That poster was actually me (both the person who you disagree with and agree with). By turning the volume knob to 11, what I was trying to emphasize was that sending square waves/distortion to speakers is not necessarily enough in and of itself. It must be at a sufficient power level to generate enough heat to melt the voice coil shielding. And yes, you're right, it's very difficult to cause speaker failure from excursion. Tweeters are notoriously known for being sensitive to square waves, which are essentially what laptop speakers are: performing the sort of limiting that others in this thread have talked about will only perpetuate the square wave problem. It's nice to see someone who understands that.:)
I agree with everything you've said; I think I simply miscommunicated earlier (I'm pretty sure you agree with me too, if my communication were more precise). And yes, back to Dell, I think there's a good chance that they underpowered the speakers (for some reason, this seems standard practice?). But there's also the possibility that the user sent square(ish) waves from VLC player, causing the distortion that we're talking about, which led to the cooling problems that we've discussed, ultimately resulting in the demise of the voice coil. We don't have enough information to know for sure. However, considering that it truly is in Dell's best interest to keep the peace and maintain customer satisfaction, I find it more likely that the end user is to blame, not Dell. But then, maybe Dell is a company that likes to dodge out of warranty claims? It's all guess work at this point.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we have to deal with compromise. What you call bad design, others call a bargain. Not every component is designed for every workload; even bridges are designed with load assumptions. It is not economically viable to make everything to the greatest durability possible. If it is important to you that every single thing be as min/max'ed as possible, you are welcome to find a manufacturer that obliges such tastes and fork over a premium for it.
Also:
A speaker should be designed to handle a DC source at its given specs. If it cannot, then its power rating due to overheating or whatever else, it should be derated until the current is low enough to handle the situation without damage.
That is asinine. It is the speaker that draws power; it is not up to some "rating" to determine how much power is given to the speaker. If you plug a 200W speaker into a 100W amplifier and open the amplifier up to full, that 200W speaker will try to draw 200 watts of power, likely overwhelming and destroying the amplifier.
It's not just the shape of the wave, but the amount of power behind it, how much heat that generates on the voice coil, and how resilient the voice coil is. Such an exploit would only work under ideal circumstances: most likely, a high-powered sound system turned up very loud. I mean, it's not exactly rocket science to not surf the internet with your computer plugged into a high-powered system with the volume cranked to 11.:)
Honestly, I have not read the article and I am not at all familiar with the details of what happened in this particular case. My comment was directed solely at the comment to which I replied. That said, my guess is that, if Dell is being even remotely honest (and they have every reason to be), their conclusion that the customer abused the sound system is very likely true. I would be rather surprised if you can't blow any decent sound system by maxing out its volume knob and sending 200% (or whatever the maximum volume is) VLC music through it.
I never said it was like a low frequency square wave. And it's not really like a "hot mix"; it takes that to an extreme (but, let's face it, hot mixes are all ready pretty extreme). The point is, the closer you get to square wave range, 1) the more potential for damage exists, 2) the worse things sound. Perhaps the best example as to what I'm referring to is taking a CD produced 20 or 30 years ago, put it in a high powered sound system and crank it up towards the upper limits of the sound system[1]. Now, take a "hot mix" CD from yesterday and put it in the system. Do not be surprised if speakers blow. My point is, there's enough color to the signal that I don't think a simple filter will do the trick. That and, yes, what I'm referring to with VLC going "above 100%" is that it's essentially making an extreme "hot mix" and that is dangerous.
[1] Even CD's produced 20 or 30 years ago are still normalized, I'm quite sure. The peak power output between the old CD and the new should be roughly equivalent; any difference should be due entirely to how well the mix covers the frequency spectrum (definite edge to new CD). It's amazing what mass quantities of compression and limiting can do to speakers.
It should be impossible for software to damage modern hardware. Full stop...
I'm not so sure about that, especially considering the way speakers cool themselves. If you crank the volume up to the point where you're essentially sending constant, large square waves to the speaker, you're literally telling the speaker, "OK, move all of the way in and stay there for a while. Now, move very quickly all of the way out and stay there for a while." The voice coil of a speaker is cooled by the speaker moving in and out and *not* staying in one place; it is a fundamental assumption that all speakers (that I know of) rely on. If you pump a ton of power into the voice coil and force the speaker to stay relatively stationary, expect a failure: the shielding around the voice coil will deteriorate and you will end up with a short circuit. So while VLC cannot send more than 100% power, it can cause the speaker to operate in such a fashion that is unintended and dangerous to the life of the speaker.
Your solution may be that, "the voice coil should be designed to withstand this sort of [ab]use." But that is purely ideological and will likely lead to increased costs for manufacturers; it may also yield less powerful or inferior sound reproduction systems. I'm not sure what the consequences of such a mandate would be, but I'm almost certain neither of us would care for them.
To be clear though, I am not saying that Dell should void the warranty over this, only that the belief that "it should be impossible for software to damage modern hardware" is likely flawed.
The term natural monopoly was coined back in the early 1900's, if memory serves. It was an excuse for government to intervene and regulate / formalize a monopoly that seemed to be "naturally occurring." Through government intervention, these "natural monopolies," while quite possibly natural in their conception, have been allowed to maintain monopoly status for exceedingly long periods of time, without the threat of competition. It's one of many mechanisms to keep out competition from big business. AT&T has historically been an excellent example of this. Also, it used to be that monopoly referred to one thing and one thing only: Corporations who received a grant from a king or other ruler for exclusive "rights" to a market, usually in exchange for some of the loot.
Also, I do believe your explanation of franchise monopoly is putting the carriage before the horse. It is not the city that goes to Big Cable Co, but Big Cable Co that goes to the city.
It is odd that they would cite consumer choice between competing ISP's, which doesn't exist because of the "natural monopoly" status granted to "utilities."
Sorry, had to chime in on your claim that price would come down if they became popular. That is contrary to the Law of Supply and Demand. Top end GPU's are expensive because there is demand for the latest and greatest, which then justifies the cost of making very expensive, cutting-edge cards.
I should probably clarify I don't use Node for anything in production. My understanding is it can handle up to 5,000 concurrent async connections; I said 2,000 to be safe, because I personally haven't done any bench marking. Also, most of your argument, while entirely true, isn't very applicable. I've never said JavaScript is anywhere near the performance of C. I imagine if it were, Google wouldn't be working on Native Client. My point was only that JavaScript's asynchronous nature makes such things second nature with no additional thought to it. All of the applicable libraries are written asynchronously as well, which is one of the things that isn't so straight forwards in other high level languages like Python. But yes I do agree with what you said.
If you compare what it takes to write async code in node.js to, say, ASP.NET MVC (thanks to async/await syntactic sugar in C#!), it's definitely not in favor of JS.
I'll have to take your word for it.
The other problem is that community itself seems to have a very low standard for libraries. When you look at some of the code from npm packages, it's really every bit as bad as the classic PHP horrors. And yet they're saying that it's a good thing, somehow, because it "does the job" etc.
Right. One of my complaints about Node in specific and JavaScript in general.
Without a doubt, the lower the barrier to entry into programming, the more competition can be expected from less qualified individuals. This may very well be taken as a threat, as you seem to take it. However, if we consider the economy as a whole and not just a single industry (or even a slice of a single industry), there are great advantages to lowering these barriers. It allows things to be done cheaper, for those who would not have had a chance to make a living in the industry do just that: make a living. When an entire industry's costs are reduced and competition increased (especially an industry as pervasive and important as the tech industry), the rest of the economy is made richer. Exceptional quality C/C++ is not the only thing that matters.
And it's not a problem in any other decent server side language either. Async/Completion Ports for.NET, NIO/Mina/Grizzly/etc for Java.
But it is in Ruby, to my knowledge. And many other higher-level languages.
I'm struggling to understand why you'd ever want this (assuming a web application, which is a fair assumption as you're talking about JS). Your business logic lives on the server, your presentation logic on the client - and never the twain shall meet. The only thing I can really think about is data type definitions, but JSON does a good job of simplifying that (and something like GSON will deal with the conversions). Now I have wanted to share code between server and client in a rich client application, but in that case I could build both sides in either.NET or Java and be perfectly happy.
Yeah I'm mostly thinking pseudo classes and things like that. Say, a custom date/time library, etc.
I realize that's just an example of simple inheritance, but not bad for using nothing more than functions and prototypes. Yes, it's a little verbose. You can also do prototypal inheritance, etc. The point is that with just a couple of constructs, JavaScript can do things that most languages must separate into many more statements, expressions, etc. But to clarify, I am *not* saying JavaScript is awesome; it clearly has limitations. But it is pretty amazing what all can be done with such a simple language. It is misunderstood.
Is he wrong though? There are no functions in Ruby, are there? Everything has to exist within a class, does it not? Clearly, I am not a Ruby programmer; enlighten me if I'm wrong, please.
JavaScript is rather misunderstood. It does, indeed, have issues--perhaps more than other languages (I'd say certainly more than say, Ruby or Python). But it has merits as well that most people overlook or simply don't know about. It is, for instance, very expressive. Particularly in the server-side programming realm, NodeJS has a few advantages to it that most other languages / frameworks don't (or require more difficulty in implementing), such as:
1. Naturally asynchronous, NodeJS allows vastly more I/O than a similar threaded solution. Need to implement long polling for 2,000 concurrent users? Not a problem.
2. The ability to share libraries and other code effortlessly between server-side and client-side applications.
Some of the down sides to NodeJS are that, well... it uses JavaScript. Seriously, though, it could be worse: it could be PHP. JavaScript really isn't that bad, once you actually learn the language. I hated it until fairly recently because I didn't really understand it. Now that I've spent some time learning its intricacies and quirks, I am much more productive with it. I can even enjoy using it. Would I prefer using Python? Absolutely. But it's really not so bad.
Moving forward though, I think one of the biggest problem with JavaScript in general is that we have far too many people who know just enough JavaScript to be dangerous that trying to establish high community standards will be very, very hard. In fact, one of the reasons I like Python so much is not that Python itself is all that great (it, too, has issues), but rather that there are countless excellent, well maintained, well designed libraries available. The same is simply not true for JavaScript in general.
I just thought that I'd point out that it's not discrimination if the person's condition interferes with work. I guess I could be wrong, but I think what laws like this mean is that the employer can't sight the mental illness (in this case) as the cause dismissal, etc. If the illness negatively affects job performance, it would still be valid to dismiss the person responsible. Also it may be of interest that the public sector is rather notorious for being more discriminatory than the private since the latter cannot afford to limit their labor pool as much as the former.
There are so many competing definitions for such things. I meant it as defined by the Austrian School of Economics. I do not keep up with all of the varying definitions. I tried to explain my definition to clarify, but most have ignored the explanations. Clearly, I should've been more concise from the get go. The term is not useless how I use it, though; it is not so broad as you think. But I'm not going to go into that now.
Nowhere have I said that the decisions people make are always the best for them. You are fighting a straw man. The point is that there is no way we can objectively make legislation or other rules to ensure that the best decision is always made; it is quite possible that in trying to do so, we make things worse. No legislation is possible to written in such a way as to account for all of the factors necessary, as they are nearly infinite. I am all for educating people on how to live better lives, make good decisions, etc [1].
[1] Educating does not mean using federal dollars.
No. I mean rational, relative to the individual's subjective value scales, which Bob demonstrates by choosing $5 now instead of $500 a week from now. As I have said countless other times in this thread, economics does not concern itself with the wisdom of actors' value scales. I think you, and many others, are getting hung up on the word "rational" due to preconceived ideas of what rational should mean. I recognize that the definition of rational that I am working with is very different than other fields, which is why I tried to differentiate it with "economic rationality." If it is still a problem, I can refrain from using the word. The point still remains, though: if Bob chooses $5 now instead of $500 a week from now, he demonstrates that he prefers the $5 now to $500 a week from now. Who are we to tell him he's wrong? Such decisions tend to be very personal; what is best for one person is not necessarily best for another; as such, we should let the person make the choice. You may think that it is highly irrational for Bob to choose $5 now instead of $500 later, but in making that judgement, you make vast assumptions about Bob's situation, the state of the economy/inflation, and also things that you cannot possibly know. For instance, Bob could be exactly $5 short in making a 20% down payment on a house; he must close the deal today. Now his actions do not seem so "irrational". The point is that YOU are not qualified to make subjective decisions for BOB. YOU are only qualified to make such decisions for YOURSELF.
I think you misunderstand what I mean by rational economic actors. I do not mean rational in the traditional sense. I mean it entirely in the subjective value scale sense. Individuals always act "rationally" based on their subjective value scales. E.g., if Bob is offered $5 right now or $500 if he waits a week and he chooses the $5 now, he has demonstrated that he values $5 now more than $500 in a week. That is what I mean by economically rational. I do *not* mean that it is in Bob's own best interest to choose the $5. The contents of the value scale and their order is a topic for another field of study.
You misunderstand. I simply mean that at any given point in time, a person acts based on his or her own subjective value scales; these scales of course, may be based off of misinformation, personal preferences, and possibly self-destructive reasoning. It is not the job of economics to determine whether the individual's value scales are reasonable or not.
As for Alan Greenspan's famous comment, I can only assume you are referring to his comment that, upon setting interest rates exceptionally low, now is the time to buy a house. So if we take say, 10 years of housing demand and try to fit it all into 1 or 2 years, what sort of economic condition is this setting up? I think there's a word for it... oh yeah, bubble.
Might I ask what university? I actually agree with your sentiment about economists. Or at least, they should have absolutely no influence on policy making. I think the only logical conclusion about economics that we can make is that economic activity should never be centralized in any way, shape, or form. Modern macro economics' track record speaks highly of this.:)
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That poster was actually me (both the person who you disagree with and agree with). By turning the volume knob to 11, what I was trying to emphasize was that sending square waves/distortion to speakers is not necessarily enough in and of itself. It must be at a sufficient power level to generate enough heat to melt the voice coil shielding. And yes, you're right, it's very difficult to cause speaker failure from excursion. Tweeters are notoriously known for being sensitive to square waves, which are essentially what laptop speakers are: performing the sort of limiting that others in this thread have talked about will only perpetuate the square wave problem. It's nice to see someone who understands that. :)
I agree with everything you've said; I think I simply miscommunicated earlier (I'm pretty sure you agree with me too, if my communication were more precise). And yes, back to Dell, I think there's a good chance that they underpowered the speakers (for some reason, this seems standard practice?). But there's also the possibility that the user sent square(ish) waves from VLC player, causing the distortion that we're talking about, which led to the cooling problems that we've discussed, ultimately resulting in the demise of the voice coil. We don't have enough information to know for sure. However, considering that it truly is in Dell's best interest to keep the peace and maintain customer satisfaction, I find it more likely that the end user is to blame, not Dell. But then, maybe Dell is a company that likes to dodge out of warranty claims? It's all guess work at this point.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we have to deal with compromise. What you call bad design, others call a bargain. Not every component is designed for every workload; even bridges are designed with load assumptions. It is not economically viable to make everything to the greatest durability possible. If it is important to you that every single thing be as min/max'ed as possible, you are welcome to find a manufacturer that obliges such tastes and fork over a premium for it.
Also:
A speaker should be designed to handle a DC source at its given specs. If it cannot, then its power rating due to overheating or whatever else, it should be derated until the current is low enough to handle the situation without damage.
That is asinine. It is the speaker that draws power; it is not up to some "rating" to determine how much power is given to the speaker. If you plug a 200W speaker into a 100W amplifier and open the amplifier up to full, that 200W speaker will try to draw 200 watts of power, likely overwhelming and destroying the amplifier.
It's not just the shape of the wave, but the amount of power behind it, how much heat that generates on the voice coil, and how resilient the voice coil is. Such an exploit would only work under ideal circumstances: most likely, a high-powered sound system turned up very loud. I mean, it's not exactly rocket science to not surf the internet with your computer plugged into a high-powered system with the volume cranked to 11. :)
Honestly, I have not read the article and I am not at all familiar with the details of what happened in this particular case. My comment was directed solely at the comment to which I replied. That said, my guess is that, if Dell is being even remotely honest (and they have every reason to be), their conclusion that the customer abused the sound system is very likely true. I would be rather surprised if you can't blow any decent sound system by maxing out its volume knob and sending 200% (or whatever the maximum volume is) VLC music through it.
I never said it was like a low frequency square wave. And it's not really like a "hot mix"; it takes that to an extreme (but, let's face it, hot mixes are all ready pretty extreme). The point is, the closer you get to square wave range, 1) the more potential for damage exists, 2) the worse things sound. Perhaps the best example as to what I'm referring to is taking a CD produced 20 or 30 years ago, put it in a high powered sound system and crank it up towards the upper limits of the sound system[1]. Now, take a "hot mix" CD from yesterday and put it in the system. Do not be surprised if speakers blow. My point is, there's enough color to the signal that I don't think a simple filter will do the trick. That and, yes, what I'm referring to with VLC going "above 100%" is that it's essentially making an extreme "hot mix" and that is dangerous.
[1] Even CD's produced 20 or 30 years ago are still normalized, I'm quite sure. The peak power output between the old CD and the new should be roughly equivalent; any difference should be due entirely to how well the mix covers the frequency spectrum (definite edge to new CD). It's amazing what mass quantities of compression and limiting can do to speakers.
It should be impossible for software to damage modern hardware. Full stop...
I'm not so sure about that, especially considering the way speakers cool themselves. If you crank the volume up to the point where you're essentially sending constant, large square waves to the speaker, you're literally telling the speaker, "OK, move all of the way in and stay there for a while. Now, move very quickly all of the way out and stay there for a while." The voice coil of a speaker is cooled by the speaker moving in and out and *not* staying in one place; it is a fundamental assumption that all speakers (that I know of) rely on. If you pump a ton of power into the voice coil and force the speaker to stay relatively stationary, expect a failure: the shielding around the voice coil will deteriorate and you will end up with a short circuit. So while VLC cannot send more than 100% power, it can cause the speaker to operate in such a fashion that is unintended and dangerous to the life of the speaker.
Your solution may be that, "the voice coil should be designed to withstand this sort of [ab]use." But that is purely ideological and will likely lead to increased costs for manufacturers; it may also yield less powerful or inferior sound reproduction systems. I'm not sure what the consequences of such a mandate would be, but I'm almost certain neither of us would care for them.
To be clear though, I am not saying that Dell should void the warranty over this, only that the belief that "it should be impossible for software to damage modern hardware" is likely flawed.
The term natural monopoly was coined back in the early 1900's, if memory serves. It was an excuse for government to intervene and regulate / formalize a monopoly that seemed to be "naturally occurring." Through government intervention, these "natural monopolies," while quite possibly natural in their conception, have been allowed to maintain monopoly status for exceedingly long periods of time, without the threat of competition. It's one of many mechanisms to keep out competition from big business. AT&T has historically been an excellent example of this. Also, it used to be that monopoly referred to one thing and one thing only: Corporations who received a grant from a king or other ruler for exclusive "rights" to a market, usually in exchange for some of the loot.
Also, I do believe your explanation of franchise monopoly is putting the carriage before the horse. It is not the city that goes to Big Cable Co, but Big Cable Co that goes to the city.
It is odd that they would cite consumer choice between competing ISP's, which doesn't exist because of the "natural monopoly" status granted to "utilities."
Sorry, had to chime in on your claim that price would come down if they became popular. That is contrary to the Law of Supply and Demand. Top end GPU's are expensive because there is demand for the latest and greatest, which then justifies the cost of making very expensive, cutting-edge cards.
I should probably clarify I don't use Node for anything in production. My understanding is it can handle up to 5,000 concurrent async connections; I said 2,000 to be safe, because I personally haven't done any bench marking. Also, most of your argument, while entirely true, isn't very applicable. I've never said JavaScript is anywhere near the performance of C. I imagine if it were, Google wouldn't be working on Native Client. My point was only that JavaScript's asynchronous nature makes such things second nature with no additional thought to it. All of the applicable libraries are written asynchronously as well, which is one of the things that isn't so straight forwards in other high level languages like Python. But yes I do agree with what you said.
There was an example of both. I threw in encapsulation as an after thought to show how it can be done in JavaScript without any special syntax.
If you compare what it takes to write async code in node.js to, say, ASP.NET MVC (thanks to async/await syntactic sugar in C#!), it's definitely not in favor of JS.
I'll have to take your word for it.
The other problem is that community itself seems to have a very low standard for libraries. When you look at some of the code from npm packages, it's really every bit as bad as the classic PHP horrors. And yet they're saying that it's a good thing, somehow, because it "does the job" etc.
Right. One of my complaints about Node in specific and JavaScript in general.
Without a doubt, the lower the barrier to entry into programming, the more competition can be expected from less qualified individuals. This may very well be taken as a threat, as you seem to take it. However, if we consider the economy as a whole and not just a single industry (or even a slice of a single industry), there are great advantages to lowering these barriers. It allows things to be done cheaper, for those who would not have had a chance to make a living in the industry do just that: make a living. When an entire industry's costs are reduced and competition increased (especially an industry as pervasive and important as the tech industry), the rest of the economy is made richer. Exceptional quality C/C++ is not the only thing that matters.
And it's not a problem in any other decent server side language either. Async/Completion Ports for .NET, NIO/Mina/Grizzly/etc for Java.
But it is in Ruby, to my knowledge. And many other higher-level languages.
I'm struggling to understand why you'd ever want this (assuming a web application, which is a fair assumption as you're talking about JS). Your business logic lives on the server, your presentation logic on the client - and never the twain shall meet. The only thing I can really think about is data type definitions, but JSON does a good job of simplifying that (and something like GSON will deal with the conversions). Now I have wanted to share code between server and client in a rich client application, but in that case I could build both sides in either .NET or Java and be perfectly happy.
Yeah I'm mostly thinking pseudo classes and things like that. Say, a custom date/time library, etc.
No, more like: http://pastie.org/private/ij3rdcgtkgteefgwj57mfg
I realize that's just an example of simple inheritance, but not bad for using nothing more than functions and prototypes. Yes, it's a little verbose. You can also do prototypal inheritance, etc. The point is that with just a couple of constructs, JavaScript can do things that most languages must separate into many more statements, expressions, etc. But to clarify, I am *not* saying JavaScript is awesome; it clearly has limitations. But it is pretty amazing what all can be done with such a simple language. It is misunderstood.
I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with Wordpress. :)
Is he wrong though? There are no functions in Ruby, are there? Everything has to exist within a class, does it not? Clearly, I am not a Ruby programmer; enlighten me if I'm wrong, please.
1. Naturally asynchronous, NodeJS allows vastly more I/O than a similar threaded solution. Need to implement long polling for 2,000 concurrent users? Not a problem.
2. The ability to share libraries and other code effortlessly between server-side and client-side applications.
Some of the down sides to NodeJS are that, well... it uses JavaScript. Seriously, though, it could be worse: it could be PHP. JavaScript really isn't that bad, once you actually learn the language. I hated it until fairly recently because I didn't really understand it. Now that I've spent some time learning its intricacies and quirks, I am much more productive with it. I can even enjoy using it. Would I prefer using Python? Absolutely. But it's really not so bad.
Moving forward though, I think one of the biggest problem with JavaScript in general is that we have far too many people who know just enough JavaScript to be dangerous that trying to establish high community standards will be very, very hard. In fact, one of the reasons I like Python so much is not that Python itself is all that great (it, too, has issues), but rather that there are countless excellent, well maintained, well designed libraries available. The same is simply not true for JavaScript in general.
I just thought that I'd point out that it's not discrimination if the person's condition interferes with work. I guess I could be wrong, but I think what laws like this mean is that the employer can't sight the mental illness (in this case) as the cause dismissal, etc. If the illness negatively affects job performance, it would still be valid to dismiss the person responsible. Also it may be of interest that the public sector is rather notorious for being more discriminatory than the private since the latter cannot afford to limit their labor pool as much as the former.
There are so many competing definitions for such things. I meant it as defined by the Austrian School of Economics. I do not keep up with all of the varying definitions. I tried to explain my definition to clarify, but most have ignored the explanations. Clearly, I should've been more concise from the get go. The term is not useless how I use it, though; it is not so broad as you think. But I'm not going to go into that now.
[1] Educating does not mean using federal dollars.
No. I mean rational, relative to the individual's subjective value scales, which Bob demonstrates by choosing $5 now instead of $500 a week from now. As I have said countless other times in this thread, economics does not concern itself with the wisdom of actors' value scales. I think you, and many others, are getting hung up on the word "rational" due to preconceived ideas of what rational should mean. I recognize that the definition of rational that I am working with is very different than other fields, which is why I tried to differentiate it with "economic rationality." If it is still a problem, I can refrain from using the word. The point still remains, though: if Bob chooses $5 now instead of $500 a week from now, he demonstrates that he prefers the $5 now to $500 a week from now. Who are we to tell him he's wrong? Such decisions tend to be very personal; what is best for one person is not necessarily best for another; as such, we should let the person make the choice. You may think that it is highly irrational for Bob to choose $5 now instead of $500 later, but in making that judgement, you make vast assumptions about Bob's situation, the state of the economy/inflation, and also things that you cannot possibly know. For instance, Bob could be exactly $5 short in making a 20% down payment on a house; he must close the deal today. Now his actions do not seem so "irrational". The point is that YOU are not qualified to make subjective decisions for BOB. YOU are only qualified to make such decisions for YOURSELF.
... at which point property rights come into play.
I think you misunderstand what I mean by rational economic actors. I do not mean rational in the traditional sense. I mean it entirely in the subjective value scale sense. Individuals always act "rationally" based on their subjective value scales. E.g., if Bob is offered $5 right now or $500 if he waits a week and he chooses the $5 now, he has demonstrated that he values $5 now more than $500 in a week. That is what I mean by economically rational. I do *not* mean that it is in Bob's own best interest to choose the $5. The contents of the value scale and their order is a topic for another field of study.
You misunderstand. I simply mean that at any given point in time, a person acts based on his or her own subjective value scales; these scales of course, may be based off of misinformation, personal preferences, and possibly self-destructive reasoning. It is not the job of economics to determine whether the individual's value scales are reasonable or not.
As for Alan Greenspan's famous comment, I can only assume you are referring to his comment that, upon setting interest rates exceptionally low, now is the time to buy a house. So if we take say, 10 years of housing demand and try to fit it all into 1 or 2 years, what sort of economic condition is this setting up? I think there's a word for it... oh yeah, bubble.
Might I ask what university? I actually agree with your sentiment about economists. Or at least, they should have absolutely no influence on policy making. I think the only logical conclusion about economics that we can make is that economic activity should never be centralized in any way, shape, or form. Modern macro economics' track record speaks highly of this. :)