Inflation is generated as a product of primarily two components: quantity and velocity (Velocity of money).

There are also other factors, like aggregate demand, commodities constraints, demographics, etc. At the same time, there is a level of indirection between Feds actions and prices of goods -- the printed money are not directly acquiring goods but buying bonds.

Money have different manifestations: from money in your pocket, to deposits, and assets in general. What was most confusing to me and the hardest to untangle in my mind was that money are used as a mean of exchange as well as a measure of wealth.

Japan is printing money and still having deflation, use this as an example in trying to understand that link between money supply and inflation is not very simple at all.

Paper problem with relation to currency is only marginal: when you have no cache you can simply write a check.

Not being able to print money can't stave off inflation if velocity of money is high (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_velocity) and vise versa -- increasing money supply when velocity is low will no produce high inflation (present day USA, where the Federal Reserve is "printing money", is one example).

How majestic the Sun is.

For everybody operating in a corporate environment mail, calendar and address book are delivered by an Exchange server. Thunderbird is good for pop3/imap/ldap which are all open standards but Exchange doesn't talk these protocols.

Enter DavMail -- a proxy that connects to Exchange server on one hand and exports pop3/imap/ldap on the other. I have been successfully using it for the past 3-4 years.

(bashrc.sourceforge.net -- configuration tricks for bashrc)

I think it was sold because of pride. How could a CPU giant license designs from puny ARM from England?!

-- http://bashrc.sourceforge.net

People think Intel's purpose is to impose the x86 instruction set and also that the only culprit that keeps them from making a successful product is the overhead of that very x86 instruction set. I don't believe it.

The interpretation and translation of instructions is some constant number of transistors, the rest of the architecture is moving ahead. There will be a moment when brute force alone, the supremacy of the fabs, will win the race.

Another factor is that when you license ARM you can customize it. You can't license and customize Atom CPUs. Intel is at the moment kept back by a combination of factors

-- http://bashrc.sourceforge.net

You comments are usually enlightened and I enjoy reading them (you are on my slashdot Firehose). I'd comment on this one because I also dwell on this topic, I strive to identify indicators of what drives the oil prices. One one hand that could be paper speculators on the other could be genuine supply and demand. It is not always clear which is prevailing. Could you please go into more details about your methodology. About the deregulation, do you mean the end of the 90s or some more recent legislature? (It is probably something more recent because at the end of the 90s there was no spike in oil prices).

Reading your post one question popped up: Isn't accepting self-signed certificates useless from security stand point, what will protect users against the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks where adversaries simply supply their own self-signed certificates?

I would add that the negotiated state is cached. And the initial encryption (public keys) is much more expensive that what takes place after that (symmetrical keys).

A problem of HTTPS I noticed is that contents of the page is not cached. If you click on a link and then click Back the page is reloaded. There is no standard for how browsers implement Back button functionality. On Mozilla and Chrome my tests showed significant degrade in speed of Back when the page is in HTTPs mode. Examination of the traffic revealed that when in HTTP no requests go to the server, when in HTTPS everything is requested and loaded fresh.

Even if you don't need credit you should still use a credit card. There are only benefits and no negatives. You get points which are embedded in the price of everything already. If you pay cash you give up on those. This could be 2% of everything you buy (if you go into barter and not cash rewards)

My personal experience at a car dealer (Audi, San Francisco) was excellent -- 2% APR on a car loan (24 months), with 70% down.

I didn't need credit, but when offered 2% I decided it made perfect sense to take it.

What is the downside of having a credit card which you pay in full each month?

The Empire gives the ordinary citizen subsidized oil prices. The funding of the army is not explicitly reflected in the gasoline prices. The result is a happy motoring nation. Every ordinary citizen benefits from it.

I love reading newspapers. I'm ready to pay higher price to continue having them around. There is no substitute to newspapers, internet is too noisy and pushes people away from reaching moments of serendipity. Modeled after the "slow food" movement, I proclaim myself a "slow news" reader :-)

I honestly am befuddled how having more kernel engineers would fix problems in Firefox. I myself see problems in Ubuntu, for example there was no way to upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (both are successive long-term support versions), but I don't see how them having more kernel engineers fixes any of the desktop oriented problems.

The strength of Ubuntu and their great contribution is their work to fix issues on the desktop.

Rants are not useless. Well researched and argumented rants are edifying, but what you said is far outside this category.

Your blog post is a nice summary about the decade of blunders of Microsoft.

At the end you link to an article that talks how Windows Server was slow and LSE was to abandon it. It is a very bad article. I was interested to learn more and clicked on the link. It was written with zero technical research. The low value of the article can be summarized as: Windows running dot NET is slower than Linux. But why? I sincerely doubt the OS and language are the culprits.

From articles concerning all the fiascos I haven't yet read anything well researched that sheds light on the server business of Microsoft. I don't know is it good, is it bad, why is good, why people use it, etc. I wouldn't use Windows as a server platform, yet I'm curious why people choose it and how they fare.