I dislike DRM, but I dislike it a whole lot more when its proponents just straight out lie.
Quoting the DestraMusic site,
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the process in which digital content (audio, video or documents) is securely delivered to consumers over the Internet.
Bullocks.
Of course as others have said, the service itself is insulting: $2AU per track for lossily compressed (128mbps!) music that I can't play on my non-Windows computer, or use on my iPod. Thrilling.
Here at least, the old name was NMR (or NMRI), for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Imaging). I used to wonder if MRI was new tech, before discovering it was just a PR move.
Of course it's completely crazy in the sense that the 'nuclear' refers to the fact that it uses a property of the atomic nucleus, and there are no nuclear reactions to be seen.
I blame poor science education!
PS: There's a nice online text discussing NMR/MRI, at least for the lay person like me.
The devices used by the Russians (eg to power nuclear lighthouses!) were thermal generators, which are about 100000 (10^5) times less efficient than the device being proposed here. Which indeed is a sort of betavoltaic device!
So blowing up one of these batteries, while still dangerous, is not nearly as severe, by virtue of it using orders of magnitude less strontium.
Is there any more information about this on the web? The only link I could find was on rexresearch, which while very interesting, does unfortunately taint it with associations with less plausible technology.
How much strontium-90 is currently being produced in commerical electricy-generating nuclear reactors? (and how expensive is it to extract?) This sort of technology has huge potential, not least of which being that it can be used to extract energy from other alpha- and beta- emitters (ie a fair chunk of nuclear waste.)
Strontium-90 isn't completely benign (it is a beta source after all, and its one radioactive decay product, Yttrium-90, I think is an even more energetic beta emitter.) It behaves chemically much like calcium, so if it's inhaled or ingested, it can be incorporated into bones, etc.
On the other hand, I get the impression that it is less dangerous than oven cleaner. You wouldn't eat that either, and like strontium-90, bare skin exposure is ill-advised.
This idea was also used by Greg Egan in the backdrop of his story "Permutation City", published in 1994. (The first half of the book I really highly recommend. Feel free to stop reading after that though...)
In this setting (IIRC), most computer time was up for sale via some bidding system. If you had small problems, sure you could run them locally, but for bigger or more intensive tasks, you'd need to buy time. Computer simulations of actual people, running at about 15% real time, constitute some of these intensive tasks. These simulated people become worried when a project to control the weather, along the lines described above, is initiated and drives up the cost of computing time on the global network.
That's not the main thrust of the novel though - just part of the scenery!
HECS fees bear little or no proportional relation to the cost of providing the course (e.g. mathematics HECS fee is higher than that of languages, despite the latter requiring much more in the way of resources. Law fees are higher than chemistry, etc.)
HECS payments, unlike income tax, are taken as a percentage of net taxable income, not as a percentage above a threshold. Payments start when the student begins to earn approximately A$25000 pre-tax, where they then must pay a minimum of $750 (3%). This is significantly less than median income in Australia. Often people in this position can't very well afford to start paying HECS.
Of course it does encourage graduates to leave the country entirely and not pay any of it...
I'm not referring to basics, but to deep stuff, honest:)
I've attended some undergraduate-level courses at a (good) German University, and can honestly say that the pace and workload was much more demanding than the equivalent course in my (also 'good') Univeristy in Australia. This was actually a foreign language course, as regards mathematics I can only judge by the graduates... Incidently, this particular course did have an associated examination and attendance requirements; failing one or not fulfilling the other would mean that the course could not be counted for credit, or as a prerequisite without special permission.
So while the system may make abuse very easy, it seems that it is hard to get that qualification at the end of it all without doing some serious work, and learning a lot of material. Perhaps those with no ambition beyond some non-academic employment are finding ways to skimp, but for those pursuing the academic path, the hill is steep and the competition stiff.
Note from that discussion that the Diplom level qualification is comparable to a Masters degree from a good UK University. It may take them a little longer to complete, but then it is certainly not the case that everyone finishes their undergrad and Masters in the minimum time either. The system completion times aren't so dissimilar as to be terribly worrying.
Knowing people teaching in the UK system, it seems that the tutorial model described in the web page referenced does not apply generally (though it does to Oxford and Cambridge.) Also, the strict course syllabus has students taking courses they are not interested in, and also makes it very hard for them to get any breadth outside their major. Bored students generally do not make good students.
If it takes people 6-10 years to get a Masters level education instead of 6-8 as you would expect in the UK, but they come out with a broad and thorough understanding of topics they themselves were motivated to pursue, is this such a bad thing? Judging from the people I've met (and I may just have been lucky) it seems in fact to work very well indeed.
PS: Students chosing to study are taking a financial loss by not being able to work full-time. Even when there is government assistance, it's not comparable to a full-time job. So it is not as though long term students are making no sacrifices.
It was my understanding that though it is called a student union, it's not really a union in the same way a trade union is a union.
Such things as laws against compulsatory unionization and the like don't apply, for this sort of reason. Also (mainly because it's not exactly relevant I guess) they don't set pay awards, etc.
[...] effectively govt. wants to reduce spending on education and force universities to obtain funding through research avenues AND raise student fees [...]
which I believe they have done at least twice in the last ten years. But then of course, the best time to kick someone is in fact when they're down.
The hypocrisy is of course that the ones arguing for these changes are the very ones that benefitted from a well-funded and free university education themselves. Also their arguments about students paying their fair share of costs and the like are completely eroded by the fact that (i) the argument that students get so much financial benefit also implies that they pay so much more tax - doing the sums indicates that graduates (on average of course) already more than payed back the cost of their education before the introduction of HECS; and (ii) the HECS charges are levied differently across courses not based on how much they cost to teach, but on how much they expect graduates to earn on average after graduation.
Having encountered postgraduate mathematics students and recent postdocs from a number of Western countries, the ones from Germany that I've met have been consistently amazing. The breadth and depth of their mathematical knowledge and understanding is awe inspiring. I can't judge exactly how broad and how deep exactly, 'cause its a lot broader and deeper then my own.
Correlation not causation etc. etc., but the Universities must be doing something right.
PS: Australian higher education used to be free. Now it's at partially student funded, but the quality of education (as measured by student-teacher ratios, per-student funding, etc.) has decreased. Note also that it started as a 'small fee' (charging for student services), quickly became partial funding for the whole degree, and then a few years later became even more of a financial burden. If Germany does start charging fees, I can only hope they do not follow a similar road.
Back when I was administering a mixed Unix network, we used to say the two NFS mount options were 'hard' and 'corrupt'.
I believe that it is theoretically possible to write software that can survive a soft mounted filesystem disappearing from under it, but no one ever does. How often do people check the return value from write()? And in memory mapped io land, it would be nasty.
The sensible interpretation is that on average, a female player plays longer than a male player. Because clearly the other interpretation would contradict what he just wrote.
Doing the sums, one gets that (again on average), a female player plays 1.8 times longer than a male player.
I believe in Australia (240VAC, 50Hz) each outlet is typically rated for 10A (2.4kW) but each circuit is rated for a total of 30A. Power boards and the like with a breaker are generally set to trip at the 10A mark, give or take 15%:/
I'd like to confirm these figures, but you have to
pay for the standard, even in electronic form! grr! I think it's a bit rough to charge for access to legal standards m'self.
Being in Australia (then), if I had waited for an Australian or even PAL region release of all the games I'd have liked to have played, I wouldn't have played much of anything.
One of the first things I did with my Dreamcast was to get it modded. And strangely, there's not a single illegally copied game in my collection.
Space Channel 5 (the original) on the Dreamcast was good fun, but suffered from a lack of replayability, was very easy, and too short. It was a game for renting.
The sequel though just kicked several different types of butt. Much longer, more challenging, much more potential game time, more to collect, more to do, tighter timing... even better graphics. And it had moments of comic genius - even if you didn't understand Japanese. You could even play co-operatively with a friend! Definitely one of the best games for the Dreamcast.
So it's welcome to see an English release at long last! (Even if it is only for the PS2.)
I can't believe games like Ikaruga or Soul Calibur II are ported to the GC...
(And the fact that SCII on GC outsold the other versions shows that play control simply isn't that important to many gamers.)
A percentage of people who take SCII seriously, play it with a joystick. In this circumstance, the default GC controller isn't important.
Don't know how large this percentage is, but it's certainly large enough to make it economically feasible for Hori to make a GC-specific SCII arcade stick.
For people who have access to both a PS2 and a GC, and who take fighting games seriously enough to use a stick, the only reason to buy the PS2 version over the GC version would be in the situation that they already have an arcade stick for the PS2 and don't want to buy a second for the GC. In every other respect (ignoring console specific characters, blech) the GC port is superior: better graphics, and, most importantly, free of the slowdowns that plague the PS2 version in some stages.
Society is not something entirely other from the people in it. Supporting society involves supporting the people that compose it -- even the ones you don't know personally, or whose activities (or lack there of) you don't approve of.
On a pragmatic level, the number of people we're speaking of is proportionally very low. Given that the support you contribute towards them directly is such a tiny proportion of what you are already paying, it seems mean to deny it.
It's very hard for people to be in a situation where they don't contribute to scoiety at all. They would have to have no friends, no family, and no hobbies that involve others. There may indeed be people who do not contribute in any way at all, but now we're speaking of an extremely small number of people indeed.
The concept of 'hard-earned money' that is then 'forcibly confiscated' by the government, is an emotive but not especially accurate picture. To say the number of dollars that corresponds to your pre-tax income is 'yours' is to deny that any other party has contributed towards that figure. Given the web of social interactions and public services that we all rely on daily, this is plainly not the case.
It seems to be a good thing to work to support oneself, in that it gives us purpose and a sense of self-worth, as well as of course providing the necessities of life. But I can't see that this means we must be selfish.
Note too that the days of high employment are very much likely numbered. Given the outsourcing of jobs overseas, as well as the replacement of unskilled labour by machine labour, it doesn't seem that it will be long before a significant percentage of people will be unable to find traditional-style employment that pays a living wage. What then?
DRM doesn't stop music copying - all it does is make it inconvenient for honest people. As you say. So those who are whining about it are exactly those who are being inconvenienced.
The pirates don't give a damn, 'cause all of these 'protections' can be easily circumvented with a bit of tech (eg linux+cdparanoia, cdplayer+optical out, etc.).. People who download music don't give a damn either, because they can just as easily download this music too (see previous sentence.)
Frankly I have no idea why the recording industry people do it. It doesn't achieve their stated aim, and just pisses off the very people who spend money on music.
Having been educated about the food stamp system, I certainly agree that the US situation is not as extreme as those which you allude to.
Nonetheless, there is an issue here: is it right to force people to work in poor conditions, essentially giving up most of their waking hours for someone else's benefit, merely so they and their families can enjoy a minimum level of health and shelter? For that is what the system achieves.
It is not as blatant, but it still is a matter of coercion through the control of necessities. It's a matter of degree (and maybe subtlety), more than one of kind.
PS: What really is so bad about some people with no ambition living off the taxes of others? The money that we 'earn' has very little to do with how hard we work or the worth of that work. The money we receive from various sources is ours only inasmuch as we have control over it; we owe too much to external factors and the support of the society at large to claim that we receive in accordance with what we deserve.
PPS:
Granted, I'm sure there are some people who end up on welfare for extended periods of time for some reason and would rather be supporting themselves, but that's rare.
Can't speak for the US, but in Australia this is a widely held but inaccurate belief. The majority of long-term unemployed want to get off welfare and support themselves (not least because living on welfare is typically a pretty miserable existence). Yet for whatever reason, the majority of the population seem to believe that most people on benefits for a long period are dole-bludgers. Some are, sure. But they constitute a small minority. It may well be different in the US, given the difference in minimum wage provisions.
I was going to post this exact post -- but you posted it for me!
Scary psychics...
One thing to add: Space Channel 5 Part 2. Sure it's a sequel, but it takes every part of Space Channel 5 and makes it funner. There's a PS2 port which I haven't played, but I can say without reservation that the Dreamcast version is fantastic.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but isn't it policy in the US to deny welfare to long-term unemployed?
Given that in most cities people do not have the land or other resources to provide their own food without money, denying welfare is forcing people to take work, even if the wages are very low or the conditions are very bad.
To me, this looks like a policy of using food to force people into being cheap labour. The tragedy is that this isn't even partisan political - both major parties seem to condone this state of affairs. The victims don't even have the hope of political reform.
MS is almost universally hated, and yet Linux sits idle because it's not easy.
It may be the case that Linux is not easy, but that's the least of it. Linux is not widely used on home computers because
It's not installed by default.
It typically does not run Microsoft applications 'out of the box'
Many people are forced to use Microsoft applications due to Microsoft having cornered the office software market, and then making it difficult or impossible for others to interoperate at the file format level.
When these are no longer an issue, then you can start worrying about ease.
We could try socialism but obvious examples have already demonstrated the sheer humanitarian horror that that produced.
So glad not to be living under the terror of the Swedish regime!
Socialism != Stalinism. Socialism in some form of capitalist democracy in fact seems to produce the best quality of life for the citizens of a country. Yes, that means quality of life may be better in some countries outside the US!
This is the first journal I've seen online that wants you to be a subscriber before even letting you read the abstract!
And at $25 per article, their rates aren't exactly cheap.
I guess though that the yearly membership rate for the ACS is quite reasonable, if chemistry is your field. But I think most of us will be waiting until it hits the shelves at the library.
And anyway, if CO2 turns out not to be as bad for the environment as we thought, surely it would be good to reallocate some of the vast resources being spent on CO2 output reduction into other areas that would benefit the environment more for the same cost. There are plenty of polluted sites to clean up, there are endangered species and rainforests to be protected, and so on. There is no shortage of worthy causes. It is very important to make a good determination of where the money should be spent.
Spending money wisely is of course the right thing to do. On the other hand, there are few environmental concerns with the same potential for large scale costs and general disaster - at least that we're facing at present. So even a small risk seems to indicate that concerns about CO2 are warranted.
The other point is that it's not a static situation: it's (of course) not just a matter of having dumped an excess of some quantity of Co2; but neither is it a case of dealing with a constant rate of excess CO2 introduction into the system. The CO2 emissions are increasing over time, with the growth being more or less exponential. Clearly this can't be sustained indefinitely, as we'll run out of things to burn. But the potential for impact on the environment is much greater than if it were a fixed quanity, or even a fixed rate.
It seems that the money being spent isn't even reducing CO2 output, but so far (on average), only reducing the growth of that output. Which is abit worrying, really. If it turns out that the risk of climate change through human CO2 emission is significant, just how difficult is it going to be to change our industries?
Not having done enough reading of the subject to speak with authority, I can't say much. Intuitively, adopting lower-impact energy sources and cleaner cars would together make a huge impact. It is a shame that nuclear energy has such a bad reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike DRM, but I dislike it a whole lot more when its proponents just straight out lie. Quoting the DestraMusic site,
Bullocks.
Of course as others have said, the service itself is insulting: $2AU per track for lossily compressed (128mbps!) music that I can't play on my non-Windows computer, or use on my iPod. Thrilling.
Here at least, the old name was NMR (or NMRI), for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Imaging). I used to wonder if MRI was new tech, before discovering it was just a PR move.
Of course it's completely crazy in the sense that the 'nuclear' refers to the fact that it uses a property of the atomic nucleus, and there are no nuclear reactions to be seen.
I blame poor science education!
PS: There's a nice online text discussing NMR/MRI, at least for the lay person like me.
The devices used by the Russians (eg to power nuclear lighthouses!) were thermal generators, which are about 100000 (10^5) times less efficient than the device being proposed here. Which indeed is a sort of betavoltaic device! So blowing up one of these batteries, while still dangerous, is not nearly as severe, by virtue of it using orders of magnitude less strontium.
Is there any more information about this on the web? The only link I could find was on rexresearch, which while very interesting, does unfortunately taint it with associations with less plausible technology.
How much strontium-90 is currently being produced in commerical electricy-generating nuclear reactors? (and how expensive is it to extract?)
This sort of technology has huge potential, not least of which being that it can be used to extract energy from other alpha- and beta- emitters (ie a fair chunk of nuclear waste.)
Strontium-90 isn't completely benign (it is a beta source after all, and its one radioactive decay product, Yttrium-90, I think is an even more energetic beta emitter.) It behaves chemically much like calcium, so if it's inhaled or ingested, it can be incorporated into bones, etc.
On the other hand, I get the impression that it is less dangerous than oven cleaner. You wouldn't eat that either, and like strontium-90, bare skin exposure is ill-advised.
This idea was also used by Greg Egan in the backdrop of his story "Permutation City", published in 1994. (The first half of the book I really highly recommend. Feel free to stop reading after that though ...)
In this setting (IIRC), most computer time was up for sale via some bidding system. If you had small problems, sure you could run them locally, but for bigger or more intensive tasks, you'd need to buy time. Computer simulations of actual people, running at about 15% real time, constitute some of these intensive tasks. These simulated people become worried when a project to control the weather, along the lines described above, is initiated and drives up the cost of computing time on the global network.
That's not the main thrust of the novel though - just part of the scenery!
- I believe it is considerably more than 20%.
- HECS fees bear little or no proportional relation to the cost of providing the course (e.g. mathematics HECS fee is higher than that of languages, despite the latter requiring much more in the way of resources. Law fees are higher than chemistry, etc.)
- HECS payments, unlike income tax, are taken as a percentage of net taxable income, not as a percentage above a threshold. Payments start when the student begins to earn approximately A$25000 pre-tax, where they then must pay a minimum of $750 (3%). This is significantly less than median income in Australia. Often people in this position can't very well afford to start paying HECS.
Of course it does encourage graduates to leave the country entirely and not pay any of itI'm not referring to basics, but to deep stuff, honest :)
... Incidently, this particular course did have an associated examination and attendance requirements; failing one or not fulfilling the other would mean that the course could not be counted for credit, or as a prerequisite without special permission.
I've attended some undergraduate-level courses at a (good) German University, and can honestly say that the pace and workload was much more demanding than the equivalent course in my (also 'good') Univeristy in Australia. This was actually a foreign language course, as regards mathematics I can only judge by the graduates
So while the system may make abuse very easy, it seems that it is hard to get that qualification at the end of it all without doing some serious work, and learning a lot of material. Perhaps those with no ambition beyond some non-academic employment are finding ways to skimp, but for those pursuing the academic path, the hill is steep and the competition stiff.
Note from that discussion that the Diplom level qualification is comparable to a Masters degree from a good UK University. It may take them a little longer to complete, but then it is certainly not the case that everyone finishes their undergrad and Masters in the minimum time either. The system completion times aren't so dissimilar as to be terribly worrying.
Knowing people teaching in the UK system, it seems that the tutorial model described in the web page referenced does not apply generally (though it does to Oxford and Cambridge.) Also, the strict course syllabus has students taking courses they are not interested in, and also makes it very hard for them to get any breadth outside their major. Bored students generally do not make good students.
If it takes people 6-10 years to get a Masters level education instead of 6-8 as you would expect in the UK, but they come out with a broad and thorough understanding of topics they themselves were motivated to pursue, is this such a bad thing? Judging from the people I've met (and I may just have been lucky) it seems in fact to work very well indeed.
PS: Students chosing to study are taking a financial loss by not being able to work full-time. Even when there is government assistance, it's not comparable to a full-time job. So it is not as though long term students are making no sacrifices.
It was my understanding that though it is called a student union, it's not really a union in the same way a trade union is a union.
Such things as laws against compulsatory unionization and the like don't apply, for this sort of reason. Also (mainly because it's not exactly relevant I guess) they don't set pay awards, etc.
which I believe they have done at least twice in the last ten years. But then of course, the best time to kick someone is in fact when they're down.The hypocrisy is of course that the ones arguing for these changes are the very ones that benefitted from a well-funded and free university education themselves. Also their arguments about students paying their fair share of costs and the like are completely eroded by the fact that (i) the argument that students get so much financial benefit also implies that they pay so much more tax - doing the sums indicates that graduates (on average of course) already more than payed back the cost of their education before the introduction of HECS; and (ii) the HECS charges are levied differently across courses not based on how much they cost to teach, but on how much they expect graduates to earn on average after graduation.
Having encountered postgraduate mathematics students and recent postdocs from a number of Western countries, the ones from Germany that I've met have been consistently amazing. The breadth and depth of their mathematical knowledge and understanding is awe inspiring. I can't judge exactly how broad and how deep exactly, 'cause its a lot broader and deeper then my own.
Correlation not causation etc. etc., but the Universities must be doing something right.
PS: Australian higher education used to be free. Now it's at partially student funded, but the quality of education (as measured by student-teacher ratios, per-student funding, etc.) has decreased. Note also that it started as a 'small fee' (charging for student services), quickly became partial funding for the whole degree, and then a few years later became even more of a financial burden. If Germany does start charging fees, I can only hope they do not follow a similar road.
Back when I was administering a mixed Unix network, we used to say the two NFS mount options were 'hard' and 'corrupt'.
I believe that it is theoretically possible to write software that can survive a soft mounted filesystem disappearing from under it, but no one ever does. How often do people check the return value from write()? And in memory mapped io land, it would be nasty.
The sensible interpretation is that on average, a female player plays longer than a male player. Because clearly the other interpretation would contradict what he just wrote.
Doing the sums, one gets that (again on average), a female player plays 1.8 times longer than a male player.
I believe in Australia (240VAC, 50Hz) each outlet is typically rated for 10A (2.4kW) but each circuit is rated for a total of 30A. Power boards and the like with a breaker are generally set to trip at the 10A mark, give or take 15% :/
I'd like to confirm these figures, but you have to pay for the standard, even in electronic form! grr! I think it's a bit rough to charge for access to legal standards m'self.
Being in Australia (then), if I had waited for an Australian or even PAL region release of all the games I'd have liked to have played, I wouldn't have played much of anything.
One of the first things I did with my Dreamcast was to get it modded. And strangely, there's not a single illegally copied game in my collection.
Region locking is simply price fixing.
Space Channel 5 (the original) on the Dreamcast was good fun, but suffered from a lack of replayability, was very easy, and too short. It was a game for renting.
... even better graphics. And it had moments of comic genius - even if you didn't understand Japanese. You could even play co-operatively with a friend! Definitely one of the best games for the Dreamcast.
The sequel though just kicked several different types of butt. Much longer, more challenging, much more potential game time, more to collect, more to do, tighter timing
So it's welcome to see an English release at long last! (Even if it is only for the PS2.)
Don't know how large this percentage is, but it's certainly large enough to make it economically feasible for Hori to make a GC-specific SCII arcade stick.
For people who have access to both a PS2 and a GC, and who take fighting games seriously enough to use a stick, the only reason to buy the PS2 version over the GC version would be in the situation that they already have an arcade stick for the PS2 and don't want to buy a second for the GC. In every other respect (ignoring console specific characters, blech) the GC port is superior: better graphics, and, most importantly, free of the slowdowns that plague the PS2 version in some stages.
Society is not something entirely other from the people in it. Supporting society involves supporting the people that compose it -- even the ones you don't know personally, or whose activities (or lack there of) you don't approve of.
On a pragmatic level, the number of people we're speaking of is proportionally very low. Given that the support you contribute towards them directly is such a tiny proportion of what you are already paying, it seems mean to deny it.
It's very hard for people to be in a situation where they don't contribute to scoiety at all. They would have to have no friends, no family, and no hobbies that involve others. There may indeed be people who do not contribute in any way at all, but now we're speaking of an extremely small number of people indeed.
The concept of 'hard-earned money' that is then 'forcibly confiscated' by the government, is an emotive but not especially accurate picture. To say the number of dollars that corresponds to your pre-tax income is 'yours' is to deny that any other party has contributed towards that figure. Given the web of social interactions and public services that we all rely on daily, this is plainly not the case.
It seems to be a good thing to work to support oneself, in that it gives us purpose and a sense of self-worth, as well as of course providing the necessities of life. But I can't see that this means we must be selfish.
Note too that the days of high employment are very much likely numbered. Given the outsourcing of jobs overseas, as well as the replacement of unskilled labour by machine labour, it doesn't seem that it will be long before a significant percentage of people will be unable to find traditional-style employment that pays a living wage. What then?
That's a very confused argument.
DRM doesn't stop music copying - all it does is make it inconvenient for honest people. As you say. So those who are whining about it are exactly those who are being inconvenienced.
The pirates don't give a damn, 'cause all of these 'protections' can be easily circumvented with a bit of tech (eg linux+cdparanoia, cdplayer+optical out, etc.).. People who download music don't give a damn either, because they can just as easily download this music too (see previous sentence.)
Frankly I have no idea why the recording industry people do it. It doesn't achieve their stated aim, and just pisses off the very people who spend money on music.
Having been educated about the food stamp system, I certainly agree that the US situation is not as extreme as those which you allude to.
Nonetheless, there is an issue here: is it right to force people to work in poor conditions, essentially giving up most of their waking hours for someone else's benefit, merely so they and their families can enjoy a minimum level of health and shelter? For that is what the system achieves.
It is not as blatant, but it still is a matter of coercion through the control of necessities. It's a matter of degree (and maybe subtlety), more than one of kind.
PS: What really is so bad about some people with no ambition living off the taxes of others? The money that we 'earn' has very little to do with how hard we work or the worth of that work. The money we receive from various sources is ours only inasmuch as we have control over it; we owe too much to external factors and the support of the society at large to claim that we receive in accordance with what we deserve.
PPS:
Can't speak for the US, but in Australia this is a widely held but inaccurate belief. The majority of long-term unemployed want to get off welfare and support themselves (not least because living on welfare is typically a pretty miserable existence). Yet for whatever reason, the majority of the population seem to believe that most people on benefits for a long period are dole-bludgers. Some are, sure. But they constitute a small minority. It may well be different in the US, given the difference in minimum wage provisions.I was going to post this exact post -- but you posted it for me!
...
Scary psychics
One thing to add: Space Channel 5 Part 2. Sure it's a sequel, but it takes every part of Space Channel 5 and makes it funner. There's a PS2 port which I haven't played, but I can say without reservation that the Dreamcast version is fantastic.
I don't think there was much (or any?) US presence in the East Timor peacekeeping force.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but isn't it policy in the US to deny welfare to long-term unemployed?
Given that in most cities people do not have the land or other resources to provide their own food without money, denying welfare is forcing people to take work, even if the wages are very low or the conditions are very bad.
To me, this looks like a policy of using food to force people into being cheap labour. The tragedy is that this isn't even partisan political - both major parties seem to condone this state of affairs. The victims don't even have the hope of political reform.
- It's not installed by default.
- It typically does not run Microsoft applications 'out of the box'
- Many people are forced to use Microsoft applications due to Microsoft having cornered the office software market, and then making it difficult or impossible for others to interoperate at the file format level.
When these are no longer an issue, then you can start worrying about ease.Socialism != Stalinism. Socialism in some form of capitalist democracy in fact seems to produce the best quality of life for the citizens of a country. Yes, that means quality of life may be better in some countries outside the US!
This is the first journal I've seen online that wants you to be a subscriber before even letting you read the abstract! And at $25 per article, their rates aren't exactly cheap. I guess though that the yearly membership rate for the ACS is quite reasonable, if chemistry is your field. But I think most of us will be waiting until it hits the shelves at the library.
The other point is that it's not a static situation: it's (of course) not just a matter of having dumped an excess of some quantity of Co2; but neither is it a case of dealing with a constant rate of excess CO2 introduction into the system. The CO2 emissions are increasing over time, with the growth being more or less exponential. Clearly this can't be sustained indefinitely, as we'll run out of things to burn. But the potential for impact on the environment is much greater than if it were a fixed quanity, or even a fixed rate.
It seems that the money being spent isn't even reducing CO2 output, but so far (on average), only reducing the growth of that output. Which is abit worrying, really. If it turns out that the risk of climate change through human CO2 emission is significant, just how difficult is it going to be to change our industries?
Not having done enough reading of the subject to speak with authority, I can't say much. Intuitively, adopting lower-impact energy sources and cleaner cars would together make a huge impact. It is a shame that nuclear energy has such a bad reputation.