Posts by Destroy All Monsters 16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
"Europe, frankly, continues to be the mixed bag that we've been talking about, and we're not planning on any significant growth in 2013"
In this bag we find: French sozialism à la Hollandaise, EZB bailout money, some stale Berlusconi, empty pension funds, greek feta, a bit of Mali interventionism and ... donkey lasagne? As well as cynicism. Lots of it.
Let's have a beer.
Don't know from what moon you people are coming from but buying processing power on educational/governmental supers (excluding those from the military-surveillance complex of course) has always been the norm. It's not like you are going to run your Fluid Dynamics on Amazon ECC. Well, you can, but there are some drawbacks.
Abstract needed? Performance Analysis of High Performance Computing Applications on the Amazon Web Services Cloud
Cloud computing has seen tremendous growth, particularly for commercial web applications. The on-demand, pay-as-you-go model creates a flexible and cost-effective means to access compute resources. For these reasons, the scientific computing community has shown increasing interest in exploring cloud computing. However, the underlying implementation and performance of clouds are very different from those at traditional supercomputing centers. It is therefore critical to evaluate the performance of HPC applications in today's cloud environments to understand the tradeoffs inherent in migrating to the cloud. This work represents the most comprehensive evaluation to date comparing conventional HPC platforms to Amazon EC2, using real applications representative of the workload at a typical supercomputing center. Overall results indicate that EC2 is six times slower than a typical mid-range Linux cluster, and twenty times slower than a modern HPC system. The interconnect on the EC2 cloud platform severely limits performance and causes significant variability.
> certain things should be nationalised (like telecommunications infrastructure)
Trevor, grow the fuck up. I have worked in a nationalised telecom infrastructure provider exploiting its telecom infrastructure "natural monopoly". Yeah no. Enjoy your soviet-era mindset and permanent fixation on finding the next justification to not change anything and destroy any stirrings of progress. "Somebody wants a modem? Can't we make this illegal??"
Another problem entirely is that natural monopolies are about as real as pink unicorns and there is no reason to make a fantasm actual by then granting actual monopolies. This is the mindset that tries to "create jobs" by increase of the monetary mass.
And if you want that, I don't see why you would roll over some protocol research.
Yes, he's in full control, well informed, has clear goals, knows what a president is about and what a president should stand for.
"That's why, earlier today, I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information-sharing and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy."
Glad that's cleared up. The administration can now continue to weaken national security, destroy jobs and eradicate "our" privacy via government control programs, as it has been doing for the last three presidential 4-year freakshows (if not the last four or five ones).
"While many of the antitrust complaints against Google that are currently being examined by the Commission’s DG Competition relate to Google’s alleged abuse of its dominant position in various markets (under Article 102 TFEU), ICOMP’s complaint focuses on the unlawful means by which Google achieved dominance in the first place. The ICOMP complaint points to Google’s broad-ranging and illegal network of agreements with partners from across the IT sector, and explains that Google has reached its current size through anticompetitive practices, rather than because of any inherent technological superiority over its rivals."
Oh really? Oh well.
"Google partnered with computer manufacturers to ensure that every new computer they manufactured would have a search-enabled Google toolbar exclusively pre-installed. It agreed with web-browsers that Google would be the exclusive default search engine offered to their subscribers. Google paid computer manufacturers to make it the exclusive default search engine for Internet Explorer. It also agreed with major software providers that the Google toolbar would be bundled into their most popular consumer software products."
Wait, what? I must have been asleep on this one. Any examples? Additionally, there are lots and lots of weasel words and citations needed in there.
Meanwhile, we have HAPPY HAPPY FISSION reactors (a PWR in my orbit? It's more likely than you think!)
Or you can deploy SOLAR REFLECTORS to direct heat onto the poor astro-roid which will transform itself into a nicely outgassing marble once you deploy several hundred km² worth of mylar.
Space Super Capitalism!!
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=206
"The Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion is that four counties of western Pennsylvania refused to pay an excise tax on whiskey that had been levied by proposal of the Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the Spring of 1791, as part of his excise tax proposal for federal assumption of the public debts of the several states.
Western Pennsylvanians failed to pay the tax, this view says, until protests, demonstrations, and some roughing up of tax collectors in western Pennsylvania caused President Washington to call up a 13,000-man army in the summer and fall of 1794 to suppress the insurrection. A localized but dramatic challenge to federal tax-levying authority had been met and defeated. The forces of federal law and order were safe.
This Official View turns out to be dead wrong. In the first place, we must realize the depth of hatred of Americans for what was called "internal taxation" (in contrast to an "external tax" such as a tariff). Internal taxes meant that the hated tax man would be in your face and on your property, searching, examining your records and your life, and looting and destroying.
The most hated tax imposed by the British had been the Stamp Tax of 1765, on all internal documents and transactions; if the British had kept this detested tax, the American Revolution would have occurred a decade earlier, and enjoyed far greater support than it eventually received.
Americans, furthermore, had inherited hatred of the excise tax from the British opposition; for two centuries, excise taxes in Britain, in particular the hated tax on cider, had provoked riots and demonstrations upholding the slogan, "liberty, property, and no excise!" To the average American, the federal government's assumption of the power to impose excise taxes did not look very different from the levies of the British crown.
The main distortion of the Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion was its alleged confinement to four counties of western Pennsylvania. From recent research, we now know that no one paid the tax on whiskey throughout the American "back-country": that is, the frontier areas of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the entire state of Kentucky.
President Washington and Secretary Hamilton chose to make a fuss about Western Pennsylvania precisely because in that region there was cadre of wealthy officials who were willing to collect taxes. Such a cadre did not even exist in the other areas of the American frontier; there was no fuss or violence against tax collectors in Kentucky and the rest of the back-country because there was no one willing to be a tax collector.
The whiskey tax was particularly hated in the back-country because whisky production and distilling were widespread; whiskey was not only a home product for most farmers, it was often used as a money, as a medium of exchange for transactions. Furthermore, in keeping with Hamilton's program, the tax bore more heavily on the smaller distilleries. As a result, many large distilleries supported the tax as a means of crippling their smaller and more numerous competitors.
Western Pennsylvania, then, was only the tip of the iceberg. The point is that, in all the other back-country areas, the whiskey tax was never paid. Opposition to the federal excise tax program was one of the causes of the emerging Democrat-Republican Party, and of the Jeffersonian "Revolution" of 1800. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of the first Jefferson term as president was to repeal the entire Federalist excise tax program. In Kentucky, whiskey tax delinquents only paid up when it was clear that the tax itself was going to be repealed.
Rather than the whiskey tax rebellion being localized and swiftly put down, the true story turns out to be very different. The entire American back-country was gripped by a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay the hated tax on whiskey. No local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents. The Whiskey Rebellion was actually widespread and successful, for it eventually forced the federal government to repeal the excise tax."
but that's down to national government not the EU
Actually, it's down to the "let's let it all hang out" financial boardello and bubble-blowing attitude encouraged by the EU freaks. That fact that they are incapable of reining in spending is the icing on the cake:
Irish banks borrowed much cheap money after joining the eurozone in 1999. The banks bet most of the borrowed money on properties in Britain, Ireland, and the United States, a strategy that paid good dividends during the housing bubble until it popped in 2008.
In 2008, Ireland insured its banks against all losses, costing it more than €50 billion ($69 billion).
Anglo Irish Bank, the bank with the most money to lose, neared bankruptcy in September 2008, but it and other Irish banks persuaded Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan to give them money for short-term cash problems, not a serious long-term problem, they claimed.
Two years later, Anglo Irish Bank and two other small banks have been nationalized. Financial aid has been given to Allied Irish and the Bank of Ireland.
Ireland is currently spending about €50 billion ($69 billion) while tax revenue is about €31 billion ($42 billion).
"almost budget-neutral in the long run"
Translation: Go into debt now to implement [preferred project] and hope to rob the populace for taxes in the future. Yaarrrr!!
"The recent capital increase of the [EIB] of €10bn brings the promise..."
Is that some freshly printed "money"?
Actually, banks create and maintain jobs too.
What you would actually need to do is rob the CENTRAL bank. Unfortunately you are then faced with the decision to either take the printing press or the folder of worthless IOUs from the exchequer, none of which is a palatable choice.
Typical software geek response... it's not about the end result, only how technically good the implementation. ...the guy sitting on a beach drinking champagne with your money for example,,, it's the exact opposite.
You don't need elegant solutions if you just beat up somebody, then take his purse.
You do need elegant solutions if you want maintainable, reliable, adaptable, testable code. Or at least something viable when you just want to get paid for your shit in the marketplace.
Two totally different things.
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