Except that the loans eventually get paid back. Those that don't are made up in other loans' fees and interest. If all loans were paid back at once, there'd be exactly the same amount of value (cash & investments, adjusted for inflation) on hand to pay out to depositors as they deposited in the first place, more or less.
Economics is mostly a lot of connected zero-sum games. For every loan, a person gets an equal amount of cash and debt. The fact that there's a way to increase the magnitude of the numbers involved does not change their sum. All accounts eventually add up to zero.
Those who try to game the system to get more cash end up screwing over others by producing extra debt, in the form of higher interest rates and more fees. This is why several banks worldwide collapsed recently: Too many risky loans defaulted, leaving the banks without enough cash. The money didn't just disappear. It had gone to many different places, like the manufacturer of the big-screen TV in the foreclosed home. The cash went to other people, but the banks were left with the debt. The fees and interest rates weren't high enough to gather the necessary cash, so the banks failed their commitments.
Sure, it's a big shock to see that banks can seemingly produce cash at will, but they're also producing an equal amount of debt. A Ponzi scheme is only one-way, with no intent of ever returning the money that was deposited. It exists purely to push money toward the top of the pyramid, and thus is not a zero-sum game in itself. It is not a fair commercial exchange. It is theft. Fractional banking is fair, so long as the majority of the people involved pay back their debts.
See? Somebody didn't like what I said, and now I'm marked as flamebait! Frankly, I find that offensive, and I'm offended. Now anybody who reads that post will be biased against the wit, and just assume I'm being a jackass. If we could discuss this out of the sight of those pesky mods, we could converse as equals.
Diplomatic discussions are intended to have private communications. Two parties can talk without worrying about offending or angering some touchy third party.
Because everybody loves examples, here's a hypothetical one:
A stronger country, Aggressiva, moves some missiles around to target more of its neighbor, Weakland. Weakland's diplomats go talk to another strong country, Strongland. Regardless of what actually was discussed, Aggressiva sees this, publicly claims they are allying against it, and declares war. Other nations see Weakland as trying to pick fights, and Weakland becomes the enemy.
If Weakland can talk to Strongland in private, then there's time to gather allies, coordinate intelligence, and understand what's actually going on. Perhaps Aggressiva's other neighbor has made a deal to move missiles away from its own borders. Perhaps they aren't actually missiles. Perhaps Aggressiva's been bullying other countries. More information, shared selectively, eventually gets a more complete picture with minimal risk.
By releasing these documents, Wikileaks has thrown a wrench in the works. Now who can Weakland trust? Anything they say might be released, so they can't safely talk about Aggressiva's actions. The diplomatic process breaks down, and devolves to a series of public press releases, which don't actually reflect any truth for fear of offending someone powerful.
If I may be allowed to veer off on a tangent, I invite you to consider the following: Instead of Weakland, we have Employee. Instead of Strongland, we have Wikileaks. Instead of Aggressiva and its missiles, we have Boss and his Termination Notice.
The Employee feels that something Boss is doing is wrong, so turns to Wikileaks for help. Boss sees this, and sends off the Termination Notice.
I find it terribly hypocritical that Wikileaks feels duty-bound to reveal private communications, when secrecy is why Wikileaks works in the first place. How many documents would Wikileaks even have if submitters' names were also leaked with them?
Worse, they're warning people away from taking things out of context! How are these candidates supposed to make decisions based on incomplete information, when they're not allowed to get biased information from only a few sources?
Now these folks will actually have to get real experience with the people they deal with, before they can judge!
Probably something along the lines of a number of botnets, zombies, secret 0-days vulnerabilities, etc.
It's pretty easy to picture governments building up large botnets of their own machines, ready to tear down any site they want. Limits on that would be good, I think.
Any different approach would be patentable. Perhaps they've solved the "fragile and not very responsive" problem. Perhaps they've designed a system that works at higher resolutions.
No patent is 100% original, nor should such a qualification be necessary. As Isaac Newton supposedly said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Let's hope this actually becomes a viable product.
The obvious market I see is a display that is actually usable for the blind. A picture's worth a thousand words, and probably more than a thousand broken and disorganized automatically-read words.
The biggest problem I've had with Arch is that changes are only tested on a few common packages before being sent out. If you use an obscure package routinely, it might not be tested decently with any given change, especially to libraries.
Once a change breaks something, you're left trying to install multiple versions, locking versions, modifying the source, or other such deep magic. Very quickly, the whole system gets to be too big a hassle to deal with.
As I've said before, that's just not how it works in any decent-sized project. You design to meet the needs, then you redesign to meet the new needs, then you redesign yet again to meet the needs that have just come up. Diaspora's first release was (and should have been) to show proof of concept: that something working could be produced. Now they get to redesign to meet security and scalability, and over time they'll redesign to meet other needs. You don't get miracles in the first version.
That's it? When I read "high powered", I was expecting switching 500-amp supplies to banks of flood lights. I wasn't expecting... this.
This is the same stuff that hobbyists and others have been doing for years. Their lights also perform outdoors, in occasional high winds, at extreme temperatures. The only thing that MIGHT be interesting here is the music analysis program, if it's capable of picking up actual musical qualities, rather than just levels of noise.
Landline phones are powered through the phone line itself, so they still (usually) function in a power outage. They only time they don't is when there's some major localized problem, like a tree taking down the utility pole right outside your house. Cordless phones and other fancy devices won't likely work, but a plain telephone will.
I'm curious as to what "real Java app" you're talking about. My company's product is written in a few hundred thousand lines of Java, using a few dozen libraries, and runs perfectly across Windows, OS X, and Linux. There is a grand total of one compatibility issue, where newlines don't behave exactly the same.
Writing portable C++ means having portable libraries, and that's not really the norm. Java libraries are almost always portable out of the box.
So the real problem is that C++ has a very limited capacity to be useful in itself, and needs third-party libraries to do anything interesting, like graphical things.
Then you have to hope that your third-party library works on whatever platforms you're working in, too.
C++ may be portable, but significant programs using it are not.
C++ is every bit as portable as assembly. All you need to know is what parts fail on which platforms, compile 15 different ways, and pray it all works after someone upgrades something.
I actually did read the EULA (one of my abnormal habits), but didn't remember that. As you pointed out, they could still get sued. Perhaps even worse, they can still get a PR nightmare to deal with outside of court, regardless of the EULA. By applying their brand, Google has invested their reputation in keeping Chrome stable and safe, so it gets a bit more trust.
My understanding is that Google's paid licensing fees for H.264, so it's included in Chrome. There may be other similar things added as well, but I don't recall any offhand.
The branding is actually important, too. Chrome effectively has Google's stamp of approval, so you can expect support and stability, which are important for corporate use. If a Chromium bug wipes your company's data, it's your own fault for using unstable software. If Chrome does it, Google's more likely to be liable.
Judging by your username, I'd guess... you studied theology?
Re:I've created an art installation that consists.
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
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· Score: 1
I once saw an art installation that was an almost-functional guillotine. Pull a lever, and the blade would come down, until it hit a hidden stop. It was installed in a public place for a year and, sadly, nobody pulled the lever.
My opinion is that the purpose of art is to make the audience think. Today, we are thinking about what kind of malevolent files could be shared, or what fleeting connections we have with people around us. A hammer and hard surface makes me think about how, now and then, everybody needs warnings about really bad ideas.
The project also includes compilers for many languages, including Python, Ruby, and Perl. Not sure if the class libraries are a part of the project's scope, as they're pretty language-specific.
Does research still need supercomputers, though? If you're writing a program parallelized enough to split across tens of thousands of processing units, why not go with a full cluster, like the vaunted Hadoop or EC2?
I think the time for a single powerful machine is long past. Maintaining the level of interconnection between the nodes is expensive, and we can do better. In the words of Dr. Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." With distributed storage (like HDFS) coupled to the distributed processing (like Hadoop), we can turn those same problems into merely cost-bound problems.
Now, instead of having nicely-organized information including business practices, already-solved problems, and the one vital flaw in the last Widget production batch, you have a million-row database table that's only accessible by a few select folks. Since they take a few months to make a custom report (because they're already so busy), it's easier and faster to go back to the original sources. Now you just have more information, redundantly duplicated.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the loans eventually get paid back. Those that don't are made up in other loans' fees and interest. If all loans were paid back at once, there'd be exactly the same amount of value (cash & investments, adjusted for inflation) on hand to pay out to depositors as they deposited in the first place, more or less.
Economics is mostly a lot of connected zero-sum games. For every loan, a person gets an equal amount of cash and debt. The fact that there's a way to increase the magnitude of the numbers involved does not change their sum. All accounts eventually add up to zero.
Those who try to game the system to get more cash end up screwing over others by producing extra debt, in the form of higher interest rates and more fees. This is why several banks worldwide collapsed recently: Too many risky loans defaulted, leaving the banks without enough cash. The money didn't just disappear. It had gone to many different places, like the manufacturer of the big-screen TV in the foreclosed home. The cash went to other people, but the banks were left with the debt. The fees and interest rates weren't high enough to gather the necessary cash, so the banks failed their commitments.
Sure, it's a big shock to see that banks can seemingly produce cash at will, but they're also producing an equal amount of debt. A Ponzi scheme is only one-way, with no intent of ever returning the money that was deposited. It exists purely to push money toward the top of the pyramid, and thus is not a zero-sum game in itself. It is not a fair commercial exchange. It is theft. Fractional banking is fair, so long as the majority of the people involved pay back their debts.
See? Somebody didn't like what I said, and now I'm marked as flamebait! Frankly, I find that offensive, and I'm offended. Now anybody who reads that post will be biased against the wit, and just assume I'm being a jackass. If we could discuss this out of the sight of those pesky mods, we could converse as equals.
Diplomatic discussions are intended to have private communications. Two parties can talk without worrying about offending or angering some touchy third party.
Because everybody loves examples, here's a hypothetical one:
A stronger country, Aggressiva, moves some missiles around to target more of its neighbor, Weakland. Weakland's diplomats go talk to another strong country, Strongland. Regardless of what actually was discussed, Aggressiva sees this, publicly claims they are allying against it, and declares war. Other nations see Weakland as trying to pick fights, and Weakland becomes the enemy.
If Weakland can talk to Strongland in private, then there's time to gather allies, coordinate intelligence, and understand what's actually going on. Perhaps Aggressiva's other neighbor has made a deal to move missiles away from its own borders. Perhaps they aren't actually missiles. Perhaps Aggressiva's been bullying other countries. More information, shared selectively, eventually gets a more complete picture with minimal risk.
By releasing these documents, Wikileaks has thrown a wrench in the works. Now who can Weakland trust? Anything they say might be released, so they can't safely talk about Aggressiva's actions. The diplomatic process breaks down, and devolves to a series of public press releases, which don't actually reflect any truth for fear of offending someone powerful.
If I may be allowed to veer off on a tangent, I invite you to consider the following: Instead of Weakland, we have Employee. Instead of Strongland, we have Wikileaks. Instead of Aggressiva and its missiles, we have Boss and his Termination Notice.
The Employee feels that something Boss is doing is wrong, so turns to Wikileaks for help. Boss sees this, and sends off the Termination Notice.
I find it terribly hypocritical that Wikileaks feels duty-bound to reveal private communications, when secrecy is why Wikileaks works in the first place. How many documents would Wikileaks even have if submitters' names were also leaked with them?
Worse, they're warning people away from taking things out of context! How are these candidates supposed to make decisions based on incomplete information, when they're not allowed to get biased information from only a few sources?
Now these folks will actually have to get real experience with the people they deal with, before they can judge!
How will Slashdot survive?
Probably something along the lines of a number of botnets, zombies, secret 0-days vulnerabilities, etc.
It's pretty easy to picture governments building up large botnets of their own machines, ready to tear down any site they want. Limits on that would be good, I think.
Any different approach would be patentable. Perhaps they've solved the "fragile and not very responsive" problem. Perhaps they've designed a system that works at higher resolutions.
No patent is 100% original, nor should such a qualification be necessary. As Isaac Newton supposedly said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Let's hope this actually becomes a viable product.
The obvious market I see is a display that is actually usable for the blind. A picture's worth a thousand words, and probably more than a thousand broken and disorganized automatically-read words.
Then, after 6 months of lost use, the answer comes back:
"Yeah, we patched that last week."
Meanwhile, servers are crashing and money is lost, too. It's simply unacceptable for any kind of business system.
The biggest problem I've had with Arch is that changes are only tested on a few common packages before being sent out. If you use an obscure package routinely, it might not be tested decently with any given change, especially to libraries.
Once a change breaks something, you're left trying to install multiple versions, locking versions, modifying the source, or other such deep magic. Very quickly, the whole system gets to be too big a hassle to deal with.
As I've said before, that's just not how it works in any decent-sized project. You design to meet the needs, then you redesign to meet the new needs, then you redesign yet again to meet the needs that have just come up. Diaspora's first release was (and should have been) to show proof of concept: that something working could be produced. Now they get to redesign to meet security and scalability, and over time they'll redesign to meet other needs. You don't get miracles in the first version.
That's it? When I read "high powered", I was expecting switching 500-amp supplies to banks of flood lights. I wasn't expecting... this.
This is the same stuff that hobbyists and others have been doing for years. Their lights also perform outdoors, in occasional high winds, at extreme temperatures. The only thing that MIGHT be interesting here is the music analysis program, if it's capable of picking up actual musical qualities, rather than just levels of noise.
Landline phones are powered through the phone line itself, so they still (usually) function in a power outage. They only time they don't is when there's some major localized problem, like a tree taking down the utility pole right outside your house. Cordless phones and other fancy devices won't likely work, but a plain telephone will.
You can get the full source easily. You can switch everything, if you want.
I'm curious as to what "real Java app" you're talking about. My company's product is written in a few hundred thousand lines of Java, using a few dozen libraries, and runs perfectly across Windows, OS X, and Linux. There is a grand total of one compatibility issue, where newlines don't behave exactly the same.
Writing portable C++ means having portable libraries, and that's not really the norm. Java libraries are almost always portable out of the box.
So the real problem is that C++ has a very limited capacity to be useful in itself, and needs third-party libraries to do anything interesting, like graphical things.
Then you have to hope that your third-party library works on whatever platforms you're working in, too.
C++ may be portable, but significant programs using it are not.
C++ is every bit as portable as assembly. All you need to know is what parts fail on which platforms, compile 15 different ways, and pray it all works after someone upgrades something.
Participation in one social activity corresponds with participation in another social activity! This is amazing!
I actually did read the EULA (one of my abnormal habits), but didn't remember that. As you pointed out, they could still get sued. Perhaps even worse, they can still get a PR nightmare to deal with outside of court, regardless of the EULA. By applying their brand, Google has invested their reputation in keeping Chrome stable and safe, so it gets a bit more trust.
My understanding is that Google's paid licensing fees for H.264, so it's included in Chrome. There may be other similar things added as well, but I don't recall any offhand.
The branding is actually important, too. Chrome effectively has Google's stamp of approval, so you can expect support and stability, which are important for corporate use. If a Chromium bug wipes your company's data, it's your own fault for using unstable software. If Chrome does it, Google's more likely to be liable.
Judging by your username, I'd guess... you studied theology?
I once saw an art installation that was an almost-functional guillotine. Pull a lever, and the blade would come down, until it hit a hidden stop. It was installed in a public place for a year and, sadly, nobody pulled the lever.
My opinion is that the purpose of art is to make the audience think. Today, we are thinking about what kind of malevolent files could be shared, or what fleeting connections we have with people around us. A hammer and hard surface makes me think about how, now and then, everybody needs warnings about really bad ideas.
Congratulations! An artist is you!
And that's why I don't do web development. Almost everybody's got a back end, and that's where I stay.
The project also includes compilers for many languages, including Python, Ruby, and Perl. Not sure if the class libraries are a part of the project's scope, as they're pretty language-specific.
Sounds like we need a new, and truly open, language and runtime for the 21st century.
You mean like Parrot, which already has implementations of several languages?
Does research still need supercomputers, though? If you're writing a program parallelized enough to split across tens of thousands of processing units, why not go with a full cluster, like the vaunted Hadoop or EC2?
I think the time for a single powerful machine is long past. Maintaining the level of interconnection between the nodes is expensive, and we can do better. In the words of Dr. Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." With distributed storage (like HDFS) coupled to the distributed processing (like Hadoop), we can turn those same problems into merely cost-bound problems.
Now, instead of having nicely-organized information including business practices, already-solved problems, and the one vital flaw in the last Widget production batch, you have a million-row database table that's only accessible by a few select folks. Since they take a few months to make a custom report (because they're already so busy), it's easier and faster to go back to the original sources. Now you just have more information, redundantly duplicated.