Who are you going to force to pay for it? Are you in the third world caring for AIDS patients?
Strictly speaking, as far as some people are concerned, he's partially correct - and no subsidies are needed to reverse it. I suspect that only a minority of those with AIDS fall in to the category of those who would live but for the patent, though.
Think about why patents (are supposed to) work. Patents provide a temporary monopoly allowing the patent holder to maintain a price considerably higher than the cost of production. This provides excess profits which they use to pay for the research.
This means that some people, those are able/willing to pay more than the cost of production but less than the monopolistic price, do not receive the drugs. This is economically inefficient: everyone (including the drug company) would be better off if these people could buy at lower prices. It's difficult or impossible to eliminate this inefficiency without scrapping the patent and removing the incentive for research which it (allegedly) provides.
This is the standard textbook argument surrounding patents and copyright - and the standard argument for why they should be limited. No doubt there are an enormous number of real-life subtleties to consider on top. Personally, in my not very informed opinion, I suspect it's probably quite well applicable to drug development.
Unfortunately, I know of only one general way to avoid this problem: government funding of drug research with the requirement that anyone may use the results. In specific cases there might be other options. If the drug company can distinguish between poor and rich people (eg, on the basis of which country they live in) they can sell at different prices. I think this may actually be happening with AIDS drugs - but my memory of it is rather faint so I could be wrong. In any case the majority of third world patients will probably be unable to afford even just the cost of production for many drugs (something like 2.5 billion people make less than two dollars a day) - but at least it helps some.
Umm nope: You forgot the big one: Most of them convert it to their local currency and send it home.
'Convert' it? They can only do that by selling them to someone else. They can only do that because dollars have value to people selling their native currency. They only have value to such people because someone, somewhere, wants to use them to buy something from the US.
There can be lots of steps in the chain - but you can't escape the fact that dollars are only valuable because they can be used to buy US exports or US assets.
Isn't that the whole point of a military? To mantain power and privilege in the international community? I agree that they are a tyrannical regime, but, their desire to maintain power is a necessary part of being a state. Do you expect them to fold if the U.S. says 'boo'?
My point is that 'they' refers not to the North Korean state or the North Korean people but to those who happen to be in power at the moment. Their army's main goal is to keep those people in power - not to protect the country's citizens. This isn't true in the US.
Remember, even foreigners don't work for nothing. The only reason Indians or Chinese (or me, for that matter, since I'm British) will do work for the US is because the money they receive will, sooner or later, allow them to buy something from America. Ultimately it just isn't possible for an economy to lose all of its jobs to outsourcing because then it would end up without anything to exchange for it's imports.
Those foreigners can only do a few things with their dollars. They can spend them on American exports, they can buy American owned assets (such as American owned companies or land) and they can lend the money to America. If they do more of the second two than the first (so that the value of US exports is less than the value of US imports) then the result is a trade deficit.
This is exactly what HAS been happening to the US. My guess is that almost all of the difference (the surplus in the capital account) has been lent to the US - and much of that to the government to fund it's growing national debt. Some asian countries have large dollar foreign exchange reserves, too, which is not so very different from lending.
This can't go on forever; there's a limit to how much foreigners want to lend to the US. The dollar will fall and outsourcing will stop being so attractive.
Unfortunately the increasing borrowing by the US government will push US interest rates up in order to attract more money in from abroad and away from other domestic investments (which means you can expect to see a fall in investment by US companies). That'll help keep the dollar up - but a lot of people still seem to be expecting the dollar to fall quite a lot over the next few years.
This probably isn't going to be too good for the US economy. A lot of people will whine when they can't buy 20 dollar DVD players any more and when higher interest rates burst the (admittedly small by international standards) US housing bubble - but at least some jobs will go back to the US.
The fact is that the Americans have more than enough nukes to ensure an "adequate" response.
Surely nukes would be a thoroughly inadequate response? The 'they' you refer to is a tyrannical regime whose main military objective is to maintain its own power and privilege (and, maybe, gain South Korea if it ever gets the chance). A nuclear bomb would do little other than kill millions of innocent, poor and repressed people whilst their leaders sit in their bunkers waiting until its safe to come out and take over again. Or maybe you were planning on sending in a conventional army afterwards to take over the radiation ridden poisoned country and build it in to a democratic nation? Or perhaps you would be hoping to kill the entire population and just seal the country off and forget about it for ever more?
'Just nuke 'em' sounds great (well, actually, it doesn't, but lets pretend that it does) but to me it sounds neither morally acceptable nor remotely useful.
Until America gets rid of its welfare and social security money pits, we will continue to take your jobs. Once we have taken all your jobs there will be no money in your country anymore and EVERYONE will get sick and die, not just the people who will not work.
It isn't really possible for all of a country's jobs to be outsourced. Even foreigners don't work for nothing - if there are no American exports to buy then dollars aren't worth working for. An economy can run a trade deficit (by selling its assets or borrowing from abroad) but it can't live that way forever.
You could start by getting a measure on the ballot in some local or state election to change the electoral system to Single Transferable Voting (aka Proportional Representation) where votes for small parties or independants are not wasted.
Actually, STV and PR are not the same thing. PR applies mostly to groups of electees (legislatures, say) and refers to the practice of choosing those elected in proportion to the votes cast. So, for example, if 20% of people vote for party one then 20% of those elected are from party one. I imagine that if you Americans abolished your rather silly electoral college system for a simple vote tally you could reasonably call that PR, too.
STV is the system where your vote is transferred to your second (or lower) preference candidate if your first preference is eliminated. This is good for new or small parties because electors no longer have to worry that by voting for such a candidate (Ralph Nader, say) they are making it more likely that their last preference candidate (George Bush, say) will win than if they voted for their second preference candidate (John Kerry, say).
I think many people feel they've nothing to hide and would opt for this payment plan if it can save them significant amounts of money. And as long as it is voluntary (i.e. you can always go with a flat rate), I don't see a problem with it.
You would, however, have to expect that your flat rate payment would go up.
There is a very important concept within insurance called adverse selection. To make things simple imagine there are two kinds of equally prevalent driver: safe drivers and dangerous drivers. Safe drivers cost an average of 500/year in claims, dangerous ones 1000/year. Let's suppose you are an insurance company in a vaguely competitive market and that it isn't possible to separate these two types of driver. What is your premium going to be? Answer: 750/year plus a bit for costs and profit.
Now imagine that a competitor finds a way to distinguish between these two drivers. They start offering insurance to safe drivers at 500/year+a bit and to dangerous drivers at 1000/year+a bit. Your safe driver customers all go the this competitor and save money leaving you with a portfolio full of dangerous drivers. Your claims cost has now risen from 750/year/driver to 1000. You are force to either raise your premium to 1000+a bit or to adopt the new technique and charge different drivers different premiums.
A real life market isn't so polarized or so easy to separate so it may well split in quite such a dramatic way. The concept is still an interesting one to apply to a market containing this new kind of policy. The safest drivers are precisely those who would save money with these new policies. The new policies would drain away the safest drivers from traditional insurers thus raising their costs and hence their premiums. This rise, in turn, provides a new tranche of drivers who can save money by switching. Depending on how accurate the system is at separating drivers, on how much it costs, on how well people accept it and probably a whole bunch of other things I haven't thought of it could lead to a large increase in premiums or even a complete collapse for the traditional policies.
The Federal Reserve "creates" (or "destroys") money by regulating how much money a bank is required to keep on hand. If a bank only has to keep 10% of its deposits on hand, then the rest of the money can be loaned out.
That's correct - but it's not its main method of regulating the money supply and interest rates. If it wants to increase the money supply it creates some money and uses it to buy treasury bills (it could also use some other asset - gold or foreign currencies, say). If it wants to decrease the money supply it does the opposite - it sells some of its holdings of treasury bonds and destroys the money it receives. (Actually, it hardly ever has to sell T bills; it usually has enough maturing at any one time that it can simply destroy the repayments rather than actually having to sell anything).
These are so-called 'open market operations'.
[ You'll have to excuse me if I'm a bit shaky on this bit; I'm British and take more notice of how this works in the UK than in the US - even then I'm not totally confident of it. ] The interest rate announced by the Fed is actually a target for the federal funds rate (their website describes this as 'the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other depository institutions overnight'). Banks need to hold a minimum reserve requirement with the Fed every night; if they think they will be short then they can borrow money from banks with surpluses at this rate. This rate is not determined by the Fed directly but by the banks themselves (via some sort of market). The Fed can affect this rate, however, by adjusting the money supply. The more T-bonds it buys the more cash there is available in the banking system and the lower is demand for these loans. It adjusts the number of T-bonds it buys in order to affect this demand which, in turn, affects the interest rate.
What would be the outcome? How can markets continue to exist, if their highs and lows can be predicted? I think that the very act of prediction will change the outcome... basically making this impossible to practically achieve.
The outcome would be that financial markets would still exist but that the predictable pattern would disappear.
Financial markets aren't just about short term speculation. The purpose of, say, a stock or bond market is to match people wishing to lend money and bear risk to those wishing to borrow.
Contrary to some posters opinions this is not a zero sum game. The borrowers use the money to invest in business and produce a return - a return which wouldn't have been possible if there had been no way for the borrower to find that source of finance.
If financial markets work perfectly then the prices within them represent the 'best guess' of the value of the underlying asset. The result is that investors' money goes in to the best investments - those which will give the best returns. Imagine if dot-com stocks had been correctly priced. How many fewer doomed companies would have been able to float or raise additional capital? That money could have been diverted to investments which, instead, produced good returns and helped the economy to grow.
If market returns could be predicted (so that buying stocks became risk free) then investing in stocks would be just like investing in, say, treasury bonds. A market would still exist because the underlying need - matching borrowers to lenders - still exists. Perfect predictability will never happen, though - company values depend on unpredictable factors out there in the real economy. Think of future consumer tastes, harvests, weather, the outcome of sporting events and terrorist attacks. In fact, a perfectly functioning market that takes all available information in to account would probably not contain any (exploitable) patterns. It should be obvious why: if prices correctly take in to account all available information then only new information can cause them to change (given constant interest rates and risk premia). Without having had this information in advance you couldn't have predicted the change - and if you had the information then this contradicts the assumption that it's new.
Currencies all have different origins as well. If we set all currencies at the same value tommorrow (i.e. US$1 == GBP1 == AU$1 == 1 Yen), and adjusted prices accordingly, then the movement of the currencies over the long term would provide an economic indicator of some sort (but not a very useful one).
Erm, no, not a very useful one. It'd quite possibly be mostly a measure of inflation. Imagine: US$1 == GBP1 one year. Over the next year UK inflation is zero and US inflation is 100%. If everything else stayed the same you'd expect to end up with US$2 == GBP1 but absolutely no real difference whatsoever.
The purchasing power parity exchange rate will do exactly that - by definition. IIRC there have been some fairly sizable academic arguments over whether there is a tendency for market exchange rates to tend to revert towards PPP rates. The last I heard was that it was very difficult to find statistically significant evidence of this (because a very wide span of data is required) but someone had managed to do it. The span of data was something like 100 years, though, so there was plenty of scope for something to be wrong.
What about people who want to link straight up via their PDA, via some embedded tech on the factory floor, via an email gateway, via any method in the future that you don't want to have to include in planning now.
Well, if I had my way there'd be no way in hell someone's PDA would even be able to send packets to a production database - never mind issue queries.
The alternative is to re-write every data rule for every interface onto your system which is a royal PITA compared to just giving them a basic SQL client.
I've seen this argument appear quite a few times, seemingly coming from DBAs. The alternative to having your new application go through the layer that's been put on top of your data is indeed to rewrite that layer inside it. But why would you do that? It really is much easier to go through the code that already exists (or even just reuse it - as a library, for example). It's not like the CORBA or HTTP clients required to do that aren't available or widely ported enough. In fact, it's surely easier to find such a client than it is to find a client library for your favourite database compiled for obscure language x on unusual platform y.
When was the last time you saw the CPU sustain a high load on your database server? Database machines are constrained by I/O (disk and network) and memory, not by CPU in most cases. Therefore, your 8-way SQL box is sitting at 10% utilization. Why not get a bit more use out of it?
This depends very much on your application and dataset. The one I look after has a small but actively used dataset (less than 1GB is heavily used) and regularly nearly fully uses the CPUs in the database machine. Moving load off the database (and, indeed, caching data elsewhere where appropriate) is the only way to survive in these circumstances (bearing in mind that buying better database hardware or software is not an option thanks to the cost).
No, what's more important is that your queries are centralized, so that you can optimize them more easily. What's easier to optimize: A single query to in a stored procedure, with the procedure called by 100 different methods; or 100 different queries to across all of your code? Yeah, sure, you can centralize that as well, but what's stopping a developer from writing his own query rather than using the optimized one you've already provided for him?
If you're doing the same SQL query from a hundred different places then I think you've got more fundamental problems than a few bits of poor SQL...
Using a database properly is about more than optimizing queries. Everything from system architecture to the detailed behaviour of this or that object affects the load on the database and the quality of its structure. Using a database properly is also about designing your application appropriately and choosing what and how it uses the database - not just how it expresses those things in SQL.
Yes, you probably want a layer which is responsible for accessing the database, enforcing security and implementing business logic (or, at least, business logic relating to persistent data). This layer can be a set of stored procedures or it can be a middle layer which the rest of your code accesses (or both, if you've got a very good reason). Whatever you choose it DEFINITELY needs to be written by someone who knows about databases (and, in case you hadn't noticed, DBAs are not the only people who know about databases).
If you put your application logic on your web server or on your middle tier transaction server, any application that connects directly to the database is going to bypass those business rules. If you actually care about business rules and security rules being enforced, you will put them into your database.
There are plenty of good reasons why you'd want your multiple applications/front-ends/whatever manipulating your data through some sort of business rule layer. Yes, you can build this layer in to your database as stored procedures - but this isn't the only way of doing it. You can also have a middle layer which talks to the database and through which everything else goes.
If you need to have disparate applications that, for some reason, can only talk to the database directly then you are certainly going to want your stored procedures. They do have certain disadvantages, though. Are your stored procedure languages as powerful and flexible as the languages you might choose for your middle layer? Can they access third party libraries for, say, matrix algebra or option pricing? Can they make CORBA calls to external systems? Can they charge people's credit cards? Even if they can do these things would you really want to do it from your stored procedures?
Putting your business logic and business rules in to a separate middle layer is a perfectly legitimate design choice. There really aren't that many languages or platforms which can't access such a layer (Perl, Java, C++, Python, Java and many other languages all have CORBA ORBs). This layer can choose to use stored procedures to implement some of its functionality if that's the right decision (to avoid transferring large amounts of data, for example). It can choose to fetch its data from a cache or from an external system, too. You still have a single place to look when you want to modify or optimize your data structure or queries or business rules.
Look at the requirement, look at your system, consider the options and put this layer in the most sensible place for your software.
Although the music itself may be in the public domain, most performances of it would not be.
There are plenty of out-of-copyright recordings of classical music (and not only that but you can buy them on CD, too - though I'm not sure if the touching up and remastering creates any new IP). Many of them are excellent performances, too. You can, for example, listen to Rachmaninov playing his own musing in recordings from before 1920 through to the 1940s. Some of them are a bit scratchy, though, and most are in mono.
Actually, it's not uncommon for reviewers to rate some of these old recordings above more recent recording.
Re:interesting idea but I doubt it will succede
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By Road and Rail?
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More on topic, I agree with you in that this idea is not very promising. Heck, even here, were trains are massively used, I don't think this kind of transportation means would be a big hit.
A large proportion of journeys are in and out of London (about 60%, I think). These are incredibly busy bits of track and (at least on the line I use) it just wouldn't be possible to fit more trains along the lines at peak (passenger) times - or any time even close to peak times. Running lots of these little runty things would be silly when what's really needed is higher passenger throughput. Some of the longer distance lines seem quite busy, too. I've seen 12-carriage trains leaving London for the two and half hour journey to Manchester with no standing room left.
They could perhaps be used at night - but I suppose this could cause problems for rail maintainance (and maybe the inflexibility would be a problem for freight operators).
Unless someone builds some long distance freight only lines (with terminals outside cities, perhaps, to cut the cost) I can't really see any room being made for these things on British railways.
It doesn't say anywhere in the article which market this is aimed at, though. Maybe the inventors don't expect it to be used in the UK anyway.
The USA's wealth distribution was much more equitable at the time that we become the country with the largest per-capita GDP, so the super-rich aren't responsible for our success.
Actually, the USA isn't the country with the largest per-capita GDP. Luxembourg comes first by quite a way. Unfortunately I can't find the figures right now (the OECD publishes them but their site is a bit of a maze). IIRC, the USA comes second using PPP exchange rates and about fifth using market exchange rates.
And middle-class (and below) people fund growth too, through indirect loans to entrepreneurs via pension plans, bank accounts, etc, and directly through stock purchases.
A high savings rate isn't the only thing that contributes to growth and high GDP. Think, also, of the miniscule amount of holiday most Amercians have each year and of the number of people who forgo income to go to University.
Oh, and right at the moment a vast amount of those savings will be going straight in to government debt. This probably wasn't what you were thinking of when you mentioned 'funding growth'. The USA's rising national debt is going to attract quite a lot of money away from investment in the private sector, I would have thought.
The price per share today should be (theoretically) unchanged as a result of today's actions.
Which is more valuable to you? Indirectly owning a share of $60bn (which is invested however Microsoft wants to invest it) which you can't get hold of and spend/reinvest as you please or having that share in your bank account? If Microsoft can't make money from that $60bn as well as its shareholders can then you'd surely expect its share price to rise.
If that doesn't convince you just look at the price of shares of closed-end investment funds. These usually trade (or at least used to) at a discount compared to the value of the shares they own.
Give your user pieces of random rubbish, one for each login. Print these on something convenient (a credit-card sized bit of card, for instance) and give this to your user. Also ask the user to enter a memorable word.
The password for a particular login is then the random rubbish for that login plus the memorable word. The memorable word can be the same for every login.
A brute force attack remains unfeasible without obtaining the piece of card; not perfect but it makes it a good deal harder as it requires the physical presence of the attacker. At the same time the user is more likely to obey your instruction not to write their word down as there is only one, easy to remember word to remember.
Stealing the password then requires both physical access to the bit of card and a brute force attack. That raises the bar quite a bit from needing only one of those two.
Re:Something good may yet come out of this
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Out of Gas
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Your definition of fair would only apply if the excess money were spent on combating these environmental concerns.
Why on earth would that be true? 'Fair' means you take account of the full costs to others (including your supplier) when you make your purchasing decision. If the price reflect this then you'll be doing it without thinking. It makes no difference to your decision what the money is spent on (unless it directly affects you, of course, which it probably doesn't to any noticeable degree).
He didn't say anything at all about wanting a 'free market'; he just implied that he wanted a better functioning market that takes account of costs not just to the buyer and seller but to third parties as well.
Hint: if you don't know what an externality is then you ought to go and find out before you try replying to his post. Then go and read about the first theorem of welfare economics and why it doesn't work in the real world where externalities exist.
Re:Something good may yet come out of this
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Out of Gas
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The "low" prices in the US have not resulted in EXCESSIVE petrol consumption since the consumption is based on roughly the fair market value instead of a vastly tax-inflated value. The US is consuming a NORMAL amount of petrol given its market value. It is Europe that is consuming a LOW amount due to taxation.
Nonsense.
The 'fair' market value is the total cost which others have to bear to provide you with the services you get from using petrol. This is much more than just the cost of getting the stuff out of the ground and refining it. It also includes damage to the global environment, damage to the local natural environment, degradation of the urban environment, damage to buildings, damage to health, accident rates, congestion and many other things.
Put those in to the prices and you'll be paying even more than current European prices.
If you'd said 'free market value' you might have been right - but there's a big difference between that and reasonable notions of 'fair', 'appropriate' or 'reasonable' prices.
Actually, the reason is...
BECAUSE IT'S A CROSS PLATFORM FRICKIN' WEB BROWSER!
If you want platform specific features, you start seperate projects, like Camino (MacOSX).
Thing is, Firefox is already a great browser on all the platforms it's on, so there's really no need for platform specific versions. Cross platform rocks; no matter what machine you're on, there's your familiar app with all your settings easily ported between them.
That's an exceptionally bad reason. Which would you prefer:
All of your software for a particular platform has a consistent GUI, uses consistent concepts, works in the same kind of way and interoperates which each other properly.
All of your software works the same across different platforms but works differently to other software on the same platform.
Almost all users use a single platform; they don't switch between them. Even those that do are familiar with the two platforms and don't want to be surprised when one program acts differently to all of the others.
Finally, people choose platforms for a reason. They should be able to expect that the software they use will take advantage of that platform's features (well, the ones actually relate to the software in question) and fit in with it's conventions. I don't want some trumped up individual piece of software thinking that it's so important that my choice of platform is irrelevant and that it's perfectly all right to exist in its own world separate from it.
Cross platform code can be useful because it lets you release your software to a wider audience more easily (providing you REALLY need that; you should always think carefully about whether or not it is really worth it). Pretending you can abstract away every platform specific detail and have everything work the same everywhere might be easy - but it's a poor assumption and a good way of producing poorer quality and less usable software.
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Strictly speaking, as far as some people are concerned, he's partially correct - and no subsidies are needed to reverse it. I suspect that only a minority of those with AIDS fall in to the category of those who would live but for the patent, though.
Think about why patents (are supposed to) work. Patents provide a temporary monopoly allowing the patent holder to maintain a price considerably higher than the cost of production. This provides excess profits which they use to pay for the research.
This means that some people, those are able/willing to pay more than the cost of production but less than the monopolistic price, do not receive the drugs. This is economically inefficient: everyone (including the drug company) would be better off if these people could buy at lower prices. It's difficult or impossible to eliminate this inefficiency without scrapping the patent and removing the incentive for research which it (allegedly) provides.
This is the standard textbook argument surrounding patents and copyright - and the standard argument for why they should be limited. No doubt there are an enormous number of real-life subtleties to consider on top. Personally, in my not very informed opinion, I suspect it's probably quite well applicable to drug development.
Unfortunately, I know of only one general way to avoid this problem: government funding of drug research with the requirement that anyone may use the results. In specific cases there might be other options. If the drug company can distinguish between poor and rich people (eg, on the basis of which country they live in) they can sell at different prices. I think this may actually be happening with AIDS drugs - but my memory of it is rather faint so I could be wrong. In any case the majority of third world patients will probably be unable to afford even just the cost of production for many drugs (something like 2.5 billion people make less than two dollars a day) - but at least it helps some.
'Convert' it? They can only do that by selling them to someone else. They can only do that because dollars have value to people selling their native currency. They only have value to such people because someone, somewhere, wants to use them to buy something from the US.
There can be lots of steps in the chain - but you can't escape the fact that dollars are only valuable because they can be used to buy US exports or US assets.
My point is that 'they' refers not to the North Korean state or the North Korean people but to those who happen to be in power at the moment. Their army's main goal is to keep those people in power - not to protect the country's citizens. This isn't true in the US.
Those foreigners can only do a few things with their dollars. They can spend them on American exports, they can buy American owned assets (such as American owned companies or land) and they can lend the money to America. If they do more of the second two than the first (so that the value of US exports is less than the value of US imports) then the result is a trade deficit.
This is exactly what HAS been happening to the US. My guess is that almost all of the difference (the surplus in the capital account) has been lent to the US - and much of that to the government to fund it's growing national debt. Some asian countries have large dollar foreign exchange reserves, too, which is not so very different from lending.
This can't go on forever; there's a limit to how much foreigners want to lend to the US. The dollar will fall and outsourcing will stop being so attractive.
Unfortunately the increasing borrowing by the US government will push US interest rates up in order to attract more money in from abroad and away from other domestic investments (which means you can expect to see a fall in investment by US companies). That'll help keep the dollar up - but a lot of people still seem to be expecting the dollar to fall quite a lot over the next few years.
This probably isn't going to be too good for the US economy. A lot of people will whine when they can't buy 20 dollar DVD players any more and when higher interest rates burst the (admittedly small by international standards) US housing bubble - but at least some jobs will go back to the US.
Surely nukes would be a thoroughly inadequate response? The 'they' you refer to is a tyrannical regime whose main military objective is to maintain its own power and privilege (and, maybe, gain South Korea if it ever gets the chance).
A nuclear bomb would do little other than kill millions of innocent, poor and repressed people whilst their leaders sit in their bunkers waiting until its safe to come out and take over again. Or maybe you were planning on sending in a conventional army afterwards to take over the radiation ridden poisoned country and build it in to a democratic nation? Or perhaps you would be hoping to kill the entire population and just seal the country off and forget about it for ever more?
'Just nuke 'em' sounds great (well, actually, it doesn't, but lets pretend that it does) but to me it sounds neither morally acceptable nor remotely useful.
It isn't really possible for all of a country's jobs to be outsourced. Even foreigners don't work for nothing - if there are no American exports to buy then dollars aren't worth working for. An economy can run a trade deficit (by selling its assets or borrowing from abroad) but it can't live that way forever.
Actually, STV and PR are not the same thing. PR applies mostly to groups of electees (legislatures, say) and refers to the practice of choosing those elected in proportion to the votes cast. So, for example, if 20% of people vote for party one then 20% of those elected are from party one. I imagine that if you Americans abolished your rather silly electoral college system for a simple vote tally you could reasonably call that PR, too.
STV is the system where your vote is transferred to your second (or lower) preference candidate if your first preference is eliminated. This is good for new or small parties because electors no longer have to worry that by voting for such a candidate (Ralph Nader, say) they are making it more likely that their last preference candidate (George Bush, say) will win than if they voted for their second preference candidate (John Kerry, say).
You would, however, have to expect that your flat rate payment would go up.
There is a very important concept within insurance called adverse selection. To make things simple imagine there are two kinds of equally prevalent driver: safe drivers and dangerous drivers. Safe drivers cost an average of 500/year in claims, dangerous ones 1000/year. Let's suppose you are an insurance company in a vaguely competitive market and that it isn't possible to separate these two types of driver. What is your premium going to be? Answer: 750/year plus a bit for costs and profit.
Now imagine that a competitor finds a way to distinguish between these two drivers. They start offering insurance to safe drivers at 500/year+a bit and to dangerous drivers at 1000/year+a bit. Your safe driver customers all go the this competitor and save money leaving you with a portfolio full of dangerous drivers. Your claims cost has now risen from 750/year/driver to 1000. You are force to either raise your premium to 1000+a bit or to adopt the new technique and charge different drivers different premiums.
A real life market isn't so polarized or so easy to separate so it may well split in quite such a dramatic way. The concept is still an interesting one to apply to a market containing this new kind of policy. The safest drivers are precisely those who would save money with these new policies. The new policies would drain away the safest drivers from traditional insurers thus raising their costs and hence their premiums. This rise, in turn, provides a new tranche of drivers who can save money by switching. Depending on how accurate the system is at separating drivers, on how much it costs, on how well people accept it and probably a whole bunch of other things I haven't thought of it could lead to a large increase in premiums or even a complete collapse for the traditional policies.
That's correct - but it's not its main method of regulating the money supply and interest rates. If it wants to increase the money supply it creates some money and uses it to buy treasury bills (it could also use some other asset - gold or foreign currencies, say). If it wants to decrease the money supply it does the opposite - it sells some of its holdings of treasury bonds and destroys the money it receives. (Actually, it hardly ever has to sell T bills; it usually has enough maturing at any one time that it can simply destroy the repayments rather than actually having to sell anything).
These are so-called 'open market operations'.
[ You'll have to excuse me if I'm a bit shaky on this bit; I'm British and take more notice of how this works in the UK than in the US - even then I'm not totally confident of it. ] The interest rate announced by the Fed is actually a target for the federal funds rate (their website describes this as 'the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other depository institutions overnight'). Banks need to hold a minimum reserve requirement with the Fed every night; if they think they will be short then they can borrow money from banks with surpluses at this rate. This rate is not determined by the Fed directly but by the banks themselves (via some sort of market). The Fed can affect this rate, however, by adjusting the money supply. The more T-bonds it buys the more cash there is available in the banking system and the lower is demand for these loans. It adjusts the number of T-bonds it buys in order to affect this demand which, in turn, affects the interest rate.
The outcome would be that financial markets would still exist but that the predictable pattern would disappear.
Financial markets aren't just about short term speculation. The purpose of, say, a stock or bond market is to match people wishing to lend money and bear risk to those wishing to borrow.
Contrary to some posters opinions this is not a zero sum game. The borrowers use the money to invest in business and produce a return - a return which wouldn't have been possible if there had been no way for the borrower to find that source of finance.
If financial markets work perfectly then the prices within them represent the 'best guess' of the value of the underlying asset. The result is that investors' money goes in to the best investments - those which will give the best returns. Imagine if dot-com stocks had been correctly priced. How many fewer doomed companies would have been able to float or raise additional capital? That money could have been diverted to investments which, instead, produced good returns and helped the economy to grow.
If market returns could be predicted (so that buying stocks became risk free) then investing in stocks would be just like investing in, say, treasury bonds. A market would still exist because the underlying need - matching borrowers to lenders - still exists. Perfect predictability will never happen, though - company values depend on unpredictable factors out there in the real economy. Think of future consumer tastes, harvests, weather, the outcome of sporting events and terrorist attacks. In fact, a perfectly functioning market that takes all available information in to account would probably not contain any (exploitable) patterns. It should be obvious why: if prices correctly take in to account all available information then only new information can cause them to change (given constant interest rates and risk premia). Without having had this information in advance you couldn't have predicted the change - and if you had the information then this contradicts the assumption that it's new.
Erm, no, not a very useful one. It'd quite possibly be mostly a measure of inflation. Imagine: US$1 == GBP1 one year. Over the next year UK inflation is zero and US inflation is 100%. If everything else stayed the same you'd expect to end up with US$2 == GBP1 but absolutely no real difference whatsoever.
The purchasing power parity exchange rate will do exactly that - by definition. IIRC there have been some fairly sizable academic arguments over whether there is a tendency for market exchange rates to tend to revert towards PPP rates. The last I heard was that it was very difficult to find statistically significant evidence of this (because a very wide span of data is required) but someone had managed to do it. The span of data was something like 100 years, though, so there was plenty of scope for something to be wrong.
Well, if I had my way there'd be no way in hell someone's PDA would even be able to send packets to a production database - never mind issue queries.
I've seen this argument appear quite a few times, seemingly coming from DBAs. The alternative to having your new application go through the layer that's been put on top of your data is indeed to rewrite that layer inside it. But why would you do that? It really is much easier to go through the code that already exists (or even just reuse it - as a library, for example). It's not like the CORBA or HTTP clients required to do that aren't available or widely ported enough. In fact, it's surely easier to find such a client than it is to find a client library for your favourite database compiled for obscure language x on unusual platform y.
This depends very much on your application and dataset. The one I look after has a small but actively used dataset (less than 1GB is heavily used) and regularly nearly fully uses the CPUs in the database machine. Moving load off the database (and, indeed, caching data elsewhere where appropriate) is the only way to survive in these circumstances (bearing in mind that buying better database hardware or software is not an option thanks to the cost).
If you're doing the same SQL query from a hundred different places then I think you've got more fundamental problems than a few bits of poor SQL...
Using a database properly is about more than optimizing queries. Everything from system architecture to the detailed behaviour of this or that object affects the load on the database and the quality of its structure. Using a database properly is also about designing your application appropriately and choosing what and how it uses the database - not just how it expresses those things in SQL.
Yes, you probably want a layer which is responsible for accessing the database, enforcing security and implementing business logic (or, at least, business logic relating to persistent data). This layer can be a set of stored procedures or it can be a middle layer which the rest of your code accesses (or both, if you've got a very good reason). Whatever you choose it DEFINITELY needs to be written by someone who knows about databases (and, in case you hadn't noticed, DBAs are not the only people who know about databases).
There are plenty of good reasons why you'd want your multiple applications/front-ends/whatever manipulating your data through some sort of business rule layer. Yes, you can build this layer in to your database as stored procedures - but this isn't the only way of doing it. You can also have a middle layer which talks to the database and through which everything else goes.
If you need to have disparate applications that, for some reason, can only talk to the database directly then you are certainly going to want your stored procedures. They do have certain disadvantages, though. Are your stored procedure languages as powerful and flexible as the languages you might choose for your middle layer? Can they access third party libraries for, say, matrix algebra or option pricing? Can they make CORBA calls to external systems? Can they charge people's credit cards? Even if they can do these things would you really want to do it from your stored procedures?
Putting your business logic and business rules in to a separate middle layer is a perfectly legitimate design choice. There really aren't that many languages or platforms which can't access such a layer (Perl, Java, C++, Python, Java and many other languages all have CORBA ORBs). This layer can choose to use stored procedures to implement some of its functionality if that's the right decision (to avoid transferring large amounts of data, for example). It can choose to fetch its data from a cache or from an external system, too. You still have a single place to look when you want to modify or optimize your data structure or queries or business rules.
Look at the requirement, look at your system, consider the options and put this layer in the most sensible place for your software.
There are plenty of out-of-copyright recordings of classical music (and not only that but you can buy them on CD, too - though I'm not sure if the touching up and remastering creates any new IP). Many of them are excellent performances, too. You can, for example, listen to Rachmaninov playing his own musing in recordings from before 1920 through to the 1940s. Some of them are a bit scratchy, though, and most are in mono.
Actually, it's not uncommon for reviewers to rate some of these old recordings above more recent recording.
A large proportion of journeys are in and out of London (about 60%, I think). These are incredibly busy bits of track and (at least on the line I use) it just wouldn't be possible to fit more trains along the lines at peak (passenger) times - or any time even close to peak times. Running lots of these little runty things would be silly when what's really needed is higher passenger throughput. Some of the longer distance lines seem quite busy, too. I've seen 12-carriage trains leaving London for the two and half hour journey to Manchester with no standing room left.
They could perhaps be used at night - but I suppose this could cause problems for rail maintainance (and maybe the inflexibility would be a problem for freight operators).
Unless someone builds some long distance freight only lines (with terminals outside cities, perhaps, to cut the cost) I can't really see any room being made for these things on British railways.
It doesn't say anywhere in the article which market this is aimed at, though. Maybe the inventors don't expect it to be used in the UK anyway.
Actually, the USA isn't the country with the largest per-capita GDP. Luxembourg comes first by quite a way. Unfortunately I can't find the figures right now (the OECD publishes them but their site is a bit of a maze). IIRC, the USA comes second using PPP exchange rates and about fifth using market exchange rates.
A high savings rate isn't the only thing that contributes to growth and high GDP. Think, also, of the miniscule amount of holiday most Amercians have each year and of the number of people who forgo income to go to University.
Oh, and right at the moment a vast amount of those savings will be going straight in to government debt. This probably wasn't what you were thinking of when you mentioned 'funding growth'. The USA's rising national debt is going to attract quite a lot of money away from investment in the private sector, I would have thought.
Which is more valuable to you? Indirectly owning a share of $60bn (which is invested however Microsoft wants to invest it) which you can't get hold of and spend/reinvest as you please or having that share in your bank account? If Microsoft can't make money from that $60bn as well as its shareholders can then you'd surely expect its share price to rise.
If that doesn't convince you just look at the price of shares of closed-end investment funds. These usually trade (or at least used to) at a discount compared to the value of the shares they own.
The password for a particular login is then the random rubbish for that login plus the memorable word. The memorable word can be the same for every login.
A brute force attack remains unfeasible without obtaining the piece of card; not perfect but it makes it a good deal harder as it requires the physical presence of the attacker. At the same time the user is more likely to obey your instruction not to write their word down as there is only one, easy to remember word to remember.
Stealing the password then requires both physical access to the bit of card and a brute force attack. That raises the bar quite a bit from needing only one of those two.
Why on earth would that be true? 'Fair' means you take account of the full costs to others (including your supplier) when you make your purchasing decision. If the price reflect this then you'll be doing it without thinking. It makes no difference to your decision what the money is spent on (unless it directly affects you, of course, which it probably doesn't to any noticeable degree).
Hint: if you don't know what an externality is then you ought to go and find out before you try replying to his post. Then go and read about the first theorem of welfare economics and why it doesn't work in the real world where externalities exist.
Nonsense.
The 'fair' market value is the total cost which others have to bear to provide you with the services you get from using petrol. This is much more than just the cost of getting the stuff out of the ground and refining it. It also includes damage to the global environment, damage to the local natural environment, degradation of the urban environment, damage to buildings, damage to health, accident rates, congestion and many other things.
Put those in to the prices and you'll be paying even more than current European prices.
If you'd said 'free market value' you might have been right - but there's a big difference between that and reasonable notions of 'fair', 'appropriate' or 'reasonable' prices.
That's an exceptionally bad reason. Which would you prefer:
Almost all users use a single platform; they don't switch between them. Even those that do are familiar with the two platforms and don't want to be surprised when one program acts differently to all of the others.
Finally, people choose platforms for a reason. They should be able to expect that the software they use will take advantage of that platform's features (well, the ones actually relate to the software in question) and fit in with it's conventions. I don't want some trumped up individual piece of software thinking that it's so important that my choice of platform is irrelevant and that it's perfectly all right to exist in its own world separate from it.
Cross platform code can be useful because it lets you release your software to a wider audience more easily (providing you REALLY need that; you should always think carefully about whether or not it is really worth it). Pretending you can abstract away every platform specific detail and have everything work the same everywhere might be easy - but it's a poor assumption and a good way of producing poorer quality and less usable software.
WARNING: Do not shoot your bow straight up.
That's music that dogs to give birth to, right?