Agree with this, I only recently started watching star trek having run out of other tv shows to watch. I started watching it in chronological order and I just finished tng and am half way through ds9. Out of the three I like tos best as the premise of each episode was a very simple 'what if' thought experiment with a very simple philosophical question. I guess I enjoyed the simplicity. The other two cover more complex issues like family and politics and economics which I think detract from the sci-fi aspect of them and push them more towards the realm of standard drama series and soap opera respectively. It depends what kind of people you are showing it to though. I was surprised how easily I got over the datedness of tos but that might not be so easy for everyone. Don't take it too seriously.
The tooth fairy? No. I was talking about the theoretical sense. If you want to talk about the reality of the world, please read my other post below and then you can pm me for further debate. Slashdot threads are not big enough for a real discussion of the current economic reality and it would be offtopic anyway.
Yeah, and if there are humans, there must be anti-humans. Also there must be a specific anti person for each person. There must be anti-money, anti-colour... What? Can you explain that point again either in terms of formal logic, or citing evidence? As an arbitrary whimsical deist I believe in god and heaven, but not hell or the devil. Can you prove me wrong about hell's nonexistence or even give a logical train of thought other than 'it is self evident'?
The profit motive is not a value of capitalism, it is a mechanism whereby it's values are achieved. Specifically the core values of capitalism are economic growth, stability and yes, innovation. Profit is a tool used to motivate people to further these goals. With regard to the article and headline, the original doctrines of capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and others were designed in principle to avoid organisations like the RIAA from existing. The RIAA is in essence a cartel (officially illegal) representing an oligopoly, which a properly functioning capitalistic system should avoid. The argument could be made that the RIAA are not real capitalists, the word corporatist is probably more accurate. I am not defending capitalism here, but I am realistic in that I don't believe that capitalism is inherently evil, any more than communism or any other economic model. You can argue that capitalism is destructive and use the current system in the world as an example. You could also argue that the current system is not true capitalism. I don't care at all which of these opinions you hold and you shouldn't care which one I hold. The point we all agree on is that the current system has major problems that need to be addressed.
This is a 'lies to children' explanation of capitalism. A more accurate definition is the ownership of capital, especially the means of production, by private interests.
Can someone mod this up. I was reading the articles linked in bewilderment trying to work out wtf this is even about. I know a fair bit about drugs and drug chemistry due to not wanting to ingest anything without knowing what it is, combined with wanting to get high (and not being able to drink alcohol). So there are synthetic cannibinoids I take it, I have never had the chance to take any but I will take the word of those articles. Herbal blends sold as legal highs are often just that, salvia divinorum is popular, as are various members of the datura family. Parsley can get you tripping balls if you have the lungs of steel required to smoke the massive quantities required. Synthetic analogues of drugs have been a problem for law enforcement for a while but that has nothing to do with cannabis at all, I mean like I said maybe someone out there is sythesising cannibinoids but the process can hardly be cheaper or safer than growing it so it doesn't seem to be reaching the market, real cannibinoid users still smoke buds. The article doesn't even mention if the method is applicable to the actual synthetic analogues that actually are reaching the consumers. I would assume it can as it seems quite a general process, but you might have to be testing for a specific class of analogue. I am partial to my tryptamines personally. If you haven't tried 5meo-dipt and you like drugs, you really should give it a shot. My opinion is that the summary, this entire discussion, and the articles linked are a strange messy mixture of fud, incompetence and ignorance. I agree with the legalisation arguments though, illegal drugs are in general less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, and also less harmful than prosecution. If you want to live inside the law though, find a brand of cough syrup with Dextromethorphan(DXM) in it. Stay away from phsyically addictive substances they are the real danger, alcohol, nicotine, opiates, cocaine. Yeah the ones you can get legally and aren't on schedule 1.
I remember seeing a story in the UK news recently: Some guy had taken a 'legal high' so called ecstasy substitute, and died from it. His parents were out for blood. Their position was that if the government was more aggressive in prohibiting new recreational drugs their son would still be alive. Even disregarding all the completely obvious flaws in their argument (mainly the impossibility of regulating these substances as discussed in the OP), it was a massive facepalm moment for me. I felt like grabbing them by the collar and shaking them and saying "If ecstasy were legal he would still be alive".
I have taken a few untested analogues myself, only after extensive research. Personally I thoroughly recommend tryptamine analogues especially 5-methoxy Di-isopropyl Tryptamine, that stuff is the bees knees. But the fact remains, lsd, ecstasy and marijuana are relatively safe, there are some deaths from ecstasy, maybe one or two from lsd, and exactly 0 from marijuana. Experimental analogues on the other hand are dangerous. Yes I know that the war on drugs is not there to prevent user harm, but I want everyone else to know that too and start asking why we don't start reducing that harm.
Not only this but we need university courses that actually teach, rather than certifying people for the workforce. Our society is facing a major shortage of education institutions in my opinion. Work certification can be done by the employer, and often is anyway. Very few employers will trust a degree alone and many will test employees themselves. If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries. If I want to learn how to do something, for me that is quite separate from wanting to have evidence that I can do a certain job. Perhaps there are institutes that focus solely on education. If anyone knows of one I would be glad to hear about it.
I think you are wrong about the UN. I would rather have Greece in control of the internet than the UN. The US as bad as that is, is less worse than anyone else as the UN rarely does anything properly because the US veto everything anyhow.
it's easier to kill civilians when they can't shoot back, see: Syria
Yeah because if people in Syria were allowed to carry handguns, they could just shoot those artillery shells out of the sky before they hit...
Argument: People cant revolt with knives and clubs improvised from things they find around the place, because the government has guns. So the people should be allowed to own guns too, so they can fight the government.
Corollary: People cant revolt with guns, because the government has tanks, helicopter gunships, artillery. So the people should be allowed to own tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery too, so they can fight the government.
Corollary 2: People cant revolt with tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery, because the government has nuclear weapons. So the people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons too, so they can fight the government.
Additional: When the people fight the government we will flip a coin, heads means they are terrorists and are evil, tails means they are freedom fighters and are good.
Doesn't this study assume that the US congress is inherently neutral? For this to work that would have to mean that the phrases used by the democrats represent an absolute average of human left wing sentiment and the phrases used by the republicans represent an absolute average of human right wing sentiment. If one were to hypothesise that the US congress has it's own inherent bias then this study is not measuring absolute bias but only a comparative bias, ie. does wikipedia have the same bias as congress. The fact that the answer is roughly yes, is very worrying to me as I don't think the US congress represents an unbiased debate in terms of the left/right spectrum, or any other spectrum for that matter.
If Youtube is "infringing copyright" then so is every ISP, hard drive manufacturer, monitor maker, and speaker manufacturer.
"Who cares about costs," some say? Obviously hard drive manufacturers should include hardware-based filtering software to make sure nothing copyright is stored on the drives without prior authorization from the media cartels. Yes this would drive up the costs of hard drives, but... but... externalities!
Dude they might be reading this, don't give them ideas.
Well they may have found how to make penises harder for even longer, but osteoperosis is a sickness so they may not have discovered this specifically. It also mostly effects old women so not a big priority, it pretty much could only have come from accidental discovery, or from situation where people society actually cares about (like cosmonauts) suffer from it. There are also the hundreds of other scientific and technological advances that have stemmed directly from space program funding, it's not like we are discussing a totally isolated incident here.
Yes perhaps my comment about shills was a bit inflammatory. When I posted there were a significant number of abusive troll posts about how people who don't like nuclear power are all retards. I know that is trolling not shilling, so I guess I just got frustrated and it came through in my post. Apologies. My point was that this story is not really about nuclear power. Like you said the troll journalists try to make it about that to get more eyeballs, but the point is solar. Still I don't think the journalists being less sensationalistic and talking about the real issues would have prevented a dozen people here bringing up nuclear power anyway.
It seems like 90% of this thread is arguing either for or against the notion that we shouldn't use solar power because it isn't always available. Rather than just mindlessly shouting about the relative price and reliability of solar vs. nuclear and the statistics about what times of day and times of year we have peak power usage, can we just examine this premise for a short moment?
We have a plentiful energy source which is sometimes (regularly) available to us. You are saying we shouldn't use it? Really? Your basis for that argument is that we can't use it all the time. This means we should never use it? I feel I must politely disagree with you there. Would you advise farmers not to grow seasonal vegetables because they cant grow them in winter? Would you advise people in a desert not to collect rainwater because it doesn't fall much in the desert? Would you advise me not to socialise with my friends because sometimes they have to work?
The article is about how an industrialised nation has demonstrated that it is economically and industrially feasible to harvest significant amounts of energy from the sun. Anyone want to talk about that? No? Well I do. I think this is great news. Good work everyone involved. Hopefully we can look forward to power bills going down in the future but what is money compared to the future habitability of the world? If a country like Germany can do this with the climate they have, this bodes very well for equatorial countries. Germany also has significant amounts of wind power, which also works at night and during the winter. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to start shutting down the coal plants first and the nuclear ones after. That debate on that has raged on this site for many pages, I myself am unsure about the answer. I want to see both phased out. Another important question is: How can we generate more clean, fuel independent energy? More solar farms and wind farms seem like a good idea. Geothermal and hydroelectric are nice for base load although hydro can be affected by weather as well. Osmotic power seems like an interesting variant, and Tesla's old idea of generating power from temperature gradients in the ocean seems worth a second look and maybe one day between the earths atmosphere and space, generation of electricity that is fuelled directly by global warming and works as a direct counter to it. I am getting too far into the possible future though now. The scientists have been doing good work though so far with solar and wind and I have every confidence in their abilities. Let's enjoy the good news for once, shilling for the nuclear power industry can wait till the next thread, and the next, and the next...
" what happened to the quest to develop a strong AI?"
There was no money in it. Voice recognition? yes. rudimentary understanding of specific query frames? yes. Real language engines? No.
The sad thing is that there was (is) a vast market for this, but the people involved in that market have no imagination. Computer games, especially roleplaying games. If game developers had continued with language at the same rate they worked on 3d graphics this would be an article criticising Kubric's movies because HAL was unrealistically stiff and mechanical and was unable to entertain the crewmembers with sparkling wit and repartee.
It's a lot easier to be socialist when your defense and medical R&D are covered by other countries.
I wish the US would see this and stop doing so for the rest of the world. It's really annoying as a US citizen to be spending 4 times (as a percentage of GDP) on our military as Germany (I think we can trust them now). Yet we pretty much mandate it to be so.
Additionally we pay more for the same medicine because our government refuses to take a stand on this issue, while other governments do. I'd like to see a law that no medicine or medical devices can be sold in the US for over the average price in the rest of the G8.
The rest of the world partly agrees with you. The US euphemism 'defence' really means 'offence' and the world could do with a lot less US offence. As far as medical research, whilst the US is a very valuable contributor, there are also areas where US patent law and laws about stem cells and similar actually impede the research of other nations. I think we will be alright without that too if it comes to that.
You speak the truth, but without proving your point. A few people are getting rich off tv shows, if the money is being unfairly divided or the people are getting worked too hard, the solution is not simply to charge consumers more. You are asking me to buy a dvd set for $100. How much of that will you see? How much of that will the writers or the people working ridiculous hours see? In most cases probably $0, they get paid an hourly rate. I want brilliant passionate people to make good quality entertainment and get paid a good living wage for it. There is virtually nothing I can do that would make that happen short of donating money directly to the people that are underpaid, which would involve a huge amount of research even finding out who they are. Also I am already getting paid less than the worst paid of them myself, and cannot spare the money.
I don't know why Australia is the example here, it sounds like things have improved drastically. I used to live in New Zealand and it wasn't uncommon to wait 6 months for a tv show to air. I now live in Germany. Normally shows are only given to the German dubbing teams on release so it takes a month when they really rush it, and over half a year in many cases. Then I have to find out what channel it is on, and watch it on my tiny little tv interspersed with ads and in German, at some very specific point in time several months from now, assuming I am home and not busy that night. Or I could watch it with the original actors voices in the original language ad free right now streamed on the internet. Of course as I am not a criminal I will not be doing that, but those are my options.
Those features are optional, they are just optional for the developer. If they opt in then you can't opt out as a customer unless they build their game to facilitate that. You need to contact the developers of your favourite games and ask them to allow you the option. I remember Paradox's Victoria 2 came totally drm free with steam, so that you could just run the game without the steam shortcut and it would run without opening steam. I think they moved away from this with later releases. The point is steam doesn't force anyone to use DRM nor does it force them to run steam as the game is running, it is just something most developers choose to do.
I especially love the ones that contradict each other. Still they make for good storytelling over a beer or a cup of coffee. My favourite one was the one where they synthesised beta-caroteine (proven to reduce cancer risk) as a supplement and found that its only effect was to increase the risk of cancer for smokers. That one was an actual clinical trial so its probably more reliable than this, but its still a fun anecdote.
Actually this is a common misconception, a study of all the humans that ever lived, found that 2/3 have died at some point in time. Therefore the odds of dying are rough 66%
In recent times, it seems that many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it, but in a surprising twist, the US Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra.
It's less a sentence and more a stream of consciousness. Maybe some extra full stops would help
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with this, I only recently started watching star trek having run out of other tv shows to watch. I started watching it in chronological order and I just finished tng and am half way through ds9. Out of the three I like tos best as the premise of each episode was a very simple 'what if' thought experiment with a very simple philosophical question. I guess I enjoyed the simplicity. The other two cover more complex issues like family and politics and economics which I think detract from the sci-fi aspect of them and push them more towards the realm of standard drama series and soap opera respectively. It depends what kind of people you are showing it to though. I was surprised how easily I got over the datedness of tos but that might not be so easy for everyone. Don't take it too seriously.
The tooth fairy? No. I was talking about the theoretical sense. If you want to talk about the reality of the world, please read my other post below and then you can pm me for further debate. Slashdot threads are not big enough for a real discussion of the current economic reality and it would be offtopic anyway.
Yeah, and if there are humans, there must be anti-humans. Also there must be a specific anti person for each person. There must be anti-money, anti-colour... What? Can you explain that point again either in terms of formal logic, or citing evidence? As an arbitrary whimsical deist I believe in god and heaven, but not hell or the devil. Can you prove me wrong about hell's nonexistence or even give a logical train of thought other than 'it is self evident'?
The profit motive is not a value of capitalism, it is a mechanism whereby it's values are achieved. Specifically the core values of capitalism are economic growth, stability and yes, innovation. Profit is a tool used to motivate people to further these goals. With regard to the article and headline, the original doctrines of capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and others were designed in principle to avoid organisations like the RIAA from existing. The RIAA is in essence a cartel (officially illegal) representing an oligopoly, which a properly functioning capitalistic system should avoid. The argument could be made that the RIAA are not real capitalists, the word corporatist is probably more accurate. I am not defending capitalism here, but I am realistic in that I don't believe that capitalism is inherently evil, any more than communism or any other economic model. You can argue that capitalism is destructive and use the current system in the world as an example. You could also argue that the current system is not true capitalism. I don't care at all which of these opinions you hold and you shouldn't care which one I hold. The point we all agree on is that the current system has major problems that need to be addressed.
This is a 'lies to children' explanation of capitalism. A more accurate definition is the ownership of capital, especially the means of production, by private interests.
Can someone mod this up. I was reading the articles linked in bewilderment trying to work out wtf this is even about. I know a fair bit about drugs and drug chemistry due to not wanting to ingest anything without knowing what it is, combined with wanting to get high (and not being able to drink alcohol). So there are synthetic cannibinoids I take it, I have never had the chance to take any but I will take the word of those articles. Herbal blends sold as legal highs are often just that, salvia divinorum is popular, as are various members of the datura family. Parsley can get you tripping balls if you have the lungs of steel required to smoke the massive quantities required. Synthetic analogues of drugs have been a problem for law enforcement for a while but that has nothing to do with cannabis at all, I mean like I said maybe someone out there is sythesising cannibinoids but the process can hardly be cheaper or safer than growing it so it doesn't seem to be reaching the market, real cannibinoid users still smoke buds. The article doesn't even mention if the method is applicable to the actual synthetic analogues that actually are reaching the consumers. I would assume it can as it seems quite a general process, but you might have to be testing for a specific class of analogue. I am partial to my tryptamines personally. If you haven't tried 5meo-dipt and you like drugs, you really should give it a shot. My opinion is that the summary, this entire discussion, and the articles linked are a strange messy mixture of fud, incompetence and ignorance. I agree with the legalisation arguments though, illegal drugs are in general less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, and also less harmful than prosecution. If you want to live inside the law though, find a brand of cough syrup with Dextromethorphan(DXM) in it. Stay away from phsyically addictive substances they are the real danger, alcohol, nicotine, opiates, cocaine. Yeah the ones you can get legally and aren't on schedule 1.
To be fair?
I remember seeing a story in the UK news recently: Some guy had taken a 'legal high' so called ecstasy substitute, and died from it. His parents were out for blood. Their position was that if the government was more aggressive in prohibiting new recreational drugs their son would still be alive. Even disregarding all the completely obvious flaws in their argument (mainly the impossibility of regulating these substances as discussed in the OP), it was a massive facepalm moment for me. I felt like grabbing them by the collar and shaking them and saying "If ecstasy were legal he would still be alive".
I have taken a few untested analogues myself, only after extensive research. Personally I thoroughly recommend tryptamine analogues especially 5-methoxy Di-isopropyl Tryptamine, that stuff is the bees knees. But the fact remains, lsd, ecstasy and marijuana are relatively safe, there are some deaths from ecstasy, maybe one or two from lsd, and exactly 0 from marijuana. Experimental analogues on the other hand are dangerous. Yes I know that the war on drugs is not there to prevent user harm, but I want everyone else to know that too and start asking why we don't start reducing that harm.
Not only this but we need university courses that actually teach, rather than certifying people for the workforce. Our society is facing a major shortage of education institutions in my opinion. Work certification can be done by the employer, and often is anyway. Very few employers will trust a degree alone and many will test employees themselves. If this becomes too much of a burden we could set up certification organisations, who simply administer tests based on the required abilities for specific job types/industries. If I want to learn how to do something, for me that is quite separate from wanting to have evidence that I can do a certain job. Perhaps there are institutes that focus solely on education. If anyone knows of one I would be glad to hear about it.
I think you are wrong about the UN. I would rather have Greece in control of the internet than the UN. The US as bad as that is, is less worse than anyone else as the UN rarely does anything properly because the US veto everything anyhow.
ftfy
it's easier to kill civilians when they can't shoot back, see: Syria
Yeah because if people in Syria were allowed to carry handguns, they could just shoot those artillery shells out of the sky before they hit...
Argument: People cant revolt with knives and clubs improvised from things they find around the place, because the government has guns. So the people should be allowed to own guns too, so they can fight the government.
Corollary: People cant revolt with guns, because the government has tanks, helicopter gunships, artillery. So the people should be allowed to own tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery too, so they can fight the government.
Corollary 2: People cant revolt with tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery, because the government has nuclear weapons. So the people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons too, so they can fight the government.
Additional: When the people fight the government we will flip a coin, heads means they are terrorists and are evil, tails means they are freedom fighters and are good.
Doesn't this study assume that the US congress is inherently neutral? For this to work that would have to mean that the phrases used by the democrats represent an absolute average of human left wing sentiment and the phrases used by the republicans represent an absolute average of human right wing sentiment. If one were to hypothesise that the US congress has it's own inherent bias then this study is not measuring absolute bias but only a comparative bias, ie. does wikipedia have the same bias as congress. The fact that the answer is roughly yes, is very worrying to me as I don't think the US congress represents an unbiased debate in terms of the left/right spectrum, or any other spectrum for that matter.
If Youtube is "infringing copyright" then so is every ISP, hard drive manufacturer, monitor maker, and speaker manufacturer. "Who cares about costs," some say? Obviously hard drive manufacturers should include hardware-based filtering software to make sure nothing copyright is stored on the drives without prior authorization from the media cartels. Yes this would drive up the costs of hard drives, but ... but ... externalities!
Dude they might be reading this, don't give them ideas.
Well they may have found how to make penises harder for even longer, but osteoperosis is a sickness so they may not have discovered this specifically. It also mostly effects old women so not a big priority, it pretty much could only have come from accidental discovery, or from situation where people society actually cares about (like cosmonauts) suffer from it. There are also the hundreds of other scientific and technological advances that have stemmed directly from space program funding, it's not like we are discussing a totally isolated incident here.
Yes perhaps my comment about shills was a bit inflammatory. When I posted there were a significant number of abusive troll posts about how people who don't like nuclear power are all retards. I know that is trolling not shilling, so I guess I just got frustrated and it came through in my post. Apologies. My point was that this story is not really about nuclear power. Like you said the troll journalists try to make it about that to get more eyeballs, but the point is solar. Still I don't think the journalists being less sensationalistic and talking about the real issues would have prevented a dozen people here bringing up nuclear power anyway.
Energy has to be produced reliably 24/7, 365 days a year, regardless of what kind of weather there happens to be.
Yes, and we now have decent way to produce it on summer days. So that is 12-25% of the problem taken care of. Now for the rest.
So how much is it when it is raining or cloudy?
It seems like 90% of this thread is arguing either for or against the notion that we shouldn't use solar power because it isn't always available. Rather than just mindlessly shouting about the relative price and reliability of solar vs. nuclear and the statistics about what times of day and times of year we have peak power usage, can we just examine this premise for a short moment?
We have a plentiful energy source which is sometimes (regularly) available to us. You are saying we shouldn't use it? Really? Your basis for that argument is that we can't use it all the time. This means we should never use it? I feel I must politely disagree with you there. Would you advise farmers not to grow seasonal vegetables because they cant grow them in winter? Would you advise people in a desert not to collect rainwater because it doesn't fall much in the desert? Would you advise me not to socialise with my friends because sometimes they have to work?
The article is about how an industrialised nation has demonstrated that it is economically and industrially feasible to harvest significant amounts of energy from the sun. Anyone want to talk about that? No? Well I do. I think this is great news. Good work everyone involved. Hopefully we can look forward to power bills going down in the future but what is money compared to the future habitability of the world? If a country like Germany can do this with the climate they have, this bodes very well for equatorial countries. Germany also has significant amounts of wind power, which also works at night and during the winter. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to start shutting down the coal plants first and the nuclear ones after. That debate on that has raged on this site for many pages, I myself am unsure about the answer. I want to see both phased out. Another important question is: How can we generate more clean, fuel independent energy? More solar farms and wind farms seem like a good idea. Geothermal and hydroelectric are nice for base load although hydro can be affected by weather as well. Osmotic power seems like an interesting variant, and Tesla's old idea of generating power from temperature gradients in the ocean seems worth a second look and maybe one day between the earths atmosphere and space, generation of electricity that is fuelled directly by global warming and works as a direct counter to it. I am getting too far into the possible future though now. The scientists have been doing good work though so far with solar and wind and I have every confidence in their abilities. Let's enjoy the good news for once, shilling for the nuclear power industry can wait till the next thread, and the next, and the next...
" what happened to the quest to develop a strong AI?"
There was no money in it. Voice recognition? yes. rudimentary understanding of specific query frames? yes. Real language engines? No.
The sad thing is that there was (is) a vast market for this, but the people involved in that market have no imagination. Computer games, especially roleplaying games. If game developers had continued with language at the same rate they worked on 3d graphics this would be an article criticising Kubric's movies because HAL was unrealistically stiff and mechanical and was unable to entertain the crewmembers with sparkling wit and repartee.
It's a lot easier to be socialist when your defense and medical R&D are covered by other countries.
I wish the US would see this and stop doing so for the rest of the world. It's really annoying as a US citizen to be spending 4 times (as a percentage of GDP) on our military as Germany (I think we can trust them now). Yet we pretty much mandate it to be so.
Additionally we pay more for the same medicine because our government refuses to take a stand on this issue, while other governments do. I'd like to see a law that no medicine or medical devices can be sold in the US for over the average price in the rest of the G8.
The rest of the world partly agrees with you. The US euphemism 'defence' really means 'offence' and the world could do with a lot less US offence. As far as medical research, whilst the US is a very valuable contributor, there are also areas where US patent law and laws about stem cells and similar actually impede the research of other nations. I think we will be alright without that too if it comes to that.
You speak the truth, but without proving your point. A few people are getting rich off tv shows, if the money is being unfairly divided or the people are getting worked too hard, the solution is not simply to charge consumers more. You are asking me to buy a dvd set for $100. How much of that will you see? How much of that will the writers or the people working ridiculous hours see? In most cases probably $0, they get paid an hourly rate. I want brilliant passionate people to make good quality entertainment and get paid a good living wage for it. There is virtually nothing I can do that would make that happen short of donating money directly to the people that are underpaid, which would involve a huge amount of research even finding out who they are. Also I am already getting paid less than the worst paid of them myself, and cannot spare the money.
I don't know why Australia is the example here, it sounds like things have improved drastically. I used to live in New Zealand and it wasn't uncommon to wait 6 months for a tv show to air. I now live in Germany. Normally shows are only given to the German dubbing teams on release so it takes a month when they really rush it, and over half a year in many cases. Then I have to find out what channel it is on, and watch it on my tiny little tv interspersed with ads and in German, at some very specific point in time several months from now, assuming I am home and not busy that night. Or I could watch it with the original actors voices in the original language ad free right now streamed on the internet. Of course as I am not a criminal I will not be doing that, but those are my options.
Those features are optional, they are just optional for the developer. If they opt in then you can't opt out as a customer unless they build their game to facilitate that. You need to contact the developers of your favourite games and ask them to allow you the option. I remember Paradox's Victoria 2 came totally drm free with steam, so that you could just run the game without the steam shortcut and it would run without opening steam. I think they moved away from this with later releases. The point is steam doesn't force anyone to use DRM nor does it force them to run steam as the game is running, it is just something most developers choose to do.
I especially love the ones that contradict each other. Still they make for good storytelling over a beer or a cup of coffee. My favourite one was the one where they synthesised beta-caroteine (proven to reduce cancer risk) as a supplement and found that its only effect was to increase the risk of cancer for smokers. That one was an actual clinical trial so its probably more reliable than this, but its still a fun anecdote.
... was roughly one in one. Guess I was wrong.
Actually this is a common misconception, a study of all the humans that ever lived, found that 2/3 have died at some point in time. Therefore the odds of dying are rough 66%
In recent times, it seems that many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it, but in a surprising twist, the US Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra.
It's less a sentence and more a stream of consciousness. Maybe some extra full stops would help