The definition of socialism is actually collective (via state in statist socialism, directly by community in anarcho-socialism) ownership of means of production. That's all there is to it. If a person can own factory or land for themselves, then it's not socialism - it's still capitalism (albeit possibly regulated).
More to the point, the idea of socialism/communism is that the workers, rather than owners, should get the fruits of their labour. If you work in a factory, you'll get a share of its profits; if you don't, you won't. Collectivist ownership is only a means towards this goal, necessary because a factory can't be run by a single person.
That's the truly ironic thing about socialism: taken to its logical conclusion, it's actually ultra-capitalism - everyone is an enterpreneur, working for themselves rather than a "boss".
Matter of fact, I would venture to say that China is doing so well because they learned from the negative example offered by the Soviet Empire, and are not making the same mistakes. Good for them, not so good for us (or the Russians, for that matter.)
Not so good for China either, if you really think about it: their success ensures that their less-than-benevolent government stays in power and keeps oppressing them for years to come.
Then again, Russia is not exactly a modern democracy either, and seems to be getting worse, so I guess Chinese are simply screwed, having missed the time in history dictatorship can get overturned...
And nutbags? what's so nutty about any of the libertarian positions? if you think about them for half a minute, and don't just knee jerk react to the views, i don't think you'd find they're nutty.
Libertarianism boils down to protecting property rights at any cost, and only them. If implemented, it would slant the playing field even more for the advantage of the rich against everyone else. I, for one, do not wish to re-enact Dark Ages with myself as a serf.
After all, no political party in a supposedly free country would want to start campaigning with something as undemocratic on their books as a secret censorship blacklist run by the government with no judicial oversight and no right of appeal which blocks 'undesireable' content as defined by the government's whim at that particular time of the day. Any competent opposition could make it into a very major issue.
Quite a few of them have, actually, and managed to paint their opponents as supporters of child porn / terrorism / boogeyman of the day. And many people, even here on Slashdot, have cheered them on, happy to ensure their children won't be exposed to any material they disagree with.
I figure we're in for a new dark age. With China rising on the outside and politicians, businessmen and hysterical parents on the inside, all those hard-won freedoms and human rights are going to erode away. It won't last forever, of course: given enough time, the pendulum will swing back and humanity will reclaim what it's losing now; but I doubt any of us will see it.
With regard to biased thinking being a pervasive problem, you are spot on. However, you throw the baby out with the bath water when you assert that all human thought is hopelessly biased, and that rationalism (and presumably, all other epistemological frameworks as well) is nothing more than a convenient way to disguise one's biases.
No system of beliefs is just a convenient way of disguising one's biases, but all of them can be. It's entirely possible to use, say, science to excuse being an asshole; eugenics is a perfect example of that.
The problem is that people who don't share a particular system of beliefs tend to not understand how anyone could believe it, and jump to the conclusion that they don't really do, but are merely pretending to in order to excuse their inexcusable behavior. This isn't helped at all that all such systems have people who believe them but don't understand them, yet feel the need to defend them; rationalism and science are perhaps the worst off here, due to their complexity.
The end result is people dismissing all arguments against their beliefs because they are usually made by people who 1) think the people they talk to are evil demagogues to be defeat or gullible sheep to be rescued and nobody wants to be treated that way and 2) don't understand why anyone would believe the system and thus usually end up arguing against strawmen of their own making, which is amuzing to watch but won't convince anyone.
All this means that it's very difficult to discuss any given belief system rationally; either your audience agrees with you, in which case it becomes an intellectual circlejerk, or they don't, in which case it ends up with you talking down to them or outright attacking them for being idiots, or there are both amongst them, in which case it becomes a free-for-all strawmen vs. insults brawl. Just look at the post that began this thread: it calmly suggests "abolishing" religion, in other words, forcing everyone to conform to the poster's beliefs. Is it any wonder that his would-be victims look at him and all that share his views with suspicion, just like he looks at them?
"This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished. That would reveal a big chunk of the world's assholes who can no longer point to the cross or to the Qur'an as justification for their actions.
The summary says that people believe what they want to believe and don't believe what they don't want to believe. You draw from this the conclusion that religion is evil and should be abolished (
Someone who wants to be an asshole will always find a justification, even if he has to twist the facts to do so. That's what the summary was all about. You, on the other hand, twisted this to support your believe that religion should be abolished. I suppose that's irony...
But there still a large number of "my god is better than your god" nyah-nyahs whose idea of healthy debate is killing others who don't agree with them rather than thinking.
And you're either one of them, or unbelievably naive about human nature. Or do you honestly think that anyone is going to stop believing anything just because you declare religion abolished?
Abolishment of religion won't solve all problems, but it has the highest ratio of simplicty-of-suggestion to worldwide-problems-solved.
Yes, in exactly the same way as abolishing the First Law of Thermodynamics is the simplest way of solving the problems with our energy supply.
Seriously, were you living up to your name when you wrote that?
The good side is on the inside of my firewall. Everyone else is potentially the enemy. Frankly, a situation which legitimized punitive retaliation against the attackers I have to fend off would be OK by me, no matter where they were located.
Legitimized? What happens when your retaliation takes out Joe Sixpack's computer down the street? You know, the one used as a proxy by an attacker?
Repeat 100 times: "I am not cyber Batman."
Cyber war is not about retaliation, it's about filtering to keep any attack from being effective.
If nothing else, that would make the transition to IPv6 much easier...
Anything that makes the transition to IPv6 easier will also make the transition to Censorship Enabled Protocol v1 easier. That's why I'm slowly turning against any changes in Internet: we managed to slip it in under the radar, I don't want it turning into yet another controlled medium.
The ironic thing here is that I'd probably never turn against my corporate/political masters if I didn't perceive them as trying to stop me from accessing whatever content I want...
In short, cyberwarfare won't work for the exact same reasons that censorship won't work, there's too many people working against the attackers who can communicate too quickly and too effectively.
What happens if the attackers start by issuing DMCA takedown notices against such communication channels? Companies respond to them automatically, after all.
Anyway, this is just another way of resisting censorship: it's just too easy to hijack it as the first step of an attack. Communication is absolutely vital in any kind of war, you can't cripple that without risking defeat. Let's just hope that those in charge fear China more than their own population, and react accordingly
That's because Microsoft imitated sudo and not PolicyKit, that places the choice into the hands of the system developer or a sysadmin, not user.
For almost all Windows desktops, those user is the sysadmin. Add the fact that all my problems so far with Windows 7 have come from having to circumvent automation and security (CRT EDID information and mandatory signed drivers, specifically), I'd say that placing power into user hands is a good thing.
An even better thing would be to be able to grant specific powers to programs, rather than just the general do-whatever-you-please admin rights, but I guess that's not happening.
For under a grand you could get a machine that would run Vista well (really all you needed was 2GB RAM, though dual core helped as well).
Vista, on 2GB of RAM and a dual-core Athlon, runs like a paralyzed pig on molasses. Win7, on 4GB and a quad-core i5 (just under a grand, all in all), is in a completely different class.
The next step after putting DirectX in your browser is to move the complex and hardware intensive computations on a server and charge people on a monthly basis to access the games. This would solve piracy by requiring you to sign in to play a game !
And require a pretty beefy server with lots of bandwidth. In other words, it's expensive.
Can you imagine HTML+CSS+SVG running as a local C++ program? Beauty and power in one sleek package. If anyone knows more about things like this, let me know.
Yeah, C++ programs that run on your machine and render HTML+CSS (and some even SVG) exist. They're called Web Browsers.
Second Life is a good research project (or playground if you will) for whenever we will be able to hook computers up to our brains and map all sensory inputs and outputs to a virtual 3D world (matrix-style).
I don't view the Web as a continuous 2D space as is, why would I want to view it as a continuous 3D space? The model of separate data items linked to each other works far better for almost all purposes; why would I want to cripple myself by insisting on having a physical avatar in a place that doesn't need one?
3D virtual worlds already exist, in the form of World of Warcraft and other games. What would I gain from using a virtual world outside of them, rather than the current Web? Would an online gallery be better or worse if you would have to walk amongst the images rather than see them neatly on a page? Would Slashdot gain anything from being 3D?
I expect to be entertained by visions of our solar-powered utopian future on at least a weekly basis.
The true irony is that we already can build large-scale efficient solar power stations. They use the amazing cutting-edge technology called "mirrors" to concentrate sunlight to heat water and drive turbines. Unfortunately, even this supertech can't get around cloudy days or nighttime.
Right now I would just like to understand how, at a human physiology level, a person's vision could be getting dimmer, yet their visual acuity is unchanged.
Are your pupils getting smaller? That could conceivably happen, their size being controlled by muscles and all... Use a mirror and check their size in the same lighting conditions; it should always be the same. Also check how fast they contract when you show a flashligth to your eyes, and especially how fast they grow again once you turn it off.
I don't suppose there are any medical researchers here with any ideas by any chance ?
Not a researcher, but that one's easy to check with a mirror, so that's where I'd start.
My cut was pretty severe. Severe enough that several hours of pressure was not stopping the bleeding. People that were admitted before me were a lady with cold symptoms (not sure why she was at the ER), a drunk guy complaining of a headache, a little boy with a scraped knee (I guess he could have had something more serious), but I was the only one bleeding profusely.
No, you weren't. A typical adult human has about 5 liters of blood in his body; had you been bleeding profusely for 3 hours, you'd been dead. Your case was not an emergency - meaning you weren't in danger of dying - and thus you waited your turn along with non-emergency cases. Exactly as you should.
You are confused. I didn't refuse the treatment. They balked before I had a chance to, when they saw how thin the cast was compared to what they were used to and how little cloth buffer there was. Make no mistake, I was about to protest... anyway, I told them how it was done and they still had to consult???
So... The doctors came across something they'd never seen before, and rather than take an non-professional person's word for the correct treatment, they checked to be sure. What, exactly speaking, is the issue here? That made the extra effort to be sure that the patient was treated correctly?
Taxes don't have to go up, it can be taken from elsewhere - e.g., maybe you could spend slightly less on that socialised military you have.
Thing is...defense IS one of the few limited enumerated jobs the federal govt is charged to perform.
The last defensive war US fought was WWII. A purely defensive army would be far smaller and cheaper than the current US one. And if stretch the definition of "defense" to include wars half the way around the globe, it could just as easily be stretched to include keeping your population healthy, so they can fight and manufacture munitions.
Also, taking care of "general welfare" is another of those enumerated jobs. It's probably an overly broad statement, as it can be used to justify just about anything, but that's what it says.
The one thing that they actually might could do, is force medical insurance to be able to be sold across state lines, you know, interstate commerce.
Better yet: force the insurers to insure anyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, genetic risks, or any other factors, for the same price and coverage. No higher premiums for someone who's mother died of cancer, no discounts for employers - in fact, make it so that employers can't insure their employees, to ensure that the insurers really have to compete.
As I see it, this would get the benefits of both public and private healthcare, and the disadvantages of neither. Insurers would be forced to compete on efficiency rather than by filtering out anyone who might possibly get sick. People would be able to pick the best coverage/price ratio. You wouldn't be dropped just because you became unemployed, and in the near future could have your genome analyzed to know what to look out for without risking becoming uninsurable for knowing your own risks.
The only possible model of abuse I see with this is that people would get an insurance only after getting ill. How to solve that is a question.
Strange thing is..for some reason they don't seem keen to even bring that up at all.
Well, it's not exactly in the best interests of corporations to have to compete.
Well, frankly, I don't want socialized medicine..I don't want the govt. telling me what Dr. I can see,
It doesn't. It simply doesn't necessarily pay for the one you choose. You're free to pay a private doctor if you wish and can.
or what tests meds the Dr can give me (possibly based on my age, etc).
Again, feel free to pay a private doctor for whatever tests you wish. Dunno what's this about doctors being forbidden to give you medicine, this is the first I've heard of it.
The part about pre-existing conditions...that I'm not sure how best to handle. If we *did* have to have a govt. sponsored thing to take care of those that were uninsurable, that might work..lump them in with the Medicaid people maybe.
So... private industry gets to pick the profitable cases, and the public pays for the rest? You profit, I pay?
I really don't want a public option because of what it can turn into.
There'll be a Great Flood as well, sent by God to wash away all the "denialists" and their multitude of sins.
So they are fundamentalists?
However I think AGW is more like a fascist cult than an Abrahamic religion, because it is an all-out attack on free minds and free thought: "believe exactly as we do, do not question our authority, or the Earth will be destroyed and it will be your fault".
And fascists as well.
The thought restrictions go way beyond questions about the science. They also require belief in a government solution, summarised by the claim: "Well, even if it isn't happening, why shouldn't we do something anyway? Our plans will make the world a better place no matter what." I've never seen any evidence for that claim, although I believe that Karl Marx wrote a few books about it.
Oh, they are commies too!
Forget gas chambers and gulags, "if you are not with us, you are against us" is the very definition of fascism. Here are some more:
And now they're are Hitler and Bush.
Those dastardly conspiring climatologists, is there no boogeyman they can't be compared to?
I never thought I would see a Slashdot discussion dominated by fascists, but here we are. -1, Free Thinking, and +5, Agrees Totally With Authority.
Good thing you're here to make well-reasoned arguments from facts rather than suggest that everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi Commie Religious Fundamentalist Neocon in league with Hitler and Bush.
Then again, any political issue will inevitable degrade to a mudslinging contest, so I guess it shouldn't surprise me...
Going on a tangent, but it just occured to me how so many of the climate change deniers arguments echoes those of creationists. It would be interesting to know what the overlap between the two groups are - they certainly seems to share more than a few traits IMNSHO
Both are humans and both are faced with something they don't want to believe, so is it really so surprising that both would resort to similar tactics?
Slashdot Mirror
Thus making the position even more attractive to parasites.
So there's even less incentive to avoid doing evil, since it can't affect your chances of re-election.
So the less wealthy are hampered even more by the need to hire a lawyer to ensure they're following these rules.
So they'll hammer party loyalty home even harder.
More to the point, the idea of socialism/communism is that the workers, rather than owners, should get the fruits of their labour. If you work in a factory, you'll get a share of its profits; if you don't, you won't. Collectivist ownership is only a means towards this goal, necessary because a factory can't be run by a single person.
That's the truly ironic thing about socialism: taken to its logical conclusion, it's actually ultra-capitalism - everyone is an enterpreneur, working for themselves rather than a "boss".
Not so good for China either, if you really think about it: their success ensures that their less-than-benevolent government stays in power and keeps oppressing them for years to come.
Then again, Russia is not exactly a modern democracy either, and seems to be getting worse, so I guess Chinese are simply screwed, having missed the time in history dictatorship can get overturned...
Libertarianism boils down to protecting property rights at any cost, and only them. If implemented, it would slant the playing field even more for the advantage of the rich against everyone else. I, for one, do not wish to re-enact Dark Ages with myself as a serf.
Quite a few of them have, actually, and managed to paint their opponents as supporters of child porn / terrorism / boogeyman of the day. And many people, even here on Slashdot, have cheered them on, happy to ensure their children won't be exposed to any material they disagree with.
I figure we're in for a new dark age. With China rising on the outside and politicians, businessmen and hysterical parents on the inside, all those hard-won freedoms and human rights are going to erode away. It won't last forever, of course: given enough time, the pendulum will swing back and humanity will reclaim what it's losing now; but I doubt any of us will see it.
Maybe, but the grandparent's point about the bottom of the ocean is still worth considering ;).
No system of beliefs is just a convenient way of disguising one's biases, but all of them can be. It's entirely possible to use, say, science to excuse being an asshole; eugenics is a perfect example of that.
The problem is that people who don't share a particular system of beliefs tend to not understand how anyone could believe it, and jump to the conclusion that they don't really do, but are merely pretending to in order to excuse their inexcusable behavior. This isn't helped at all that all such systems have people who believe them but don't understand them, yet feel the need to defend them; rationalism and science are perhaps the worst off here, due to their complexity.
The end result is people dismissing all arguments against their beliefs because they are usually made by people who 1) think the people they talk to are evil demagogues to be defeat or gullible sheep to be rescued and nobody wants to be treated that way and 2) don't understand why anyone would believe the system and thus usually end up arguing against strawmen of their own making, which is amuzing to watch but won't convince anyone.
All this means that it's very difficult to discuss any given belief system rationally; either your audience agrees with you, in which case it becomes an intellectual circlejerk, or they don't, in which case it ends up with you talking down to them or outright attacking them for being idiots, or there are both amongst them, in which case it becomes a free-for-all strawmen vs. insults brawl. Just look at the post that began this thread: it calmly suggests "abolishing" religion, in other words, forcing everyone to conform to the poster's beliefs. Is it any wonder that his would-be victims look at him and all that share his views with suspicion, just like he looks at them?
The summary says that people believe what they want to believe and don't believe what they don't want to believe. You draw from this the conclusion that religion is evil and should be abolished (
Someone who wants to be an asshole will always find a justification, even if he has to twist the facts to do so. That's what the summary was all about. You, on the other hand, twisted this to support your believe that religion should be abolished. I suppose that's irony...
And you're either one of them, or unbelievably naive about human nature. Or do you honestly think that anyone is going to stop believing anything just because you declare religion abolished?
Yes, in exactly the same way as abolishing the First Law of Thermodynamics is the simplest way of solving the problems with our energy supply.
Seriously, were you living up to your name when you wrote that?
Legitimized? What happens when your retaliation takes out Joe Sixpack's computer down the street? You know, the one used as a proxy by an attacker?
Repeat 100 times: "I am not cyber Batman."
Cyber war is not about retaliation, it's about filtering to keep any attack from being effective.
Weren't most of those regimes sponsored by the home of the free? Or at least the nastier right-wing tyrannies...
Anything that makes the transition to IPv6 easier will also make the transition to Censorship Enabled Protocol v1 easier. That's why I'm slowly turning against any changes in Internet: we managed to slip it in under the radar, I don't want it turning into yet another controlled medium.
The ironic thing here is that I'd probably never turn against my corporate/political masters if I didn't perceive them as trying to stop me from accessing whatever content I want...
What happens if the attackers start by issuing DMCA takedown notices against such communication channels? Companies respond to them automatically, after all.
Anyway, this is just another way of resisting censorship: it's just too easy to hijack it as the first step of an attack. Communication is absolutely vital in any kind of war, you can't cripple that without risking defeat. Let's just hope that those in charge fear China more than their own population, and react accordingly
For almost all Windows desktops, those user is the sysadmin. Add the fact that all my problems so far with Windows 7 have come from having to circumvent automation and security (CRT EDID information and mandatory signed drivers, specifically), I'd say that placing power into user hands is a good thing.
An even better thing would be to be able to grant specific powers to programs, rather than just the general do-whatever-you-please admin rights, but I guess that's not happening.
Vista, on 2GB of RAM and a dual-core Athlon, runs like a paralyzed pig on molasses. Win7, on 4GB and a quad-core i5 (just under a grand, all in all), is in a completely different class.
Isn't porn one of the things that get refused classification?
And require a pretty beefy server with lots of bandwidth. In other words, it's expensive.
Yeah, C++ programs that run on your machine and render HTML+CSS (and some even SVG) exist. They're called Web Browsers.
I don't view the Web as a continuous 2D space as is, why would I want to view it as a continuous 3D space? The model of separate data items linked to each other works far better for almost all purposes; why would I want to cripple myself by insisting on having a physical avatar in a place that doesn't need one?
3D virtual worlds already exist, in the form of World of Warcraft and other games. What would I gain from using a virtual world outside of them, rather than the current Web? Would an online gallery be better or worse if you would have to walk amongst the images rather than see them neatly on a page? Would Slashdot gain anything from being 3D?
The true irony is that we already can build large-scale efficient solar power stations. They use the amazing cutting-edge technology called "mirrors" to concentrate sunlight to heat water and drive turbines. Unfortunately, even this supertech can't get around cloudy days or nighttime.
Are your pupils getting smaller? That could conceivably happen, their size being controlled by muscles and all... Use a mirror and check their size in the same lighting conditions; it should always be the same. Also check how fast they contract when you show a flashligth to your eyes, and especially how fast they grow again once you turn it off.
Not a researcher, but that one's easy to check with a mirror, so that's where I'd start.
No, you weren't. A typical adult human has about 5 liters of blood in his body; had you been bleeding profusely for 3 hours, you'd been dead. Your case was not an emergency - meaning you weren't in danger of dying - and thus you waited your turn along with non-emergency cases. Exactly as you should.
So... The doctors came across something they'd never seen before, and rather than take an non-professional person's word for the correct treatment, they checked to be sure. What, exactly speaking, is the issue here? That made the extra effort to be sure that the patient was treated correctly?
The last defensive war US fought was WWII. A purely defensive army would be far smaller and cheaper than the current US one. And if stretch the definition of "defense" to include wars half the way around the globe, it could just as easily be stretched to include keeping your population healthy, so they can fight and manufacture munitions.
Also, taking care of "general welfare" is another of those enumerated jobs. It's probably an overly broad statement, as it can be used to justify just about anything, but that's what it says.
Better yet: force the insurers to insure anyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, genetic risks, or any other factors, for the same price and coverage. No higher premiums for someone who's mother died of cancer, no discounts for employers - in fact, make it so that employers can't insure their employees, to ensure that the insurers really have to compete.
As I see it, this would get the benefits of both public and private healthcare, and the disadvantages of neither. Insurers would be forced to compete on efficiency rather than by filtering out anyone who might possibly get sick. People would be able to pick the best coverage/price ratio. You wouldn't be dropped just because you became unemployed, and in the near future could have your genome analyzed to know what to look out for without risking becoming uninsurable for knowing your own risks.
The only possible model of abuse I see with this is that people would get an insurance only after getting ill. How to solve that is a question.
Well, it's not exactly in the best interests of corporations to have to compete.
It doesn't. It simply doesn't necessarily pay for the one you choose. You're free to pay a private doctor if you wish and can.
Again, feel free to pay a private doctor for whatever tests you wish. Dunno what's this about doctors being forbidden to give you medicine, this is the first I've heard of it.
So... private industry gets to pick the profitable cases, and the public pays for the rest? You profit, I pay?
Cheap and available to everyone?
So they are fundamentalists?
And fascists as well.
Oh, they are commies too!
And now they're are Hitler and Bush.
Those dastardly conspiring climatologists, is there no boogeyman they can't be compared to?
Good thing you're here to make well-reasoned arguments from facts rather than suggest that everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi Commie Religious Fundamentalist Neocon in league with Hitler and Bush.
Then again, any political issue will inevitable degrade to a mudslinging contest, so I guess it shouldn't surprise me...
Both are humans and both are faced with something they don't want to believe, so is it really so surprising that both would resort to similar tactics?