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If they do all that well, then the attentive student will adopt a particular perspective

Or maybe not. Again you're defining how well the teacher teaches by what perspective the student develops, under the assumption that students must believe what they're properly taught. Reality is, no matter how well a teacher teaches, some students will inject their own meanings into the class, to come out with a different perspective. There's a few dozen biases in the way, and no class (or classes) will overcome them all. It is entirely possible that even with a full understanding of the mechanics of life, the student will still believe that the hand of God comes down at conception and blesses the zygote with a soul that eventually becomes the sentience of the person.

just as a well instructed astronomy class will cause students to adopt the heliocentric perspective.

And yet, the heliocentric perspective isn't correct in anything but the broadest sense. The Sun isn't the center of the universe, or our galaxy, or even our solar system. Of course it took two centuries to find that out, but that was still two centuries ago.

How much acknowledgement of fallibility should astronomers offer when they discuss Ptolemy?

Quite a lot. They should realize that Ptolemy's ideas were far better than his predecessors, but still incorrect, and similarly their own ideas may only be a better form of wrong.

I am always on the lookout for alternative perspectives that can explain the world as it is. Anti-abortionists have provided none.

On the contrary, they have provided the explanation that God plans for all people, including those in all stages of development. You just reject that out of hand because it's not your preferred explanation. It's not mine either, but I cannot prove them wrong. After all, the burden of proof lies with the one trying to change the other's mind. Your perfect biology class must not only teach biology, but disprove the preexisting theories of the students.

Game consoles are already general purpose computers, by definition. They may well have a locked-down interface, but that is not the same thing. They are entirely capable of executing arbitrary code

I thought a "general-purpose computer" was something that could act as the universal linear bounded automaton.* We appear to be running into a definition clash. Mandatory code signing, the requirement that a third party has blessed a particular input to the ULBA, makes the input not "arbitrary" as I understand the definition of "arbitrary". Or has the concept of code signing been introduced into the universal Turing machine framework such that "arbitrary" can be germanely redefined?

* The ULBA is the physically realizable subset of the universal Turing machine.

Dr. Herbert West, your PhD should be revoked for making up an obnoxious and incorrect variant of the phrase "correlation does not equal causation."

We're dealing with an equivocation here, and unrecognized equivocation stops useful debate. The English word "imply" has two meanings, one weak and one strong: "suggest" and "prove". Yes, correlation suggests causation, but it doesn't prove it. What a strong correlation does prove, however, is that a search for what causal relationship underlies this correlation is far more likely than not to promote the progress of science.

We regularly give trivial problems (like FizzBuzz) to our applicants. Ever since we went from hiring only referrals from other developers, a large percentage of them can't even handle the trivial problems. How in heck are they supposed to be able to solve real problems with bugs in deployed production software?

"Free as in beer" is a concept generally associated with Richard Stallman. He was trying to explain his concept of free software. The basic idea is that when you say free beer, you mean that you don't want to pay money for it. When you say free speech, you mean that you don't want it to be restricted. Stallman's concept of free software was for it to be free like speech should be, not free like we wish beer was.

Links (from googling "free as in beer"):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FreeAsInBeer
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31717/what-do-the-phrases-free-speech-vs.-free-beer-really-mean/

maybe they don't use ruggedOS?

I'm pretty sure they are running HollywoodOS http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HollywoodOs http://nand.net/~demaria/hollywood.txt

Actually, someone who is a part time resident who plans on going back to another place should be voting back at that other place and not where they relocated temporarily.

To avoid futile debate due to definition clash, first we have to define "part-time resident". If someone who lives somewhere nine months out of the year is a "part-time resident", that could be used to disenfranchise someone entirely. Let me explain further:

I was going to school in Terre Haute from the fourth quarter of 1999 through the second quarter of 2003. During that time, I would visit my parents in Fort Wayne every third quarter and twice a quarter in the other quarters. I was a "part-time resident" both in Terre Haute, living there less than 12 months of the year because I planned to return to Fort Wayne for summer break, and in Fort Wayne, living there also less than 12 months of the year because I planned to return to Terre Haute for the start of the next school year. If someone in such a situation is counted as a "part-time resident" in both places, you have just in effect raised the voting age to 22 1/2 for college students who live on campus. This would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, let alone the Twenty-sixth. So in practice, which locality's policy affected me more, that of the place where I lived nine months including election day or that of the place where I lived three?

I've yet to see a single game for it that isn't a clone of something else

I've yet to see a game for any system in the past fifteen years that isn't a clone. There hasn't been a new genre launch (that I'm aware of) since Parappa the Rapper launched rhythm games. Even Katamari Damacy, which a lot of people have hauled out as an example of a highly original game, was just a 3D platformer with the growing mechanic from the early 1980s arcade game Bubbles. Of course I'm probably wrong; please correct me if so.

Or do I misunderstand your definition of clone?

Why does a WebApp need access to anything at the OS level?

You haven't yet defined "operating system" to mean "kernel" or "operating environment"; this definition is a perennial debate. To avoid collapse of the discussion due to definition disagreement, I'll address both meanings: A web application doesn't need access to anything at the kernel level, but I can explain why it would need access to something at the operating environment level. Say the operating system has a list of applications that are playing audio. A web application that plays audio needs to somehow register itself as an application that plays audio so that when you have Pandora running, it'll show up as "Pandora (web)" and not "one of your 100 open Firefox tabs; good luck guessing which one".

Wikipedia has a brief, general description.

One example of Agile approach is named Scrum. c.f Beginners Guide to Scrum - my referring t Scrum as an agile approach, considering that it's not, per se, a formal process model.

Another example, which has perhaps been around for longer, is named Extreme Programming c.f Extreme Programming, at the Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. Wiki

Like most software methdology, iterative development dates back to the 50's. All of these "new" software approaches are just different mash-ups of existing development techniques; it's inappropriate to credit any of them with real innovation.

I think you may need someone to explain the difference to you between "pretending to be Unix" and "being very similar to Unix".

So you've recognized that this is a definition clash. And yes, I do need LordLimecat to explain the definition he's using so that I don't go beating up straw men.

You might also want to google "posix" as well.

As I understand LordLimecat's definition of emulation, the first OS to implement what we now call POSIX was UNIX, and everything else that implements POSIX emulates UNIX.

I like to play web games to kill time.

SuperKendall wrote the following, with which Quiet_Desperation agreed:

If you liked casual games you REALLY should have bought an iPad.

Belial6 wrote:

[Platformers] universally suck for touch screens.

If platformers aren't casual games, let's get the definition clash out of the way first: what are casual games? Or what should a fan of platformers have bought instead of an iPad or an Android tablet?

how were they made before

Flash toons have synchronized sound; GIFs are silent. GIFs and "movies" (by which I guess you mean MP4 and WebM) are likewise space-inefficient. Expect file size to rise by a factor of ten, which hurts both the publisher (need to pay for more outgoing bandwidth) and the viewer (need to pay for more incoming bandwidth).

They should be made as SVG animations, notable the only platform that cannot support these are Apple products

Internet Explorer, the browser that comes with Windows, doesn't support SVG+SMIL either, as I wrote in this comment. If you disagree with my reasoning, please more clearly define "platform that cannot support". Otherwise, the discussion will surely be derailed by a definition debate.

Two options:

False dichotomy

If you're going to make a distinction between two product classes, you're going to need to tell us how you define the difference so that the debate doesn't collapse. As a first approximation, I define a laptop as a computer with a built-in keyboard suitable for touch typing and a screen that folds down to cover the keyboard when not in use, and I define a netbook as a laptop with a small screen.

Microsoft Windows 7 is the same quality as Windows ME, just with a fancier UI, which I don't need anyways.

How the hell did a comment like this get modded Insightful?

Windows Me was a single-user OS with, frankly, no such thing as security. It was the last iteration of the 9x kernel, a system so archaic that it still used DOS as a boot loader and 16-bit device driver compatibility layer.

Windows 7 is the most recent production release of the Windows NT kernel, which effectively reimplemented the Win32 API from scratch in a new, modern OS. The WinNT security model is actually better than that of Unix, but the need for legacy compatibility required pretty much everyone to run as administrator during the Windows XP era, which rendered many of the security improvements null and void. That is why UAC was introduced on Vista; though it had serious flaws at first (multiple clicks required for basic OS functions) it did wave a big red flag in front of developers requiring admin permissions in their software, saying "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG". By the time Windows 7 came around, limited user access was a realistic possibility for most users. Added functionality like protected mode for the browser also made a real difference. These days, exploits are much more likely to come through the Java runtime or through one of Adobe's browser plugins than through a security hole in Windows itself. Things aren't perfect by any means, but no matter what else you might criticize them for, no one can reasonably dispute that Microsoft has gotten a LOT better on system security since the Windows Me era.

if they do something stupid nobody buys their product, and the most accommodating company fills their void in the marketplace.

Except that copyright means that no one else can fill this void legally. Thus a more accommodating company will provide it illegally.

literally thousands of cheaper or free alternatives

What's the close substitute for Game of Thrones? Perhaps the entire debate is one over the definition of "close substitute". In that case, the argument cannot continue until someone defines a "close substitute" for a television series.

False Continuum much?

A continuum is introduced as a way to work around accusations that a dichotomy is false. What argument technique is recommended as a way to work around accusations that a continuum is false?

No one said anything about preventing government intervention in cases of actual crime.

Which only ends up in a debate over the definition of "crime". Should intentionally failing to provide for your children by committing suicide be considered a crime? Should it be considered a crime if the suicide is slow?

Microsoft has its own games consoles. Apple, Google, and Amazon? Nope.

If you want to claim that a company "doesn't have its own game console", I would imagine that you would first have to define "game console" so that the discussion won't derail later. Can the iPad be connected to a TV? Can the Mac mini be connected to a TV? And if so, what specifically makes a tablet or a personal computer not a "game console"?

Hell for that matter, Amazon's Kindle Fire could be, scratch that, should be a game console. Amazon would do well to target/attack the iPod Touch market, just as the iPod Touch attacked the Gameboy/DS market. I'm still waiting, they finally fixed their "login to device == authorization to buy anything" problem on release, but if they create great games exclusive for Kindle Fire (or v2, v3, etc) then they'll be in a great position.

Microsoft has its own games consoles. Apple, Google, and Amazon? Nope.

If you want to claim that a company "doesn't have its own game console", I would imagine that you would first have to define "game console" so that the discussion won't derail later. Can the iPad be connected to a TV? Can the Mac mini be connected to a TV? And if so, what specifically makes a tablet or a personal computer not a "game console"?

The patent was filed in 1996. The C2 wiki has been doing this since 1995. Camel case words are automatically converted to hyperlinks. (And coincidentally, the next Slashdot story is an interview with its inventor, Ward Cunningham.) Shortly afterwards, I copied the idea in my company's issue tracking system. Identifiers like "Q1234" were automatically converted to hyperlinks to the page describing the issue.

I know Apple's patent isn't exactly the same thing, but once you've had the idea of recognising things in plain text the rest is obvious. Fuck Apple.

If you're a software developer and you haven't read Ward's Wiki, I strongly advise doing so now. It has a lot of content from some very smart people you won't get elsewhere. Primarily it focuses on software design patterns, but even outside of that subject I've learned a lot just by reading random pages there.

Math. OK. That's a bit terse. Computational linguistics? Spend some time browsing terms like "lambda" on C2 Wiki or even plain old Wikipedia. Everybody on Slashdot has their pet language, and they are all special. When you get down to it, it's all math with different notation.

The real answer might be, "think about what's important to you, and then pick one and study it. Then pick another one because the first choice is always the throw-away version".

Because open source has proven to be immune to such things? Puhlease...

I'm gonna go ahead and cite the Ken Thompson hack here:

You don't give a proper cite (as in a link), but a quick search shows that you're quoting somebody on a laid back wiki (c2 is definitely not the same league as Wikipedia) who incorrectly remembers what Ken Thompson's fundamental point was.

Rather than quote from a wiki, I'll quote from the actual Ken Thompson paper: "The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself."

There's a big difference in the nature of the attack that Ken Thompson was talking about (trojan) versus software with security bugs. In reality, the sinister Ken Thompson trojan that infects binaries at a deep level (in his case, the compiler) is pretty rare and not the cause of the typical malware incidents seen in practice.

You keep making the argument that if I disagree with the patent system, it must be because I do not understand it.

That's because you keep saying things that show complete ignorance of how the patent system works.

It is as if your reaction to beheadings in Saudi Arabia was saying that they were ordered by a court and so everything is OK.

No, it's as if I think the death penalty's okay for a confessed serial killer (which I do, by the way). Morality and legality are separate issues. Here, I think it's moral that someone who invests time and effort in working out an idea should get a chance to make it a business, without getting screwed by the fast-moving predatory companies out there. The legal system currently aligns with that.

And I sincerely believe that you are sick and evil.

And I sincerely believe that's irrelevant to the conversation, yet you keep bringing it up. I believe you're a self-absorbed asshole who hasn't bothered to learn about the patent system more than read Slashdot, see lawsuits, and declare it broken and bad. I believe you're so arrogant in your assumption that you know everything that you can't even condescend to make a logical argument in your favor. I believe that, instead of logic, you resort to ad hominem attacks right from the start, claiming that anyone disagreeing with you must be evil. I believe that you're a Ron Paul supporter, because you share his believe that any imperfect system should be scrapped, and somehow magically the Free Market God will fix everything.

But again, that sort of thing's irrelevant.

In nfps video, there are n frames per second, each distinct (except in interlaced video transmission).

And the problem is just that: interlaced video transmission. When people are working from differences of definition, it's hard to how to express a clear distinction between video at 50 fields per second that are the top and bottom fields of a 25 fps source and video at 50 fields per second that are in effect downsampled from a 50 fps source. I would have defined a "frame" as the time period in which a distinct sample of motion is recorded, which would make 25fps "film-like" and 50fps "video-like". But some other people define "frame" as always "the corresponding top and bottom fields" in an interlaced signal, under which 50fps interlaced video is impossible, and pedantically accuse anybody using a different definition of "calling a tail a leg".

Film your computer screen while stationary using a cell phone camera sometime

My cell phone doesn't have a camera, but I'll let you finish your point:

and watch the flicker due to unmatched refresh rates.

Temporal aliasing (frame rate mismatch) between a CRT monitor and a camera or between fluorescent lights and a camera is a completely different matter from how "frame" and "field"

You haven't silenced anybody. Everyone's just ignoring you. I, for instance, just had a lovely weekend without encountering anybody with overinflated egos from their meager accomplishments.

I briefly considered an actual point-by-point illustration of how ludicrous the "hosts file as security" idea is for modern computers, then I clicked "read more", and remembered why I don't actually even read your posts anymore. Once you start copying every message you can think of, insulting anyone who disagrees with you, and quoting non-sequitur lines from movies, I lose all interest in a discussion based on merits, because I don't expect you to participate meaningfully.

I get it. You think you're an admin god, and everyone whose opinions differ must be stupid, and it is your duty as a deity to point out that they are inferior. When mods delete your post, it must be because they're intimidated, and certainly couldn't be that the offense in your comments outweighed any useful content. That's fine. You're certainly entitled to your own opinions of yourself, regardless of whether I think they're crazy or not. Likewise, everyone else (myself included) is entitled to think that you're insane, if they so choose. I personally respect your obvious knowledge of the deep workings of Windows and video drivers, but I find your comments too stunningly arrogant to actually read.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: If your next message is under 15em vertically on my display, and free from insults, I'll read it, in the hopes of having a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, I have no desire to speak with you again.

Then to avoid stalling the discussion, I'd like to understand your definition of "post-personal-computer computing".

We appear to have run into a difference of definition. So what's a better term that means "descendants of people born on land that now belongs to the United States of America before the European colonization thereof"?

We appear to be dealing with a difference of definition, so let's resolve it now. I define weight is mass times one's acceleration relative to some frame of reference. How do you define weight?

> 'one striking commonality in all modern programming languages, especially the popular ones, is how little innovation there is in them!'

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GreenspunsTenthRuleOfProgramming

"Every sufficiently complex application/language/tool will either have to use Lisp or reinvent it the hard way."

So why do people (hotshots) keep reinventing the wheel, instead of contributing to libraries for LISP and/or Scheme?

For non-hotshots, get back to rowing at bottom of the ship with PHP and Java business-logic oars!

Of course, that's not to say that someone who was born can't be considered a parasite

For example, a newborn is still a parasite sucking the mammaries of its mother.

but they aren't the ones I think you should be allowed to kill.

Why should birth be the line if both fetuses and unweaned infants are parasites?

I tell them I'm full of laziness, impatience, and hubris. And it's all true.

http://c2.com/morse/wiki.cgi?MorseFasterThanTextMessaging

It may not be faster than a normal keyboard, but it's faster (with practice) than sending a text message...

with the TMTOWTDI of Perl!
with the fluidity of Perl!
with the my's and sigils of Perl!

Then again, Perl is an acquired taste even for me.

One of the goals set out in the Rust is to eventually be as fast as C++. Many have tried such. How much space and time overhead would such a union type incur compared to the maybe type that is the C++ pointer?

Once I compiled a Hello World program using for a handheld platform with an ARM7 CPU and 288 KiB of RAM. Even after enabling Thumb instructions, size optimization, and gc-sections, the final binary ended up 180,032 bytes. (The version using was much smaller.) I looked into what might have been causing this, and a whole bunch of locale-related crap was staring me in the face despite that I wasn't printing any date or money objects. StoneCypher told me my problem was having used g++ and GNU libstdc++ instead of a sufficiently smart compiler, and he recommended switching to Green Hills Optimizing Compiler.

If you do make the occasional mistake, the first thing you should stop doing is using goto, it seems that throwing the instruction pointer around in unpredictable ways can mess up stack pointers.

As I understand it, in C-like languages, goto within a function is guaranteed to fix any changes to the stack pointer that the start and end of a scope may have introduced. Especially in C, it's probably the cleanest way to simulate exceptions for cleaning up allocated resources.

After that, you might look at avoiding the use of pointers.

In Java, everything that isn't a primitive is a pointer. If by "pointers" you meant pointers in the C sense, or values on which one can do pointer arithmetic, dropping "pointers" entirely would mean accepting the RAM bloat and throughput penalty that a profiler shows for managed code compared to native code. There are some cases where you really do need your code to be as fast as C, especially on a handheld device.

Its called letting the OS cache disk access

We appear to disagree on the meaning of "cache". It's not just the browser's "cache" of downloaded objects that would be marked purgeable. Are you claiming that cached DOMs, used for back and forward buttons, recently closed tabs, and recently closed windows, should all be written to the HDD? Or that cached decompressed images should be written to the HDD as BMP files?

At no point does it state that the icons cannot be removed. [...] "This app cannot be uninstalled from the phone's software library"

The original claim was: "There are icons you can't remove on the iPhone. [But this is a]lso true of any Android phone that's not a Nexus and not rooted." You are correct that any shortcut icon can be removed from the home screen of an Android device. But if you touch the little grid of squares at the bottom center of the home screen, you end up on the "phone's software library" screen. An icon that cannot be removed from this screen is still an icon that cannot be removed from the phone. I will wait to continue this discussion until we can agree on a definition for "icons you can't remove".

it only applies to two handsets

To find reports that apply to handsets other than the two handsets mentioned in the LA Times article, go to Google and put in android "can't remove" site:slashdot.org .

Here we have a systematic trail of incorrect statements. That sir makes you a liar.

Past scientists have made a "trail of incorrect statements" due to incomplete understanding of physical laws. These statements were "systematic" due to the scientific method supporting them. So if lacking complete understanding of the world makes me a liar, we all are liars and need a savior.

I have a good understanding of OOP

You'd be the first. The rest of us still haven't come to any agreement on what even constitutes OOP. Even Alan Kay, who coined the term, regrets it (the mess that often passes for OOP today isn't even close to his original vision.)

Give Steve Yegee's excellent essay Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns a read.

You might also want to take a look at some of the discussions on c2 such as this one, and this one

I have a good understanding of OOP

You'd be the first. The rest of us still haven't come to any agreement on what even constitutes OOP. Even Alan Kay, who coined the term, regrets it (the mess that often passes for OOP today isn't even close to his original vision.)

Give Steve Yegee's excellent essay Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns a read.

You might also want to take a look at some of the discussions on c2 such as this one, and this one

There are a few problems with functional programming languages that have prevented their true adoption anywhere.

1. Limited paradigms - I always prefer languages that let me write my code the way I want, a la C++, than a language that requires a strict paradigm from academia like Lisp. If I want to use the inherent hardware property based side effects of certain code structures, let me. Programming languages =/= mothers.

Common Lisp (and Scheme, even more so, although the community is more oriented toward impure functional style) enforces no fixed paradigm. It can be used functionally (conses happen to be a pretty good data structure for functional algorithms), but is more often used in an object-oriented manner. It was even one of the first OO languages, and AFAIK the first to implement multiple dispatch. It even has a powerful imperative operators.

Thanks to macros and the metaobject protocol you can even add new paradigms to the language. Paternalistic, Lisp is not.

3. Most functional languages except Ocaml are like Ruby and Python in that they have tremendous performance overhead. For a consumer application, that overhead usually doesnt impede adoption (its more like the software is poorly written than the applications environment is too inefficient). But when talking about server programming the costs of running something under Ruby vs C are astronomical, and the same problem arises with functional programming. It might not hurt the consumer that the Python implementation of their music player consuming 30% more clock cycles than the exact same program written in C, but it does cause huge scaling issues with popular resources like Twitter.

4. In extension of 3, functional programming is getting away from how the hardware actually works. It is good for a novice that doesnt want to get into the details of pointers and caching and disk IO, but professionals should enter the game knowing how the underlying system runs and that making tradeoffs for readability by someone who doesnt know the language anyway vs performance benefits falls to the wayside. Developer time is important, but when you factor in the massive overhead trying to get 20+ year professional developers in C to try to think functionally you are never justifying the upfront cost of using the languages.

Languages like SML and OCaml are actually more optimizable than C. Thanks to providing more type information &c they can take advantage of fancy whole program optimization and whatnot.

The "way hardware works" is an artifact of C being the dominant language. There's no reason hardware couldn't (and it has before) have GC assistance, type checking, capabilities, etc. It's really not appropriate and scalable to view the computer as something that flips bits around a gigantic linear array... it was reasonable to deal with that when you had 4000 words, but not when you have 400000000 words.

Software is nice because you can abstract! Writing programs to a model of an infinite store that Just Works (tm) is beneficial to everyone -- it frees source code from a particular hardware implementation, is easier to reason with, and separates the concern of hardware resource management.

This discussion of compilers written in their own language makes me think of the Ken Thompson Hack, wherein the hacked compiler forever propagates malicious content that is not contained in the source code.

"This hack can propagate transparently across languages and language generations. In the case of cross compilers it can leap across whole architectures."

27 years later it's still the most devious backdoor I've ever heard of.

And the current implementation of BASIC has named functions, doesn't require line numbers, in fact it can do anything pascal did, so what?

Indeed, that's been true for decades. PASCAL was designed to be contrary, they deliberately made stupid choices made correctly in other languages to differentiate it. So I'm unclear as to why anyone ever brings it up.

Lets compare smalltalk from 1995 with Java.

"Smalltalk didn't get into the mainstream due to one very large event - the merger of ParcPlace and Digitalk in 1995, and the ensuing madness. 18 months were wasted on a failed merge of the products (i.e., no new releases)."

Ah, Switzerland... The population of New York City, spread across the area of Maryland, where social stratification is hidden by a stigma against looking too rich or looking too poor.

Doesn't sound much different from U.S. Anyway, I think there is evidence that small countries are more business friendly, because their only chance to be successful is to attract trade (or finance). Larger countries can't rely entirely on that, because they have too large population to be supported only by trade. So successful smaller countries generally do have lower taxes than successful large countries.

You're missing the other observed evidence of a direct democracy: ancient Athens, where playwrights swayed politics more easily than politicians did.

Comparing anything ancient to today is not meaningful. Even though this is commonly said, it should also be said the system that ancient Athens had was way superior to anything else of that era. Also, if someone needs to resort to manipulation, that's already a victory. To manipulate masses is always more expensive than having direct control (by force) over them. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's because you never lived in totalitarian regime. I also take offense when someone talks about "ruling mob", completely ignoring the real problem, i.e. those who actually do the manipulation. They are the problem, not the people! You can manipulate almost anyone, high IQ or not, any magician can attest to that.

You're also assuming a requirement of absolute morality, where whatever you want is morally right. In your example, it depends entirely upon what expert visited your home and what your actions are in response to their suggestions are. If an interior decorator came and suggested you change the color scheme of your kitchen, you are certainly free to do so or not, as you like. If the expert is a serial killer suggesting good ways to torture victims, I don't believe you should be allowed to follow his suggestions.

No, that's wrong. I only assume there are subjective morals and the democracy is a good way to agree on common morality. It's you who imposes absolute morality onto others in saying that other people should not be allowed to listen to serial killers.

At the level of the United States government, every decision affects millions of people. The simple choice to reject an expert's opinion in favor of a celebrity's (for instance) has consequences far more serious than the color of your dishes. Yes, the expert opinions are wrong on occasion, but I believe that happens less often than the naive and easily-swayed opinions of the ruling mob.

Well, what evidence do you have, apart from "I believe"? There is for example a study from CATO institute that statistically shows that people are more able to limit politicians' spending that politicians do themselves. Similar studies have been done in Switzerland on cantonal level and confirm this finding. It's not a coincidence that the most successful countries in the world are usually also the most democratic (i.e. USA on local level and Switzerland).

I think you miss the point of (semi)direct democracy. The point is more power to the people who can keep politicians in democratic countries in check. In Switzerland, you can observe this directly - because people can decide things, politics is much less controversial. And as I said, if anything, there is evidence that the masses are actually more conservative than politicians.

And at last, there exist interesting proposals to solve the "expert" problem. My favorite is that you select a handful of people from population randomly (k

Ah, Switzerland... The population of New York City, spread across the area of Maryland, where social stratification is hidden by a stigma against looking too rich or looking too poor.

Doesn't sound much different from U.S. Anyway, I think there is evidence that small countries are more business friendly, because their only chance to be successful is to attract trade (or finance). Larger countries can't rely entirely on that, because they have too large population to be supported only by trade. So successful smaller countries generally do have lower taxes than successful large countries.

You're missing the other observed evidence of a direct democracy: ancient Athens, where playwrights swayed politics more easily than politicians did.

Comparing anything ancient to today is not meaningful. Even though this is commonly said, it should also be said the system that ancient Athens had was way superior to anything else of that era. Also, if someone needs to resort to manipulation, that's already a victory. To manipulate masses is always more expensive than having direct control (by force) over them. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's because you never lived in totalitarian regime. I also take offense when someone talks about "ruling mob", completely ignoring the real problem, i.e. those who actually do the manipulation. They are the problem, not the people! You can manipulate almost anyone, high IQ or not, any magician can attest to that.

You're also assuming a requirement of absolute morality, where whatever you want is morally right. In your example, it depends entirely upon what expert visited your home and what your actions are in response to their suggestions are. If an interior decorator came and suggested you change the color scheme of your kitchen, you are certainly free to do so or not, as you like. If the expert is a serial killer suggesting good ways to torture victims, I don't believe you should be allowed to follow his suggestions.

No, that's wrong. I only assume there are subjective morals and the democracy is a good way to agree on common morality. It's you who imposes absolute morality onto others in saying that other people should not be allowed to listen to serial killers.

At the level of the United States government, every decision affects millions of people. The simple choice to reject an expert's opinion in favor of a celebrity's (for instance) has consequences far more serious than the color of your dishes. Yes, the expert opinions are wrong on occasion, but I believe that happens less often than the naive and easily-swayed opinions of the ruling mob.

Well, what evidence do you have, apart from "I believe"? There is for example a study from CATO institute that statistically shows that people are more able to limit politicians' spending that politicians do themselves. Similar studies have been done in Switzerland on cantonal level and confirm this finding. It's not a coincidence that the most successful countries in the world are usually also the most democratic (i.e. USA on local level and Switzerland).

I think you miss the point of (semi)direct democracy. The point is more power to the people who can keep politicians in democratic countries in check. In Switzerland, you can observe this directly - because people can decide things, politics is much less controversial. And as I said, if anything, there is evidence that the masses are actually more conservative than politicians.

And at last, there exist interesting proposals to solve the "expert" problem. My favorite is that you select a handful of people from population randomly (k

Ah, Switzerland... The population of New York City, spread across the area of Maryland, where social stratification is hidden by a stigma against looking too rich or looking too poor.

Doesn't sound much different from U.S. Anyway, I think there is evidence that small countries are more business friendly, because their only chance to be successful is to attract trade (or finance). Larger countries can't rely entirely on that, because they have too large population to be supported only by trade. So successful smaller countries generally do have lower taxes than successful large countries.

You're missing the other observed evidence of a direct democracy: ancient Athens, where playwrights swayed politics more easily than politicians did.

Comparing anything ancient to today is not meaningful. Even though this is commonly said, it should also be said the system that ancient Athens had was way superior to anything else of that era. Also, if someone needs to resort to manipulation, that's already a victory. To manipulate masses is always more expensive than having direct control (by force) over them. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's because you never lived in totalitarian regime. I also take offense when someone talks about "ruling mob", completely ignoring the real problem, i.e. those who actually do the manipulation. They are the problem, not the people! You can manipulate almost anyone, high IQ or not, any magician can attest to that.

You're also assuming a requirement of absolute morality, where whatever you want is morally right. In your example, it depends entirely upon what expert visited your home and what your actions are in response to their suggestions are. If an interior decorator came and suggested you change the color scheme of your kitchen, you are certainly free to do so or not, as you like. If the expert is a serial killer suggesting good ways to torture victims, I don't believe you should be allowed to follow his suggestions.

No, that's wrong. I only assume there are subjective morals and the democracy is a good way to agree on common morality. It's you who imposes absolute morality onto others in saying that other people should not be allowed to listen to serial killers.

At the level of the United States government, every decision affects millions of people. The simple choice to reject an expert's opinion in favor of a celebrity's (for instance) has consequences far more serious than the color of your dishes. Yes, the expert opinions are wrong on occasion, but I believe that happens less often than the naive and easily-swayed opinions of the ruling mob.

Well, what evidence do you have, apart from "I believe"? There is for example a study from CATO institute that statistically shows that people are more able to limit politicians' spending that politicians do themselves. Similar studies have been done in Switzerland on cantonal level and confirm this finding. It's not a coincidence that the most successful countries in the world are usually also the most democratic (i.e. USA on local level and Switzerland).

I think you miss the point of (semi)direct democracy. The point is more power to the people who can keep politicians in democratic countries in check. In Switzerland, you can observe this directly - because people can decide things, politics is much less controversial. And as I said, if anything, there is evidence that the masses are actually more conservative than politicians.

And at last, there exist interesting proposals to solve the "expert" problem. My favorite is that you select a handful of people from population randomly (k