Firstly, the post you link to isn't saying that companies shouldn't turn up a profit, but that managing a company with money as the goal tends to cause the company to lose its focus on what it produces (after all, the focus is on the money). While a company can decrease the quality of its goods or services and seem unaffected for some time, in the long-term that is unsustainable. Surely you have heard the countless stories of companies being run into the ground to enrich the shareholders and leave management with golden parachutes.
As to what you are arguing here, that companies exist to make a profit and have an obligation to do so, I have a question. Make a profit for whom? Naturally, since I am neither upper management, nor a major stockholder, I would prefer that a significant share of the profit go to the employees, including management (indeed, they deserve to be paid well, given some of the shit they put up with), but not to the extent that is common now. I also believe that companies should charge for their services fairly, not pushing their prices up as far as they can, as that leads to economic instability, among other issues. Now attempting to enforce good corporate behavior of any sort can be problematic itself, but what I am trying to say here is that a company does not and should not exist for the profit of its owners alone. To say that a company has no other reason to exist than to turn up profit is an incredibly cynical and (in my opinion) dangerous point of view.
There are also people here who think that having government dictate how an economy should run is the preferred way, not allowing the private ownership and operation of property (capitalism) and free market (equality before the law, rule of law that does not discriminate against people and thus create inequality of treatment and inefficiencies of economy) to do what it does best - savings, investment, production.
To be honest, a lot of the things things you posted in the parent to the linked post invoke Poe's law for me, and make me wonder if you are just a troll. You misrepresent the linked to poster as advocating government "dictate" an economy, referring to some sort of "socialists or welfare statists" whom who describe as leeches, running an economy. What the posts in the thread you seem to me to be saying was that the services upper management and shareholders provide are not priced according to their added value, but according to their position of ownership, which is rent-seeking.
Here is the entirety of the linked post, which I generally agree with:
Every item in your hands was built and delivered to you by somebody with more money than you.
Bullshit. Every item in my hands was built and delivered by people who make about as much as I do. The rich just take a cut and add no value.
As for the argument you are making here, it is meaningless definitions. No such free market exists, and I believe that it in fact cannot exist. I believe that that defining free market as equality before the law and not discriminating against people so as to create inequality of treatment contradicts allowing unconstrained and unbridled private ownership and operation of property. Furthermore, though this may be taking what you are saying too far, if the g
No, no it really isn't. Its just not that simple. For instance, at least the following conditions must be satisfied for this method to work:
1. The business must believe they have something to gain in order to be amenable to such a change. Somewhat simply, the amount of business lost due to boycott must be greater than the potential amount of lost business due to the perception that the airlines are incompetent or less safe. I'm not quite sure we are even at this point yet.
2. The lost business must be sufficient for the airlines to care about the business of people who refuse to fly on account of the TSA. Business can ignore the demands of large groups of consumers. The television networks, as well as the music industry (the latter somewhat less so than it used to be) are good examples of this with respect to bundling and advertisements. This condition will not be fulfilled, because even if all of Slashdot would boycott flying, it would not be enough pressure to equal the potential shame of having to admit the security theater is useless (and that they previously supported it).
3. The business must acknowledge the cause of their loss of business as being directly related to the TSA. The videogame industry is a good example of how an industry can refuse to acknowledge a particular cause for loss of business. In general, only a portion of the business lost due to the TSA will be recorded by the airlines as such. This compounds the difficulty of point 1 and 2, but also could be its own problem if the airlines decided the problem was due to the inconvenience of waiting in slow-moving lines to be processed (this may or may not even refer to the TSA screening). In that case, they may decide to make the TSA more efficient, rather than removing them.
If they decided that was the case, perhaps they would even be correct about most of their customers.
Additionally,
4. The government must not require the airports to keep the TSA intact. This last one is almost certainly irrelevant if the government is as bought as I think it is, but I place it here because the airlines don't technically operate the TSA if my understanding is correct. The government is currently unwilling to change its position, presumably due to the contractors who like the TSA's existence, and the political difficulty of removing an entire department.
TL;DR, so I reiterate, even if all of Slashdot would boycott flying, it would not be enough pressure to equal the potential shame of having to admit the security theater is useless. And I suspect that between corporate business and business that is indeed absolutely necessary (intercontinental travel in general is a PITA without flight) would keep some of the airlines alive enough to completely ignore anything else. Boycotting is always useful, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of consumer politics.
This is why we are where we are. This is one of the biggest reasons (corporate funding being more important, obviously) the republicrats have consistently won the US elections in recent times. I am always reminded, when hearing sentiments like this, of Douglas Adam's description of a particular (fictional) democracy ruled by lizards. The people are not lizards, they just elect the lizards to rule them. Why do they elect lizards?
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
Please, do not sacrifice what is practical for the future for the convenience of the present. Surely, regardless of viewpoint, be it socialist or libertarian or what have you, this remains true: that people tend to get the worst government they (as a community) are willing to put up with.
TFA notes that she herself recently made an "off-color" joke (although not necessarily of the same quality)
(Incidentally, making off-color jokes in public doesn't necessarily make you a horrible human being who deserves public shaming, a point that Richards herself should appreciate as she recently joked with a fellow Twitter user about stuffing his pants with socks the next time he has to undergo a TSA pat-down.)
In the background is the emerging giant, AMD. AMD's past failures mean too many people do not understand the nature of AMD's threat to Intel and Nvidia. AMD has a 100% record of design wins in new forward-thinking products in the PC space.
Hrm, while I agree with a good deal of the rest of your post, how does this manage to not include the bulldozer architecture? As a largely AMD customer myself, I'm not sure I can bring myself to call that a "design win".
It will never be seen again. And the journalist will be considered lucky that he still has his camera. Given all of the talk I hear from people down in the USA concerning the sanctity of private property, it seems somewhat strange that the government would be so myopic in matters like this. I suppose I shouldn't find that strange, I guess. Just another example of how the people with power live under different laws than the rest of us.
Violation of TOS is breach of contract at most. A civil matter, not even a crime, and nowhere near a felony. The notion that violating a TOS is also a violation of CFAA would mean that anybody could make their own laws, simply by writing them into the TOS on their website. The very idea is ridiculous.
Ah, but but doesn't the DMCA already cause the breakage of any digital lock to become a violation of the law? This is just a logical extension of that sort of thinking is it not? "Digital Trespassing" oh the possibilities...
To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.
As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.
Absolutely not. When there are few suppliers available in the market, monopolistic and oligarchic pricing make consumer choice very limited, in some cases to the point where they have no choice but to either purchase a product that is gimped, needlessly inefficient, or priced through the roof, or do without entirely. Consumer-marketed printers and ink/toner, the pre-installed crapware that comes with most PCs, and of course US ISPs are good examples of this I believe.
This decision by seagate almost certainly doesn't fall into that category, since, as other posters have noted, there may soon not be a substantial market for 7200 RPM laptop hard drives. However, simply stating "they are free to decide what they want to sell or not" is not a good reason to dismiss this.
Very much this; mod parent up. I wonder what the consequences of an ad-less approach would be, however.
It may become harder for certain widget-making companies to achieve the sort of market penetration we see today when starting from scratch without using nuke-from-orbit style marketing. This could mean a greater duplication of effort in creating products (less economies of scale, potentially increasing the price of goods) and therefore less monopolization (potentially decreasing the price of goods), but also potentially makes it more difficult for small businesses to grow which may maintain established monopolies/oligarchies.
At any rate, I don't expect the results of forcing the current market into an ad-less or nearly ad-less state to be like anything that existed before.
Not entirely true. Wall street did back Romney much more than Obama, but Obama was also primarily supported by the 1%, just not to the extent that Mitt was. A quick search shows that large tech firms (M$, Apple, Google), the MPIAA firms (Disney, Time Warner, etc.), and various finance firms (many were also top Romney supporters) among Obama's top supporters.
While what you said is all true, instruments are also much less likely to give false positives just because the handler wants it to do so. I agree that dogs can be reliable when used well, but in situations where the true positive rate is less than 0.01%, there are other issues with dogs.
It isn't that there should be a very light sentence for reckless actions unless injury occurs, it is that no reckless action of this type has *ever* caused detectable injury despite thousands of instances of this reckless action occurring. Think for a moment about what is necessary to cause injury.
The laser can only cause injury when shone directly into an area of a few square centimeters (although the actual target area may be larger if the beam is somewhat diffuse, but still sufficiently focused). And this from a distance that would likely need to be half of a mile away (unless the plane is just taking off or landing, in which case its probably more like a quarter-mile). In addition, this is only possible if the aircraft is flying more or less directly towards the laser source. In any case, anyone who succeeds in such marksmanship should probably be offered a large salary by a military contractor as soon as they get out of jail. The person would probably even be enough of an idiot to accept.
Prosecution, fine. What these people are doing *can* cause harm. Three years is idiotic.
So what exactly are you proposing then, a Russian revolution? Seriously, what *can* they do? They have no governmental authority outside of a vote, and even supposing Putin steps down (itself a ridiculous proposition) they still will have no governmental authority. All they would be able to do, without guns and ammo, is make some noise and hope his replacement listens.
They already have a plan of action and it is shout into the wind and hope people hear. Perhaps enough people will hear so that Putin won't win the next election, perhaps Putin will make some effort to be less of a PITA for them, and perhaps Putin's eventual replacement will take note of their discontent more than he does. Year sure, they can hope Putin will step down, but who among the protestors really think that's gonna happen. Remember that Putin in all likelihood won the vote without direct fraud, so making noise in public really is an end to itself right now.
Hrm, the article refers to DNA evidence as a "gold standard". I suppose its better than fingerprint analysis, but I do wonder if DNA evidence is also trusted too far.
911 may be ambiguous for phone systems where you must dial 9 to get to the outside. For instance, at my workplace we had serious trouble with employees dialing 911 by accident. People dialed 9 to get out, then 1 for international, then another 1 either by mistake, or as the first part of an area code. The emergency services were not amused.
No, he is correct. There are two types of inflation, monetary inflation and price inflation. Your parent is clearly talking about the latter. This is the standard definition of the term inflation (look at the titles of the wikipedia articles there).
By that definition, bitcoin should be measured against what it can buy, or the real value of bitcoins. However, few things can be bought directly with bitcoins, and even some of those things might automatically fluctuate with the value of bitcoins in USD. So when bitcoin fluctuates against the dollar, that is indeed inflation/deflation due to what can be bought. You can substitute USD for CAD, AUD, or Euro as you prefer, that is just the only way to buy most of the goods on any reasonable price index. Your comparison with imports/exports is mistaken.
If bitcoin was adopted by a country, most of these problems would disappear, at least for those living in that country anyways. Since you must tie bitcoin to any other currency at the moment in order to buy necessary goods, let us use the fiction I'll call "Euro-Bitcoin", which is bitcoin as tied to the euro currency, instead of giving bitcoin a country of its own (which would change the current situation considerably). You will notice some bonus deflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro decrease relative to bitcoin, and some bonus inflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro rise relative to bitcoin, or should the market decide to raise the prices of common goods (which can happen completely separately from monetary inflation). This will be negligible for our discussion, as that plagues all currencies, not just bitcoin.
Now, the fact that you cannot just buy milk at the local grocery store using bitcoin creates another problem for Euro-Bitcoin. This is that someone must be willing to exchange bitcoin for euros in order for your Euro-Bitcoin value to be spendable. Now, the price at which someone is willing to exchange your bitcoins depends on the perceived demand for bitcoins in the market. If people want to own 10x as many bitcoins, the price of bitcoins jacks up, and the value of Euro-Bitcoin increases. If the reverse happens, the price of bitcoins plummets and the value of Euro-Bitcoin decreases. This is the inflation which the GP was talking about, the purchasing power of the bitcoin, with respect to buying real goods, can decrease or increase significantly according to bitcoin demand.
Right now, should any one major holder of bitcoins get rid of a significant portion of their bitcoins for the euro, it is conceivable that would saturate the market for bitcoins and decrease demand. This could cause the price of bitcoins to drop fantastically, since there are only so many people trying to buy, say, several hundred thousand euros worth of bitcoins. Bear in mind that since most bitcoins are being held, rather than being used, in general the pool of bitcoins available for exchange is much smaller, so the whole bitcoin economy must fit inside a fraction of the total Euro-Bitcoin value of bitcoins in existence. Should any significant fraction of that value be suddenly put up for exchange, that will tank the price. That may or may not happen, but if it does, it will mean inflation, lots of inflation.
I think it is also reasonable for the price of bitcoin to drop gradually, which also creates significant inflation (by definition), but that won't kill bitcoin, only decrease the value of everyone's bitcoin.
Personally, I don't like the "rich get richer" nature of (monetary) deflationary currencies, but bitcoin can suffer from inflation under the wrong circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm, I'm not entirely sure what makes this insightful. You are completely misrepresenting the four posts you disagree with.
There are people on /. who wouldn't understand such a thing for example. There are people here who do not understand that a company must turn up profit and if it doesn't it has no reason to exist, it's employing land, capital and labour inefficiently.
Firstly, the post you link to isn't saying that companies shouldn't turn up a profit, but that managing a company with money as the goal tends to cause the company to lose its focus on what it produces (after all, the focus is on the money). While a company can decrease the quality of its goods or services and seem unaffected for some time, in the long-term that is unsustainable. Surely you have heard the countless stories of companies being run into the ground to enrich the shareholders and leave management with golden parachutes.
As to what you are arguing here, that companies exist to make a profit and have an obligation to do so, I have a question. Make a profit for whom? Naturally, since I am neither upper management, nor a major stockholder, I would prefer that a significant share of the profit go to the employees, including management (indeed, they deserve to be paid well, given some of the shit they put up with), but not to the extent that is common now. I also believe that companies should charge for their services fairly, not pushing their prices up as far as they can, as that leads to economic instability, among other issues. Now attempting to enforce good corporate behavior of any sort can be problematic itself, but what I am trying to say here is that a company does not and should not exist for the profit of its owners alone. To say that a company has no other reason to exist than to turn up profit is an incredibly cynical and (in my opinion) dangerous point of view.
There are also people here who think that having government dictate how an economy should run is the preferred way, not allowing the private ownership and operation of property (capitalism) and free market (equality before the law, rule of law that does not discriminate against people and thus create inequality of treatment and inefficiencies of economy) to do what it does best - savings, investment, production.
To be honest, a lot of the things things you posted in the parent to the linked post invoke Poe's law for me, and make me wonder if you are just a troll. You misrepresent the linked to poster as advocating government "dictate" an economy, referring to some sort of "socialists or welfare statists" whom who describe as leeches, running an economy. What the posts in the thread you seem to me to be saying was that the services upper management and shareholders provide are not priced according to their added value, but according to their position of ownership, which is rent-seeking.
Here is the entirety of the linked post, which I generally agree with:
Every item in your hands was built and delivered to you by somebody with more money than you.
Bullshit. Every item in my hands was built and delivered by people who make about as much as I do. The rich just take a cut and add no value.
As for the argument you are making here, it is meaningless definitions. No such free market exists, and I believe that it in fact cannot exist. I believe that that defining free market as equality before the law and not discriminating against people so as to create inequality of treatment contradicts allowing unconstrained and unbridled private ownership and operation of property. Furthermore, though this may be taking what you are saying too far, if the g
You want to get rid of the TSA?
Don't fly.
It's that simple.
No, no it really isn't. Its just not that simple. For instance, at least the following conditions must be satisfied for this method to work:
1. The business must believe they have something to gain in order to be amenable to such a change. Somewhat simply, the amount of business lost due to boycott must be greater than the potential amount of lost business due to the perception that the airlines are incompetent or less safe. I'm not quite sure we are even at this point yet.
2. The lost business must be sufficient for the airlines to care about the business of people who refuse to fly on account of the TSA. Business can ignore the demands of large groups of consumers. The television networks, as well as the music industry (the latter somewhat less so than it used to be) are good examples of this with respect to bundling and advertisements. This condition will not be fulfilled, because even if all of Slashdot would boycott flying, it would not be enough pressure to equal the potential shame of having to admit the security theater is useless (and that they previously supported it).
3. The business must acknowledge the cause of their loss of business as being directly related to the TSA. The videogame industry is a good example of how an industry can refuse to acknowledge a particular cause for loss of business. In general, only a portion of the business lost due to the TSA will be recorded by the airlines as such. This compounds the difficulty of point 1 and 2, but also could be its own problem if the airlines decided the problem was due to the inconvenience of waiting in slow-moving lines to be processed (this may or may not even refer to the TSA screening). In that case, they may decide to make the TSA more efficient, rather than removing them.
If they decided that was the case, perhaps they would even be correct about most of their customers.
Additionally,
4. The government must not require the airports to keep the TSA intact. This last one is almost certainly irrelevant if the government is as bought as I think it is, but I place it here because the airlines don't technically operate the TSA if my understanding is correct. The government is currently unwilling to change its position, presumably due to the contractors who like the TSA's existence, and the political difficulty of removing an entire department.
TL;DR, so I reiterate, even if all of Slashdot would boycott flying, it would not be enough pressure to equal the potential shame of having to admit the security theater is useless. And I suspect that between corporate business and business that is indeed absolutely necessary (intercontinental travel in general is a PITA without flight) would keep some of the airlines alive enough to completely ignore anything else. Boycotting is always useful, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of consumer politics.
This is why we are where we are. This is one of the biggest reasons (corporate funding being more important, obviously) the republicrats have consistently won the US elections in recent times. I am always reminded, when hearing sentiments like this, of Douglas Adam's description of a particular (fictional) democracy ruled by lizards. The people are not lizards, they just elect the lizards to rule them. Why do they elect lizards?
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
Please, do not sacrifice what is practical for the future for the convenience of the present. Surely, regardless of viewpoint, be it socialist or libertarian or what have you, this remains true: that people tend to get the worst government they (as a community) are willing to put up with.
Mod parent up.
TFA notes that she herself recently made an "off-color" joke (although not necessarily of the same quality)
(Incidentally, making off-color jokes in public doesn't necessarily make you a horrible human being who deserves public shaming, a point that Richards herself should appreciate as she recently joked with a fellow Twitter user about stuffing his pants with socks the next time he has to undergo a TSA pat-down.)
In the background is the emerging giant, AMD. AMD's past failures mean too many people do not understand the nature of AMD's threat to Intel and Nvidia. AMD has a 100% record of design wins in new forward-thinking products in the PC space.
Hrm, while I agree with a good deal of the rest of your post, how does this manage to not include the bulldozer architecture? As a largely AMD customer myself, I'm not sure I can bring myself to call that a "design win".
It will never be seen again. And the journalist will be considered lucky that he still has his camera. Given all of the talk I hear from people down in the USA concerning the sanctity of private property, it seems somewhat strange that the government would be so myopic in matters like this. I suppose I shouldn't find that strange, I guess. Just another example of how the people with power live under different laws than the rest of us.
Violation of TOS is breach of contract at most. A civil matter, not even a crime, and nowhere near a felony. The notion that violating a TOS is also a violation of CFAA would mean that anybody could make their own laws, simply by writing them into the TOS on their website. The very idea is ridiculous.
Ah, but but doesn't the DMCA already cause the breakage of any digital lock to become a violation of the law? This is just a logical extension of that sort of thinking is it not? "Digital Trespassing" oh the possibilities...
To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.
As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.
Absolutely not. When there are few suppliers available in the market, monopolistic and oligarchic pricing make consumer choice very limited, in some cases to the point where they have no choice but to either purchase a product that is gimped, needlessly inefficient, or priced through the roof, or do without entirely. Consumer-marketed printers and ink/toner, the pre-installed crapware that comes with most PCs, and of course US ISPs are good examples of this I believe.
This decision by seagate almost certainly doesn't fall into that category, since, as other posters have noted, there may soon not be a substantial market for 7200 RPM laptop hard drives. However, simply stating "they are free to decide what they want to sell or not" is not a good reason to dismiss this.
Somehow "Just like...Obama" isn't very encouraging to me
Very much this; mod parent up. I wonder what the consequences of an ad-less approach would be, however.
It may become harder for certain widget-making companies to achieve the sort of market penetration we see today when starting from scratch without using nuke-from-orbit style marketing. This could mean a greater duplication of effort in creating products (less economies of scale, potentially increasing the price of goods) and therefore less monopolization (potentially decreasing the price of goods), but also potentially makes it more difficult for small businesses to grow which may maintain established monopolies/oligarchies.
At any rate, I don't expect the results of forcing the current market into an ad-less or nearly ad-less state to be like anything that existed before.
Not entirely true. Wall street did back Romney much more than Obama, but Obama was also primarily supported by the 1%, just not to the extent that Mitt was. A quick search shows that large tech firms (M$, Apple, Google), the MPIAA firms (Disney, Time Warner, etc.), and various finance firms (many were also top Romney supporters) among Obama's top supporters.
RMS is a religion.
Doesn't everyone know that
Indeed, I'm only running an intel CPU right now because the Bulldozer architecture...lets say it needs work.
Actually, I haven't seen any evidence recently that the democrats aren't just as supportive of the military front as the republicans.
Consoles, Apple, and now Windows- how many times do we have to learn the same lesson?
Don't forget Ubuntu.
While what you said is all true, instruments are also much less likely to give false positives just because the handler wants it to do so. I agree that dogs can be reliable when used well, but in situations where the true positive rate is less than 0.01%, there are other issues with dogs.
It isn't that there should be a very light sentence for reckless actions unless injury occurs, it is that no reckless action of this type has *ever* caused detectable injury despite thousands of instances of this reckless action occurring. Think for a moment about what is necessary to cause injury.
The laser can only cause injury when shone directly into an area of a few square centimeters (although the actual target area may be larger if the beam is somewhat diffuse, but still sufficiently focused). And this from a distance that would likely need to be half of a mile away (unless the plane is just taking off or landing, in which case its probably more like a quarter-mile). In addition, this is only possible if the aircraft is flying more or less directly towards the laser source. In any case, anyone who succeeds in such marksmanship should probably be offered a large salary by a military contractor as soon as they get out of jail. The person would probably even be enough of an idiot to accept.
Prosecution, fine. What these people are doing *can* cause harm. Three years is idiotic.
So what exactly are you proposing then, a Russian revolution? Seriously, what *can* they do? They have no governmental authority outside of a vote, and even supposing Putin steps down (itself a ridiculous proposition) they still will have no governmental authority. All they would be able to do, without guns and ammo, is make some noise and hope his replacement listens.
They already have a plan of action and it is shout into the wind and hope people hear. Perhaps enough people will hear so that Putin won't win the next election, perhaps Putin will make some effort to be less of a PITA for them, and perhaps Putin's eventual replacement will take note of their discontent more than he does. Year sure, they can hope Putin will step down, but who among the protestors really think that's gonna happen. Remember that Putin in all likelihood won the vote without direct fraud, so making noise in public really is an end to itself right now.
Indeed. To give the government that kind of moral power seems to be a bit of a slippery slope to me.
Mod parent up.
Hrm, the article refers to DNA evidence as a "gold standard". I suppose its better than fingerprint analysis, but I do wonder if DNA evidence is also trusted too far.
Hrm, that "litany of lies" seems rather informative to me...
911 may be ambiguous for phone systems where you must dial 9 to get to the outside. For instance, at my workplace we had serious trouble with employees dialing 911 by accident. People dialed 9 to get out, then 1 for international, then another 1 either by mistake, or as the first part of an area code. The emergency services were not amused.
No, he is correct. There are two types of inflation, monetary inflation and price inflation. Your parent is clearly talking about the latter. This is the standard definition of the term inflation (look at the titles of the wikipedia articles there).
By that definition, bitcoin should be measured against what it can buy, or the real value of bitcoins. However, few things can be bought directly with bitcoins, and even some of those things might automatically fluctuate with the value of bitcoins in USD. So when bitcoin fluctuates against the dollar, that is indeed inflation/deflation due to what can be bought. You can substitute USD for CAD, AUD, or Euro as you prefer, that is just the only way to buy most of the goods on any reasonable price index. Your comparison with imports/exports is mistaken.
If bitcoin was adopted by a country, most of these problems would disappear, at least for those living in that country anyways. Since you must tie bitcoin to any other currency at the moment in order to buy necessary goods, let us use the fiction I'll call "Euro-Bitcoin", which is bitcoin as tied to the euro currency, instead of giving bitcoin a country of its own (which would change the current situation considerably). You will notice some bonus deflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro decrease relative to bitcoin, and some bonus inflation in Euro-Bitcoin should the euro rise relative to bitcoin, or should the market decide to raise the prices of common goods (which can happen completely separately from monetary inflation). This will be negligible for our discussion, as that plagues all currencies, not just bitcoin.
Now, the fact that you cannot just buy milk at the local grocery store using bitcoin creates another problem for Euro-Bitcoin. This is that someone must be willing to exchange bitcoin for euros in order for your Euro-Bitcoin value to be spendable. Now, the price at which someone is willing to exchange your bitcoins depends on the perceived demand for bitcoins in the market. If people want to own 10x as many bitcoins, the price of bitcoins jacks up, and the value of Euro-Bitcoin increases. If the reverse happens, the price of bitcoins plummets and the value of Euro-Bitcoin decreases. This is the inflation which the GP was talking about, the purchasing power of the bitcoin, with respect to buying real goods, can decrease or increase significantly according to bitcoin demand.
Right now, should any one major holder of bitcoins get rid of a significant portion of their bitcoins for the euro, it is conceivable that would saturate the market for bitcoins and decrease demand. This could cause the price of bitcoins to drop fantastically, since there are only so many people trying to buy, say, several hundred thousand euros worth of bitcoins. Bear in mind that since most bitcoins are being held, rather than being used, in general the pool of bitcoins available for exchange is much smaller, so the whole bitcoin economy must fit inside a fraction of the total Euro-Bitcoin value of bitcoins in existence. Should any significant fraction of that value be suddenly put up for exchange, that will tank the price. That may or may not happen, but if it does, it will mean inflation, lots of inflation.
I think it is also reasonable for the price of bitcoin to drop gradually, which also creates significant inflation (by definition), but that won't kill bitcoin, only decrease the value of everyone's bitcoin.
Personally, I don't like the "rich get richer" nature of (monetary) deflationary currencies, but bitcoin can suffer from inflation under the wrong circumstances.
The laws that the RIAA folks got passed would say otherwise, with very stiff penalties.
mod parent up