There's no such thing as "inflation due to scarcity" because inflation is a drop in the value of currency (typically through creation of such currency in large amounts, but possibly also through faster transaction speeds, also called "velocity of money").
No, inflation is a straightforward case of things costing more than they did, which can be due to scarcity and/or increased demand.
The monetary base has increased dramatically over the past five years (as in several fold), but other than a few hysterics you won't find many people claiming that we've seen hyperinflation - prices are slightly higher than a few years ago, not orders of magnitude greater.
The "Inflation is defined by the monetary base not the cost of goods" thing is a meme in certain circles. It's wrong. There may be a tiny number of pseudo-economists who use the term that way, but the vast majority of people, economists and lay-people alike, use it to mean rises in prices. If psuedo-economists were ever able to redefine the term that way, we'd need a new word to describe rises in prices, because that's what we're interested in, not whether the Fed has punched another zero into its computer.
It's also a bonus for me if my pristine Lexus doesn't have wheels because nobody's going to steal it by driving it away...
NAT is poor security. It doesn't prevent bad stuff getting in to the network, it merely prevents one type of access, and it has a habit of lulling admins into a false sense of security as a result. What's needed is proper fine grained network security on a workstation by workstation and connection by connection basis. That's something IPv6, through its mandatory support of IPSec, is very good at (at least, from the point of view of creating the essential infrastructure necessary for such security to work.
NAT breaks things. It makes things appear OK that aren't. With hindsight, we should have never used it to begin with. I suspect the foot dragging we saw with IPv6 would never have happened if the fact we had run out of IPv4 addresses had been noticed in the late nineties. (Yes, we ran out then. The NAT thing kinda hid the problem, but not without consequences.)
It's not double standards. The submitter is misinformed. It is indeed the case that when a music publisher sues you and the courts calculate a fine, the fine is per work, not per (other) person who made a copy. If, somehow, the copyright holder were able to prove that you hosted a single copy of "Milkshake" (or whatever the devil it is you young people listen to these days) and it was downloaded ten million times, the fine would still be, at most, $150,000 (if the copyright holder can show the infringement was willful.) The fine is variable and can be anything between $200 and $150,000 depending on a range of different factors, none of which are "How many copies were made".
The reason you see such high fines isn't because "The Man" gets his laws differently, it's because $150,000 x # songs (the theoretical maximum for hosting on your P2P client) is a lot of money, and because the most high profile cases have been people being sued who have pretty much openly doing everything they can to annoy the judges and juries involved.
I'm serious. Java (on the web browser) got ignored, Flash (a more complex system so misleadingly more insecure) got the attention, and as a result Sun, and then Oracle, increasingly went to "phoning it in" as far as updating the Java plug-in went. If you want to know where the security holes are in any system, don't look at the parts that everyone uses, as those are the parts the security people are all over.
I'm a little confused by the list to be honest. Apparently a novel food tracking device to help dieting is a terrible idea, but an 84" tablet is way cool and a huge advance for everyone.
Seriously. Theoretically there's no reason Java-as-a-web-technology can't be as secure, when implemented as a plug-in, as Javascript, and it absolutely (because it's a much simpler architecture) ought to be much, much, more secure than Flash. The only reason it isn't is because it's been ignored. There's only one company out there making Java plug-ins that anyone uses, and that company - which had problems at the best of times - was recently swallowed by a large corporation that doesn't care at all.
It's a mess. Java is the biggest wasted opportunity in web technologies. We probably wouldn't have needed HTML5 (and would never have bothered with Flash) had it been used, and had it evolved with the support it needed. As it is, instead of that, it's become today's major security nightmare.
It's caused by whatever I'm opposed to today, and if only we did what I agree with and have always advocated, these problems would disappear!
FWIW, I doubt it's high inequality, as most low income people I've met in the US tend to be better off than most low income people I knew in the UK.
My guess would be poor access to healthcare, bizarre price differentials that make it cheaper to buy unhealthy ready made meals in supermarkets than make things from scratch, and the bans on walkable community developments that mean any journey outside of the home has to be done in a car, with the exception of a handful of cities that would be impossible to reform into libertarian "everyone forced to drive cars because a lack of choices in something as basic as transportation makes you free" utopias.
Yes I'm aware that the above is the first paragraph applied to me.
Also Google makes use of the Google sponsored jQuery, rather than offering a choice of competing Javascript DOM manipulation libraries, when building the search results page. This is terrible and Google should be fined one gajillion euros a minute until they offer a choice of Javascript DOM manipulation libraries.
Seriously, you're complaining that Google shows a map when displaying local search results using their own technology? What. The. F---?
This is nothing like what Microsoft did with Netscape. Microsoft bundled IE, a system that competes with Netscape, with Windows. They did nothing in doing so that harmed the utility and usefulness of Windows to an extent that it would drive people away from Windows, indeed, they made it more useful.
If it were true (and it clearly isn't, it's an all-out lie that's disprovable simply by using the search engine) that Google was burying search results for competing products in their search engine such that they're hard to find, then it would harm the search engine's utility as a result. Google's marketshare for some of these supposedly promoted products might increase, but the number of people using Google would decrease as it would be harder to find the information Google users are looking for.
There are rival search engines, most of which are excellent. Bing's major problem is that everyone knows its from Microsoft, which makes it "uncool", it's a search engine that's at least as good as Google's in practice. It's well advertised and people can and would move to it if Google's search was crippled in the way the EU (and Slashdot's legion of Facebook/Apple shills) is/are claiming.
The same was not true for Windows, where getting out of Windows meant locking yourself out of the infrastructure that most of the world was using, preventing access to content and communications with most entities you would interact with to live your life. Even for the tiny minority that were impacted negatively by Microsoft's decision to bundle IE (again, for most Windows users having a browser pre-installed was a net positive even if you and I roll our eyes about IE's poor security at that time), picking an alternative was not an option.
The situations are completely unlike one another. Google's search engine is harmed by doing anything remotely resembling what the EU claims, Windows was not harmed by bundling IE. And people can switch from Google easily and quickly. In the late 1990s, Windows users couldn't switch from Windows without severe consequences.
It's one of those "Too many competing, bad, standards" things combined with a lack of understanding, in my experience, by too many Linux people about why Exchange, and moreover the overall Windows infrastructure, supports the features it does.
It seems to me to be ironic that the things certain "GNU/Linux should work like Windows!" advocates set out to copy were the least important, and arguably the worst examples: the insistence on a bloated application development framework for GNOME and GNOME 1's attempt to be a Windows 95 clone (with giant icons!) merely created a crippled user experience. Meanwhile the good decisions Microsoft made - Active Directory, a fully working groupware suite, etc - were ignored because even the Miguels in the FOSS community didn't grok them.
Kudos to the SAMBA team for getting AD working. I don't think we necessarily needed it, except for Windows integration (any standardized combination of Kerberos and LDAP would do) but it'll make it easier to persuade the FOSS community to start taking that aspect of things seriously. What I hope is that we'll start to see real improvements on the groupware side too. As it is, unless you want to do everything yourself, managing your own email server and an entirely separate calendar thing, and an entirely separate contacts thing, etc (guys, you know IMAP can store pretty much anything, right?), and don't care about interoperability, we still seem to be stuck in the stone age.
Well assuming you replaced headlights based on regular LEDs with headlights based upon this technology, it would mean same brightness headlights, but slightly better fuel efficiency.
OK, I don't get it. PDF is a moderately good system for digitally representing paged media allowing the same content to be distributed formatted for printing (or scanned from paper with the layout intact) while providing a clean, digital, representation for viewing on a computer monitor. And Javascript is a fairly decent scripting language, logical, clean, and increasingly efficient. If there's a "problem" with "javascript" it's usually that most developers have to use it in a web browser, the limitations and poor APIs of which are generally what developers find annoying rather than the language itself.
So what's the problem with this exactly? And, even with the ugly browser API, how is it worse than loading an ugly, insure, C++ binary blob into memory to handle PDFs instead?
Well, get an unlocked, open, Android phone, such as a member of the Google Nexus family, and load whatever operating system you want on it.
Your complaint may have been justified five years ago, when pretty much all phones were entirely locked down, and every phone OS was burdened with carrier customizations, but you now have choices, you don't have to buy those things. Yes, they're what the carriers continue to push. But even Verizon carried the Galaxy Nexus.
There wasn't a huge boom in car ownership until the early fifties. So regardless of when leaded gasoline was introduced (a long time earlier) you wouldn't expect crime to start to rise, if lead was causing brain damage, until a decade or so after that.
I dunno, I don't see this ending well. I assume a fair number of ad supported sites would block the ISP from accessing their sites, which, given such a block would also affect customers that are willing to see ads, would ultimately undermine the ISP as customers switch to other ISPs in droves.
Not that I don't understand the motive, ads have gone from bad to OK to bad to OK and now back to bad again with the ridiculous number of autoplaying HTML5 videos. But this probably isn't the solution.
It's perfectly fine to consider a technology to be important, useful, necessary, and positive, and thus take a "pro-" position on it, when there are abuses of that technology.
I consider myself pro-computing. Based upon where you're posting, you probably do too. Patent trolls, the BSA, malware writers, and other scumbagss do not make our industry and the technology is supports inherently bad.
Slashdot Mirror
tl;dr version: Global warming is a myth because Al Gore is fat.
Got it.
No, inflation is a straightforward case of things costing more than they did, which can be due to scarcity and/or increased demand.
The monetary base has increased dramatically over the past five years (as in several fold), but other than a few hysterics you won't find many people claiming that we've seen hyperinflation - prices are slightly higher than a few years ago, not orders of magnitude greater.
The "Inflation is defined by the monetary base not the cost of goods" thing is a meme in certain circles. It's wrong. There may be a tiny number of pseudo-economists who use the term that way, but the vast majority of people, economists and lay-people alike, use it to mean rises in prices. If psuedo-economists were ever able to redefine the term that way, we'd need a new word to describe rises in prices, because that's what we're interested in, not whether the Fed has punched another zero into its computer.
Oh this crap again?
Phil Plait says it better than I can: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/01/14/no_global_warming_for_16_years_debunking_climate_change_denial.html
It's also a bonus for me if my pristine Lexus doesn't have wheels because nobody's going to steal it by driving it away...
NAT is poor security. It doesn't prevent bad stuff getting in to the network, it merely prevents one type of access, and it has a habit of lulling admins into a false sense of security as a result. What's needed is proper fine grained network security on a workstation by workstation and connection by connection basis. That's something IPv6, through its mandatory support of IPSec, is very good at (at least, from the point of view of creating the essential infrastructure necessary for such security to work.
NAT breaks things. It makes things appear OK that aren't. With hindsight, we should have never used it to begin with. I suspect the foot dragging we saw with IPv6 would never have happened if the fact we had run out of IPv4 addresses had been noticed in the late nineties. (Yes, we ran out then. The NAT thing kinda hid the problem, but not without consequences.)
It's not double standards. The submitter is misinformed. It is indeed the case that when a music publisher sues you and the courts calculate a fine, the fine is per work, not per (other) person who made a copy. If, somehow, the copyright holder were able to prove that you hosted a single copy of "Milkshake" (or whatever the devil it is you young people listen to these days) and it was downloaded ten million times, the fine would still be, at most, $150,000 (if the copyright holder can show the infringement was willful.) The fine is variable and can be anything between $200 and $150,000 depending on a range of different factors, none of which are "How many copies were made".
The reason you see such high fines isn't because "The Man" gets his laws differently, it's because $150,000 x # songs (the theoretical maximum for hosting on your P2P client) is a lot of money, and because the most high profile cases have been people being sued who have pretty much openly doing everything they can to annoy the judges and juries involved.
Angstoms eh? What's that in Libraries of Congress? I assume it's not as big as a small car?
Disuse leads to misuse.
I'm serious. Java (on the web browser) got ignored, Flash (a more complex system so misleadingly more insecure) got the attention, and as a result Sun, and then Oracle, increasingly went to "phoning it in" as far as updating the Java plug-in went. If you want to know where the security holes are in any system, don't look at the parts that everyone uses, as those are the parts the security people are all over.
I take it all back, an 84" tablet is the most awesomeist thing ever!
It's an 84" touchscreen. Hard to see why you'd want the touchscreen in a device you typically control from several arm lengths away.
I guess you could tie one of those capacitive styli to the end of a broom pole and use that as a remote...
I'm a little confused by the list to be honest. Apparently a novel food tracking device to help dieting is a terrible idea, but an 84" tablet is way cool and a huge advance for everyone.
It wasn't used enough.
Seriously. Theoretically there's no reason Java-as-a-web-technology can't be as secure, when implemented as a plug-in, as Javascript, and it absolutely (because it's a much simpler architecture) ought to be much, much, more secure than Flash. The only reason it isn't is because it's been ignored. There's only one company out there making Java plug-ins that anyone uses, and that company - which had problems at the best of times - was recently swallowed by a large corporation that doesn't care at all.
It's a mess. Java is the biggest wasted opportunity in web technologies. We probably wouldn't have needed HTML5 (and would never have bothered with Flash) had it been used, and had it evolved with the support it needed. As it is, instead of that, it's become today's major security nightmare.
Heck of a job Larry Ellison.
It's caused by whatever I'm opposed to today, and if only we did what I agree with and have always advocated, these problems would disappear!
FWIW, I doubt it's high inequality, as most low income people I've met in the US tend to be better off than most low income people I knew in the UK.
My guess would be poor access to healthcare, bizarre price differentials that make it cheaper to buy unhealthy ready made meals in supermarkets than make things from scratch, and the bans on walkable community developments that mean any journey outside of the home has to be done in a car, with the exception of a handful of cities that would be impossible to reform into libertarian "everyone forced to drive cars because a lack of choices in something as basic as transportation makes you free" utopias.
Yes I'm aware that the above is the first paragraph applied to me.
Guns? Probably not, but it's worth looking into.
FWIW, my first Google search result on "email" was Yahoo Mail, which makes me wonder if Google randomizes the order of certain search results.
Also Google makes use of the Google sponsored jQuery, rather than offering a choice of competing Javascript DOM manipulation libraries, when building the search results page. This is terrible and Google should be fined one gajillion euros a minute until they offer a choice of Javascript DOM manipulation libraries.
Seriously, you're complaining that Google shows a map when displaying local search results using their own technology? What. The. F---?
This is nothing like what Microsoft did with Netscape. Microsoft bundled IE, a system that competes with Netscape, with Windows. They did nothing in doing so that harmed the utility and usefulness of Windows to an extent that it would drive people away from Windows, indeed, they made it more useful.
If it were true (and it clearly isn't, it's an all-out lie that's disprovable simply by using the search engine) that Google was burying search results for competing products in their search engine such that they're hard to find, then it would harm the search engine's utility as a result. Google's marketshare for some of these supposedly promoted products might increase, but the number of people using Google would decrease as it would be harder to find the information Google users are looking for.
There are rival search engines, most of which are excellent. Bing's major problem is that everyone knows its from Microsoft, which makes it "uncool", it's a search engine that's at least as good as Google's in practice. It's well advertised and people can and would move to it if Google's search was crippled in the way the EU (and Slashdot's legion of Facebook/Apple shills) is/are claiming.
The same was not true for Windows, where getting out of Windows meant locking yourself out of the infrastructure that most of the world was using, preventing access to content and communications with most entities you would interact with to live your life. Even for the tiny minority that were impacted negatively by Microsoft's decision to bundle IE (again, for most Windows users having a browser pre-installed was a net positive even if you and I roll our eyes about IE's poor security at that time), picking an alternative was not an option.
The situations are completely unlike one another. Google's search engine is harmed by doing anything remotely resembling what the EU claims, Windows was not harmed by bundling IE. And people can switch from Google easily and quickly. In the late 1990s, Windows users couldn't switch from Windows without severe consequences.
It's one of those "Too many competing, bad, standards" things combined with a lack of understanding, in my experience, by too many Linux people about why Exchange, and moreover the overall Windows infrastructure, supports the features it does.
It seems to me to be ironic that the things certain "GNU/Linux should work like Windows!" advocates set out to copy were the least important, and arguably the worst examples: the insistence on a bloated application development framework for GNOME and GNOME 1's attempt to be a Windows 95 clone (with giant icons!) merely created a crippled user experience. Meanwhile the good decisions Microsoft made - Active Directory, a fully working groupware suite, etc - were ignored because even the Miguels in the FOSS community didn't grok them.
Kudos to the SAMBA team for getting AD working. I don't think we necessarily needed it, except for Windows integration (any standardized combination of Kerberos and LDAP would do) but it'll make it easier to persuade the FOSS community to start taking that aspect of things seriously. What I hope is that we'll start to see real improvements on the groupware side too. As it is, unless you want to do everything yourself, managing your own email server and an entirely separate calendar thing, and an entirely separate contacts thing, etc (guys, you know IMAP can store pretty much anything, right?), and don't care about interoperability, we still seem to be stuck in the stone age.
Well assuming you replaced headlights based on regular LEDs with headlights based upon this technology, it would mean same brightness headlights, but slightly better fuel efficiency.
OK, I don't get it. PDF is a moderately good system for digitally representing paged media allowing the same content to be distributed formatted for printing (or scanned from paper with the layout intact) while providing a clean, digital, representation for viewing on a computer monitor. And Javascript is a fairly decent scripting language, logical, clean, and increasingly efficient. If there's a "problem" with "javascript" it's usually that most developers have to use it in a web browser, the limitations and poor APIs of which are generally what developers find annoying rather than the language itself.
So what's the problem with this exactly? And, even with the ugly browser API, how is it worse than loading an ugly, insure, C++ binary blob into memory to handle PDFs instead?
Cool story bro?
Well, get an unlocked, open, Android phone, such as a member of the Google Nexus family, and load whatever operating system you want on it.
Your complaint may have been justified five years ago, when pretty much all phones were entirely locked down, and every phone OS was burdened with carrier customizations, but you now have choices, you don't have to buy those things. Yes, they're what the carriers continue to push. But even Verizon carried the Galaxy Nexus.
There wasn't a huge boom in car ownership until the early fifties. So regardless of when leaded gasoline was introduced (a long time earlier) you wouldn't expect crime to start to rise, if lead was causing brain damage, until a decade or so after that.
I dunno, I don't see this ending well. I assume a fair number of ad supported sites would block the ISP from accessing their sites, which, given such a block would also affect customers that are willing to see ads, would ultimately undermine the ISP as customers switch to other ISPs in droves.
Not that I don't understand the motive, ads have gone from bad to OK to bad to OK and now back to bad again with the ridiculous number of autoplaying HTML5 videos. But this probably isn't the solution.
It is a correctly stated analogy and your substitution makes no sense unless you also change "GMO" to "patents". I suggest you read it again.
Or perhaps pretending that an analogy doesn't apply is an attempt to hide your lie.
It's perfectly fine to consider a technology to be important, useful, necessary, and positive, and thus take a "pro-" position on it, when there are abuses of that technology.
I consider myself pro-computing. Based upon where you're posting, you probably do too. Patent trolls, the BSA, malware writers, and other scumbagss do not make our industry and the technology is supports inherently bad.
I'm shocked to hear that. Also shocked to read, from the same source, that the US is aquiring the Canadian Maple Leaf symbol: http://www.thelapine.ca/united-states-acquires-maple-leaf-symbol
You don't work for the Chinese media do you? Just wondering.