You still aren't getting it. We do not conduct public borrowing in order to obtain money to spend. We first spend money, which we exchange for real resources, then "borrow" that same money back when our trading partners transfer their financial assets into "securities accounts" which pay a somewhat higher interest than do reserves themselves (current rates are ~3% for "long-term" securities, which are actually highly liquid, and 0.25% for reserves). Indeed, it cannot be otherwise as a matter of logic, because the only source of US dollars is the US federal government itself.
Of course our public debt is increasing; it must increase given that the real terms of trade are in our favor. In other words, we are exchanging pieces of paper with only a notional value for real resources. Once consumed, our trading partners have forever lost whatever those resources could provide, while their US financial assets only have value within a context of voluntary exchange.
Even if the debt were "repaid" via increased tax levies, that would not imply transfer of real resources. Since the de novo source of US dollars can (by definition) only be the US government, the government must first transfer money into the private sector for said money to be later taxed.
No matter what happens vis-a-vis the government's debt positions, the only way for us to lose access to our real resources is by voluntarily exchanging them for financial assets.
We'll send our resources to our creditors and as the debt and interest increase future generations will have to send more of it to our creditors than we do now.
We don't "repay" public debts with real resources. We "repay" them when a securities account (yes, that's what they call them) at the Fed is debited and a reserve account is credited. We also don't "borrow" (sell securities) in order to fund expenditures. Indeed, it is impossible for someone to exchange US dollars for US securities without having first obtained the dollars. This is in direct contradiction to the normal state of affairs during "borrowing." The only way for future generations to lose real resources is by voluntarily exchanging them for US dollars.
The proper way to understand public debt, in the form of US Treasury Securities, is to see reserves as "checking account" and securities as "savings accounts." Just as your bank does not sacrifice any real resources when you transfer money from savings to checking (indeed, they may be better off due to reductions in interest payments), the USA does not lose real resources when the Fed conducts a "reserve add" AKA debt repayment.
If this were true, there'd be no real problem with the Federal Reserve buying up all the Public Debt in the USA, and then doing so again whenever more money is needed (next month, and every month after, basically).
Reserves and Securities are both highly liquid, interest-bearing public debts. The point is that if you trade one for another the only difference is the interest rate (currently ~3% for securities and 0.25% for reserves). If the Fed literally bought all of securities, the private sector would have less money in the long run due to a lower average interest rate.
Hell, they could abolish income taxes and corporate taxes too, while they're at it.
It is absolutely a fact that taxes (and bond sales) do not operationally fund the federal government's expenditures. In that sense they could be abolished. However, it's clear that inflation would result as private sector wealth - in the form of bank deposits - would not be drained to counter the increase from federal spending. This is in contrast to the accumulation of reserve balances at the Fed, which only function to settle payments and can't be lent "out" into the economy-at-large.
And using the miracle of accounting, we'd all get something for nothing, right?
Again, you aren't getting the point. The only constraint on output is the availability of real (physical and human) resources. We are simply doing less than we might given the available real resources, because of a mistaken belief that the net amount of public liabilities represents something other than the net amount of private assets.
Think of it this way; as a matter of logic it is impossible for China to have used US dollars to purchase US securities without the US having first supplied China with US dollars via market exchange (or gifts, I guess).
I mostly agree with you; my points is just that even under the current mainstream legal view (CMLV), it seems this particular patent doesn't really describe an invention at all, just features for a hypothetical one. Again, this should have disqualified this patent even under the CMLV.
I do believe however that software patents were originally denied as mathematics, i.e. because you can't patent the abstract, rather than because of prior art. To take your sorting example, there isn't really a prior-art comparison between physical sorting (based on size, shape, etc.) and sorting algorithms such as qsort, Heap Sort, Merge Sort, etc. Patents don't cover specific functions, just specific ways of implementing those functions (again, according to the CMLV). If I got a patent on qsort, it wouldn't prohibit you from using or patenting Heap Sort.
And yes, most of the software patents we see are clearly invalid under the CMLV, but the USPTO is extremely lax and declarations of invalidity require costly and lengthy legal interventions.
Sure, the recession is technically over. Thus begins the extended economic depression during which unemployment remains extraordinarily high - over 60% for young people in periphery countries - and the economy significantly underperforms its potential.
This is all the result of a political economy which requires permanent public deficits for private sector growth in the absence of private credit expansion, combined with a private debt overhang prohibiting such an expansion.
This AC is completely wrong. All public debts are matched by an equal private asset. "Paying off" public debt consists of asset swaps between reserve accounts and securities accounts held at the Federal Reserve. There will never be a need to levy higher taxes to conduct such swaps, let alone a need for private individuals to "work harder."
Wrong. Whatever is produced at a given point in time is available for consumption at that time. We will never send real resources backwards in time in order to "repay" public debts.
The real theft your generation has perpetrated on mine is all of this lost output which can never be regained. Public debt needs to increase so the output gap can be closed.
I personally agree that algorithms should not be patentable. I also think that software is sufficiently protected by copyrights and in any event I agree also with recent scholarly work against intellectual property in general.
However, say we provisionally accept the mainstream legal view that algorithms are patentable so long as the patent is really 1) non-obvious, 2) novel and 3) describes actual methods to achieve functionality. I think that then it's not possible for a patent to fail tests 1 or 2 if it fails test 3, because one cannot specify the novelty or obviousness of a method if no method is given. So I do think the "prior art" test is secondary to the "is this an invention" test, and the current patent isn't an invention, just a list of features a hypothetical invention might contain.
This patent is almost entirely composed of statements such as "The context analysis module 316 is configured to interpret the received text," which means nothing. It's just a statement of a wish for such a module, with no disclosure of how such a module might, in fact, work.
You are mistaken about the purpose of a patent, which is disclose how an invention functions, not to reserve types of functionality regardless of implementation.
You are unclear on the concept of the patent. No invention or inventor is "deserving" of a patent. An inventor granted a patent enters into a social contract in which the society/government agrees to enforce monopoly use rights in exchange for disclosure of the covered invention. It's a pragmatic arrangement which seeks to prevent inventions being held as secrets and eventually forgotten, nothing more.
The purpose of patents is to give inventors a limited monopoly on their specific invention, method or process in exchange for disclosure. It is not to reserve ideas or functionality. Just saying "create an information model" is nothing like enough. You can't own the idea of "create an information model," although you might be able to own a particular "information model" if it is novel and nonobvious, etc.
To use your example, if I were to invent and patent an ansible which employs quantum entanglement, your ansible employing latent human telepathy is non-infringing. You can't patent "the ansible," only a specific method for realizing one.
I wish it did, I wanted to see if I could reproduce the error. Who knows, but its possible the companies are only willing to license individual users, not all the users of a project. I don't know how the ISO standards work - FRAND licensing or something?
The copiers are using JBIG2, not JBIG, which is lossless. JBIG2 on the other hand has lossless and lossy modes. In both modes the algorithm employs "similar symbol matching," but in the lossless mode differences for each instance of a symbol from a reference are stored while the lossy mode stores only the reference symbols.
ImageMagick doesn't seem to support JBIG2 so I haven't been able to play around with it at all. I just wonder if even the lossless mode is safe since it sounds bug prone (i.e. unless they have unit tests on many images to guarantee bit-perfect reproduction, all bets are off).
What's really bizarre is that they chose to invent some half-assed lossy compressor instead of using PNG (lossless) or JPEG (lossy, but a helluva lot better than their algorithm apparently).
Just install DD-WRT on your router and activate DNSMasq. You can configure specific hosts for your LAN as well as parameters such as cache duration. The local DNS cache will probably speed things up for you as well.
No, Sky has done nothing. Access is restored because EZTV stopped pointing their domain at TorrentFreak's IP, and the Sky filter is updated at some interval.
Lastpass frees you to use long, generated passwords. It supports two-factor authentication. It has a secure model in which only encrypted blobs are ever sent remotely (a master password is used locally to encrypt and decrypt the transmitted data), even when the web version is used. AFAIK it's the only password manager to support multiple password fields on the same form. It tracks duplicate passwords, so after Ubuntu Forums was hacked a couple weeks ago, it was easy for me to change my accounts using the same throwaway forum password (now they're all generated).
They are probably pushing the boundaries of their traditional ranges to look for food. I wonder if that will put them into contact with pods from farther afield; apparently they don't speak the same dialects. The Wikipedia page (under Vocalizations) mentions that pod or region-specific call patterns are used frequently after calves are born.
Slashdot Mirror
You still aren't getting it. We do not conduct public borrowing in order to obtain money to spend. We first spend money, which we exchange for real resources, then "borrow" that same money back when our trading partners transfer their financial assets into "securities accounts" which pay a somewhat higher interest than do reserves themselves (current rates are ~3% for "long-term" securities, which are actually highly liquid, and 0.25% for reserves). Indeed, it cannot be otherwise as a matter of logic, because the only source of US dollars is the US federal government itself.
Of course our public debt is increasing; it must increase given that the real terms of trade are in our favor. In other words, we are exchanging pieces of paper with only a notional value for real resources. Once consumed, our trading partners have forever lost whatever those resources could provide, while their US financial assets only have value within a context of voluntary exchange.
Even if the debt were "repaid" via increased tax levies, that would not imply transfer of real resources. Since the de novo source of US dollars can (by definition) only be the US government, the government must first transfer money into the private sector for said money to be later taxed.
No matter what happens vis-a-vis the government's debt positions, the only way for us to lose access to our real resources is by voluntarily exchanging them for financial assets.
We'll send our resources to our creditors and as the debt and interest increase future generations will have to send more of it to our creditors than we do now.
We don't "repay" public debts with real resources. We "repay" them when a securities account (yes, that's what they call them) at the Fed is debited and a reserve account is credited. We also don't "borrow" (sell securities) in order to fund expenditures. Indeed, it is impossible for someone to exchange US dollars for US securities without having first obtained the dollars. This is in direct contradiction to the normal state of affairs during "borrowing." The only way for future generations to lose real resources is by voluntarily exchanging them for US dollars.
The proper way to understand public debt, in the form of US Treasury Securities, is to see reserves as "checking account" and securities as "savings accounts." Just as your bank does not sacrifice any real resources when you transfer money from savings to checking (indeed, they may be better off due to reductions in interest payments), the USA does not lose real resources when the Fed conducts a "reserve add" AKA debt repayment.
If this were true, there'd be no real problem with the Federal Reserve buying up all the Public Debt in the USA, and then doing so again whenever more money is needed (next month, and every month after, basically).
Reserves and Securities are both highly liquid, interest-bearing public debts. The point is that if you trade one for another the only difference is the interest rate (currently ~3% for securities and 0.25% for reserves). If the Fed literally bought all of securities, the private sector would have less money in the long run due to a lower average interest rate.
Hell, they could abolish income taxes and corporate taxes too, while they're at it.
It is absolutely a fact that taxes (and bond sales) do not operationally fund the federal government's expenditures. In that sense they could be abolished. However, it's clear that inflation would result as private sector wealth - in the form of bank deposits - would not be drained to counter the increase from federal spending. This is in contrast to the accumulation of reserve balances at the Fed, which only function to settle payments and can't be lent "out" into the economy-at-large.
And using the miracle of accounting, we'd all get something for nothing, right?
Again, you aren't getting the point. The only constraint on output is the availability of real (physical and human) resources. We are simply doing less than we might given the available real resources, because of a mistaken belief that the net amount of public liabilities represents something other than the net amount of private assets.
Think of it this way; as a matter of logic it is impossible for China to have used US dollars to purchase US securities without the US having first supplied China with US dollars via market exchange (or gifts, I guess).
I mostly agree with you; my points is just that even under the current mainstream legal view (CMLV), it seems this particular patent doesn't really describe an invention at all, just features for a hypothetical one. Again, this should have disqualified this patent even under the CMLV.
I do believe however that software patents were originally denied as mathematics, i.e. because you can't patent the abstract, rather than because of prior art. To take your sorting example, there isn't really a prior-art comparison between physical sorting (based on size, shape, etc.) and sorting algorithms such as qsort, Heap Sort, Merge Sort, etc. Patents don't cover specific functions, just specific ways of implementing those functions (again, according to the CMLV). If I got a patent on qsort, it wouldn't prohibit you from using or patenting Heap Sort.
And yes, most of the software patents we see are clearly invalid under the CMLV, but the USPTO is extremely lax and declarations of invalidity require costly and lengthy legal interventions.
Sure, the recession is technically over. Thus begins the extended economic depression during which unemployment remains extraordinarily high - over 60% for young people in periphery countries - and the economy significantly underperforms its potential.
This is all the result of a political economy which requires permanent public deficits for private sector growth in the absence of private credit expansion, combined with a private debt overhang prohibiting such an expansion.
This AC is completely wrong. All public debts are matched by an equal private asset. "Paying off" public debt consists of asset swaps between reserve accounts and securities accounts held at the Federal Reserve. There will never be a need to levy higher taxes to conduct such swaps, let alone a need for private individuals to "work harder."
You are right about passing debt to our children
Wrong. Whatever is produced at a given point in time is available for consumption at that time. We will never send real resources backwards in time in order to "repay" public debts.
The real theft your generation has perpetrated on mine is all of this lost output which can never be regained. Public debt needs to increase so the output gap can be closed.
Lost Output Clock
I personally agree that algorithms should not be patentable. I also think that software is sufficiently protected by copyrights and in any event I agree also with recent scholarly work against intellectual property in general.
However, say we provisionally accept the mainstream legal view that algorithms are patentable so long as the patent is really 1) non-obvious, 2) novel and 3) describes actual methods to achieve functionality. I think that then it's not possible for a patent to fail tests 1 or 2 if it fails test 3, because one cannot specify the novelty or obviousness of a method if no method is given. So I do think the "prior art" test is secondary to the "is this an invention" test, and the current patent isn't an invention, just a list of features a hypothetical invention might contain.
This patent is almost entirely composed of statements such as "The context analysis module 316 is configured to interpret the received text," which means nothing. It's just a statement of a wish for such a module, with no disclosure of how such a module might, in fact, work.
You are mistaken about the purpose of a patent, which is disclose how an invention functions, not to reserve types of functionality regardless of implementation.
You are unclear on the concept of the patent. No invention or inventor is "deserving" of a patent. An inventor granted a patent enters into a social contract in which the society/government agrees to enforce monopoly use rights in exchange for disclosure of the covered invention. It's a pragmatic arrangement which seeks to prevent inventions being held as secrets and eventually forgotten, nothing more.
The purpose of patents is to give inventors a limited monopoly on their specific invention, method or process in exchange for disclosure. It is not to reserve ideas or functionality. Just saying "create an information model" is nothing like enough. You can't own the idea of "create an information model," although you might be able to own a particular "information model" if it is novel and nonobvious, etc.
To use your example, if I were to invent and patent an ansible which employs quantum entanglement, your ansible employing latent human telepathy is non-infringing. You can't patent "the ansible," only a specific method for realizing one.
This patent is just a wish list of features with no disclosure of any technique for realizing any of those features.
I'm not sure what "it" is since the patent itself doesn't describe an algorithm. It's just a wish list of potential features.
I wish it did, I wanted to see if I could reproduce the error. Who knows, but its possible the companies are only willing to license individual users, not all the users of a project. I don't know how the ISO standards work - FRAND licensing or something?
The copiers are using JBIG2, not JBIG, which is lossless. JBIG2 on the other hand has lossless and lossy modes. In both modes the algorithm employs "similar symbol matching," but in the lossless mode differences for each instance of a symbol from a reference are stored while the lossy mode stores only the reference symbols.
ImageMagick doesn't seem to support JBIG2 so I haven't been able to play around with it at all. I just wonder if even the lossless mode is safe since it sounds bug prone (i.e. unless they have unit tests on many images to guarantee bit-perfect reproduction, all bets are off).
What's really bizarre is that they chose to invent some half-assed lossy compressor instead of using PNG (lossless) or JPEG (lossy, but a helluva lot better than their algorithm apparently).
Just install DD-WRT on your router and activate DNSMasq. You can configure specific hosts for your LAN as well as parameters such as cache duration. The local DNS cache will probably speed things up for you as well.
No, Sky has done nothing. Access is restored because EZTV stopped pointing their domain at TorrentFreak's IP, and the Sky filter is updated at some interval.
Seconded.
Lastpass frees you to use long, generated passwords. It supports two-factor authentication. It has a secure model in which only encrypted blobs are ever sent remotely (a master password is used locally to encrypt and decrypt the transmitted data), even when the web version is used. AFAIK it's the only password manager to support multiple password fields on the same form. It tracks duplicate passwords, so after Ubuntu Forums was hacked a couple weeks ago, it was easy for me to change my accounts using the same throwaway forum password (now they're all generated).
They are probably pushing the boundaries of their traditional ranges to look for food. I wonder if that will put them into contact with pods from farther afield; apparently they don't speak the same dialects. The Wikipedia page (under Vocalizations) mentions that pod or region-specific call patterns are used frequently after calves are born.
It's well known that Internet Explorer use triggers psychotic episodes in most people.
Ah, evidence. To all the leaddites (heh heh) out there I suggest you just accept it.
"Nature cannot be fooled." - Feynman
Don't forget about the radioactivity. DU is depleted of fissile material (U-235), but U-238 has a half-life of 4.5 * 10^9 years.
No doubt, I just watched a video of a pod of them training juveniles to wave wash a seal of of a floe.