they sue people for.

Yeah, so nobody actually read your question. Welcome to slashdot and sorry about that. You really need to understand how email and the internet work a bit better if you thought DNS could do this for you. What you're asking for is a slightly more difficult problem than just "sendmail | tee -a foo".

If you're stuck on sendmail, these might help:
http://www.nber.org/copy-out.html
http://www.milter.info/sendmail/milter-bcc/

If you want to give other MTA's a whirl for this purpose, google "tee postfix" and see the postfix mailing list thread or try that qmail foo suggested by another poster.

Basically, there are different "problems" with each method, but it's late and I want to go home so you'll have to do your own homework. A few likely complications: recipient checks, source IP checks, header munges interfering with spam filtering

-Isaac

According to (1), in 2000, most of them are US phd's... 61%, or 2,684. If you'll grant that this % hasn't changed much then I think the US is ahead- by just a smidgen.

2,684 of 300 Mil (8.95E-5) vs. 24,900 of 3 Bil (8.30E-5)

1. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan05/w105

I like how "RTFA" has become the defacto "STFU N00B" comment. It has about the same amount of persuasiveness, too.

It claims that new drugs (not old drugs repatented under a different formula and target) have come on the market less frequently than before the Bayh-Dole act.

Did you see any metrics supporting that claim? No. Go back and look at page 6 - they dance around the issue, discussing life expectancy and pharmaceutical company revenue. The closest data that they provide to show that pharmaceutical development is unchanged is... wait for it... a suggestion that it's "worse." They make a hand-wave reference to charts that they don't cite. Notice that?

Why would Fortune fail to include some numbers that support its core point? I spent some time this afternoon looking for metrics on the number of new drugs, or (as a different metric) approved NMEs, over the past decades. I didn't find any. It's suprisingly unavailable. Go ahead, look for yourself.

There's a reason for that. This article attempts to analyze the rate of new drug developments (in order to answer an unrelated question about the FDA approval process.) From his article:

"There is considerable variation across diseases--even diseases in the same broad disease groups--in the extent and timing of increases in the stock of available drugs. This is illustrated by Figure 6, which shows, for two conditions--diseases of the thyroid gland and diseases of other endocrine glands--the number of drugs available to treat the condition in year t, as a percent of the number of drugs available to treat the condition in 1979.23 Between 1979 and 1984, the number of drugs available to treat diseases of the thyroid gland increased 29%, while the number of drugs available to treat diseases of other endocrine glands increased only 13%. However, between 1984 and 1998, the number of drugs available to treat diseases of the thyroid gland did not increase at all, while the number of drugs available to treat diseases of other endocrine glands increased 33%."

In a nutshell - it's difficult to measure the rate of new drug development, because the results vary depending on how you define key factors. Does this not raise some suspicion about Fortune's vague conclusion that drug development has gotten "worse?"

The costly experimentation in cell lines and animals that you think corporations do is actually done by the research scientists receiving those grants.

You're either being ignorant or clever. This preclinical research is done by academics - but under industry sponsorship, not under federal grants. Federal grants do not pay for drug validation. You couldn't get funding from the government to do that. The for-profit companies pick up the costs at that stage.

Before your next post, try googling "industry-sponsored research."

Once you show some hard data that the Bayh-Dole act lead to an increase in productivity, we'll talk again. Until then, the evidence points firmly to an unintended consequence of stifling innovation by reducing the incentive for scientists to collaborate.

Again, nice trick. You're faced with two unproven assertions, and you choose to believe one without proof unless I can prove the other. That's not very rational.

- David Stein

So, to refute his claim that the recession started during the Clinton administration, you show unemployment statistics? You do know what a recession is, right? Two consecutive quarters of decreasing GDP?

If you want:

Bush installed by Supreme Court January 2001. Business cycle peaks in March 2001.

"The NBER does not define a recession in terms of two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. Rather, a recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

However, if you want to use the dumb "decline of GDP = recession" definition, the recession began in 1Q2001 according to the official figures linked above. Either way, the economy definitely tanked after the 2000 elections.

I find that a strange argument. Anyway, see: Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data?. Quote: "It it would take more than a year to scan a single platter with recent MFM technology, and tens of terabytes of image data would have to be processed."

The higher wages of multinationals, of course, does not come from their own generosity, or even out of concern about anti-sweatshop group, but from the simple fact that they are more productive than smaller, less advanced domestic producers in developing countries.

The literature is rich with studies that show higher wages of multinationals:

'Technological competition' causes U.S. multinationals to pay more

Even critics of Nike, whose wages and working conditions have become a cause celebre on college campuses, concede that the footwear giant pays higher rates than those prevailing in Asia, where their plants are located. The same pattern is found among multinationals with factories in South America and Eastern Europe.

"The wage differences between multinationals and domestic firms," writes Dan Bernhardt, a University of Illinois economist, "far exceed the differences in rental payments for buildings and land, or prices paid for domestic raw materials by foreign firms compared with their local counterparts."

Effects of Multinational Company Investments

For example, considering the charge that foreign investment leads to depressed wages and thus exploits "host country" workers, Lipsey finds that the opposite is true. "Within host countries it has been abundantly shown that foreign-owned firms pay higher wages than domestically-owned firms"

The Effects of Multinational Production on Wages and Working Conditions in Developing Countries

This evidence indicates that multinational firms routinely provide higher wages and better working conditions than their local counterparts

I haven't studied too much economics, but I remember from my classes something along the lines that with the Solow growth model one can pretty accurately find out the rate of innovations growth in a country and per capita because innovations are the main force behind productivity growth.

Also, there was this thing called Schumpeterian trilogy which talks about the relation between invention, innovation and diffusion. Basically, there will be no productivity gains from inventions if nobody gets to use them.

Ideas for Google searches from here:
http://www.nber.org/reporter/summer99/eaton.html

There was an officially declared recession for the first 3 quarters of 2001.

Here for more.

Finally someone in this discussion who gets it. Apart from that, the speed of an AFM/MFM microscope would be a couple of bytes per second. Good luck recovering a 40 GB harddisk with that. Nobody has ever demonstrated a successful recovery of overwritten data.

AFAIK, data recovery normally deals with restoring data from drives with mechanical or electronic defects. Or with recovering deleted (but not overwritten) data, like the undelete tools in the DOS era.

Huh? The last recession ended in 7/2003 http://www.nber.org/cycles/july2003.html and certainly didn't last six year... Check your facts and get back with us.

America has a way of luring the smartest and most hard working people here with the hopes of a better life. And the country where they came from losses one more leader, one more person who could have had an impact.

That's because the US is the country where they can maximize their potential. They might have helped their own home countries a bit if they stayed but they can help their homeland a lot more by maximizing their own opportunities and then helping out after they've achieved something. That's exactly what's wrong with buying talent analogy - only a little of it is bought. The US expends a lot of resources developing a lot of the raw talent that comes here.

I'm an immigrant and part of an extended family of immigrants (38 in the US and 28 in Canada). We send more money back to Vietnam per year than all of our relatives (in the hundreds) in Vietnam have made in their entire time in Vietnam (and we all worked hard for what we've achieved). I sorta have a problem with people telling me how I should've lived my life. If you're really concerned with helping unfortunate countries develop, you can always volunteer with the Peace Corps, donate money yourself or even move there.

And then, what do we give back to other countries? We open HUGE factories where we move jobs, like when GM closed the plants in Michigan and moved them to Mexico because people there would work for pennies on the dollar.

Poverty has declined the most in the countries that have integrated the most into the global economy. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w8933 (National Bureau of Economic Research). So it seems the US is 'giving' quite a bit back. Unless you're trying to say that poor people in foreign countries don't want jobs. My relatives in the Nike factories are better off than they were before. They don't have the same standard of living as we do in the US but then it's an entirely different situation.

What does this say about how the world is being organized?

It's getting more efficient and we're making progress.

Unemployment in Scandinavia by Country, according to the CIA world factbook. Finland, Greenland and Iceland included as they're all at various times and places considered Scandinavian, at least that's what Wikipedia told me.

Sweden: 4.9% (2003 estimate)
Norway: 4.7% (2003 est.)
Denmark: 6.1% (2003)
Finland: 9% (2003 est.)
Iceland: 3.4% (2003 est.)
Greenland: 10% (2000 est.)

For comparison:

United States: 6% (2003)
United Kingdom: 5% (2003 est.)
Canada: 7.8% (2003 est.)
France: 9.7% (2003 est.)
Germany: 10.5% (2003 est.)
Netherlands: 3.7% (2003 est.)
Switzerland: 3.7% (2003 est.)

This link says that the European Union's unemployment rate as a whole is 8%. They report various numbers differently than the CIA world factbook, such as reporting Denmark's rate as "below 5 per cent." They also say:

"Still, there is however no obvious relationship between the degree of social protection and the unemployment rate today. For example, the Netherlands has returned to low unemployment while continuing to offer high social protection. Scandinavian countries have maintained both high social protection and a low natural rate of unemployment."

Sorry - basic economics show that the burden of wage taxes are split between the employer and the employee. If the 30% tax was removed, the market clearing price for your labor would still be $100. Moreover, reducing wage taxes increases overall employment. Studies have proven out both of these theories.

Please see this link so you are not to economics what creationists are to biology, then read this study which shows that lower labor taxes decreases unemployment.

Karma whore huh? I think that means my honor is at stake or something.

In any case, that was a while ago but I think the study is http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html and here is a more recent study http://www.nber.org/~confer/2004/URCs04/felix.pdf

A bit of research and theory suggests that, while these patents are a big pain in the US, there might be a case for implementing them in developing countries, in order to reward entrepreneurs who find successful business models and practices. Currently, there are few incentives for discovery of new industries in developing countries, since as soon as they are discovered, everyone rushes in and the original entrepreneur is put out of business.

And rule one of capitalism: without incentives, there's no innovation.

See for example Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik, "Economic Development as Self-{Discovery"

Recovering overwritten data from a magnetic medium is theoretically possible, but there is no evidence that anyone actually succeeded in doing that in a practical situation.

"Partly as a result of [Clinton's], but also in part due to the strong economy, welfare use plummeted, work rose dramatically among single parents, and poverty was reduced.". Republicans and Democrats are not equal. Find a new riff.

Have some free clues:

The recession stared in March 01

The GDP most certainly did drop and recovery hasn't been as strong

Bush has lied about this in the past

earlier this year, Bush tried to manipulate the reporting of this for political purposes

While it can certainly be substantiated that the the Bush administration's policies didn't cause or contribute to the cause of the recession, he most certainly is on the hook for dealing with it. Argueing about when it began is both counterproductive and rather clueless on his part, as it does do anything to change the situation.

We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html. Have a nice day.

Started under Bush, continued under Bush. We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html

Ah, the old "recession started during the Clinton administration" lie being passed around again.

No, it didn't. We didn't go into recession until 2001. Graph, citations and data at http://www.xciv.org/~meta/2004/09/10#2004-09-09b
and http://www.nber.org/cycles.html

yes, the recession started while Clinton was still in office

If you're going to lie, you might at least attempt a slightly convincing lie. The NBER web site has a nice summary of the official government figures showing when the recession began. It began in March 2001. If you don't believe that page, download the original data and graph it yourself with GNUplot (yes, I have done so) and you'll see that the first dip began in December 2000 just after the elections, with the downswing as W took power in January, and the official recession starting in March.

yes, the recession started while Clinton was still in office

If you're going to lie, you might at least attempt a slightly convincing lie. The NBER web site has a nice summary of the official government figures showing when the recession began. It began in March 2001. If you don't believe that page, download the original data and graph it yourself with GNUplot (yes, I have done so) and you'll see that the first dip began in December 2000 just after the elections, with the downswing as W took power in January, and the official recession starting in March.

Shred is only for the real paranoid. Recovering overwritten data from a magnetic medium is theoretically possible, but there is no evidence that anyone actually succeeded in doing that in a practical situation. It would require a scanning-tunneling microscope (about $100,000) and the bitrate would (my guess) be in the kbit/s range, so recovering a 40 GB harddisk would take about 1 year, assuming 10 kbit/sec. With this,

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1048576

cat /dev/zero > /dev/hdb

HOWEVER the OFFICIAL definition of a recession that it starts whenever the NBER says it does... Unfortunately, they usually don't get around to it until months after the fact.

I do blame Clinton for the recession which began during his presidency -- and I would credit him had he managed to turn it around. But he didn't, and Bush did, so Bush deserves the credit for turning it around.

But other than that, your chronology falls flat -- eight months (the period from the economy's peak some time in July 1990 until consistent growth began again in March of 1991) is not three quarters, even if it does begin on a quarter boundary, and in any case you're counting the entire period of slowing, rather than the period of negative real GDP growth.

Also, you are aware that the NBER is a private think tank, and not an official measure of anything, right? And that this fact, combined with their reticence about revealing who pays their budget makes it particularly interesting that they use a definition of `recession' so different from that in the dictionary?

So again, your average is holding at one gaffe per post of yours -- do you really want to keep this up?

Clinton cannot be credited for the economic growth of the nineties since it began before he was president.

Ha. You would be blaming Clinton for any recession that had occured during his presidency, would you not?

The economy was already turning sour when Clinton was in office. However, the liberal media spin constantly blames the GOP. Funny. George W. wasn't even in office (or elected, for that matter) before the economy went south.

Bullshit. Check the NBER web site. The business cycle peaked--that is, the economy went from growth to recession--in March 2001. Quote:

The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology

So Bush had been chosen (not elected) for over a year before the recession began. Spin that one, FOX-boy.

Hey, didya know that every single Republican president this century has presided over a recession in his first term? Check the data if you don't believe me. But hey, as Bill Hicks would have put it, there is absolutely no connection between giving Republicans final say in signing budgets into law, and having a recession... and you'd be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise.

The economy was already turning sour when Clinton was in office. However, the liberal media spin constantly blames the GOP. Funny. George W. wasn't even in office (or elected, for that matter) before the economy went south.

Bullshit. Check the NBER web site. The business cycle peaked--that is, the economy went from growth to recession--in March 2001. Quote:

The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology

So Bush had been chosen (not elected) for over a year before the recession began. Spin that one, FOX-boy.

Hey, didya know that every single Republican president this century has presided over a recession in his first term? Check the data if you don't believe me. But hey, as Bill Hicks would have put it, there is absolutely no connection between giving Republicans final say in signing budgets into law, and having a recession... and you'd be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise.

Murran is a publicity genius. But the Bell Curve is full of shit. The National Longitudinal Study of Youth was used for the most of the regression analysis in the Bell Curve. The youth in the study did indeed take the Armed Forces Qualifying Test. Where you are wrong is that the AFQT scores vary widely over education levels. Herrnstein and Murray LIED about the relationship between education and scores on the test. Anyway for a thorough debunking of the bogus Bell Curve science read this

At no point in recorded history has "fear of punishment" proven an effective mechanism for encouraging public order.

This is not true at all. There is evidence that people, even professional criminals, respond rationally to dis-incentives like increased penalties. In the case of traffic offenses the evidence is rock solid. Increasing fines and other penalties translates very directly into better compliance with the law.

Of course people also respond rationally to incentives. When the relative benefits of crime are huge (as with poor people selling drugs today, or poor people stealing food to survive in the past) then people will still commit crimes. Even more importantly, when the risk of getting caught is small then people will discount the penalties.

For most crimes a combination of severe penalties, and a reasonable chance of getting caught, will deter pretty much anyone from commiting them (except people who are actually nuts, or extemely dim-witted).

The economy grew at 4% last quarter [economagic.com]. You do realize the '01 recesion was the shortest in 20 years right?

Narrow your parameters enough and you can get any results you like. Based on the stock market performance over the past week, your 4% growth will probably be reversed by this quarter. Lies, damned lies, and quarterly reports.

By the way, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it is too soon to call the recession "over". The US still has a 6% unemployment rate (an 8 year high). Yes, this is low compared to the 1982 high of 10.8 (whilst R. Reagan (R) was president), and is less than the 7.8% in 1990-1991 (whilst G. Bush Sr. (R) was president), but it hasn't changed significantly since Decemeber 2001.

The absolute size of the defecit isn't important, it's the size of the defecit relative to the size of the economy.

While I can understand your point of view, I disagree. A high debt load is a liability, and is a risk when things like recessions and depressions occur. The size of the deficit affects interest rates and the performance of Wall Street. The national debt is 6.3 trillion dollars. We've spent 118 billion dollars in interest payments on that debt since October 2002. That interest is paid out of taxes. You may be comfortable living with a high debt load, but I'm not, and I don't much appreciate having to pay for poor policy decisions by the current administration.

Actually they are letting them keep more of their own money.

... which results in everybody else having to shoulder more of that budget deficit.

Look, there's a simple, and accurate, analogy: you owe $100 to a bank, and your payments are not even sufficient to pay the monthly interest on that amount, so the amount keeps increasing. Rather than try to pay off the debt, you've decided on a plan of action that will reduce your spending on health insurance, increase your leasure spending, and buy more handguns. Oh, and you've decided to pick a fight with your neighbor because you think he might be planning to pick a fight with you, and you're hemoraging money to support that.

Deplete it of what? And what will be the benefit of a larger supply of oil?

Er... about $9 billion dollars, per month to support the war effort. That's a conservative estimate, and doesn't include the current costs of proparations for the war, which are in the hundreds of millions. The estimates for a total cost for the war are from $50 billion (low, conservative estimate) to $300 billion (high, liberal estimate). The reality is probably around $100 billion. Surely, a drop in the bucket for our current $6 trillion budget deficit.

For lower gas prices.

Jesus.

SGI gave us their journaling file system. Sun gave us Staroffice. IBM has given a laundry list, but I'm drawing a blank for specifics. There was an announcement on /. yesterday about a ``christmas gift'' from IBM, but they've done a lot more than that.

Each of these are doing that for only one reason: that intellectual ``property'' has more value to them if they share it. IBM sells services. They can't make much money servicing Microsoft's software, so they popularize things like Linux. THey also sell hardware, and if making the OS cheaper helps them to sell their high-profit-margin servers, they'd be fools not to do anything which makes that OS cheaper. Sun opened Staroffice for exactly that reason. I'm sure that SGI had a similar rational.

There is also netscape/mozilla. They just needed someone else to do the development that they no longer had the resources to do alone. Opening their code let them do that without selling the whole company.

If a company opens code that they couldn't sell anyway, they get at least as many competent developers working on it, at the same cost. They get at least as much revenue. There will be at least as much demand for support contracts. Others will be able to bid on those support contracts, but a fraction of something is bigger than all of nothing ...

This phenomenon has gone on long enough that academics are begining to try to explain it. Learner and Tyrole have a paper out, this isn't academic, but is accessible, this looks interesting, but I haven't done more than glance at it.

...because I think that this inattention to detail is simply a human thing -- people everywhere are lazy.

When a law professor submits an article to a law review, it's (with a few exceptions) been peer-reviewed already for substance, but not form. The peer-review process is entirely informal in these cases -- either the prof workshops the article at relevant workshops at different law schools, or he/she posts the article on a peer-review website like NBER. Anyway, if the article is accepted, the very first step of editing involves the staff of the law review sitting down and painstakingly checking every single cite and its proposition (often called a cite check or tech check) to make sure the CITES are correct in form AND in substance. (Usually this is viewed as "grunt" work, but it's certainly not -- as the posted article implies, the cites are one of the most important things about an article!)

As a former law review member, I can tell you that law profs are just as susceptible to lazy behavior as anyone. The main reasons for incorrect cites I think are these: 1) profs read the articles a long time ago, and have been citing them ever since, but have forgotten the subtleties of the articles' arguments but think they still remember; and 2) profs have other profs as friends, and hear about those friends' articles and then cite them because, well, they're friends.

Misciting articles happens all the time. Don't think that peer-review will catch all those kinds of errors -- I'd hope that the science journals have a process for checking the accuracy of cites.

Someone addresses the H1B Problem More data on the H1B problem Proof that the NSF caused the H1B Mess

Plus the flooding of H1b Visa Workers and the layoff of the Dotcom workers caused a 25% unemployment of IT Workers. Making IT workers "A dime a dozen" in the eyes of managers. People who used to earn $60,000USD to $90,000USD a year now have to compete for $20,000USD to $40,000USD a year jobs in the IT market that require more skills and education than their former jobs did. If their college degree is ten years old, they are rejected because the knowledge they learned is now obsolite (unless they are COBOL programmers or something that doesn't expire that quickly). My degree is now ten years old, and I either have to go back to college and get a new one, or hope that my AAS will get me a job somewhere.

Plus managers have always discriminated against IT workers, calling us all sorts of names, working us 60 hours or more a week at no extra pay, trying to get us to write code faster but not understanding than when code is slammed out at those speeds that it isn't as reliable.

That an Microsoft changing everything every three years doesn't help. Why it is enough to turn a developer to Linux and C++ with a bit of Java and Perl. ;)

Economic analysis of open source (such as this one and this one) come to the conclusion that open source software is often a loss-leader for individuals to advance their careers, or for corporations to sell support, hardware (e.g. VA Linux), hard copies (Red Hat), or books.

I think that we do also need to keep in mind that by significantly reducing the price-of-entry of computers and servers, open source expands the number of people and companies using computers and the Internet, which itself is often a return on the time investment, and drives plenty of for-profit business.

Jason Kau writes " is a working paper on the economics of open source software from the Nation Bureau of Economic Research entitled "The Simple Economics of Open Source". Focuses primarily on Apache, Perl, and Sendmail but mentions Linux, Debian, VA Linux, etc. It's a 40 page PDF document. Some background in Economics would probably be helpful. " something you should