Silver already has plenty of industrial uses, however they are not what drive the price of silver.
The reason most people invest in gold and silver are different: They are a kind of money that no government can print,they are costly to mine. Compare that to the pieces of paper that come out of the printing press in a central bank, and especially the central bank that we have that just doubled their balance sheet, and it is easy to see that the amount of gold and silver remains relatively fixed to the amount of dollars (and most other fiat currencies).
Historically, gold and silver have replaced every single fiat currency in history starting from the Romans 2000 years ago. Make no mistake, they will replace our current currency as well sooner or later.
It took the central bank raising interest rates to 20% by Paul Volger back in 1980 and cause a deep but quick recession to make gold and silver go down. The prospect of 20% interest was enough to entice a lot of people to get some dollars and gain interest rather than hold gold and silver. Also, the 20% interest rates means the Central bank stopped the printing presses. Does anyone believe Bernanke and Obama have the balls to do that again?
I am a libertarian, and I do not believe in net neutrality regulation. However I see nothing wrong with FOSS.
The attempt to put them together as one is simply a red herring
If someone wants to make a more accurate analogy, it would be the government making a law that says that FOSS developers can not restrict commercial uses or distribution of the software they write.
Apple had one computer with one operating system (the mac) vs one operating system (MS-DOS and later Windows) running on hundreds of different clones.
Eventually, the clones competed fiercely on price and features and ate away most of the market share. This happens even as apple had an arguably better product.
So... The real problem is that they have a local monopoly then.
Currently cities make exclusive deals with ISP's over an area, if they were allowed to compete freely they would have much less incentive to "abuse" since competition would wipe them out.
Second, net neutrality regulation is a solution searching for a problem. We do not currently have any issue with this, we have not had it for decades. So why fix something that so obviously isn't broken?
Third, give credit to free market, which pretty much killed DRM (in spite of government's DMCA). It was not government that forced apple and other online music vendors to kill DRM, it was simple competition. Even Comcast's torrent problem (the closest thing to violating any net neutrality regulation), was completely killed by free market. People did not liked it, and they backed out after public's outrage and potential customer loss.
Forth, there could be legitimate reasons to have non neutral networks. For example, if google decided to give away free internet access that would happen to give their services a boost. Why not?? I would "buy" it. Who are you or the government to tell me (or google) that we are doing something wrong? isn't it a matter that only concerns Google and me?
If the ISP can snoop you have no security in your papers.
What does this have to do with the constitution?
If the ISP can throttle who you can speak to, you have no free assembly.
you still have the right to free assembly. They do not have the obligation to help you, especially since you are using their property and accepted their terms.
If the ISP can ban communications, you have no speech.
Same as above.
PS show where it says you can create a corporation in the constitution?
nowhere. That is why the government does not (or should not) create corporations.
If you read the constitution, it is very simple: unless prohibited by the constitution, individuals can do whatever they want. Unless granted by the constitution, the federal government can do nothing. Nowadays, they completely ignore this document, and government does whatever they want.
The constitution is not meant to restrict individuals or companies, it is meant to restrict government. That is why it explicitly says that unless a power is granted to the federal government by the constitution, that power is reserved to the individuals or the states.
If net neutrality was proposed at a state level, then yes, it would be compliant with the constitution, each state would choose whether to implement it or not.
How come no one even asks anymore whether a bill would violate the constitution?. Section 1,8 lists the 20 powers that congress has, go ahead and read them, they are written in plain English unlike any bill that has been passed in the last few decades. The 10th amendment explicitly reserves any other power to the states or to the people.
Nowhere in those 20 listed powers can you read anything about telecommunications or anything that could be remotely interpreted to justify net neutrality.
According to your argument, it is the people who suffer the most of these taxes. I don't know about you, but I don't think this is a good thing.
But there is also another issue, US taxes profits overseas as opposed to most other countries that have territorial taxes, and it is extremely high. that means that an american company has a huge disadvantage against a company from other country that does not charge taxes earned outside.
Moreover, the US is a tax heaven itself, it does not charge taxes to any foreign company doing business here. If we do not want to be hipocrits, and we want the foreign countries to stop being tax heavens, so should we. This means that we are simply going to loose a ton of business to more competitive countries.
Please see this excellent video analyzing the moral and economic issues with going after tax heavens.
The real solution is not to go after the tax heavens, the real solution is to lower the taxes here to give an incentive for companies to do business here and not outside
I realize this is slashdot, which tends to have a socialist view, and we are talking about *evil* microsoft, so there is no convincing people here, but this reasoning does not only apply to microsoft, a lot of companies (the ones that can) will simply pack up and leave.
The Chinese have been engaging in protectionism for years now, by keeping their currency artificially low.
You accuse the Chinese of manipulating the currency. Yet, look at what our wonderful FED is doing to our own currency. That chart represents how much money the FED has printed (fisically, electronically or otherwise). If you really think we are at risk of "deflation", you have been drinking too much kool-aid.
Also, look at history, we (the US) conned the world by telling them that dollars where redeemable for gold. And once the dollar became the world currency, we went off of the gold standard (1971) and started printing it like crazy.
One ounce of gold was worth $35-$36 beginning 1971, it is worth $914 at close today. That means that the dollar lost 96% of its value in 38 years.
The Chinese may not be free of sin, but we are certainly not the country to throw the first stone.
What do you think will happen if the Chinese let their currency gain value? Every product that comes from China will become more expensive, or simply unavailable. This "protectionism" is letting you buy cheap products. In the short run, yes, China's exporting companies will suffer, but in the long run, products in China will become cheap (relative to the US and the rest of the world), and they will enjoy consumption like we have here.
This seems like the wrong incentive to me. They are not providing any incentive to loose the weight for the employee. What do they care if the employer pays a fine?
Moreover, what this is going to cause is that companies are going to discriminate against overweight people when hiring, to avoid paying a fine.
It would seem more straight forward to me if they fined the overweight person himself, or if they don't want to do something so unpopular, raise taxes and give tax breaks to fit people.
I am pretty sure that KHTML has been merged/dropped and there is only WebKit in Konqueror now. But I am subject to correction on this.
no, konqueror is using KHTML and will use it in the foreseeable future. There is a google summer of code to work on the webkit kpart so that konqueror will be able to use webkit by the end of the summer, but it will probably wont be mainstream for a while:
A while ago, konqueror developers posted a FAQ describing the future of KHTML. As of today, it still applies
A posibility is that, a new browser may be added to kde, that will be tunned for web browsing as opposed to konqueror which is a swiss army knife. Kind of what Dolphin did for file management. There is already a webkit based browser in the works that could achieve this in the future.
Heck you can get those specs for about $300 on a desktop.
The fact is that you are paying that much because of the weight, because of how portable it is. The closest thing to your specs that weights 4 pounds is the mac book air and that starts at $1700.
Flash was all powerful and pretty. Putting aside the serious deficiencies with flash, hiring quality people to work with it was nearly impossible. The people that where good with flash where graphics designers, they like to do pretty animations and colorful graphics, but they where terrible programmers, and knew nothing about usability and user interfaces. The people that where good programmers avoided flash like the plague ( myself included:), why did I ever go work for them? ). Usability people's first recommendation: dump flash.
So if you are a big enough shop, and you decide to do your web application in flash, you need a minimum of 4 people: A graphics designer to do flash, a user interface guy to design your interface and a programmer to do your code, and a project manager that can make them work together. If you are a small shop, and can not afford 4 people, you should really reconsider your choice of platform.
At the end, we ended up switching to good old HTML, the transition was very painful, but now there are lot more options when hiring, the product improved dramatically, and there is less worry about someone being hit by a bus.
This is an easy to reproduce set of bugs someone else found on their browser.
I would be glad to receive bug reports with an easy to use test case. It saves me the trouble of determining if it is a bug or not, coming up with a test case, the pain of communicating back and forth with the customer trying to find out what they are doing and how the bug is being triggered, etc. Also, this test suite will improve compatibility with other browsers so it will reduce bug reports in the long run.
'Three plaintiffs were each seeking 69,000 euros ($100,000) in damages for invasion of their privacy after their homosexuality was revealed on the website.' ... not that there is anything wrong with that.
what happens when neither centralized government control of the market nor capital control of the market is capable of producing a desirable outcome? Neither centralized government control or capital can make you fly like superman either. What is your point?
"We need 5L of patent applications, stat! Can you imagine the dough we'll make when we lock up this discovery so that no one else can cure diabetes but us?" The choices are:
Current patent system: Someone discovers this, protects it with patents, and locks it up for a few years
No patents for medical advances: Why would anybody spend any money on research if someone can come along and reproduce the formula? Philanthropy money is very limited. You really need the big capitalist bucks to back research or nothing significant will ever be discovered. You need to provide some sort of economic incentive if you want people to invest in research, and that is why patents exist
Goverment sponsored research: The problem with this system is that the government has no incentive whatsoever to be efficient. If they used the money to give away medicine rather than research, they would get more votes. Moreover, some of the most promising research like steam cell, are so controversial that most politicians would steer clear from it. This also opens the door for religion to influence research since the vast majority of voters belong to some religion.
The absolute best system is one where helping people and researching is in your best economic interest. A system where by healing someone you make a profit. This way money will naturally flow towards health care. Of the three alternatives, patents is the one that is closer to that. If you can come up with another system, I would love to hear about it.
The Patent troll does not have to own the patent. For example, Microsoft can grant them a license that allows the patent troll to do these deal and then forward the money to Microsoft with a small percentage staying with the patent troll.
Heck, Microsoft can create another company just for this purpose. It would not be hard to get around the GPLv3 with that language.
Leave aside Microsoft for a minute. The GPLv3 does nothing to protect against future threats, as long as the threatening companies does not distribute software. It focuses so much on Microsoft, that it leaves the door open to any other company outside of the software distribution business.
From the GPLv3, the wording meant to stop Microsoft-Novel deals is:
...You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work...
So all Microsoft has to do is give the patents to a proxy company that is not in the business of distributing software, ie. a patent troll, and the proxy company can do the Proxy-Novel deals for them, even over GPLv3 software, without Novel being in violation of the GPLv3.
And if you are thinking of removing the "that is in the business of distributing software" part for your project, think again. Your license would have additional restrictions not present in vanilla GPLv3. Your modified GPLv3 would not be GPLv3 compatible and your code would no longer be able to link to GPLv3 code. You would not be able to accept patches to your code under GPLv3.
Even if kde developers decide to switch KHTML to LGPL v3, WebKit was forked from a earlier LGPL v2 copy of KHTML, so they would not be affected.
Moreover, one of the biggest contributors (the biggest?) to WebKit is Apple. Somehow it seems unlikely that apple will agree to a change in the license that can prevent it's use in their own cell phone. To be able to relicense it, you will need agreement from all copyright holders including Apple.
This is shameless FUD from FSF.
So FSF, I'll say the same thing that has been said so many times to SCO: Show us the infringing code or STFU.
So much they even UNLOCKED my cell phone. So long I bought the cell phone from T-Mobile, and I have been with them for a few months. They will be extremely polite while doing so. They are the "don't be evil" carrier of the bunch.
Slashdot Mirror
Silver already has plenty of industrial uses, however they are not what drive the price of silver.
The reason most people invest in gold and silver are different: They are a kind of money that no government can print,they are costly to mine. Compare that to the pieces of paper that come out of the printing press in a central bank, and especially the central bank that we have that just doubled their balance sheet, and it is easy to see that the amount of gold and silver remains relatively fixed to the amount of dollars (and most other fiat currencies).
Historically, gold and silver have replaced every single fiat currency in history starting from the Romans 2000 years ago. Make no mistake, they will replace our current currency as well sooner or later.
It took the central bank raising interest rates to 20% by Paul Volger back in 1980 and cause a deep but quick recession to make gold and silver go down. The prospect of 20% interest was enough to entice a lot of people to get some dollars and gain interest rather than hold gold and silver. Also, the 20% interest rates means the Central bank stopped the printing presses. Does anyone believe Bernanke and Obama have the balls to do that again?
I am a libertarian, and I do not believe in net neutrality regulation. However I see nothing wrong with FOSS. The attempt to put them together as one is simply a red herring
If someone wants to make a more accurate analogy, it would be the government making a law that says that FOSS developers can not restrict commercial uses or distribution of the software they write.
This is exactly how Apple lost the PC war
Apple had one computer with one operating system (the mac) vs one operating system (MS-DOS and later Windows) running on hundreds of different clones.
Eventually, the clones competed fiercely on price and features and ate away most of the market share. This happens even as apple had an arguably better product.
So... The real problem is that they have a local monopoly then.
Currently cities make exclusive deals with ISP's over an area, if they were allowed to compete freely they would have much less incentive to "abuse" since competition would wipe them out.
Second, net neutrality regulation is a solution searching for a problem. We do not currently have any issue with this, we have not had it for decades. So why fix something that so obviously isn't broken?
Third, give credit to free market, which pretty much killed DRM (in spite of government's DMCA). It was not government that forced apple and other online music vendors to kill DRM, it was simple competition. Even Comcast's torrent problem (the closest thing to violating any net neutrality regulation), was completely killed by free market. People did not liked it, and they backed out after public's outrage and potential customer loss.
Forth, there could be legitimate reasons to have non neutral networks. For example, if google decided to give away free internet access that would happen to give their services a boost. Why not?? I would "buy" it. Who are you or the government to tell me (or google) that we are doing something wrong? isn't it a matter that only concerns Google and me?
Only time will tell if 7 will happen, or apple will do something to avoid a history repeat.
If the ISP can snoop you have no security in your papers.
What does this have to do with the constitution?
If the ISP can throttle who you can speak to, you have no free assembly.
you still have the right to free assembly. They do not have the obligation to help you, especially since you are using their property and accepted their terms.
If the ISP can ban communications, you have no speech.
Same as above.
PS show where it says you can create a corporation in the constitution?
nowhere. That is why the government does not (or should not) create corporations.
If you read the constitution, it is very simple: unless prohibited by the constitution, individuals can do whatever they want. Unless granted by the constitution, the federal government can do nothing. Nowadays, they completely ignore this document, and government does whatever they want.
The constitution is not meant to restrict individuals or companies, it is meant to restrict government. That is why it explicitly says that unless a power is granted to the federal government by the constitution, that power is reserved to the individuals or the states.
If net neutrality was proposed at a state level, then yes, it would be compliant with the constitution, each state would choose whether to implement it or not.
How come no one even asks anymore whether a bill would violate the constitution?. Section 1,8 lists the 20 powers that congress has, go ahead and read them, they are written in plain English unlike any bill that has been passed in the last few decades. The 10th amendment explicitly reserves any other power to the states or to the people.
Nowhere in those 20 listed powers can you read anything about telecommunications or anything that could be remotely interpreted to justify net neutrality.
2 people hit out of 6 billion in the world, so odds are 1 in 3 billion or the PDOOMA 1 in 1 million FTA
what are the odds that either the androgynous boy or some reporter made the whole thing up?
According to your argument, it is the people who suffer the most of these taxes. I don't know about you, but I don't think this is a good thing.
But there is also another issue, US taxes profits overseas as opposed to most other countries that have territorial taxes, and it is extremely high. that means that an american company has a huge disadvantage against a company from other country that does not charge taxes earned outside.
Moreover, the US is a tax heaven itself, it does not charge taxes to any foreign company doing business here. If we do not want to be hipocrits, and we want the foreign countries to stop being tax heavens, so should we. This means that we are simply going to loose a ton of business to more competitive countries.
Please see this excellent video analyzing the moral and economic issues with going after tax heavens.
The real solution is not to go after the tax heavens, the real solution is to lower the taxes here to give an incentive for companies to do business here and not outside
I realize this is slashdot, which tends to have a socialist view, and we are talking about *evil* microsoft, so there is no convincing people here, but this reasoning does not only apply to microsoft, a lot of companies (the ones that can) will simply pack up and leave.
The Chinese have been engaging in protectionism for years now, by keeping their currency artificially low.
You accuse the Chinese of manipulating the currency. Yet, look at what our wonderful FED is doing to our own currency. That chart represents how much money the FED has printed (fisically, electronically or otherwise). If you really think we are at risk of "deflation", you have been drinking too much kool-aid.
Also, look at history, we (the US) conned the world by telling them that dollars where redeemable for gold. And once the dollar became the world currency, we went off of the gold standard (1971) and started printing it like crazy.
One ounce of gold was worth $35-$36 beginning 1971, it is worth $914 at close today. That means that the dollar lost 96% of its value in 38 years.
The Chinese may not be free of sin, but we are certainly not the country to throw the first stone.
What do you think will happen if the Chinese let their currency gain value? Every product that comes from China will become more expensive, or simply unavailable. This "protectionism" is letting you buy cheap products. In the short run, yes, China's exporting companies will suffer, but in the long run, products in China will become cheap (relative to the US and the rest of the world), and they will enjoy consumption like we have here.
It took me all of 30 seconds to realize the full potential for this technology
This seems like the wrong incentive to me. They are not providing any incentive to loose the weight for the employee. What do they care if the employer pays a fine?
Moreover, what this is going to cause is that companies are going to discriminate against overweight people when hiring, to avoid paying a fine.
It would seem more straight forward to me if they fined the overweight person himself, or if they don't want to do something so unpopular, raise taxes and give tax breaks to fit people.
no, konqueror is using KHTML and will use it in the foreseeable future. There is a google summer of code to work on the webkit kpart so that konqueror will be able to use webkit by the end of the summer, but it will probably wont be mainstream for a while:
A while ago, konqueror developers posted a FAQ describing the future of KHTML. As of today, it still applies
A posibility is that, a new browser may be added to kde, that will be tunned for web browsing as opposed to konqueror which is a swiss army knife. Kind of what Dolphin did for file management. There is already a webkit based browser in the works that could achieve this in the future.
...that weights 3 pounds?
Heck you can get those specs for about $300 on a desktop.
The fact is that you are paying that much because of the weight, because of how portable it is. The closest thing to your specs that weights 4 pounds is the mac book air and that starts at $1700.
This same thing happened to us with Flash.
Flash was all powerful and pretty. Putting aside the serious deficiencies with flash, hiring quality people to work with it was nearly impossible. The people that where good with flash where graphics designers, they like to do pretty animations and colorful graphics, but they where terrible programmers, and knew nothing about usability and user interfaces. The people that where good programmers avoided flash like the plague ( myself included :), why did I ever go work for them? ). Usability people's first recommendation: dump flash.
So if you are a big enough shop, and you decide to do your web application in flash, you need a minimum of 4 people: A graphics designer to do flash, a user interface guy to design your interface and a programmer to do your code, and a project manager that can make them work together. If you are a small shop, and can not afford 4 people, you should really reconsider your choice of platform.
At the end, we ended up switching to good old HTML, the transition was very painful, but now there are lot more options when hiring, the product improved dramatically, and there is less worry about someone being hit by a bus.
There is an obvious application for this technology.
This is an easy to reproduce set of bugs someone else found on their browser.
I would be glad to receive bug reports with an easy to use test case. It saves me the trouble of determining if it is a bug or not, coming up with a test case, the pain of communicating back and forth with the customer trying to find out what they are doing and how the bug is being triggered, etc. Also, this test suite will improve compatibility with other browsers so it will reduce bug reports in the long run.
Why the heck would they be pissed?
- Current patent system: Someone discovers this, protects it with patents, and locks it up for a few years
- No patents for medical advances: Why would anybody spend any money on research if someone can come along and reproduce the formula? Philanthropy money is very limited. You really need the big capitalist bucks to back research or nothing significant will ever be discovered. You need to provide some sort of economic incentive if you want people to invest in research, and that is why patents exist
- Goverment sponsored research: The problem with this system is that the government has no incentive whatsoever to be efficient. If they used the money to give away medicine rather than research, they would get more votes. Moreover, some of the most promising research like steam cell, are so controversial that most politicians would steer clear from it. This also opens the door for religion to influence research since the vast majority of voters belong to some religion.
The absolute best system is one where helping people and researching is in your best economic interest. A system where by healing someone you make a profit. This way money will naturally flow towards health care. Of the three alternatives, patents is the one that is closer to that. If you can come up with another system, I would love to hear about it.Here is a picture of Roman Zippel trying to socialize with fellow kernel hackers.
The Patent troll does not have to own the patent. For example, Microsoft can grant them a license that allows the patent troll to do these deal and then forward the money to Microsoft with a small percentage staying with the patent troll.
Heck, Microsoft can create another company just for this purpose. It would not be hard to get around the GPLv3 with that language.
Leave aside Microsoft for a minute. The GPLv3 does nothing to protect against future threats, as long as the threatening companies does not distribute software. It focuses so much on Microsoft, that it leaves the door open to any other company outside of the software distribution business.
...You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work...So all Microsoft has to do is give the patents to a proxy company that is not in the business of distributing software, ie. a patent troll, and the proxy company can do the Proxy-Novel deals for them, even over GPLv3 software, without Novel being in violation of the GPLv3.
And if you are thinking of removing the "that is in the business of distributing software" part for your project, think again. Your license would have additional restrictions not present in vanilla GPLv3. Your modified GPLv3 would not be GPLv3 compatible and your code would no longer be able to link to GPLv3 code. You would not be able to accept patches to your code under GPLv3.
LGPL version 3 does not apply to WebKit.
Even if kde developers decide to switch KHTML to LGPL v3, WebKit was forked from a earlier LGPL v2 copy of KHTML, so they would not be affected.
Moreover, one of the biggest contributors (the biggest?) to WebKit is Apple. Somehow it seems unlikely that apple will agree to a change in the license that can prevent it's use in their own cell phone. To be able to relicense it, you will need agreement from all copyright holders including Apple.
This is shameless FUD from FSF.
So FSF, I'll say the same thing that has been said so many times to SCO: Show us the infringing code or STFU.
I agree, T-Mobile really has a superb service.
So much they even UNLOCKED my cell phone. So long I bought the cell phone from T-Mobile, and I have been with them for a few months. They will be extremely polite while doing so. They are the "don't be evil" carrier of the bunch.