Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
Evolution is a scientific model which explains objective observations about the physical world. It is no more a "religion" than calculus, the periodic table, the laws of thermodynamics, or the Theory of Relativity.
It means that when the bank fails - not just doesn't have enough currency on hand this minute - the FDIC will give you your money back.... But the FDIC will send you a check or more likely your account will end up at some other bank with the FDIC replacing the money in it.
I realize they don't agree to unlimited, immediate withdrawals, but there is a time limit -- 30 days, I believe. After that point the bank must return your deposit or be declared insolvent. In practice the FDIC always steps in well before the bank is actually refusing ordinary withdrawals so as not to give the appearance of failure, sparking a run on the bank. As for shifting the payment to another bank, by check or electronic transfer -- that presumes that there are other banks available. If whatever bank they move the deposit to is itself insolvent then they haven't resolved the issue. In the event of a general run on the banks either the FDIC must come up with sufficient physical currency to cover the insured deposits, or it must fail in its purpose. Supposedly it's backed by "the full faith and credit" of the U.S. government, which would include the Treasury, but I'll admit they could simply allow it to fail -- in which case no one would place their trust in that "full faith and credit" ever again.
My point was there is nothing else but those bytes in the computer - there is no physical thing those bytes represent.
I disagree that there is no physical thing represented; those bytes represent a claim for a specific number of Federal Reserve Notes, whether or not sufficient Notes exist to repay all the existing claims.
The bytes themselves are the money.... I agree that in a bank the money is yours (and the bank is borrowing it from you)...
You aren't agreeing, because that's the opposite of what I said. If you define the money as data in computers, then I don't own it; the bank does, because it owns the computers. What I own is a claim on the bank for $5 in Federal Reserve Notes, payable "on demand" (within a fixed time). I couldn't care less what data is in their computers, provided they meet the legal obligations they accepted along with my deposit.
FDIC does not commit to sending you paper currency, it commits to setting some bytes in a different computer...
The FDIC commits to "insuring" your money against bank failures, which are typically recognized as the bank's inability to supply paper currency and coin in response to requests for withdrawals. I'll admit that the FDIC web site is remarkably short on details in this regard, but what exactly would "deposit insurance" mean if not a guarantee that you can withdraw your deposits?
But I don't see what any of that has to do with your checking account be a "a series of bytes" that it is worth quibbling about the ownership of.
Then you missed the whole point, which is that a bank account isn't just "a series of bytes", but rather a legal claim on the bank. Putting aside, as you suggested, the whole concept of credit multiplication, the system works as follows: I deposit $5 at the bank. In return, the bank enters into a legal obligation to repay me $5 on demand. As evidence of this obligation they enter data into their computer, and I get a receipt. The legal claim is the important part, not the data. Even if the data were lost this claim would still exist. I don't own the data in the bank's computers that says I have a claim for $5; I own the claim itself. (Whether I could prove that the claim exists is a different matter.) The bank "owns" the data in the only way data can be "owned": they own the computers on which the data exists.
The data for an online game looks a lot like the data for a bank account, but the legal agreement between the host and the players is nothing like that between a bank and its depositors.
This would only make sense if our Constitution allowed for seccession, but since it does not,...
The Constitution doesn't say anything about secession one way or the other. It doesn't explicitly support it, but it doesn't deny it, either. Those who wrote it had just recently embarked on an act of secession themselves. I'm willing to grant that Congress can Constitutionally declare war on another country -- including one created by secession -- with or without just cause, but there is nothing in the Constitution which would make the secession of a state an illegal act.
No, this came later, with the rise of the mega-corporations,...
If you want to get technical it came with the formation of the government itself. Governments only exist to take from some and give to others; any government which truly was equally for all its citizens would have no reason to exist.
Putting that aside, the civil war was clearly not "of", "by", or "for" the southern states, or (by extension) their citizens.
Why should we need a Constitutional amendment to end a practice which was never Constitutional to begin with?
If they cared about what Constitutional limits civil forfeiture would never have existed in the first place. For that matter, those you would need to pass the amendment are complicit in the crime; why would they support an amendment against their own interests?
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...
It is well worth noting that this would apply just as well to the cause for which those on the opposing side fought and died. Winning or losing a war says absolutely nothing about the justice of one's aims.
... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Truly ironic, following as it does an war against the exercise of freedom, one which proved once and for all that said government is of, by, and for only some of its people.
Does that mean copyrights will now be available on every street corner?
Copyrights already are available on every street corner. That's the problem. Unfortunately, this particular Czar's job appears to be to make the problem even worse.
Since there is significantly less currency existing than there is money represented in bank computers by series of bytes, what are those goods and actual assets exactly?
The data represents a claim on the bank to be repaid in physical currency. If the computers say you have $100 in your account, you can come in to the bank and withdraw that amount in a marketable form unconnected with the bank itself. Currently that form (barely) retains its value only as a result of stringent anti-counterfeiting laws and the issuer's fears of hyperinflation, but not so long ago it took the shape of high-quality scarce resources deemed valuable in their own right -- and not just for trade.
The amount of currency in existence includes that held in bank accounts, because if there ever was a run on the banks the FDIC is committed to provide nearly the full amount in the form of Federal Reserve Notes. This would imply massive production of new paper currency, but if the reserve requirements were increased accordingly it need not mean massive inflation. Prices already take bank balances into account; trading those balances for paper currency would make little difference, so long as it didn't increase the amount banks can create via loans.
I'm not sure that percent of GDP is such a great way to measure the national debt, since government spending and investment (e.g. making loans to the government) both count positively towards the GDP. All else being equal, I would expect that the debt/GDP ratio would decrease as a result of deficit spending.
The U.S., U.K and many first world countries seem to have rushed to state capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism) or Socialism almost overnight in seizing control of major banks, massive attempts at market manipulation, etc.... As soon as their was a real crisis in the first world they rushed to the nationalization to solve it, something they have railed against elsewhere forever.
I expect that it's a lot easier to back a long-term solution when you're not up for reelection by those who will experience firsthand the short-term turmoil that inevitably accompanies the restructuring of a credit-addicted economy onto a more stable foundation. An investor must be concerned with long-term stability, whereas a politician only need care about appearances. These first-world leaders are speaking as investors with regards to developing economies, but as politicians at home.
That may have been true of the Eee 700 series, but I have an Eee 900 and it had no trouble connecting to my WPA-PSK access point with the default software. It would've been easier with NetworkManager instead of their custom configuration interface, but it worked nonetheless.
What I really don't understand is why, for a project which started out Linux-only, it contains so much hardware with mediocre-to-poor Linux support: the wireless card and the Ethernet adapter both require out-of-kernel drivers; the ACPI interface can't seem to get the battery capacity right; the sound support is flaky at best due to incomplete specs; and yet another driver was required for basic ACPI support (now part of the kernel). I managed to get it all working under a stock distro (Debian) eventually, and I'm quite happy with it -- I like a challenge now and then -- but if you're going to build a Linux laptop, why not pick hardware known to be compatible?
Or how about this plan: The provider charges the receiver a flat rate for each SMS. The receiver creates a ruleset describing the amount to charge each sender. The sender indicates the maximum amount they're willing to pay when they send the SMS. Simple rulesets (sender pays, 50/50, whitelist) can be generated automatically.
This would work best if senders could be easily categorized (static, customer-provided info) and tagged (dynamic, user-provided info). It wouldn't be very practical to require everyone to individually identify every single potential sender.
I don't particularly doubt that it's intended as a trap either. However, if random posters on Slashdot know that it's a trap, wouldn't you expect the leaders of the countries involved to also be wary of that possibility?
I expect the AC is near the truth; they take the loans because they (the leaders) reap the benefits while others pay the price. That, however, is not the fault of IMF/World Bank; they merely provided the opportunity. If they weren't available some other organization would be found, or created, to fulfill the same role.
You never said exactly what forces this country to accept the loan. If the IMF/World Bank know the country can't pay it off, then the country itself should know that as well. If it takes the loan anyway, and later defaults, then the sale of its infrastructure and resources to pay the balance of the loan is a perfectly natural and just compromise, and not in any way a form of theft.
Re:Building your own kernel these days ain't easy
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 1
The point, in this case, is simply to get a more up-to-date kernel than the one included with the official distribution, with a minimum of hassle. The best way to do that is to copy the official configuration (/boot/config-`uname -r`) to.config, run "make oldconfig" to pick up any new options, and maybe run "make menuconfig" if you want to change a specific setting or two. The official kernel was acceptably configured, if a bit outdated, so there's no need to make any sweeping changes.
I believe QEMU (and probably Bochs) already has that option. For QEMU there is also a monitor command named "wavcapture" for this purpose. As for the DMCA, it mentions "circumvention", not reverse engineering, although the option to save audio to a file may have enough alternative uses to avoid being classified as a circumvention device.
(Not a lawyer, etc., etc. Insert standard disclaimer here.)
SSH and its related services are SSL, with the addition of a convenient user interface and more direct control over which certificates you choose to trust. You're at least as well off with SSH/etc., security-wise, as you would be with HTTPS.
A "free" market is one in which prices are set by the dynamic of supply and demand.
Here's a somewhat clearer statement of the same principle, also from Wikipedia: "A free market is a market in which property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers."
If property rights are understood to include personal rights (property rights in one's own body), which is the traditional libertarian view, then aggression against an individual is just as much a coerced exchange as theft or fraud or trespass. Your definition and the one I quoted are essentially the same, because any price which is not set by mutual consent is determined by aggression, not supply and demand. Aggression is nothing more or less than the enforcement of a price to which one side or the other does not consent.
The who idea/definition behind a free market is that, when there is demand, a supply will meet it. If artificial conditions are preventing a supply from meeting a demand, then a free market simply does not exist.
I would agree with all of this, but I do not agree that any of the factors mentioned can prevent supply from meeting demand.
A free market explicitly assumes, by its very definition, that an equilibrium state can be met in a reasonably timely fashion.
Only in a perfectly static system, with no uncertainty or change, which doesn't exist. The free market approaches equilibrium, but as preferences and knowledge are constantly changing such a state can never be perfectly achieved. The equilibrium state is a useful thought-experiment for isolating individual factors, nothing more.
[Libertarian market principles] completely break down in cases like these when, in most of the country, you have... government protected monopolies/oligopolies....
Isn't that exactly what I said? There can be no free market in the presence of aggression.
If you believe in market anarchy, that's one thing, but there's a difference between a free market and an anarchic one.
As I've shown above, I don't believe there can be a difference. The only free market is the anarchic one.
When did "truly free markets" come to mean anything other than "each individual is free to do whatever he or she wants provided his or her actions cause no direct harm to others"?
So-called "barriers to entry", the number of "players", the existence of (unattainable) equilibrium -- these are all irrelevant. The market is free if and only if there is no systemic aggression (initiation of coercion; violation of others' property rights, including personal rights, or threats thereof).
The libertarian stance isn't really about the market at all; it's about aggression, and the correct response to it. In a libertarian society -- one which adheres to the Non-Aggression Principle and thus does not endorse or tolerate the initiation of force or fraud -- the free market is a natural byproduct.
Show me one example where a bank was forced to loan out money to someone and where they instead couldn't have said "... I am not lending any more money with these kind of unprofitable regulations."
The thing is, it wasn't unprofitable so long as house prices continued to increase. As the article points out, no one is going to default on their mortgage when they can sell or refinance instead, and that's generally an easy option when the home's price has increased significantly since it was purchased. The widespread foreclosures began less than one quarter -- effectively immediately -- after prices stopped rising.
Add to said short-term incentive a reasonable confidence that the powerful entity that push for lower lending standards wouldn't allow major creditors to go under for following its recommendations and the path to our current situation isn't so difficult to understand.
The common thread is that many of the complainers are simply emo teenagers who have parental issues and the parent will ALWAYS be wrong, regardless of the story.
Remember that Slashdot is not a single consciousness with unified views on everything. Slashdot is a collections of diverse individuals, each with their own opinions on many topics, including parenting. There are likely a few with "parental issues", but for the most part I think what you're seeing is a lack of consensus, not individual inconsistency.
It's fairly common for companies to have large loans secured by a deposit of stock.
At first I just accepted this, but on second glance it seems a bit odd. Why would a creditor accept stock as collateral? After all, if the company can't manage to pay its debts its stock won't be worth much, and that's precisely when the deposit is needed most.
"This attack requires NO knowledge of the key used for encryption and it applies to ECB Mode (Electronic Codebook), Counter Mode (CM), Galois/Counter Mode (GCM), LRW, XEX, XTS, as well as CBC-based modes of disk encryption applications (OTFE)."
Pretty soon the share price has crashed, the company faces bankruptcy,...
Perhaps I missed something along the way, but how exactly does a low (or zero) share price imply bankruptcy? Whatever investors might think of its shares, the company still has its assets, earnings, employees, relationships with customers and suppliers, etc. There could be problems getting credit, I suppose, but reliance on continuing credit is already a sign of financial troubles whatever the share price might be. Even then a creditor should be more interested in the company's earnings and profit margin than in the share price.
A precipitous drop in price would look very bad for the managers, of course, and would place the shareholders in a unenviable situation if there was a merger or buyout in the works, but from a net worth point of view -- assets minus liabilities -- the company's only relation to its shares is in the initial public offering, correct? The company doesn't gain or lose anything based on who happens to own the shares, or how much one investor paid another to acquire them, except insofar as (voting) shareholders can influence company policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
Evolution is a scientific model which explains objective observations about the physical world. It is no more a "religion" than calculus, the periodic table, the laws of thermodynamics, or the Theory of Relativity.
It means that when the bank fails - not just doesn't have enough currency on hand this minute - the FDIC will give you your money back. ... But the FDIC will send you a check or more likely your account will end up at some other bank with the FDIC replacing the money in it.
I realize they don't agree to unlimited, immediate withdrawals, but there is a time limit -- 30 days, I believe. After that point the bank must return your deposit or be declared insolvent. In practice the FDIC always steps in well before the bank is actually refusing ordinary withdrawals so as not to give the appearance of failure, sparking a run on the bank. As for shifting the payment to another bank, by check or electronic transfer -- that presumes that there are other banks available. If whatever bank they move the deposit to is itself insolvent then they haven't resolved the issue. In the event of a general run on the banks either the FDIC must come up with sufficient physical currency to cover the insured deposits, or it must fail in its purpose. Supposedly it's backed by "the full faith and credit" of the U.S. government, which would include the Treasury, but I'll admit they could simply allow it to fail -- in which case no one would place their trust in that "full faith and credit" ever again.
My point was there is nothing else but those bytes in the computer - there is no physical thing those bytes represent.
I disagree that there is no physical thing represented; those bytes represent a claim for a specific number of Federal Reserve Notes, whether or not sufficient Notes exist to repay all the existing claims.
The bytes themselves are the money. ... I agree that in a bank the money is yours (and the bank is borrowing it from you) ...
You aren't agreeing, because that's the opposite of what I said. If you define the money as data in computers, then I don't own it; the bank does, because it owns the computers. What I own is a claim on the bank for $5 in Federal Reserve Notes, payable "on demand" (within a fixed time). I couldn't care less what data is in their computers, provided they meet the legal obligations they accepted along with my deposit.
FDIC does not commit to sending you paper currency, it commits to setting some bytes in a different computer...
The FDIC commits to "insuring" your money against bank failures, which are typically recognized as the bank's inability to supply paper currency and coin in response to requests for withdrawals. I'll admit that the FDIC web site is remarkably short on details in this regard, but what exactly would "deposit insurance" mean if not a guarantee that you can withdraw your deposits?
But I don't see what any of that has to do with your checking account be a "a series of bytes" that it is worth quibbling about the ownership of.
Then you missed the whole point, which is that a bank account isn't just "a series of bytes", but rather a legal claim on the bank. Putting aside, as you suggested, the whole concept of credit multiplication, the system works as follows: I deposit $5 at the bank. In return, the bank enters into a legal obligation to repay me $5 on demand. As evidence of this obligation they enter data into their computer, and I get a receipt. The legal claim is the important part, not the data. Even if the data were lost this claim would still exist. I don't own the data in the bank's computers that says I have a claim for $5; I own the claim itself. (Whether I could prove that the claim exists is a different matter.) The bank "owns" the data in the only way data can be "owned": they own the computers on which the data exists.
The data for an online game looks a lot like the data for a bank account, but the legal agreement between the host and the players is nothing like that between a bank and its depositors.
This would only make sense if our Constitution allowed for seccession, but since it does not, ...
The Constitution doesn't say anything about secession one way or the other. It doesn't explicitly support it, but it doesn't deny it, either. Those who wrote it had just recently embarked on an act of secession themselves. I'm willing to grant that Congress can Constitutionally declare war on another country -- including one created by secession -- with or without just cause, but there is nothing in the Constitution which would make the secession of a state an illegal act.
No, this came later, with the rise of the mega-corporations, ...
If you want to get technical it came with the formation of the government itself. Governments only exist to take from some and give to others; any government which truly was equally for all its citizens would have no reason to exist.
Putting that aside, the civil war was clearly not "of", "by", or "for" the southern states, or (by extension) their citizens.
Why should we need a Constitutional amendment to end a practice which was never Constitutional to begin with?
If they cared about what Constitutional limits civil forfeiture would never have existed in the first place. For that matter, those you would need to pass the amendment are complicit in the crime; why would they support an amendment against their own interests?
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ...
It is well worth noting that this would apply just as well to the cause for which those on the opposing side fought and died. Winning or losing a war says absolutely nothing about the justice of one's aims.
... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Truly ironic, following as it does an war against the exercise of freedom, one which proved once and for all that said government is of, by, and for only some of its people.
Does that mean copyrights will now be available on every street corner?
Copyrights already are available on every street corner. That's the problem. Unfortunately, this particular Czar's job appears to be to make the problem even worse.
Since there is significantly less currency existing than there is money represented in bank computers by series of bytes, what are those goods and actual assets exactly?
The data represents a claim on the bank to be repaid in physical currency. If the computers say you have $100 in your account, you can come in to the bank and withdraw that amount in a marketable form unconnected with the bank itself. Currently that form (barely) retains its value only as a result of stringent anti-counterfeiting laws and the issuer's fears of hyperinflation, but not so long ago it took the shape of high-quality scarce resources deemed valuable in their own right -- and not just for trade.
The amount of currency in existence includes that held in bank accounts, because if there ever was a run on the banks the FDIC is committed to provide nearly the full amount in the form of Federal Reserve Notes. This would imply massive production of new paper currency, but if the reserve requirements were increased accordingly it need not mean massive inflation. Prices already take bank balances into account; trading those balances for paper currency would make little difference, so long as it didn't increase the amount banks can create via loans.
I'm not sure that percent of GDP is such a great way to measure the national debt, since government spending and investment (e.g. making loans to the government) both count positively towards the GDP. All else being equal, I would expect that the debt/GDP ratio would decrease as a result of deficit spending.
The U.S., U.K and many first world countries seem to have rushed to state capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism) or Socialism almost overnight in seizing control of major banks, massive attempts at market manipulation, etc. ... As soon as their was a real crisis in the first world they rushed to the nationalization to solve it, something they have railed against elsewhere forever.
I expect that it's a lot easier to back a long-term solution when you're not up for reelection by those who will experience firsthand the short-term turmoil that inevitably accompanies the restructuring of a credit-addicted economy onto a more stable foundation. An investor must be concerned with long-term stability, whereas a politician only need care about appearances. These first-world leaders are speaking as investors with regards to developing economies, but as politicians at home.
That may have been true of the Eee 700 series, but I have an Eee 900 and it had no trouble connecting to my WPA-PSK access point with the default software. It would've been easier with NetworkManager instead of their custom configuration interface, but it worked nonetheless.
What I really don't understand is why, for a project which started out Linux-only, it contains so much hardware with mediocre-to-poor Linux support: the wireless card and the Ethernet adapter both require out-of-kernel drivers; the ACPI interface can't seem to get the battery capacity right; the sound support is flaky at best due to incomplete specs; and yet another driver was required for basic ACPI support (now part of the kernel). I managed to get it all working under a stock distro (Debian) eventually, and I'm quite happy with it -- I like a challenge now and then -- but if you're going to build a Linux laptop, why not pick hardware known to be compatible?
Or how about this plan: The provider charges the receiver a flat rate for each SMS. The receiver creates a ruleset describing the amount to charge each sender. The sender indicates the maximum amount they're willing to pay when they send the SMS. Simple rulesets (sender pays, 50/50, whitelist) can be generated automatically.
This would work best if senders could be easily categorized (static, customer-provided info) and tagged (dynamic, user-provided info). It wouldn't be very practical to require everyone to individually identify every single potential sender.
I don't particularly doubt that it's intended as a trap either. However, if random posters on Slashdot know that it's a trap, wouldn't you expect the leaders of the countries involved to also be wary of that possibility?
I expect the AC is near the truth; they take the loans because they (the leaders) reap the benefits while others pay the price. That, however, is not the fault of IMF/World Bank; they merely provided the opportunity. If they weren't available some other organization would be found, or created, to fulfill the same role.
From the sound of it, the country should know that accepting the loan (even if it's the only one available) would be worse than going without.
They certainly can't be worse off after turning down the IMF/World Bank's loan offer than they would have been had the offer never been made.
You never said exactly what forces this country to accept the loan. If the IMF/World Bank know the country can't pay it off, then the country itself should know that as well. If it takes the loan anyway, and later defaults, then the sale of its infrastructure and resources to pay the balance of the loan is a perfectly natural and just compromise, and not in any way a form of theft.
The point, in this case, is simply to get a more up-to-date kernel than the one included with the official distribution, with a minimum of hassle. The best way to do that is to copy the official configuration (/boot/config-`uname -r`) to .config, run "make oldconfig" to pick up any new options, and maybe run "make menuconfig" if you want to change a specific setting or two. The official kernel was acceptably configured, if a bit outdated, so there's no need to make any sweeping changes.
I believe QEMU (and probably Bochs) already has that option. For QEMU there is also a monitor command named "wavcapture" for this purpose. As for the DMCA, it mentions "circumvention", not reverse engineering, although the option to save audio to a file may have enough alternative uses to avoid being classified as a circumvention device.
(Not a lawyer, etc., etc. Insert standard disclaimer here.)
... and SSL, or at least SSH/SCP/SFTP.
SSH and its related services are SSL, with the addition of a convenient user interface and more direct control over which certificates you choose to trust. You're at least as well off with SSH/etc., security-wise, as you would be with HTTPS.
A "free" market is one in which prices are set by the dynamic of supply and demand.
Here's a somewhat clearer statement of the same principle, also from Wikipedia: "A free market is a market in which property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers."
If property rights are understood to include personal rights (property rights in one's own body), which is the traditional libertarian view, then aggression against an individual is just as much a coerced exchange as theft or fraud or trespass. Your definition and the one I quoted are essentially the same, because any price which is not set by mutual consent is determined by aggression, not supply and demand. Aggression is nothing more or less than the enforcement of a price to which one side or the other does not consent.
The who idea/definition behind a free market is that, when there is demand, a supply will meet it. If artificial conditions are preventing a supply from meeting a demand, then a free market simply does not exist.
I would agree with all of this, but I do not agree that any of the factors mentioned can prevent supply from meeting demand.
A free market explicitly assumes, by its very definition, that an equilibrium state can be met in a reasonably timely fashion.
Only in a perfectly static system, with no uncertainty or change, which doesn't exist. The free market approaches equilibrium, but as preferences and knowledge are constantly changing such a state can never be perfectly achieved. The equilibrium state is a useful thought-experiment for isolating individual factors, nothing more.
[Libertarian market principles] completely break down in cases like these when, in most of the country, you have ... government protected monopolies/oligopolies ....
Isn't that exactly what I said? There can be no free market in the presence of aggression.
If you believe in market anarchy, that's one thing, but there's a difference between a free market and an anarchic one.
As I've shown above, I don't believe there can be a difference. The only free market is the anarchic one.
When did "truly free markets" come to mean anything other than "each individual is free to do whatever he or she wants provided his or her actions cause no direct harm to others"?
So-called "barriers to entry", the number of "players", the existence of (unattainable) equilibrium -- these are all irrelevant. The market is free if and only if there is no systemic aggression (initiation of coercion; violation of others' property rights, including personal rights, or threats thereof).
The libertarian stance isn't really about the market at all; it's about aggression, and the correct response to it. In a libertarian society -- one which adheres to the Non-Aggression Principle and thus does not endorse or tolerate the initiation of force or fraud -- the free market is a natural byproduct.
Show me one example where a bank was forced to loan out money to someone and where they instead couldn't have said "... I am not lending any more money with these kind of unprofitable regulations."
Here you go: Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown, by Stan J. Liebowitz.
The thing is, it wasn't unprofitable so long as house prices continued to increase. As the article points out, no one is going to default on their mortgage when they can sell or refinance instead, and that's generally an easy option when the home's price has increased significantly since it was purchased. The widespread foreclosures began less than one quarter -- effectively immediately -- after prices stopped rising.
Add to said short-term incentive a reasonable confidence that the powerful entity that push for lower lending standards wouldn't allow major creditors to go under for following its recommendations and the path to our current situation isn't so difficult to understand.
The common thread is that many of the complainers are simply emo teenagers who have parental issues and the parent will ALWAYS be wrong, regardless of the story.
Remember that Slashdot is not a single consciousness with unified views on everything. Slashdot is a collections of diverse individuals, each with their own opinions on many topics, including parenting. There are likely a few with "parental issues", but for the most part I think what you're seeing is a lack of consensus, not individual inconsistency.
It's fairly common for companies to have large loans secured by a deposit of stock.
At first I just accepted this, but on second glance it seems a bit odd. Why would a creditor accept stock as collateral? After all, if the company can't manage to pay its debts its stock won't be worth much, and that's precisely when the deposit is needed most.
"This attack requires NO knowledge of the key used for encryption and it applies to ECB Mode (Electronic Codebook), Counter Mode (CM), Galois/Counter Mode (GCM), LRW, XEX, XTS, as well as CBC-based modes of disk encryption applications (OTFE)."
Pretty soon the share price has crashed, the company faces bankruptcy, ...
Perhaps I missed something along the way, but how exactly does a low (or zero) share price imply bankruptcy? Whatever investors might think of its shares, the company still has its assets, earnings, employees, relationships with customers and suppliers, etc. There could be problems getting credit, I suppose, but reliance on continuing credit is already a sign of financial troubles whatever the share price might be. Even then a creditor should be more interested in the company's earnings and profit margin than in the share price.
A precipitous drop in price would look very bad for the managers, of course, and would place the shareholders in a unenviable situation if there was a merger or buyout in the works, but from a net worth point of view -- assets minus liabilities -- the company's only relation to its shares is in the initial public offering, correct? The company doesn't gain or lose anything based on who happens to own the shares, or how much one investor paid another to acquire them, except insofar as (voting) shareholders can influence company policy.