Society penalizes you for being a polite person already.
The 'jerk' effect is pretty common: given someone who's not complaining and someone who is, the establishment will take care of the person who's complaining first, in order to get them to shut up. No one likes the jerk, everyone likes the polite person, but the jerk will get seated at a restaurant first, will get their money back easier when returning something, and the like.
As a polite person, the establishment knows they can ignore you for a long time. But the jerk will cause them problems immediately.
I've checked out hosted servers; they invariably have a tiny HD limit, and a not-too-bad-but-annoying-nonetheless transfer limit. I have 200+ gigs from my home machines, and I can saturate the pipe 24/7/365 if I want.
Show me a hosting company that'll give me that.
(Not to mention the usefulness of being able to remotely SSH+VNC and be at my home machine, to do work or whatnot.)
So the porn site doesn't bother getting the captcha until it has a user ready. Porn site has a link saying, "For free porn, click here!". They click, spam script gets the captcha, user is shown a copy of the captcha, along with, "To prevent people from harvesting our precious pr0n, type in the letters...you have 20 seconds to comply..."
The intrinsic problem is that people are willing to solve captchas in return for rewards, such as porn.
Automated spam script goes to sign up new email address, gets presented captcha. Downloads captcha -- as the server would expect any normal web browser to do.
Captcha is copied to some location. Filename probably contains information that can identify the specific script that's running, since there'll undoubtedly be many going simultaneously.
From that point, there's about 20 minutes, give or take, for the porn site to display the copy of the captcha and ask for the user's input. On a site seeing any amount of traffic at all, that should be more than enough.
Once a user has given input, the spam script is notified, and sends the input back to the captcha server. The captcha server never sees the IP address of the human -- it only deals with the spam script -- so it'll never know anything's up.
The gold standard isn't a very good idea in the real world. It'd be a piss poor idea in the game world. Allow me to explain:
Let's suppose that there was a fixed amount of money, which is what the gold standard does. Well, it has to be distributed somewhere to begin with, so let's say it's in a vault, and everytime someone kills a monster, the money's taken out of that vault and given to the player.
That's fine, until the vault runs out. After that point, killing a monster gets you no gold. Well, where else are you going to get gold? You could sell items to storekeepers, but eventually they'd run out of money, too. So, you'd have to get it from other players.
But, the supply of gold is fixed. The supply of items is not; more are still created all the time. What's that mean? It means that the value of gold goes up, and the value of items go down (deflation). The longer you hold onto your gold, the more it'll buy.
And don't forget, of course, that this gold would be piling up in the hands of the experienced players and guilds, who could've gotten the money when it was "free". New players who never had that chance would be left out.
It's better not to include the "me" part at all. That means extra work because you have to add to/etc/aliases yourself, whereas you can have the MTA do the + thing for you.
If you're using Postfix, you could add this to your/etc/postfix/virtual.regexp:
/^(.*)_(.*)@domain name$/ $1
Then, any mail that includes a '_' will be forwarded to whatever's before the '_' without having to add an alias in for each one.
You seem to be laboring under some preconceived misnotions.
Wouldn't take Satellite "No TV when wind is blowing and/or sun is shining" if it was free for life...so never looked into it and don't really care to tell you the truth. Sorry.
My satellite has gone out far, far less than my cable ever did. In the ~4 months or so I've had satellite, it's gone out for about 20 minutes once. With cable, it was not uncommon for it to be down hours each month.
But, hey, if you like to believe that things are the way they are without actually investigating them, more power to you.
I could build a better setup for more, but won't be paying for a "Lifetime Subscription" or 12 bux a month for life with only means of adding more space or features available is...buy a whole new unit instead of a piece of hardware or adding a new script.
I was rather unaware that it was impossible to add more space to a TiVo. I bet that would really surprise everyone who's done it! You should go tell them. They should be most impressed.
And, as for cost, yes. Much better to have a $500 computer with a $100 video card than $250 for a TiVo. Why, at that rate, it might take 2.5 years for the TiVo to cost as much.
Same for improving performance of the system, upgrade mainboard/CPU and shouldn't have to do it again a year later AND than pay even more than the first time being lured in.
That's funny. I could swear that people often complain about needing to upgrade incessently as a hallmark of the PC, not the consumer appliance.
NOTE: This is not intended to be a troll or a TiVo slam! I'm sincerely interested in/. opinion.
Then why didn't you read the dozens of other posts in any given TiVo article where someone asks the same questions/makes the same point?
But, whatever:
#1: Cable PVR. Sure. If you have cable, and your cable company offers this (Comcast in Chicago doesn't, for instance). And, if it's actually streaming on demand, then it's likely you can't see any given show that may have just been broadcast -- it's probably limited to the popular ones. No saving stuff for later, no odd shows.
Finally, on the note of cable, it's gotten a wee bit expensive. I pay less now for DirecTV than I did for Comcast, and that's including the TiVo subscription rate and more pay channels.
#2: Computer. Sure. Let's say the computer cost $500. (You could, of course, use a less powerful computer, but then you need a video card that does hardware encoding, and those are more expensive. So.) TiVo costs $250. You could say, "But the computer can have a bigger HD", but the TiVo could too -- if you're the kind of person who wouldn't blink at setting up a computer as a PVR, then installing a hard drive shouldn't be a problem either.
And, of course, there's the computer setup time. Now, personally, I think playing around with MythTV and the like is fun. But I don't confuse fun with popular or cost effective. I don't mind spending a day configuring MythTV to do what I want, but I think I'm in a small subset of the population on that one.
I suspect your theory is correct. Why, just today, I was thinking to myself, "I bet all of those oil-change places are out of business."
I mean, really. An oil change. Anyone can do one, for 1/4 to 1/2 the price that a Jiffy Lube or a gas station will charge you. How can those places stay in business with a model like that? It's unheard of.
Confident in my intellectual superiority, I drove to work, only to pass plenty of oil change places still doing a fine business. I was saddened and dismayed to find out that such thinking is, in fact, totally wrong. Shocking as it is, it seems people are willing to pay for convenience.
In breaking news, a professional liquidator who gets paid to oversee companies that are in bankruptcy said that he expects there to be a lot of companies in bankruptcy next year, helping his business.
Facts pointing out this may not be the case were pushed aside.
Word probably uses a hash function to test the password (just like Linux doesn't store passwords, but hashes, in/etc/password). There's some function, you put the "password" in, it spits a hash out, and that is compared to the stored hash.
Hashes are more secure than storing the password, because they tend to be pretty one way -- it's trivial to get a hash from a password, but much less trivial to get a password from the hash.
However, hashes can collide; the smaller the hash returned, compared to the possible keyspace, the more likely this is. For instance, if I have a hash function that returns a one byte hash that I use to hash my password, then there is a 1/256 chance that _any_ gibberish I send in will return the same hash, and thus match.
Microsoft is probably using a very small hash, and your "tool of choice" probably just brute forces the thing until it finds a match.
If your tool of choice continued through the keyspace, it would inevitably come up with test, too.
Or, for that matter, any learning remote. Basically, it works like this: you push the "learning" button sequence, and then you aim your other remote at the learning one, and push whatever button you want to mimic. Then you push whatever button on the learning remote that you want to do that function, and, wa-lah, there you go.
It's a bit of a pain to setup, but it can assign whatever you want to whichever buttons you want. So, for instance, I've assigned the volume buttons to always go to the receiver, never the TV, regardless of which mode I'm in, or, when I'm in receiver mode, I can assign the numeric buttons to turn the receiver to TV, DVD, Playstation, etc.
My current way of version control is the old way of just zipping up each release!
If it's just you working on this...well, that's fine. And it probably is the easiest. There's little-to-no reason to use CVS if it's just you.
But, otherwise:
I haven't found much info on conceptual/fundmental questions, like on integrating with IDEs
Depends on the IDE. Most plugins for Windows or *nix shell out to the command line CVS, and process its output. But, I'm not familiar with Mac IDEs at all.
"do I check the entire development tree into CVS, or just the text files?" If it's just the text files, that seems like a lot of work.
Typically, the entire tree, but, and here's a big con of CVS, you have to have a correct cvswrappers file, or manually tell it which files are text and which are binary.
I do the entire tree, myself.
"How do I put my web site HTML files into a repository and still have the web server still be able to access it?"
Assuming you have a CVS client on your web server, and it can access your CVS server, you put in a shortcut (or nightly job, or what have you) that does a checkout module, like so:
cvs co -R -d <target directory> <module name>
(You could use cvs export, but it doesn't seem to like overwriting files that already exist)
But, again, CVS use is only compelling if you have more than one person working on the project at the same time.
So, I'm used for the ads for Thinkgeek. Even the ads for Microsoft don't faze me. But I bring up this story, and the ad is "Slashdot Personals, powered by Match.com".
And I said to myself, "Wow. Now _there's_ some targeted advertising. That's the sort of marketer that would sell icecubes on the Titanic."
Politicians and moral crusaders learn nothing from history. Prohibition does not work.
Prohibition doesn't work when it conflicts with what the majority want. The majority wanted alcohol during the 1920's, and were willing to violate the law to get it.
That's got no bearing on spam, which the majority doesn't want, just like the majority doesn't want murder, rape, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement, or any other number of illegal activities.
The Cypherpunks never went around suing people (that is, actually costing them money) who weren't using encryption to mask their illegal activities. The RIAA is.
Real world practicality will always be a much better motivator than abstract idealism.
Why, that's a brilliant idea! If only they'd done that for...uh, Pac-Man. And Mario. And Sonic the Hedgehog. Oh, and that old Nintendo Power show. And probably a few dozen more I'm forgetting.
What I, as a gamer, want to see is the Roger and Ebert (or, I guess, Ebert and Roeper now) version of game reviews.
When I first got cable, I was really excited over G4. Then I watched some. I don't care about "The Top 10 Best Dressed Videogame Characters". I would've been interested in their head-to-head games if they'd shown more of the game, tactics, strategies, etc, and less of the two hosts. As it was, I never went back to G4.
What brand recognition? Gamers have been burned enough time that there's really not much in the way of brand recognition. How many times has Game X done well, and then been followed by Game X Part 2, which is often as not a $50 expansion pack?
I'm one of those people who bought a PS2 just to buy GTA. I'd heard it was a fun, entertaining game. But I'm incredibly uninterested in Manhunt, because it's...well, not a fun, entertaining game. It brings nothing to the table besides excessive gore, and excessive gore simply ain't fun. I didn't play GTA because you could get a hooker, then kill her and take your cash back, no matter how much the mass media may try to convince themselves otherwise. Seems Take Two bought into that hype, too.
Win2k and WinXP are pretty similar. Even moreso if you turn on WinXP's "classic" style, instead of that bubblecrap.
My gaming machine is a Win2k machine, and I have yet to find a game that won't run on it, except old DOS games (Ultima VII and System Shock come to mind), and, for whatever oddball reason, Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic.
This is starting to bore me, so just a few points.
What they pay is less than the rate that they charge for loans they make to others. When banks charge higher rates for loans, they are in a position to pay more to depositors while still making a profit themselves.
Loaners suffer during deflation. The borrower ends up repaying loans with money that is more valuable than the amount borrowed, even if the loan is for 0% (which it would, of course, never be). This increases the amount of defaults, which increases the risk of loaning.
No, you're not. Because nobody can just wave his hand and expand the money supply.
No, but it could happen. Example: the inflation in Spain after gold was shipped from the New World in the 16th century.
Or, in the future, if someone figures out how to get the gold out of the sea profitably (since the sea holds 99% of the gold on earth). If the gold standard is in place, that person/company instantly becomes the richest being on earth.
(That would also devalue your hard earned gold-backed currency, too.)
Um. Yes, they do. It's called "Legal Tender". If you owe me a debt, the legal tender laws state that you can satisfy that debt by paying me in dollars. Some people make nuisances of themselves, for instance, by forcing businesses to accept hundred dollar bills in payment for $2 worth of goods - because they can. The law gives the seller no recourse.
Um. No. Totally incorrect. Note, for instance, taxis that do not accept bills over $20. Legal tender means the government must recognize it, but not any private entity. If the business wanted, they could refuse to accept the $100 bill.
If people put off buying 2GHz P4 computers today, they'll be able to buy them for much less next year. But people still buy them today. They don't wait. Some do, of course; but enough people don't do so that manufacturers still have the incentive to produce things now, as well as seeking to improve them.
Manufacturers are worried about the deflation that affects PC sales. Why do you think every single PC maker is trying to position them as a seller of consumer electronics, rather than just computers?
You seem to think that this happens in a vacuum. It doesn't. If a company reduces its prices, it has reasons for doing so.
Yes. That would be deflation. Money is worth more; good are worth less. To stay competitive, the company must lower its prices. It will then lower its costs. That will inevitably result in less money for its employees, and/or less employees. When enough companies do this, the deflation will accelerate, as there will be less money to buy thing with, and the spiral will continue.
Slashdot Mirror
Society penalizes you for being a polite person already.
The 'jerk' effect is pretty common: given someone who's not complaining and someone who is, the establishment will take care of the person who's complaining first, in order to get them to shut up. No one likes the jerk, everyone likes the polite person, but the jerk will get seated at a restaurant first, will get their money back easier when returning something, and the like.
As a polite person, the establishment knows they can ignore you for a long time. But the jerk will cause them problems immediately.
Sad but true.
I've checked out hosted servers; they invariably have a tiny HD limit, and a not-too-bad-but-annoying-nonetheless transfer limit. I have 200+ gigs from my home machines, and I can saturate the pipe 24/7/365 if I want.
Show me a hosting company that'll give me that.
(Not to mention the usefulness of being able to remotely SSH+VNC and be at my home machine, to do work or whatnot.)
I pay $100 / mo for DSL. Know why?
Static IPs and the ability -- written right there in the TOS -- to run servers.
SBC is dynamic IP (I believe it's PPPoE), and servers aren't allowed.
There's really no comparison.
So the porn site doesn't bother getting the captcha until it has a user ready. Porn site has a link saying, "For free porn, click here!". They click, spam script gets the captcha, user is shown a copy of the captcha, along with, "To prevent people from harvesting our precious pr0n, type in the letters...you have 20 seconds to comply..."
The intrinsic problem is that people are willing to solve captchas in return for rewards, such as porn.
Wouldn't matter.
Automated spam script goes to sign up new email address, gets presented captcha. Downloads captcha -- as the server would expect any normal web browser to do.
Captcha is copied to some location. Filename probably contains information that can identify the specific script that's running, since there'll undoubtedly be many going simultaneously.
From that point, there's about 20 minutes, give or take, for the porn site to display the copy of the captcha and ask for the user's input. On a site seeing any amount of traffic at all, that should be more than enough.
Once a user has given input, the spam script is notified, and sends the input back to the captcha server. The captcha server never sees the IP address of the human -- it only deals with the spam script -- so it'll never know anything's up.
The gold standard isn't a very good idea in the real world. It'd be a piss poor idea in the game world. Allow me to explain:
Let's suppose that there was a fixed amount of money, which is what the gold standard does. Well, it has to be distributed somewhere to begin with, so let's say it's in a vault, and everytime someone kills a monster, the money's taken out of that vault and given to the player.
That's fine, until the vault runs out. After that point, killing a monster gets you no gold. Well, where else are you going to get gold? You could sell items to storekeepers, but eventually they'd run out of money, too. So, you'd have to get it from other players.
But, the supply of gold is fixed. The supply of items is not; more are still created all the time. What's that mean? It means that the value of gold goes up, and the value of items go down (deflation). The longer you hold onto your gold, the more it'll buy.
And don't forget, of course, that this gold would be piling up in the hands of the experienced players and guilds, who could've gotten the money when it was "free". New players who never had that chance would be left out.
It's better not to include the "me" part at all. That means extra work because you have to add to /etc/aliases yourself, whereas you can have the MTA do the + thing for you.
/etc/postfix/virtual.regexp:
/^(.*)_(.*)@domain name$/ $1
If you're using Postfix, you could add this to your
Then, any mail that includes a '_' will be forwarded to whatever's before the '_' without having to add an alias in for each one.
You seem to be laboring under some preconceived misnotions.
Wouldn't take Satellite "No TV when wind is blowing and/or sun is shining" if it was free for life...so never looked into it and don't really care to tell you the truth. Sorry.
My satellite has gone out far, far less than my cable ever did. In the ~4 months or so I've had satellite, it's gone out for about 20 minutes once. With cable, it was not uncommon for it to be down hours each month.
But, hey, if you like to believe that things are the way they are without actually investigating them, more power to you.
I could build a better setup for more, but won't be paying for a "Lifetime Subscription" or 12 bux a month for life with only means of adding more space or features available is...buy a whole new unit instead of a piece of hardware or adding a new script.
I was rather unaware that it was impossible to add more space to a TiVo. I bet that would really surprise everyone who's done it! You should go tell them. They should be most impressed.
And, as for cost, yes. Much better to have a $500 computer with a $100 video card than $250 for a TiVo. Why, at that rate, it might take 2.5 years for the TiVo to cost as much.
Same for improving performance of the system, upgrade mainboard/CPU and shouldn't have to do it again a year later AND than pay even more than the first time being lured in.
That's funny. I could swear that people often complain about needing to upgrade incessently as a hallmark of the PC, not the consumer appliance.
NOTE: This is not intended to be a troll or a TiVo slam! I'm sincerely interested in /. opinion.
Then why didn't you read the dozens of other posts in any given TiVo article where someone asks the same questions/makes the same point?
But, whatever:
#1: Cable PVR. Sure. If you have cable, and your cable company offers this (Comcast in Chicago doesn't, for instance). And, if it's actually streaming on demand, then it's likely you can't see any given show that may have just been broadcast -- it's probably limited to the popular ones. No saving stuff for later, no odd shows.
Finally, on the note of cable, it's gotten a wee bit expensive. I pay less now for DirecTV than I did for Comcast, and that's including the TiVo subscription rate and more pay channels.
#2: Computer. Sure. Let's say the computer cost $500. (You could, of course, use a less powerful computer, but then you need a video card that does hardware encoding, and those are more expensive. So.) TiVo costs $250. You could say, "But the computer can have a bigger HD", but the TiVo could too -- if you're the kind of person who wouldn't blink at setting up a computer as a PVR, then installing a hard drive shouldn't be a problem either.
And, of course, there's the computer setup time. Now, personally, I think playing around with MythTV and the like is fun. But I don't confuse fun with popular or cost effective. I don't mind spending a day configuring MythTV to do what I want, but I think I'm in a small subset of the population on that one.
I suspect your theory is correct. Why, just today, I was thinking to myself, "I bet all of those oil-change places are out of business."
I mean, really. An oil change. Anyone can do one, for 1/4 to 1/2 the price that a Jiffy Lube or a gas station will charge you. How can those places stay in business with a model like that? It's unheard of.
Confident in my intellectual superiority, I drove to work, only to pass plenty of oil change places still doing a fine business. I was saddened and dismayed to find out that such thinking is, in fact, totally wrong. Shocking as it is, it seems people are willing to pay for convenience.
In breaking news, a professional liquidator who gets paid to oversee companies that are in bankruptcy said that he expects there to be a lot of companies in bankruptcy next year, helping his business.
Facts pointing out this may not be the case were pushed aside.
Film at eleven.
Word probably uses a hash function to test the password (just like Linux doesn't store passwords, but hashes, in /etc/password). There's some function, you put the "password" in, it spits a hash out, and that is compared to the stored hash.
Hashes are more secure than storing the password, because they tend to be pretty one way -- it's trivial to get a hash from a password, but much less trivial to get a password from the hash.
However, hashes can collide; the smaller the hash returned, compared to the possible keyspace, the more likely this is. For instance, if I have a hash function that returns a one byte hash that I use to hash my password, then there is a 1/256 chance that _any_ gibberish I send in will return the same hash, and thus match.
Microsoft is probably using a very small hash, and your "tool of choice" probably just brute forces the thing until it finds a match.
If your tool of choice continued through the keyspace, it would inevitably come up with test, too.
Or, for that matter, any learning remote. Basically, it works like this: you push the "learning" button sequence, and then you aim your other remote at the learning one, and push whatever button you want to mimic. Then you push whatever button on the learning remote that you want to do that function, and, wa-lah, there you go.
It's a bit of a pain to setup, but it can assign whatever you want to whichever buttons you want. So, for instance, I've assigned the volume buttons to always go to the receiver, never the TV, regardless of which mode I'm in, or, when I'm in receiver mode, I can assign the numeric buttons to turn the receiver to TV, DVD, Playstation, etc.
And, uh, it's $20.
Last item first:
My current way of version control is the old way of just zipping up each release!
If it's just you working on this...well, that's fine. And it probably is the easiest. There's little-to-no reason to use CVS if it's just you.
But, otherwise:
I haven't found much info on conceptual/fundmental questions, like on integrating with IDEs
Depends on the IDE. Most plugins for Windows or *nix shell out to the command line CVS, and process its output. But, I'm not familiar with Mac IDEs at all.
"do I check the entire development tree into CVS, or just the text files?" If it's just the text files, that seems like a lot of work.
Typically, the entire tree, but, and here's a big con of CVS, you have to have a correct cvswrappers file, or manually tell it which files are text and which are binary.
I do the entire tree, myself.
"How do I put my web site HTML files into a repository and still have the web server still be able to access it?"
Assuming you have a CVS client on your web server, and it can access your CVS server, you put in a shortcut (or nightly job, or what have you) that does a checkout module, like so:
cvs co -R -d <target directory> <module name>
(You could use cvs export, but it doesn't seem to like overwriting files that already exist)
But, again, CVS use is only compelling if you have more than one person working on the project at the same time.
No, this has nothing to do with the story.
So, I'm used for the ads for Thinkgeek. Even the ads for Microsoft don't faze me. But I bring up this story, and the ad is "Slashdot Personals, powered by Match.com".
And I said to myself, "Wow. Now _there's_ some targeted advertising. That's the sort of marketer that would sell icecubes on the Titanic."
Politicians and moral crusaders learn nothing from history. Prohibition does not work.
Prohibition doesn't work when it conflicts with what the majority want. The majority wanted alcohol during the 1920's, and were willing to violate the law to get it.
That's got no bearing on spam, which the majority doesn't want, just like the majority doesn't want murder, rape, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement, or any other number of illegal activities.
The Cypherpunks never went around suing people (that is, actually costing them money) who weren't using encryption to mask their illegal activities. The RIAA is.
Real world practicality will always be a much better motivator than abstract idealism.
Why, that's a brilliant idea! If only they'd done that for...uh, Pac-Man. And Mario. And Sonic the Hedgehog. Oh, and that old Nintendo Power show. And probably a few dozen more I'm forgetting.
What I, as a gamer, want to see is the Roger and Ebert (or, I guess, Ebert and Roeper now) version of game reviews.
When I first got cable, I was really excited over G4. Then I watched some. I don't care about "The Top 10 Best Dressed Videogame Characters". I would've been interested in their head-to-head games if they'd shown more of the game, tactics, strategies, etc, and less of the two hosts. As it was, I never went back to G4.
Why bother running Terminal Services on a non-default port? Why not have the Terminal Services connection tunnel through SSH?
(I can only assume that your Windows box is behind a firewall, and not directly accessible to the world. If it is, well, this is a moot question.)
What brand recognition? Gamers have been burned enough time that there's really not much in the way of brand recognition. How many times has Game X done well, and then been followed by Game X Part 2, which is often as not a $50 expansion pack?
I'm one of those people who bought a PS2 just to buy GTA. I'd heard it was a fun, entertaining game. But I'm incredibly uninterested in Manhunt, because it's...well, not a fun, entertaining game. It brings nothing to the table besides excessive gore, and excessive gore simply ain't fun. I didn't play GTA because you could get a hooker, then kill her and take your cash back, no matter how much the mass media may try to convince themselves otherwise. Seems Take Two bought into that hype, too.
No, you bastards, stop claiming credit for our operations. It's the first action of the Front for the Liberation of Patches!
(Of Judea)
That's one doomed space marine!
Win2k and WinXP are pretty similar. Even moreso if you turn on WinXP's "classic" style, instead of that bubblecrap.
My gaming machine is a Win2k machine, and I have yet to find a game that won't run on it, except old DOS games (Ultima VII and System Shock come to mind), and, for whatever oddball reason, Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic.
But none of them run under WinXP, either.
We all know that the HR people put the impossible into their resumes (5 years of Java back in '96, anyone)?
And we also all know that HR does keyword searches on resumes, throwing out any that don't have the keyword.
So why would't turnabout be fair play?
This is starting to bore me, so just a few points.
What they pay is less than the rate that they charge for loans they make to others. When banks charge higher rates for loans, they are in a position to pay more to depositors while still making a profit themselves.
Loaners suffer during deflation. The borrower ends up repaying loans with money that is more valuable than the amount borrowed, even if the loan is for 0% (which it would, of course, never be). This increases the amount of defaults, which increases the risk of loaning.
No, you're not. Because nobody can just wave his hand and expand the money supply.
No, but it could happen. Example: the inflation in Spain after gold was shipped from the New World in the 16th century.
Or, in the future, if someone figures out how to get the gold out of the sea profitably (since the sea holds 99% of the gold on earth). If the gold standard is in place, that person/company instantly becomes the richest being on earth.
(That would also devalue your hard earned gold-backed currency, too.)
Um. Yes, they do. It's called "Legal Tender". If you owe me a debt, the legal tender laws state that you can satisfy that debt by paying me in dollars. Some people make nuisances of themselves, for instance, by forcing businesses to accept hundred dollar bills in payment for $2 worth of goods - because they can. The law gives the seller no recourse.
Um. No. Totally incorrect. Note, for instance, taxis that do not accept bills over $20. Legal tender means the government must recognize it, but not any private entity. If the business wanted, they could refuse to accept the $100 bill.
Snopes talks about this here.
If people put off buying 2GHz P4 computers today, they'll be able to buy them for much less next year. But people still buy them today. They don't wait. Some do, of course; but enough people don't do so that manufacturers still have the incentive to produce things now, as well as seeking to improve them.
Manufacturers are worried about the deflation that affects PC sales. Why do you think every single PC maker is trying to position them as a seller of consumer electronics, rather than just computers?
You seem to think that this happens in a vacuum. It doesn't. If a company reduces its prices, it has reasons for doing so.
Yes. That would be deflation. Money is worth more; good are worth less. To stay competitive, the company must lower its prices. It will then lower its costs. That will inevitably result in less money for its employees, and/or less employees. When enough companies do this, the deflation will accelerate, as there will be less money to buy thing with, and the spiral will continue.