Olympic didn't sink at all, much less in "roughly the same way" as either Titanic or Britannic. It was dismantled when retired from service after the merger of White Star Lines with Cunard Lines.
A hole in the bow caused massive flooding,sinking the ship. The redesigns after titanic helped, but the base design was flawed. While the britanica took a torpedo and had a full complenment of life rafts.
The Britannic struck a mine; it appears to have sunk because its watertight portals on the lower decks were open to ventilate patient wards (it had been pressed into service as a hospital ship in WWI) and perhaps because internal watertight doors were open for ventilation and access purposes.
(And, of course, because it struck a mine, a device purpose built for the sinking of ships.)
All three ships sank similarly.
That's a stretch even in the case of the two that sank, and of course nonsense in the case of the one that did not.
That's true. Britannic, which was launched as a hospital ship due to WWI, sunk after striking a mine. Olympic is the only one which lasted through the 1910s.
There were 3 identical ships built (Titanic, Olympic, Britannic). Only one suffered from bad rivets.
They weren't identical; Olympic, the first built wasn't identical to Titanic initially, and was refitted in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster while Britannic (originally promoted as Gigantic, a name which was changed in the wake of the Titanic disaster), which hadn't been completed at the time of the Titanic disaster, incorporated design changes as a result of the Titanic disaster.
There seem to be a *large* number of people who have convinced themselves that animals with the intelligecne of dogs or cats are non-sentient, and any personality or self awareness that they seem to exhibit is just the owners self-deception.
The absence of anything remotely like an objective, testable definition of "personality" and "self-awareness" makes most discussions of the question "does X have personality" battles of poorly examined preconceptions. (And, yes, there are testable operationalizations of the idea of "personality" and "self-awareness" but they tend to be very distant proxies for the ideas people attach to "personality" and "self-awareness" with no real reason to believe that they have any correspondence to the interesting features people have in mind with those words.)
My point was that you have a broken system and oddly enough, you are getting bad results from this broken system.
And my point is that you completely failed in attempting to identify the part of the system that was broken, in accurately describing the part of the system that you mischaracterized as broken, and in accurately describing the historical context of the part of the system that you mischaracterized as broken.
You did not address my core point which is that so long as you have a system like the Fed, you will always have more debt than dollars in circulation and no amount of tinkering will change that.
I didn't address that point because its a completely beside the, well, point (at least, the point that matters). I did address the important (and wrong) point you made related to that, which is that not only does more debt than money exist, but that that is somehow a problem.
The system is destined to collapse one way or another,
This statement of faith is unsupported by evidence or reason.
for many of the same reasons why Ponzi schemes must eventually fail.
No, this is simply wrong. Ponzi schemes must eventually fail because they require an exponential increase in the number of participants each round of operation, and because each participant has an incentive to maximize the frequency of the rounds; in most, it takes very few rounds before the number of required participants exceeds the population of the planet, failure is guaranteed at some point no later, and often much earlier, than that. The modern banking system, in general, does not have that problem (speculative investment bubbles, which have existed both before and after central banking became the dominant international norm and are independent of it, often exhibit dynamics not unlike a Ponzi scheme, but, again, that's a different issue than central banking.)
The items you mention, like the bursting of the housing bubble, only impact when this system fails.
Bursting of speculative bubbles cause very similar economic failures whether or not there is central banking. They don't influence the inevitable failures that result from central banking, they directly produce failures on their own.
I never claimed that you can't have a depression without a fractional reserve system, only that this built-in debt that no one in the mainstream media ever talks about (except in vague aggregate terms like "national debt") is a huge factor in the current depression.
National debt is not a vague aggregate, its a very specific measure of debt of a specific entity (the federal government), and it has little to do with the inherent debt in the kind of money system we have, since the system does not prevent any individual entity, including a national government, from having zero or negative debt. You seem to either not understand what nation debt is, or be engaging in the fallacy of distribution. And your broader point remains wrong, no matter how many times you repeat it.
Generally, people don't seem very interested in truth; what they seem to want is palatable truth that makes them feel better.
That would explain your conveniently simple, but both economically and historically ignorant description of the roots of our problem.
This is one of those things (a character weakness, actually) that I consider to be "not my problem" and I generally refuse to accommodate it.
It might be better for you if you would consider it "your problem", and would try to refuse to indulge in it.
Assuming you are sincerely interested in this, you may find it interesting to research Andrew Jackson, his stated reasons for opposing the central bank of his time, and in particula
The world is in a global economic depression because the wealthiest nations have all adopted a centralized banking system like the USA's Federal Reserve. This system, inherently and by design, has more debt than currency in circulation to pay that debt because interest (the "prime rate") is attached to money the moment it is created.
Uh, no.
That was all true for a long time without an global economic depression.
There is a recession in the US and some other places which may become a global economic depression because of a massive credit seize-up in the wake of, among other things, the bursting of the housing bubble in the US, and because of other factors (including the decline in income in the bottom four quintiles even during the most recent expansion in the US) reducing both industrial and consumer demand. The global reach of the crisis is due to the effect that the world economy is massively integrated through investment and trade.
The independent central banks that have become a near-universal norm have only marginal relevance; they aren't a significant cause of the problem (government policies in the US, like Gramm-Leach-Bliley, probably a significant role, but that's not central bank action.) Nor, for that matter, are they capable of doing much about the problem; they are mostly capable of short-term stabilization of minor disruptions, big crises render monetary responses mostly meaningless except as slight mitigation at best.
Let's say that the Federal Reserve has just been set up. There is currently no money in circulation so the first money is created.
Um, there was money in circulation when the Federal Reserve was set up.
I hope people understand why the Founding Fathers considered centralized banks to be more dangerous than standing armies
"the Founding Fathers" did no such thing. Certain of the Founding Fathers opposed a central bank (Jefferson and those that went on to form the nucleus of the Democratic-Republicans), OTOH, certain of the Founding Fathers (e.g., Alexandar Hamilton and the rest of those that went on to form the nucleus of the Federalists) certainly favored a central bank as a desirable thing.
The only people who are able to sift through hundreds of thousands of lines of code and spot areas to improve on are people incredibly familiar with the code and probably the main development team.
That may be true if one assumes that the method of confirming the problem is a manual searching through the source code.
Most improvements come after people have actually run the software, used the drivers, run benchmarks and noticed that the program is buggy or sluggish in certain areas.
Which is much easier with open-source projects where its much easier to conduct those kinds of experience, whether or not you review any more of the source code than is necessary to understand the interfaces of the components you are replacing.
The benefits of open source are not all dependent on people reviewing existing source code line by line.
A paper currency still maintains a fig leaf of respectability, because inflation is limited by (a) how fast your physical printing presses run, and (b) people noticing that more physical notes are circulating.
Actually, no. Increases in the money supply are limited by (a). Inflation is limited by neither (a) nor (b), even in a physical currency system. Inflation is not the same thing as increase in the money supply, nor is it the same thing as perceived increase in the money supply. It is something that simple supply and demand analysis suggests is a likely consequence of increases in the money supply if all other variables are held constant.
Previous attempts to inflate a physical fiat currency (e.g. the Civil War Greenback) resulted in a currency crash as people fled from the inflating currency into more stable currencies, like gold coin.
No one ever attempts to inflate a currency, except perhaps cinematic villains. What arguably happened in the civil war was an attempt to monetize the debt by printing more money. Inflation is likeyl side effect of debt monetization, but not the intended goal. (Avoiding debt monetization by governments is one reason beyond the adoption of an "independent" central bank as near-universal norm in the modern world.)
Having a fiat currency of account means that (a) you can inflate your currency as much as you desire, and (b) people won't notice it as quickly, because numbers on a check or credit card statement don't have the same visceral impact as piles of paper bills or stacks of metal coins.
Inflation isn't a product of "visceral impact", its a product of people actually having more money to spend when the pool of goods to buy grows less quickly. Further, information about the quantity of money in circulation in the modern world spreads with equal rapidity whether its in account or paper.
In a system where the vast majority of money is in the form of a fiat currency of account, money cannot change hands except through the banking system. All transactions begin as deposits in the account of the buyer and end up as deposits in the account of the seller.
Wrong. In a system where the vast majority of money is in the form of a fiat currency of account, most exchange of money must occur via exchanges of account (which need not involve banks -- non-bank institutions can sell on direct credit and settle without a bank transfer, though as a practical matter one expects that will generally be a very small fraction of total transactions. You don't get from "vast majority" to "all" in any case.
The deflation of prices in the current economic environment is inevitably a temporary matter.
All of human society is a "temporary matter", and one certainly hopes that deflation isn't long-lasting.
There is a massive amount of pent-up monetary inflation that has been pumped into the system
"monetary inflation" isn't a thing that can be "pent-up" or "pumped into the system", much less both. What there is is a lot of money that has been created by Fed lending, largely in response to the money that has been destroyed by the evaporation of private credit.
The result is that the multiplier effect isn't currently happening, therefore the Fed's actions are having little to no immediate effect.
Well, some of the Feds actions are having no immediate effect because they are purely symbolic, and not actual "actions". For instance, lowering the Fed funds target rate to 0-0.25% seems like a big action, but it was really a non-action since despite the higher target rate, the Fed funds rate was in the 0-0.25% range before the target rate was lowered.
As that uncertainty eases up, and banks are less afraid of runs, t
Sorry, that's just a stupid argument. Because an application is closed source they're never going to boost performance?
Uh, no.
The argument was because the product is open source (and implicitly, though this wasn't stated by GP, an open development process) it is easier for outside observers (1) to confirm the underlying root of the performance problem, and (2) to confirm that progress is underway to correct that root cause.
It is not that because the other product is closed source it will necessarily never improve.
Clean coal is green. (It's also mined magical pixies from mines located at the opposite ends of rainbows from those occupied by leprachauns and their pots of gold.)
If it's getting warmer, wouldn't this happen all by itself?
Uh, no, evaporation beyond that resulting from existing environmental conditions would not happen all by itself, regardless of what the existing environmental conditions are. The evaporation that would happen by itself is the evaporation that happens without any special intervention, all by itself. See how that works?
Actually, the Shuttle Enterprise was going to be called the Constitution after the naval ship of the same name.
This is, of course, true in fact, but not in the continuity of Star Trek where the shuttle itself is one of the preceding "Enterprises" after which the series of starships was named. (Interestingly enough, Constitution was adopted as the class name of the starship class to which Enterprise belonged in the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a designation which was incorporated into later episodes and films.)
Isn't that a bad thing? Copyrights should expire after the original creator's (or his wife's) death.
Personally, I think that a reasonable fixed term would be a better choice to limit copyrights, rather than ending them with someone's death, which gives other people an interest in promoting that death.
What benefit would the ISP have for kicking off customers?
It enables them to continue overselling bandwidth without actually having the capacity to support its use, by selectively booting the small percentage of users that actually use what they are paying for.
Alternative explanation is that they have actually understood that extortion is bad.. nah.. not likely.
The new policy is still bullying, just bullying ISPs to cut-off P2P users rather than bullying users directly. If the ISPs play ball -- and they have less motivation to fight than the targetted users (indeed, since the users mainly targetted are likely a very small proportion of the user base that is using a high proportion of the oversold bandwidth that the ISP has available, it may see the RIAA as giving it an excuse for something it would like to do anyway) -- then the user has none of the options to defend themselves that they would have if the RIAA went after them with direct litigation.
Have you read up on what an "open market operation" is?
Yes.
I have, several times, and I still don't know how that ever passed for legitimate bookkeeping.
Open market operations are not form of bookkeeping, "legitimate" or not. This seems to be the first problem in your understanding. Clearly, records have to be kept of open market operations, but those records are not the operations.
The Fed sets an interest rate target. By itself, this would be tilting at windmills that meant nothing. But if banks are charging interest rates that are higher than the target, the Fed buys securities (usually Treasury bonds) from the banks, depositing money directly into the banks' individual reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve in order to purchase them. Because the banks now have more reserves, they can make more loans. This is a rise in supply of loans without a corresponding rise in demand for them, and thus loan prices (interest rates) fall through competition.
Yes, that's the basic theory. And the fed does the reverse if the banks are charging each other interest rates lower than the target.
Wait, where did the Fed get the money? That's the 2 Trillion Dollar Question. Federal reserve accounts are just ledgers full of numbers. Today they're spreadsheets on a computer; previously, paper ledgers were used, but it's the same idea. Either way, no physical dollar bills ever changed hands from Fed to bank, ever since the Fed was created in 1913.
So? Physical dollar bills are nothing special, they're just an expense. A fiat currency of account is exactly the same as a physical fiat currency.
(Plus, of course, this isn't true: paper dollars change hands between the Fed and banks all the time, which is, in fact, how all paper dollars get into circulation. The banks pay for the paper dollars out of their reserve accounts.)
This flow of money from bank to bank is the "velocity of money" euphemism that economists speak of.
The velocity of money is the number of times the same dollar is spent (within a bounded, temporally and often geographically as well, universe of analysis), whether it touches a bank anywhere in between is irrelevant. It is not the magnification in the actual supply of money caused by fractional reserve banking.
What's actually happening is that the small amount of monetary inflation created through open market operations is multiplied through fractional banking, and at the same time the monetary inflation transforms into price inflation driving up prices as it changes hands.
Except when it doesn't, as now, when the Fed is pouring out money, and prices are deflating. But, yes, the a major point of open market operations is to influence inflation, both by contracting the money supply to avoid high inflation (tight money policy), and to expand the money supply to fight deflation (loose money policy) as the Fed is currently attempting.
Actually, "it" (Fundamentalism) is new (exactly the same age as the word), and the people doing the witch burning weren't Fundamentalists. The proper noun "Fundamentalists" refers to members of a particular theological movement that originated in American Protestantism.
Now, if the poster who first made the reference had said "fundamentalists", which means nothing more than those who strictly adhere to any belief system, that would be different. (Arguably, still wrong, but that's a matter of debating the actual motivations of the act.)
Important information that precedes any answer to the question you ask has either been left out, or not decided, and the description given is self-contradictory on some of the important parts that aren't omitted. For instance, you say students will "essentially own the machines" and then talk about their ability to purchase them after graduation, and state mandates for filtering on school machines. Neither of the latter two points are consistent with the former: student ownership means students don't need to buy them, and mandates that apply to school-owned machines don't apply to them.
Most importantly, you need a coherent idea of why you are spending the money to buy computers to give (or lend, as it seems from your description) computers to students. Once you know that, the uses and restrictions that are consistent with that will be much easier to determine, because you will actually have something to evaluate them against.
(Personally, I think once you know why students need computers, it might be better to decide on a common hardware/software platform that meets that need, communicate that it was required, and subsidize purchase and reasonable repair/replacement -- with a means test -- rather than the school buying computers for the whole student population and retaining ownership and responsibility for monitoring/controlling their use at all times, particularly if there are significant state mandates that apply to school-owned computers.)
--- We're a school district in the beginning phases of a laptop program which has the eventual goal of putting a Macbook in the hands of every student from 6th to 12th grade. The students will essentially own the computers, are expected to take them home every night, and will be able to purchase the laptops for a nominal fee upon graduation. Here's the dilemma -- how much freedom do you give to students? The state mandates web filtering on all machines. However, there is some flexibility on exactly what should be filtered. Are things like Facebook and Myspace a legitimate use of a school computer? What about games, forums, or blogs, all of which could be educational, distracting or obscene? We also have the ability to monitor any machine remotely, lock the machine down at certain hours, prevent the installation of any software by the user, and prevent the use of iChat. How far do we take this? While on one hand we need to avoid legal problems and irresponsible behavior, there's a danger of going so far to minimize liability that we make the tool nearly useless. Equally concerning is the message sent to the students. Will a perceived lack of trust cripple the effectiveness of the program?
Fractional reserve is the root of our problems today.
No, its not. And regulated fractional reserve banking requires banks to get their money from somewhere, contrary to your indication that it does not. They have to acquire the reserves, and the permission to issue more money via reserve regulations.
The system is designed to lend out more money than actually exists
No, it doesn't. All money that is lent out actually exists as much as any money exists.
thus the economy is overloaded by design, and inflation is guaranteed.
Inflation is not guaranteed. In fact, for the last several months the US has been experiencing deflation.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year, nor do they yield 3% more meat.
Perhaps not, agricultural is a pretty mature field after thousands of years, though increases do continue. Technology isn't limited to computers.
Of course, there are lots of fields that are less mature than agriculture where a 3% increase in yield annually would be small.
You can say what you want about wealth, but there is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world
No, there isn't. Well, there is for some resources, there are declining quantities for others, and increasing quantities for yet still others.
and printing more money isn't going to change that.
Nor is it designed to. Nor is that particularly relevant to inflation, or to the actual problems we face at the moment.
I don't: I mean since currency ceased to be tied to anything of actual value, e.g., gold.
And what do you mean about it? The economy of the world hasn't been a bigger mess since the end of the gold standard than before it, and the big messes that have happened in the interim all have explanations that are independent of the absence of the gold standard (and currency remains tied to something of "actual value", to wit, the issuing government's willingness to accept it in payment of debts, fines, and taxes.
The move to fiat money was driven by exactly the same forces that drove the move to representational money which were important forces that drove the selection of the particular commodities used in commodity money, the need for money to keep moving to be useful as a medium of exchange.
There's perhaps a reasonable argument that fiat money is less secure than other forms as a store of value, but in an economy in which one can buy commodities freely with the fiat money, there is little reason to use money as a store of value in the first place, anyway. And, anyway, representational money has most of the same problems in that role (and of course, any system relying on notations of account is effectively, at best, representational money, even if the cash form of the currency is commodity money.)
Slashdot Mirror
Wandering well off-topic, though, the 1997 film Titanic had a James Horner soundtrack, and Celine Dion had vocals on exactly one song on it.
Olympic didn't sink at all, much less in "roughly the same way" as either Titanic or Britannic. It was dismantled when retired from service after the merger of White Star Lines with Cunard Lines.
The Britannic struck a mine; it appears to have sunk because its watertight portals on the lower decks were open to ventilate patient wards (it had been pressed into service as a hospital ship in WWI) and perhaps because internal watertight doors were open for ventilation and access purposes.
(And, of course, because it struck a mine, a device purpose built for the sinking of ships.)
That's a stretch even in the case of the two that sank, and of course nonsense in the case of the one that did not.
That's true. Britannic, which was launched as a hospital ship due to WWI, sunk after striking a mine. Olympic is the only one which lasted through the 1910s.
They weren't identical; Olympic, the first built wasn't identical to Titanic initially, and was refitted in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic disaster while Britannic (originally promoted as Gigantic, a name which was changed in the wake of the Titanic disaster), which hadn't been completed at the time of the Titanic disaster, incorporated design changes as a result of the Titanic disaster.
The absence of anything remotely like an objective, testable definition of "personality" and "self-awareness" makes most discussions of the question "does X have personality" battles of poorly examined preconceptions. (And, yes, there are testable operationalizations of the idea of "personality" and "self-awareness" but they tend to be very distant proxies for the ideas people attach to "personality" and "self-awareness" with no real reason to believe that they have any correspondence to the interesting features people have in mind with those words.)
And my point is that you completely failed in attempting to identify the part of the system that was broken, in accurately describing the part of the system that you mischaracterized as broken, and in accurately describing the historical context of the part of the system that you mischaracterized as broken.
I didn't address that point because its a completely beside the, well, point (at least, the point that matters). I did address the important (and wrong) point you made related to that, which is that not only does more debt than money exist, but that that is somehow a problem.
This statement of faith is unsupported by evidence or reason.
No, this is simply wrong. Ponzi schemes must eventually fail because they require an exponential increase in the number of participants each round of operation, and because each participant has an incentive to maximize the frequency of the rounds; in most, it takes very few rounds before the number of required participants exceeds the population of the planet, failure is guaranteed at some point no later, and often much earlier, than that. The modern banking system, in general, does not have that problem (speculative investment bubbles, which have existed both before and after central banking became the dominant international norm and are independent of it, often exhibit dynamics not unlike a Ponzi scheme, but, again, that's a different issue than central banking.)
Bursting of speculative bubbles cause very similar economic failures whether or not there is central banking. They don't influence the inevitable failures that result from central banking, they directly produce failures on their own.
National debt is not a vague aggregate, its a very specific measure of debt of a specific entity (the federal government), and it has little to do with the inherent debt in the kind of money system we have, since the system does not prevent any individual entity, including a national government, from having zero or negative debt. You seem to either not understand what nation debt is, or be engaging in the fallacy of distribution. And your broader point remains wrong, no matter how many times you repeat it.
That would explain your conveniently simple, but both economically and historically ignorant description of the roots of our problem.
It might be better for you if you would consider it "your problem", and would try to refuse to indulge in it.
Uh, no.
That was all true for a long time without an global economic depression.
There is a recession in the US and some other places which may become a global economic depression because of a massive credit seize-up in the wake of, among other things, the bursting of the housing bubble in the US, and because of other factors (including the decline in income in the bottom four quintiles even during the most recent expansion in the US) reducing both industrial and consumer demand. The global reach of the crisis is due to the effect that the world economy is massively integrated through investment and trade.
The independent central banks that have become a near-universal norm have only marginal relevance; they aren't a significant cause of the problem (government policies in the US, like Gramm-Leach-Bliley, probably a significant role, but that's not central bank action.) Nor, for that matter, are they capable of doing much about the problem; they are mostly capable of short-term stabilization of minor disruptions, big crises render monetary responses mostly meaningless except as slight mitigation at best.
Um, there was money in circulation when the Federal Reserve was set up.
"the Founding Fathers" did no such thing. Certain of the Founding Fathers opposed a central bank (Jefferson and those that went on to form the nucleus of the Democratic-Republicans), OTOH, certain of the Founding Fathers (e.g., Alexandar Hamilton and the rest of those that went on to form the nucleus of the Federalists) certainly favored a central bank as a desirable thing.
That may be true if one assumes that the method of confirming the problem is a manual searching through the source code.
Which is much easier with open-source projects where its much easier to conduct those kinds of experience, whether or not you review any more of the source code than is necessary to understand the interfaces of the components you are replacing.
The benefits of open source are not all dependent on people reviewing existing source code line by line.
Actually, no. Increases in the money supply are limited by (a). Inflation is limited by neither (a) nor (b), even in a physical currency system. Inflation is not the same thing as increase in the money supply, nor is it the same thing as perceived increase in the money supply. It is something that simple supply and demand analysis suggests is a likely consequence of increases in the money supply if all other variables are held constant.
No one ever attempts to inflate a currency, except perhaps cinematic villains. What arguably happened in the civil war was an attempt to monetize the debt by printing more money. Inflation is likeyl side effect of debt monetization, but not the intended goal. (Avoiding debt monetization by governments is one reason beyond the adoption of an "independent" central bank as near-universal norm in the modern world.)
Inflation isn't a product of "visceral impact", its a product of people actually having more money to spend when the pool of goods to buy grows less quickly. Further, information about the quantity of money in circulation in the modern world spreads with equal rapidity whether its in account or paper.
Wrong. In a system where the vast majority of money is in the form of a fiat currency of account, most exchange of money must occur via exchanges of account (which need not involve banks -- non-bank institutions can sell on direct credit and settle without a bank transfer, though as a practical matter one expects that will generally be a very small fraction of total transactions. You don't get from "vast majority" to "all" in any case.
All of human society is a "temporary matter", and one certainly hopes that deflation isn't long-lasting.
"monetary inflation" isn't a thing that can be "pent-up" or "pumped into the system", much less both. What there is is a lot of money that has been created by Fed lending, largely in response to the money that has been destroyed by the evaporation of private credit.
Well, some of the Feds actions are having no immediate effect because they are purely symbolic, and not actual "actions". For instance, lowering the Fed funds target rate to 0-0.25% seems like a big action, but it was really a non-action since despite the higher target rate, the Fed funds rate was in the 0-0.25% range before the target rate was lowered.
Uh, no.
The argument was because the product is open source (and implicitly, though this wasn't stated by GP, an open development process) it is easier for outside observers (1) to confirm the underlying root of the performance problem, and (2) to confirm that progress is underway to correct that root cause.
It is not that because the other product is closed source it will necessarily never improve.
Since every body of water is exactly 0 feet deep at the coastline, by definition, that last bit is pretty obvious.
Dirty coal is black.
Clean coal is green. (It's also mined magical pixies from mines located at the opposite ends of rainbows from those occupied by leprachauns and their pots of gold.)
Uh, no, evaporation beyond that resulting from existing environmental conditions would not happen all by itself, regardless of what the existing environmental conditions are. The evaporation that would happen by itself is the evaporation that happens without any special intervention, all by itself. See how that works?
This is, of course, true in fact, but not in the continuity of Star Trek where the shuttle itself is one of the preceding "Enterprises" after which the series of starships was named. (Interestingly enough, Constitution was adopted as the class name of the starship class to which Enterprise belonged in the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a designation which was incorporated into later episodes and films.)
Personally, I think that a reasonable fixed term would be a better choice to limit copyrights, rather than ending them with someone's death, which gives other people an interest in promoting that death.
It enables them to continue overselling bandwidth without actually having the capacity to support its use, by selectively booting the small percentage of users that actually use what they are paying for.
The new policy is still bullying, just bullying ISPs to cut-off P2P users rather than bullying users directly. If the ISPs play ball -- and they have less motivation to fight than the targetted users (indeed, since the users mainly targetted are likely a very small proportion of the user base that is using a high proportion of the oversold bandwidth that the ISP has available, it may see the RIAA as giving it an excuse for something it would like to do anyway) -- then the user has none of the options to defend themselves that they would have if the RIAA went after them with direct litigation.
Really? 200 degrees C is only 392 degrees F.
Yes.
Open market operations are not form of bookkeeping, "legitimate" or not. This seems to be the first problem in your understanding. Clearly, records have to be kept of open market operations, but those records are not the operations.
Yes, that's the basic theory. And the fed does the reverse if the banks are charging each other interest rates lower than the target.
So? Physical dollar bills are nothing special, they're just an expense. A fiat currency of account is exactly the same as a physical fiat currency.
(Plus, of course, this isn't true: paper dollars change hands between the Fed and banks all the time, which is, in fact, how all paper dollars get into circulation. The banks pay for the paper dollars out of their reserve accounts.)
The velocity of money is the number of times the same dollar is spent (within a bounded, temporally and often geographically as well, universe of analysis), whether it touches a bank anywhere in between is irrelevant. It is not the magnification in the actual supply of money caused by fractional reserve banking.
Except when it doesn't, as now, when the Fed is pouring out money, and prices are deflating. But, yes, the a major point of open market operations is to influence inflation, both by contracting the money supply to avoid high inflation (tight money policy), and to expand the money supply to fight deflation (loose money policy) as the Fed is currently attempting.
Actually, "it" (Fundamentalism) is new (exactly the same age as the word), and the people doing the witch burning weren't Fundamentalists. The proper noun "Fundamentalists" refers to members of a particular theological movement that originated in American Protestantism.
Now, if the poster who first made the reference had said "fundamentalists", which means nothing more than those who strictly adhere to any belief system, that would be different. (Arguably, still wrong, but that's a matter of debating the actual motivations of the act.)
Important information that precedes any answer to the question you ask has either been left out, or not decided, and the description given is self-contradictory on some of the important parts that aren't omitted. For instance, you say students will "essentially own the machines" and then talk about their ability to purchase them after graduation, and state mandates for filtering on school machines. Neither of the latter two points are consistent with the former: student ownership means students don't need to buy them, and mandates that apply to school-owned machines don't apply to them.
Most importantly, you need a coherent idea of why you are spending the money to buy computers to give (or lend, as it seems from your description) computers to students. Once you know that, the uses and restrictions that are consistent with that will be much easier to determine, because you will actually have something to evaluate them against.
(Personally, I think once you know why students need computers, it might be better to decide on a common hardware/software platform that meets that need, communicate that it was required, and subsidize purchase and reasonable repair/replacement -- with a means test -- rather than the school buying computers for the whole student population and retaining ownership and responsibility for monitoring/controlling their use at all times, particularly if there are significant state mandates that apply to school-owned computers.)
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We're a school district in the beginning phases of a laptop program which has the eventual goal of putting a Macbook in the hands of every student from 6th to 12th grade. The students will essentially own the computers, are expected to take them home every night, and will be able to purchase the laptops for a nominal fee upon graduation. Here's the dilemma -- how much freedom do you give to students? The state mandates web filtering on all machines. However, there is some flexibility on exactly what should be filtered. Are things like Facebook and Myspace a legitimate use of a school computer? What about games, forums, or blogs, all of which could be educational, distracting or obscene? We also have the ability to monitor any machine remotely, lock the machine down at certain hours, prevent the installation of any software by the user, and prevent the use of iChat. How far do we take this? While on one hand we need to avoid legal problems and irresponsible behavior, there's a danger of going so far to minimize liability that we make the tool nearly useless. Equally concerning is the message sent to the students. Will a perceived lack of trust cripple the effectiveness of the program?
Every flaw that anyone else has? That's impressive.
Strictly speaking, its not a factual part of history. Fundamentalism is a movement that arose much more recently than anyone being burnt at the stake.
Yes, they do.
No, its not. And regulated fractional reserve banking requires banks to get their money from somewhere, contrary to your indication that it does not. They have to acquire the reserves, and the permission to issue more money via reserve regulations.
No, it doesn't. All money that is lent out actually exists as much as any money exists.
Inflation is not guaranteed. In fact, for the last several months the US has been experiencing deflation.
Perhaps not, agricultural is a pretty mature field after thousands of years, though increases do continue. Technology isn't limited to computers.
Of course, there are lots of fields that are less mature than agriculture where a 3% increase in yield annually would be small.
No, there isn't. Well, there is for some resources, there are declining quantities for others, and increasing quantities for yet still others.
Nor is it designed to. Nor is that particularly relevant to inflation, or to the actual problems we face at the moment.
And what do you mean about it? The economy of the world hasn't been a bigger mess since the end of the gold standard than before it, and the big messes that have happened in the interim all have explanations that are independent of the absence of the gold standard (and currency remains tied to something of "actual value", to wit, the issuing government's willingness to accept it in payment of debts, fines, and taxes.
The move to fiat money was driven by exactly the same forces that drove the move to representational money which were important forces that drove the selection of the particular commodities used in commodity money, the need for money to keep moving to be useful as a medium of exchange.
There's perhaps a reasonable argument that fiat money is less secure than other forms as a store of value, but in an economy in which one can buy commodities freely with the fiat money, there is little reason to use money as a store of value in the first place, anyway. And, anyway, representational money has most of the same problems in that role (and of course, any system relying on notations of account is effectively, at best, representational money, even if the cash form of the currency is commodity money.)