The great thing about centralised search engines is that they're not gamed... oh wait...
...is that it isn't in the provider's interest to encourage spam domains full of adverts brokered by itself... oh wait...
...is that there's careful control over dissemination of information so privacy is not compromised... oh wait...
A p2p search engine will have different problems. But in the limit perhaps it'll be like a load of Google or whatever servers sitting around the Internet instead of in one or two datacentres.
(1) Will nothing happen to the alleged offender (i.e. no throttling/cut-off/etc.) unless and until a court has found against him?
(2) I don't understand how a group of ISPs in cooperation with "rights holders" could get to decide when "rights holders are able to pursue court action" unless there is some legislation behind it - ideas?
(3) Would the "rights holders" be paying for the admin involved in all of this?
(1) In which Western country are all forms of support withdrawn after 6/12 months, please? Not just an enhanced jobseekers' pay but any legal means to access food;
(2) In a labour camp you are required to work in poor conditions if you want to survive, making money for some powerful group with your labour, which is like the new range of "welfare" work programmes. The chief purpose of a labour camp, as the new range of work programmes, is to extract cheap labour from desperate individuals.
But in a death camp someone kills you. The chief purpose of the death camp is to kill you, which is (probably) not the purpose of a state which happens not to have a comprehensive welfare system.
This is all it comes down to: make people desperate and exploit cheap labour for profit through a unification of government and corporation. At least China's damn honest about it.
I'm going to be blunt here: you're an idiot. And not just an idiot worthy of sympathy but one who rides so far and so high on his hobby horse you knock over your audience in fits of laughter.
I mention the 1930s not because of Nazism but as the last decade before the rise of the welfare state - the last decade where men in general in the free West were "required to work there if you want to eat". And the calculation for you to perform was 2011 - 1930 > 80: your suggestion of the purpose of work is outdated and belongs long ago in a less advanced society.
I realise that history education is so fucking poor that the only two things on this site people seem to remember happened before the '80s were Hitler and the American Revolution (and/or possibly French), but please do get a grip.
I remember an interview with an African politician, who came to the UK to see how the social system worked. After touring the neighborhoods of welfare housing, filled with people living off of welfare checks, his observation what that this was a totally dehumanizing experience.
Taking allowances isn't compulsory. Every man has the choice to pretend that he lives in a less advanced country and just beg on the streets or take dangerous, unregulated work. (For the flamebait moderation: "Like people have to do in much of Africa.")
The people he saw had no purpose to their lives, no one needed anything they produced, and in fact they produced nothing at all.
If you define "purpose in life" as "making profit for a business which exploits your labour" then... well... I guess I'm glad you've found your purpose in life. It certainly isn't mine. Anyway, Britain had lots of people employed actually producing stuff - in factories where workers often had a degree of control of the means of production through unions, making their labour per se meaningful to them - until society-destroying Thatcher.
If society is going to give you money, why should you not be required to do something for it?
(1) Many unemployed people today (though the demographic's not quite as skewed to older people as in the '80s) have spent more years working, participating in the community and paying taxes than you have spent alive - if anyone "owes" anything, you owe them;
(2) If you want society to protect you, should you not be required to do certain things for it?
(3) Jobseekers' allowance is paid to people so they look for and improve their prospects for work, not so they tire themselves out doing random chores.
If you sweep a sidewalk, remove graffiti, or something, you are contributing to your society.
Indeed. It's called a "job". You do the work and you get paid for it. If local governments want to prioritise placements for the long term unemployed, more power to them.
Additionally, this keeps the person in the habit of working - of getting up in the morning, leaving the house, and doing something.
Why did this Victorian notion that the unemployed are lazy layabouts suddenly come from? Whenever there's a Tory government - coincident, always, with a massive rise in unemployment - it's suddenly the fault of the worker that there are no jobs.
Yes, everyone knows one guy who seems like he can't be arsed to get up and do anything. So what? Are we going to base our whole philosophy toward individual welfare on this stereotype so beloved by recent governments?
The trick here is that everyone is "biologically disadvantaged" in some way - intelligence isn't something you can develop much beyond early childhood.
The current governments cannot afford fair wages instead of benefits unfortunately.
Governments claim lots of things. The problem is not a lack of money (one man's debt is another man's credit) but that money is increasingly being channeled towards special interests in every sector.
Social benefits, especially in Europe, is a huge factor in financing a country, second after keeping the financial industry alive.
The way to handle unemployed, in my opinion, is to have them working on something that is usefull, but out of reach of the current budget. And there are oodles of things that can be done. Creating nicer neighbourhoods, creating new parks/forests, helping the elderly (supervised and voluntarily of course), helping with open source products, etc. etc. etc.
Do they have to look for work 8 hours a day as well, or are you suggesting that the government take back the responsibility for helping people find jobs (public or private sector)?
Paid workers and genuine volunteers already do the above things. If society cannot find enough volunteers but wants certain work to be done then it can cough up the money to pay people to do it. Again, there is not a lack of money, there is just ever-growing inequality. Put bluntly: the rich can pay higher taxes to pay the unemployed to make their community better. If we can force the poor to be "volunteers" then we can force the rich to be "philanthropists", right?
you would end up with a communist kind of workforce, which is *not* a good thing.
What's good is what alleviates the suffering of the people in the short and long term. If your definition of "communist" (which I guess isn't the same as mine) applies then who cares?
Is a specific job immediately assigned to you with scant regards for your abilities and disabilities? Is starvation the only (legal) alternative to this job? Are worker protections not applicable for this job?
Of course there are similarities between A and B. But there are equally as many differences, and emotionally charged descriptor of outcome for A makes any discussion moot.
Concentrate on the similarities of philosophy. Egregiously inhumane outcomes are consequences, not causes.
What you say about private enterprise is absolutely true, and your proposal is much better than Britain's where private enterprise is already dismissing "proper" employees so it can take on free labour. But shouldn't the government pay a fair wage for labour too?
Yes, prioritise the long term unemployed by offering them (part time - so as many people can be involved as possible) community service positions first. Yes, support their training. But then pay them as you would pay any other man or woman with a job.
Volunteer work is volunteer. Labour which you have to provide in order to receive some money is paid work, however the government tries to handwave it. If it were genuine compulsory community service - in the style e.g. of Spain's former alternative to the Mili - then it would be required of every able-bodied citizen, not just those receiving certain allowances.
For one, the job of the unemployed is to find work; probably in most countries you will lose unemployment benefits if you refuse any work and isn't that the same thing as what you so casually deem a "hard labour camp".
Most countries don't require you to take up the first above-board job you can find - certainly not initially. They also provide protections against various forms of maltreatment in employment. The new Work Programmes are not regarded as employment and do not come with the same protections.
Also, yes, the unemployed are today required to look for work to receive jobseeker allowances (this has always struck me as inefficient - whatever happened to proper government-supported labour exchanges?). But this itself isn't exploitative as there is no labour being extracted. The underlying problem with labour camps is that they are regarded as a highly profitable alternative to properly treating your fellow man. Once they have become acceptable it requires a sweeping philosophical change to halt their expansion.
It is a "hard labour camp" in the sense that you're required to work there if you want to eat, i.e. if you want to live. You won't be shot or beaten for not working - you'll just be left to die - but the outcome is the same. It's healthy to see that you have Stalin as a yardstick for what counts as going too far, right? And even in the gulag, reduction of rations or transfer were often the punishments given to those who refused to work. No transport costs, either.
Europe is gradually introducing an underclass in each state by turning jobseekers' allowances into a pay well below minimum wage in exchange for doing government work or work for private companies which have the government's favour. This underclass replaces labourers which used to be, well, paid a regular wage for what is regular work. The UK, for example, has recently begun Work Programme, and was last week planning to add to this a scheme whereby the government pays a proportion of certain employees' wages for a fixed amount of time so employers don't have to. It's all about special interests keeping a cheap fund of desperate workers.
As subject. There are excellent IT people, willing to do their job and help their colleagues - and then there are people who think they are more intelligent or more important than any other janitor.
Remember, it's not your attitude which is wrong - it's everyone else to blame!
It's better to be told in advance when you're going to be beaten, have property confiscated or simply be whisked off for saying the wrong thing. Wastes a lot less time than letting you mouth off until you're speaking loudly enough for others to hear.
So you are the government? That's great. Is everything going exactly as you want it? No? Then it must be that your assertion is wrong.
You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach.
Swallowing a straw man will make anyone feel a little queasy.
Your attitude is the problem, not the solution.
My attitude or your straw man's attitude? Because if you mean my attitude, I'm fairly sure it's your attitude too. You're still living under the protection of society, right?
The government spends the government's money, not your money.
I know the anti-society propaganda machine has been in full force since Reagan, but you pay money to the government in return for the privilege of living and working in your nation. It's then the government's money. The government represents the people, thus spends according to the people's wishes. It represents the people primarily by allowing the people to vote.
If you don't like the way the government's spending money, it's up to you to encourage your fellow man to vote differently..
Changing the whole way the world works [tm] really is that simple.
Or perhaps your alternative is even shitter than whatever's going on now - which, as the past few thousand years go, isn't that bad.
Male aggression is a sexual characteristic./. exists because the male mind[tm] has certain characteristics which can be appealed to.
Another male sexual characteristic is to notice the physical features of women.
It's easy to take selective offence, especially when political correctness is so good at it. But while repressing antisocial acts may be good for society, repressing thoughts which make you uncomfortable will get you nowhere.
After all, it would be a liar who didn't notice the appearance of a politician, and a lying politician who said he did not consider his own appearance.
You're going to great lengths to dig up reasons for BSD operating systems to be bad.
Not "bad", but so elitist and cliquish that they fell way behind Linux for reasons other than "lawyers". Easier to blame that gang of non-techies over there rather than cleaning up your own house, isn't it?
to cobble together an OS
Don't let your bias shout too loudly. Also, why the disdain for groups which actually try to build an OS for the applications rather than for the benefit of their own ego? MS knows who they need to cater to and so does Linus.
Why would I write a network card for FreeBSD? The vast majority of manufacturers of such cards write their own drivers.
You're missing the point entirely. Linux kernel developers have made it much easier than BSD developers for others to write drivers - whether "the vast majority of manufacturers" or interested third parties. There's still the problem of API stability vs Windows but this is more an engineering decision (GPL v2 allows for a community to keep things agile rather than relying on legacy bloat) than a personality one (BSD's "if you aren't already core or protege then you should be able to divine from the source what counts as part of the stable public API and any changes we make, so fuck you!").
This argument is academic: the different philosophies and the resultant success of Linux have been played out magnificently over the past two decades. BSD is where it is only through inertia and a few first class isolated projects (e.g. openssh).
Slashdot Mirror
The great thing about centralised search engines is that they're not gamed... oh wait...
A p2p search engine will have different problems. But in the limit perhaps it'll be like a load of Google or whatever servers sitting around the Internet instead of in one or two datacentres.
Just to clarify, that's between ISPs and specific "rights holders" on the fate of users from the PoV of those specific "rights holders"?
(1) Will nothing happen to the alleged offender (i.e. no throttling/cut-off/etc.) unless and until a court has found against him?
(2) I don't understand how a group of ISPs in cooperation with "rights holders" could get to decide when "rights holders are able to pursue court action" unless there is some legislation behind it - ideas?
(3) Would the "rights holders" be paying for the admin involved in all of this?
(1) In which Western country are all forms of support withdrawn after 6/12 months, please? Not just an enhanced jobseekers' pay but any legal means to access food;
(2) In a labour camp you are required to work in poor conditions if you want to survive, making money for some powerful group with your labour, which is like the new range of "welfare" work programmes. The chief purpose of a labour camp, as the new range of work programmes, is to extract cheap labour from desperate individuals.
But in a death camp someone kills you. The chief purpose of the death camp is to kill you, which is (probably) not the purpose of a state which happens not to have a comprehensive welfare system.
This is all it comes down to: make people desperate and exploit cheap labour for profit through a unification of government and corporation. At least China's damn honest about it.
I'm going to be blunt here: you're an idiot. And not just an idiot worthy of sympathy but one who rides so far and so high on his hobby horse you knock over your audience in fits of laughter.
I mention the 1930s not because of Nazism but as the last decade before the rise of the welfare state - the last decade where men in general in the free West were "required to work there if you want to eat". And the calculation for you to perform was 2011 - 1930 > 80: your suggestion of the purpose of work is outdated and belongs long ago in a less advanced society.
I realise that history education is so fucking poor that the only two things on this site people seem to remember happened before the '80s were Hitler and the American Revolution (and/or possibly French), but please do get a grip.
I remember an interview with an African politician, who came to the UK to see how the social system worked. After touring the neighborhoods of welfare housing, filled with people living off of welfare checks, his observation what that this was a totally dehumanizing experience.
Taking allowances isn't compulsory. Every man has the choice to pretend that he lives in a less advanced country and just beg on the streets or take dangerous, unregulated work. (For the flamebait moderation: "Like people have to do in much of Africa.")
The people he saw had no purpose to their lives, no one needed anything they produced, and in fact they produced nothing at all.
If you define "purpose in life" as "making profit for a business which exploits your labour" then... well... I guess I'm glad you've found your purpose in life. It certainly isn't mine. Anyway, Britain had lots of people employed actually producing stuff - in factories where workers often had a degree of control of the means of production through unions, making their labour per se meaningful to them - until society-destroying Thatcher.
If society is going to give you money, why should you not be required to do something for it?
(1) Many unemployed people today (though the demographic's not quite as skewed to older people as in the '80s) have spent more years working, participating in the community and paying taxes than you have spent alive - if anyone "owes" anything, you owe them;
(2) If you want society to protect you, should you not be required to do certain things for it?
(3) Jobseekers' allowance is paid to people so they look for and improve their prospects for work, not so they tire themselves out doing random chores.
If you sweep a sidewalk, remove graffiti, or something, you are contributing to your society.
Indeed. It's called a "job". You do the work and you get paid for it. If local governments want to prioritise placements for the long term unemployed, more power to them.
Additionally, this keeps the person in the habit of working - of getting up in the morning, leaving the house, and doing something.
Why did this Victorian notion that the unemployed are lazy layabouts suddenly come from? Whenever there's a Tory government - coincident, always, with a massive rise in unemployment - it's suddenly the fault of the worker that there are no jobs.
Yes, everyone knows one guy who seems like he can't be arsed to get up and do anything. So what? Are we going to base our whole philosophy toward individual welfare on this stereotype so beloved by recent governments?
The trick here is that everyone is "biologically disadvantaged" in some way - intelligence isn't something you can develop much beyond early childhood.
The current governments cannot afford fair wages instead of benefits unfortunately.
Governments claim lots of things. The problem is not a lack of money (one man's debt is another man's credit) but that money is increasingly being channeled towards special interests in every sector.
Social benefits, especially in Europe, is a huge factor in financing a country, second after keeping the financial industry alive.
Welfare in the sense of unemployment, disability and child allowances (excluding education) make up about 16% of the UK budget - and that's factoring in the huge inefficiencies made by contracting work out to state-capitalist organisations such as ATOS.
The way to handle unemployed, in my opinion, is to have them working on something that is usefull, but out of reach of the current budget. And there are oodles of things that can be done. Creating nicer neighbourhoods, creating new parks/forests, helping the elderly (supervised and voluntarily of course), helping with open source products, etc. etc. etc.
Do they have to look for work 8 hours a day as well, or are you suggesting that the government take back the responsibility for helping people find jobs (public or private sector)?
Paid workers and genuine volunteers already do the above things. If society cannot find enough volunteers but wants certain work to be done then it can cough up the money to pay people to do it. Again, there is not a lack of money, there is just ever-growing inequality. Put bluntly: the rich can pay higher taxes to pay the unemployed to make their community better. If we can force the poor to be "volunteers" then we can force the rich to be "philanthropists", right?
you would end up with a communist kind of workforce, which is *not* a good thing.
What's good is what alleviates the suffering of the people in the short and long term. If your definition of "communist" (which I guess isn't the same as mine) applies then who cares?
The 1930s were... well, I'll leave your state-provided education to calculate.
Is a specific job immediately assigned to you with scant regards for your abilities and disabilities? Is starvation the only (legal) alternative to this job? Are worker protections not applicable for this job?
Of course there are similarities between A and B. But there are equally as many differences, and emotionally charged descriptor of outcome for A makes any discussion moot.
Concentrate on the similarities of philosophy. Egregiously inhumane outcomes are consequences, not causes.
What you say about private enterprise is absolutely true, and your proposal is much better than Britain's where private enterprise is already dismissing "proper" employees so it can take on free labour. But shouldn't the government pay a fair wage for labour too?
Yes, prioritise the long term unemployed by offering them (part time - so as many people can be involved as possible) community service positions first. Yes, support their training. But then pay them as you would pay any other man or woman with a job.
Volunteer work is volunteer. Labour which you have to provide in order to receive some money is paid work, however the government tries to handwave it. If it were genuine compulsory community service - in the style e.g. of Spain's former alternative to the Mili - then it would be required of every able-bodied citizen, not just those receiving certain allowances.
For one, the job of the unemployed is to find work; probably in most countries you will lose unemployment benefits if you refuse any work and isn't that the same thing as what you so casually deem a "hard labour camp".
Most countries don't require you to take up the first above-board job you can find - certainly not initially. They also provide protections against various forms of maltreatment in employment. The new Work Programmes are not regarded as employment and do not come with the same protections.
Also, yes, the unemployed are today required to look for work to receive jobseeker allowances (this has always struck me as inefficient - whatever happened to proper government-supported labour exchanges?). But this itself isn't exploitative as there is no labour being extracted. The underlying problem with labour camps is that they are regarded as a highly profitable alternative to properly treating your fellow man. Once they have become acceptable it requires a sweeping philosophical change to halt their expansion.
It is a "hard labour camp" in the sense that you're required to work there if you want to eat, i.e. if you want to live. You won't be shot or beaten for not working - you'll just be left to die - but the outcome is the same. It's healthy to see that you have Stalin as a yardstick for what counts as going too far, right? And even in the gulag, reduction of rations or transfer were often the punishments given to those who refused to work. No transport costs, either.
Europe is gradually introducing an underclass in each state by turning jobseekers' allowances into a pay well below minimum wage in exchange for doing government work or work for private companies which have the government's favour. This underclass replaces labourers which used to be, well, paid a regular wage for what is regular work. The UK, for example, has recently begun Work Programme, and was last week planning to add to this a scheme whereby the government pays a proportion of certain employees' wages for a fixed amount of time so employers don't have to. It's all about special interests keeping a cheap fund of desperate workers.
A reverse lottery? Oh, memories of a Sliders episode... to adapt:
For power and wealth you must buy lottery tickets. Each week, a set of winners is chosen... and euthanised[tm].
All in favour?
"Individual rights" being defined either by the majority or by a sufficiently loud minority.
Thanks for playing.
As subject. There are excellent IT people, willing to do their job and help their colleagues - and then there are people who think they are more intelligent or more important than any other janitor.
Remember, it's not your attitude which is wrong - it's everyone else to blame!
I haven't been to the US since they introduced the eye scan for citizens of my home country at entry.
Shame. It was quite a nice place compared to much of the world.
It's better to be told in advance when you're going to be beaten, have property confiscated or simply be whisked off for saying the wrong thing. Wastes a lot less time than letting you mouth off until you're speaking loudly enough for others to hear.
The people ARE the government.
So you are the government? That's great. Is everything going exactly as you want it? No? Then it must be that your assertion is wrong.
You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach.
Swallowing a straw man will make anyone feel a little queasy.
Your attitude is the problem, not the solution.
My attitude or your straw man's attitude? Because if you mean my attitude, I'm fairly sure it's your attitude too. You're still living under the protection of society, right?
The government spends the government's money, not your money.
I know the anti-society propaganda machine has been in full force since Reagan, but you pay money to the government in return for the privilege of living and working in your nation. It's then the government's money. The government represents the people, thus spends according to the people's wishes. It represents the people primarily by allowing the people to vote.
If you don't like the way the government's spending money, it's up to you to encourage your fellow man to vote differently..
Changing the whole way the world works [tm] really is that simple.
Or perhaps your alternative is even shitter than whatever's going on now - which, as the past few thousand years go, isn't that bad.
Why would the commission need be made up out of elected members when
Mainland Europe has never really understood democracy, has it?
And once again Germany manages to create an undemocratic European super-state (well, "democratic" in the Soviet sense).
Male geekiness is a sexual characteristic.
Male aggression is a sexual characteristic. /. exists because the male mind[tm] has certain characteristics which can be appealed to.
Another male sexual characteristic is to notice the physical features of women.
It's easy to take selective offence, especially when political correctness is so good at it. But while repressing antisocial acts may be good for society, repressing thoughts which make you uncomfortable will get you nowhere.
After all, it would be a liar who didn't notice the appearance of a politician, and a lying politician who said he did not consider his own appearance.
You're going to great lengths to dig up reasons for BSD operating systems to be bad.
Not "bad", but so elitist and cliquish that they fell way behind Linux for reasons other than "lawyers". Easier to blame that gang of non-techies over there rather than cleaning up your own house, isn't it?
to cobble together an OS
Don't let your bias shout too loudly. Also, why the disdain for groups which actually try to build an OS for the applications rather than for the benefit of their own ego? MS knows who they need to cater to and so does Linus.
Why would I write a network card for FreeBSD? The vast majority of manufacturers of such cards write their own drivers.
You're missing the point entirely. Linux kernel developers have made it much easier than BSD developers for others to write drivers - whether "the vast majority of manufacturers" or interested third parties. There's still the problem of API stability vs Windows but this is more an engineering decision (GPL v2 allows for a community to keep things agile rather than relying on legacy bloat) than a personality one (BSD's "if you aren't already core or protege then you should be able to divine from the source what counts as part of the stable public API and any changes we make, so fuck you!").
This argument is academic: the different philosophies and the resultant success of Linux have been played out magnificently over the past two decades. BSD is where it is only through inertia and a few first class isolated projects (e.g. openssh).