Law firms are special cases. Lawyers work 18 hrs/day and can't afford to be bothered with slow computers running updates. IT has to stay late or come in at odd hours just to get any patching done. Patching and security audits are absolutely essential because of the nature of the industry. I've seen lawyers keep the same, unsaved document open on their desktop for weeks at a time, waiting for le mot juste, a BSOD, or a filing deadline, whichever comes first. A law firm is one of the most challenging environments for desktop support.
As we speak, someone in a global corporation with a fat north/south pipe is working on implementing this on two computers at each end, so that it can be patented, placed on his resume, filed away, and never again put to use.
A single bank cannot loan out more cash than it has. It keeps a fraction in reserve. Aside from what I already pointed out, that the depositor still believes he has his original deposit, a bank does not create new currency out of thin air.
Banks as a whole, however, can end up loaning out more than the original deposit, through loans made between them. Please read the wikipedia section above and the associated table. It is quite informative.
I'm trying to come up with a way to debunk this. And this is the best I've come up with. I'm not completely happy with it but here goes.
Bankruptcy destroys debt. So, if your initial loan creates enough of a profit to you, you get that money from someone else, pay off the interest, and you stay in business. That other person goes bankrupt. The debt is written off by the FED (note I don't actually know if this is the case).
I like your example. But it is overly simplistic. At any given time, there are enough players declaring bankruptcy to destroy a significant amount of debt. When trade stops producing economic growth, a few major banks go bankrupt and the FED writes off that last 5% of the economy or whatever. We all live happily ever after without the need for constant growth because there is plenty of money circulating in the economy at that point.
I kind of like this interpretation because it drives home the stupidity of not letting banks fail. But I'm open to criticism.
You understand it's the same thing? They keep $20 in reserve and lend out 4x that.
The problem is that the depositor still thinks he has $100, while most of it has actually gone out the door. As pointed out, this becomes worse when most of the loans are between banks.
Good regulation is what prevents financial organizations from becoming too leveraged.
You are missing his point. Good regulation would prevent banks from becoming "leveraged" in the first place. What we have is not even regulation. It is legitimized fraud.
Consider this. I tell you that I will hold onto your money for you, even offering you a bit of interest, and that you can come and get it at any time as long as you withdraw less than $1000 a day. Sound like a deal? Okay, so you give me $15,000. I immediately turn around and loan out your money on a 36 month note for a new truck.
You come back fifteen times over the next six months and try to withdraw $1000 each time. The first time, I might be able to cover your withdrawal from the loan payments I've received. The next few times, I'm paying you from my own money while I repossess the truck. But unfortunately, the truck dropped in value by half the minute it was driven off the lot. So, even after I re-sell the truck and give you all of my own money, I can only cover up to about $10,000 of what I owe you.
And that's pretty much the situation we're in with banking in America right now. Why do you think the car companies are lining up for bankruptcy along with the failed mortgage lenders? No amount of additional regulation can continue to hide the fact that loaning out demand-deposits (at any leverage ratio) on long-term notes should rightly constitute fraud. And, for far too long, banks have been making bad loans to irresponsible consumers to purchase items that aren't worth half of what they pay for them.
The intent of the law is to encourage the use of alternative fuels. Paper companies are already using alternative fuels both economically and efficiently. Taxing them, and distributing that money to less-efficient companies that are not currently using alternative fuels economically, discourages paper companies from existing, thereby punishing them for using alternative fuels.
Regardless, concentrating on bullshit like this, instead of seriously addressing the negative externalities of dependence on foreign fossil fuels, makes all of us worse off.
But I seriously can't fucking believe, that after eight years of the incompetent fucking clowns in the Bush administration, that anyone has the brass balls to try to justify, let alone suggest, more retarded, illegal bravado from the executive branch. You are a complete dumbfuck, just like the tools who passed this law in 2005, and the tools who are currently skullfucking the concept of market economics for their ill-conceived political agenda. This country has become a sad fucking joke. And idiots like you are the primary reason. By now, absolutely no one should give two dry shits what the average mouth-breathing American thinks about who or what is "evil" and what his president-god-king should do about it, since it's obvious that most of their heads are so far up their own asses that they couldn't find them with two hands and a GPS device.
and a Verizon wireless card, and those stupid face-morphing image programs, and a decent VPN client that supports whatever not-quite-standard firewall your small business uses, and Google Earth, and online poker software, and a typing tutor, and the Kinkos print driver, and a diet planner, and a genealogy program, and this lamp, and that's all I need.
You will find quite a bit of variation in hardware support from the different distros, especially for any hardware released in the last year or so.
RedHat, for instance, puts a lot of fun things into their kernels. Most of them are absolutely essential for supporting the latest hardware, and don't usually make it into the mainline kernel for at least a few months. Some of their customizations, on the other hand, are buggy or too proprietary to ever make it into the mainstream kernel. One example I can think of is that the 2.4 RedHat kernels supported hot-swapping IDE drives on standard controllers. I don't think the standard kernel ever got that feature.
But it's not just an internet appliance. For kids and teenagers, it's a cheap laptop. For businessmen, it's a workstation that fits on an airplane tray table with a battery that lasts for the entire flight. For housewives, it's a recipe-book and IM client that sits on the kitchen counter while you're preparing a meal.
It needs to run QuickBooks and TurboTax and the recipe-compilation CDs that they sell at WalMart. It needs to run iTunes and the latest Sudoku puzzle games. It needs to run Excel and a decent instant messenger. It needs to view videos on YouTube and AOL.com and all the major networks websites. It needs to at least run the older $25 video games you can buy at BestBuy, out of the box.
And I agree with you that, for most of these, Linux can come very close to 100% feature parity with Windows for very close to 100% of the users out there. I know this because I've done it. But I also know that it isn't easy. It isn't point-and-click. And it isn't provided by any current distro in a way that the average consumer can easily do all of this for themselves, which is the level of functionality that people expect from even a $300 consumer product, right or wrong. And, in my view, until any of this changes, Linux will have a difficult time making significant inroads on the home user desktop market.
I agree. This article sucks. The author makes nothing that can be interpreted as a compelling main argument. He really just tries to attribute a lot of annoying little bugs in the various Linux versions shipped with netbooks to a general "threshold of unfamiliarity" on the part of the average user. I can't really believe that unfamiliarity has anything to do with it.
Just from what I have read in this thread, there are distros without flash pre-installed, distros with non-functional drivers, bad default fonts, no video players, and on top of this little or no vendor support available.
It's crazy to blame any of that on Linux as a whole. One of the major strengths of Linux is that you have a choice of distros and suppliers, and poorly-supported ones are expected to fail in the marketplace.
Even when I was supporting Linux desktops five years ago, I could not have imagined seeing a Linux desktop environment on millions of consumer devices.
At the time, the only large distros with significant advantages over Windows (RedHat and Debian) were absolutely opposed to supporting desktop users, even business desktops. Since then, Debian-derived distros have had varying degrees of success on the desktop, but RedHat is (unfortunately) still opposed.
The idea of a consumer OS that wouldn't play commercial games and support third-party programs out-of-the-box was laughable. And I imagine the failure to address either of those problems is leading to the loss of market share for Linux on netbooks.
Remember the Prophet units in the Empire Earth games? In ancient times they started out as religious shamans. But once you played up to modern times they were nutjobs wearing "The End Is Near!" sandwich boards. They could cause earthquakes.
The 'add_drv' command on Solaris does the exact same thing that the 'insmod' command does on Linux, that is dynamically linking device driver modules into the kernel.
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Just like a commie pinko liberal professor to teach our students they need to take down the American flag for the sake of "global warming".
Law firms are special cases. Lawyers work 18 hrs/day and can't afford to be bothered with slow computers running updates. IT has to stay late or come in at odd hours just to get any patching done. Patching and security audits are absolutely essential because of the nature of the industry. I've seen lawyers keep the same, unsaved document open on their desktop for weeks at a time, waiting for le mot juste, a BSOD, or a filing deadline, whichever comes first. A law firm is one of the most challenging environments for desktop support.
As we speak, someone in a global corporation with a fat north/south pipe is working on implementing this on two computers at each end, so that it can be patented, placed on his resume, filed away, and never again put to use.
Then can you use the electricity to power the computers?
As pointed out, this becomes worse when most of the loans are between banks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Money_creation
A single bank cannot loan out more cash than it has. It keeps a fraction in reserve. Aside from what I already pointed out, that the depositor still believes he has his original deposit, a bank does not create new currency out of thin air.
Banks as a whole, however, can end up loaning out more than the original deposit, through loans made between them. Please read the wikipedia section above and the associated table. It is quite informative.
Citation needed.
Stop doing this.
Are you kidding? SP3 is a giant tub of bloat backported from Vista. Microsoft has been slowly boiling us with service packs for a while now.
I'm trying to come up with a way to debunk this. And this is the best I've come up with. I'm not completely happy with it but here goes.
Bankruptcy destroys debt. So, if your initial loan creates enough of a profit to you, you get that money from someone else, pay off the interest, and you stay in business. That other person goes bankrupt. The debt is written off by the FED (note I don't actually know if this is the case).
I like your example. But it is overly simplistic. At any given time, there are enough players declaring bankruptcy to destroy a significant amount of debt. When trade stops producing economic growth, a few major banks go bankrupt and the FED writes off that last 5% of the economy or whatever. We all live happily ever after without the need for constant growth because there is plenty of money circulating in the economy at that point.
I kind of like this interpretation because it drives home the stupidity of not letting banks fail. But I'm open to criticism.
You understand it's the same thing? They keep $20 in reserve and lend out 4x that.
The problem is that the depositor still thinks he has $100, while most of it has actually gone out the door. As pointed out, this becomes worse when most of the loans are between banks.
Do you think any stupid people spend more on lotteries than they receive in welfare / social security?
This is South Korea. The democracy. The US client state. Requiring citizen ID numbers and outlawing anonymous free speech.
Not North Korea. The communist dictatorship.
Make no mistake. Since the article makes a point to keep saying "Korea", a significant portion of US readers will conflate the two.
How is it that governments exploit stupid people, exactly?
Good regulation is what prevents financial organizations from becoming too leveraged.
You are missing his point. Good regulation would prevent banks from becoming "leveraged" in the first place. What we have is not even regulation. It is legitimized fraud.
Consider this. I tell you that I will hold onto your money for you, even offering you a bit of interest, and that you can come and get it at any time as long as you withdraw less than $1000 a day. Sound like a deal? Okay, so you give me $15,000. I immediately turn around and loan out your money on a 36 month note for a new truck.
You come back fifteen times over the next six months and try to withdraw $1000 each time. The first time, I might be able to cover your withdrawal from the loan payments I've received. The next few times, I'm paying you from my own money while I repossess the truck. But unfortunately, the truck dropped in value by half the minute it was driven off the lot. So, even after I re-sell the truck and give you all of my own money, I can only cover up to about $10,000 of what I owe you.
And that's pretty much the situation we're in with banking in America right now. Why do you think the car companies are lining up for bankruptcy along with the failed mortgage lenders? No amount of additional regulation can continue to hide the fact that loaning out demand-deposits (at any leverage ratio) on long-term notes should rightly constitute fraud. And, for far too long, banks have been making bad loans to irresponsible consumers to purchase items that aren't worth half of what they pay for them.
we create laws specifically to prevent that.
The only thing this law has prevented is papermills from using alternative fuels.
Are you saying you want a type of anarchy
The parent said nothing about anarchy. No need to erect strawmen.
I think copious legislation should be applied
Your "copious" legislation has already been applied. It is demonstrably counterproductive.
The intent of the law is to encourage the use of alternative fuels. Paper companies are already using alternative fuels both economically and efficiently. Taxing them, and distributing that money to less-efficient companies that are not currently using alternative fuels economically, discourages paper companies from existing, thereby punishing them for using alternative fuels.
Regardless, concentrating on bullshit like this, instead of seriously addressing the negative externalities of dependence on foreign fossil fuels, makes all of us worse off.
But I seriously can't fucking believe, that after eight years of the incompetent fucking clowns in the Bush administration, that anyone has the brass balls to try to justify, let alone suggest, more retarded, illegal bravado from the executive branch. You are a complete dumbfuck, just like the tools who passed this law in 2005, and the tools who are currently skullfucking the concept of market economics for their ill-conceived political agenda. This country has become a sad fucking joke. And idiots like you are the primary reason. By now, absolutely no one should give two dry shits what the average mouth-breathing American thinks about who or what is "evil" and what his president-god-king should do about it, since it's obvious that most of their heads are so far up their own asses that they couldn't find them with two hands and a GPS device.
You mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Wouldn't that necessitate abandoning the so-called monogamous form of sexual relationship?
and a Verizon wireless card, and those stupid face-morphing image programs, and a decent VPN client that supports whatever not-quite-standard firewall your small business uses, and Google Earth, and online poker software, and a typing tutor, and the Kinkos print driver, and a diet planner, and a genealogy program, and this lamp, and that's all I need.
In theory, yes. In reality, not really.
You will find quite a bit of variation in hardware support from the different distros, especially for any hardware released in the last year or so.
RedHat, for instance, puts a lot of fun things into their kernels. Most of them are absolutely essential for supporting the latest hardware, and don't usually make it into the mainline kernel for at least a few months. Some of their customizations, on the other hand, are buggy or too proprietary to ever make it into the mainstream kernel. One example I can think of is that the 2.4 RedHat kernels supported hot-swapping IDE drives on standard controllers. I don't think the standard kernel ever got that feature.
But it's not just an internet appliance. For kids and teenagers, it's a cheap laptop. For businessmen, it's a workstation that fits on an airplane tray table with a battery that lasts for the entire flight. For housewives, it's a recipe-book and IM client that sits on the kitchen counter while you're preparing a meal.
It needs to run QuickBooks and TurboTax and the recipe-compilation CDs that they sell at WalMart. It needs to run iTunes and the latest Sudoku puzzle games. It needs to run Excel and a decent instant messenger. It needs to view videos on YouTube and AOL.com and all the major networks websites. It needs to at least run the older $25 video games you can buy at BestBuy, out of the box.
And I agree with you that, for most of these, Linux can come very close to 100% feature parity with Windows for very close to 100% of the users out there. I know this because I've done it. But I also know that it isn't easy. It isn't point-and-click. And it isn't provided by any current distro in a way that the average consumer can easily do all of this for themselves, which is the level of functionality that people expect from even a $300 consumer product, right or wrong. And, in my view, until any of this changes, Linux will have a difficult time making significant inroads on the home user desktop market.
I agree. This article sucks. The author makes nothing that can be interpreted as a compelling main argument. He really just tries to attribute a lot of annoying little bugs in the various Linux versions shipped with netbooks to a general "threshold of unfamiliarity" on the part of the average user. I can't really believe that unfamiliarity has anything to do with it.
Just from what I have read in this thread, there are distros without flash pre-installed, distros with non-functional drivers, bad default fonts, no video players, and on top of this little or no vendor support available.
It's crazy to blame any of that on Linux as a whole. One of the major strengths of Linux is that you have a choice of distros and suppliers, and poorly-supported ones are expected to fail in the marketplace.
Savage is a combination RTS/FPS with both Linux and Windows versions.
Not quite the same thing, of course, as both modes require a full-blown PC. But interesting, nonetheless.
Even when I was supporting Linux desktops five years ago, I could not have imagined seeing a Linux desktop environment on millions of consumer devices.
At the time, the only large distros with significant advantages over Windows (RedHat and Debian) were absolutely opposed to supporting desktop users, even business desktops. Since then, Debian-derived distros have had varying degrees of success on the desktop, but RedHat is (unfortunately) still opposed.
The idea of a consumer OS that wouldn't play commercial games and support third-party programs out-of-the-box was laughable. And I imagine the failure to address either of those problems is leading to the loss of market share for Linux on netbooks.
Remember the Prophet units in the Empire Earth games? In ancient times they started out as religious shamans. But once you played up to modern times they were nutjobs wearing "The End Is Near!" sandwich boards. They could cause earthquakes.
Solaris on SPARC has device drivers in user-space.
According to the Sun website, for Solaris 10:
Device drivers run in kernel mode and are prevented from directly accessing processes in user mode.
The 'add_drv' command on Solaris does the exact same thing that the 'insmod' command does on Linux, that is dynamically linking device driver modules into the kernel.
You are confused.
You're seriously concerned about the cost for the US military to guard our coastal borders?
It's less than the cost of guarding oil wells in Iraq.