Apple make shiny toys, there is no denying this. It is a shame that their customer support and build quality are so dire. About a year ago, I decided I should send my PowerBook in for repairs. It was not an easy decision, there were a few things wrong with it (white spots on the screen, one of the SO-DIMM slots not working, detection of headphones had an intermittent fault), but nothing that made it unusable - and I used it a lot. Never mind, I thought, it usually only takes them two days to do a repair, so I'll back everything up, grit my teeth, and send it in.

A month later they finally admitted that they'd lost it. A month after that they got around to replacing it. The one they replaced it with didn't even boot. They collected it and fixed it relatively quickly, leaving me with a new machine which had a fault in one of the SO-DIMM slots.

At this point, I decided not to send it back in for repair again. I'd already wasted around 10 hours on hold to Apple's customer support, and I didn't want to spend any longer.

Now, however, the fault with one slot has become an intermittent fault with both. Moving the machine at all causes memory errors (and will cause it not to resume from standby). When I boot, I have no idea which RAM slot will be operational (I've put a stick in each - sometimes I boot with 512MB, sometimes with 256MB. So far, I haven't managed to boot with 768MB, but there's hope...).

I am going to try to borrow a machine from the department while I wait for this one to be repaired. If I am really lucky, I'll be able to bring it home and work from here. Well, I can hope...

This week I got some new toys. I think my supervisor is feeling guilty (been seeing other students, or something), and practically forced me to spend some grant money on shiny things. These were:

• An Apple 23" Cinema HD. Very nice. I'm using it now. I have so much screen space that I can actually see my desktop in several places (unlike my physical desktop, which is covered with things).
• A LaCie 500GB disk (which is really 466GB). FireWire 800, with FW400 and USB2 as well (although you can only chain them with FW800). I have a 320GB (300GB) one at home, which I use for video editing. This one is for storing large data sets, and definitely not for video editing, oh no. Honest.
• An iSight. Officially so I can join video conferencing meetings with the other 3 sites we work with on my laptop.
• A BlueTooth Keyboard (Apple) and mouse (Kensington - 3 buttons!) so I don't need to plug in lots of wires when I plug in my laptop.

I suddenly have an incentive to stay at my desk (apart from the view of the sea).

In unrelated news, I mentioned previously that I was putting OpenBSD on a co-located Mac Mini, and would be writing about this. The first 4 of these are now online:

Macs in a rack - taking the mini to the masses
Why OpenBSD?
Setting up secure mail on OpenBSD
Filtering Spam with OpenBSD

The fifth one (Web and Webmail) is done, but will not be release until next Friday (it's my birthday next week, so I wrote it early). The sixth will cover setting up a Jabber server. I haven't yet decided what the seventh will cover - suggestions welcome...

Oh, and the hosting place has agreed to give a discount to Ping Wales readers, so don't forget to mention Ping to them if you do decide to use them (details in the first article).

I finally decided to order a Mac Mini. Not as a desktop, but as a colocated server (with the company featured on Slashdot a while back). One thing that they don't advertise is that their `remote hands' service allows you to change operating systems. While I am very pleased with OS X as a desktop, I would rather have something a little more command line oriented on a server (yes, I know you can do most things on the command line with OS X, but it is not really designed for it). To this end, I shall be installing OpenBSD on it as soon as it arrives. This means that I will have a 1.42GHz RISC system running OpenBSD with 20GB of bandwidth a month for $22.99. The closes competitors I found for this were several times the price for a similar service - largely due to the fact that they required 1U systems which cost a whole lot more to host.

Once the system is set up and running, I will post more details.

On my /. front page, I have the two sections I most frequently read in little boxed, BSD and Apple. The Apple box is completely full of April Fools' `Jokes', while the BSD box is completely full of real stories. The seems slightly bizarre, since there are so many opportunities to generate convincing April Fools' stories for *BSD (I seem to recall one last year claiming that FreeBSD was going to start using the Linux kernel), and yet no one bothered. I'll have to remember to write one next year.

Might as well use this journal for rants, I suppose...

I've finally managed get myself set up with ADSL on Linux. I went with Demon, as they've got a decent reputation, and their web page states:

"Host software support for:

• Windows 98, 98SE, 2000, ME and XP
• Mac OS 8.6,9 and X
• Linux

Great! However, after the package arrived, I couldn't help noticing a few obvious differences between the "host software support" for Windows vs Linux:

• The CD contains Windows drivers for the USB modem. There are no Linux drivers (and you have to mount it with rock-ridge extensions disabled to see anything at all, which wasn't obvious).
• There are detailed step-by-step instructions showing how to set it up on Windows. Linux isn't mentioned on the printed copy, and the CD version contains a single line, telling you to download drivers from the 'net (How? I don't have drivers for my modem!! Didn't anyone spot this little problem when they wrote the instructions?)
• When I phoned up for support and said I was installing on Linux, the response was "Ha! Good luck!". Not what you want to hear. I pointed out that Linux is one of their supported systems but apparently "We don't have any training for that."

The problem was that the CHAP authentication was failing (I'd downloaded some drivers from sourceforge via my mobile phone's irDA port - painfully slow, but it worked). The helpdesk chap was friendly, but didn't seem able to suggest anything.

I got fed up and bought myself an ADSL modem router. Exactly the same problem. But this time when I phoned up and said I had a router, they suddenly had a whole load of useful test addresses to try which quickly narrowed the problem down to BT's exchange. Grr. BT fixed it after a couple of days, and it's all been fine since, but I think describing Linux as supported is really stretching things!

Slashdot is full of political trolls. These are people who advocate political ideas dishonestly and disrespectfully, and abuse and insult users who question or threaten their (often dubious) worldview. We cannot help the deficiencies in America's educational system, nor can we force people to have morals or civility, nor can we stop them from abusing the moderation system, and (this being America) we would fight to the death to defend their right to speak their mind (no matter how depraved their impulses), but, and this is the important thing, we are not obligated to listen to them, either.

PoliticalTrollOptOut is a service. Simply, we identify political trolls and add them to our Foes list. This allows others to use our work for study, or, more importantly, to enhance their slashdot experience.

Anyone who wants can make us their Friend will see all the trolls we identify as Foes of Friends. This "warning signal" can save you a lot of trouble. And if that's not enough, you can use your slashdot preferences to hide (or make prominent, and study) posts by the Political Trolls we identify, by adjusting the score modifier for "Foes of Friends." It's that simple.

Do you hate getting sucked into pointless arguments by people who actually derive satisfaction and enjoyment from your outrage? Tired of arguing with people who are knowingly and smugly being dishonest? Need a break from the growing wave of nutty reactionary posting and moderation?

If slashdot's moderation system isn't cutting it for you, we can help. Just crank their scores down and watch them disappear. Just imagine, if we all did it, they would be left talking to themselves.

Are you a moderator today? Switch it the other way, and use PoliticalTrollOptOut as a quick reference for known troublemakers.

One thing we don't encourage is moderating with trolls filtered out. Where's the fun in that, anyway?

So I just make you my friend? It's that simple?

Sure! If you like, though, we encourage everyone using our service to spread the word by linking to this journal in their signature, with something like this:

Tired of Political Trolls?
<A HREF="http://slashdot.org/~PoliticalTrollOptOut/journal">Opt Out!</A>

We know what you're thinking: what constitutes a political troll? How can we make that call? And, how can any one person or group possibly catch them all?

Let's be realistic. What crosses this line is not something everyone is going to agree on. Furthermore, as is the style these days, everyone actually will disagree on it. Anyone we flag will assume we're their political opposition. Conservatives will call us liberals, and vice versa. We know who we are dealing with; we are going directly after slashdot's worst of the worst. They will not politely disagree with us. They will say we are biased, crazy, hypocritical, that we flag anyone we dislike, that we even eat babies. They'll claim every person we haven't flagged yet is proof of our failure, bias, or evil. They will call us censors and Nazis and child molesters and every other evil thing they can think of. Some of them will put more energy and creativity into derailing and destroying us than they put into their homework, spouses, or jobs.

If the trolls weren't really this bad, we wouldn't need to bother with this in the first place.

All you are really doing is deciding to pick us as an editor. You can look at every decision we've made so far, look at our Foes list and read what is written here, and decide for yourself based on the evidence whether you think we're useful, and if you trust us to keep it up.

We make these decisions based on some basic tests. We do our best to be fair and non-partisan, and apply our standards without any regard for whatever position anyone is actually advocating. Of course you could have a "ConservativeOptOut" or a "LiberalOptOut" - in fact, I encourage it! But that's not us. We flag them all, whatever stripe they claim to be. They're really not that different anyway.

What are those tests?

1. There are many trolls; is this one clearly a political advocate, crank or ideologue?
2. Are they being abnormally personal, rude, condescending, disrespectful, or mean? Do they engage in stalking (following "enemies" into other threads to harrass them) or threats?
3. Are they propagating widely known and discredited misinformation or propaganda (i.e. "Who was behind 9/11 again?"). Note that we tend to apply this one only when it's really blatant, not for things that could conceivably be legitimately disputed.
4. Are they being clearly disengenuous, arguing in bad faith, using debater's tricks, misquoting or lying about foregoing posts? Are they engaging in slander/libel? Making big claims and refusing to cite sources?
5. Are they conspicuously imitating, plagiarizing, or attempting to use as authoritative citations, known political propaganda organizations, bent think tanks, "*-wing" blogs, or other discredited or disreputable party mouthpieces?
6. We consider this project to be reasonable and fair. People we flag will disagree and will naturally troll us too, in a variety of ways, for instance, falsely reporting others as political trolls. We will not refuse to flag people just because the object of their political trolling is us.

This is it. We're not attorneys; if you want a more precise definition for what we do and how we do it, look at our track record.

Obviously, we can never catch them all. Even if we could, anyone can stop posting from one account and make another. There is a little penalty for that - no karma, no karma bonuses, and inconvenience - but it's not enough to stop them. Slashdot generates more text in a day than most people can read in a week, and this is a volunteer effort.

That means that any troll can (and will) point to another troll that hasn't been flagged yet and cry "unfair," "biased," etc etc. They're hoping you'll be fooled, but I'm sure you're smarter than that.

None of these problems are so serious we shouldn't try, and try we shall. We will never flag them all, but if we can get quite a few. Over time we will continue to improve, and fairly quickly what we offer will become substantial enough to be useful.

What? How are we supposed to talk about politics without being labeled a political troll?

That's easy. We've been doing this for many millenia, and it's the source of almost all of our progress as a species. Nerds: try to think about a political idea like a software engineering idea. You may believe in it, you may even have thought of it yourself and be really attached to it, but you can't really swear it's perfect and bug free, can you? In other words:

1. Be absolutely, scrupulously honest
2. Be respectful, tolerant, and keep your sense of humor
3. Be forthright; clearly say what you mean
4. Be prepared to be wrong
5. Be prepared to be right but part as friends with someone you haven't convinced of it
6. Don't make judgements, ask questions (This works so well you will end up swearing by it!)
7. Don't imagine your ideas or beliefs are obvious to anyone
8. Pretend you are a scholar. If you already are a scholar, pretend you are a great scholar. Never say something is a fact unless you can back up with references.
9. When citing sources, use reputable ones. The more reputable, the better your argument looks. Something isn't automatically a lie because it comes from a particular place; simultaneously, it's silly to use a shady, discredited, or obviously biased source. Citing the Enquirer doesn't make your Batboy argument stronger, neither can Bill O'Reilly or Dan Rather help your case much about the Bush family or the "vast left-wing conspiracy."
10. If you get something wrong, apologize and admit it. (You have no idea how classy this looks, or how stupid you look lamely trying to cover up a mistake)
11. Refrain from immediately assuming an error on someone's part is malicious. If it's an accident, you'll never help them without respecting them, and if it's not an accident, it'll become pretty clear soon enough. Don't jump on it, just keep asking questions.
12. When conversing with a stranger, pretend you are talking to your grandmother. Unless you hate your grandmother. Then, just pretend you are talking to your best friend who may really agree with you, but is playing devil's advocate
13. You will be mocked, insulted, slanedered, misinterpreted, and otherwise abused in every conceivable way. That's life. Keep speeking the truth; if you've got that covered there really no need to get that nasty in return. (You have no idea how much better you'll look than the other guy)

When you talk politics with somebody, you and they are on the same team. Your goal in this game is to both learn and advance your knowledge by pooling your resources, finding the weak points in your ideas, adapting, and growing.

You're like good attorneys practicing old-fashioned adversarial justice. You may want your side to win, but you are not trying to win at all costs. You all want the truth to win in the end, or you both lose. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true!

I found a troll! Quick, flag them!

For the time being, we maintain a separate user that usually has an open journal. It's here. You can use it for the reporting of new candidates. We used to have a journal on this user, below, but they expire, and then making new ones messes up the order, etc etc.

We make no guarantees. The journal may be open or it may not. We may read it, or we may not. We may follow it, or we may not. We generally do not reply to suggestions.

So far, the suggestion box has been most useful for trolls to report themselves by trolling there without being anonymous. Almost the entire contents of the reports are typically trolls doing predictable things: pissing, moaning, false reports, accusing us of various nefarious acts of bias and conspiracy, posting gay porn, etc.

If your post doesn't include a detailed description, with links to the best examples you can find of their behavior, we ignore it.

If you say "so and so is lying, trolling, etc." without providing links to back it up, we ignore it.

You only have so many foes slots.

That's right. As we run out of slots, we'll create more users. We'll post a notification if/when that happens.

It's impossible to be unbiased!

Not at all.

It's impossible to be "perfectly fair." But you can do a good job and get close enough for everyone's needs.

Anyone who claims they are unbiased, is not trustworthy.

Technically, it's anyone who makes illogical arguments who is untrustworthy.

Some people are fair and unbiased. Others aren't, but claim they are.

The only way to tell them apart is to evaluate their claims with observable facts.

Luckily, if you are evaluating PTOO, all the facts are right here, at your fingertips. Follow some links and make your own conclusions.

You have more people from one party than another in your list. This is proof that you're biased.

I imagine we'd have to maintain exactly the same number of party X versus party Y trolls to make this one go away.

Why just political trolls?

People act like asses for a lot of reasons, that's true. Maybe a plain old "TrollOptOut" would be useful. If you think so, go for it, don't let me stop you. I track the political ones because I find them particularly insufferable. Maybe it's the egomaniac, control-freak mentality that draws people into politics. Maybe it's just that there are more of them. One big thing about them is that they tend to resist the moderation system the best. Since they rally around a cause, a like-minded group of them will often end up with mod points, and they never use them impartially. The best of them sometimes make surprisingly sophisticated (and labor-intensive) attempts to game the moderation system.

By contrast, I kind of respect the straight-up hardcore anarchist trolls. Those guys don't give a crap about karma or winning friends and influencing people. They have no agenda at all, except to piss off or freak out as many people as possible. Many would disdain and even avoid stooping to politics to twist somebody's tit. Sometimes I find them kind of funny, actually.

Most of what this user posts is not trolling!

Of course not.

There are a few rare ones who do nothing but troll. Most are normal, friendly even interesting people who can make highly informative posts about Sendmail configurations or Thai venereal diseases. It's just that once every 100 posts the editors release a political story, and the full moon comes out, and then you better look away, it's ugly.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who participate here. I am perfectly happy to lose the ones who have engaged in political trolling, even if they don't do it "that often." There is plenty left over.

A troll has sucked a bunch of people into an argument. One of the responders get nasty. Are they both "Political Trolls"?

Not really.

I like to start with the low-hanging fruit: the people who instigate the fight. The ones who go over the top. There are plenty of these without going depth-first into all the debatable cases. I do usually watch the ones I'm not sure about for a while to see if they have a pattern.

What can I do if I disagree with a decision?

Someday there will be software that lets us get into a giant automated election about every decision we make. For now, decisions are made by me, and in the future, anyone I choose to share this account with. You can assume any such person will make roughly similar judgements as I would.

I've been flagged as a troll! Not fair! Waaaaah!

Yes, we are aware that you disagree with everything we've said about you, and that none of you believe you have been judged fairly.

Duh. This is rule number one in the political troll's playbook.

You have not been censored. We, and our friends, may choose not to listen to you, and you have no right to force us to.

You got flagged because you were caught engaging in political trolling. You have your opinion about what you said, and we have ours. Goodbye.

Surely you must admit you are not infallible. Is there any process for appeal?

The problem is abuse. There are not many ways to do this that are scalable and sustainable against the kind of abuse generated by a large group of professional abusers.

Thus, the short answer is, no. We rely on our judgement, and we give you the opportunity to as well. That's all we can offer.

• damiangerous
• daveschroeder
• AtariAmarok, aka Concern Is A Faggot, sammeal
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• SamBeckett
• Jim_Callahan Jim_Callahan
• Kohath
• HanzoSpam
• Jerf Jerf
• Juggle
• danheskett
• Megaweapon Megaweapon
• That's Unpossible!...(reply)...That's Unpossible!
• sadomikeyism
• randallpowell
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• ifwm ifwm
• Master of Transhuman
• magarity magarity

Yesterday, Slashdot linked to something I wrote for the first time. Depressingly, this is possibly the least coherent rambling I have ever written (I'd drunk a lot of caffeine and was in a hurry) - even including most of my comments on Slashdot. Ho hum.

The United States is facing the possibility of a severe economic correction. Yet most of the causes of such a correction are, for the most part, being completely ignored in preference to partisan bickering. It is the proverbial elephant in the living room - except it is not just one, but several elephants that everyone is doing their best to ignore. While the likelihood that any of these issues could result in disaster is low, these are issues worth taking the time to discuss.

The first elephant is debt. There are 3 kinds of debt that are of concern: Household debt, the budget deficit, and the current account or trade deficit. Of those three, it is only the budget deficit that gets any real attention, and even then it is often brushed aside.

The current US budget deficit stands at $413,000,000,000 in the 2004 fiscal year. This is a record deficit. To put it in perspective, that's 3.6% of the Gross Domestic Product, almost a quarter of total federal spending, or 80% of the total receipts from Federal income taxes. Clearly such a situation is not good. But there are deeper implications for such a large fiscal gap. Some economists argue that such large deficits are detrimental to private investment. The deficit effectively soaks up a large portion of the US's savings, which would otherwise be invested back into the private sector. There is historical precedent for this - investment fell to record lows during the previous record budget deficits under President Reagan. But there is something else to consider as well. This debt is managed by selling Government bonds and securities. These securities can be, and often are, sold overseas.

Currently, the two largest foreign owners of US Government debt are Japan and China. Japan had an economic boom, but collapsed in the 90s and has been struggling since. The Japanese government is very conservative, and has been remarkably slow to introduce reforms that are seen by many as necessary to stimulate the Japanese economy. Recently however, the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has been fighting to push through the necessary reforms, with some success. In the last couple of years the Japanese economy has shown signs of improvement. Meanwhile, the Chinese economy is strong, and only getting stronger. Why is this important? Because as both of these economies gear up there will be far less interest in investing overseas, and much greater emphasis in investing the the local growing economy. This would essentially amount to a mass sell off of US debt in the form of government bonds, something that would almost certainly fuel higher inflation in the US, putting pressure on the Federal Reserve to take action by increasing interest rates. That is to say, it would almost certainly lead to a large scale recession in the US.

The US current account deficit stood at $530,668,000,000 in 2003 and $313,341,000,000 for just the first two quarters of the 2004 financial year. That's a record figure for each of the first two quarters of 2004. This could represent a country living beyond its means, or it could represent an economic power attracting large amounts of foreign investment. Certainly as long as the US remains a significant economic powerhouse it can sustain high current account deficits. That is, as long as the US remains an attractive place for foreigners to invest, an imbalance is of limited concern. Whether such a high current account deficit is sustainable is a complicated issue affected by many factors. A reasonably coherent explanation of some of those factors can be found in a 2002 paper by Catherine Mann. In rough précis, the current account deficit is balanced by private savings, but widened by budget deficits, yet at the same time is driven by the attractiveness of US investments to foreigners. Should the current account grow too large, the perception of the ability of the US to repay the investment may decrease, causing an economic correction. In the conclusion of her paper Mann indicates that a change in trajectory (from growing to shrinking) is inevitable, and the concern is whether this will occur through slow structural and policy changes, or whether it will be caused by a sharp correction in overseas investment. Two of the major requirements she lists for structural change are greater fiscal discipline (resulting in budget surpluses) and increased personal savings. Since the paper was published in 2002 we have seen massive increases in the budget deficit, as just discussed. At the same time, the prospects for increased personal savings are very limited (which I will touch on in a moment). Add to that the beginnings of resurgent Asian economies attracting investment, and the risk of a sharp correction is certainly much greater. The consequences of a sudden shift in global investment away from the US would be extremely rapid depreciation of the US dollar, most certainly resulting in considerable economic hardship in the US.

US household debt stood at $8,454,400,000,000 in 2002, and has grown since. A quick look at the associated chart shows just how serious the upward trend in household debt is. This debt is driven both by mortgages, and by credit card debt in an increasingly consumerist society. Do you recall the "Shop for America" campaigns following September 11? It is exactly that kind of thinking that helps to drive the consumer society even further into debt. In 2004 household debt increased 4 times faster than the economy, and average credit card debt for households with at least 1 credit card increased 300%, to over $9000. Of course this is not necessarily crippling, as a recent speech by Alan Greenspan points out. It is, however, trending in the wrong direction, and getting worse fast. It is certainly far from the increase in household and personal savings required to help curb the current account deficit.

The concern about debt for the US is, in the end, quite simple. US debt, in all three forms, is huge, and it is only getting larger. All three forms of debt, while different, are connected in that both household debt and government debt have a significant influence of the sustainability of such a large (and growing) current account deficit. At the same time, either the current account deficit or the budget deficit, if they continue to grow, could easily trigger a rapid and severe depreciation of the US dollar. Which brings us to our next elephant.

The second elephant is the US Dollar. At the time of writing, the US Dollar is running at about 0.77 Euros to the Dollar. One could claim that this is simply due to a strong Euro, but in reality most world currencies, including the Japanese yen and the Great British pound are trading strongly against the US Dollar. A quick look at the historical record of the US Dollar against the Euro, the yen, and the pound shows a distinct downward trend over the last two years in all cases. Of course this need not be seen as a bad thing, certainly it is beneficial to US exports, an increase in which would be highly beneficial for the current account deficit. There are potential issues however. The US dollar has, to some extent, remained as strong as it has due its position as the de facto global currency, in which most major commodities, including oil and gold, are traded. The Federal Reserve estimated that in 2003 around $400 billion of the $680 billion US dollars in circulation were held outside the United States. This high demand for US Dollars overseas is an effective prop for the US Dollar, meaning it is unlikely to ever fall too low too quickly. This prop could, however, disappear. The possibility of the Euro becoming a new alternative global currency is increasing.

In 2001 Alan Greenspan gave a cogent speech on the possibilities of the Euro as a global currency. The first salient point is the fact that a global currency tends toward a natural monopoly - as use increases, it becomes an increasingly attractive currency to hold, while the decreasing liquidity of competing currencies makes them less and less desirable as a global currency. Transitions can of course be slow, for example the transition from the Pound Sterling to the US Dollar between the world wars, but once it begins it becomes inevitable. Greenspan then notes that, at least on the surface, the Euro possesses all the traits required of a global currency (a stable currency based in a strong economy with a well developed financial system and deep, liquid financial markets). Greenspan continues by discussing reasons why the US Dollar remained so dominant after the introduction of the Euro. He cites the strength of the US Dollar against the Euro (the Euro depreciated against the US Dollar in its first two years after introduction), the strength of the US economy on comparison to the EU, and the Euro's apparent inability to expand into foreign equity markets. As already noted, the strength of the US dollar against the Euro, and in fact most world currencies, has been in decline. On the other hand, while the relative strength of the EU economy to that of the US has increased during the US recession, the US economy is beginning to show signs of increasing growth. Lastly, however, the Euro is now beginning to extend into foreign equity markets, most notably oil. An increasing amount of Middle Eastern oil is being traded in Euros, and while the US Dollar remains dominant, both Iran and Saudi Arabia have flirted with the idea of completely converting to Euros. Equally significantly, Russia, the second largest oil producer in the world, has expressed serious interest in trading their oil in Euros instead of US Dollars, though it has not yet embarked on such an en masse conversion. For now the US dollar comfortably remains the dominant player, but there are enough signs for concern, and as Alan Greenspan pointed out, a transition will have a tipping point, after which it will be carried by its own momentum.

The threat to the US economy is that this transition, if it occurs, may not be slow. Because the strength of the US dollar is currently supported in part by its position as a global currency, a shift toward the Euro could trigger further collapse of a weakening dollar initiating a panic driven feedback cycle resulting in an almost complete collapse of the US dollar from its current point of strength. Such a collapse will only be compounded by the fact that the US currently repays its debt in US Dollars - the only country in the world that is granted the privilege of paying off debt in its home currency. Should the US Dollar destabilise significantly (or the Euro establish itself as the global currency) many debt holders could choose to request payment in Euros. This would force the US to purchase Euros (at a markup) to service its debt, both reinforcing the Euro as global currency, an inflating US debt. Such a situation would only serve to exacerbate the US Dollar's collapse.

Of course ideally such a collapse would be halted by the closing current account deficit as the price of imports skyrockets, and US exports become ever more attractive. The US populace is, however, a heavily addicted consumer, more than willing to spend its way into increasing household debt (as already noted). Worse still, US exports have been on the decline despite the recent weakness of the US dollar. Increasingly, the US is importing goods from China, and services from India. Which leads us to another elephant.

The third elephant is the rise of India and China. Both the Indian and Chinese economies are growing very rapidly. These are the two most populous nations on earth, so they should not be taken lightly. Both countries are filled with young and talented people eager to make the most of their education and climb the global economic ladder. In the case of India this has taken the form of, for example, outsourced IT jobs from the US. Increasingly US companies are importing their IT service from India, where there is a vast pool of highly capable people who do not face the vast cost of living that their counterparts in the US do. In many ways this can simply be seen as globalization and free trade beginning to more evenly distribute the wealth of the world, and is not a threat as long as the US continues to innovate and create new industries for itself. There is a question as to whether this actually occurring however.

The most common statistic for measuring economic strength, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), shows the US economy to be in good shape. Current US GDP is between 10 and 11 trillion US dollars depending on whether you measure by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) or Current Exchange Rate (CER). GDP does have problems, the most important to consider here being its ability to include work that produces no net gain, and its lack of consideration for negative externalities. It is worth considering how much work in the US is included in the GDP that has very minimal net gain. For those familiar with the SCO Group versus IBM court case, its worth noting that tens of millions of dollars have been spent, all counted toward GDP, and yet most observers would point out that, in comparison to the money spent, the gains are negligible if they exist at all. This is common to a surprisingly large number of other court cases in an increasingly litigious country. All of it counts toward GDP, much of it returns little if any gain. A more debatable issue is the current costs of management, particularly in larger corporations that have exceptionally high salaries for the many tiers of upper management - is the net gain provided by management actually comparable to the money being spent. It is certain that management provides significant value, what is unclear is exactly how much value, and how that compares to the salaries involved. As stated, this is a point for debate. The fear is that if, in fact, US GDP is inflated by such issues, the economy could find itself hollow when it comes time to compete in earnest.

Currently India is exporting low and mid level IT services to the US, but given current Indian growth, it is only a matter of time before India is in a position to cease selling its services piecemeal, and instead sell complete packages. At present, while a certain amount of work is being outsourced to India as their economy grows, management and the corporations have remained in the US. Given the growing number of capable and experienced IT workers in India however, it is inevitable that new companies will arise in India taking advantage of the considerably lower cost of living to compete head to head with US corporations for complete solutions. Again we have to question the ability of the US to forge ahead into new industries. It could be argued that ambition for education, science, and research is lower for the current youth of the US than for their would be competitors in India, China, Korea and Japan. While there is involvement from the US in the very ambitious fusion reactor project, it will most likely be sited in Europe, and if not there, then Japan. On the other hand it was a US based company, Scaled Composites, that recently won the Ansari X-Prize and looks to be at the forefront of commercial spaceflight. The future remains uncertain, but this is certainly an issue for concern.

Finally, the rapid growth in India and China is having other visible effects. China, in particular, with its rapidly growing manufacturing sector, has had an an equally rapid increase in its demand for oil, adding a new element to the global oil market. While China is currently trying to slow its economic growth to more sustainable levels, the growth in its hunger for oil is not expected to be similarly dampened. Oil prices are already being driven ever higher, and unlike the crises in the 1970's, it is not due to disruptions in supply, but instead simply due to demand. That this is detrimental to the worlds largest oil user, the US, is obvious. Of more concern is that with increasing Chinese oil needs stretching current oil production capacity to its limits, a disruption in supply now could be catastrophic. This issue is discussed in detail in an article by Paul Krugman. In the wake of ever higher oil prices, alternative energy sources may prove to be one of the most significant new industries in the coming decade. With this in mind, the question must be asked: Which countries are going to be at the leading edge of research in alternative energy sources?

There remains one significant issue to discuss: the domino effect. This is the fact that the three major issues so far discussed are all interconnected. Increasing strength in the Chinese and Indian economies, providing goods and services to consumption addicted Americans willing to go into personal debt to maintain their standard of living, could easily lead to a widening of the US current account deficit. If the current account deficit grows too large it could easily trigger significant depreciation of the US Dollar. Should the US Dollar start too look too volatile, or become a significant financial risk to hold (due to depreciation), global markets could easily start to embrace the far more stable Euro, potentially sending the US Dollar into free fall. During a period of such extreme uncertainty in the US Dollar, foreign investors may well seek to diversify their investments away from the US towards rapidly growing countries such as India or China. That is to say, any one of these issues could trigger the others, to a devastating end.

Much of what has been discussed is speculative. Far from being probable, the potentially disastrous outcomes outlined are somewhat unlikely. Furthermore, even if the worst did come to pass the US would rebound, and may well come back stronger than ever. The reason to consider these issues, despite the low probabilities, despite the eventual recovery, is that the possible effects could be so pernicious during the time required for such an economic correction to shake itself out. The severity of the possible outcome demands our attention. These are issues that US politicians should be discussing instead of quoting the standard divisive talking points about the usual false dichotomies. You won't hear these issues raised, however, because with these issues politicians can't give a soundbite as to how they'll spend some money, or make a law that will fix the problem. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away, and just because there are no easy solutions doesn't mean that nothing can be done. What is certain is that nothing will be done if people aren't aware of the problems.

Today, I was testing my Jabber client (which now has a really buggy Alpha build released) and I realised that none of my MSN contacts were visible. A short examination of this problem revealed that the entire MSN network seems to have gone down for the second time in 12 hours. Nice to see such good reliability from MS.

I would feel more smug, if not for the fact that my Jabber server (theravensnest.org) was unavailable for a few hours last night due to the fact that the idiots who run the upstream router seem unable to keep it connected for more than a few days at a time. Fortunately, this only affected about 2 people, unlike the MSN glitch.

In other news, my client is now in a semi-usable state, and I am finally able to ditch Psi (which has a habit of deciding to eat all of my CPU after it's been running for a few minutes, probably due to the pile of bugware known as Qt for Mac). In the near future I will begin porting it to GNUStep, which should just require translating the OS X nib files into GNUStep nibs (nibs are serialised object files used for user interface definitions on NeXTStep-derived platforms).

On Monday, Apple announced a whole load of shiny things. Potentially the most interesting of these (and the one that got the least coverage) was the iChat server, which will be part of OS X Server 10.4. It appears to be the Jabberd (or possibly Jabberd2) server, with a configuration GUI. The first reason this is nice is that it means that I can cross writing a Cocoa Jabberd configuration interface and creating a .app bundle off my To-Do list. The second is that iChat will fully support Jabber.

As you may be aware, iChat has used a slightly modified (serverless) version of Jabber for peer to peer chats. Now, it will be using Jabber for through-server traffic as well. At present, the marketing material refers to the fact that iChat server can be used from Windows or Linux using third-party clients, but it would be quite unlike Apple to release something like this without client support on the Windows side. This is especially true if they wish to include support for things like voice and video chats (currently supported by iChat, but not other Jabber clients). While I don't want to make any concrete predictions, it seems quite possible that Apple are going to release a version of iChat for Windows, supporting Jabber. The question then becomes whether the Windows version would support AIM. It seems unlikely that it would, given how much AOL dislike third party clients on their network.

Personally, I'm hoping that Apple will develop a 100% functional AIM <-> Jabber transport for their server, and migrate everything to Jabber (and I said something along these lines on the JDEV list shortly after the launch of iChat). Thoughts?

Tuesday was my birthday (I drank a large quantity of Champagne before finally getting to bed at 6am). My birthday present from Apple was the launch of iTMS in the UK (which seems not to have been covered on /.). While it's more expensive than the US one (79p, while Apple's calculator informs me that 99 is equal to just under 55p), it is still cheaper than buying CDs (about 5 pounds cheaper on one of the albums I bought. I didn't check any of the others) and a whole lot more convenient.

The new terms of the DRM mean that I can listen to the music I buy on up to 5 computers (completely useless now I've decommissioned all of the computers I used to use except my PowerBook and the FreeBSD box that runs my web, mail and subversion servers), burn it to CD (also not useful, since the only CD players I own are inside computers) and put it on my iPod (very useful, since my iPod is either on my belt or plugged into my stereo 99% of the time). All in all, I am very impressed with the service.

This is my last ever journal entry.

HeironymousCoward is signing off.

The news today that criminal gangs have been spotted selling botnets, the day after the FCC considers spyware to be a valid model for software producers...

In case there is any doubt at all, let me summarize the near furture of the Internet in two words: Robber. Barons.

The installed base of computers and their hooks into modern society represents an incredible resource. You can look at crime from many angles, but the one that I prefer is the biological/ecological metaphor of the parasite. For every "normal" species, there are 3-4 parasite species. The evolution of life has been largely driven by the need to fight off opportunistic parasites.

The Internet, representing the infrastructure on which the modern information economy is hosted, has almost no defenses against parasites. Large swathes of it are monocultures, and the number of successful invasions of this monoculture is on an upward curve that shows no sign of slowing its rate of increase.

Historians know that the present is never framed in terms of arguments of the past. The future is never framed in terms of arguments of the present.

We look today at the Internet as a vast market opportunity, and debate how companies like Microsoft can be allowed to exploit this market without harming it. We argue about the relative merits of alternatives. We predict their growth and discuss strategies.

It's all irrelevant. Tomorrow's Internet will be concerned with only one thing: fighting the war against the invasion of the body snatchers, the infinite armies of parasites that infest every single susceptible computer.

Let me make this concrete. You want to use the Internet? Start by paying a small fee to your local security service provider. And hope he does his job. If his protection does not keep you safe from the others, your network access and data will vanish randomly. The good news is that someone, somewhere will be back with your data, for a price.

It will take only a generation for common criminal behaviour to turn into formalized protection, and from there into a form of taxation on all commerce.

We could sit back and watch this happen, except that during this process, governments will not sit still. Huge task forces will be assembled to protect the national interests and fight the criminal gangs. Wish it was that easy. For every success, ten new gangs will spring up, more vicious, more creative. The anti cybercrime task forces will spend huge amounts of money on the fight, will lobby for extra powers, will use increasing force and aggression.

Caught between the increasingly organized and motivated criminal gangs, and the symetrically developing cybercrime task forces, will be the citizenry of the world, as usual. We will watch as our liberties are infringed from both sides. We will complain but no-one will listen. And we will pay, one way or another.

By the time the war is over, after 20-30 years or so, there will be little difference between the forces of law-and-order and those of the underworld. The rule will be: if you want to do business, you pay. If you can't pay, go and work for someone else.

That is what I predict will happen.

Now, there is a simple and obvious way to prevent this. I'll let you figure out what that way is, and why it's not going to be.

Personally, I'm retiring to start a microbrewery.

Hasta la vista, friends.

Actions speak louder than words. But words survive when actions are dust.

Price of download single (3-4 minutes high quality music): $0.99.

Price of downloaded ringtone (30 seconds radio quality): $4.00.

Why? Because phone manufacturers don't allow mobile phones to play MP3 ringtones. Why not? Because they also profit from the ringtone business (Nokia sells ringtones and logos in Europe).

The music industry already makes more from ringtones than singles...

Hence I present you with the next greatest concept in consumer-from-business theft... RINGTONE PIRACY!! Yes, 12-year olds will be hauled before the judge for illegally swapping ringtones. Modchips that allow mobile phones to play "illegal" MP3 songs (But, yer 'onor, I own the CD!) will be banned in all civilized nations.

Just wait for the Slashdot headline "Ringtone pirates sentenced to 12 months".

Or don't. You read it first here.