Jun 28, 2007
“The shameful secret of the welfare state is that it makes irresponsible slaves out of previously free and responsible people.
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Jun 28, 2007
Fiat currencies in the 20th century: monetary catastrophes unfolding at varying speed since the birth of the Federal Reserve.
The currency system is based on coercion: directly via the legal tender laws (which decree that fiat currency must be used/accepted for all payments of debt) and indirectly via the value imputed to government debt which rests on the faith in the government’s ability to extort enough future tax revenue to be able to repay its debt.
Government bonds are the tally sticks of our age, and serve as the main ‘backing’ of bank notes and their digital counterparts in circulation. They are what is tying the government and the banking system together, via the central bank. The central bank has the power to ‘monetize’ such debt by creating money out of thin air. This roundabout way of going about it is an essential part of the confidence game, the creation of the illusion of value.
Inflation is nothing but a cleverly disguised tax. If the government had to actually raise taxes instead of borrowing the staggering sums of money it uses, it would have to raise taxes by so much that it would face a rebellion.
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Jun 28, 2007
“The State has sought to engage in theft from the citizenry via monetary debasement from the very dawn of Western civilization. How did worthless objects come into widespread acceptance as money? Demand for fiat money was created by its acceptance for payment of taxes.
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Jun 28, 2007
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Jun 28, 2007
“Taxes in the largely agricultural economy of the Middle Ages were usually paid in the form of goods, and these payments were recorded with notches on wooden ‘tally’ sticks that were then split length-wise. One half remained with the tax payer serf, as proof of payment (an ingenious way to avoid counterfeiting). It didn’t take long for the King and his treasurer to realize that they could actually issue tally sticks in advance, in order to finance ‘emergency spending’. The half of the tally stick which originally remained with the treasury had a handle and was called the ‘stock’ - the term that has evolved to describe shares in publicly listed corporations today
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Jun 28, 2007
“For any significant piece of code at Google, you can find almost a whole book about it internally, and a well-written one at that.
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Jun 28, 2007
“Intel’s Core 2 processors are buggy as hell. Some of these bugs don’t just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code. BIOS vendors will be very late providing workarounds/fixes. Some bugs are unfixable and cannot be worked around. Intel only provides detailed fixes to BIOS vendors and large operating system groups. Open Source operating systems are largely left in the cold.
Intel understates the impact of these errata very significantly. Almost all operating systems will run into these bugs. Basically the MMU simply does not operate as specified/implemented in previous generations of x86 hardware. Some of these bugs are along the lines of “buffer overflow”; where a write-protect or non-execute bit for a page table entry is ignored. Others are floating point instruction non-coherencies, or memory corruptions — outside of the range of permitted writing for the process — running common instruction sequences.
At this time, I cannot recommend purchase of any machines based on the Intel Core 2. Intel must become more transparent.
— Theo de Raadt paints a stark contrast with the handling of the fdiv bug 13 years ago.
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Jun 28, 2007
“If the ICC wants the game to be globalised there should be enough cricket to create equality. Because if you don’t have the games in the first place, how are you going to develop your players to compete with the best?
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Jun 28, 2007
“There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.
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Jun 28, 2007
“The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
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