They generally try to instill in you, the capacity to learn.
I'd say it's more about the capacity to write reports satisfying various quirky bosses. By the time you get old enough to get a degree it's about at least ten to fifteen years too late to make significant changes in learning capacity and problem solving strategies (if that's at all possible anyway).
Linus Torvald didn't learn about designing an operating system
Mmm, not really the right example. Linux was, eh, not quite academically designed, and would, as I recall, violate pretty much every paradigm popular at universities at the time. He did get internet access there tho, which I'd say was one of the main factors in laying the groundwork (besides need and interest).
Degrees are important and are worth much more
Degrees are a more thorough testing of general ability. Still, a degree wont give you any ability you don't already have, and with todays internet access it's not like it's hard to find the knowledge you need to accomplish what you want (at least in CS fields).
Calling it a property right is a (deliberate, in some cases) misnomer; monopoly right or private taxation right is more appropriate and more accurate in describing it.
As the laws governing such rights are inherently counterproductive and unethical (as they decrease the creation of intellectual variety and expression, as well as deliberately decrease the availability and wealth inherent in such (vast deadweight loss due to non-pareto efficiency)) it can never be unethical to violate those laws.
The ethical approach is to primarily avoid handing any money to any entity engaged in promoting such laws, as well as promoting the various non-damaging possible approaches (ie, not based on artificial scarcity or control, but solely on monetary transfer) to reimburse and promote creative endeavours.
1995 according to Apple. And searching on Apple and PVC gives you a nice Apple webpage detailing these things, so it seems that Greenpeace managed to convince Apple to publish the details at least.
That said, while I certainly don't hold Greenpeace in a particularly high regard, but as far as Apple and environmentalism is concerned, you don't need to go further than the battery replacement issue to draw your own conclusions.
The problem with computers sorting on symptoms is that symptoms are common, symptoms overlap diseases and there are a lot of unconscious filters that medical professionals use to get the diagnosis
It's not so much a problem with computers as a problem with diseases. Remember, the unconscious filters that medical professionals use to get the diagnosis also often get the wrong diagnosis.
The problem space of accurately matching symptoms with diseases is _hard_, and it's also a problem which is almost entirely unsuited to the human brain.
They could be useful as an adjunct to jog your memory
Jogging memory may be exactly what, as it were, the doctor ordered. Most of the research I've seen indicates that patients researching their own issues have a much better chance of avoiding missed diagnosis or other failures. Jogging the professionals memory may be much of the reason for that.
Software that provides possible options, statistical likelyhood for each, suggesting ways to rule out or rule in options, seriousness and time sensitivity of testing for each option, etc, could do a lot to reduce incidence of mistakes.
sound like recommending that everyone start playing Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, with the limitation that only one can have the keyboard at a time.
Considering that both Europe and China are launching their own satellite navigation networks, largely as a distrust issue, the idea that a single signed DNS root will be politically digestible over anything but a very short term shows a certain... detachment... from the actual politics of the world.
I suspect that even if DNSSEC gets deployed to any large extent it'll get fractured again due to missteps by the controlling organizations (You gonna sign that Tibet key or not?).
In the end there are other solutions that might be more palatable. You could specify multiple servers against which to cross-check DNS lookups, you could store keys after first access, (and to solve Kaminsky it's even easier as you could just extend the random id code) etc, etc. The hierarchial trust structure appeals to some, particularly as it fits DNS very well, but it has some problems that may perhaps never be resolved and that can render it incompatible with reality.
I think the Yahoo/Microsoft saga is one of the most shocking displays of directors' self-interest vs their shareholders' interests.
With that sentence I was unsure which directors and which shareholders you were referring to. If you recall, Microsoft lost more value than Yahoo gained on the bid.
In hindsight shareholders have lost $20 billion. At the time of the offer the premium was around $10 billion.
Half of which was in Microsoft stock. Which is also worth significantly less today.
The speculators could have sold at any time they wanted. Holding onto or speculating in stock in a bear market is actually not guaranteed to make a profit. If they have any complaints about that, they should apply to convert to a bank holding company and get bailout funds.
Considering the reaction of Microsoft stock during the acquisition period, you're joined by a lot of Microsoft shareholders.
I think trying to acquire Yahoo was more about Steve Ballmers ego needing some marketshare against Google, rather than any form of sane business for either company. I suspect Ballmer got told by the board to concentrate on core business instead of his ego, hence the abort of the takeover.
Apart from some speculators who've gotten what they deserve, it's hard to see why anyone would have any interest in the deal; like you say, yahoo would lose a lot of it's five customers, and Microsoft would get a company whose employees certainly wouldn't be thrilled to be working for them.
40 PCIe 2.0 lanes (which are the cheapo chipsets capacity) are more than enough to drive 48 disks. You do realize that PCIe is comprised of switched serial lanes, right? There is no bus contention on PCIe lanes. Each lane is one 500MB/sec serial bus in it's own right.
You really should read up some on modern hardware. You sortof sound like you've been in hibernation for a decade. And woken up cranky;).
Sounds like you need to read up on your consumer hardware; it's not 1997 anymore. There are cheap modern consumer grade motherboards that come with 3xPCIe(2.0) 16x slots. That's a combined bus bandwidth of 24GB per second. Far more than enough to eat 48 SATA drives.
I've worked in 'Enterprise' IT for fifteen years. Ten years ago it was nice to bring junked equipment home. These days I bring things I junk at home to work.
'Enterprise' hardware has gone from being expensive and significantly better to being just expensive. It's not the enterprise that's driving the state of the art anymore.
These days when I hear a mention of 'mission critical' I tend to file it in the same folder as 'enLarge your DATA'; sales pitches aimed at insecure managers. For the price you'll get swindled into paying for (some barely tested) 'high-end' products you can usually afford 10x redundancy. If not 100x (and I've seen worse than that).
So Sun is targeting a slightly different *wallet* with their device. That doesn't change the fact that most would get better performance/security/space/price by simply, like the GP suggested, throwing together commodity hardware.
You mean, they must be reinsured immediately. Or refinanced on different terms.
if AIG wasn't being bailed out, it could be getting a lot nastier.
Yah, like Goldman Sachs getting a serious haircut. Nastier (for Paulsons friends that is).
Face it, most of the scaremongering is simply done by the beneficiaries of the bailouts in question. They'd rather the taxpayer pay for their mistakes than face their stock going worthless; most solid businesses or municipals would not be overly encumbered by the failure of AIG. Yes, they might have to temporarily pay an extra premium, but that would be easily arranged.
The same argument can be made for any medical treatment at all, ranging from flu to cancer. In fact, it can be made for most civilizational aspects, agriculture, housing, etc.
Like it or not, natural selection has been largely bypassed in civilized culture and it may not even be particularly relevant in the situation you mention, as infection rate is miniscule in many countries leading to such immunity being extremely unlikely to be a deciding factor, and certainly not a useful method for eradicating HIV.
For long-term protection against biological extinction events it's probably better to bypass natural selection on this scale anyway and keep as wide and diverse a genepool as possible. Variants that create immunity for one, treatable, disease may be susceptible to some future more dangerous plague, or vice-versa. (For example, ccr5 mediated HIV resistance has indications that it lowers resistance to other diseases such as west nile).
So it's not so much that your idea is controversial, it's just that it's not particularly, eh, useful.
Now please report to the nearest sterilization clinic and volunteer to join the fight against bad ideas.;)
From an economic perspective it's most appropriate to view IP as various forms of delegated taxation rights (which, not entirely coincidentally, isn't far from their historic use).
And as such, their tendency to grow to consume ever more of the economic output is hardly surprising; imagine putting the beneficiaries of any other taxation scheme in charge of the rates and revenue, without having to ever justify the cost.
Often times, the possibility that you might infringe a patent is pretty clear from a cursory reading
Of course, with the quality of patents granted, the language and the overly broad claims means someone reading patents may very well conclude that there is no software they can possibly write without 'the possibility that they might be infringing a patent'.
When even the patent office can barely tell what it and what isn't valid, the average software engineer has no chance; if you have pockets deep enough, hand the code to the lawyers and they can analyze it. They're probably better at reading code than the programmers are at reading patent claims.
AMD Opteron and Intels upcoming CPUs support NUMA, or rather ccNUMA. That basically syncs only areas cached in multiple caches. OS support for that isn't extremely complex; it becomes mainly an issue of minimizing the situations where multiple caches cache the same memory.
Yes. But it's not as if savings accounts tend to give that much interest anyway. If you want interest on the money you can explicitly invest them in tradeable bonds instead.
Of course the "problem" with FRB
One of the problems. To tie back to the previous situation; savings accounts are claimed to be 'there' while they're not, and there still is a reserve requirement. If a bond defaults then the lender gets hit; if FRB loans default, then the bank needs to reduce lending, rebuild capital or face actual bankruptcy and everyone gets hit.
Without FRB the transfer system between bad loans in one or a few sectors and every other sector would be much less direct and the feedback loop would be less tight (if there would be one at all).
And that will happen with or without an FRB economy.
Yes, which is when we come to the other part; the price of money. With market controlled rates, rates will adjust higher if demand for loans rises. Massive malinvestments and speculation like everything from the housing bubble to SUV production would be far less likely to happen and they would not be able to get as far; as demand for mortgages rose, interest rates would rise, savers would get more acceptable rates on lower risk investments, etc.
The centrally controlled rates of central banking more or less enforce speculation; by effectively keeping negative real return rates they pretty much tell everyone with money (or without, as we've basically had negative real rates on borrowing too) that they should speculate or their money will get eaten by inflation (if we count actual inflation, not the ebonicized "let's discount anything that goes up" version that's politically palatable).
And as long as you have a proper progressive taxing system, it is still worth working more to earn more.
Yep. I don't have any objections to taxes per-se, as long as they're _honest_ about it (as opposed to FRB/inflationary policies or intellectual 'property' which are essentially hidden taxation forms). Taxes are at least nominally democratically decided and they are, to a fairly large extent, accounted for.
Providing safety nets (even fairly generous such) is definitely within what I'd call good use of money. Stimulating the economy through rescheduling of projects during economic lulls is another good use (altho I'd strongly suggest we'd have far less such lulls if we didn't have the FRB/FED induced bubble/collapse cycle).
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that we finance our deficits through printing money.
Mmmhmm. And what do you think the asset price bubble in houses and resultant tax revenue is, eh?
He might even call it a bank...
Risking capital in bonds is not the equivalent of depositing capital in supposedly fully available on-demand withdrawal accounts.
Banks don't go bankrupt and force the FDIC to pay customers because customer investments in bonds go sour. Banks go bankrupt because they speculate with money that isn't theirs to speculate with.
I had thought that the foundation of our economy was our workers, schools, offices.
And without currency you can pay the teachers in pigs. If you can find someone to sell you a pig for your apples. That you got for working in that office. Unless they go bad first.
The foundation of any economy beyond barter is an acceptable medium of exchange; destroy the medium of exchange and you destroy the economy.
restrictions on risk-taking as "regulation"
Risk taking with other peoples money without their consent is not equivalent to risk taking with your own.
I can guarantee that such a move would cause unbelievably catastrophic decreases in living standards,
And I can guarantee you that it wont (with the solid scientific evidence of periods in history where growth was avid without FRB). And even more than that, it would get rid of the gross malinvestments driven by flawed incentives, and most likely end the boom-bust cycle permanently, replacing it with a sustainable growth based on sound investments instead. Or maybe you think the 14 million uninhabited houses and vast parking lots of unsold SUV's are great investments whose loss would be 'catastropic'?
The distortion to the economy that unlimited credit creates doesn't result in improvements in living standards. It results in vast overproduction of things that nobody wants if they have to actually pay for them.
The resulting economic downturn would kill millions of people
Oh, please. get. real. There's nothing preventing redistributive policies without making up capital that doesn't exist and pushing payment to the future. In fact, the idea that inflationary policies are good for the poor ought to have been fairly throughly debunked by the last few years; it's not the poor that have been winners, in case you've missed that. It's not the poor who'll get income/benefit increases at par with inflation. In fact, it seems execs are far better at that...
for a better economic rebuttal
Heh. Ok, I'll tear it apart.
1) Barring fractional reserve banking does not mean you cannot have government intervention for GDP stimulation. It just means you have to actually get taxpayer consent to tax them for the public good, as opposed to fiat appropriation through inflation.
2) Your link says "I can't afford to lock up a chunk of my savings for six months to two years."
Perhaps the author has not heard of selling bonds? The maturity doesn't mean you have to hold it until then, you can sell it to someone else.
"The money in my savings and money market accounts is there for a reason-"
Yes, well, except it isn't actually there. The bank has lent it out. Which means you may or may not actually be able to get it when you want it, modulo any getting taxpayers to pay it back instead. And, really, when did you last get paid a decent interest on an active transfer/checking account?
Etc. I'd suggest you study up on both the quite disproven economic theories the current system is based on, as well as the more sound Austrian school economics. An Austrian prescription would be to actually prevent the inevitable collapse by preventing the bubble from ever forming, ie, in the late 60's. By now you can play any Keynsian game all you want; the game is already over and there's nothing that can be done. We can hope we don't get the pain of a complete delever down to 1960's levels, but frankly I'm not so certain anymore.
People and investors are not rational and therefore do not fully follow the free market model.
With the Fed holding interest rates at negative real returns as compared to any real CPI measurement, there's quite some leeway as to what can be considered rational. The choice the last few years was not between some returns and more returns, it was between negative returns and saving capital from inflation.
The rules were set by the Fed, with negative real cost for capital and unlimited availability of credit, rules that basically said "borrow and we'll give you money", "save and we'll take your money away". With such rules you could easily make a case for practically everyone in the economy being rational these last few years.
Fiat currencies are a red herring, fractional reserve lending isn't.
You can create a fiat currency that cannot be arbitrarily expanded (which would be the point to any real resource tie anyway), but fractional reserve lending will arbitrarily expand any currency, fiat or not.
Yes. The Fed set interest rates that were, if you're honest, far into negative real return land. That essentially means the government/Fed is saying that either you take risks or we're going to take your money through inflation.
With market controlled interest rates and without the unlimited credit creation of fractional reserve banking, such a risk profile would never have been possible. Demand for credit would have driven prices for credit up, increasing the returns for less risk, preventing the bubble build up. Capital to put into CDS's and CDO's with those risk levels at those costs would simply never have appeared.
With central banking all risk and all capital becomes inherently underpriced. It's essential and fundamental to the system; it's the method by which the central bank claims it can 'stimulate growth' (which should be read as 'encourage speculation and build asset price bubbles').
So the problem is easy to solve. Remove the problem at the source; the central banks and fractional reserve banking.
there has been no substantive debate about what actually needs to be done to change financial regulation
Because what needs to be done is quite easy; move to 100% reserve requirements and market based interest rates.
But most politicians don't want to do that; things like wars or other massive deficit generating activities would be much harder to fund if you had to actually tax citizens as opposed to tax them through inflation. The power of the state to control the value of money is simply too tempting for them to let go of it.
Do we place stricter leverage limits so that these firms are not allowed to take on risk?
Why should banks be allowed to risk depositors money at all? If depositors want return on their money, they are free to lend the money out by investing in bonds themselves. As long as the whole foundation of the economy, the currency, is inherently unsound and leveraged, any regulation of the system above that is meaningless.
You have to realize, the whole economy didn't become leveraged for no reason, it became leveraged because the Fed, and other central banks, have been basically pointing a gun at the heads of anyone with (or even without) money and telling them to 'invest' (speculate) and leverage or the Fed is going to take their money away through inflation (the actual rates of which have been close to double-digit for some time if you don't to play games with the numbers). They like to call it 'stimulating growth', but what it comes down to is essentially forcing investors to chose between negative returns or finding a new bubble object, which makes the numbers look good for a little while.
You see it again this time; the Fed is already down at negative real return rates. This time most investors know better and would rather take a shave from the Fed than stick their money into the churning maw of asset deflation.
Any and every regulation that would in any way be effective against the symptoms of this crisis basically does a roundabout limitation of the central banks ability to force credit creation (and through unlimited credit keep rates down), from limiting leverage to enforcing stricter rating requirements. The only thing that actually makes any real sense to do is to limit it at the source; the Fed.
He just doesn't get that some people do things not for the money.
And, like so many others, he misses the fact that sometimes _saving_ money means you get an even better profit margin than you do by _earning_ money.
Far too many companies give far too much of their revenue base to third parties. Some get tired of it, roll their own, and share those rolls as they're not in the business of rolling their own and they'd rather share maintenance of non-core-business related projects with others than dedicate too much focus to non-core, but important, cost-saving measures.
The intentional abuse of the word by the IPR proponents and industries have made it pointless to argue anymore. Better to just accept that 'pirate' has become a synonym of 'copy' and treat it like that, further debasing the expression, thus reducing the incentive for the intentional abuse.
For what I'll use them for? Not very. Looks like they've got great stats for bulk storage, and any more demanding segments I can stripe and/or cache anyway (with memory prices where they are, it's not like you hit swap anymore).
Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience. Lack of capacity, not quite so easily. So several of these are definitely on the shopping list. (Mmm, mythtv storage...)
Actually, drbd does active/active these days (since 8.0), so you can do without the SAN.
(I actually moved over from xen vm's on iSCSI SAN LUN's to drbd as it made some things easier and nicer (having lv's for each device, rather than separate iscsi LUN's, etc) Not quite the same performance, but in the same range at least, and for my purposes in this case the tradeoff was worth it).
You still need GFS2 or some other cluster-aware file system on top if you want the whole shared-file system semantics with all it entails, but it's certainly doable.
Slashdot Mirror
They generally try to instill in you, the capacity to learn.
I'd say it's more about the capacity to write reports satisfying various quirky bosses. By the time you get old enough to get a degree it's about at least ten to fifteen years too late to make significant changes in learning capacity and problem solving strategies (if that's at all possible anyway).
Linus Torvald didn't learn about designing an operating system
Mmm, not really the right example. Linux was, eh, not quite academically designed, and would, as I recall, violate pretty much every paradigm popular at universities at the time. He did get internet access there tho, which I'd say was one of the main factors in laying the groundwork (besides need and interest).
Degrees are important and are worth much more
Degrees are a more thorough testing of general ability. Still, a degree wont give you any ability you don't already have, and with todays internet access it's not like it's hard to find the knowledge you need to accomplish what you want (at least in CS fields).
Now it's an ever-extending new property right
Calling it a property right is a (deliberate, in some cases) misnomer; monopoly right or private taxation right is more appropriate and more accurate in describing it.
As the laws governing such rights are inherently counterproductive and unethical (as they decrease the creation of intellectual variety and expression, as well as deliberately decrease the availability and wealth inherent in such (vast deadweight loss due to non-pareto efficiency)) it can never be unethical to violate those laws.
The ethical approach is to primarily avoid handing any money to any entity engaged in promoting such laws, as well as promoting the various non-damaging possible approaches (ie, not based on artificial scarcity or control, but solely on monetary transfer) to reimburse and promote creative endeavours.
Early GenX here.
1995 according to Apple. And searching on Apple and PVC gives you a nice Apple webpage detailing these things, so it seems that Greenpeace managed to convince Apple to publish the details at least.
That said, while I certainly don't hold Greenpeace in a particularly high regard, but as far as Apple and environmentalism is concerned, you don't need to go further than the battery replacement issue to draw your own conclusions.
The problem with computers sorting on symptoms is that symptoms are common, symptoms overlap diseases and there are a lot of unconscious filters that medical professionals use to get the diagnosis
It's not so much a problem with computers as a problem with diseases. Remember, the unconscious filters that medical professionals use to get the diagnosis also often get the wrong diagnosis.
The problem space of accurately matching symptoms with diseases is _hard_, and it's also a problem which is almost entirely unsuited to the human brain.
They could be useful as an adjunct to jog your memory
Jogging memory may be exactly what, as it were, the doctor ordered. Most of the research I've seen indicates that patients researching their own issues have a much better chance of avoiding missed diagnosis or other failures. Jogging the professionals memory may be much of the reason for that.
Software that provides possible options, statistical likelyhood for each, suggesting ways to rule out or rule in options, seriousness and time sensitivity of testing for each option, etc, could do a lot to reduce incidence of mistakes.
sound like recommending that everyone start playing Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, with the limitation that only one can have the keyboard at a time.
Considering that both Europe and China are launching their own satellite navigation networks, largely as a distrust issue, the idea that a single signed DNS root will be politically digestible over anything but a very short term shows a certain... detachment... from the actual politics of the world.
I suspect that even if DNSSEC gets deployed to any large extent it'll get fractured again due to missteps by the controlling organizations (You gonna sign that Tibet key or not?).
In the end there are other solutions that might be more palatable. You could specify multiple servers against which to cross-check DNS lookups, you could store keys after first access, (and to solve Kaminsky it's even easier as you could just extend the random id code) etc, etc. The hierarchial trust structure appeals to some, particularly as it fits DNS very well, but it has some problems that may perhaps never be resolved and that can render it incompatible with reality.
I think the Yahoo/Microsoft saga is one of the most shocking displays of directors' self-interest vs their shareholders' interests.
With that sentence I was unsure which directors and which shareholders you were referring to. If you recall, Microsoft lost more value than Yahoo gained on the bid.
In hindsight shareholders have lost $20 billion. At the time of the offer the premium was around $10 billion.
Half of which was in Microsoft stock. Which is also worth significantly less today.
The speculators could have sold at any time they wanted. Holding onto or speculating in stock in a bear market is actually not guaranteed to make a profit. If they have any complaints about that, they should apply to convert to a bank holding company and get bailout funds.
...and I hope I'm not the only one.
Considering the reaction of Microsoft stock during the acquisition period, you're joined by a lot of Microsoft shareholders.
I think trying to acquire Yahoo was more about Steve Ballmers ego needing some marketshare against Google, rather than any form of sane business for either company. I suspect Ballmer got told by the board to concentrate on core business instead of his ego, hence the abort of the takeover.
Apart from some speculators who've gotten what they deserve, it's hard to see why anyone would have any interest in the deal; like you say, yahoo would lose a lot of it's five customers, and Microsoft would get a company whose employees certainly wouldn't be thrilled to be working for them.
40 PCIe 2.0 lanes (which are the cheapo chipsets capacity) are more than enough to drive 48 disks. You do realize that PCIe is comprised of switched serial lanes, right? There is no bus contention on PCIe lanes. Each lane is one 500MB/sec serial bus in it's own right.
You really should read up some on modern hardware. You sortof sound like you've been in hibernation for a decade. And woken up cranky ;).
Sounds like you need to read up on your consumer hardware; it's not 1997 anymore. There are cheap modern consumer grade motherboards that come with 3xPCIe(2.0) 16x slots. That's a combined bus bandwidth of 24GB per second. Far more than enough to eat 48 SATA drives.
I've worked in 'Enterprise' IT for fifteen years. Ten years ago it was nice to bring junked equipment home. These days I bring things I junk at home to work.
'Enterprise' hardware has gone from being expensive and significantly better to being just expensive. It's not the enterprise that's driving the state of the art anymore.
These days when I hear a mention of 'mission critical' I tend to file it in the same folder as 'enLarge your DATA'; sales pitches aimed at insecure managers. For the price you'll get swindled into paying for (some barely tested) 'high-end' products you can usually afford 10x redundancy. If not 100x (and I've seen worse than that).
So Sun is targeting a slightly different *wallet* with their device. That doesn't change the fact that most would get better performance/security/space/price by simply, like the GP suggested, throwing together commodity hardware.
must be redeemed immediately.
You mean, they must be reinsured immediately. Or refinanced on different terms.
if AIG wasn't being bailed out, it could be getting a lot nastier.
Yah, like Goldman Sachs getting a serious haircut. Nastier (for Paulsons friends that is).
Face it, most of the scaremongering is simply done by the beneficiaries of the bailouts in question. They'd rather the taxpayer pay for their mistakes than face their stock going worthless; most solid businesses or municipals would not be overly encumbered by the failure of AIG. Yes, they might have to temporarily pay an extra premium, but that would be easily arranged.
The same argument can be made for any medical treatment at all, ranging from flu to cancer. In fact, it can be made for most civilizational aspects, agriculture, housing, etc.
Like it or not, natural selection has been largely bypassed in civilized culture and it may not even be particularly relevant in the situation you mention, as infection rate is miniscule in many countries leading to such immunity being extremely unlikely to be a deciding factor, and certainly not a useful method for eradicating HIV.
For long-term protection against biological extinction events it's probably better to bypass natural selection on this scale anyway and keep as wide and diverse a genepool as possible. Variants that create immunity for one, treatable, disease may be susceptible to some future more dangerous plague, or vice-versa. (For example, ccr5 mediated HIV resistance has indications that it lowers resistance to other diseases such as west nile).
So it's not so much that your idea is controversial, it's just that it's not particularly, eh, useful.
Now please report to the nearest sterilization clinic and volunteer to join the fight against bad ideas. ;)
From an economic perspective it's most appropriate to view IP as various forms of delegated taxation rights (which, not entirely coincidentally, isn't far from their historic use).
And as such, their tendency to grow to consume ever more of the economic output is hardly surprising; imagine putting the beneficiaries of any other taxation scheme in charge of the rates and revenue, without having to ever justify the cost.
Often times, the possibility that you might infringe a patent is pretty clear from a cursory reading
Of course, with the quality of patents granted, the language and the overly broad claims means someone reading patents may very well conclude that there is no software they can possibly write without 'the possibility that they might be infringing a patent'.
When even the patent office can barely tell what it and what isn't valid, the average software engineer has no chance; if you have pockets deep enough, hand the code to the lawyers and they can analyze it. They're probably better at reading code than the programmers are at reading patent claims.
AMD Opteron and Intels upcoming CPUs support NUMA, or rather ccNUMA. That basically syncs only areas cached in multiple caches. OS support for that isn't extremely complex; it becomes mainly an issue of minimizing the situations where multiple caches cache the same memory.
the interest rates on savings accounts are zero
Yes. But it's not as if savings accounts tend to give that much interest anyway. If you want interest on the money you can explicitly invest them in tradeable bonds instead.
Of course the "problem" with FRB
One of the problems. To tie back to the previous situation; savings accounts are claimed to be 'there' while they're not, and there still is a reserve requirement. If a bond defaults then the lender gets hit; if FRB loans default, then the bank needs to reduce lending, rebuild capital or face actual bankruptcy and everyone gets hit.
Without FRB the transfer system between bad loans in one or a few sectors and every other sector would be much less direct and the feedback loop would be less tight (if there would be one at all).
And that will happen with or without an FRB economy.
Yes, which is when we come to the other part; the price of money. With market controlled rates, rates will adjust higher if demand for loans rises. Massive malinvestments and speculation like everything from the housing bubble to SUV production would be far less likely to happen and they would not be able to get as far; as demand for mortgages rose, interest rates would rise, savers would get more acceptable rates on lower risk investments, etc.
The centrally controlled rates of central banking more or less enforce speculation; by effectively keeping negative real return rates they pretty much tell everyone with money (or without, as we've basically had negative real rates on borrowing too) that they should speculate or their money will get eaten by inflation (if we count actual inflation, not the ebonicized "let's discount anything that goes up" version that's politically palatable).
And as long as you have a proper progressive taxing system, it is still worth working more to earn more.
Yep. I don't have any objections to taxes per-se, as long as they're _honest_ about it (as opposed to FRB/inflationary policies or intellectual 'property' which are essentially hidden taxation forms). Taxes are at least nominally democratically decided and they are, to a fairly large extent, accounted for.
Providing safety nets (even fairly generous such) is definitely within what I'd call good use of money. Stimulating the economy through rescheduling of projects during economic lulls is another good use (altho I'd strongly suggest we'd have far less such lulls if we didn't have the FRB/FED induced bubble/collapse cycle).
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that we finance our deficits through printing money.
Mmmhmm. And what do you think the asset price bubble in houses and resultant tax revenue is, eh?
He might even call it a bank...
Risking capital in bonds is not the equivalent of depositing capital in supposedly fully available on-demand withdrawal accounts.
Banks don't go bankrupt and force the FDIC to pay customers because customer investments in bonds go sour. Banks go bankrupt because they speculate with money that isn't theirs to speculate with.
I had thought that the foundation of our economy was our workers, schools, offices.
And without currency you can pay the teachers in pigs. If you can find someone to sell you a pig for your apples. That you got for working in that office. Unless they go bad first.
The foundation of any economy beyond barter is an acceptable medium of exchange; destroy the medium of exchange and you destroy the economy.
restrictions on risk-taking as "regulation"
Risk taking with other peoples money without their consent is not equivalent to risk taking with your own.
I can guarantee that such a move would cause unbelievably catastrophic decreases in living standards,
And I can guarantee you that it wont (with the solid scientific evidence of periods in history where growth was avid without FRB). And even more than that, it would get rid of the gross malinvestments driven by flawed incentives, and most likely end the boom-bust cycle permanently, replacing it with a sustainable growth based on sound investments instead. Or maybe you think the 14 million uninhabited houses and vast parking lots of unsold SUV's are great investments whose loss would be 'catastropic'?
The distortion to the economy that unlimited credit creates doesn't result in improvements in living standards. It results in vast overproduction of things that nobody wants if they have to actually pay for them.
The resulting economic downturn would kill millions of people
Oh, please. get. real. There's nothing preventing redistributive policies without making up capital that doesn't exist and pushing payment to the future. In fact, the idea that inflationary policies are good for the poor ought to have been fairly throughly debunked by the last few years; it's not the poor that have been winners, in case you've missed that. It's not the poor who'll get income/benefit increases at par with inflation. In fact, it seems execs are far better at that...
for a better economic rebuttal
Heh. Ok, I'll tear it apart.
1) Barring fractional reserve banking does not mean you cannot have government intervention for GDP stimulation. It just means you have to actually get taxpayer consent to tax them for the public good, as opposed to fiat appropriation through inflation.
2) Your link says "I can't afford to lock up a chunk of my savings for six months to two years."
Perhaps the author has not heard of selling bonds? The maturity doesn't mean you have to hold it until then, you can sell it to someone else.
"The money in my savings and money market accounts is there for a reason-"
Yes, well, except it isn't actually there. The bank has lent it out. Which means you may or may not actually be able to get it when you want it, modulo any getting taxpayers to pay it back instead. And, really, when did you last get paid a decent interest on an active transfer/checking account?
Etc. I'd suggest you study up on both the quite disproven economic theories the current system is based on, as well as the more sound Austrian school economics. An Austrian prescription would be to actually prevent the inevitable collapse by preventing the bubble from ever forming, ie, in the late 60's. By now you can play any Keynsian game all you want; the game is already over and there's nothing that can be done. We can hope we don't get the pain of a complete delever down to 1960's levels, but frankly I'm not so certain anymore.
People and investors are not rational and therefore do not fully follow the free market model.
With the Fed holding interest rates at negative real returns as compared to any real CPI measurement, there's quite some leeway as to what can be considered rational. The choice the last few years was not between some returns and more returns, it was between negative returns and saving capital from inflation.
The rules were set by the Fed, with negative real cost for capital and unlimited availability of credit, rules that basically said "borrow and we'll give you money", "save and we'll take your money away". With such rules you could easily make a case for practically everyone in the economy being rational these last few years.
Well, except the ones responsible for the rules.
Fiat currencies are a red herring, fractional reserve lending isn't.
You can create a fiat currency that cannot be arbitrarily expanded (which would be the point to any real resource tie anyway), but fractional reserve lending will arbitrarily expand any currency, fiat or not.
Did the government "force"
Yes. The Fed set interest rates that were, if you're honest, far into negative real return land. That essentially means the government/Fed is saying that either you take risks or we're going to take your money through inflation.
With market controlled interest rates and without the unlimited credit creation of fractional reserve banking, such a risk profile would never have been possible. Demand for credit would have driven prices for credit up, increasing the returns for less risk, preventing the bubble build up. Capital to put into CDS's and CDO's with those risk levels at those costs would simply never have appeared.
With central banking all risk and all capital becomes inherently underpriced. It's essential and fundamental to the system; it's the method by which the central bank claims it can 'stimulate growth' (which should be read as 'encourage speculation and build asset price bubbles').
So the problem is easy to solve. Remove the problem at the source; the central banks and fractional reserve banking.
there has been no substantive debate about what actually needs to be done to change financial regulation
Because what needs to be done is quite easy; move to 100% reserve requirements and market based interest rates.
But most politicians don't want to do that; things like wars or other massive deficit generating activities would be much harder to fund if you had to actually tax citizens as opposed to tax them through inflation. The power of the state to control the value of money is simply too tempting for them to let go of it.
Do we place stricter leverage limits so that these firms are not allowed to take on risk?
Why should banks be allowed to risk depositors money at all? If depositors want return on their money, they are free to lend the money out by investing in bonds themselves. As long as the whole foundation of the economy, the currency, is inherently unsound and leveraged, any regulation of the system above that is meaningless.
You have to realize, the whole economy didn't become leveraged for no reason, it became leveraged because the Fed, and other central banks, have been basically pointing a gun at the heads of anyone with (or even without) money and telling them to 'invest' (speculate) and leverage or the Fed is going to take their money away through inflation (the actual rates of which have been close to double-digit for some time if you don't to play games with the numbers). They like to call it 'stimulating growth', but what it comes down to is essentially forcing investors to chose between negative returns or finding a new bubble object, which makes the numbers look good for a little while.
You see it again this time; the Fed is already down at negative real return rates. This time most investors know better and would rather take a shave from the Fed than stick their money into the churning maw of asset deflation.
Any and every regulation that would in any way be effective against the symptoms of this crisis basically does a roundabout limitation of the central banks ability to force credit creation (and through unlimited credit keep rates down), from limiting leverage to enforcing stricter rating requirements. The only thing that actually makes any real sense to do is to limit it at the source; the Fed.
He just doesn't get that some people do things not for the money.
And, like so many others, he misses the fact that sometimes _saving_ money means you get an even better profit margin than you do by _earning_ money.
Far too many companies give far too much of their revenue base to third parties. Some get tired of it, roll their own, and share those rolls as they're not in the business of rolling their own and they'd rather share maintenance of non-core-business related projects with others than dedicate too much focus to non-core, but important, cost-saving measures.
But the use in the summary is even worse.
The intentional abuse of the word by the IPR proponents and industries have made it pointless to argue anymore. Better to just accept that 'pirate' has become a synonym of 'copy' and treat it like that, further debasing the expression, thus reducing the incentive for the intentional abuse.
How important is throughput?
For what I'll use them for? Not very. Looks like they've got great stats for bulk storage, and any more demanding segments I can stripe and/or cache anyway (with memory prices where they are, it's not like you hit swap anymore).
Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience. Lack of capacity, not quite so easily. So several of these are definitely on the shopping list. (Mmm, mythtv storage...)
Actually, drbd does active/active these days (since 8.0), so you can do without the SAN.
(I actually moved over from xen vm's on iSCSI SAN LUN's to drbd as it made some things easier and nicer (having lv's for each device, rather than separate iscsi LUN's, etc) Not quite the same performance, but in the same range at least, and for my purposes in this case the tradeoff was worth it).
You still need GFS2 or some other cluster-aware file system on top if you want the whole shared-file system semantics with all it entails, but it's certainly doable.