Sorry - I had (and indeed still have) a Spectrum 48K+ and while it was a great games machine (as well as a classic starting point for the would-be programmer) it was pretty terrible as a productivity machine.
The keyboard was useless for typing; the printer connectivity was via a towering expansion module that was positioned an inch away from the top-row of the keyboard and would crash the machine if it got knocked; there was no decent floppy drive available in the early years and the Microdrives combined tiny capacity (85K) with comical levels of reliability; the screen was very low resolution 256x192 (better than a C64 mind you) and had the attribute overlay issue; the nail in the coffin was a CPU that made Vu-3D unbelievably slow, even when rendering the most simplistic of scenes. At least a year of my childhood was wasted waiting for the Speccy to wheeze its way through simple, monochrome, images that contained fewer pixels than modern application icons.
The big thing about MacPaint was that it integrated with the other applications on the machine. You could draw something in paint and use it in MacWrite. There was no such facility on the Spectrum; you could not draw an image in Art Studio and paste it in to Tasword. The Speccy was the best home computer of the early eighties, but a player in the home office market it was not.
The UK national ID card scheme was all about Fighting Terrorism
I always found this strange as we'd been fighting terrorism for some decades before the ID card scheme was started and had managed without them. This is especially impressive as for most of those decades the terrorists were well funded, well organised, well equipped professionals that came within a hair's breadth of killing the Prime Minister and cabinet. Modern day "terrorists" are nothing but a random assortment of malcontent God botherers and yet they will, apparently, destroy British society if not tamed with the leash of identity cards.
Yes you are. This is not a "storage system to be used as a filesystem" it's an implementation of the Amazon S3 interface that provides remote, redundant key/value storage (where the value in this case is a bucket of bytes). There's nothing to stop you implementing a file system on top of it; but the API provided by Google is at a lower level than that. Which is a good thing as a standard file system is not necessarily the best way to use this kind of storage.
This is why even very democratic countries aren't fully blown, all power to the majority, democracies. Democracy is not necessarily compatible with liberty and when conflict between the two arises you need something to ensures that liberty wins. Otherwise you've nothing better than mob rule, which isn't much fun if you're not part of the current ruling mob.
It should be required by law that ownership of and licenses and access to any digitally bought DRM protected items must be transferable. Period.
Why? I like the second hand market as much as the next man (who doesn't sell new games for a living). I've got countless second hand games consoles and games; a collection that is unlikely to be extended beyond the current generation of machines due to non-transferable DRM. However, that doesn't give me the right to dictate to games publishers how they should sell their product. As long as the non-transferability of the content is made clear at the point of sale, it's the publisher's prerogative.
You are not buying a modern video game. You are buying a license to play the game for a limited time and in accordance with whatever restrictions the publisher has placed upon you at the time of purchase. If you do not agree with this, don't purchase the game. The ability to play Assassins Creed 2 is not a human right. I won't be buying it for the PC because the cost of suffering the DRM outweighs any potential fun I'd have playing the game. I will be buying more Valve games off Steam because the downsides of the DRM (primarily the non-transferability) are outweighed by the convenience of Stream and the games' potential entertainment value.
The ultimate sanction of a consumer is not to consume. If enough people are discouraged from buying games because of DRM, the DRM will either change to something less odious or disappear completely when the publishers go bankrupt. Ubisoft can't force you to buy their games and you do not have the right to force Ubisoft to sell to you on your terms alone. If DRM offends you so heinously, limit your entertainment purchases to non-DRM, or even non-copyrighted, works; they do exist and their publishers could use your custom.
But as an author, if I can't receive remuneration for a work I didn't publish 119 years ago, what's my incentive to continue to write unpublished material? People like you would have us live in an age denuded of ancient, unpublished authors!
Be fair: TalkTalk have their problems but they are leading the charge against Mandelson's latest attempt to turn the entire UK population in to criminals. Obviously they're doing so out of self interest; but we all win if they are successful.
It's been a few years since I did my CS degree; but shouldn't the first year or so be taken up with the fundamentals of Computer Science: algorithms and many exciting forms of mathematics? The remaining years are then filled with yet more maths, along with specialist applications (compiler design/optimisation, hardware, operating system design, etc) and the occasional bit of coding.
Having a "Games Programming" section of the syllabus seems strange on its own, putting it in the first half of the first years is insane. How did they introduce it? "This is an opportunity for you to put in to practice all of the theory we haven't taught you yet".
I think a fairer system is that Monsanto (or whoever) pay to replace the farmers stock with non-GM modified seed of the farmer's choice and provide remuneration for the lost yield. If the farmer refuses, then the patent holder can break out the lawyers and commence legal action.
That way the patents are protected and the incentive to develop new GM technology remains; but third parties are not punished for something that isn't their fault. It also provides an incentive for patent holders to be careful about how their product is dispersed: contaminating a large commercial farm could prove very costly.
We are an inferior species who have taken advantage of the Earth, hurt it, and not even cared.
Inferior compared to what? We are the paragon of animals, the only one that's broken out of purely evolution driven behaviour and the only one capable of reasoning, planning and communicating beyond the most primitive of levels. That we expend resources maintaining species in existence that are of no use to us is an example of how special we are; no other species in the universe as we know it would do such a thing or even possess the ability to consider such an action.
The Earth is a lump on inanimate matter: it cannot be hurt or taken advantage of. It is not concious, it does not feel and it's only of any value because we need it to survive. I'm in favour of protecting the environment insofar as it's for the benefit of mankind. If any other species stands in the way of our survival we should not hesitate to treat it in the same way as the smallpox virus: isolate, study and destroy.
I don't think it's actually life anymore. You are just a material that gets used up. A human resource.
Anymore? As opposed to a utopian time when all men were free and lived only for themselves? Never existed outside of wishful thinking and revisionist history.
If only I had mod points. Your first two points are something everyone who's worried about China's purchasing of US debt should learn and understand. That and the fact that less than 30% of US public debt is owned by foreign investors, of which China owns less than a quarter. This is about equivalent to the combined Japanese and British holdings; yet we don't see hysterical pronouncements about how the Japs/Brits have America by the balls.
Nintendo has gone from being the only reasonable company in the industry
Nintendo stopped being a reasonable company (from the consumer and third party publisher point of view) in the mid-80's when they achieved dominance of the US video game market. Their strong arming of retailers and software developers, monopolistic price inflation and profligate litigation were second to none. Nintendo only became a "reasonable" company when Sony usurped them at the top table; something that only happened because of the colossal hubris that surrounded everything Nintendo did.
All successful (and many unsuccessful) console manufacturers are as ruthless, controlling and manipulative as their market share allows them to be. As someone who remembers a time before the Playstation the idea that Nintendo is happy, cuddly, friend of the gamer is utterly laughable.
But it does make it understandable. The current Government has little to no regard for civil liberties but likes to project the illusion that they are a liberal party. Passing laws to censor the internet would damage this illusion, give MPs the chance to debate the rules and Lords a chance to delay/revise them. This is not an acceptable situation for the Government, especially after the problems with ID cards and ninety day detention; thus they opted to threaten the ISPs in to joining their voluntary schema. This avoids the oversight and glare of an actual law while having the appearance of free choice.
Obviously there was no choice; the alternative to IWF would have either bankrupted the ISPs (not good for those who own them) or forced a huge rise in prices (which would have been blamed on the those owning the ISPs). Any complaints made by the ISPs were dismissed using the dual shields of "fighting terrorism" and "protecting the children", which made it impossible to build any real support in the media for their cause. Given the choice between dropping a rock on your head and having someone else drop a boulder on you, there's only one way to go. The ISPs did the absolute minimum required to keep the Government off their back and stay in business. The only people to blame here are the current ruling party, those who make policy for them, those who fund them and those who vote for them.
The problem with fat client software is not that it's equal or inferior to a well-built website. It's definitely superior. ...
There's certainly a wide range of applications that will always remain fat client only
Websites cannot be definitely superior and unusable in certain situations. As it is they are not definitely superior as anything that can be done on a website can be done using a local client. However not everything that a local client can do is possible on a website (unless you start using embedded applications and turning the web page in to a local client within a web browser frame).
I also take issue with the implication that all local clients are fat clients. It's perfectly possible to have a system with a thin, locally hosted GUI and a much larger server backend. You can even use HTTP to communicate between the two. The use of a local GUI in such situations gives you (the software designer/programmer) much more control over the user experience. Your well-crafted UI isn't going to fall apart because a user has decided to use Chrome or the latest version of Safari has introduced a rendering bug.
To repeat my original post: web interfaces have their place but they are not a replacement for properly implemented local GUIs. For something that is relatively simple and for which the zero installation benefit of the web outweighs the downsides, an HTML/Flash/Javascript interface is the way to go. That not withstanding, the functionality available to the local GUI designer is a superset of that available to the web designer. The local GUI isn't limited to HTTP as a transport mechanism. The local GUI isn't subject to vagaries of browser "standards" compliance and to crash briefly back on topic; there is no web UI toolkit that approaches Qt for ease of use, cleanness of interface or cross platform functionality.
Yes - because web frontends are the silver bullet that solves all of our client-side needs. In fact, why bother having general purpose computers out side of data centres? Instead we can have a global installation of five (for example) really big computers and we can access them using dumb internet terminals. Luckily the infinite bandwidth and uninterrupted global connectivity on offer, combined with the well enforced WWW standards means that even the most complex of GUIs can be provided via the browser. Why do we even bother with proper operating systems when everything man could need from a computer can be provided via a TCP/IP stack and XULRunner?
Oh wait, because even the best web based GUIs are primitive and unresponsive compared to a well designed, well implemented local interface. With Qt it's possible to create a native GUI that runs on all major desktop platform (and even Solaris) with less effort than it takes to get even a moderately complex web interface running correctly on IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.
Web interfaces are excellent for simple tasks like email and feed reading; they are terrible when deployed in more complex arenas. Even when you take in to account proprietary, binary only workarounds like Flash and Silverlight.
It is distinctly non-trivial to set up a secure, trustworthy, reliable internet payment system. It's a financially worthwhile undertaking for the high per-capita income markets, but not for the rest of the planet; predominately due to the vast array of regulation and red tape one would have to jump through for each new country.
This is compounded by the problem that many middling-to-lower markets have onerous Governments that are often outright kleptocracies. These kind of Governments don't take kindly to payment systems they don't control and can't easily manipulate.
South American nations could make their citizens' lives easier in this regard by converting Mercosur in to a regulatory union: with common bank controls and free movement of wealth, if not a common currency. This would greatly increase the viability of an internet accessible payment system being profitable and so successful.
While the parent poster has clearly had too much coffee, the overall point made is valid. There are so many colour/pattern matching games available it's no surprise that this one failed to make an impact. It must be disappointing for the author, but he has to be honest with himself as to whether the game is actually any good and if there's any space in market for it at the chosen price point.
Obviously it would have been better if these questions had been asked and researched before spending six months and thirty-two grand on development; but what's done is done.
Exactly. To all the people complaining about police involvement: it's what happens when you create a society in which only the police have any real authority. Teachers have been cowed by law and the ever increasing threat of lawsuits. In such situations they can either ignore any disruption which, with children being children, will ultimately lead to a situation where teaching anyone anything is impossible; or they can call in the people that society has gifted the only effective authority to. The first option will prevent those who want to learn from learning, the second affects only the disruptive pupil.
I find the involvement of police in the education system abhorrent. But if it is to end the rights and powers of parents and pupils with reference to schools must be reduce and those of teachers increased.
Oh, and on an vaguely related note. American schools have "guidance counsellors"? When did they decide to base their schools off Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Spot on. Had slavery just been an ethical issue it would have persisted over a wider area for much longer. That slavery cannot compete with free labour is what killed it. Once the economic argument in favour of the system was gone it came down to ethics and political expediency: both of which were largely in favour of abolition.
How much beer can you brew? Beer requires hops, which requires arable land in the correct climate; these are finite resources and beer producers will be in competition with innumerable producers of other goods for the same resources.
If beer consumption dramatically increased with the reduction in working hours (which is a pretty safe bet in many countries) then:
The supply of beer remains the same, but the rise in demand means that prices will rise. You could cap the price by law, but that would simply result in massive beer shortage which in Britain, Ireland, Holland and Germany at least would lead to bloody revolution in about a day. You could subsidise the beer prices, but that would either force up inflation, making everyone poorer (if the Government simply printed money); or reduce overall incomes, making everyone poorer (if tax were increased).
The supply of beer increases, but this requires more land be purchased by the beer manufacturers (which costs money) and will leave less land for the producers of other goods (reducing their supply and forcing up prices).
Everything of value is scarce. There is a finite amount of any given natural resource available to us and everything uses natural resources to some extent. You could try to ameliorate the issue by having some central authority distribute the resources available, but the vast complexity of even a small economy means that it's a wildly inefficient process. The alternative is to allow a market to determine the values and accept that people who like stuff will work longer hours, increase demand and drive up prices.
Either that or we can just wait until Earth is Contacted.
The problem with a lot of third world nations is that they have zero competitive advantage. Many of them are not capable of sustaining sufficient agriculture to feed their populace, have zero natural resources and are not well placed to be trading nations. In these cases no amount of capitalism, or indeed socialism/communism/etc, can help them. The best thing they could do is get absorbed by a more successful country, ideally one who has a labour shortage and so could with a few more people.
In the past this happened all the time. Even in Europe the smaller, weaker nations were absorbed by their larger, more successful neighbours (e.g. England absorbing Wales and Scotland, Prussia absorbing Hanover and Saxony). But in the modern era we treat nation borders as immutable boundaries, never to be breached. That and the corruption endemic in the ruling elite of such countries, who stand to lose their privileged position if a take over were to occur.
Obviously this doesn't apply to formerly successful nations who collapse under the weight of their own stupidity (see Zimbabwe).
All statists are alike, they may fly flags of convenience (socialist, fascist, social-democrat, conservative, etc...) but deep down they all place maintenance and growth of state power above all other considerations. The old school Labour party were as guilty of this as the current mob.
Frankly it's all been going downhill in the UK since Lloyd George destroyed the Liberal party.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry - I had (and indeed still have) a Spectrum 48K+ and while it was a great games machine (as well as a classic starting point for the would-be programmer) it was pretty terrible as a productivity machine.
The keyboard was useless for typing; the printer connectivity was via a towering expansion module that was positioned an inch away from the top-row of the keyboard and would crash the machine if it got knocked; there was no decent floppy drive available in the early years and the Microdrives combined tiny capacity (85K) with comical levels of reliability; the screen was very low resolution 256x192 (better than a C64 mind you) and had the attribute overlay issue; the nail in the coffin was a CPU that made Vu-3D unbelievably slow, even when rendering the most simplistic of scenes. At least a year of my childhood was wasted waiting for the Speccy to wheeze its way through simple, monochrome, images that contained fewer pixels than modern application icons.
The big thing about MacPaint was that it integrated with the other applications on the machine. You could draw something in paint and use it in MacWrite. There was no such facility on the Spectrum; you could not draw an image in Art Studio and paste it in to Tasword. The Speccy was the best home computer of the early eighties, but a player in the home office market it was not.
No, school leavers is the correct term. In the UK "graduate" usually refers to someone who has graduated from a university.
I always found this strange as we'd been fighting terrorism for some decades before the ID card scheme was started and had managed without them. This is especially impressive as for most of those decades the terrorists were well funded, well organised, well equipped professionals that came within a hair's breadth of killing the Prime Minister and cabinet. Modern day "terrorists" are nothing but a random assortment of malcontent God botherers and yet they will, apparently, destroy British society if not tamed with the leash of identity cards.
Yes you are. This is not a "storage system to be used as a filesystem" it's an implementation of the Amazon S3 interface that provides remote, redundant key/value storage (where the value in this case is a bucket of bytes). There's nothing to stop you implementing a file system on top of it; but the API provided by Google is at a lower level than that. Which is a good thing as a standard file system is not necessarily the best way to use this kind of storage.
This is why even very democratic countries aren't fully blown, all power to the majority, democracies. Democracy is not necessarily compatible with liberty and when conflict between the two arises you need something to ensures that liberty wins. Otherwise you've nothing better than mob rule, which isn't much fun if you're not part of the current ruling mob.
It should be required by law that ownership of and licenses and access to any digitally bought DRM protected items must be transferable. Period.
Why? I like the second hand market as much as the next man (who doesn't sell new games for a living). I've got countless second hand games consoles and games; a collection that is unlikely to be extended beyond the current generation of machines due to non-transferable DRM. However, that doesn't give me the right to dictate to games publishers how they should sell their product. As long as the non-transferability of the content is made clear at the point of sale, it's the publisher's prerogative.
You are not buying a modern video game. You are buying a license to play the game for a limited time and in accordance with whatever restrictions the publisher has placed upon you at the time of purchase. If you do not agree with this, don't purchase the game. The ability to play Assassins Creed 2 is not a human right. I won't be buying it for the PC because the cost of suffering the DRM outweighs any potential fun I'd have playing the game. I will be buying more Valve games off Steam because the downsides of the DRM (primarily the non-transferability) are outweighed by the convenience of Stream and the games' potential entertainment value.
The ultimate sanction of a consumer is not to consume. If enough people are discouraged from buying games because of DRM, the DRM will either change to something less odious or disappear completely when the publishers go bankrupt. Ubisoft can't force you to buy their games and you do not have the right to force Ubisoft to sell to you on your terms alone. If DRM offends you so heinously, limit your entertainment purchases to non-DRM, or even non-copyrighted, works; they do exist and their publishers could use your custom.
But as an author, if I can't receive remuneration for a work I didn't publish 119 years ago, what's my incentive to continue to write unpublished material? People like you would have us live in an age denuded of ancient, unpublished authors!
Be fair: TalkTalk have their problems but they are leading the charge against Mandelson's latest attempt to turn the entire UK population in to criminals. Obviously they're doing so out of self interest; but we all win if they are successful.
Having a "Games Programming" section of the syllabus seems strange on its own, putting it in the first half of the first years is insane. How did they introduce it? "This is an opportunity for you to put in to practice all of the theory we haven't taught you yet".
I think a fairer system is that Monsanto (or whoever) pay to replace the farmers stock with non-GM modified seed of the farmer's choice and provide remuneration for the lost yield. If the farmer refuses, then the patent holder can break out the lawyers and commence legal action.
That way the patents are protected and the incentive to develop new GM technology remains; but third parties are not punished for something that isn't their fault. It also provides an incentive for patent holders to be careful about how their product is dispersed: contaminating a large commercial farm could prove very costly.
Inferior compared to what? We are the paragon of animals, the only one that's broken out of purely evolution driven behaviour and the only one capable of reasoning, planning and communicating beyond the most primitive of levels. That we expend resources maintaining species in existence that are of no use to us is an example of how special we are; no other species in the universe as we know it would do such a thing or even possess the ability to consider such an action.
The Earth is a lump on inanimate matter: it cannot be hurt or taken advantage of. It is not concious, it does not feel and it's only of any value because we need it to survive. I'm in favour of protecting the environment insofar as it's for the benefit of mankind. If any other species stands in the way of our survival we should not hesitate to treat it in the same way as the smallpox virus: isolate, study and destroy.
Everyone is asleep but me!
Anymore? As opposed to a utopian time when all men were free and lived only for themselves? Never existed outside of wishful thinking and revisionist history.
Beware citizens of the UK, no organisation that can inflict a custardy death should be trifled with.
If only I had mod points. Your first two points are something everyone who's worried about China's purchasing of US debt should learn and understand. That and the fact that less than 30% of US public debt is owned by foreign investors, of which China owns less than a quarter. This is about equivalent to the combined Japanese and British holdings; yet we don't see hysterical pronouncements about how the Japs/Brits have America by the balls.
Nintendo has gone from being the only reasonable company in the industry
Nintendo stopped being a reasonable company (from the consumer and third party publisher point of view) in the mid-80's when they achieved dominance of the US video game market. Their strong arming of retailers and software developers, monopolistic price inflation and profligate litigation were second to none. Nintendo only became a "reasonable" company when Sony usurped them at the top table; something that only happened because of the colossal hubris that surrounded everything Nintendo did.
All successful (and many unsuccessful) console manufacturers are as ruthless, controlling and manipulative as their market share allows them to be. As someone who remembers a time before the Playstation the idea that Nintendo is happy, cuddly, friend of the gamer is utterly laughable.
But it does make it understandable. The current Government has little to no regard for civil liberties but likes to project the illusion that they are a liberal party. Passing laws to censor the internet would damage this illusion, give MPs the chance to debate the rules and Lords a chance to delay/revise them. This is not an acceptable situation for the Government, especially after the problems with ID cards and ninety day detention; thus they opted to threaten the ISPs in to joining their voluntary schema. This avoids the oversight and glare of an actual law while having the appearance of free choice.
Obviously there was no choice; the alternative to IWF would have either bankrupted the ISPs (not good for those who own them) or forced a huge rise in prices (which would have been blamed on the those owning the ISPs). Any complaints made by the ISPs were dismissed using the dual shields of "fighting terrorism" and "protecting the children", which made it impossible to build any real support in the media for their cause. Given the choice between dropping a rock on your head and having someone else drop a boulder on you, there's only one way to go. The ISPs did the absolute minimum required to keep the Government off their back and stay in business. The only people to blame here are the current ruling party, those who make policy for them, those who fund them and those who vote for them.
Websites cannot be definitely superior and unusable in certain situations. As it is they are not definitely superior as anything that can be done on a website can be done using a local client. However not everything that a local client can do is possible on a website (unless you start using embedded applications and turning the web page in to a local client within a web browser frame).
I also take issue with the implication that all local clients are fat clients. It's perfectly possible to have a system with a thin, locally hosted GUI and a much larger server backend. You can even use HTTP to communicate between the two. The use of a local GUI in such situations gives you (the software designer/programmer) much more control over the user experience. Your well-crafted UI isn't going to fall apart because a user has decided to use Chrome or the latest version of Safari has introduced a rendering bug.
To repeat my original post: web interfaces have their place but they are not a replacement for properly implemented local GUIs. For something that is relatively simple and for which the zero installation benefit of the web outweighs the downsides, an HTML/Flash/Javascript interface is the way to go. That not withstanding, the functionality available to the local GUI designer is a superset of that available to the web designer. The local GUI isn't limited to HTTP as a transport mechanism. The local GUI isn't subject to vagaries of browser "standards" compliance and to crash briefly back on topic; there is no web UI toolkit that approaches Qt for ease of use, cleanness of interface or cross platform functionality.
Yes - because web frontends are the silver bullet that solves all of our client-side needs. In fact, why bother having general purpose computers out side of data centres? Instead we can have a global installation of five (for example) really big computers and we can access them using dumb internet terminals. Luckily the infinite bandwidth and uninterrupted global connectivity on offer, combined with the well enforced WWW standards means that even the most complex of GUIs can be provided via the browser. Why do we even bother with proper operating systems when everything man could need from a computer can be provided via a TCP/IP stack and XULRunner?
Oh wait, because even the best web based GUIs are primitive and unresponsive compared to a well designed, well implemented local interface. With Qt it's possible to create a native GUI that runs on all major desktop platform (and even Solaris) with less effort than it takes to get even a moderately complex web interface running correctly on IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.
Web interfaces are excellent for simple tasks like email and feed reading; they are terrible when deployed in more complex arenas. Even when you take in to account proprietary, binary only workarounds like Flash and Silverlight.
It is distinctly non-trivial to set up a secure, trustworthy, reliable internet payment system. It's a financially worthwhile undertaking for the high per-capita income markets, but not for the rest of the planet; predominately due to the vast array of regulation and red tape one would have to jump through for each new country.
This is compounded by the problem that many middling-to-lower markets have onerous Governments that are often outright kleptocracies. These kind of Governments don't take kindly to payment systems they don't control and can't easily manipulate.
South American nations could make their citizens' lives easier in this regard by converting Mercosur in to a regulatory union: with common bank controls and free movement of wealth, if not a common currency. This would greatly increase the viability of an internet accessible payment system being profitable and so successful.
While the parent poster has clearly had too much coffee, the overall point made is valid. There are so many colour/pattern matching games available it's no surprise that this one failed to make an impact. It must be disappointing for the author, but he has to be honest with himself as to whether the game is actually any good and if there's any space in market for it at the chosen price point.
Obviously it would have been better if these questions had been asked and researched before spending six months and thirty-two grand on development; but what's done is done.
Exactly. To all the people complaining about police involvement: it's what happens when you create a society in which only the police have any real authority. Teachers have been cowed by law and the ever increasing threat of lawsuits. In such situations they can either ignore any disruption which, with children being children, will ultimately lead to a situation where teaching anyone anything is impossible; or they can call in the people that society has gifted the only effective authority to. The first option will prevent those who want to learn from learning, the second affects only the disruptive pupil.
I find the involvement of police in the education system abhorrent. But if it is to end the rights and powers of parents and pupils with reference to schools must be reduce and those of teachers increased.
Oh, and on an vaguely related note. American schools have "guidance counsellors"? When did they decide to base their schools off Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Spot on. Had slavery just been an ethical issue it would have persisted over a wider area for much longer. That slavery cannot compete with free labour is what killed it. Once the economic argument in favour of the system was gone it came down to ethics and political expediency: both of which were largely in favour of abolition.
How much beer can you brew? Beer requires hops, which requires arable land in the correct climate; these are finite resources and beer producers will be in competition with innumerable producers of other goods for the same resources.
If beer consumption dramatically increased with the reduction in working hours (which is a pretty safe bet in many countries) then:
Everything of value is scarce. There is a finite amount of any given natural resource available to us and everything uses natural resources to some extent. You could try to ameliorate the issue by having some central authority distribute the resources available, but the vast complexity of even a small economy means that it's a wildly inefficient process. The alternative is to allow a market to determine the values and accept that people who like stuff will work longer hours, increase demand and drive up prices.
Either that or we can just wait until Earth is Contacted.
The problem with a lot of third world nations is that they have zero competitive advantage. Many of them are not capable of sustaining sufficient agriculture to feed their populace, have zero natural resources and are not well placed to be trading nations. In these cases no amount of capitalism, or indeed socialism/communism/etc, can help them. The best thing they could do is get absorbed by a more successful country, ideally one who has a labour shortage and so could with a few more people.
In the past this happened all the time. Even in Europe the smaller, weaker nations were absorbed by their larger, more successful neighbours (e.g. England absorbing Wales and Scotland, Prussia absorbing Hanover and Saxony). But in the modern era we treat nation borders as immutable boundaries, never to be breached. That and the corruption endemic in the ruling elite of such countries, who stand to lose their privileged position if a take over were to occur.
Obviously this doesn't apply to formerly successful nations who collapse under the weight of their own stupidity (see Zimbabwe).
All statists are alike, they may fly flags of convenience (socialist, fascist, social-democrat, conservative, etc ...) but deep down they all place maintenance and growth of state power above all other considerations. The old school Labour party were as guilty of this as the current mob.
Frankly it's all been going downhill in the UK since Lloyd George destroyed the Liberal party.