*sigh* Fine I'll bite. One. Last. Time. Must... resist... forces... of... ignorance...
Your understanding matches nothing but some vague idea that "language changes therefore just about anything I say can be right". This was never a liguistics discussion, it was about what Communism and Capitalism are. You seem to think that they are vague ideas that are constantly changing. My position from the very start has been that whatever the commoners' understanding of the terms are, most -ism words refer to very thoroughly explored, albeit broad, ideological paradigms. These definitions may change in the future, but at this point in history their origins and intents are still clearly remembered by political and social analysts.
Example from here: "Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production. It can be classified as a branch of the broader socialist movement." Whatever you think Communism is, your idea is wrong. Communism is defined clearly in The Communist Manifesto and if you think it is something else then you are wrong by definition.
Read the whole of that Wiki article as well as the manifesto, and you will see that whatever the average person understands by the term, there is one correct understanding of it. The common person gets his understanding of communism by listening to the rhetoric spouted by American pop culture laced with residual propaganda from Mcarthy's days. This is the reason that most people misunderstand the term, it was and still is deliberately miscast by the western media to look like something sinister and dangerous when in reality it is just an opposing political viewpoint. Most people now think it is some totalitarian system when in fact it's goal is a stateless society. The very word Communist invokes images of Russian generals lurking in bluestone basements with a map of the US and a big red marker deciding which city to bomb first.
To quote from Wiki again: "The communist society Marx envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains theoretical; Marx, in fact, commented very little on what communist society would actually look like. However, the term 'Communism', especially when it is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties that claimed to embody the dictatorship of the proletariat."
So you see the reference to any existing state such as China, North Korea or whatever as "Communist" is inaccurate. Assumption of the communist label is nothing but a political move by them to lead their people to believe they are acting in their interests. At best, and being incredibly generous, they could be referred to as the intermediate prolitarian revolutionary governments, but that's so much of a stretch that Marx would turn in his grave if you referred to the governments of China or NK in that way. It's just like the "freedom and liberty" rhetoric that western governments espouse to make their people believe they are truly acting altruistically.
You said that most people think of Communism as a totalitarian system. Referring to the Socialism Wikipedia article, "The primary concerns of socialism are social equality and an equitable distribution of wealth that would serve the interests of society as a whole.". Hardly totalitarian theory. In fact, most people wouldn't even know the difference between Socialism and Fascism, they just lump them both in the "these guys are nasty people" category because that's what they have been taught by the media.
The only ill-defined -ism from modern times is Fascism. Due to it's short life and strong political stigma, very few political and social thinkers gave
Yes, Christian right creationist. That's me! Did it occur to you that I simply can't be bothered arguing with you? You're the one with the blanket no exceptions rule that "all meaning is fluid over any length of time". I just can't be fucked discussing this any more with someone who obviously hasn't any insight into the topic over an above a lay understanding. It's like discussing the budget deficit with Uncle Joe. Sure he has an opinion like everyone else, but I wouldn't be putting him in Greenspan's shoes any time soon. Feel free to respond how you please, this is my last post in this thread so you win. I lose. You're smart. I'm dumb etc etc.
Many people ask me why I insist on server side web apps unless there is absolutely positively no way around it. Now they know why. Client side processing means client side requirements. Server side processing means the client can be using anything from a PC with Firefox to an iPhone with... oh wait:P
Even telling your collision searcher that the hash you want to look for can be for a document of any length and with any content as long as it starts with a capital "A" will be very hard. Mathematically, it will be (assuming you are using monobye ASCII) 256 times harder than just finding a random data block. Finding a similar hash that starts with "As" will be 256^2 harder than finding a random data block. In short, the more specific you need the data to be, the harder finding a hash that matches that will be.
The idea of a hash is that appending data to an existing data block radically changes the resulting hash. One cannot simply start with a given data block and append data to it to find a hash, the resulting linear equation will be monstrously difficult to solve and far outside of current computing capacity.
In theory, given any data block, there should be a 128bit string that can be appended to it to generate the the same MD4 as the block would give without it. Finding the right string to append to say a 1mb file is, even with the deprecated MD4, outside the resources of any known computing facility including the Lawrence Livermore monster.
Even applying that math, you still have non-trivial time requirements. Assuming you can test for collisions at a rate of 10^12 attempts / second (that's a thousand billion attempts per second, a rate that would requre a very large grid or supercomputer) you still have to wait in the order of magnitude of 10^12 seconds. I.e., about 31,700 years.
In reality, collision testing would not be able to be done anywhere near that fast, I'd guess the assumption of 10^12 attempts / second is about 1,000 times faster than anyone could do it. Anyone with real world experience in finding hash collisions feel free to chime in right about now.
A non-tiny data block (anything over say over 100kb) would require a huge amount of processing power and memory bandwidth in order to find a collision with a similar sized data block. Lets go back to our 10^12 cracking grid. To find a 100kb data block with a given hash at that rate would require the computer to have 100kb*10^12 transferred from memory to the CPU every second and then hashed. That's 100,000,000,000,000kb, or 100petabytes between CPU and memory every second plus whatever CPU power is required to perform 10^12 hashes on that data. While clever use of the hardware and lots of L2 cache could perhaps keep this off the main memory bus, it's still a phenomenally difficult task for any CPU.
Take these figures, and assume that it is now 2,000 times easier. These figures still put the time at finding a collission outside of the average lifespan of a person. Now factor in the fact that not just *any* collision will do, we need one that's about the right size and has at least a certain *part* that looks like something useful. I.e., a random data block is not a useful substitution for a PDF of an important doc, the recipient will notice if they receive random data instead of something readable. The practicality of any attack given these real world constraints goes down by an order of magnitude or two.
In short, SHA-1 is still safe. There is no realistically exploitable attack vector, at least not in the public domain as yet. That being said, I am a paranoiac. In the DB file stores that I am in charge of I keep both MD5 and SHA-1 hashes in the metadata table, and have been recommending this for years.
About the same size. A zillion squillion dzjillion times better. You think that's a made up number? You'll realize it isn't when you compare the two players side by side.
Let's be honest now -- outside of a political science classroom, how often do you hear the word "communism" used to refer to Marx's ideas, and how often do you hear the word "communism" used to refer to the system of politics and economics in North Korea, Cuba, China, or the USSR? You know exactly which is the common usage -- the usage that is meaningful in the language that we speak. You know which usage people will assume you are using in casual conversation. Similarly, capitalism -- in the vernacular -- has nothing to do with Adam Smith and everything to do with what the guy at the service station will use as an excuse when you bitch that gas prices are too high. Most people who talk about capitalism have never even HEARD of Adam Smith, and wouldn't have the slightest idea what his ideas were.
That's my whole f&^%king point you lay dolt! That an idea is commonly misrepresented by lay people whose education doesn't go far past the multiplication tables does NOT make that common misrepresentation correct! Just coz enough people think that 2+2=5 does not make it so. The entire population of Earth at one point in time thought it was flat. That did not make it so. If your understanding of political science is on par with the gas station guy then what the HELL are you doing talking to me? I don't mean to high horse you but it's hard not to when you set the bar at the level of intellectual sophistication expected of the guy who pumps my gas. Just becase 99% of people have never read the works of Marx, Smith, Mill or Franklin doesn't mean their ideas no longer exist as they were conceived. They do, you just need to learn to read them rather than regurgitate the trash you hear from your local gas pump droid. If you consider philosophy majors to be pedantic jackasses then don't pontificate on the subject. You're like those idiot armchair football coaches who think they can take a team to victory in the superbowl despite the fact that their experience in the game is limited to their remote control.
Oh, and for the record, most of the time I hear "Communism" referred to it is a reference to the relevant concepts of socialist economics. Most people with even the remotest modicum of an education are aware that China, North Korea and USSR are about as close to being Communist as Care Bears are to being flesh eating reptiles with two heads.
But for the sake of finishing this I concede. You're right. Let's start burning dictionaries and textbooks and doing away with all points of linguistic reference. Who needs educated accuracy when ignorant ranting is so much fun?
P.S., Oh, and "vernacular"? It's very obvious when a person is using words for the sake of adding vocab. Words like that are incongruent with the rest of your lay shit talk. Put the dictionary down unless you plan on using it for something other than referencing big words.
Look OK, Communism is defined in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. Capitalism is the economic face of Liberalism, as described in the works of people like Adam Smith. While I acknowledge that in 2,000 years when the work of these people is long forgotten and their ideas have been lost, these words may come to mean different things. Feel free to say "I told you so" when we are having this discussion in 2,000 years. Until then, however, these concepts are clearly defined and their meanings are not some fluid shapeless mass with no fixed meaning. They are clearly defined. Philosophy and politics were a big part of my legal degree. Now STFU because I'm getting embarrassed on your behalf.
Please, for the love of God, tell me that spelling it "bidness" was a joke. Please, I have so little faith in humanity left, don't throw me over the edge!
I dunno about GP, but yesterday I ate Mexican food, causing me to crap twice. The two craps looked remarkably similar.
Personally, I think my crap is more newsworthy than this article's crap.
What the &$%# were the editors thinking when this BS was submitted? I mean FFS? I've seen some stuff on slow news days that was of questionable interest to a wide audience but this takes the cake. "Oh, some smart cookie realized that some snowflakes *may* be alike, and we can't prove otherwise without examining every snowflake on Earth." All I have to say about this article is W T F !
A descent into "language changes over time" is really a last resort appeal to semantic flexibility to change the borders of correctness so that they encompass your position. I'm sorry, certain words refer to fixed concepts. Language syntax may be fluid, but underlying concepts are not. A spade is a spade and it will be in 200 years. New technology that automates the digging process is called something else. The whole "language isn't fixed" argument isn't a one-size-fits-all counter point to anyone who points out that you have misunderstood the meaning of a word or concept.
Oh, and words like immutable don't make you sound smarter by default.
Buddy, disagree all you like, I was not stating my opinion, but fact. Socialism, by difinion, is "belief in society". Just look at the word: Social + ism.
America is not a welfare state. Having a welfare office does not make a state a welfare state any more than Hong Kong makes China a capitalist state.
Communism does not refer to a totalitarian system of state ownership. That is just what happened when leaders who professed to be communists took charge. In case you haven't noticed, leaders' real agendas != their stated political beliefs. Communism, as in "commun" + "ism" is a system of political, economic and social order defined by Marx in his manifesto, anything that deviates from this is, by definition, something else, a derivative work so to speak. One of the few bonna fide attempts at implementing communism that I can think of off the top of my head was that by President Allende in Chile, who made an amazing attempt at direct economic management using technology decades ahead of its time. If anyone else can think of another example then feel free to chime in.
The word "conservative" is a relative word, it refers to a position less agressive or unorthodox than another. Thus, it's meaning does change with context. Words like "communism", "socialism" and "capitalism" do not, as they are nouns that refer to specific ideological concepts. The word "conservative" is a comparative adjective, which only has a meaning when used in a comparative context. E.g., "Fred's ideas are more conservative than Bob's" makes sense while "Fred's ideas are conservative." does not. It's like "Fred is fatter than Bob" makes sense, while "Fred is fatter." does not outside of a specific implied context.
It really pisses me off when the US media uses the word "conservative" as though it refers to some political system or ideology. At best, the word "neocon" can be used as a vernacular noun, but it's use to refer to fundamentalist militant capitalism is not really, in my mind, correct usage. I prefer the term "fundamentalist militant capitalism", as that really is what it is; a marriage between the highest echelons of the capitalist system and the military to employ force in securing business advantages for corporations in countries too weak to resist. It is the militant spread of capitalist organisations into countries that may or may not embrace capitalist values. This was nicely illustrated when Allende won the presidential elections in Chile in 1970 on a Marxist platform, and the then US Secretary of State said, upon launching a debilitating campaign of economic and political disruption, that they "would not stand by and let a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its people". I.e., "screw what they want, we are in a better position to know what's good for them". Fundamentalist militant capitalism. If there are fundamentalists spreading their doctrine by force in this world it is not Muslims, it is the US government. Further examples: Bechtel in WWII, Unocal in Afghanistan and Halliburton in Iraq.
So yea, I digressed a fair bit, but the words Communism, Capitalism, Socialism and Liberalism are proper nouns referring to specific things, so their meanings do not change with time. Derivative systems will call themselves something different. Conservative is a comparative adjective, so its meaning does change. Yes, real politics is in practice a practical application of ideas from many areas, but that does not mean the ideas themselves change.
Sorry to tread on you like that, but when you're wrong, you're wrong:)
Slashdot Option 1: Encourage stupid people by paying out when they do stupid things like believe email that reads "Dwonlaod tihs spam fihgting tool".
Slashdot Option 2: Encourage banks to absorb financial responsibility of eCommerce mishaps and take the lead in system security.
Can't... make... decision... brain... splitting... in... half...
Just FYI, capitalism and socialism are not really comparable. Capitalism and communism are. Capitalism's ideological father is liberalism, the idea that the individual is the supreme unit of society and the freedom of the individual is the focus of social order. Socialism is the idea that the good of the society as a whole is the focus of the social order.
Capitalism is liberalism's economic facet, communism is socialism's economic facet. Both liberalism and socialism have political facets as well, and this issue, the issue of the ordering of political activity, are treated very differently under liberal and social models. So this issue is *very* relevant to the socialism/liberalism dichotomy, as long as you use the correct terminology.
Without getting into a long debate over this, I would just like to say that a *real* public healthcare sector incorporating research has never existed, and can't while insanely profitable companies in the US keep snapping up the best and brightest. In a globalized economy you can't have one country with a publically funded medical research sector as its top workers will always be stolen by Pfizer or SKB.
This proposition won't work while there is a majority of medical research conducted within the current Western capitalist paradigm. As long as people are allowed to profit from the delivery of medicine, those who see medicine as nothing more than a business will treat it as such.
Until governments realize that medical research needs to be treated and thought about a little differently than research into the latest greatest big TV screen technology we will have drugs that save lives restricted to only those who can pay for them. Personally, I see this as a despicable commodification of life itself, where there is the perverse belief that the market is a good mechanism for determining who's life is the most valuable to them and thus who should be allocated the scarce resource of medical treatment. Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it.
The loss of Bullfrog was a sad day. Those guys were, in my books, the best game designers the world has ever seen, with more original ideas and new concepts than any other development crew. I would LOVE another Syndicate, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Syndicate and XCom are my two biggest agreements there, although I agree with all of them.
Syndicate and XCom are two of my favorite games of all time, and I really wish they'd stop screwing around with the XCom franchise and make a real sequel not some BS totally different game with the same name.
And yes, the loss of Bullfrog was a sad day. Those guys were, in my books, the best game designers the world has ever seen, with more original ideas and new concepts than any other development crew.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* Fine I'll bite. One. Last. Time. Must... resist... forces... of... ignorance...
Your understanding matches nothing but some vague idea that "language changes therefore just about anything I say can be right". This was never a liguistics discussion, it was about what Communism and Capitalism are. You seem to think that they are vague ideas that are constantly changing. My position from the very start has been that whatever the commoners' understanding of the terms are, most -ism words refer to very thoroughly explored, albeit broad, ideological paradigms. These definitions may change in the future, but at this point in history their origins and intents are still clearly remembered by political and social analysts.
Example from here: "Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production. It can be classified as a branch of the broader socialist movement." Whatever you think Communism is, your idea is wrong. Communism is defined clearly in The Communist Manifesto and if you think it is something else then you are wrong by definition.
Read the whole of that Wiki article as well as the manifesto, and you will see that whatever the average person understands by the term, there is one correct understanding of it. The common person gets his understanding of communism by listening to the rhetoric spouted by American pop culture laced with residual propaganda from Mcarthy's days. This is the reason that most people misunderstand the term, it was and still is deliberately miscast by the western media to look like something sinister and dangerous when in reality it is just an opposing political viewpoint. Most people now think it is some totalitarian system when in fact it's goal is a stateless society. The very word Communist invokes images of Russian generals lurking in bluestone basements with a map of the US and a big red marker deciding which city to bomb first.
To quote from Wiki again: "The communist society Marx envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains theoretical; Marx, in fact, commented very little on what communist society would actually look like. However, the term 'Communism', especially when it is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties that claimed to embody the dictatorship of the proletariat."
So you see the reference to any existing state such as China, North Korea or whatever as "Communist" is inaccurate. Assumption of the communist label is nothing but a political move by them to lead their people to believe they are acting in their interests. At best, and being incredibly generous, they could be referred to as the intermediate prolitarian revolutionary governments, but that's so much of a stretch that Marx would turn in his grave if you referred to the governments of China or NK in that way. It's just like the "freedom and liberty" rhetoric that western governments espouse to make their people believe they are truly acting altruistically.
You said that most people think of Communism as a totalitarian system. Referring to the Socialism Wikipedia article, "The primary concerns of socialism are social equality and an equitable distribution of wealth that would serve the interests of society as a whole.". Hardly totalitarian theory. In fact, most people wouldn't even know the difference between Socialism and Fascism, they just lump them both in the "these guys are nasty people" category because that's what they have been taught by the media.
The only ill-defined -ism from modern times is Fascism. Due to it's short life and strong political stigma, very few political and social thinkers gave
Yes, Christian right creationist. That's me! Did it occur to you that I simply can't be bothered arguing with you? You're the one with the blanket no exceptions rule that "all meaning is fluid over any length of time". I just can't be fucked discussing this any more with someone who obviously hasn't any insight into the topic over an above a lay understanding. It's like discussing the budget deficit with Uncle Joe. Sure he has an opinion like everyone else, but I wouldn't be putting him in Greenspan's shoes any time soon. Feel free to respond how you please, this is my last post in this thread so you win. I lose. You're smart. I'm dumb etc etc.
Wow, I thought block collisions ended back when they killed MD2.
Thanks for the clarification.
Many people ask me why I insist on server side web apps unless there is absolutely positively no way around it. Now they know why. Client side processing means client side requirements. Server side processing means the client can be using anything from a PC with Firefox to an iPhone with... oh wait :P
What the? Troll? I guess objectivity counts for nothing when you're smoking Steve Jobs' cock.
Now *that's* a troll you brain dead mod fucktard.
Right, in theory, wrong in practice (I think).
Even telling your collision searcher that the hash you want to look for can be for a document of any length and with any content as long as it starts with a capital "A" will be very hard. Mathematically, it will be (assuming you are using monobye ASCII) 256 times harder than just finding a random data block. Finding a similar hash that starts with "As" will be 256^2 harder than finding a random data block. In short, the more specific you need the data to be, the harder finding a hash that matches that will be.
The idea of a hash is that appending data to an existing data block radically changes the resulting hash. One cannot simply start with a given data block and append data to it to find a hash, the resulting linear equation will be monstrously difficult to solve and far outside of current computing capacity.
In theory, given any data block, there should be a 128bit string that can be appended to it to generate the the same MD4 as the block would give without it. Finding the right string to append to say a 1mb file is, even with the deprecated MD4, outside the resources of any known computing facility including the Lawrence Livermore monster.
Darl McBride, is that you?
Even applying that math, you still have non-trivial time requirements. Assuming you can test for collisions at a rate of 10^12 attempts / second (that's a thousand billion attempts per second, a rate that would requre a very large grid or supercomputer) you still have to wait in the order of magnitude of 10^12 seconds. I.e., about 31,700 years.
In reality, collision testing would not be able to be done anywhere near that fast, I'd guess the assumption of 10^12 attempts / second is about 1,000 times faster than anyone could do it. Anyone with real world experience in finding hash collisions feel free to chime in right about now.
A non-tiny data block (anything over say over 100kb) would require a huge amount of processing power and memory bandwidth in order to find a collision with a similar sized data block. Lets go back to our 10^12 cracking grid. To find a 100kb data block with a given hash at that rate would require the computer to have 100kb*10^12 transferred from memory to the CPU every second and then hashed. That's 100,000,000,000,000kb, or 100petabytes between CPU and memory every second plus whatever CPU power is required to perform 10^12 hashes on that data. While clever use of the hardware and lots of L2 cache could perhaps keep this off the main memory bus, it's still a phenomenally difficult task for any CPU.
Take these figures, and assume that it is now 2,000 times easier. These figures still put the time at finding a collission outside of the average lifespan of a person. Now factor in the fact that not just *any* collision will do, we need one that's about the right size and has at least a certain *part* that looks like something useful. I.e., a random data block is not a useful substitution for a PDF of an important doc, the recipient will notice if they receive random data instead of something readable. The practicality of any attack given these real world constraints goes down by an order of magnitude or two.
In short, SHA-1 is still safe. There is no realistically exploitable attack vector, at least not in the public domain as yet. That being said, I am a paranoiac. In the DB file stores that I am in charge of I keep both MD5 and SHA-1 hashes in the metadata table, and have been recommending this for years.
Dude. iRiver S10.
About the same size. A zillion squillion dzjillion times better. You think that's a made up number? You'll realize it isn't when you compare the two players side by side.
Please accept this in lieu of an intelligent argument: Bite me you sub-mediocre cock smoking moron!
That's my whole f&^%king point you lay dolt! That an idea is commonly misrepresented by lay people whose education doesn't go far past the multiplication tables does NOT make that common misrepresentation correct! Just coz enough people think that 2+2=5 does not make it so. The entire population of Earth at one point in time thought it was flat. That did not make it so. If your understanding of political science is on par with the gas station guy then what the HELL are you doing talking to me? I don't mean to high horse you but it's hard not to when you set the bar at the level of intellectual sophistication expected of the guy who pumps my gas. Just becase 99% of people have never read the works of Marx, Smith, Mill or Franklin doesn't mean their ideas no longer exist as they were conceived. They do, you just need to learn to read them rather than regurgitate the trash you hear from your local gas pump droid. If you consider philosophy majors to be pedantic jackasses then don't pontificate on the subject. You're like those idiot armchair football coaches who think they can take a team to victory in the superbowl despite the fact that their experience in the game is limited to their remote control.
Oh, and for the record, most of the time I hear "Communism" referred to it is a reference to the relevant concepts of socialist economics. Most people with even the remotest modicum of an education are aware that China, North Korea and USSR are about as close to being Communist as Care Bears are to being flesh eating reptiles with two heads.
But for the sake of finishing this I concede. You're right. Let's start burning dictionaries and textbooks and doing away with all points of linguistic reference. Who needs educated accuracy when ignorant ranting is so much fun?
P.S., Oh, and "vernacular"? It's very obvious when a person is using words for the sake of adding vocab. Words like that are incongruent with the rest of your lay shit talk. Put the dictionary down unless you plan on using it for something other than referencing big words.
P.P.S I'll have a tank of unleaded thanks.
Look OK, Communism is defined in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. Capitalism is the economic face of Liberalism, as described in the works of people like Adam Smith. While I acknowledge that in 2,000 years when the work of these people is long forgotten and their ideas have been lost, these words may come to mean different things. Feel free to say "I told you so" when we are having this discussion in 2,000 years. Until then, however, these concepts are clearly defined and their meanings are not some fluid shapeless mass with no fixed meaning. They are clearly defined. Philosophy and politics were a big part of my legal degree. Now STFU because I'm getting embarrassed on your behalf.
Aah *relaxes back in his chair as a beatific smile forms on his face*
Please, for the love of God, tell me that spelling it "bidness" was a joke. Please, I have so little faith in humanity left, don't throw me over the edge!
I dunno about GP, but yesterday I ate Mexican food, causing me to crap twice. The two craps looked remarkably similar.
Personally, I think my crap is more newsworthy than this article's crap.
What the &$%# were the editors thinking when this BS was submitted? I mean FFS? I've seen some stuff on slow news days that was of questionable interest to a wide audience but this takes the cake. "Oh, some smart cookie realized that some snowflakes *may* be alike, and we can't prove otherwise without examining every snowflake on Earth." All I have to say about this article is
W
T
F
!
A descent into "language changes over time" is really a last resort appeal to semantic flexibility to change the borders of correctness so that they encompass your position. I'm sorry, certain words refer to fixed concepts. Language syntax may be fluid, but underlying concepts are not. A spade is a spade and it will be in 200 years. New technology that automates the digging process is called something else. The whole "language isn't fixed" argument isn't a one-size-fits-all counter point to anyone who points out that you have misunderstood the meaning of a word or concept.
Oh, and words like immutable don't make you sound smarter by default.
Awww *blush*
Buddy, disagree all you like, I was not stating my opinion, but fact. Socialism, by difinion, is "belief in society". Just look at the word: Social + ism.
:)
America is not a welfare state. Having a welfare office does not make a state a welfare state any more than Hong Kong makes China a capitalist state.
Communism does not refer to a totalitarian system of state ownership. That is just what happened when leaders who professed to be communists took charge. In case you haven't noticed, leaders' real agendas != their stated political beliefs. Communism, as in "commun" + "ism" is a system of political, economic and social order defined by Marx in his manifesto, anything that deviates from this is, by definition, something else, a derivative work so to speak. One of the few bonna fide attempts at implementing communism that I can think of off the top of my head was that by President Allende in Chile, who made an amazing attempt at direct economic management using technology decades ahead of its time. If anyone else can think of another example then feel free to chime in.
The word "conservative" is a relative word, it refers to a position less agressive or unorthodox than another. Thus, it's meaning does change with context. Words like "communism", "socialism" and "capitalism" do not, as they are nouns that refer to specific ideological concepts. The word "conservative" is a comparative adjective, which only has a meaning when used in a comparative context. E.g., "Fred's ideas are more conservative than Bob's" makes sense while "Fred's ideas are conservative." does not. It's like "Fred is fatter than Bob" makes sense, while "Fred is fatter." does not outside of a specific implied context.
It really pisses me off when the US media uses the word "conservative" as though it refers to some political system or ideology. At best, the word "neocon" can be used as a vernacular noun, but it's use to refer to fundamentalist militant capitalism is not really, in my mind, correct usage. I prefer the term "fundamentalist militant capitalism", as that really is what it is; a marriage between the highest echelons of the capitalist system and the military to employ force in securing business advantages for corporations in countries too weak to resist. It is the militant spread of capitalist organisations into countries that may or may not embrace capitalist values. This was nicely illustrated when Allende won the presidential elections in Chile in 1970 on a Marxist platform, and the then US Secretary of State said, upon launching a debilitating campaign of economic and political disruption, that they "would not stand by and let a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its people". I.e., "screw what they want, we are in a better position to know what's good for them". Fundamentalist militant capitalism. If there are fundamentalists spreading their doctrine by force in this world it is not Muslims, it is the US government. Further examples: Bechtel in WWII, Unocal in Afghanistan and Halliburton in Iraq.
So yea, I digressed a fair bit, but the words Communism, Capitalism, Socialism and Liberalism are proper nouns referring to specific things, so their meanings do not change with time. Derivative systems will call themselves something different. Conservative is a comparative adjective, so its meaning does change. Yes, real politics is in practice a practical application of ideas from many areas, but that does not mean the ideas themselves change.
Sorry to tread on you like that, but when you're wrong, you're wrong
Slashdot Option 1: Encourage stupid people by paying out when they do stupid things like believe email that reads "Dwonlaod tihs spam fihgting tool". Slashdot Option 2: Encourage banks to absorb financial responsibility of eCommerce mishaps and take the lead in system security. Can't... make... decision... brain... splitting... in... half...
Just FYI, capitalism and socialism are not really comparable. Capitalism and communism are. Capitalism's ideological father is liberalism, the idea that the individual is the supreme unit of society and the freedom of the individual is the focus of social order. Socialism is the idea that the good of the society as a whole is the focus of the social order.
Capitalism is liberalism's economic facet, communism is socialism's economic facet. Both liberalism and socialism have political facets as well, and this issue, the issue of the ordering of political activity, are treated very differently under liberal and social models. So this issue is *very* relevant to the socialism/liberalism dichotomy, as long as you use the correct terminology.
Without getting into a long debate over this, I would just like to say that a *real* public healthcare sector incorporating research has never existed, and can't while insanely profitable companies in the US keep snapping up the best and brightest. In a globalized economy you can't have one country with a publically funded medical research sector as its top workers will always be stolen by Pfizer or SKB.
This proposition won't work while there is a majority of medical research conducted within the current Western capitalist paradigm. As long as people are allowed to profit from the delivery of medicine, those who see medicine as nothing more than a business will treat it as such.
Until governments realize that medical research needs to be treated and thought about a little differently than research into the latest greatest big TV screen technology we will have drugs that save lives restricted to only those who can pay for them. Personally, I see this as a despicable commodification of life itself, where there is the perverse belief that the market is a good mechanism for determining who's life is the most valuable to them and thus who should be allocated the scarce resource of medical treatment. Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it.
The loss of Bullfrog was a sad day. Those guys were, in my books, the best game designers the world has ever seen, with more original ideas and new concepts than any other development crew. I would LOVE another Syndicate, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Syndicate and XCom are my two biggest agreements there, although I agree with all of them.
Syndicate and XCom are two of my favorite games of all time, and I really wish they'd stop screwing around with the XCom franchise and make a real sequel not some BS totally different game with the same name.
And yes, the loss of Bullfrog was a sad day. Those guys were, in my books, the best game designers the world has ever seen, with more original ideas and new concepts than any other development crew.
I agree! Please please please make another Syndicate someone!
More Syndicate now! One of the best games I have EVER played, and definitely one of my most enduring favorites.