I just judge it based on my experiences (In London, mostly)
Would you base your experiences of the US on just New York City? The New Yorkers would argue that that's a good idea, but it's still clearly ridiculous. Well, London's like that with respect to the UK, except Londoners are even more insular.
...then giving away the directory structure and size of each updated file? You know, you can tell a lot from those.
You have the power to customize the amount of information that you give out according to your paranoia level and the amount of convenience you desire. Bitching about something you have complete control over won't help.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Yeah but who's going to start it, kid? You?
If there's a big fire, do you blame the person who stacked large amounts of kindling up or the person who provided the spark? (Smart answer: blame both for their actions.)
I remember people printing EBCDIC porn "art" on the line printer as an undergraduate. (The university had an ancient IBM mainframe in those days just before the blossoming of the internet.) Certain files were passed round very discretely among certain parts of the student body.
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot cam predates this by two years, though that was on a local network and didn't use a web browser. It didn't appear on the Internet until November, 1993.
That doesn't apply. The Eolas patent is all about browser plugins, a technology invented by Mike Doyle very early on during the development of the web and which he demonstrated to MS sometime back shortly after he applied for a patent. After getting the brush-off, he was furious to discover ActiveX was basically the same thing and made basically after someone saw his demo. That lead to the whole legal dispute. (If you ask Mike[*] now, he says that fighting legal wars over patents is a horrible thing to do, and dreadfully expensive too.)
Back to the Trojan Room Coffee Pot. That was one of the first examples anywhere of a web page serving dynamically-changing content. (I don't remember if you had to refresh the page manually. I do remember that the poor machine with the camera was vastly underpowered for even this trivial task.) But the image data was just a normal image, and the browser the people on site were using was just plain old NCSA Mosaic. (There may have also been a separate viewer app for people on the right network segment of the Computer Lab — there was a vogue for such things then, all written in Motif — but that was never me and I didn't drink coffee then anyway. But I did spend a lot of time in the next building anyway.) This all predates the founding of Netscape.
The Netscape Fishcam shortly followed. I believe the first outdoor cam was at an antartic research station shortly after that.
Moving images were enabled by the "server-push" feature in Netscape's server and client. I'm assuming this used that technology, which of necessity would have pre-dated this claim. I would think the use case would be obvious.
It's easy to think that things are obvious after the fact. Very easy. But before it happened? (Remember, the idea spread like wildfire as it was the first way that people could put full interactivity in their pages, back when form submission still sucked ass.)
The awful part is that MS's implementation of the idea (ActiveX) was so brutally insecure from the beginning. If only they'd put more effort into privilege separation then, so much effort by so many would have been saved. The Eolas code wouldn't have had that flaw (as you can bet your bottom dollar that it was Unix-based).
I don't much at all about the 2002 patent.
————— [*] Disclosure: I do know Mike Doyle personally, and he's an interesting guy who's really into applying technology to medicine. He's one of those people who's quite good at having ideas a bit before others do. I've no financial connection though.
Still waiting for flying cars, positronic brains, fusion energy, and FTL travel...
Flying cars require a fancy power source to be energetically viable. "Positronic brains" (leaving aside the whole "positronic" word, which Asimov said was just said for effect) requires solving the Hard AI Problem, which progress is being made on but it's turned out to be really hard. Fusion is available provided you don't want to extract useful energy out of it; getting energy out has required learning a shit-load of stuff about plasma physics and advanced materials. I'd guess that AI and fusion power are things that will happen, and flying cars won't happen (on anything other than an occasional curiosity level) for mundane reasons like the need for pilots licenses.
FTL travel is the big one. Nobody knows how to do FTL travel, or if they do they're not telling. I'd love to know how to even begin to crack that one on a practical level, especially as it would potentially solve all sorts of problems with space exploration. (I'd particularly like wormholes as in Pandora's Star as that would let people travel without the awkwardness of needing spaceships most of the time.) But it requires something that is believed impossible (or at least permanently out of reach) according to current theory, so I guess we'd better come up with other ideas for how to live without it. Or maybe we need to realize that the universe is not what we think it is, but that only helps if we're becoming more correct, not less...
(and evidence of fixing in relation to this disaster, if found, should absolutely be used to prosecute to the fullest)
Very hard to prove without getting someone to confess to it. Prices behaved in the sort of way you'd expect given the basic nature of the market; small resellers felt the pinch first and large OEMs later, which is entirely attributable to the timescales of the contracts involved.
Still not a good enough argument to not require a reasonable and non-discriminatory (as determined by the end user) way to buy directly.
Sure. You buy 10k drives and the manufacturer will be very happy to deal with you direct; they won't mind that at all. What they won't do is sell in small lots, nor can you force them to. If you only want a small number, it's simpler to buy from a middleman (such as Newegg) so you don't have to hold a vast inventory of drives you don't want or run a retail operation to dispose of the unwanted kit.
I'm sorry, but this is imply bullshit. What we are dealing with is not "fear economics", but with the consequences of overemphasizing efficiency over resilience and/or robustness. And at the root of that is that that is what economic "thinking" teaches economic actors to do.
Economics will merrily quantify the level of risk associated with a decision (possibly wrongly; this is an area of current research as it is becoming clear that the simple models previously used were thoroughly bogus) but it won't tell you what the decision should actually be. Nor will professional management practice. Alas, lots of people think that they do and that they have to optimize the system (or their part of it) under the assumption that everything is working perfectly. This is stupid, but all too common.
Plus, the Seagate CEO's offhanded remarks about having the customers up against a wall (reading between the lines, of course)...are rather vexing.
It's kind of tough for you. It takes a long time to build a hard drive factory (you're talking about a cycle of about a decade). It will take a long time for prices to drop back, and you're probably looking at a new level for exponential decay of price per gigabyte to decay from. But the worst part is that you have to realize that there's no reason there won't be another such catastrophe. OK, the details might be different (earthquake, volcano, war, etc.) but the effect on prices of some critical component could be just the same anyway. Any time there's a concentration of high-tech factories anywhere in the world, there's an increase in risk.
Again, this may change in a year or two, but given their past transgressions, I'm not holding my breath.
Holding your breath for a year or two is probably not a good idea, well not unless you've got some other mechanism for managing O2 and CO2 levels in your blood.
Videos [on VHS] sell for a dollar or less and they're just about invincible to kids.
That reminds me of one of my brothers unwinding the tape from inside a VHS cassette and getting it wrapped around lots of furniture. Yes, that takes some doing as there's a catch to make it tricky to do that; you need to insert some sort of tool into a fairly small hole to disable the ratchets on the reels (there's another mechanism for the guard that's lifted out of the way when bringing the magnetic heads close to the tape). But definitely not kid-proof, not with even very slightly ingenious kids.
At least it was just one of the programs recorded for him that was ruined, and not something that everyone else cared about.
(including the film experience, which can't practically be replicated at home
Which is what exactly? To be entertained? I don't go to a movie theater to watch a documentary.
The film experience involves having a large moving image at a distance that is comfortable for the eyes. Normal TV is a little close if you're making it apparently large enough (i.e., subtending a large enough angle to your eyes). You can replicate the film experience at home, but only if you've got a proper home cinema setup. I haven't, and I don't have the spare space to make one.
Other parts of the film experience are a mixed bag. The sound is worth replicating (and the easiest to do) but the oversalted popcorn, watery cola, surly youths pretending to be staff and usurious prices can all be safely omitted.
It depends on what you're using the device for. High capacitance can be very useful for things like power storage (and, if the leakage current is low enough, memory). You're right that you don't want it in the logic circuits though.
Ultimately it might have been cheaper just to give the guy a job.
Except that it's insane to employ a blackmailer as you can never ever trust them. Same with a fraudster. You've got to hire someone else to fix the problems, and in general the cost of punishment is regarded as permissible as part of the cost of a reasonable degree of social stability.
Wouldn't storing them in Web standard formats, like XHTML/HTML, XML, etc be the way to go? As opposed to even formats like.doc,.xls and so on? Stuff defined by W3?
Because XHTML/HTML was designed as more of a presentation format, not as a word processing or spreadsheet document storage format.
But fundamentally, the data is still there in a format you can process. It's got at least some semantic information (e.g., where the paragraphs and headings are, which parts are references to other bits). It's definitely not terrible.
Of course, the truth of it is that SGML was designed as a generic structured textual data storage scheme (HTML is an application of it) and XML is an update to SGML that removes a lot of the really complicated bits that nobody really needs (XHTML is a descendent of HTML as applied to an XML underpinning). Yet ultimately, as long as the data is there and reasonably easy to extract, a format will work fine for long-term storage. Even the Microsoft Office proprietary formats aren't too much of a problem, as there's plenty of open source software that can open them and get the majority of the content out just fine; even if it doesn't look 100% the same, you can get the sense of things.
If that were true, it would be unprovable. But, anyway, it's not true. Some of the most important (and proven) results in 20th century mathematics were negative: Goedel's proof that arithmetic is INcomplete, Church's proof that polyadic first-order logic is UNdecidable, Tarski's proof that truth is UNdefinable, Cohen's proof that the continuum hypothesis is UNprovable in ZFC, etc.
You've made a category error there. You can most certainly prove negative results about abstractions like mathematics, as the assumptions can be precisely quantified as the schema of axioms. The part where it becomes impossible is when translating the abstraction to the real world, as you can't tell exactly what the schema of axioms for the real world really are. (We have some theories though.)
Not to mention that FRAND stands for "Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory" and 2.25% is most certainly _NOT_ Fair nor Reasonable.
Gouging everyone for the same amount (proportionately) is both fair and non-discriminatory. Whether it is reasonable is something you can debate if you wish.
Hey, doesn't Facebook or Google do this already . . . ? . . . for an extra fee ? . . . ?
Google does a lot of it for free via Google Scholar. Almost all the rest is done through various funding agencies (who have long used bibliometrics to determine scientific relevance, the same core algorithm as Google's ranking algorithm). The exception is the friends/foes part, which is left to you to organize.
Except that Hitler was appointed, not voted, into power initially.
He was leader of the largest party in a democratically-elected parliament (don't know how fair the election was) and thus was given first chance to form a coalition (which he did, before rapidly sidelining his coalition partners through assorted shenanigans). That was the way the German system officially worked at the time; Chancellor was (and is) an appointed position where the appointment is made by the (largely ceremonial) head of state, with convention being to put someone in post who can form a stable government somehow, and that in turn is typically determined by how well they did at the election.
The system is very different in the US, where the head of state is also the head of the executive branch, but those are separate roles in most european countries. (In fact, I can't think offhand of anywhere where this isn't true. Byelorussia maybe?)
Why rewrite it at all? Flash memory is sized in gigabytes and is unlikely to be the expensive part of any embedded device. There are plenty of variants of the standard UNIX utilities - the *BSD ones, the SysV rewrites, etc. There's absolutely no need to go for a single binary on any modern device.
The single-binary approach is much simpler to distribute and manage, especially as those "single" binaries are typically just a dressing around some kind of archival or disk image format. In effect, you use a special version of mount to convert the binary into a mounted directory, and copy stuff out of that. Then the executable part of the binary does effectively the reverse. It's neat and robust, and very good for a lot of custom commercial software (especially where the main concern is someone breaking something by accident, not software piracy). It's often relatively easy to convert such things into cloud images too (provided that makes any sense for the app; not always true) and copying the distribution package onto some flash memory, that's just a trivial deployment option.
Re:The barrier is too high, MAN must adapt
on
Next-Gen Spacesuits
·
· Score: 2
Unfortunately it looks like the human species (and maybe most multicellular animals!) is just not suited for long duration space flight and maybe even habitation of other (lesser gravity) worlds.
The problem is, we've currently only got proper data for 1g and (effectively) 0g, and damn little for anything in between. What are the long-term effects at martian gravitation levels? Lunar? 0.1g? If the worst of the effects can be staved off by even 0.1g, we can relatively easily spin craft to achieve that. (1g is more difficult, because of the amount of mass and energy involved.) But first we need the data, as you can't extrapolate or interpolate a curve from just two datapoints...
Doesn't count. Europe has some stupidly small countries, some of which are smaller than cities. Heck, some would fit in a good-sized shopping mall. Saying that Australia is bigger than that... well, no shit Sherlock.
Keynesians are not economists, and real economists predicted economic collapse DECADES in advance, at the moment when Nixon took US (and thus the world) off the gold standard.
Quite apart from the No True Scotsman parts of that argument, the problem you've got is that economics is full of faddishness and a tendency to say that reality needs to conform to models rather than the other way round. This means you'll always be able to find some economist somewhere that will say something that you can use to "prove" your point, but actually getting a useful prediction out of them is hard to the point of pointless. Which they won't tell you.
If I wanted the sort of predictions you're basing your argument on, I wouldn't ask economists. I'd ask some old men in a pub who would be happy to tell me that everything was better in their day. Yes, it still wouldn't be useful but at least it would only cost me a round of beer and I'd be certain just how much it was worth.
Slashdot Mirror
I just judge it based on my experiences (In London, mostly)
Would you base your experiences of the US on just New York City? The New Yorkers would argue that that's a good idea, but it's still clearly ridiculous. Well, London's like that with respect to the UK, except Londoners are even more insular.
...then giving away the directory structure and size of each updated file? You know, you can tell a lot from those.
You have the power to customize the amount of information that you give out according to your paranoia level and the amount of convenience you desire. Bitching about something you have complete control over won't help.
Yeah but who's going to start it, kid? You?
If there's a big fire, do you blame the person who stacked large amounts of kindling up or the person who provided the spark? (Smart answer: blame both for their actions.)
There was porn ASCII art.
I remember people printing EBCDIC porn "art" on the line printer as an undergraduate. (The university had an ancient IBM mainframe in those days just before the blossoming of the internet.) Certain files were passed round very discretely among certain parts of the student body.
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot cam predates this by two years, though that was on a local network and didn't use a web browser. It didn't appear on the Internet until November, 1993.
That doesn't apply. The Eolas patent is all about browser plugins, a technology invented by Mike Doyle very early on during the development of the web and which he demonstrated to MS sometime back shortly after he applied for a patent. After getting the brush-off, he was furious to discover ActiveX was basically the same thing and made basically after someone saw his demo. That lead to the whole legal dispute. (If you ask Mike[*] now, he says that fighting legal wars over patents is a horrible thing to do, and dreadfully expensive too.)
Back to the Trojan Room Coffee Pot. That was one of the first examples anywhere of a web page serving dynamically-changing content. (I don't remember if you had to refresh the page manually. I do remember that the poor machine with the camera was vastly underpowered for even this trivial task.) But the image data was just a normal image, and the browser the people on site were using was just plain old NCSA Mosaic. (There may have also been a separate viewer app for people on the right network segment of the Computer Lab — there was a vogue for such things then, all written in Motif — but that was never me and I didn't drink coffee then anyway. But I did spend a lot of time in the next building anyway.) This all predates the founding of Netscape.
The Netscape Fishcam shortly followed. I believe the first outdoor cam was at an antartic research station shortly after that.
Moving images were enabled by the "server-push" feature in Netscape's server and client. I'm assuming this used that technology, which of necessity would have pre-dated this claim. I would think the use case would be obvious.
It's easy to think that things are obvious after the fact. Very easy. But before it happened? (Remember, the idea spread like wildfire as it was the first way that people could put full interactivity in their pages, back when form submission still sucked ass.)
The awful part is that MS's implementation of the idea (ActiveX) was so brutally insecure from the beginning. If only they'd put more effort into privilege separation then, so much effort by so many would have been saved. The Eolas code wouldn't have had that flaw (as you can bet your bottom dollar that it was Unix-based).
I don't much at all about the 2002 patent.
—————
[*] Disclosure: I do know Mike Doyle personally, and he's an interesting guy who's really into applying technology to medicine. He's one of those people who's quite good at having ideas a bit before others do. I've no financial connection though.
Still waiting for flying cars, positronic brains, fusion energy, and FTL travel...
Flying cars require a fancy power source to be energetically viable. "Positronic brains" (leaving aside the whole "positronic" word, which Asimov said was just said for effect) requires solving the Hard AI Problem, which progress is being made on but it's turned out to be really hard. Fusion is available provided you don't want to extract useful energy out of it; getting energy out has required learning a shit-load of stuff about plasma physics and advanced materials. I'd guess that AI and fusion power are things that will happen, and flying cars won't happen (on anything other than an occasional curiosity level) for mundane reasons like the need for pilots licenses.
FTL travel is the big one. Nobody knows how to do FTL travel, or if they do they're not telling. I'd love to know how to even begin to crack that one on a practical level, especially as it would potentially solve all sorts of problems with space exploration. (I'd particularly like wormholes as in Pandora's Star as that would let people travel without the awkwardness of needing spaceships most of the time.) But it requires something that is believed impossible (or at least permanently out of reach) according to current theory, so I guess we'd better come up with other ideas for how to live without it. Or maybe we need to realize that the universe is not what we think it is, but that only helps if we're becoming more correct, not less...
(and evidence of fixing in relation to this disaster, if found, should absolutely be used to prosecute to the fullest)
Very hard to prove without getting someone to confess to it. Prices behaved in the sort of way you'd expect given the basic nature of the market; small resellers felt the pinch first and large OEMs later, which is entirely attributable to the timescales of the contracts involved.
Still not a good enough argument to not require a reasonable and non-discriminatory (as determined by the end user) way to buy directly.
Sure. You buy 10k drives and the manufacturer will be very happy to deal with you direct; they won't mind that at all. What they won't do is sell in small lots, nor can you force them to. If you only want a small number, it's simpler to buy from a middleman (such as Newegg) so you don't have to hold a vast inventory of drives you don't want or run a retail operation to dispose of the unwanted kit.
I'm sorry, but this is imply bullshit. What we are dealing with is not "fear economics", but with the consequences of overemphasizing efficiency over resilience and/or robustness. And at the root of that is that that is what economic "thinking" teaches economic actors to do.
Economics will merrily quantify the level of risk associated with a decision (possibly wrongly; this is an area of current research as it is becoming clear that the simple models previously used were thoroughly bogus) but it won't tell you what the decision should actually be. Nor will professional management practice. Alas, lots of people think that they do and that they have to optimize the system (or their part of it) under the assumption that everything is working perfectly. This is stupid, but all too common.
Plus, the Seagate CEO's offhanded remarks about having the customers up against a wall (reading between the lines, of course)...are rather vexing.
It's kind of tough for you. It takes a long time to build a hard drive factory (you're talking about a cycle of about a decade). It will take a long time for prices to drop back, and you're probably looking at a new level for exponential decay of price per gigabyte to decay from. But the worst part is that you have to realize that there's no reason there won't be another such catastrophe. OK, the details might be different (earthquake, volcano, war, etc.) but the effect on prices of some critical component could be just the same anyway. Any time there's a concentration of high-tech factories anywhere in the world, there's an increase in risk.
Again, this may change in a year or two, but given their past transgressions, I'm not holding my breath.
Holding your breath for a year or two is probably not a good idea, well not unless you've got some other mechanism for managing O2 and CO2 levels in your blood.
I find it harder to type on touchscreen keyboards then on physical phone keyboards when I'm shitfaced.
You reply to work emails when drunk? I know it might make dealing with the utter rubbish out of Marketing easier, but even so it's probably unwise...
Videos [on VHS] sell for a dollar or less and they're just about invincible to kids.
That reminds me of one of my brothers unwinding the tape from inside a VHS cassette and getting it wrapped around lots of furniture. Yes, that takes some doing as there's a catch to make it tricky to do that; you need to insert some sort of tool into a fairly small hole to disable the ratchets on the reels (there's another mechanism for the guard that's lifted out of the way when bringing the magnetic heads close to the tape). But definitely not kid-proof, not with even very slightly ingenious kids.
At least it was just one of the programs recorded for him that was ruined, and not something that everyone else cared about.
(including the film experience, which can't practically be replicated at home
Which is what exactly? To be entertained? I don't go to a movie theater to watch a documentary.
The film experience involves having a large moving image at a distance that is comfortable for the eyes. Normal TV is a little close if you're making it apparently large enough (i.e., subtending a large enough angle to your eyes). You can replicate the film experience at home, but only if you've got a proper home cinema setup. I haven't, and I don't have the spare space to make one.
Other parts of the film experience are a mixed bag. The sound is worth replicating (and the easiest to do) but the oversalted popcorn, watery cola, surly youths pretending to be staff and usurious prices can all be safely omitted.
It depends on what you're using the device for. High capacitance can be very useful for things like power storage (and, if the leakage current is low enough, memory). You're right that you don't want it in the logic circuits though.
Ultimately it might have been cheaper just to give the guy a job.
Except that it's insane to employ a blackmailer as you can never ever trust them. Same with a fraudster. You've got to hire someone else to fix the problems, and in general the cost of punishment is regarded as permissible as part of the cost of a reasonable degree of social stability.
Because XHTML/HTML was designed as more of a presentation format, not as a word processing or spreadsheet document storage format.
But fundamentally, the data is still there in a format you can process. It's got at least some semantic information (e.g., where the paragraphs and headings are, which parts are references to other bits). It's definitely not terrible.
Of course, the truth of it is that SGML was designed as a generic structured textual data storage scheme (HTML is an application of it) and XML is an update to SGML that removes a lot of the really complicated bits that nobody really needs (XHTML is a descendent of HTML as applied to an XML underpinning). Yet ultimately, as long as the data is there and reasonably easy to extract, a format will work fine for long-term storage. Even the Microsoft Office proprietary formats aren't too much of a problem, as there's plenty of open source software that can open them and get the majority of the content out just fine; even if it doesn't look 100% the same, you can get the sense of things.
'You can't prove a negative'
If that were true, it would be unprovable. But, anyway, it's not true. Some of the most important (and proven) results in 20th century mathematics were negative: Goedel's proof that arithmetic is INcomplete, Church's proof that polyadic first-order logic is UNdecidable, Tarski's proof that truth is UNdefinable, Cohen's proof that the continuum hypothesis is UNprovable in ZFC, etc.
You've made a category error there. You can most certainly prove negative results about abstractions like mathematics, as the assumptions can be precisely quantified as the schema of axioms. The part where it becomes impossible is when translating the abstraction to the real world, as you can't tell exactly what the schema of axioms for the real world really are. (We have some theories though.)
Not to mention that FRAND stands for "Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory" and 2.25% is most certainly _NOT_ Fair nor Reasonable.
Gouging everyone for the same amount (proportionately) is both fair and non-discriminatory. Whether it is reasonable is something you can debate if you wish.
Hey, doesn't Facebook or Google do this already . . . ? . . . for an extra fee ? . . . ?
Google does a lot of it for free via Google Scholar. Almost all the rest is done through various funding agencies (who have long used bibliometrics to determine scientific relevance, the same core algorithm as Google's ranking algorithm). The exception is the friends/foes part, which is left to you to organize.
Except that Hitler was appointed, not voted, into power initially.
He was leader of the largest party in a democratically-elected parliament (don't know how fair the election was) and thus was given first chance to form a coalition (which he did, before rapidly sidelining his coalition partners through assorted shenanigans). That was the way the German system officially worked at the time; Chancellor was (and is) an appointed position where the appointment is made by the (largely ceremonial) head of state, with convention being to put someone in post who can form a stable government somehow, and that in turn is typically determined by how well they did at the election.
The system is very different in the US, where the head of state is also the head of the executive branch, but those are separate roles in most european countries. (In fact, I can't think offhand of anywhere where this isn't true. Byelorussia maybe?)
Why rewrite it at all? Flash memory is sized in gigabytes and is unlikely to be the expensive part of any embedded device. There are plenty of variants of the standard UNIX utilities - the *BSD ones, the SysV rewrites, etc. There's absolutely no need to go for a single binary on any modern device.
The single-binary approach is much simpler to distribute and manage, especially as those "single" binaries are typically just a dressing around some kind of archival or disk image format. In effect, you use a special version of mount to convert the binary into a mounted directory, and copy stuff out of that. Then the executable part of the binary does effectively the reverse. It's neat and robust, and very good for a lot of custom commercial software (especially where the main concern is someone breaking something by accident, not software piracy). It's often relatively easy to convert such things into cloud images too (provided that makes any sense for the app; not always true) and copying the distribution package onto some flash memory, that's just a trivial deployment option.
Unfortunately it looks like the human species (and maybe most multicellular animals!) is just not suited for long duration space flight and maybe even habitation of other (lesser gravity) worlds.
The problem is, we've currently only got proper data for 1g and (effectively) 0g, and damn little for anything in between. What are the long-term effects at martian gravitation levels? Lunar? 0.1g? If the worst of the effects can be staved off by even 0.1g, we can relatively easily spin craft to achieve that. (1g is more difficult, because of the amount of mass and energy involved.) But first we need the data, as you can't extrapolate or interpolate a curve from just two datapoints...
Bigger than several European countries.
Doesn't count. Europe has some stupidly small countries, some of which are smaller than cities. Heck, some would fit in a good-sized shopping mall. Saying that Australia is bigger than that... well, no shit Sherlock.
Keynesians are not economists, and real economists predicted economic collapse DECADES in advance, at the moment when Nixon took US (and thus the world) off the gold standard.
Quite apart from the No True Scotsman parts of that argument, the problem you've got is that economics is full of faddishness and a tendency to say that reality needs to conform to models rather than the other way round. This means you'll always be able to find some economist somewhere that will say something that you can use to "prove" your point, but actually getting a useful prediction out of them is hard to the point of pointless. Which they won't tell you.
If I wanted the sort of predictions you're basing your argument on, I wouldn't ask economists. I'd ask some old men in a pub who would be happy to tell me that everything was better in their day. Yes, it still wouldn't be useful but at least it would only cost me a round of beer and I'd be certain just how much it was worth.