Yes and no, it's a medium ground between fully opening the source code and keeping the APIs shut, but I'm not really sure how this differs from typical APIs where the programmer knows what the API is but doesn't necessarily know how any of it is accomplished internally.
Its hard to tell a lot of detail (and its possible that the concept is fluff that doesn't have a strong concept behind it) from anything I've seen about it, but the "open surface" description includes not just APIs but also "protocols and standards". Its also not clear what sense of "open" is being used -- if open merely means "disclosed" (which it might, from MS) then its a fairly low bar, if its "unencumbered", then having both the the programming APIs, networking protocols, and other standards "open" means that other vendors are free to implement them, even if the existing implementation isn't open-source.
In either the weak or the strong form, "open surface" is a valuable feature in the cloud (and the strong form obviously more valuable to than the weak form), but "open source" remains valuable as well (open surface is in part important because if the original implementation isn't open source, open surface -- particularly of the unencumbered form -- makes it more likely that a third-party open-source implementation will come to exist.)
Open source implementation of open-surface services is really the gold standard of the cloud -- it provides the maximum flexibility, including the flexibility to freely deploy locally the same cloud apps that you would deploy with a cloud vendor, and to -- assuming you are deploying locally -- evolve (or pay the developer of your choice to evolve) the platform as well as the applications.
If you want lambdas and such, why wouldn't you just use LISP or Scheme [racket-lang.org] instead of trying to hack it into a C-syntax family language.
Because the main competing C-derived language to Java (C#), which is also the key systems language for the main competing managed framework to the JVM (.NET) already has "lambdas and such", while still having the rest of syntax more accessible than Lisp-family languages to the vast number of developers that have strong backgrounds in C-derived languages but less background in Lisp-family languages.
Not only that, but tacking lambdas on to Java is going to be some crazy reuse of syntax instead of having a well-designed syntax for it.
The syntax seems very well designed to me, and is fairly similar lambda syntax in C# and other non-Lisp-family languages.
Wrong. That's like saying AT&T lowered their wireless data package price from $30 (unlimited) to $15 (250mb).
They did. Or $25/2Gb.
Unless you actually believe aT&T Did the Right Thing®, too?
I didn't make any statement about right or wrong. AT&T's change was, for most users, a price cut. It increased the price for heavy 3G data users, which is also a significant fact, but does not change the fact that the minimum cost of the data plan was reduced, and that the cost for most users was reduced.
(That said I was wrong factually about the cut; Netflix kept the price of the service most comparable to Wal-Mart's service -- streaming-only -- the same, the price cut was only for people using disc-only, which previously wasn't available separately. But in any case there wasn't a price increase for the service comparable to what Wal-Mart is offering.)
Today Wal-Mart has added streaming video to their website. What better time to compete with Netflix, now that they have raised their prices?
Netflix actually lowered the price customers pay to get the most comparable service to the Wal-Mart offering (streaming-only), as well as for disc-only service; the only people who saw price increases were those people who want both streaming and DVD delivery, which
There is no need whatsoever to do this for any system based on Intel graphics or ATI graphics, as these open source drivers are distributed with (and updated with) the Linux distribution.
Well, except that with many intel graphics systems, you have to choose between different sets of drivers that are broken in different ways (both open source and closed), so, yeah, the exact problem referred to upthread is particularly likely.
This means that these days a machine based on nVidia must really be considered as not suitable for running Linux. If you want to run Linux well, don't attempt to do it on a machine with nVidia graphics. Linux and nVidia graphics are simply not designed for each other (compared to Intel or ATI/AMD graphics).
IME, nVidia graphics work a lot better than Intel graphics on Linux. "Open source drivers are included with most distributions" is not the same thing as "drivers which work well are included with most distributions".
It isn't stupid at all. Lots and lots of scientific software is written by grad students worried about the results, and don't care about the quality of the code itself.
End users rarely care about the quality of code, they always care about the value delivered by the code. So, yeah, just as lots of business software (in the form of Access databases, excel spreadsheets often with extensive custom VBA, etc.) is written by end users that don't care about code quality, so is lots of scientific software. Code quality has no intrinsic value, it has instrumental value in terms of value delivered by the code (e.g., cleaner code reduces the cost of debugging the code and adding new functions.)
OTOH, IME, scientists who write tools that end up needing to be improved (either because they see new uses they'd like to put them to, or because they let other people use them) are no less quick than any other programmers who don't have previous experience with "productized" software to pick up on the value of taking steps to improve maintainability and flexibility.
Giving up on the US market just over not being able to use Java is unlikely and stupid. They will just find another dev language probably either extending Go or create a C++ framework. Assuming damages cover the already distributed androids they are fine to use java but for new version devs must rewrite their apps.
The VM is as big of a deal than the dev language. It seems to me that Google pretty clearly sees Android and the Dalvik VM as a short-term solution, with Chrome OS and PNaCl for native apps as the longer term solution. But its going to hurt them if they don't have time to give developers a gentle transition period where you've got Chrome running on Android, so both Android and Chrome OS apps can run, before deprecating traditional native apps in favor of PNaCl apps.
Netflix is making it cheaper to get discs than it has been previously.
How does this constitute "nuking disks"?
With Netflix nuking discs I wonder what the HW execs think about their only channel drying up.
Netflix is not a the only channel through which people buy Blu-Ray discs. In fact, its a channel through which people rent blu-ray discs, which reduces the incentive to buy them.
They're assuming that everyone has cheap, reliable, easily available broadband.
No, they aren't. They are concluding (not assuming) that bundling disk-based subscriptions with streaming subscriptions has adverse affects on their net profits, so they are unbundling the services and selling them separately. (This increases prices for people who want to keep both services, and decreases prices for people who either use only disks or only stream; therefore, it actually benefits people who don't have cheap, reliable, and easily available broadband, since those people will no longer be charged for a streaming service that they aren't using. It also benefts people who do have cheap, reliable, and easily available broadband but don't want to mess with physical disks. It increases costs for people like me who like to stream some things but prefer to get blu-ray for other things, but, hey, I can't really expect the only-streaming and only-disk people to subsidize my viewing habits forever.)
These are Google's own numbers here suggesting that the iPad is still eating their lunch.
Only suggests that if you assume that because all Android Honeycomb devices are tablets, it necessary follows that all Android tablets run Honeycomb. This is, to say the least, not true. The vast majority of Android tablets don't run Honeycomb.
I think the problem rests in old case law, developed when automation like this was just science fiction, that anything not on private property is fair game. We need a new legal concept of "public but ephemeral" that applies to information that is normally soon forgotten like who was in a parking lot a week ago.
I agree, in general, though there is room to quibble about whether the gap in the law is best sourced to "old case law" or to the fact that the Constitution itself doesn't consider the issue of public ephemeral data.
Any collection of ephemeral data that occurs without a warrant should itself expire within a short period of time as well should be distribution limited - i.e. no sending it off to another database at the FBI that is exempt.
That may still be too much of a slippery slope, because once its collected there will always be pressure to extend the retention and expand the distribution. All it would take is one kid getting kidnapped and the license plate data expiring a day before the cops thought to look at it and voila, ready-made emotional argument to push for doubling retention time.
Alternatively, you could retain the data indefinitely, but require a warrant for the search of the historical data, specifying the search parameters and providing the cause justifying the search. This would give non-current public ephemeral data similar protection to traditional private data, while at the same time not destroying the data itself. Since the data can be searched with a warrant issued with cause, this eliminates the risk of mandated destruction destroying evidence that could have solved a crime -- and thus eliminates the opportunity for exploiting that as the basis for lobbying for extension in the "casual search" window for the data.
I thought the Keynesians were predicting that with the stimulus we wouldn't see more than 8.5% unemployment?
Which Keynesians? I know Paul Krugman was predicting that we would see continued high unemployment for an extended period of time, with a significant potential for a second recession before employment significantly recovered, without a much more massive stimulus than Obama and Congress finally provided.
Weren't the Keynesians through the 2000s saying that housing was a good deal and everyone should get a house?
No, Randian Objectivists like Alan Greenspan were saying that. (Well, Greenspan specifically was, I don't actually recall anyone else taken seriously in economic matters saying it -- of course, people selling houses and selling mortgages and otherwise in the financial sector were saying it, but that's based on self-interest, not economic theory.)
Didn't the Austrians predict throughout the 2000s that the enormous bubble in housing, caused by Government intrusion into the marketplace, would bring down the entire U.S. economy?
If any Austrians that made that prediction, the only difference between them and many leading Keynesians (e.g., Krugman) and plenty of others who are market analysts but not economists of any broader stripe was after the "caused by..." part. The housing bubble was fairly widely recognized long before it burst.
But it rejects economical models and statistics. These models, never-mind how much are you inclined to believe them are full of flaws. And one of them particularly hardcore. The assumption that humans will make rational decisions based on presented facts.
That's actually not a feature of rational choice theory, which models behavior as making the choice with the best utility with full knowledge, not making a "rational decision" based on "presented facts". Its actually well-known that what it posits (which requires perfect information) isn't an accurate model of the underlying reality. How science works, though, is to arrive at successively better models of reality by positing a model which makes falsifiable predictions, testing them, and refining them as necessary. Within certain domains within economics and other social sciences, rational choice theory has reasonable predictive power and better models aren't available. Within other domains, it doesn't, and other models (often based on modifications to rational choice theory based on observations of how actual human decisionmaking has shown to diverge from utility optimizing with perfect information) are used.
Despite four decades of applied psychology research showing that rational decision making in certain situations is not attainable, your statistic lovers in the "we love Keynes" Department won't listen, and won't change their models accordingly.
You don't discard a model because research in a different domain shows that its basic principle isn't universally applicable. You discard a model because you have a model which works better. And there are lots of models used in lots of domains within economics are empirical models that aren't derived from simple rational choice theory to start with, including most of those labelled "Keynesian".
Discarding aggregate economic models based on rational choice theory that work empirically because rational choice doesn't model individual level decisions perfectly and thus can't be a perfect explanation of why those models work empirically is merely dumb. Discarding empirical economic models for which rational choice theory isn't central in the first place for that reason is insane.
Bernard Sanders is not the only self-described democratic socialist in the Congress; there are at least 69 others (since, including Sanders, there are 70 members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, but there may be additional self-described "democratic socialists" who are not members of the DSA.)
You're a troll.
No, I'm not. Words and phrases have meaning, and "self-described democratic socialist" is a phrase that applies to more than one person in the US Congress.
By any definition that covers the Democratic party most of the Republican's qualify as well.
If I had been referring to the Democratic party, then I wouldn't have said 70, I would have said 244 -- there are more than 70 Democrats in Congress. But the issue isn't how you define "democratic socialist", its how people describe themselves (Bernie Sanders was described, in GGP, falsely as the only SELF-DESCRIBED democratic socialist in Congress.) The Democratic Socialists of America are a group whose membership includes many Democrats (and many people who aren't Democrats, of whom Bernard Sanders is the only one in Congress), and which identifies itself as the nation's largest socialist organization. I may have overstated the number in Congress, as the count of 70 was current as of the 111th Congress, but, still, Bernard Sanders is far from the only self-described democratic socialist in Congress.
You see the dollar's weakness. This was the supposed "oil crisis" of the 70's. There was no shortage of supply, or sudden change in demand or speculation. The dollar shit, after Nixon went all the way off.
There were two major oil crises in the US in the 1970s. The first was before the official abandonment of the peg of the dollar to gold, when in an effort to reduce the trade deficit in order to preserve the peg Nixon imposed limits on oil imports (an effort which failed, which caused the complete abandonment of the already-merely-notional peg of the dollar to gold, and more significantly the peg of many other world currencies to the dollar), the second was when the Arab states raised prices globally and boycotted sales to Israel, the US, and certain close allies of those countries. So, your argument is wrong in, essentially, every point.
Expanding the money supply isn't necessary for economic growth - what happens instead is that as the economy grows, prices of everything fall
Actually, it is by definition impossible for that ("prices of everything fall") to happen in a regime where the currency is effectively pegged to a particular commodity; if you have a notionally commodity-pegged currency and prices of everything fall relative to the curerncy, then the fundamental basis of your currency system has collapsed.
This is mostly good. It means that you can save money and it'll be worth more to you in the future.
Insofar as this is true, you can achieve exactly the same effect in a fiat money system by buying whatever commodity it is that, in a commodity-backed system, the currency would be pegged to. But the store of value function isn't the important function of money, the medium of exchange function is, and pegging it to a single commodity (and thus exposing your principal medium of exchange to supply and demand fluctuations in that commodity) is disastrous to the medium of exchange function. So why do it?
Also, "expanding the money supply" means that the government effectively prints paper money and says "you have to accept this as payment on stuff", without them having done actual work to create more stuff in the economy. Why should they be allowed to do that? How do you keep them from doing it to excess, e.g. Weimar Germany where you needed wheelbarrows full of currency to buy bread, or Zimbabwe which has dropped at least 30 zeroes off their currency, leaving what a friend of mine called "homeopathic quantities of money"?
How do you stop government from any other bad policy decision? In a democracy, you don't elect people that show a bent toward that decision. If your system of government is broken enough that you can't do that, your problem isn't with your currency system, its with your system of government, so fix the real problem.
You want to try again to explain how the US didn't become a superpower until after WW2 (and further, to answer the GP, how the US wasn't already a superpower in 1971, the year it went off the gold standard)?
The U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933. It was recognized as the world's overwhelmingly dominant economic power when essentially the entire world adopted a system in which the U.S. dollar was the standard against which other currencies were pegged in 1946. Its true that the U.S currency was, in the same system, notionally pegged to gold, but (1) this peg featured very limited convertibility, and (2) this peg to gold very quickly broke down as anything more than notional, as gold within a decade or so was trading well above the notional peg price, and a variety of extreme steps had to be taken to attempt to maintain any credibility of the peg, which continued to become less and less meaningful, leading to abandoning reserve requirements and further steps to limit convertibility in 1968, attempts to reset the peg value vs. gold of the US dollar from 1971, and finally the Bretton Woods system of currencies using the U.S. dollar as the standard being abandoned in 1973.
Its important to note that the Bretton Woods arrangement wasn't a real good standard in the usual sense (the U.S. dollar wasn't freely convertible to gold), in attempt to restrict the opportunities for runs on gold and other problems which had caused the disastrous collapse of gold standards around the world not long before -- a failed attempt, at that, as the same problems even with the restricted convertibility brought down Bretton Woods, as well.
Pegging currencies to a single well-selected commodity might be good for the "store of value" function of money (but only in the short term, as pegged currencies regimes don't tend to last long in environments with modern, active trading markets), but its really bad (compared to fiat money) for the "medium of exchange" function, and experience has shown this pretty clearly. As long as people can buy commodities with money, any advantage a pegged currency would have for store of value is realized in a fiat money system as well, as people can just buy the commodity directly, and hold it as a store of value, liquidating it only as necessary to generate currency to use in exchange.
A well-selected, dynamically adjusted basket of commodities might work fairly well as basis for currency, but from a practical standpoint the management and selection of the basket would be even more subject to manipulation that would be opaque to the general public than the fairly simple and (comparatively) easily understood manipulations possible with fiat money. You probably get a lot better result for the effort, just in terms of currency policy and its effects, improving government transparency and accountability in a fiat money regime than trying to replace a fiat money regime with something else, and improving transparency and accountability has lots of side benefits outside of currency policy.
The US went off the gold standard in 1933. Much of the world (including the US) adopted a currency system in which the U.S. dollar was the standard, and the U.S. dollar was notionally pegged to gold but with only limited convertibility (only central banks could convert dollars to gold, and only in specified quantities) in 1946 (Bretton Woods), an arrangement which showed strains almost immediately, and which had effectively collapsed by the late 1960s (when a series of events, including a major run on gold and gold trading in markets far above its notionally fixed "peg" price, led the US acted to limit further even convertibility and to abandon its minimum reserve ratio of gold to dollars), and which effectively fell completely apart in 1971 when the long-standing notional peg at $35/oz. was abandoned and the dollar went through a series of price adjustments relative to gold, leading to complete abandonment of the pegs of other currencies to the dollar in the Bretton Woods arrangement in 1973.
no nonsense, U.S. went off the gold standard in 1973. The Depression had everything to do with self-referential paper pyramid scams, same as recession of now.
In the real world, the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933, and the while there is some debate among experts about how big a role the gold standard played in the Depression overall, it was undisputably a major factor in the bank run and bank collapses that were one of the early events of the depression, because these were directly triggered by waves of attempts to convert dollars to gold.
Its true that much of the world, including the U.S., adopted a system that was something like a gold standard under the 1946 Bretton Woods agreement, but this wasn't what most people (including most current advocates of a "gold standard") define as a gold standard (particularly, it was a "U.S. dollar standard" with a notional peg to gold, but only certain specially privileged actors had the right to convert dollars to gold; most gold standard advocates advocate free convertibility.)
Even the limited sort-of-gold-standard of Bretton Woods was showing major strains by the late 1950s, and was completely failed by the late 1960s (with major runs on gold, the US threatening to deny conversion of dollars to gold to certain countries, and the open market price of gold far above the notional peg price), and effectively killed any meaningful resemblance to a gold standard in 1971 when direct convertibility was suspended and then the dollar began a series of rapid adjustments in nominal gold value in an attempt to maintain the core of the Bretton Woods system, which was the peg of other currencies to the U.S. dollar.
What actually happened in 1973 is that the world left the U.S. dollar standard, more than the U.S. leaving any meaningful gold standard.
Quit being a shill for the banking cartel parasites who have been draining our wealth.
How about if you quit being a shill for the gold investors would-be parasites that are looking for their chance to join the banking cartels in that draining. If you look at the history of economies under the gold standard, its not like banking cartels were any less parasitic. The push for a return to a gold standard largely comes from people who have staked out positions in gold hoping to benefit from the inevitable runs on gold that gold standards produce, and their dupes.
BRILLIANT! That means that any flaws in your OS or applications (web browser) WON'T BE PATCHED
It doesn't get patches because it runs from read-only media; the approved version is updated when necessary to address security concerns, but you have to use new read only media, rather than patching the existing one, that being the nature of "read-only".
Fascinating that you didn't seem to notice that this came from Bernie Sanders who's the only self described democratic socialist in the national legislature.
Bernard Sanders is not the only self-described democratic socialist in the Congress; there are at least 69 others (since, including Sanders, there are 70 members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, but there may be additional self-described "democratic socialists" who are not members of the DSA.)
The Computational Document Format (CDF) allows authors to embed interactive charts, diagrams and graphics into their documents, allowing readers to adjust variables to see how increasing a price affects profits, for example, or display different segments of a brain scan. Wolfram aims to make the format easy enough for non-programmers to use, based on the linguistic commands used in its search engine. '[Currently] anyone who can make an Excel macro should easily be able to make interactivity for CDF,'
HTML+JS, XAML+VB.NET, and (obviously) Excel+VBA already meet this standard. And are widely deployed. Why do we need CDF as currently implemented?
'Where I'd like to get is that anyone who can make an Excel chart can make interactivity in CDFs.'"
And I'd like a pet unicorn. The hardest part of the task "make interactivity" (at least, interactivity that works correctly, without which interactivity is useless) in modern high-level environments isn't syntax, its developing the analytical skills necessary to clearly define what you want out of the interactivity. Non-interactive charts are conceptually simpler than any interactive behavior and will always be easier to specify a simple non-interactive like than to define useful interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Its hard to tell a lot of detail (and its possible that the concept is fluff that doesn't have a strong concept behind it) from anything I've seen about it, but the "open surface" description includes not just APIs but also "protocols and standards". Its also not clear what sense of "open" is being used -- if open merely means "disclosed" (which it might, from MS) then its a fairly low bar, if its "unencumbered", then having both the the programming APIs, networking protocols, and other standards "open" means that other vendors are free to implement them, even if the existing implementation isn't open-source.
In either the weak or the strong form, "open surface" is a valuable feature in the cloud (and the strong form obviously more valuable to than the weak form), but "open source" remains valuable as well (open surface is in part important because if the original implementation isn't open source, open surface -- particularly of the unencumbered form -- makes it more likely that a third-party open-source implementation will come to exist.)
Open source implementation of open-surface services is really the gold standard of the cloud -- it provides the maximum flexibility, including the flexibility to freely deploy locally the same cloud apps that you would deploy with a cloud vendor, and to -- assuming you are deploying locally -- evolve (or pay the developer of your choice to evolve) the platform as well as the applications.
Because the main competing C-derived language to Java (C#), which is also the key systems language for the main competing managed framework to the JVM (.NET) already has "lambdas and such", while still having the rest of syntax more accessible than Lisp-family languages to the vast number of developers that have strong backgrounds in C-derived languages but less background in Lisp-family languages.
The syntax seems very well designed to me, and is fairly similar lambda syntax in C# and other non-Lisp-family languages.
They did. Or $25/2Gb.
I didn't make any statement about right or wrong. AT&T's change was, for most users, a price cut. It increased the price for heavy 3G data users, which is also a significant fact, but does not change the fact that the minimum cost of the data plan was reduced, and that the cost for most users was reduced.
(That said I was wrong factually about the cut; Netflix kept the price of the service most comparable to Wal-Mart's service -- streaming-only -- the same, the price cut was only for people using disc-only, which previously wasn't available separately. But in any case there wasn't a price increase for the service comparable to what Wal-Mart is offering.)
Netflix actually lowered the price customers pay to get the most comparable service to the Wal-Mart offering (streaming-only), as well as for disc-only service; the only people who saw price increases were those people who want both streaming and DVD delivery, which
Well, except that with many intel graphics systems, you have to choose between different sets of drivers that are broken in different ways (both open source and closed), so, yeah, the exact problem referred to upthread is particularly likely.
IME, nVidia graphics work a lot better than Intel graphics on Linux. "Open source drivers are included with most distributions" is not the same thing as "drivers which work well are included with most distributions".
Actually, while someone wrote it, often the problem is precisely that no one is, in fact, responsible for it.
End users rarely care about the quality of code, they always care about the value delivered by the code. So, yeah, just as lots of business software (in the form of Access databases, excel spreadsheets often with extensive custom VBA, etc.) is written by end users that don't care about code quality, so is lots of scientific software. Code quality has no intrinsic value, it has instrumental value in terms of value delivered by the code (e.g., cleaner code reduces the cost of debugging the code and adding new functions.)
OTOH, IME, scientists who write tools that end up needing to be improved (either because they see new uses they'd like to put them to, or because they let other people use them) are no less quick than any other programmers who don't have previous experience with "productized" software to pick up on the value of taking steps to improve maintainability and flexibility.
The VM is as big of a deal than the dev language. It seems to me that Google pretty clearly sees Android and the Dalvik VM as a short-term solution, with Chrome OS and PNaCl for native apps as the longer term solution. But its going to hurt them if they don't have time to give developers a gentle transition period where you've got Chrome running on Android, so both Android and Chrome OS apps can run, before deprecating traditional native apps in favor of PNaCl apps.
Netflix is making it cheaper to get discs than it has been previously.
How does this constitute "nuking disks"?
Netflix is not a the only channel through which people buy Blu-Ray discs. In fact, its a channel through which people rent blu-ray discs, which reduces the incentive to buy them.
No, they aren't. They are concluding (not assuming) that bundling disk-based subscriptions with streaming subscriptions has adverse affects on their net profits, so they are unbundling the services and selling them separately. (This increases prices for people who want to keep both services, and decreases prices for people who either use only disks or only stream; therefore, it actually benefits people who don't have cheap, reliable, and easily available broadband, since those people will no longer be charged for a streaming service that they aren't using. It also benefts people who do have cheap, reliable, and easily available broadband but don't want to mess with physical disks. It increases costs for people like me who like to stream some things but prefer to get blu-ray for other things, but, hey, I can't really expect the only-streaming and only-disk people to subsidize my viewing habits forever.)
Only suggests that if you assume that because all Android Honeycomb devices are tablets, it necessary follows that all Android tablets run Honeycomb. This is, to say the least, not true. The vast majority of Android tablets don't run Honeycomb.
I agree, in general, though there is room to quibble about whether the gap in the law is best sourced to "old case law" or to the fact that the Constitution itself doesn't consider the issue of public ephemeral data.
Alternatively, you could retain the data indefinitely, but require a warrant for the search of the historical data, specifying the search parameters and providing the cause justifying the search. This would give non-current public ephemeral data similar protection to traditional private data, while at the same time not destroying the data itself. Since the data can be searched with a warrant issued with cause, this eliminates the risk of mandated destruction destroying evidence that could have solved a crime -- and thus eliminates the opportunity for exploiting that as the basis for lobbying for extension in the "casual search" window for the data.
Which Keynesians? I know Paul Krugman was predicting that we would see continued high unemployment for an extended period of time, with a significant potential for a second recession before employment significantly recovered, without a much more massive stimulus than Obama and Congress finally provided.
No, Randian Objectivists like Alan Greenspan were saying that. (Well, Greenspan specifically was, I don't actually recall anyone else taken seriously in economic matters saying it -- of course, people selling houses and selling mortgages and otherwise in the financial sector were saying it, but that's based on self-interest, not economic theory.)
If any Austrians that made that prediction, the only difference between them and many leading Keynesians (e.g., Krugman) and plenty of others who are market analysts but not economists of any broader stripe was after the "caused by..." part. The housing bubble was fairly widely recognized long before it burst.
Actually its a series of loans, all of which were paid back, and there was never that much money loaned out at one time.
That's actually not a feature of rational choice theory, which models behavior as making the choice with the best utility with full knowledge, not making a "rational decision" based on "presented facts". Its actually well-known that what it posits (which requires perfect information) isn't an accurate model of the underlying reality. How science works, though, is to arrive at successively better models of reality by positing a model which makes falsifiable predictions, testing them, and refining them as necessary. Within certain domains within economics and other social sciences, rational choice theory has reasonable predictive power and better models aren't available. Within other domains, it doesn't, and other models (often based on modifications to rational choice theory based on observations of how actual human decisionmaking has shown to diverge from utility optimizing with perfect information) are used.
You don't discard a model because research in a different domain shows that its basic principle isn't universally applicable. You discard a model because you have a model which works better. And there are lots of models used in lots of domains within economics are empirical models that aren't derived from simple rational choice theory to start with, including most of those labelled "Keynesian".
Discarding aggregate economic models based on rational choice theory that work empirically because rational choice doesn't model individual level decisions perfectly and thus can't be a perfect explanation of why those models work empirically is merely dumb. Discarding empirical economic models for which rational choice theory isn't central in the first place for that reason is insane.
No, I'm not. Words and phrases have meaning, and "self-described democratic socialist" is a phrase that applies to more than one person in the US Congress.
If I had been referring to the Democratic party, then I wouldn't have said 70, I would have said 244 -- there are more than 70 Democrats in Congress. But the issue isn't how you define "democratic socialist", its how people describe themselves (Bernie Sanders was described, in GGP, falsely as the only SELF-DESCRIBED democratic socialist in Congress.) The Democratic Socialists of America are a group whose membership includes many Democrats (and many people who aren't Democrats, of whom Bernard Sanders is the only one in Congress), and which identifies itself as the nation's largest socialist organization. I may have overstated the number in Congress, as the count of 70 was current as of the 111th Congress, but, still, Bernard Sanders is far from the only self-described democratic socialist in Congress.
There were two major oil crises in the US in the 1970s. The first was before the official abandonment of the peg of the dollar to gold, when in an effort to reduce the trade deficit in order to preserve the peg Nixon imposed limits on oil imports (an effort which failed, which caused the complete abandonment of the already-merely-notional peg of the dollar to gold, and more significantly the peg of many other world currencies to the dollar), the second was when the Arab states raised prices globally and boycotted sales to Israel, the US, and certain close allies of those countries. So, your argument is wrong in, essentially, every point.
Actually, it is by definition impossible for that ("prices of everything fall") to happen in a regime where the currency is effectively pegged to a particular commodity; if you have a notionally commodity-pegged currency and prices of everything fall relative to the curerncy, then the fundamental basis of your currency system has collapsed.
Insofar as this is true, you can achieve exactly the same effect in a fiat money system by buying whatever commodity it is that, in a commodity-backed system, the currency would be pegged to. But the store of value function isn't the important function of money, the medium of exchange function is, and pegging it to a single commodity (and thus exposing your principal medium of exchange to supply and demand fluctuations in that commodity) is disastrous to the medium of exchange function. So why do it?
How do you stop government from any other bad policy decision? In a democracy, you don't elect people that show a bent toward that decision. If your system of government is broken enough that you can't do that, your problem isn't with your currency system, its with your system of government, so fix the real problem.
The U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933. It was recognized as the world's overwhelmingly dominant economic power when essentially the entire world adopted a system in which the U.S. dollar was the standard against which other currencies were pegged in 1946. Its true that the U.S currency was, in the same system, notionally pegged to gold, but (1) this peg featured very limited convertibility, and (2) this peg to gold very quickly broke down as anything more than notional, as gold within a decade or so was trading well above the notional peg price, and a variety of extreme steps had to be taken to attempt to maintain any credibility of the peg, which continued to become less and less meaningful, leading to abandoning reserve requirements and further steps to limit convertibility in 1968, attempts to reset the peg value vs. gold of the US dollar from 1971, and finally the Bretton Woods system of currencies using the U.S. dollar as the standard being abandoned in 1973.
Its important to note that the Bretton Woods arrangement wasn't a real good standard in the usual sense (the U.S. dollar wasn't freely convertible to gold), in attempt to restrict the opportunities for runs on gold and other problems which had caused the disastrous collapse of gold standards around the world not long before -- a failed attempt, at that, as the same problems even with the restricted convertibility brought down Bretton Woods, as well.
Pegging currencies to a single well-selected commodity might be good for the "store of value" function of money (but only in the short term, as pegged currencies regimes don't tend to last long in environments with modern, active trading markets), but its really bad (compared to fiat money) for the "medium of exchange" function, and experience has shown this pretty clearly. As long as people can buy commodities with money, any advantage a pegged currency would have for store of value is realized in a fiat money system as well, as people can just buy the commodity directly, and hold it as a store of value, liquidating it only as necessary to generate currency to use in exchange.
A well-selected, dynamically adjusted basket of commodities might work fairly well as basis for currency, but from a practical standpoint the management and selection of the basket would be even more subject to manipulation that would be opaque to the general public than the fairly simple and (comparatively) easily understood manipulations possible with fiat money. You probably get a lot better result for the effort, just in terms of currency policy and its effects, improving government transparency and accountability in a fiat money regime than trying to replace a fiat money regime with something else, and improving transparency and accountability has lots of side benefits outside of currency policy.
The US went off the gold standard in 1933. Much of the world (including the US) adopted a currency system in which the U.S. dollar was the standard, and the U.S. dollar was notionally pegged to gold but with only limited convertibility (only central banks could convert dollars to gold, and only in specified quantities) in 1946 (Bretton Woods), an arrangement which showed strains almost immediately, and which had effectively collapsed by the late 1960s (when a series of events, including a major run on gold and gold trading in markets far above its notionally fixed "peg" price, led the US acted to limit further even convertibility and to abandon its minimum reserve ratio of gold to dollars), and which effectively fell completely apart in 1971 when the long-standing notional peg at $35/oz. was abandoned and the dollar went through a series of price adjustments relative to gold, leading to complete abandonment of the pegs of other currencies to the dollar in the Bretton Woods arrangement in 1973.
In the real world, the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933, and the while there is some debate among experts about how big a role the gold standard played in the Depression overall, it was undisputably a major factor in the bank run and bank collapses that were one of the early events of the depression, because these were directly triggered by waves of attempts to convert dollars to gold.
Its true that much of the world, including the U.S., adopted a system that was something like a gold standard under the 1946 Bretton Woods agreement, but this wasn't what most people (including most current advocates of a "gold standard") define as a gold standard (particularly, it was a "U.S. dollar standard" with a notional peg to gold, but only certain specially privileged actors had the right to convert dollars to gold; most gold standard advocates advocate free convertibility.)
Even the limited sort-of-gold-standard of Bretton Woods was showing major strains by the late 1950s, and was completely failed by the late 1960s (with major runs on gold, the US threatening to deny conversion of dollars to gold to certain countries, and the open market price of gold far above the notional peg price), and effectively killed any meaningful resemblance to a gold standard in 1971 when direct convertibility was suspended and then the dollar began a series of rapid adjustments in nominal gold value in an attempt to maintain the core of the Bretton Woods system, which was the peg of other currencies to the U.S. dollar.
What actually happened in 1973 is that the world left the U.S. dollar standard, more than the U.S. leaving any meaningful gold standard.
How about if you quit being a shill for the gold investors would-be parasites that are looking for their chance to join the banking cartels in that draining. If you look at the history of economies under the gold standard, its not like banking cartels were any less parasitic. The push for a return to a gold standard largely comes from people who have staked out positions in gold hoping to benefit from the inevitable runs on gold that gold standards produce, and their dupes.
It doesn't get patches because it runs from read-only media; the approved version is updated when necessary to address security concerns, but you have to use new read only media, rather than patching the existing one, that being the nature of "read-only".
Bernard Sanders is not the only self-described democratic socialist in the Congress; there are at least 69 others (since, including Sanders, there are 70 members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, but there may be additional self-described "democratic socialists" who are not members of the DSA.)
HTML+JS, XAML+VB.NET, and (obviously) Excel+VBA already meet this standard. And are widely deployed. Why do we need CDF as currently implemented?
And I'd like a pet unicorn. The hardest part of the task "make interactivity" (at least, interactivity that works correctly, without which interactivity is useless) in modern high-level environments isn't syntax, its developing the analytical skills necessary to clearly define what you want out of the interactivity. Non-interactive charts are conceptually simpler than any interactive behavior and will always be easier to specify a simple non-interactive like than to define useful interaction.
I've lived in the US my entire life and I've seen about an even mix of "kitchen in the back" and "kitchen in the front".