US has not seen what true inflation is for a while. So the Wheelbarrow scenario may be a long way off. Eastern Europe, South America etc. have been living with almost 30-40% inflation for a while and they have managed to not destroy themselves.
On the other hand a collapse of banks is almost disastrous for any country involved.
BTW, your quote about devaluation of currency == deflation makes no sense (runny nose example). Did you mean the opposite ? Devaluation of paper means inflation and increase in value of paper means deflation. When paper becomes more valuable, people hoard it - causing a deflationary cycle.
The link does not go to Dell. What are you doing here ? Not only do you read the link, you then google the product, go to the manufacturers website, watch the video and then comment on it ? That sacrilege - you should be ashamed of yourselves being on slashdot.
Of course you can buy a 486 at comparable prices. But I don't think that was the point. He built the circuits, the laptop case, OS, interpreter and applications all from scratch. I think the point is to be a hardhack similar to ones from the Homebrew computer clubs of the past.
You have no idea about the scale of the problem if you have not lived in Tropical areas. There are way more mosquitoes in the swamps/forests and preying on animals than are there in homes. We can install one of these laser doohickeys in every home and we still will have killed only a fraction of all mosquitoes in the world.
If the second question of "people with lower incomes are more likely to go into the military" has something to do with post-military income, would it also not indicate that poorer people on an average, adjusted for education and career tend to remain poor through their lifetime? That may be a bigger problem to fix if America has to remain the land of opportunities.
They both feed on each other. It is not that people in Russia or China are naturally more corrupt, but that the system gives them all the wrong incentives.
If you responsible for allocating a billion dollars and your pay is only a few thousand and you know that you are stuck in that position for life, you will cheat. In a capitalistic system you have bonuses, you have promotions based on skill and you have other greedy people watching over you to not lose money.
know here in AR our freeways have two states: ones that have potholes you can bury a dog in, and ones with potholes you can bury a cow in.
What about potholes you can grow Banana plants in ?
Canada arguably has the most lenient immigration policies for the educated in the world.
All they need is for you to have a years experience in any of these sectors or have lived in Canada for a year for you to immigrate. They don't really care about your nationality as long as you speak English
While they may not have a sign that says "Come on in and take jobs from Canadians", they certainly have a "Welcome to Canada" sign stuck on the border.
I think in this case even the technical staff was clueless.
Considering the snowstorm around here, let me use a weather analogy.
We need to predict what the temperature would be the next day. One way of doing this is to look at past data over a month and say that the trend will hold until tomorrow. ie if the temperature has been increasing from 20 degrees to a 40 over the month, the temperature tomorrow will be 40 or 41 degrees. This at least is a justifiable assumption. But another way of doing this is to see what people are wearing. If everyone is wearing coats and caps, maybe tomorrow will be a cold day. The underlying assumption here is that everyone around you is aware of the weather and plans accordingly. This is the sort of thing that went on with the financial model we are discussing. And since people have really no clue about tomorrows weather, if you base your prediction of temperature on other peoples dress, you are likely to get caught out in an occasional snowstorm (like I did today).
In the case of Mortgages, you could potentially look at past historical trends and predict tomorrows default rates. This model went a step further and used the credit default swap prices to predict future defaults. The idea is that the guys who are selling the credit default swaps have some clue about what is happening and would price the swaps appropriately (swaps are basically just insurance against defaults). So if the assumption is correct, you could look at correlation of swap prices in California with that in New York and figure out how often defaults are correlated.
You can see where this is going. The banks adopted the model since it was simple and the ratings agencies bought it since they could now rate CDO's without ever studying the real world. Of course swap prices were wrong (and were available only in the post-war period) and correlations were wrong and on top of all this, the ratings were based on very limited data.
So in essence, techs build a wrong model, the ratings agencies then fed the model with wrong data and the banks used these misguided results to make crazy bets.
Seems like that is not the case. Coal power costs $1.3 per Watt, and Nuclear power costs $1.5 to $2. This is just on the Capital costs, with Coal and Nuclear power the running costs are likely to be significant.
On the other hand for solar power, the manufacturing costs $1 and running costs zero. I am assuming that there is a hidden cost of land for solar power which is not included here , but then First Solar operates out of Arizona -they got plenty of desert there.
So I guess it is the turn of Nuclear power guys to ramp up the efficiencies. Most likely that will come from India where they just got hold of a Nuclear Deal and are starting to build more. Add to that the low costs of labor, Nuclear may be competitive for a while more.
None of this gives you backing for calling this "solar and wind crap" though. These technologies, if wiki data is to be believed, will win the price war with no subsidies, strictly competing in the marketplace.
Actually Nokia was the original champion for this.
Each menu on the phone is associated with a number 1= Call 2= Messages etc. and the same applies to the submenus. Most of my friends had these sequences memorized, so they could pick up a phone and type 1-2-1 and get into their received text messages menu etc. without looking at their phone. The cool thing was that this sequence of menu's was the same in ALL the Nokia phones, so most of the users stuck with Nokia when they upgraded.
Later on Nokia changed their menu layout and their phone chargers causing a lot of the users to defect.
I can't believe that the Spanish had not figured that out
Whaling is a much older business than cannon-fighting. While almost any country that whaled from boats threw their harpoons down onto the whales (like Japanese) all the ship based whalers already knew that throwing a harpoon up into the air would carry it a longer distance. The same goes for archery. Chinese and the English archers were firing their arrows into the air in massed volleys for years before the Spanish Armada. I can't understand why the Spanish would not have figured out that the same rule worked for Cannons.
Also note that Galileo's compass already simplified most of the math.
I think what really happens is that each city or region develops its own driving culture and when different driving cultures meet, it becomes hell
In Spain/Portugal for example, cars and Buses are very well behaved. The scooterists on the other hand are allowed to do as they please. When an outsider gets there they offend the locals by driving their scooters too slowly or driving their cars violating the "secret" right of the scooters.
In India the rules are simpler. 1) keep your eyes up front on the road and 2) if it is safe to go, you must go. So people generally ignore traffic lights (rule no.2) and when there are none still manage to somehow not hit each other (rule no.1). So the American who has a rearview mirror and uses it or one who stops for pedestrians confuse the Indians
I never cracked the Russian traffic code, but I think it goes like this. Maintain traffic rules approximately at New York City levels. If you get caught, pay the cop exactly half of the legal fine as a bribe. This seems to work pretty well for them, but if you actually follow the rules you still can get rear-ended and held to blame since the other guy can bribe the cops and you wont.
Smaller cities with emptier roads seem to develop a culture of politer driving, while crowded cities tend to move more towards "bigger car wins".
Then that is a misuse of the term Editor. The words Editor and Editorial oversight have a long history and the terms are pretty well understood.
If these so called/. editors refuse to spell check or even check to see if the text is factually correct by reading the linked articles, maybe their titles should be changed. Maybe called the content administrators or "link (non) clickers". I mean if the whole idea is to just pick the most popular story, I'd go read reddit or digg. The minimal oversight that these so called admins provide is what makes./ and kuro5hin different from the other fully democratic blogs.
Maybe asking that these editors actually do some work is not a bad thing, both for longer term sustainability of/. and the general reading pleasure of the site.
And this also excludes the easier loophole of just dialing from a public payphone or dialing using a calling card (not all calling cards reveal the dialing phone number correctly).
I know this because I have called my friends in different countries using pay phones and calling cards and they hate it when I do that - they can't figure out whether the number "0000" is a spam call or a legit one.
Oh and before someone says you can't find a payphone, look in places near universities and bars. They usually have one around for students and drunkards to call. An incomplete list here (http://www.payphone-directory.org/)
Since we have a lawyer responding, could I ask you a question ? (I understand that even though you are a lawyer, this is not a legal advice since I did not pay you etc. - Just asking a question to an informed source)
Is it even legal to change site licenses retroactively ? Can you write up a contract that says that you accept any further changes in contract ?
The way facebook explained this is like this:
There is the facebok messaging feature where you can send messages to your friends. When you do this there are 2 copies of messages made, one in your "outbox" and the other in the recipients "inbox". When you delete your account, only your copy of the message is deleted, the recipient still has access to the message you sent.
In effect, Facebook retains your messages even when you delete your account. Facebook wanted to make this niggle more public and asked their lawyers to do that. Apparently the lawyers wrote up a contract that said ALL the information is retained when you delete your account. Why they added the condition on copyrights, I never know.
Atleast facebook is blaming the lawyers for this.
I think that is the key here.
When a new operating system is introduced the older one is usually discontinued or available as standalone. In this case the only way you could get XP was if you bought Vista too. In other words, Microsoft bundled Vista and XP into a single product and made customers pay for both of them. I am not sure if this is anti-competitive, but is clearly damaging to the US customer - hence seems like a valid anti-trust suit. Additionally since XP is the defacto standard for computers and customers really want the product, it could be argued that Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly position to sell Vista.
Since these are complementary products it is difficult to find an analogy, but I am guessing this would be similar to a consumer products company giving out samples of their newer products along with their older products and then charging for both of them. For example if you buy Tide detergant, you get a bottle of Tide "Ultra clean" and then you have to pay for both of them. If tide was a monopoly, they may get into trouble.
That said IANAL.
Did you serve in Vietnam before you became a Nerd ? Because this solution sounds a lot like destroying a village to save it from commies
Radioactive materials totally mess with electronics of all kinds. Your CPU's will malfunction, your hard-disks will pick up random errors and possibly the only thing that will continue to work is your FiberChannel connections
Monopoly in a business sense is very common. For example, Tyco has a near monopoly (>60% in US) on fire alarm installations. Similarly Collar Stay and Shirt button markets are extremely monopolistic in each country. The standards defining them on the other hand are open - fire codes are public and buttons and collar stays can be copied freely.
On the other hand leveraging a monopoly to kill other products or to raise prices in ways that hurt customers are considered monopolistic. In the case of the fire alarm market, the engineer licensing is what protects the monopoly, so the govt does not care. Similarly buttons etc. are commoditized and prices are rarely high. So again both are legal.
It is the convention to refer to companies by stock quotes in financial forums (yahoo finance for example). Maybe the poster is more familiar with those boards than with slashdot.
We should welcome all outsiders to our board (onboard?) no? With the recent market situation it is a case of "poor, hungry, huddled masses":-)
Slashdot Mirror
US has not seen what true inflation is for a while. So the Wheelbarrow scenario may be a long way off. Eastern Europe, South America etc. have been living with almost 30-40% inflation for a while and they have managed to not destroy themselves.
On the other hand a collapse of banks is almost disastrous for any country involved.
BTW, your quote about devaluation of currency == deflation makes no sense (runny nose example). Did you mean the opposite ? Devaluation of paper means inflation and increase in value of paper means deflation. When paper becomes more valuable, people hoard it - causing a deflationary cycle.
Sorry then.
But I thinking picking a Microcontroller meant for non-CPU purposes and then re-speccing it as a CPU has its own joys.
The link does not go to Dell. What are you doing here ? Not only do you read the link, you then google the product, go to the manufacturers website, watch the video and then comment on it ? That sacrilege - you should be ashamed of yourselves being on slashdot.
A garden gnome ?
Of course you can buy a 486 at comparable prices. But I don't think that was the point. He built the circuits, the laptop case, OS, interpreter and applications all from scratch. I think the point is to be a hardhack similar to ones from the Homebrew computer clubs of the past.
You have no idea about the scale of the problem if you have not lived in Tropical areas. There are way more mosquitoes in the swamps/forests and preying on animals than are there in homes. We can install one of these laser doohickeys in every home and we still will have killed only a fraction of all mosquitoes in the world.
If the second question of "people with lower incomes are more likely to go into the military" has something to do with post-military income, would it also not indicate that poorer people on an average, adjusted for education and career tend to remain poor through their lifetime? That may be a bigger problem to fix if America has to remain the land of opportunities.
They both feed on each other. It is not that people in Russia or China are naturally more corrupt, but that the system gives them all the wrong incentives.
If you responsible for allocating a billion dollars and your pay is only a few thousand and you know that you are stuck in that position for life, you will cheat. In a capitalistic system you have bonuses, you have promotions based on skill and you have other greedy people watching over you to not lose money.
know here in AR our freeways have two states: ones that have potholes you can bury a dog in, and ones with potholes you can bury a cow in.
What about potholes you can grow Banana plants in ?
Canada arguably has the most lenient immigration policies for the educated in the world.
All they need is for you to have a years experience in any of these sectors or have lived in Canada for a year for you to immigrate. They don't really care about your nationality as long as you speak English
While they may not have a sign that says "Come on in and take jobs from Canadians", they certainly have a "Welcome to Canada" sign stuck on the border.
I think in this case even the technical staff was clueless. .
Considering the snowstorm around here, let me use a weather analogy.
We need to predict what the temperature would be the next day. One way of doing this is to look at past data over a month and say that the trend will hold until tomorrow. ie if the temperature has been increasing from 20 degrees to a 40 over the month, the temperature tomorrow will be 40 or 41 degrees. This at least is a justifiable assumption. But another way of doing this is to see what people are wearing. If everyone is wearing coats and caps, maybe tomorrow will be a cold day. The underlying assumption here is that everyone around you is aware of the weather and plans accordingly. This is the sort of thing that went on with the financial model we are discussing. And since people have really no clue about tomorrows weather, if you base your prediction of temperature on other peoples dress, you are likely to get caught out in an occasional snowstorm (like I did today).
In the case of Mortgages, you could potentially look at past historical trends and predict tomorrows default rates. This model went a step further and used the credit default swap prices to predict future defaults. The idea is that the guys who are selling the credit default swaps have some clue about what is happening and would price the swaps appropriately (swaps are basically just insurance against defaults). So if the assumption is correct, you could look at correlation of swap prices in California with that in New York and figure out how often defaults are correlated.
You can see where this is going. The banks adopted the model since it was simple and the ratings agencies bought it since they could now rate CDO's without ever studying the real world. Of course swap prices were wrong (and were available only in the post-war period) and correlations were wrong and on top of all this, the ratings were based on very limited data
So in essence, techs build a wrong model, the ratings agencies then fed the model with wrong data and the banks used these misguided results to make crazy bets.
Seems like that is not the case.
Coal power costs $1.3 per Watt, and Nuclear power costs $1.5 to $2. This is just on the Capital costs, with Coal and Nuclear power the running costs are likely to be significant.
On the other hand for solar power, the manufacturing costs $1 and running costs zero. I am assuming that there is a hidden cost of land for solar power which is not included here , but then First Solar operates out of Arizona -they got plenty of desert there.
So I guess it is the turn of Nuclear power guys to ramp up the efficiencies. Most likely that will come from India where they just got hold of a Nuclear Deal and are starting to build more. Add to that the low costs of labor, Nuclear may be competitive for a while more.
None of this gives you backing for calling this "solar and wind crap" though. These technologies, if wiki data is to be believed, will win the price war with no subsidies, strictly competing in the marketplace.
Actually Nokia was the original champion for this.
Each menu on the phone is associated with a number 1= Call 2= Messages etc. and the same applies to the submenus. Most of my friends had these sequences memorized, so they could pick up a phone and type 1-2-1 and get into their received text messages menu etc. without looking at their phone.
The cool thing was that this sequence of menu's was the same in ALL the Nokia phones, so most of the users stuck with Nokia when they upgraded.
Later on Nokia changed their menu layout and their phone chargers causing a lot of the users to defect.
That indeed seems to be anecdotal experience. Apparently after the initial burst of curiosity, no one bought them
I can't believe that the Spanish had not figured that out
Whaling is a much older business than cannon-fighting. While almost any country that whaled from boats threw their harpoons down onto the whales (like Japanese) all the ship based whalers already knew that throwing a harpoon up into the air would carry it a longer distance. The same goes for archery. Chinese and the English archers were firing their arrows into the air in massed volleys for years before the Spanish Armada. I can't understand why the Spanish would not have figured out that the same rule worked for Cannons.
Also note that Galileo's compass already simplified most of the math.
I think what really happens is that each city or region develops its own driving culture and when different driving cultures meet, it becomes hell
In Spain/Portugal for example, cars and Buses are very well behaved. The scooterists on the other hand are allowed to do as they please. When an outsider gets there they offend the locals by driving their scooters too slowly or driving their cars violating the "secret" right of the scooters.
In India the rules are simpler. 1) keep your eyes up front on the road and 2) if it is safe to go, you must go. So people generally ignore traffic lights (rule no.2) and when there are none still manage to somehow not hit each other (rule no.1). So the American who has a rearview mirror and uses it or one who stops for pedestrians confuse the Indians
I never cracked the Russian traffic code, but I think it goes like this. Maintain traffic rules approximately at New York City levels. If you get caught, pay the cop exactly half of the legal fine as a bribe. This seems to work pretty well for them, but if you actually follow the rules you still can get rear-ended and held to blame since the other guy can bribe the cops and you wont.
Smaller cities with emptier roads seem to develop a culture of politer driving, while crowded cities tend to move more towards "bigger car wins".
Then that is a misuse of the term Editor. The words Editor and Editorial oversight have a long history and the terms are pretty well understood. /. editors refuse to spell check or even check to see if the text is factually correct by reading the linked articles, maybe their titles should be changed. Maybe called the content administrators or "link (non) clickers". I mean if the whole idea is to just pick the most popular story, I'd go read reddit or digg. The minimal oversight that these so called admins provide is what makes ./ and kuro5hin different from the other fully democratic blogs. /. and the general reading pleasure of the site.
If these so called
Maybe asking that these editors actually do some work is not a bad thing, both for longer term sustainability of
And this also excludes the easier loophole of just dialing from a public payphone or dialing using a calling card (not all calling cards reveal the dialing phone number correctly).
I know this because I have called my friends in different countries using pay phones and calling cards and they hate it when I do that - they can't figure out whether the number "0000" is a spam call or a legit one.
Oh and before someone says you can't find a payphone, look in places near universities and bars. They usually have one around for students and drunkards to call. An incomplete list here (http://www.payphone-directory.org/)
Since we have a lawyer responding, could I ask you a question ? (I understand that even though you are a lawyer, this is not a legal advice since I did not pay you etc. - Just asking a question to an informed source)
Is it even legal to change site licenses retroactively ? Can you write up a contract that says that you accept any further changes in contract ?
The way facebook explained this is like this:
There is the facebok messaging feature where you can send messages to your friends. When you do this there are 2 copies of messages made, one in your "outbox" and the other in the recipients "inbox". When you delete your account, only your copy of the message is deleted, the recipient still has access to the message you sent.
In effect, Facebook retains your messages even when you delete your account. Facebook wanted to make this niggle more public and asked their lawyers to do that. Apparently the lawyers wrote up a contract that said ALL the information is retained when you delete your account. Why they added the condition on copyrights, I never know.
Atleast facebook is blaming the lawyers for this.
I think that is the key here.
When a new operating system is introduced the older one is usually discontinued or available as standalone. In this case the only way you could get XP was if you bought Vista too. In other words, Microsoft bundled Vista and XP into a single product and made customers pay for both of them. I am not sure if this is anti-competitive, but is clearly damaging to the US customer - hence seems like a valid anti-trust suit. Additionally since XP is the defacto standard for computers and customers really want the product, it could be argued that Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly position to sell Vista.
Since these are complementary products it is difficult to find an analogy, but I am guessing this would be similar to a consumer products company giving out samples of their newer products along with their older products and then charging for both of them. For example if you buy Tide detergant, you get a bottle of Tide "Ultra clean" and then you have to pay for both of them. If tide was a monopoly, they may get into trouble.
That said IANAL.
Did you serve in Vietnam before you became a Nerd ? Because this solution sounds a lot like destroying a village to save it from commies
Radioactive materials totally mess with electronics of all kinds. Your CPU's will malfunction, your hard-disks will pick up random errors and possibly the only thing that will continue to work is your FiberChannel connections
Sort of like how an OS lets you log-in before it is even booted up ?
Monopoly in a business sense is very common. For example, Tyco has a near monopoly (>60% in US) on fire alarm installations. Similarly Collar Stay and Shirt button markets are extremely monopolistic in each country. The standards defining them on the other hand are open - fire codes are public and buttons and collar stays can be copied freely.
On the other hand leveraging a monopoly to kill other products or to raise prices in ways that hurt customers are considered monopolistic. In the case of the fire alarm market, the engineer licensing is what protects the monopoly, so the govt does not care. Similarly buttons etc. are commoditized and prices are rarely high. So again both are legal.
It is the convention to refer to companies by stock quotes in financial forums (yahoo finance for example). Maybe the poster is more familiar with those boards than with slashdot. :-)
We should welcome all outsiders to our board (onboard?) no? With the recent market situation it is a case of "poor, hungry, huddled masses"