We are currently in a credit orgy, with $1 in 1913 translating to just under $.05 today. That should speak volumes all by itself.
Which translates to about 3% inflation per year. So what? And what the heck is a credit orgy?
The current Keynesian myth of modern economics (which isn't all that Keynesian when you get right down to it) is destroying our money.
You are just throwing out buzz words which you don't really understand. Modern macro is more about using differential equations to describe how different scenarios lead to/away from equilibria based on individual micro economic choices and the ability of individuals to understand and predict how gov't policy will affect the economy. What Keynes wrote in the 1930s would not pass muster with economists today. Mostly because it is difficult to fully operationalize all of the various concepts he introduced as well as understand how the macro concepts he discussed flow out of first principals of micro economics. How does one measure "animal spirits," for example?
Your rant only shows you don't understand "money" or markets any more than the current batch of economists. (or "greater fool salesmen" as I like to call them)
Your rant simply shows that you don't understand normative science. A scientist does not start from a value laden premise that one way of doing things is somehow better than another. A scientist asks if, given a set of measurable conditions, we can build a theory that shows how the system we are studying will behave. If you don't think the gov't should be given certain policy instruments (money supply and tax and bond financing), then build a model based on measurable human behavior that shows how such an economy would behave. Only then can you begin to make intelligent statements about why your system would lead to better outcomes. Otherwise you will continue to sound like the economics equivalent of the loonies who think the moon landings were a hoax. I'll also suggest that you read some history. The US experience with private money during the first third of the 1800s was not all that happy.
When using hard money, deflation of the money supply is a good thing.
Tell that to the folks who were put out of work in the panic of 1873. The problem with using gold as the money standard is that the economy is at the mercy of the gold supply. Find too much gold, inflation results. Find too little gold, and the economy can't grow as fast as it is capable. And what do we do when there is no more gold to find? Using gold as a monetary standard is a terrible idea. Having a State Bank that can extra pump extra liquidity into the economy when it is growing too slowly (e.g. recent experience in Japan) or reduce it when growth has hit resource limits while otherwise adding just enough money to the system to account for growth needs has proven to be a far superior idea. Only folks who flunked macroeconomics and differential equations or think of an economy as static think a gold standard is a good idea these days.
The US operated as a Free Market for over 100 years before the depression, with close to 0% inflation overall. "Designing Men" control the economy via the money supply (credit) and Regulation.
Not hardly. There were large swings in the level of prices (both inflation and deflation) during the 1800s. The gold standard essentially fixed the money supply as a function of the supply of gold. When there were large gold strikes (1849 in CA, the Alaska Klondike strike in the 1890s), the gold supply increased faster than the general growth in the economy leading to inflation. At other times, not enough new gold was being found to handle the needs of the economy and the result was deflation. After the Civil War, the question of whether to retire the greenbacks issued to fight the war was a major political issue. Rural farmers and debtors wanted to keep them (and the resulting inflation) in order to pay their debts with cheap currency while Eastern bankers and other creditors tried to force the retirement of the greenback which would have the effect of reducing the money supply and thus reducing inflation and protecting the value of their loans.
If a private university accepts Federal dollars (for research and maybe for student loan programs) they may indeed be subject to the First Amendment. The logic being something like "Federal $s are being used for supression of free speech." Accepting Fed money puts big restrictions on what an institution can do. There is a case that was argued before SCOTUS today that asks if university law schools can prevent military recruitment at their schools. The universities say yes since the military discriminates against gays in contravention of their policies. The Feds are arguing no since the universities take fed research dollars and the law requires equal access to students by the miltary if the institution takes federal money.
when you're an international business you have to deal with the local laws of the country you do business in.
Or live up to your Don't Be Evil motto by deciding not to do business there. I'm not sure where to draw that line, but there are clear cases where that decision should have been automatic.
I've seen 50 or 60 shows since the mid-70s and bought every piece of vinyl they released. And I've stopped buying their stuff. Not because of this little kerfluffle, but because I've got a wife and kid to support and now I'm faced with buying Harry Potter tickets at $18-21 for the family or another Dead CD/DVD at $18-21. The other day I was at Best Buy and found a Pink Floyd movie (the Roman amphitheater flick) and a couple of Monty Python movies for $7 ea. The Dead have simply priced themselves out of the market.
But I also sympathise with the Dead on the merchandise copyright issues. Years ago I sold bumper stickers on tour ("Jerryatrics Ward - Visiting Hours: From when they come to call on you 'til we all fall down"). I did a high quality production run with really good ink and vinyl and sold out pretty quick. A year later I ran into some kid selling an identical sticker except that he'd used the cheapest ink and paper he could find. This is one of the reasons for maintaining copyright on logos and such. It allows the holder to keep some control over quality.
They often do consult experts. Go watch the "A rolling stone gathers no moss." episode where the staff ignored the biologist's recommendation on how to prepare the moss. The staff had to repeat the experiment. IIRC, this was also the longest (and not likely to have been the most thrilling) experiment they had run.
Abit Lawsuit: You have until February 15, 2006 to file the paperwork to get your boards repaired. I've got a VP6 mobo from around 2000. I installed a new DVD player in the box this past weekend and, fortunately, there was no sign of any capacitor bulging, leakage, etc. The box has been running Linux 24/7 for 5+ years.
It's always been my understanding that Copyright doesn't cover MAKING copies, only DISTRIBUTING them.
Back in my grad school days, IIRC, Ohio State used to have signs up near the copiers in the libraries warning users not to use the copiers to copy whole books. If a library allows users to copy a book, are they contributing to copyright infringement? This is just what the libraries are helping Google do. Why is it OK for Google but not the average library patron? Perhaps if Google bought one copy of every book they are scanning the case might be different.
So, the real question is: Why is it fair that I pay a much larger portion of my wages than someone making less than me?
Go read up on John Rawl's and The Veil of Ignorance. The basic idea is that before you are born, you don't know if you will be born as the gifted child of a wealthy family or a mentally handicapped child of a poor family. What tax system would you choose for the society you will live in before you discover the actual alternative into which you are born? Is it fair to newborn children that some are born into wealthy families and others into poor families or that some are born with great talent and others with physical or mental handicaps? To me, a fair tax system is one that balances incentives to work hard and grow the economy with the moral understanding that people don't all start out equally.
Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap.
Digitizing does not usually capture all of the useful information about the book, either. What was the paper made of? How was it bound? What type of ink was used? This type of info can be critically important for resolving controversies about the authenticity of certain old manuscripts (think The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene or The Vinland Map).
Another problem is that the software needed to interpret the 0s and 1s needs to be kept with the digitized copy. If the data are stored as, say, tiff images, then you'd better make sure that there is software to display tiff imgages around as long as the original data stream is kept.
Bottom line is that digital archiving solves some problems but not all and creates whole new headaches as well.
Finally, there is no magic by definition. ID has a number of different manifestations, but none claim magic. ID claims that there is a designer, a master engineer.
So ID doesn't claim magic, but it does claim there are magicians.
Science is a great tool and can tell us much about the world in which we live. Science, however, is not especially great at looking into the past because we have to base our understanding on a lot of assumptions.
<scorn>Are you suggesting that IDs faith in the existence of a master magician is somehow more plausible than assuming that radioactive decay been constant for the last 5 million years?</scorn> Stay away from my kids and keep your pseudo scientific Taliban nonsense out of the public schools!
It runs happily on a 4MB 486 with 1GB of hard drive, with no virtual memory, and will contentedly churn through a complete rebuild without any trouble whatsoever.
Must be a lot of added bloat in there. Minix 1.5 used to run very happily on a PC XT w/ 640K RAM and a 40 MB disk. It would run on a minimal machine w/ as little as 256K RAM and 2 360K floppies. I haven't booted it in a century or so, but I still have an XT with Minix installed on it and a box of 20 or so 360K floppies with binaries and source.
In fact, the lack of 386 memory management mode in Minix was one of the prime reasons that Linus started writing Linix. Tanenbaum was very reluctant to add features such as 386 mode and swapping. And IIRC, the Minix version on my XT did not even have a hard drive boot loader and required a 360K floppy disk to boot.
One other point that I always wondered about w/ Minix was the security claims that Tanenbaum made for Minix 1.5. Again, IIRC, he offered a Dutch dollar for any new security bugs found. This always amused me since the 8088 has no memory management security and it is therefore trivial to write multitudes of user programs that could conquer the world. I don't suppose those counted, though. I assume that a 386 version that is running in 386 mode really is secure and not just pretend secure like 1.5.
but in fact Java's niche just seems to keep shrinking.
And yet the folks who keep repeating this "Java is dieing" mantra in one form or another never seem to provide any metrics that might really prove their point. OTOH, there are lots of easily available metrics (e.g. job listings, press releases from handset manufactures, product announcements on Freshmeat) that seem to suggest the opposite.
Who cares what Sun had in mind 10 years ago? In both life and technology, staying static will kill you.
But there are a multitude of dirs for executables. I'd drop/usr/local/share/bin from the list, but sendmail is traditionally in/usr/lib. I also have a multitude of subdirs in/usr/lib with executables on my Solaris box (e.g./usr/lib/lp/bin and/usr/lib/lp/postscript). Postfix puts its executables in some oddball place (/usr/libexec/postfix) instead of the sensible place (/usr/sbin or/usr/local/sbin)./usr/ucb is another traditional place to put BSD variants of standard unix commands on ATT based unixes and I've seen Linux distros that have copied that tradition.
You make a very interesting point although I disagree completely with your statement that "we accept the inaccurate model [global warming] on faith and reject the accurate model that this device "proves"."
Neither scientist nor scientific process accepts models based on faith. Current theories in science are always based on best-fit models of the observable facts. No scientist claims that new models won't supplant older theories as newer, better, more accurate observations are made. But the burden of proof when claiming a theory is wrong is on the scientist with the new idea or new observation. He must show why the new observation is relevent and why the current theory fails to account for the new observation. This keeps real crackpots (e.g. intelligent design advocates) at bay while eventually accepting the good ideas (e.g. Warren and Marshall's ulcer theory). Yes, this can often take awhile and the process is subject to the many frailties of humans. But overall, the process works quite well.
And your post should not have been modded off-topic.
I want the subapplications separated, too, but for a different reason. There is nothing quite as annoying as Exiting from a doc and discovering that you have also inadvertantly killed 4 other spreadsheets/docs that were completely unrelated to the doc you were trying to quit.
They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version. Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.
That'll work until the first time he tries to install some other program and gets a dialog box that says: Please install Open Office version 2.0.0 or greater before installing this program.
I'll have to offer an a retraction of my earlier comment. Coincidentally, the New York Times has an article on finding good native British food in London's restaurant scene.
Slashdot Mirror
We are currently in a credit orgy, with $1 in 1913 translating to just under $.05 today. That should speak volumes all by itself.
Which translates to about 3% inflation per year. So what? And what the heck is a credit orgy?
The current Keynesian myth of modern economics (which isn't all that Keynesian when you get right down to it) is destroying our money.
You are just throwing out buzz words which you don't really understand. Modern macro is more about using differential equations to describe how different scenarios lead to/away from equilibria based on individual micro economic choices and the ability of individuals to understand and predict how gov't policy will affect the economy. What Keynes wrote in the 1930s would not pass muster with economists today. Mostly because it is difficult to fully operationalize all of the various concepts he introduced as well as understand how the macro concepts he discussed flow out of first principals of micro economics. How does one measure "animal spirits," for example?
Your rant only shows you don't understand "money" or markets any more than the current batch of economists. (or "greater fool salesmen" as I like to call them)
Your rant simply shows that you don't understand normative science. A scientist does not start from a value laden premise that one way of doing things is somehow better than another. A scientist asks if, given a set of measurable conditions, we can build a theory that shows how the system we are studying will behave. If you don't think the gov't should be given certain policy instruments (money supply and tax and bond financing), then build a model based on measurable human behavior that shows how such an economy would behave. Only then can you begin to make intelligent statements about why your system would lead to better outcomes. Otherwise you will continue to sound like the economics equivalent of the loonies who think the moon landings were a hoax. I'll also suggest that you read some history. The US experience with private money during the first third of the 1800s was not all that happy.
When using hard money, deflation of the money supply is a good thing.
Tell that to the folks who were put out of work in the panic of 1873. The problem with using gold as the money standard is that the economy is at the mercy of the gold supply. Find too much gold, inflation results. Find too little gold, and the economy can't grow as fast as it is capable. And what do we do when there is no more gold to find? Using gold as a monetary standard is a terrible idea. Having a State Bank that can extra pump extra liquidity into the economy when it is growing too slowly (e.g. recent experience in Japan) or reduce it when growth has hit resource limits while otherwise adding just enough money to the system to account for growth needs has proven to be a far superior idea. Only folks who flunked macroeconomics and differential equations or think of an economy as static think a gold standard is a good idea these days.
The US operated as a Free Market for over 100 years before the depression, with close to 0% inflation overall. "Designing Men" control the economy via the money supply (credit) and Regulation.
Not hardly. There were large swings in the level of prices (both inflation and deflation) during the 1800s. The gold standard essentially fixed the money supply as a function of the supply of gold. When there were large gold strikes (1849 in CA, the Alaska Klondike strike in the 1890s), the gold supply increased faster than the general growth in the economy leading to inflation. At other times, not enough new gold was being found to handle the needs of the economy and the result was deflation. After the Civil War, the question of whether to retire the greenbacks issued to fight the war was a major political issue. Rural farmers and debtors wanted to keep them (and the resulting inflation) in order to pay their debts with cheap currency while Eastern bankers and other creditors tried to force the retirement of the greenback which would have the effect of reducing the money supply and thus reducing inflation and protecting the value of their loans.
What other power is needed?
The power to make it legal to use QoS as they please.
If a private university accepts Federal dollars (for research and maybe for student loan programs) they may indeed be subject to the First Amendment. The logic being something like "Federal $s are being used for supression of free speech." Accepting Fed money puts big restrictions on what an institution can do. There is a case that was argued before SCOTUS today that asks if university law schools can prevent military recruitment at their schools. The universities say yes since the military discriminates against gays in contravention of their policies. The Feds are arguing no since the universities take fed research dollars and the law requires equal access to students by the miltary if the institution takes federal money.
when you're an international business you have to deal with the local laws of the country you do business in.
Or live up to your Don't Be Evil motto by deciding not to do business there. I'm not sure where to draw that line, but there are clear cases where that decision should have been automatic.
I've seen 50 or 60 shows since the mid-70s and bought every piece of vinyl they released. And I've stopped buying their stuff. Not because of this little kerfluffle, but because I've got a wife and kid to support and now I'm faced with buying Harry Potter tickets at $18-21 for the family or another Dead CD/DVD at $18-21. The other day I was at Best Buy and found a Pink Floyd movie (the Roman amphitheater flick) and a couple of Monty Python movies for $7 ea. The Dead have simply priced themselves out of the market.
But I also sympathise with the Dead on the merchandise copyright issues. Years ago I sold bumper stickers on tour ("Jerryatrics Ward - Visiting Hours: From when they come to call on you 'til we all fall down"). I did a high quality production run with really good ink and vinyl and sold out pretty quick. A year later I ran into some kid selling an identical sticker except that he'd used the cheapest ink and paper he could find. This is one of the reasons for maintaining copyright on logos and such. It allows the holder to keep some control over quality.
Mickey Hart is the only drummer I've seen who used a chain saw as a percussion instrument.
an open source version of Missle Command in their system?
They often do consult experts. Go watch the "A rolling stone gathers no moss." episode where the staff ignored the biologist's recommendation on how to prepare the moss. The staff had to repeat the experiment. IIRC, this was also the longest (and not likely to have been the most thrilling) experiment they had run.
Abit Lawsuit: You have until February 15, 2006 to file the paperwork to get your boards repaired. I've got a VP6 mobo from around 2000. I installed a new DVD player in the box this past weekend and, fortunately, there was no sign of any capacitor bulging, leakage, etc. The box has been running Linux 24/7 for 5+ years.
Unfortunately, sufficient fossil records do not exist to support major speciation.
Yes, they do.
It's always been my understanding that Copyright doesn't cover MAKING copies, only DISTRIBUTING them.
Back in my grad school days, IIRC, Ohio State used to have signs up near the copiers in the libraries warning users not to use the copiers to copy whole books. If a library allows users to copy a book, are they contributing to copyright infringement? This is just what the libraries are helping Google do. Why is it OK for Google but not the average library patron? Perhaps if Google bought one copy of every book they are scanning the case might be different.
So, the real question is: Why is it fair that I pay a much larger portion of my wages than someone making less than me?
Go read up on John Rawl's and The Veil of Ignorance. The basic idea is that before you are born, you don't know if you will be born as the gifted child of a wealthy family or a mentally handicapped child of a poor family. What tax system would you choose for the society you will live in before you discover the actual alternative into which you are born? Is it fair to newborn children that some are born into wealthy families and others into poor families or that some are born with great talent and others with physical or mental handicaps? To me, a fair tax system is one that balances incentives to work hard and grow the economy with the moral understanding that people don't all start out equally.
Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap.
Digitizing does not usually capture all of the useful information about the book, either. What was the paper made of? How was it bound? What type of ink was used? This type of info can be critically important for resolving controversies about the authenticity of certain old manuscripts (think The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene or The Vinland Map).
Another problem is that the software needed to interpret the 0s and 1s needs to be kept with the digitized copy. If the data are stored as, say, tiff images, then you'd better make sure that there is software to display tiff imgages around as long as the original data stream is kept.
Bottom line is that digital archiving solves some problems but not all and creates whole new headaches as well.
Finally, there is no magic by definition. ID has a number of different manifestations, but none claim magic. ID claims that there is a designer, a master engineer.
So ID doesn't claim magic, but it does claim there are magicians.
Science is a great tool and can tell us much about the world in which we live. Science, however, is not especially great at looking into the past because we have to base our understanding on a lot of assumptions.
<scorn>Are you suggesting that IDs faith in the existence of a master magician is somehow more plausible than assuming that radioactive decay been constant for the last 5 million years?</scorn> Stay away from my kids and keep your pseudo scientific Taliban nonsense out of the public schools!
It runs happily on a 4MB 486 with 1GB of hard drive, with no virtual memory, and will contentedly churn through a complete rebuild without any trouble whatsoever.
Must be a lot of added bloat in there. Minix 1.5 used to run very happily on a PC XT w/ 640K RAM and a 40 MB disk. It would run on a minimal machine w/ as little as 256K RAM and 2 360K floppies. I haven't booted it in a century or so, but I still have an XT with Minix installed on it and a box of 20 or so 360K floppies with binaries and source.
In fact, the lack of 386 memory management mode in Minix was one of the prime reasons that Linus started writing Linix. Tanenbaum was very reluctant to add features such as 386 mode and swapping. And IIRC, the Minix version on my XT did not even have a hard drive boot loader and required a 360K floppy disk to boot.
One other point that I always wondered about w/ Minix was the security claims that Tanenbaum made for Minix 1.5. Again, IIRC, he offered a Dutch dollar for any new security bugs found. This always amused me since the 8088 has no memory management security and it is therefore trivial to write multitudes of user programs that could conquer the world. I don't suppose those counted, though. I assume that a 386 version that is running in 386 mode really is secure and not just pretend secure like 1.5.
but in fact Java's niche just seems to keep shrinking.
And yet the folks who keep repeating this "Java is dieing" mantra in one form or another never seem to provide any metrics that might really prove their point. OTOH, there are lots of easily available metrics (e.g. job listings, press releases from handset manufactures, product announcements on Freshmeat) that seem to suggest the opposite.
Who cares what Sun had in mind 10 years ago? In both life and technology, staying static will kill you.
But there are a multitude of dirs for executables. I'd drop /usr/local/share/bin from the list, but sendmail is traditionally in /usr/lib. I also have a multitude of subdirs in /usr/lib with executables on my Solaris box (e.g. /usr/lib/lp/bin and /usr/lib/lp/postscript). Postfix puts its executables in some oddball place (/usr/libexec/postfix) instead of the sensible place (/usr/sbin or /usr/local/sbin). /usr/ucb is another traditional place to put BSD variants of standard unix commands on ATT based unixes and I've seen Linux distros that have copied that tradition.
You make a very interesting point although I disagree completely with your statement that "we accept the inaccurate model [global warming] on faith and reject the accurate model that this device "proves"."
Neither scientist nor scientific process accepts models based on faith. Current theories in science are always based on best-fit models of the observable facts. No scientist claims that new models won't supplant older theories as newer, better, more accurate observations are made. But the burden of proof when claiming a theory is wrong is on the scientist with the new idea or new observation. He must show why the new observation is relevent and why the current theory fails to account for the new observation. This keeps real crackpots (e.g. intelligent design advocates) at bay while eventually accepting the good ideas (e.g. Warren and Marshall's ulcer theory). Yes, this can often take awhile and the process is subject to the many frailties of humans. But overall, the process works quite well.
And your post should not have been modded off-topic.
I want the subapplications separated, too, but for a different reason. There is nothing quite as annoying as Exiting from a doc and discovering that you have also inadvertantly killed 4 other spreadsheets/docs that were completely unrelated to the doc you were trying to quit.
They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version. Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.
That'll work until the first time he tries to install some other program and gets a dialog box that says: Please install Open Office version 2.0.0 or greater before installing this program.
Unless, of course, you are a Gnome use, in which case you get GConf. What is GConf? Well, it's a nice implmentation of a registry. :)
Well, it's a registry anyway.
No way that all those vacuum tubes will fit into a two-drawer file cabinet. Takes more like a whole room full of file cabinets!
I'll have to offer an a retraction of my earlier comment. Coincidentally, the New York Times has an article on finding good native British food in London's restaurant scene.