Sony-BMG doesn't produce content, it owns content others produce. It is a parasite.
If Sony-BMG doesn't produce content, then neither do Microsoft or Adobe. You said yourself that the record companies treat music made under their label as "works for hire", much the same as Microsoft treats code produced by their programmers. Book publishers, on the other hand, don't. The publishing industry evolved hundreds of years earlier than the recording and software industries, under a completely different legal and social system. Anyway, the music industry doesn't produce music, but sales. For that you need: an image, buzz, airplay, record store shelf space, marketing, and way, way back, in very last place, the actual music.
And 99% of content owners (the indies) choose to let their work be freely shared. Only the RIAA bands, a minority, choose not to.
Right now, they get that option. If you, or anyone else, doesn't like major label music, disagrees with their harassing legal tactics, or thinks that music is overpriced, you don't have to buy any. As you said, there is a huge amount of music out there for free. Artists are also free to sign with a major label, or not. If the free model truly works for the artists, the major labels will wither away and die simply from lack of new talent as they are drawn to the indies. Right now, most popular music is produced under RIAA labels. The people have spoken. But that does not diminish your right to enjoy any type of music you want.
What I really can't stand, and I haven't heard this from you, is the moralistic argument that just because the RIAA is evil, its okay to pirate music. There are plenty of options, as you have pointed out.
You said they were ESTABLISHED for that purpose. here, have a bite of crow.
You're right. But I don't think that diminishes the argument that one of their primary purposes now is copyright protection.
Privacy, as we have experienced in the last hundred years, is on its way out anyway. The sheer volume, immortality, and interconnection of, even publicly available, datasets inadvertently reveal information most of us would rather keep private. Much like how most people don't have a problem with beat cops regularly patrolling an area, but feel threatened by cameras monitoring, recording, analyzing, and storing information about the same public area.
That said, its here to stay. The data's here as long as we use credit cards for most purchases, use I-Pass(or similar) toll paying systems, carry GPS enabled cell phones, and expect the police to protect us from 100% of terrorist and criminal bogeymen. We might as well get some private research done, rather than leave it all to the government and big business.
care to explain why Cory Doctorow's Little Brother sells well despite being on the internet?
Because I can't make a paper book at my house, for pennies. To most people, a digital copy of a book is of less value than the real thing; while a mp3 is, arguably, more valuable than a CD. The portability and flexibility can't be beat. Kudos to Cory Doctorow for using an innovative promotional model to market his book. But, I think music is a horse of a different color. There just isn't enough value-added for music to make the kosher download or CD attractive versus the free one.
Copyright law doen't protect the musicians like it protects GPL programmers, it protects the GPL while not protecting the RIAA musician whatever; musicians' labor is "works for hire" under US copyright law...
I specifically didn't use the term "musician" when referring to the constituency of the RIAA. I used the term "content producer". The record labels, for better or worse, are the *producers* of the music, the artists themselves are merely employees(read: bitches) of the record labels. The big record labels, through the RIAA, are trying to protect their copyrights. The FSF does much the same for GPL'd code, whose copyright they control.
Most "content producers" WANT their work shared.
And right now, under current law, the copyright holder gets to choose whether or not to make their work freely available to all. No one is stopping indie bands from doing whatever they want with their music. No one is forcing bands to sign with the major labels. And, under the law, they are entitled to restrict the reproduction of their music however they see fit.
And BTW, the RIAA wan't established "to protect their rights". It was established to standardize records' equalization.
That's true, but doesn't change the fact that right now they are acting on the behalf of the labels to protect their copyrights.
My main point was: the laws that allow content producers to control the terms under which they can be copied, protect the record labels as well as GPL programmers.
PS. None of this should be construed as an endorsement of the RIAA's tactics or methods. They are a reprehensible organization, which represents a business model that is, rightly, dieing. But, right now with the state of the law as it exists today, they have the right to protect their copyrights. Unless someone wants to frame the issue of piracy as some form of civil disobedience, the right way to go about changing the situation is to get the law changed.
If I'm spewing out copies of music, movies, or software, it's because the writers WANTED it to be "spewed out", like most file sharers.
If content producers WANTED their content freely distributed to anyone and everyone with no restrictions, they wouldn't band together into associations like the RIAA, MPAA or FSF to protect their rights. Yes, the tactics of the RIAA in particular are reprehensible and ill-conceived. Yes, they will never be able to put the P2P genii back in the bottle. But, for now, that's the way the system works.
The laws that protect Metallica are the ones that also protect GPL'd software.
Why not scrap the system and use the money we are wasting to put an armed air marshal or two on every flight? I don't think box-cutters are going to be particularly effective against firearms....
I would love that. Still have to have bomb scanners though. Bomb > gun. And you can hide a bomb almost anywhere, so you've got to have metal detectors and shoe removal. Or you could hide the bomb in personal electronics, got to check those...
cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that wonderful piece of technology known as the polygraph before.....
Nobody said it had to be perfect. It just has to be more useful than the methods they currently employ. This only has to be more accurate then the current practice. The current security is slow, stupid and irrational. Honestly, this doesn't sound that much better. But, unless we totally scrap the system and go back to the 1960's security measures (not freaking likely given the level of politician and media inspired fear), I'll settle for a system that results in less hassle when I fly.
Homeowners don't supplement their income with credit. The loan represents a liability for the borrower, and an asset for the lender. The borrower may also incur an expense in the form of interest payments, which may be considered income by the lender.
That's how I do my books, anyway. If I'm wrong someone please correct me. I'll go to the bank right now and "supplement" my income:)
You're not wrong, you're just in the minority. Millions of people in the US use their lines of credit, home-equity or consumer credit cards, as a supplement to their income. They use it to buy things they cannot afford on income alone and just *don't think* about how they will repay it. Sadly, a significant portion of US consumption is paid for with ill-considered borrowing.
The housing bubble didn't help matters any. Skyrocketing housing prices gave the owners the equity in the first place, and continued appreciation allowed them to sell and make it someone else's problem. Re-mortgaging a house used to be something only done when in dire financial straights. People worked their whole lives to own their houses free and clear. It's amazing how quickly people started using their house like a credit card.
If the dollar was backed by gold, we would not NEED "faith" in America or the American economy.
Right. The value of the dollar would then be backed by the limited and fairly stable supply of gold. They're not making any more of it. And that would work fine if the economy was a static and unchanging system. Price levels would remain constant.
But, the economy is not static or unchanging. New products are constantly coming to market, increasing our standard of living, and generally making life more pleasant and productive. Each year there are more and more new products. Just look at the average kitchen today versus one from the 1960's.
The problem with a static money supply is that the same amount of dollars are chasing an ever increasing supply of goods. Econ 101 says, through supply and demand, that the price of all those goods (including stocks, real-estate and other investments) will fall. So, over time, because of the falling prices of everything, the best investment is to simply hide your gold under your mattress, confident that tomorrow you'll be able to buy more with it than you were today. Deflation
Without that money in circulation, in investments or spent, it becomes impossible for businesses to raise money for future investments, governments collect less tax, and the economy stagnates. The current monetary policy is not the best. But, a strict gold standard would be even worse.
I wasn't endorsing the gold standard as a practical system of money. I was only pointing out that the intrinsic value of gold is not the main argument of gold-bugs. Rather, its immunity to manipulation by politicians seems to be the most often heard argument in its favor.
There's no such thing as safe when you're dealing with the market. You may beat the trend by diversifying, but it's far from "safe." If you wanted to be safe, you'd be purchasing real estate and other tangible assets as well.
You're right. The S&P 500 is only "safe" relative to owning individual stocks, and not when compared to other asset classes. But the perception of real-estate as "safe" is, in part, what lead to the current crisis. I wouldn't advise any individual investor to speculate on stocks with 30 to 1 or greater leverage. But that's exactly what people did when investing in real-estate.
Gold only has the value that other people think it has.
While that is true, the real argument for the gold standard is its fairly constant and predictably increasing supply. All the gold that will ever exist on earth is already here, and we find a little more every year. The main difference is that the government can't just make more gold when politically expedient, like they can with paper money. However, that's also its largest negative according to most economists. The current bailouts would be impossible with gold coins.
You haven't actually lost anything until you decide to sell at the lower value. The market will come back, it always does.
That's great, unless I'm 65 and expected to live on the money I get from selling my house, moving to an apartment, and liquidating my investments. The stock market, had I got in 10 years ago and invested in a safe S&P 500 index fund, has done absolutely nothing. Zero return in ten years. Ten years is pretty close to "long term" in my book.
"day traders" are responsible for all the major flux in the markets, and at all times. they should be put to the wall
Day traders are responsible for the unprecedented and unequaled liquidity in the US stock markets. They are the reason you can *always* sell or buy a stock. AIG and other bailout recipients have problems because they held onto assets, like CDS, that now are completely illiquid. They can't sell at any price. What they need is a CDS market filled with day traders who are willing to speculate on those assets and are willing to buy them at *some* price. Without speculating day traders, there is no market for you "long term" investors.
A long-standing rule of thumb for "recession" is that it is defined as contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters (six months).
That definition worked in the past, when GDP more or less equaled national income. But today, when a significant portion of retirement income comes directly from capital gains in the stock market through 401(k)s, when many homeowners have supplemented their income through home-equity lines of credit, and when almost everyone carries significant balances on credit cards, the GDP decline definition of a recession is not sufficient. Even though most people are still at the same job, making the same pay (contributing the same amount to GDP), they most certainly do not have the same amount of money. Its more useful to think of the GDP decline as less of a definition, but more as a symptom.
Definitions can change based on changing circumstances. Seventy years ago, a baseball bat was defined as a club made out of wood with certain characteristics. Times changed, and so has the definition. What has happened in our economy in the last year may not have been two straight quarters of GDP decline, but the effect on the average American may be the same.
Any decent brick and mortar casino will have an auto shuffler. Even the local dog tracks here in FL that run card games use them.
Having been a frequent visitor to casinos in the recent past, I can say that the use of auto-shufflers varies widely depending on the casino, or even different tables in the same casino. Some players, especially blackjack players, have a superstition that the auto-shuffler is somehow "rigging" the game to give the house a bigger advantage. I have seen casinos with auto-shufflers at every table hand shuffling cards because the reaction from players had been so negative.
I have to say that this discovery applies to blackjack much more than poker, or any other card game. Multi-deck blackjack, as is played at most tables in most casinos in the USA, is played with all players' cards face up. After each hand, the dealer collects the cards from each player in exactly the same way and places them in the discard pile. So, if the dealer is collecting the cards in the casino-regulated fashion, after the shoe has been dealt down to the cut-card the exact composition of the discard pile is known, with the exception of the undealt cards behind the cut-card.
Compare this to poker where the majority of the cards are never dealt, and of those that are, more than half are discarded before being turned face up for all to see. The composition of the unshuffled cards are more accurately known in blackjack, even when played with 6 decks.
Add to this that hand-shuffled, multi-deck blackjack cards are not shuffled very well at all. The large stack of cards is broken down into smaller piles which are then shuffled together in a predefined, casino-standard way, which does not add nearly as much randomness as a standard shuffle (which is infeasible with that many cards).
The bottom line is that with a computer, a few matrices, and a good dealer(who follows all of the casino shuffling and card collecting rules), the cards coming out of the shoe can be predicted with a suprisingly large amount of accuracy.
Well yes, it is in their interest to make sure the markets are good. But what if they decide it isn't in their interest? Then what? That's when one hundred million urban Chinese men, only a generation removed from the rice paddy, who got used to their cell phones, DVD players and relatively high standard of living, decide that returning to the country farm, when the factory they used to work at closes, isn't what they would like to do. Without those factories that manufacture goods for export, there will be an awful lot of pissed off young men who have an issue with the current Chinese government.
Not to mention that many of those factories are owned by the Chinese military. They might have something to say about the government closing off markets for trade.
They not only already are a superpower, they are more powerful than the US. I don't see how we could possibly hurt them, but they could destroy us. They're not more powerful than the US. We both have a loaded gun pointed at the other in the form of trade. Sure, they could pretty well screw us over economically if they decided to. But there are hundreds of millions of newly urbanized Chinese, who make the toys and electronics that are shipped to the west, who would be very pissed off if the actions of their current government resulted in the loss of their relatively good paying jobs.
I would be surprised if the government of China would throw away the last fifty years of economic progress in their country over something like Tibet or Taiwan. There is a large section of their population who only accept the repressive authoritarianism of their government because of the massive increase in the standard of living. Take that away, and the current leaders will be out on their asses.
We can, and do. But there is nothing in the constitution that could be interpreted to remove states' sovereignty. The constitution was written, and remains, a compact between states and their respective citizenry. The constitution does not grant the states the right to exist; the states grant the federal government the right to exist. We can come up with new ways of interpreting the constitution, or even write a whole new one, but without rewriting each state constitution there is no way to remove their sovereignty.
The states have ceded a lot of authority to the federal government over the past 200 years, especially since the Civil War. Much of that, civil rights for example, has been for the best. But the ability of the states to write and enforce their own laws is what made it possible for this country to grow from 13 colonies to one of the most geographically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Laws that may apply to the dairy farmers in Wisconsin may be counterproductive in a largely urban state like New Jersey.
States rights are still important even after the closing of our western frontier and slower growth today. State governments are more responsive, flexible and approachable than the federal government. Local politics may not be as sexy as the soap opera in Washington, but if you truly want your voice to be heard, local and state is the only way to go.
The states have tremendous untapped power even now, in this age of a strong central government. Washington just got used to pushing whatever they wanted down the states' throats. Even if I thought that REAL ID was a good idea, I still want the states to dust off their boots once in a while, just to keep everyone on their toes.
I've oft heard the argument made that the idea of states' rights makes less sense nowadays when people regularly move to a different state than their own for university, and then perhaps to a different state to work, and then perhaps to yet another state to retire. There are many people who move to Wisconsin to take advantage of their great public University. Then move away to a state, like California or Arizona to work where there are more jobs in their area of expertise. Then they retire to Florida, where they pay no state income tax. It is only because of the states' sovereignty, separate from the Federal Government, that the people in those states can decide for themselves what is important.
States' rights make more sense now than ever before. People are able to move from state to state more easily than in the past. It's a feedback loop. As more retirees move to states like Florida and vote, more retiree friendly legislation gets passed, and more are drawn there as a result. They are happy because they get to live in a state where they have the votes to get what they want. And I'm happy they aren't here driving ten under the speed limit, clogging up the highways where I live. It's win-win.
Just having the source is useless if you can't tinker with it, compile it, and install it yourself. If I had to buy my own $500 computer just to get the privilege of running my own version of an open source app, I probably wouldn't bother. OSS cannot thrive under these conditions. I think it will do just fine.
> There is no other field today where the barriers to entry are so low that almost anyone can make a real contribution.
I suggest you work out a tidy proof of P = NP then. If thats too much trouble, perhaps just finding a polynomial time algorithm for factoring? Of course, a proof that that doesn't exist would work as well. Yes, the two problems are different, and the second should be easier than the first. I didn't mean to imply that every problem in CS was approachable by anyone, but that there are so many things that are unknown in the field that require nothing more than a computer and a bright mind to solve. CS, as a field, is in much the same place now as physics was in the 16-17th centuries. So much was unknown at that time, that all those "experiments" that kids do today in physics class, where the expected result is obvious, hadn't ever been done before and would have resulted in actual, new knowledge.
You think you have a better scheduler algorithm, a more efficient file system, a new fancy sort, a better model for game physics, or a way to win the NetFlix Prize; all you need is a computer, free software, and time. You don't have to get time on the Hubble, gain access to a super-collider, launch a fleet of weather balloons, or finance a deep-sea submersible. The barriers to entry are very low, compared to other sciences.
religious belief is not synonymous with ignorance, nor is it the opposite of knowledge and understanding. I did not mean to imply that it was. Most of the smartest people in history have been religious to one degree or another. I only meant to link ignorance to the religious world-view that has become known as the "God of the Gaps." A few centuries ago, the gaps were far, far larger than they are today. People filled these gaps with supernatural explanations that have since been shown by science to be incorrect.
As the gaps have gotten smaller, more and more people have accepted that just because we don't currently know how something works, it does not mean that it must have a supernatural explanation. What I meant was that the world-view that holds that currently unexplainable physical phenomena have solely supernatural causes has been broadly rejected in favor of scientific explanations.
People with no understanding of the scientific method and no ability to reason like a scientist get to pretend they know something about science. By watching, they do know something more about what we understand of the world around us. That is the best we can do with a medium like TV. Hopefully, they pick up a fact or two, and come to the same realization I do when I watch something like This Old House: "I'm going to leave that to the professionals." I don't watch and then just start knocking down the walls in my house.
The best case scenario is after seeing a show about dinosaurs, space, physics or even wildlife of the savanna, some kid goes down to the library and checks out a book on the topic.
The people who think that the Discovery Channel is the last word in science are the same ones who, without it, would still have no idea what science is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony-BMG doesn't produce content, it owns content others produce. It is a parasite.
If Sony-BMG doesn't produce content, then neither do Microsoft or Adobe. You said yourself that the record companies treat music made under their label as "works for hire", much the same as Microsoft treats code produced by their programmers. Book publishers, on the other hand, don't. The publishing industry evolved hundreds of years earlier than the recording and software industries, under a completely different legal and social system. Anyway, the music industry doesn't produce music, but sales. For that you need: an image, buzz, airplay, record store shelf space, marketing, and way, way back, in very last place, the actual music.
And 99% of content owners (the indies) choose to let their work be freely shared. Only the RIAA bands, a minority, choose not to.
Right now, they get that option. If you, or anyone else, doesn't like major label music, disagrees with their harassing legal tactics, or thinks that music is overpriced, you don't have to buy any. As you said, there is a huge amount of music out there for free. Artists are also free to sign with a major label, or not. If the free model truly works for the artists, the major labels will wither away and die simply from lack of new talent as they are drawn to the indies. Right now, most popular music is produced under RIAA labels. The people have spoken. But that does not diminish your right to enjoy any type of music you want.
What I really can't stand, and I haven't heard this from you, is the moralistic argument that just because the RIAA is evil, its okay to pirate music. There are plenty of options, as you have pointed out.
You said they were ESTABLISHED for that purpose. here, have a bite of crow.
You're right. But I don't think that diminishes the argument that one of their primary purposes now is copyright protection.
One more step to a non private world CHECK
Privacy, as we have experienced in the last hundred years, is on its way out anyway. The sheer volume, immortality, and interconnection of, even publicly available, datasets inadvertently reveal information most of us would rather keep private. Much like how most people don't have a problem with beat cops regularly patrolling an area, but feel threatened by cameras monitoring, recording, analyzing, and storing information about the same public area.
That said, its here to stay. The data's here as long as we use credit cards for most purchases, use I-Pass(or similar) toll paying systems, carry GPS enabled cell phones, and expect the police to protect us from 100% of terrorist and criminal bogeymen. We might as well get some private research done, rather than leave it all to the government and big business.
care to explain why Cory Doctorow's Little Brother sells well despite being on the internet?
Because I can't make a paper book at my house, for pennies. To most people, a digital copy of a book is of less value than the real thing; while a mp3 is, arguably, more valuable than a CD. The portability and flexibility can't be beat. Kudos to Cory Doctorow for using an innovative promotional model to market his book. But, I think music is a horse of a different color. There just isn't enough value-added for music to make the kosher download or CD attractive versus the free one.
Copyright law doen't protect the musicians like it protects GPL programmers, it protects the GPL while not protecting the RIAA musician whatever; musicians' labor is "works for hire" under US copyright law...
I specifically didn't use the term "musician" when referring to the constituency of the RIAA. I used the term "content producer". The record labels, for better or worse, are the *producers* of the music, the artists themselves are merely employees(read: bitches) of the record labels. The big record labels, through the RIAA, are trying to protect their copyrights. The FSF does much the same for GPL'd code, whose copyright they control.
Most "content producers" WANT their work shared.
And right now, under current law, the copyright holder gets to choose whether or not to make their work freely available to all. No one is stopping indie bands from doing whatever they want with their music. No one is forcing bands to sign with the major labels. And, under the law, they are entitled to restrict the reproduction of their music however they see fit.
And BTW, the RIAA wan't established "to protect their rights". It was established to standardize records' equalization.
That's true, but doesn't change the fact that right now they are acting on the behalf of the labels to protect their copyrights.
My main point was: the laws that allow content producers to control the terms under which they can be copied, protect the record labels as well as GPL programmers.
PS. None of this should be construed as an endorsement of the RIAA's tactics or methods. They are a reprehensible organization, which represents a business model that is, rightly, dieing. But, right now with the state of the law as it exists today, they have the right to protect their copyrights. Unless someone wants to frame the issue of piracy as some form of civil disobedience, the right way to go about changing the situation is to get the law changed.
If I'm spewing out copies of music, movies, or software, it's because the writers WANTED it to be "spewed out", like most file sharers.
If content producers WANTED their content freely distributed to anyone and everyone with no restrictions, they wouldn't band together into associations like the RIAA, MPAA or FSF to protect their rights. Yes, the tactics of the RIAA in particular are reprehensible and ill-conceived. Yes, they will never be able to put the P2P genii back in the bottle. But, for now, that's the way the system works.
The laws that protect Metallica are the ones that also protect GPL'd software.
Why not scrap the system and use the money we are wasting to put an armed air marshal or two on every flight? I don't think box-cutters are going to be particularly effective against firearms....
I would love that. Still have to have bomb scanners though. Bomb > gun. And you can hide a bomb almost anywhere, so you've got to have metal detectors and shoe removal. Or you could hide the bomb in personal electronics, got to check those...
And we're right back where we started. Damn.
cuz nobody has EVER been able to fool that wonderful piece of technology known as the polygraph before.....
Nobody said it had to be perfect. It just has to be more useful than the methods they currently employ. This only has to be more accurate then the current practice. The current security is slow, stupid and irrational. Honestly, this doesn't sound that much better. But, unless we totally scrap the system and go back to the 1960's security measures (not freaking likely given the level of politician and media inspired fear), I'll settle for a system that results in less hassle when I fly.
Homeowners don't supplement their income with credit. The loan represents a liability for the borrower, and an asset for the lender. The borrower may also incur an expense in the form of interest payments, which may be considered income by the lender.
That's how I do my books, anyway. If I'm wrong someone please correct me. I'll go to the bank right now and "supplement" my income:)
You're not wrong, you're just in the minority. Millions of people in the US use their lines of credit, home-equity or consumer credit cards, as a supplement to their income. They use it to buy things they cannot afford on income alone and just *don't think* about how they will repay it. Sadly, a significant portion of US consumption is paid for with ill-considered borrowing.
The housing bubble didn't help matters any. Skyrocketing housing prices gave the owners the equity in the first place, and continued appreciation allowed them to sell and make it someone else's problem. Re-mortgaging a house used to be something only done when in dire financial straights. People worked their whole lives to own their houses free and clear. It's amazing how quickly people started using their house like a credit card.
If the dollar was backed by gold, we would not NEED "faith" in America or the American economy.
Right. The value of the dollar would then be backed by the limited and fairly stable supply of gold. They're not making any more of it. And that would work fine if the economy was a static and unchanging system. Price levels would remain constant.
But, the economy is not static or unchanging. New products are constantly coming to market, increasing our standard of living, and generally making life more pleasant and productive. Each year there are more and more new products. Just look at the average kitchen today versus one from the 1960's.
The problem with a static money supply is that the same amount of dollars are chasing an ever increasing supply of goods. Econ 101 says, through supply and demand, that the price of all those goods (including stocks, real-estate and other investments) will fall. So, over time, because of the falling prices of everything, the best investment is to simply hide your gold under your mattress, confident that tomorrow you'll be able to buy more with it than you were today. Deflation
Without that money in circulation, in investments or spent, it becomes impossible for businesses to raise money for future investments, governments collect less tax, and the economy stagnates. The current monetary policy is not the best. But, a strict gold standard would be even worse.
I wasn't endorsing the gold standard as a practical system of money. I was only pointing out that the intrinsic value of gold is not the main argument of gold-bugs. Rather, its immunity to manipulation by politicians seems to be the most often heard argument in its favor.
There's no such thing as safe when you're dealing with the market. You may beat the trend by diversifying, but it's far from "safe." If you wanted to be safe, you'd be purchasing real estate and other tangible assets as well.
You're right. The S&P 500 is only "safe" relative to owning individual stocks, and not when compared to other asset classes. But the perception of real-estate as "safe" is, in part, what lead to the current crisis. I wouldn't advise any individual investor to speculate on stocks with 30 to 1 or greater leverage. But that's exactly what people did when investing in real-estate.
Gold only has the value that other people think it has.
While that is true, the real argument for the gold standard is its fairly constant and predictably increasing supply. All the gold that will ever exist on earth is already here, and we find a little more every year. The main difference is that the government can't just make more gold when politically expedient, like they can with paper money. However, that's also its largest negative according to most economists. The current bailouts would be impossible with gold coins.
You haven't actually lost anything until you decide to sell at the lower value. The market will come back, it always does.
That's great, unless I'm 65 and expected to live on the money I get from selling my house, moving to an apartment, and liquidating my investments. The stock market, had I got in 10 years ago and invested in a safe S&P 500 index fund, has done absolutely nothing. Zero return in ten years. Ten years is pretty close to "long term" in my book.
"day traders" are responsible for all the major flux in the markets, and at all times. they should be put to the wall
Day traders are responsible for the unprecedented and unequaled liquidity in the US stock markets. They are the reason you can *always* sell or buy a stock. AIG and other bailout recipients have problems because they held onto assets, like CDS, that now are completely illiquid. They can't sell at any price. What they need is a CDS market filled with day traders who are willing to speculate on those assets and are willing to buy them at *some* price. Without speculating day traders, there is no market for you "long term" investors.
A long-standing rule of thumb for "recession" is that it is defined as contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters (six months).
That definition worked in the past, when GDP more or less equaled national income. But today, when a significant portion of retirement income comes directly from capital gains in the stock market through 401(k)s, when many homeowners have supplemented their income through home-equity lines of credit, and when almost everyone carries significant balances on credit cards, the GDP decline definition of a recession is not sufficient. Even though most people are still at the same job, making the same pay (contributing the same amount to GDP), they most certainly do not have the same amount of money. Its more useful to think of the GDP decline as less of a definition, but more as a symptom.
Definitions can change based on changing circumstances. Seventy years ago, a baseball bat was defined as a club made out of wood with certain characteristics. Times changed, and so has the definition. What has happened in our economy in the last year may not have been two straight quarters of GDP decline, but the effect on the average American may be the same.
Any decent brick and mortar casino will have an auto shuffler. Even the local dog tracks here in FL that run card games use them.
Having been a frequent visitor to casinos in the recent past, I can say that the use of auto-shufflers varies widely depending on the casino, or even different tables in the same casino. Some players, especially blackjack players, have a superstition that the auto-shuffler is somehow "rigging" the game to give the house a bigger advantage. I have seen casinos with auto-shufflers at every table hand shuffling cards because the reaction from players had been so negative.
I have to say that this discovery applies to blackjack much more than poker, or any other card game. Multi-deck blackjack, as is played at most tables in most casinos in the USA, is played with all players' cards face up. After each hand, the dealer collects the cards from each player in exactly the same way and places them in the discard pile. So, if the dealer is collecting the cards in the casino-regulated fashion, after the shoe has been dealt down to the cut-card the exact composition of the discard pile is known, with the exception of the undealt cards behind the cut-card.
Compare this to poker where the majority of the cards are never dealt, and of those that are, more than half are discarded before being turned face up for all to see. The composition of the unshuffled cards are more accurately known in blackjack, even when played with 6 decks.
Add to this that hand-shuffled, multi-deck blackjack cards are not shuffled very well at all. The large stack of cards is broken down into smaller piles which are then shuffled together in a predefined, casino-standard way, which does not add nearly as much randomness as a standard shuffle (which is infeasible with that many cards).
The bottom line is that with a computer, a few matrices, and a good dealer(who follows all of the casino shuffling and card collecting rules), the cards coming out of the shoe can be predicted with a suprisingly large amount of accuracy.
Must be the Germans invading it. Twice.
Don't forget about the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. You know, the one the Germans actually won.
Not to mention that many of those factories are owned by the Chinese military. They might have something to say about the government closing off markets for trade.
I would be surprised if the government of China would throw away the last fifty years of economic progress in their country over something like Tibet or Taiwan. There is a large section of their population who only accept the repressive authoritarianism of their government because of the massive increase in the standard of living. Take that away, and the current leaders will be out on their asses.
We can, and do. But there is nothing in the constitution that could be interpreted to remove states' sovereignty. The constitution was written, and remains, a compact between states and their respective citizenry. The constitution does not grant the states the right to exist; the states grant the federal government the right to exist. We can come up with new ways of interpreting the constitution, or even write a whole new one, but without rewriting each state constitution there is no way to remove their sovereignty.
The states have ceded a lot of authority to the federal government over the past 200 years, especially since the Civil War. Much of that, civil rights for example, has been for the best. But the ability of the states to write and enforce their own laws is what made it possible for this country to grow from 13 colonies to one of the most geographically and culturally diverse countries in the world. Laws that may apply to the dairy farmers in Wisconsin may be counterproductive in a largely urban state like New Jersey.
States rights are still important even after the closing of our western frontier and slower growth today. State governments are more responsive, flexible and approachable than the federal government. Local politics may not be as sexy as the soap opera in Washington, but if you truly want your voice to be heard, local and state is the only way to go.
The states have tremendous untapped power even now, in this age of a strong central government. Washington just got used to pushing whatever they wanted down the states' throats. Even if I thought that REAL ID was a good idea, I still want the states to dust off their boots once in a while, just to keep everyone on their toes.
States' rights make more sense now than ever before. People are able to move from state to state more easily than in the past. It's a feedback loop. As more retirees move to states like Florida and vote, more retiree friendly legislation gets passed, and more are drawn there as a result. They are happy because they get to live in a state where they have the votes to get what they want. And I'm happy they aren't here driving ten under the speed limit, clogging up the highways where I live. It's win-win.
I wish states would step up and grow a pair more often. It's about time the states remembered their place in our system of checks and balances.
I suggest you work out a tidy proof of P = NP then. If thats too much trouble, perhaps just finding a polynomial time algorithm for factoring? Of course, a proof that that doesn't exist would work as well. Yes, the two problems are different, and the second should be easier than the first. I didn't mean to imply that every problem in CS was approachable by anyone, but that there are so many things that are unknown in the field that require nothing more than a computer and a bright mind to solve. CS, as a field, is in much the same place now as physics was in the 16-17th centuries. So much was unknown at that time, that all those "experiments" that kids do today in physics class, where the expected result is obvious, hadn't ever been done before and would have resulted in actual, new knowledge.
You think you have a better scheduler algorithm, a more efficient file system, a new fancy sort, a better model for game physics, or a way to win the NetFlix Prize; all you need is a computer, free software, and time. You don't have to get time on the Hubble, gain access to a super-collider, launch a fleet of weather balloons, or finance a deep-sea submersible. The barriers to entry are very low, compared to other sciences.
As the gaps have gotten smaller, more and more people have accepted that just because we don't currently know how something works, it does not mean that it must have a supernatural explanation. What I meant was that the world-view that holds that currently unexplainable physical phenomena have solely supernatural causes has been broadly rejected in favor of scientific explanations.
The best case scenario is after seeing a show about dinosaurs, space, physics or even wildlife of the savanna, some kid goes down to the library and checks out a book on the topic.
The people who think that the Discovery Channel is the last word in science are the same ones who, without it, would still have no idea what science is all about.