I agree. We have no 'right' to get free news and analysis. Providing content takes money - staff have to be paid, bandwidth have to be paid for. If I think I will get a quality service then I am happy to pay (more happy to get it free, but do not expect that)... I am more than happy to provide basic information about myself as an appreciative reader for 'free but registration required' outlets, as I derive a benefit from the service.
Do not expect to get something for free - those places that do benevolently give out information are totally great, but people making a living out of journalism, publishing, etc can't be expected to work for free. Infact those places that do give out information for 'free' deserve more scrutiny (IMHO) as they are more likely to have vested interests in info they give out (e.g. a free nutrition website advocating the Atkins diet which is funded by 'Animal Fat Farmers of America' or a survey of computer security sponsored by Microsoft).
I agree. The trouble is we do not all live in countries which draw a liberal line at law enforcement. FreeNET is a great idea spoiled by the rotting compost in our society which puts so many off.
BTW - if you are unaware - unlike most P2P systems, on FreeNET you do not choose what material to share, rather it gets stored (and served from) your computer according to the network-wide demand. So if someone uploads kiddie porn to the network it may be stored on your computer for others to download. Because of its anonymous nature (well, nearly) it is very attractive for people who may want to bypass local law enforcement - i.e., those that wish to engage in unlawful activities will be disproportionatly drawn to it.
AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure.
"I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would actually be fun," he recalled.
Three years later, Mr. Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Mr. Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third. Firm numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
Advertisement
And just as earlier forms of file-sharing seem to be waning in popularity under legal pressure from the music industry, new technologies like BitTorrent are making it easier than ever to share and distribute the huge files used for video. One site alone,
suprnova.org, routinely offers hundreds of television programs, recent movies and copyrighted software programs. The movie industry, among others, has taken notice.
What Mr. Cohen has created, however, seems beyond his control. And when he was developing the system, he said, widespread copyright infringement was not what he had in mind.
Rather, he was intrigued by a problem familiar to many Internet users and felt acutely by friends who were trading music online legally: the excruciating wait while files were being downloaded.
"Obviously their problem was not enough bandwidth to meet demand," Mr. Cohen said in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near his home in Seattle. "It seemed pretty clear to me that there is a lot of bandwidth out there, but it's not being used properly. There's all of this upload capacity that people aren't using."
That was the essential insight behind BitTorrent. Under older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small subset of users actually share files with the world. Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace parlance.
BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).
The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original "seeder." That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source. A separate file-sharing network known as eDonkey uses a similar system.
For Mr. Cohen, BitTorrent was always about exercising his brain rather than trying to fatten his wallet. Unlike many other file-sharing programs, BitTorrent is both free and open-source, which means that those with enough technical know-how can incorporate Mr. Cohen's code into their own programs.
While writing the software, "I lived on savings for a while and then I lived off credit cards, you know, using those zero percent introductory rates to use one credit card to pay off the previous card," Mr. Cohen said.
The first usable version of BitTorrent appeared in October 2002, but the system needed a lot of fine-tuning. Luckily for Mr. Cohen, he was living in the Bay Area at the time and his project had attracted the attention of John Gilmore, the free-software entrepreneur, who had also been one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gilmore ended up helping Mr. Cohen with some of
Why TF mod this troll? It is an education on how to use HTML tags which many/. posters (seemingly) don't know how to use. It is not troll it is +++informative!
I hear you. I have 3x18" LCDs at work and the scroll is awful, I cannot read or focus while scrolling but on my 19" CRT at home (and previous 15" CRTs at work) this was no problem.
the word around the water cooler is that we just paid them off -- really, the amount of money they wanted was insignificant against the massive PR damage we were looking at.
In India it would probably be easier and cheaper to have them killed (hey, that seems easier in the US too!) and would discourage further abuses (given the country is corrupt enough (a local jusisdiction probably is - certainly was in Thailand (one of the most corruption-ridden countries on this planet))).
Ever notice they dont print the names of juvenile suspects in the newspaper?
It is illegal to print the names of juvenile suspects in most countries. The newspaper don't like to get their asses sued.
In many countries it is also illegal to print the names of convicted jeuveniles (something to do with being over the legal age of responsibility (~8 years old in some countries) but not totally responsible until they're a bit older (~14 in many countries)).
The fact is this person revealed details against their contract code and more importantly, if they are in this position they should have the moral/ethical decency not to do this.
Whether they were outsourced or not outsoured does not matter (IMHO) - they still have a personal moral/ethical judgement... FT government contractors are not great saviours, rather this individual is one with poor/sick ethical judgement (it is in no way 'freedom of speech' to disclose confidential/sensitive information about young kids).
I do not believe outsourcing creates a more or less trustworthy/moral/ethical situations/employees (well, they just have less benefits rights and more legal liability if somethinggoes wrong), it is the individual who makes a better individual and avoids being a piece of scum.
You can prove that 1+1 = 2 (even though it might take 300 pages.)
Isn't there some kind of axiom(s) to define numbers and addition (well, reduced to more basic (primevil?) axioms in number and set theory)? Mathematics is based on axioms (there is no truth, just derivation), I remember in geometry at uni (or M1GLA as it was called) we had the axioms of basic number theory, that n dimensional space space exists (well, is defined), and that a point in n-dimensional space may exist, and distance exists (the concept of a vector) - from there we proved all mainstream geometry (up to Gauss in geo 201). At the end of the course we went back and undid these axioms. A great mental exercise but put me off geo for ever - just did linear algrbra (sort of geo but a much nicer approach), some stats and stochastic (some deterministic) calculus after that. Theoretical physics? - please don't start on that load of BS.
A lawyer finds out he has an inoperable brain tumor. It's so large, they have to do a brain transplant. His doctor gives him a choice of available brains. There's a jar of rocket scientist brains for $10 an ounce, a jar of regular scientist brains for $15 an ounce, and a jar of lawyer brains for the sum of $800 an ounce. The outraged lawyer says, "This is a ripoff! How come the lawyer brains are so damned expensive?" The doctor replies, "Do you know how many lawyers it takes
Submited By: JokeLoad.
re not going to change my mind -- either you book me in to be castrated or I'll simply go to another doctor."
Submited By: JokeLoad.
Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton...
Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton were at a Yankees game. Before the game began a secret service man came up to him and whispered in his ear.
Bill Clinton suddenly picked up Hillary and threw her out on the field.
use, I can't grant you a divorce from Minnie!"
Mickey Mouse was stunned and asked, "Why not??!!"
The Judge said, "I've reviewed all the information you gave to the court, but I can't find any evidence at all to support the grounds that she is crazy!"
Mickey Mouse says, "Your Honor! I didn't say she was CRAZY, I said she was fucking Goofy!"
Submited By: JokeLoad.
UNKULUNKULU;
OR,
THE TRADITION OF CREATION
AS EXISTING AMONG
THE AMAZULU AND OTHER TRIBES
OF
SOUTH AFRICA.
UNKULUNKULU is no longer known.1 It is he who was the first man;2 he broke off3 in the p. 2 beginning.4 We do not know his wife; and the ancients do not tell us that he had a wife.5
We hear it said, that Unkulunkulu broke off6 the nations from Uthlanga.7
p. 3
It is said he sent a chameleon; he said to it, "Go, Chameleon, go and say, Let not men die." The chameleon set out; it went slowly;8 it loitered in the way; and as it went, it ate of the fruit of a tree, which is called Ubukwebezane.9
At length Unkulunkulu sent a lizard10 after the chameleon, when it had already set out for some time. The lizard went; it ran and made great haste, for Unkulunkulu had said, "Lizard, when you have arrived, say, Let men die." So the lizard went, and said, "I tell you, It is said, Let men die." The lizard came back again to Unkulunkulu, before the chameleon had reached his destination, the chameleon which was sent first; which was sent, and told to go and say, "Let not men die."
p. 4
At length it arrived and shouted, saying, "It is said, Let not men die!" But men answered, "O! we have heard the word of Abantu the lizard; it has told us the word, 'It is said, Let men die.' We cannot hear your word. Through the word of the lizard, men will die."11
p. 5
Unkulunkulu gave men Amatongo;12 he gave them doctors for treating disease, and diviners; he gave them medicines to treat diseases occasioned by the Itongo.13 Unkulunkulu said, "If a man is being affected by the Itongo, you shall kill a bullock and laud the Itongo; the man will get well if he has been affected by the Itongo."
p. 6
He said, "You will see also by night, you will dream; the Itongo will tell you what it is it wishes." He said, "It will also tell you the bullock it would have killed."
The Itongo dwells with the great man; he who dreams is the chief of the village; it says "Should you kill a bullock, the man will get well." The bullock which the Itongo mentions is killed; and although people were thinking that the man would die, he gets well; and so it is clear that the man was affected by the Itongo. The gall-bladder is taken from the bullock, and the man has the gall poured on him; they give praise and say, "In order that we may see that it is the Itongo, let us see him get well this very day; and at the very dawn of tomorrow eat meat; so we shall see that it is the Itongo. On the other hand, we shall not admit in our hearts that it is the Itongo; we shall say, it is disease only; there is no Itongo in his body. If we see that it is the Itongo, we shall see it by his getting well, and so we shall give thanks. Then we will kill many cattle, and laud the Itongo, an
It may be hard to track down the spammers advertising it (and prove a link between them and the retailer) but it is hell-of-easy tracking down the retailer when they accept payments on Visa/Mastercard.
f you read the first one it clearly points out that...
you mean this:
other schools of economic thought reject or downplay the importance of multiplier effects, particularly in the long run.
The basic assumption is that the economy starts off with unused resources, for example some workers are unemployed. By increasing demand in the economy it is then possible to boost production. If the economy was already at full employment, any attempt to boost demand would only lead to inflation. Note also that even if, say, some workers are out of work, it may be difficult to employ them directly due to bottlenecks in other parts of the economy.
The I suggest you re-read. In the long run there are no structural problems, but there are in Germany today, and the future can be borrowed from to boost today. Fiscal stimulus are indeed not pareto-efficient (raising the productivity fronteer) but as you say, they redistribute income (it will be paid back in the future - remember Germany is having fun breaking the growth-and-stability-pact as we type!).
Fiscal stimulus (borrowing today, saving tomorrow or vice versa) are essential tools in smoothing the business/economic cycle, they never went out of fashion in the 80s, politicians just jumped on the monetarism bandwagon for their buzz words (and stopped believing folley like the Phillips curve actualy works). In reality there very few economists today that believe in either pure 'Keynesian' or pure 'monetarism' - the main different is the shape of the supply curve and most now believe it is ski-slope shaped, we just have to work out how far down the slope we are.
Interesting Marshall plan idea; alternatively it may be some kind of game-theory strategy where a comparative advantage is built up now (or comparative disadvantage is reduced) by government expenditure in the hope of a geographical-inertia monopoly/returns-to-scale payoff in the future.
I have a serious suggestion: as so many people are royally pissed at these stupid harvesting zines, why don't we just wait until a decent news source publishes before coming to/. with a story?
I'd prefer to have the choice at least, then I can take it or leave it (perhaps slashdot could introduce a filter on 'stories needing free registration' in the user preferences?). But let's hope their registration system is implemented more (or less?) compentantly than their domain renewal (and the entire email system going down)!
Verbal agression is not violence... you're the one mentioning violence. Verbal aggression is, however, abusive, on a website, in a letter, on the street, in a bar. If you are as abusive in real life as you are on this website you would probably have had a few injuries over time. You abuse with the keyboard, others abuse with fists. Abuse is abuse.
No. You must be unaware of the 'multiplier effect' in economics, you can read up here. Basically, if there is surplus productive capacity in a economy (which Germany surely has) a stimulative effect at employing that surplus will have spill over benefit to everyone (chip makers need bakers, burger flippers etc) economically 'near' them. The money goes round the economic circle and multiplies.
As Germany is in a depressed economic position (lots of deflationary pressures) such fiscal stimulus is useful (this was the argument for the Bush tax cuts - but that was probably unnecessary in the US (and was not 'directed' to undercapacity areas of the economy), but is much more necessary in Germany), not that this is a cure-all as German is suffering really bad structural problems too.
Then there is the money multiplier concept (a not very good definition here) which explains how money increases as the definition broadens - is cash money, but the amount of money on deposit is greater than all cash in circulation and in bank tills This is a seperate issue and not relevant to this discussion, but a fine demonstation that of all things in life, money is one ofthe finest examples of something which multiplies.
Well, I think the crux was they deter some crime (some evidence of displacement, some evidence of removal) - those crimes are more thought through, but they don't stop drunken violence (more than 50% of assaults in the UK are committed by drunk people) or crack addicts as these people are less rational. But even if they don't stop many crimes they make it easier to identify the culprit (as pointed out above).
Almost... but here is one for all the students (possibly the grandparent confusion)
"A TV set powered by its own internal batteries - a pocket sized TV for example - may be covered by a licence at your parents' address." from here.
I may have 3 TVs in my house, but only need one licence, similarly I don't need a seperate licence for a pocket TV as long as I have one for my home address, but as you say I can't only have a battery operated TV.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA and find your questions answered.
I agree. We have no 'right' to get free news and analysis. Providing content takes money - staff have to be paid, bandwidth have to be paid for. If I think I will get a quality service then I am happy to pay (more happy to get it free, but do not expect that)... I am more than happy to provide basic information about myself as an appreciative reader for 'free but registration required' outlets, as I derive a benefit from the service.
Do not expect to get something for free - those places that do benevolently give out information are totally great, but people making a living out of journalism, publishing, etc can't be expected to work for free. Infact those places that do give out information for 'free' deserve more scrutiny (IMHO) as they are more likely to have vested interests in info they give out (e.g. a free nutrition website advocating the Atkins diet which is funded by 'Animal Fat Farmers of America' or a survey of computer security sponsored by Microsoft).
I agree. The trouble is we do not all live in countries which draw a liberal line at law enforcement. FreeNET is a great idea spoiled by the rotting compost in our society which puts so many off.
BTW - if you are unaware - unlike most P2P systems, on FreeNET you do not choose what material to share, rather it gets stored (and served from) your computer according to the network-wide demand. So if someone uploads kiddie porn to the network it may be stored on your computer for others to download. Because of its anonymous nature (well, nearly) it is very attractive for people who may want to bypass local law enforcement - i.e., those that wish to engage in unlawful activities will be disproportionatly drawn to it.
15 of you last 24 posts have been at least troll or less than +1 default. So...
FUCK OFF AND DIE OR BECOME A BELGIAN MONK. .
Story text follows:
File Sharing's New Face
By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: February 12, 2004
EATTLE
AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure.
"I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would actually be fun," he recalled.
Three years later, Mr. Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Mr. Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third. Firm numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
Advertisement
And just as earlier forms of file-sharing seem to be waning in popularity under legal pressure from the music industry, new technologies like BitTorrent are making it easier than ever to share and distribute the huge files used for video. One site alone,
suprnova.org, routinely offers hundreds of television programs, recent movies and copyrighted software programs. The movie industry, among others, has taken notice.
What Mr. Cohen has created, however, seems beyond his control. And when he was developing the system, he said, widespread copyright infringement was not what he had in mind.
Rather, he was intrigued by a problem familiar to many Internet users and felt acutely by friends who were trading music online legally: the excruciating wait while files were being downloaded.
"Obviously their problem was not enough bandwidth to meet demand," Mr. Cohen said in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near his home in Seattle. "It seemed pretty clear to me that there is a lot of bandwidth out there, but it's not being used properly. There's all of this upload capacity that people aren't using."
That was the essential insight behind BitTorrent. Under older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small subset of users actually share files with the world. Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace parlance.
BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).
The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original "seeder." That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source. A separate file-sharing network known as eDonkey uses a similar system.
For Mr. Cohen, BitTorrent was always about exercising his brain rather than trying to fatten his wallet. Unlike many other file-sharing programs, BitTorrent is both free and open-source, which means that those with enough technical know-how can incorporate Mr. Cohen's code into their own programs.
While writing the software, "I lived on savings for a while and then I lived off credit cards, you know, using those zero percent introductory rates to use one credit card to pay off the previous card," Mr. Cohen said.
The first usable version of BitTorrent appeared in October 2002, but the system needed a lot of fine-tuning. Luckily for Mr. Cohen, he was living in the Bay Area at the time and his project had attracted the attention of John Gilmore, the free-software entrepreneur, who had also been one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gilmore ended up helping Mr. Cohen with some of
Why TF mod this troll? It is an education on how to use HTML tags which many /. posters (seemingly) don't know how to use. It is not troll it is +++informative!
I hear you. I have 3x18" LCDs at work and the scroll is awful, I cannot read or focus while scrolling but on my 19" CRT at home (and previous 15" CRTs at work) this was no problem.
the word around the water cooler is that we just paid them off -- really, the amount of money they wanted was insignificant against the massive PR damage we were looking at.
In India it would probably be easier and cheaper to have them killed (hey, that seems easier in the US too!) and would discourage further abuses (given the country is corrupt enough (a local jusisdiction probably is - certainly was in Thailand (one of the most corruption-ridden countries on this planet))).
Ever notice they dont print the names of juvenile suspects in the newspaper?
It is illegal to print the names of juvenile suspects in most countries. The newspaper don't like to get their asses sued.
In many countries it is also illegal to print the names of convicted jeuveniles (something to do with being over the legal age of responsibility (~8 years old in some countries) but not totally responsible until they're a bit older (~14 in many countries)).
The fact is this person revealed details against their contract code and more importantly, if they are in this position they should have the moral/ethical decency not to do this.
Whether they were outsourced or not outsoured does not matter (IMHO) - they still have a personal moral/ethical judgement... FT government contractors are not great saviours, rather this individual is one with poor/sick ethical judgement (it is in no way 'freedom of speech' to disclose confidential/sensitive information about young kids).
I do not believe outsourcing creates a more or less trustworthy/moral/ethical situations/employees (well, they just have less benefits rights and more legal liability if somethinggoes wrong), it is the individual who makes a better individual and avoids being a piece of scum.
You can prove that 1+1 = 2 (even though it might take 300 pages.)
Isn't there some kind of axiom(s) to define numbers and addition (well, reduced to more basic (primevil?) axioms in number and set theory)? Mathematics is based on axioms (there is no truth, just derivation), I remember in geometry at uni (or M1GLA as it was called) we had the axioms of basic number theory, that n dimensional space space exists (well, is defined), and that a point in n-dimensional space may exist, and distance exists (the concept of a vector) - from there we proved all mainstream geometry (up to Gauss in geo 201). At the end of the course we went back and undid these axioms. A great mental exercise but put me off geo for ever - just did linear algrbra (sort of geo but a much nicer approach), some stats and stochastic (some deterministic) calculus after that. Theoretical physics? - please don't start on that load of BS.
What's the difference if dark-matter is really just another false theory? In the long run it's not going to make a whole heck of a lot of difference.
It will make a difference because Zephram Cochran won't be ale to make warp drive!
A lawyer finds out he has an inoperable brain tumor. It's so large, they have to do a brain transplant. His doctor gives him a choice of available brains. There's a jar of rocket scientist brains for $10 an ounce, a jar of regular scientist brains for $15 an ounce, and a jar of lawyer brains for the sum of $800 an ounce. The outraged lawyer says, "This is a ripoff! How come the lawyer brains are so damned expensive?" The doctor replies, "Do you know how many lawyers it takes Submited By: JokeLoad. re not going to change my mind -- either you book me in to be castrated or I'll simply go to another doctor." Submited By: JokeLoad. Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton... Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton were at a Yankees game. Before the game began a secret service man came up to him and whispered in his ear. Bill Clinton suddenly picked up Hillary and threw her out on the field. use, I can't grant you a divorce from Minnie!" Mickey Mouse was stunned and asked, "Why not??!!" The Judge said, "I've reviewed all the information you gave to the court, but I can't find any evidence at all to support the grounds that she is crazy!" Mickey Mouse says, "Your Honor! I didn't say she was CRAZY, I said she was fucking Goofy!" Submited By: JokeLoad. UNKULUNKULU; OR, THE TRADITION OF CREATION AS EXISTING AMONG THE AMAZULU AND OTHER TRIBES OF SOUTH AFRICA. UNKULUNKULU is no longer known.1 It is he who was the first man;2 he broke off3 in the p. 2 beginning.4 We do not know his wife; and the ancients do not tell us that he had a wife.5 We hear it said, that Unkulunkulu broke off6 the nations from Uthlanga.7 p. 3 It is said he sent a chameleon; he said to it, "Go, Chameleon, go and say, Let not men die." The chameleon set out; it went slowly;8 it loitered in the way; and as it went, it ate of the fruit of a tree, which is called Ubukwebezane.9 At length Unkulunkulu sent a lizard10 after the chameleon, when it had already set out for some time. The lizard went; it ran and made great haste, for Unkulunkulu had said, "Lizard, when you have arrived, say, Let men die." So the lizard went, and said, "I tell you, It is said, Let men die." The lizard came back again to Unkulunkulu, before the chameleon had reached his destination, the chameleon which was sent first; which was sent, and told to go and say, "Let not men die." p. 4 At length it arrived and shouted, saying, "It is said, Let not men die!" But men answered, "O! we have heard the word of Abantu the lizard; it has told us the word, 'It is said, Let men die.' We cannot hear your word. Through the word of the lizard, men will die."11 p. 5 Unkulunkulu gave men Amatongo;12 he gave them doctors for treating disease, and diviners; he gave them medicines to treat diseases occasioned by the Itongo.13 Unkulunkulu said, "If a man is being affected by the Itongo, you shall kill a bullock and laud the Itongo; the man will get well if he has been affected by the Itongo." p. 6 He said, "You will see also by night, you will dream; the Itongo will tell you what it is it wishes." He said, "It will also tell you the bullock it would have killed." The Itongo dwells with the great man; he who dreams is the chief of the village; it says "Should you kill a bullock, the man will get well." The bullock which the Itongo mentions is killed; and although people were thinking that the man would die, he gets well; and so it is clear that the man was affected by the Itongo. The gall-bladder is taken from the bullock, and the man has the gall poured on him; they give praise and say, "In order that we may see that it is the Itongo, let us see him get well this very day; and at the very dawn of tomorrow eat meat; so we shall see that it is the Itongo. On the other hand, we shall not admit in our hearts that it is the Itongo; we shall say, it is disease only; there is no Itongo in his body. If we see that it is the Itongo, we shall see it by his getting well, and so we shall give thanks. Then we will kill many cattle, and laud the Itongo, an
It may be hard to track down the spammers advertising it (and prove a link between them and the retailer) but it is hell-of-easy tracking down the retailer when they accept payments on Visa/Mastercard.
f you read the first one it clearly points out that...
you mean this:
other schools of economic thought reject or downplay the importance of multiplier effects, particularly in the long run.
The basic assumption is that the economy starts off with unused resources, for example some workers are unemployed. By increasing demand in the economy it is then possible to boost production. If the economy was already at full employment, any attempt to boost demand would only lead to inflation. Note also that even if, say, some workers are out of work, it may be difficult to employ them directly due to bottlenecks in other parts of the economy.
The I suggest you re-read. In the long run there are no structural problems, but there are in Germany today, and the future can be borrowed from to boost today. Fiscal stimulus are indeed not pareto-efficient (raising the productivity fronteer) but as you say, they redistribute income (it will be paid back in the future - remember Germany is having fun breaking the growth-and-stability-pact as we type!).
Fiscal stimulus (borrowing today, saving tomorrow or vice versa) are essential tools in smoothing the business/economic cycle, they never went out of fashion in the 80s, politicians just jumped on the monetarism bandwagon for their buzz words (and stopped believing folley like the Phillips curve actualy works). In reality there very few economists today that believe in either pure 'Keynesian' or pure 'monetarism' - the main different is the shape of the supply curve and most now believe it is ski-slope shaped, we just have to work out how far down the slope we are.
Interesting Marshall plan idea; alternatively it may be some kind of game-theory strategy where a comparative advantage is built up now (or comparative disadvantage is reduced) by government expenditure in the hope of a geographical-inertia monopoly/returns-to-scale payoff in the future.
I have a serious suggestion: as so many people are royally pissed at these stupid harvesting zines, why don't we just wait until a decent news source publishes before coming to /. with a story?
I'd prefer to have the choice at least, then I can take it or leave it (perhaps slashdot could introduce a filter on 'stories needing free registration' in the user preferences?). But let's hope their registration system is implemented more (or less?) compentantly than their domain renewal (and the entire email system going down)!
Verbal agression is not violence... you're the one mentioning violence. Verbal aggression is, however, abusive, on a website, in a letter, on the street, in a bar. If you are as abusive in real life as you are on this website you would probably have had a few injuries over time. You abuse with the keyboard, others abuse with fists. Abuse is abuse.
try this
No. You must be unaware of the 'multiplier effect' in economics, you can read up here. Basically, if there is surplus productive capacity in a economy (which Germany surely has) a stimulative effect at employing that surplus will have spill over benefit to everyone (chip makers need bakers, burger flippers etc) economically 'near' them. The money goes round the economic circle and multiplies.
As Germany is in a depressed economic position (lots of deflationary pressures) such fiscal stimulus is useful (this was the argument for the Bush tax cuts - but that was probably unnecessary in the US (and was not 'directed' to undercapacity areas of the economy), but is much more necessary in Germany), not that this is a cure-all as German is suffering really bad structural problems too.
Then there is the money multiplier concept (a not very good definition here) which explains how money increases as the definition broadens - is cash money, but the amount of money on deposit is greater than all cash in circulation and in bank tills This is a seperate issue and not relevant to this discussion, but a fine demonstation that of all things in life, money is one ofthe finest examples of something which multiplies.
but then the criminals find it necessary to always carry guns, even for the most petty crimes, which for the large part now, they don't (in the UK).
Well, I think the crux was they deter some crime (some evidence of displacement, some evidence of removal) - those crimes are more thought through, but they don't stop drunken violence (more than 50% of assaults in the UK are committed by drunk people) or crack addicts as these people are less rational. But even if they don't stop many crimes they make it easier to identify the culprit (as pointed out above).
Almost... but here is one for all the students (possibly the grandparent confusion)
"A TV set powered by its own internal batteries - a pocket sized TV for example - may be covered by a licence at your parents' address." from here.
I may have 3 TVs in my house, but only need one licence, similarly I don't need a seperate licence for a pocket TV as long as I have one for my home address, but as you say I can't only have a battery operated TV.
OT but a great story, thanks. I couldn't help thinking it was Korean-based, was it?
The real worry is when you start having government funded virus writers.
Don't worry, the US is years ahead in terms of 'electronic counter measures'.
No! You should be looking on this Google!