What does DRM at iTunes have to do with your choice of other Apple products? Out of curiosity, do you not run Windows as well because of Zune and Microsoft's Palladium?
I use Apple hardware and software. I don't use the iTunes service for anything more than podcasts. The audio files I use on my iPods come from my own CD and LP collection. I feel no requirement to use iTunes or DRM'd music.
Yes, I would be pretty happy if iPod played FLAC and APE. I've got a large collection of digitized vinyl in those formats, and I'm too lazy to do a batch process to convert them to Apple Lossless.
There is something else I think I'd like to see in the iPod. I recently bought my father a Tascam guitar trainer device. It's at heart a very sturdy metal MP3 player (1GB) with the ability to slow down or speed up a track while preserving proper pitch. It makes it easier for a musician to study a song and figure out what notes are being played. If iPod could speed or slow down playback while preserving pitch, I wouldn't have needed to get that Tascam.
I think the general rule for the "come to X country and learn its language" is for people intending to live there, not vacation there
Why wouldn't a person want to learn at least a little of the language of the country they are visiting? It's nice to be able to know how to say, "Please take me to a hospital, I've been shot and I'm about to die." as well as, "Yes, I would like to biggie-size my chez McDonald's royale with cheese"
I don't think anyone's suggesting that you've got to be able to recite the host country's national epic in native tongue.
I'm a native German and English speaker myself. Sitting in both boats as I do, I can understand the sensitivities involved with favoring one language over another. But I find that English is really easily the best language for international communications.
English has several features that I think make it a better language. It's semantically open, unlike French. Adding new words to English is very simple. We can even create new verbs and nouns from the last names of people (ie. bork). It adapts existing foreign words easily. I'm often able to use "über" and "verboten" in English without getting at looks.
English doesn't require special accent marks in order define meanings. English has simplified definite and indefinite articles. Compared to German, "a", "an", and "the" are much simpler. English features no real gender. No worries about matching verbs, nouns, and articles; or even changing the meaning of a word. For possession, the Saxon genitive is efficient and simple. It accomplishes more in less space to say "John's car" rather than "the car of John". English also features simplified demonstratives, and very simplified declension of nouns. None of the der, den, dem, des conflicts that plague German and make it difficult for non-German speakers to learn. In English the placement of adjectives doesn't affect its meaning. In French you have scenarios like "un homme grand" (a great man) and "un grand homme" (a tall man). In English, you rely on the context of the adjective. Finally, English has a more direct simplified sentence structure.
of course, English has its downside, thinking contextually in English to find meaning vs thinking literally in French can create some confusions, I'm sure.
Sure, some people advocate English everywhere just because they're linguistically lazy and somewhat arrogant, but truly, there legitimate reasons for stressing English as an international language of commerce vs say, Irish where it can take an "aoi" to stress a "long i" sound, or Chinese were choosing a written form is as much a decision about your politics as it is about efficiency (simplified used in China vs traditional used in Taiwan).
Actually, if you live in a very dry, desert climate, this works. All across Sun Valley in arizona (Phoenix, Scottsdale, etc), you'll find misters, a kind of out door A/C which sprays mists of water into the air. It uses very little water, but makes a very noticeable difference in temperature. The temperature in coverage area becomes comfortable enough for out door dining in summer. On a small scale, this works well... so isn't this prior art?
I have just limited experience using apt-get and more experience using RPMs and Slackware PKGs, so it's hard for me to do a 1:1 comparison.
For me, it's the larger issue of how and where application files are installed. I don't like files being exploded all across the filesystem. Windows puts things in Program Files/ and then dumps a lot of stuff within Windows/ too. *NIX apps go in/man/user/bin etc...
Most Mac apps are packaged as bundles. To install an app, I download a disk image of it. Think of it is as a mini ISO, though that's not really correct. I mount it, drag the icon of an app anywhere onto my computer, and now the app is installed and default file extensions (usually) are set.
Visually on the desktop these bundles are expressed as a single icon representing the entirety of the application. It's really a directory, but its default response when double-clicked is to act like an executable. For example, on Mac OS, I see just a single icon for the app Adobe Lightroom. If I drag the icon to my desktop, I've now moved the entire application to my desktop. If I drag it to trash, I've deleted the entire application. On Windows, the icon is really just a short cut to a binary hidden within a directory structure somewhere on the drive. Dragging that icon does nothing to the actual program. Also, just deleting the entire Lightroom folder, doesn't actually uninstall it.
Here's where apt-get is better I believe. Mac is very inconsistent under the hood. Most software packages coming from the open source world are packaged as tarballs. Following the *NIX standard, they explode all over the *NIX filesystem structure, and moving them about is messy. Some software packages specifically designed for Mac are installers with the PKG extension. They are more of a pain to remove. Library bundles are mostly just like application bundles. My SDL installation is a bundle right now â"â" everything for SDL is represented by a single folder. However, dependencies get messy. I'm never totally sure that the right version of a library is installed. As said, dependency checking is tragic.
So, in one way, perhaps only to a non-technical end user, the way Mac does things as bundles is superior. But if you're a developer, or just someone who cares about dependencies, things can get frustrating. What's nice is that, the way things work on Mac OS X, I can install all my dependencies the traditional *NIX way. I believe I can install RPM too. And I have applications as bundles.
I'm inclined to agree in this specific case of Steve Jobs. Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio all maintained some creativity at Apple. Apple did a lot of things during those years, but it seemed like Apple was all over the place and often confused. As idealistic as Jobs is, he's been arguably more pragmatic this time around compared to the other guys.
In general though, there's been a lot of Type A personalities out there that were horribly detrimental to their companies. I'd cite Worldcom (LDDS) which eventually became MCI Worldcom and destroyed MCI.
WTFE, There *ARE* spies and terrorists in America, and this is exactly the kind of behavior you would expect out of them... let's just proceed with utter fear and paranoia.
Are these guys even photographers by trade? I am one, and I've never known even a hobbyist photographer who thought it was particularly wise to take very specific photos of federal installations. Unless they're just stupid, they might just be employees who were tossed a camera and told to go out and shoot without any advance training.
Pretty likely it is a knee-jerk reaction to the Mumbai shootings. There are incidents of photographers running into trouble with NYPD for photographing the Statue of Liberty not long after September 11th.
But as for signs being posted. I don't know to what degree the Indian legal system follows the English system, but it likely doesn't matter that no signs are posted. Were I to travel to India, I automagically know every law of India on the books cause of that whole legal fallacy thing.
Apple catches a lot of flak on its design esthetics. Many people knock the design of Apple products as being form over function, but I do in fact benefit from the form. It's not just an art-piece. One of my favorite Macs is the iMac (2006 to present). I'm disadvantaged by that design for a lot of things: no ability to install an PCI TV tuner, hard drive upgrades are a pain in the ass, etc.; but it's nice not have a tower that takes up space on the desk, or collect static electricity and dust on the floor; and no delicious cables for cats to gnaw on. Given that the majority of my computer use is in support of photography, this means I have more space for my cameras and lenses and cameras...
Sony has its own now, and it's a pretty expensive unit if I recall. But for at least a little while, Apple iMacs were alone in allowing me to have a computer in an already fairly cluttered space.
You're describing a kind of muscle memory it sounds like. On a guitar, I just know where certain frets and strings are without looking. My fingers just find them. On *most* GUI apps, I just know that the File menu option is somewhere to the upper left corner of a window.
Can we make an argument for user interfaces which evolve over time after learning what requirements a particular user has? I just commented about the hidden "go to folder" text entry dialog in Mac OS X's finder. If I go to use that menu item enough, shouldn't it materialize in my Finder window as a permanent fixture? Similar unused options and hide themselves. I wonder if having menus which effectively reorganize themselves is considered bad UI design.
A text box view of a current location??? God, I never thought I'd miss that. As a Mac OS user I can use the "Go to Folder" menu item in Finder to raise a dialog where I can type in folder location, but I do love Windows 95's inclusion of this in Explorer. I like Finder, but I find it too streamlined. It's suitable for quick views of data, but not good for when I looking to juggle many files. I really need that tree view and not a 3 panel folder view. I need an Explorer for Mac OS X.
I've always hated web views. As you said, if I wanted to see it in a web view, I would have opened it in a browser. Frankly, I reject most of these navigational modes found in Microsoft's Active Desktop.
About the strengths of Linux's package management. I always found package management in Linux frustrating. I never liked the UNIX tradition of exploding files all across multiple filesystems. I understand the virtues of doing so, but I prefer applications to be self-contained bundles that can be easily installed and removed without impacting related applications. I likely have multiple installations of the x264 library on my Mac as a result of redundancies, but I find Mac bundles to be very easy to use, for both people like me who often try out new applications and non-technical users who feel nervous installing apps. And of course, I have a major problem with Mac packages (.PKG).
On Windows, I've found most installers to be pretty capable, but even there i've generally favored apps that were installable by simply unzipping into a folder and manually adding a shortcut to the Start Menu.
Is it possible yet on any Linux distro to have an equivalent to Mac bundles, and if so, is Linux at a point where I can unpack a downloaded app, drag over its icon to install, or delete its icon to complete remove the app?
Macs do use commodity hardware now, but it's still a matter of how well things are put together. For example, of my WinTel PCs, my HPs and my bare bones homebuilts shared basically the same hardware configurations, and yet my HPs suffered from numerous hardware problems to include shoddy power supply components, misaligned parts, not enough/too much thermal paste. It's like automobiles. Within a common class, they're all essentially the same parts, but it's a matter of how things are put together.
Part of the magic of my Macs is how much more quiet the machines run compared to standard PCs, not to mention the lower heat dissipation. Obviously though, the standard C2D processor implies that noise level and heat dissipation would be the same. But there is still the issue of loud fans.
Yeah, I sat my 360 upright for a day before getting too antsy about the idea. Ironically, my PS3 has been vertical since I bought it long ago, and it's been fine. I think owe my comfort with it to the slot loading drive as opposed to the tray. Perhaps an Xbox 360 with slot loaded drive would be better?
So this isn't a problem specific only to those older generation 360s, but a general characteristic of all 360s including the most recent ones? My late '07 has been error-free and damage-free since day one. My 1st gen PS3 is proving more error prone much to my chagrin, but all its own problems, I've never had a PS3 disc get scratched. I can say the same for my 360 discs as well. My console rests horizontal and is never moved since I use my wireless controller for everything including powering up. Does this problem arise in consoles which are kept horizontal as well?
I believe she was mostly a prostitute, and her only striptease act was performed during her out-calls. I don't think she was a professional stripper... of which I have known many personally. Most strippers, actually exotic dancers, won't accept money for sex.
You know, I'm still not sure what to make of Ron Paul, but you're right, you couldn't sanely call him a socialist even the way we toss the word about now. I didn't know that he was still holding office.
Not his belief in caring for the poor, no. But his view that we should force people to do that "caring" on our behalf by taking their property
I refreshed myself a little tonight on Bastiat and I concede your point on his idea of socialism. I still however would argue that Obama is not a socialist though he might play one on TV. I see Obama's rhetoric about giving money to the poor to be an attempt to correct a social imbalance created as a result of the government favoring the wealthy robber barons to the detriment of the middle class for so long. I don't believe he's actively trying to create a single working class. And I don't believe he will try to prevent anyone from getting rich off their own hard work. The reality is, in our country, we've long given up our property to the benefit of our fellow countrymen.
I didn't mean to imply that you said "everyone"; sorry. I mean to say that everyone in Congress is a "socialist" to some degree based on this popular redefinition of "socialism" that's being used today. You obviously understand Socialism a bit more than many other Americans, but I promise you, when you say Obama is a socialist, there will be many many many many Americans who will immediately visualize Obama as carrying a little red book and secretly working with the Russians to plot our destruction. I'm not convinced that Obama's belief in caring for the poor in this country falls into socialism as Bastiat believes it to be. I think he could go a bit further if you will.
My point, ultimately is that "socialist" is a red herring; just another jingoistic label to people like McCain want us to put on our bumperstickers as his friends sell more and more of the country to China and Saudi Arabia.
As for Liberty... you're preaching to the choir. I can only add that absent a properly functioning government and officials that put the government back in check, Liberty cannot exist. In the good days, we'd revolt. Now, we're patriotic only if we sit idly by.
If everyone is a socialist to some degree, then the label is no longer distinguishable, is it then? We end up with the ridiculous parody that we've got now where one senator calls another socialist while simultaneously calling for government investment and ownership in banking institutions.
I think Bastiat's position on socialism come with the caveat that governments and markets must live in harmony and work efficiently such that we don't wind up with a huge gaping hole in our labor force and a large class of poor, unskilled citizens who depend on the rest of society to care for them because they simply cannot get a job. Bastiat's biggest fight was with mercantilism if I'm not mistaken. I think our situation is more complicated precisely because we weren't more protectionist with our economy.
Bastiat was a harmonic libertarian. By his definition, every Democrat and Republican in office today is a little socialist. He would especially consider Bush 43 and every governor of Alaska a socialist.
McCain would most definitely be considered a socialist by that definition.
Slashdot Mirror
What does DRM at iTunes have to do with your choice of other Apple products? Out of curiosity, do you not run Windows as well because of Zune and Microsoft's Palladium?
I use Apple hardware and software. I don't use the iTunes service for anything more than podcasts. The audio files I use on my iPods come from my own CD and LP collection. I feel no requirement to use iTunes or DRM'd music.
There's a fourth reaction: ... curse, say "that sucks", and then make another iTunes purchase.
Yes, I would be pretty happy if iPod played FLAC and APE. I've got a large collection of digitized vinyl in those formats, and I'm too lazy to do a batch process to convert them to Apple Lossless.
There is something else I think I'd like to see in the iPod. I recently bought my father a Tascam guitar trainer device. It's at heart a very sturdy metal MP3 player (1GB) with the ability to slow down or speed up a track while preserving proper pitch. It makes it easier for a musician to study a song and figure out what notes are being played. If iPod could speed or slow down playback while preserving pitch, I wouldn't have needed to get that Tascam.
Right, and isn't Belize a native English speaking country, and not a spanish speaking one?
I think the general rule for the "come to X country and learn its language" is for people intending to live there, not vacation there
Why wouldn't a person want to learn at least a little of the language of the country they are visiting? It's nice to be able to know how to say, "Please take me to a hospital, I've been shot and I'm about to die." as well as, "Yes, I would like to biggie-size my chez McDonald's royale with cheese"
I don't think anyone's suggesting that you've got to be able to recite the host country's national epic in native tongue.
I'm a native German and English speaker myself. Sitting in both boats as I do, I can understand the sensitivities involved with favoring one language over another. But I find that English is really easily the best language for international communications.
English has several features that I think make it a better language. It's semantically open, unlike French. Adding new words to English is very simple. We can even create new verbs and nouns from the last names of people (ie. bork). It adapts existing foreign words easily. I'm often able to use "über" and "verboten" in English without getting at looks.
English doesn't require special accent marks in order define meanings. English has simplified definite and indefinite articles. Compared to German, "a", "an", and "the" are much simpler. English features no real gender. No worries about matching verbs, nouns, and articles; or even changing the meaning of a word. For possession, the Saxon genitive is efficient and simple. It accomplishes more in less space to say "John's car" rather than "the car of John". English also features simplified demonstratives, and very simplified declension of nouns. None of the der, den, dem, des conflicts that plague German and make it difficult for non-German speakers to learn. In English the placement of adjectives doesn't affect its meaning. In French you have scenarios like "un homme grand" (a great man) and "un grand homme" (a tall man). In English, you rely on the context of the adjective. Finally, English has a more direct simplified sentence structure.
of course, English has its downside, thinking contextually in English to find meaning vs thinking literally in French can create some confusions, I'm sure.
Sure, some people advocate English everywhere just because they're linguistically lazy and somewhat arrogant, but truly, there legitimate reasons for stressing English as an international language of commerce vs say, Irish where it can take an "aoi" to stress a "long i" sound, or Chinese were choosing a written form is as much a decision about your politics as it is about efficiency (simplified used in China vs traditional used in Taiwan).
Nuke the site from orbit! It' the only way to be sure.
Actually, if you live in a very dry, desert climate, this works. All across Sun Valley in arizona (Phoenix, Scottsdale, etc), you'll find misters, a kind of out door A/C which sprays mists of water into the air. It uses very little water, but makes a very noticeable difference in temperature. The temperature in coverage area becomes comfortable enough for out door dining in summer. On a small scale, this works well... so isn't this prior art?
I have just limited experience using apt-get and more experience using RPMs and Slackware PKGs, so it's hard for me to do a 1:1 comparison.
For me, it's the larger issue of how and where application files are installed. I don't like files being exploded all across the filesystem. Windows puts things in Program Files/ and then dumps a lot of stuff within Windows/ too. *NIX apps go in /man /user/bin etc...
Most Mac apps are packaged as bundles. To install an app, I download a disk image of it. Think of it is as a mini ISO, though that's not really correct. I mount it, drag the icon of an app anywhere onto my computer, and now the app is installed and default file extensions (usually) are set.
Visually on the desktop these bundles are expressed as a single icon representing the entirety of the application. It's really a directory, but its default response when double-clicked is to act like an executable. For example, on Mac OS, I see just a single icon for the app Adobe Lightroom. If I drag the icon to my desktop, I've now moved the entire application to my desktop. If I drag it to trash, I've deleted the entire application. On Windows, the icon is really just a short cut to a binary hidden within a directory structure somewhere on the drive. Dragging that icon does nothing to the actual program. Also, just deleting the entire Lightroom folder, doesn't actually uninstall it.
Here's where apt-get is better I believe. Mac is very inconsistent under the hood. Most software packages coming from the open source world are packaged as tarballs. Following the *NIX standard, they explode all over the *NIX filesystem structure, and moving them about is messy. Some software packages specifically designed for Mac are installers with the PKG extension. They are more of a pain to remove. Library bundles are mostly just like application bundles. My SDL installation is a bundle right now â"â" everything for SDL is represented by a single folder. However, dependencies get messy. I'm never totally sure that the right version of a library is installed. As said, dependency checking is tragic.
So, in one way, perhaps only to a non-technical end user, the way Mac does things as bundles is superior. But if you're a developer, or just someone who cares about dependencies, things can get frustrating. What's nice is that, the way things work on Mac OS X, I can install all my dependencies the traditional *NIX way. I believe I can install RPM too. And I have applications as bundles.
I'm inclined to agree in this specific case of Steve Jobs. Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio all maintained some creativity at Apple. Apple did a lot of things during those years, but it seemed like Apple was all over the place and often confused. As idealistic as Jobs is, he's been arguably more pragmatic this time around compared to the other guys.
In general though, there's been a lot of Type A personalities out there that were horribly detrimental to their companies. I'd cite Worldcom (LDDS) which eventually became MCI Worldcom and destroyed MCI.
WTFE, There *ARE* spies and terrorists in America, and this is exactly the kind of behavior you would expect out of them... let's just proceed with utter fear and paranoia.
Are these guys even photographers by trade? I am one, and I've never known even a hobbyist photographer who thought it was particularly wise to take very specific photos of federal installations. Unless they're just stupid, they might just be employees who were tossed a camera and told to go out and shoot without any advance training.
Pretty likely it is a knee-jerk reaction to the Mumbai shootings. There are incidents of photographers running into trouble with NYPD for photographing the Statue of Liberty not long after September 11th.
But as for signs being posted. I don't know to what degree the Indian legal system follows the English system, but it likely doesn't matter that no signs are posted. Were I to travel to India, I automagically know every law of India on the books cause of that whole legal fallacy thing.
Yes, and just to add something more.
Apple catches a lot of flak on its design esthetics. Many people knock the design of Apple products as being form over function, but I do in fact benefit from the form. It's not just an art-piece. One of my favorite Macs is the iMac (2006 to present). I'm disadvantaged by that design for a lot of things: no ability to install an PCI TV tuner, hard drive upgrades are a pain in the ass, etc.; but it's nice not have a tower that takes up space on the desk, or collect static electricity and dust on the floor; and no delicious cables for cats to gnaw on. Given that the majority of my computer use is in support of photography, this means I have more space for my cameras and lenses and cameras...
Sony has its own now, and it's a pretty expensive unit if I recall. But for at least a little while, Apple iMacs were alone in allowing me to have a computer in an already fairly cluttered space.
You're describing a kind of muscle memory it sounds like. On a guitar, I just know where certain frets and strings are without looking. My fingers just find them. On *most* GUI apps, I just know that the File menu option is somewhere to the upper left corner of a window.
Can we make an argument for user interfaces which evolve over time after learning what requirements a particular user has? I just commented about the hidden "go to folder" text entry dialog in Mac OS X's finder. If I go to use that menu item enough, shouldn't it materialize in my Finder window as a permanent fixture? Similar unused options and hide themselves. I wonder if having menus which effectively reorganize themselves is considered bad UI design.
A text box view of a current location??? God, I never thought I'd miss that. As a Mac OS user I can use the "Go to Folder" menu item in Finder to raise a dialog where I can type in folder location, but I do love Windows 95's inclusion of this in Explorer. I like Finder, but I find it too streamlined. It's suitable for quick views of data, but not good for when I looking to juggle many files. I really need that tree view and not a 3 panel folder view. I need an Explorer for Mac OS X.
I've always hated web views. As you said, if I wanted to see it in a web view, I would have opened it in a browser. Frankly, I reject most of these navigational modes found in Microsoft's Active Desktop.
About the strengths of Linux's package management. I always found package management in Linux frustrating. I never liked the UNIX tradition of exploding files all across multiple filesystems. I understand the virtues of doing so, but I prefer applications to be self-contained bundles that can be easily installed and removed without impacting related applications. I likely have multiple installations of the x264 library on my Mac as a result of redundancies, but I find Mac bundles to be very easy to use, for both people like me who often try out new applications and non-technical users who feel nervous installing apps. And of course, I have a major problem with Mac packages (.PKG).
On Windows, I've found most installers to be pretty capable, but even there i've generally favored apps that were installable by simply unzipping into a folder and manually adding a shortcut to the Start Menu.
Is it possible yet on any Linux distro to have an equivalent to Mac bundles, and if so, is Linux at a point where I can unpack a downloaded app, drag over its icon to install, or delete its icon to complete remove the app?
Macs do use commodity hardware now, but it's still a matter of how well things are put together. For example, of my WinTel PCs, my HPs and my bare bones homebuilts shared basically the same hardware configurations, and yet my HPs suffered from numerous hardware problems to include shoddy power supply components, misaligned parts, not enough/too much thermal paste. It's like automobiles. Within a common class, they're all essentially the same parts, but it's a matter of how things are put together.
Part of the magic of my Macs is how much more quiet the machines run compared to standard PCs, not to mention the lower heat dissipation. Obviously though, the standard C2D processor implies that noise level and heat dissipation would be the same. But there is still the issue of loud fans.
;-)
No, I just pay more while taking her out to dinner and a movie, 20 bucks at a time.
Yeah, I sat my 360 upright for a day before getting too antsy about the idea. Ironically, my PS3 has been vertical since I bought it long ago, and it's been fine. I think owe my comfort with it to the slot loading drive as opposed to the tray. Perhaps an Xbox 360 with slot loaded drive would be better?
So this isn't a problem specific only to those older generation 360s, but a general characteristic of all 360s including the most recent ones? My late '07 has been error-free and damage-free since day one. My 1st gen PS3 is proving more error prone much to my chagrin, but all its own problems, I've never had a PS3 disc get scratched. I can say the same for my 360 discs as well. My console rests horizontal and is never moved since I use my wireless controller for everything including powering up. Does this problem arise in consoles which are kept horizontal as well?
I believe she was mostly a prostitute, and her only striptease act was performed during her out-calls. I don't think she was a professional stripper... of which I have known many personally. Most strippers, actually exotic dancers, won't accept money for sex.
You know, I'm still not sure what to make of Ron Paul, but you're right, you couldn't sanely call him a socialist even the way we toss the word about now. I didn't know that he was still holding office.
Not his belief in caring for the poor, no. But his view that we should force people to do that "caring" on our behalf by taking their property
I refreshed myself a little tonight on Bastiat and I concede your point on his idea of socialism. I still however would argue that Obama is not a socialist though he might play one on TV. I see Obama's rhetoric about giving money to the poor to be an attempt to correct a social imbalance created as a result of the government favoring the wealthy robber barons to the detriment of the middle class for so long. I don't believe he's actively trying to create a single working class. And I don't believe he will try to prevent anyone from getting rich off their own hard work. The reality is, in our country, we've long given up our property to the benefit of our fellow countrymen.
I didn't mean to imply that you said "everyone"; sorry. I mean to say that everyone in Congress is a "socialist" to some degree based on this popular redefinition of "socialism" that's being used today. You obviously understand Socialism a bit more than many other Americans, but I promise you, when you say Obama is a socialist, there will be many many many many Americans who will immediately visualize Obama as carrying a little red book and secretly working with the Russians to plot our destruction. I'm not convinced that Obama's belief in caring for the poor in this country falls into socialism as Bastiat believes it to be. I think he could go a bit further if you will.
My point, ultimately is that "socialist" is a red herring; just another jingoistic label to people like McCain want us to put on our bumperstickers as his friends sell more and more of the country to China and Saudi Arabia.
As for Liberty... you're preaching to the choir. I can only add that absent a properly functioning government and officials that put the government back in check, Liberty cannot exist. In the good days, we'd revolt. Now, we're patriotic only if we sit idly by.
:D
If everyone is a socialist to some degree, then the label is no longer distinguishable, is it then? We end up with the ridiculous parody that we've got now where one senator calls another socialist while simultaneously calling for government investment and ownership in banking institutions.
I think Bastiat's position on socialism come with the caveat that governments and markets must live in harmony and work efficiently such that we don't wind up with a huge gaping hole in our labor force and a large class of poor, unskilled citizens who depend on the rest of society to care for them because they simply cannot get a job. Bastiat's biggest fight was with mercantilism if I'm not mistaken. I think our situation is more complicated precisely because we weren't more protectionist with our economy.
Bastiat was a harmonic libertarian. By his definition, every Democrat and Republican in office today is a little socialist. He would especially consider Bush 43 and every governor of Alaska a socialist.
McCain would most definitely be considered a socialist by that definition.