That's what I was getting at. If a non-Mac system tried to retrieve a Mac text file "foo", the Mac should fold the two forks into one and deliver a file called "foo.txt". If a Mac gets a single-fork file from a non-Mac called "foo.txt", it should split it out into two forks (making reasonable assumptions/tests of the content to get the metadata right) and save a file called "foo". All this could be done transparently by the OS or whatever service is running the file transfer. Seems to me this would be the type of behavior the average joe would expect - it should "just work" - exactly what Apple is known for. Of course there'd also be "raw data" transfers for the techies that needed that sort of thing, but that's not what I'm talking about.
And doesn't OS X use the (stupid) file extension primarily these days, rather than metadata? In most ways OS X is a big leap forward, but in some ways it feels like going back to the stone age.
Ok, you just said something you you should be kicking yourself for at the moment: "Firmware".
OK, I didn't know when firmware was invented. I guess we can't do that, then.
Hardware flexibility was not a concern at the time.
Ahhh, but for the purposes of this thought experiment, that's not important to us. Sure, maybe the limitations of the time would force us to scrap such "idealistic" concepts (if we still wanted to produce a Mac on an affordable 1984 budget), but we want to discuss what we would do to build a Mac using 2005 knowledge and 1984 technology.
The data/resource fork idea is a fairly elegant one. If the remote systems didn't communicate directly to the Mac disk but through the Mac OS, why couldn't the Mac OS just return the file single-fork-ized to non-Mac systems?
HFS on what? The floppy drives? That would not have been a good thing.
I was under the impression that MFS was used even on the first Mac HDs. Sure, an altogether different format could be used for extremely low-capacity devices like floppies.
Fitting a fully preemptable kernel in 128K would have been a true challenge with the hardware at the time.
Exactly. I did mention that memory was the limiting factor when designing the OS. RAM was just too darn expensive at the time, so PE MT just wasn't a realistic option. I don't know if modularity would have been practical (having not studies OS design), but if it had been, the ability to swap out just the lowest level of the system and gain PE MT would have been very nice. Maybe modularity like this is even more resource-intensive than a monolithic PE MT design, I don't know.
the only reason why the OS fit at all was because it was preloaded
Sure, squeezing the OS into ROM was kind of a crutch, but it allowed them to ship the product within project parameters. So it was a great way to solve a big problem they faced. But did the hardware have to be built to boot exclusively from ROM? Couldn't there be a switch built into firmware somehow, without that much extra work? It would have made the hardware more flexible down the road.
It's easy for us today to look back and say "well they should have done this or that", but such discussions ignore the tremendous amount of technological progress that has gone on in the past 20 years.
I'm not dissing the choices of the engineers of 20 years ago. Not at all! I'm simply saying that since we do know today much more than we did then, how would it be done differently with the same hardware limitations? If the engineers then had known that RAM limits would quickly rise, that color was going to be standard, etc, all the things that seem obvious to us now in hindsight, might they have made different choices?
I got a bunch of older Macs as freebies from doctors (and some nurses) when I worked at a hospital - personal machines they were getting rid of. (I cleaned them up for donation, so they were happy to let me have them.) I saw one NeXT (and several other Macs that weren't quite as old) that the hospital itself was having recycled. That's a shame, but I understand that it's cheaper to pay to have the thing hauled away and disposed of "properly" than paying a tech to wipe the drive thoroughly and strip whatever parts may be useful. I'd've happily signed an agreement to dispose of any possibly confidential data on the drive if I could have taken the machine.
Yes, starting with HFS (even HFS+ perhaps?) would have been nice, but MFS wasn't around for long. I would also have used some Unix conventions like "/" as the path delimiter instead of ":", with its root at "/" instead of "". I would also have used "\n" instead of "\r" as the line terminator. Obviously this would have made efforts such as A/UX and the OS X switch, as well as interoperability with any Unix system, much easier.
I think what really held Apple back from a PE MT system (other than greater development time) was the fact that it would require more RAM for the OS to manage it, and that meant more expensive. Most people recognize the low RAM and only being able to run one program at a time as the two biggest problems of the first Macs. If I could have designed the OS to be highly modular, so that a pre-emptive kernel could be dropped in when cheaper RAM became available (maybe by 1986?) without sacrificing compatibility, I definitely would have done it. It could have been like Copland, except 10 years sooner - obviating the need to switch to OS X.
If the machines weren't hardwired to boot MacOS, that would IMO be a bonus, too.
But you're right. The fact that the OS lasted in basically the same form for 15 years, despite what we consider to be serious limitations, is a testimony to how much Apple did get right.
Very cool. I ran my site on a SE/30 with NetBSD too until the fan noise in my office started to drive me crazy. I moved it to my G3 and powered down the SE/30 until I have different project for it.
Linux can only boot on Macs with a paged memory management unit. This includes all the Macs with a 68030 or 68040, and the Mac II (one of the two Macs built with a 68020). The original 68000-based Macs cannot run Linux. The requirements are basically the same for running *BSD on old Macs. Until recently NetBSD required a FPU also (now there is a build with software support for those math functions); I don't know if 68k Linux has a similar requirement (NetBSD and A/UX are the only Unices I run on my 68k boxes because of the small install footprint).
Sometimes I wonder what the MacOS would have looked like if those engineers would have known where it was going to go in the future, and knew all the modern techniques of programming? Alternatively you could ask, how would we design the Mac today if we limited ourselves to hardware available in 1984?
Would the filesystem have been designed differently? Would there have been more emphasis on preemptive multitasking? Would certain conventions from other systems have been adopted to ease interoperability when networking came on the scene? How would certain missteps admitted by Apple engineers been avoided?
You said it: price. Most people use less than half the capabilities of Word, less than a quarter the capabilities of Excel, and have no need at all for presentations, databases, or groupware. If I could pay $50 for something that did only those things as well as MS does them, yeah, I'd probably pony up the $50. Until then, anything else looks better than a $400 MS Office suite.
That's the problem! We have only one chance to express a preference, and when there are more than two options, that is insufficient. We need to change the voting system to allow more expression of voters' honest preferences, as I state elsewhere in this thread.
I do tend to think the Duopoly parties are very similar. They are both statist, differing only slightly on what they should use government power for. I think part of the problem is that most people think of the political spectrum as one-dimensional. It isn't. There are as many dimensions are there are issues. Practically speaking, however, positions on many separate issues seem to come together based on general worldviews.
I consider the Constitution Party to be basically a libertarian party that believes it is "freedom of religion" not "freedom from religion" and is pro-life, whereas the LP has a vocal atheist fringe and does not take an official stand either way on abortion. Other than that, they are very similar in promoting a return to limited government. The rationale behind the desire is different, based on whether you consider the Judeo-Christian God a valid concept or not, but that's relatively immaterial as far as actually implementing policies to reduce gov't and keep it in check. Whether liberty is simply a pragmatically good idea to keep some from harming others, or God's will to keep sinful people from harming others, both groups want to work toward it.
I left out the issue of loops causing no clear winner being determined because I don't think it is a huge problem. Yes, in theory, they can occur. With a single voter it is easy to illustrate. (I like A over B because of his policy on education, and I like B over C because of her stance on criminal justice, but I like C over A because of his support for tax cuts.) However, you can't actually vote a cycle with rankings. Either they tie, or they don't. You can't create a loop. I think with such large numbers of people involved it would be very very unlikely that such a loop would exist. I don't have any mathematics to back that up, however.
I don't think IRV is a "secondary" solution, as it does not solve the third-party "spoiler effect" problem, it just disguises it. It has other problems of its own. Individual IRV sums cannot be summed together like Condorcet can, making it impractical for large (districted) elections that depend on sub-tallies. Mathematically, IRV meets even fewer of the criteria for a fair election method than plurality does. One I just mentioned, but the biggest one is that it is non-monotonic - meaning that if you rank your favorite candidate lower, it may actually help him win, and ranking a disfavored candidate higher may cause him to lose. Such an illogical and unintuitive system should be rejected outright. This problem is much more blatantly offensive than the possible issue of loops arising in a Condorcet vote, because there's no way to fix it. Resolving a loop may seem a little bizarre, but the rational basis for how it's done makes sense - basically if you can't find a single candidate that won the most, find one that lost the least (to state it very nontechnically).
IRV gives a convincing illusion that third parties are included fairly, but until one becomes a major party it will always be excluded, and only the relative ranking of the two major parties (for the final round) makes any difference. The system does not evaluate all preferences simultaneously but sequentially, discarding part of your ballot as it goes. If the system throws out part of your vote, then it's no longer using your honest vote, which defeats the whole purpose! Our current system is basically a runoff system in a way, with all rounds prior to the last taking place in the media. Everybody "knows" that the only choice that matters is R-v-D, so that's the only one they bother with.
If we seriously can't go to a Condorcet voting system, I'd rather use Approval voting. Sure, the uneducated masses may continue to vote only "D" or "R" and ignore other unknown candidates they'd likely agree with, but those who are informed can at least vote honestly without wasting their ballot. We'd have a truer indication of the support that third parties have, which means they'd get more coverage. Over time, this feedback loop may actually enable a third party to win. (Imagine what would happen to the left and the right if they suddenly discovered that Ralph Nader or Michael Peroutka actually did have the support of 30% of the electorate. I bet the Duopoly would be furiously scurrying to head off another 20% waking up to the fact that there are other options.) A bonus to Approval is that it can work with current voting machines.
So you're saying we need to make it worse, so that people will see the need to make it better?
I agree that a multi-party system is better. The way to do this, as I've said elsewhere in the thread, is implement a voting system that encourages honest voting and gives a fair result. Every view (to the extent that is reasonable) should be represented. There are more than two, after all, yet we seem stuck with only two parties.
Here's a list of ideas for voting and representation reform.
Condorcet voting for most races instead of plurality
Repeal the 17th Amendment
Electoral College results by district, with the two at-large votes going to candidates who "deserve" them proportionally but couldn't carry enough (or any) districts, instead of winner-take-all
Proportional Representation in one house at the state level since there's little point in having two houses if they represent the same districts of people
The first two I'd place roughly equal and very high in importance, the last two roughly equal but less important.
You are correct. I was oversimplifying somewhat. Obviously honest voting is absolutely essential, but simple plurality voting will always cause problems.
I know it is argued that IRV could be used as a "stepping stone" to Condorcet, but I don't buy it. If we "fix" the voting system once to something supposedly better than plurality (and IRV is demonstrably worse not better) I think there would be strong resistance to fixing it a second time. Even though the second stage fix would be completely transparent to voters in terms of UI. It might be a tough sell but if we only get one shot to make it right, we have to really make it right!
I really don't think Condorcet is hard to explain, as long as you don't use the "math-y" terms such as "pairwise comparison matrix". If you just say 1) rank the candidates in the order you like them, and 2) you take everybody's rankings to decide which candidate can beat all the others in a head-to-head contest, then I think the average joe can grok the concept.
All that Condorcet needs to be accepted is a change of the definition of winner from "has more votes than anybody else" to "can defeat anybody else in a one-on-one". You can use an extreme case of Duverger's law (which you alluded to) to illustrate: imagine 10 candidates, all well qualified, 9 of them conservative (just for example), splitting an overwhelmingly conservative vote. Can you imagine a liberal who was backed by only 15% being able to defeat 9 other guys one-on-one? If not, how can you say he is really the preferred choice for the position? Obviously, the conservative 85% would probably take any conservative over the liberal - which is precisely what is proven when they vote strategically/dishonestly for the one perceived to "have the best chance" even if he's the least conservative of the options. But why should you have to sacrifice your own conscience based on your assumption of what anyyone else will do? You shouldn't have to - this isn't democracy-by-peer-pressure. Condorcet is the solution.
You and I probably dissagree on nearly everything, but we can come together on this. Duopoly polarized divisive politics is more harmful to the country than any particular issue.
I could not possibly agree more. If we manage to fix the system and it hurts "my" side or "your" side worse than the current system, we'd live with the fact that doing the right thing hurts sometimes. If the system is designed fairly, at least then we know for sure if our views are popular or not. With our current system nobody really has an honest chance, and those willing to "game" the system accumulate (dangerous) power to themselves.
I'll check out the site you mentioned, too. Thanks.
Maybe they were responsible enough on their own that they didn't need it detailed out for them? The Bill of Rights isn't for the people so much, it's for the government - to remind it very clearly where it's boundaries are. The powers delegated to Congress define pretty well what its responsibilities are. Individuals usually can't get into too much trouble on their own - shirk your responsibilities and it will come back to haunt you. Government, though, is an untamed beast that will feed and feed and grow and grow as much as it can unless kept on a tight leash under strict watch.
Amen! It's not so much what the goobermint is trying to do with the power, the problem is the fact that it keeps accumulating more and more power! Even if you agree with one administration, another is bound to come along that will misuse it (in your opinion, or mine). The only thing you can do that is fair to everyone is to keep governmental authority to the bare minimum necessary. Repealing the 16th and 17th amendments would be a good start.
I was going to say the same thing. Opera's not OSS, but it's worked hard to become the leader in this market. Is this just a case of NIH syndrome? Apple and Nokia will spend more on developing something on their own.
You're right, Duverger's Law (spoiler effect) is a feature (bug!) of the system itself, not any inherent flaw in the platforms of the minor parties. If we used Condorcet voting (not the same as IRV), every party could stand on its own merit. There would be no advantage inherent in being an incumbent party, or having the perception of being one of the most popular.
Of course, if everybody voted honestly instead of strategically there wouldn't be a problem either. But since that's awfully hard to do when the system encourages strategic thinking, we ought to change the system so that it encourages honesty. I don't know how we can have truly representative government if the people don't vote how they really think.
Politics isn't one-dimensional, so why do we think two parties can accurately reflect all political views? Politics is n-dimensional, for the n different issues that have become political. A strong multi-party system where everybody has a representative voice would be a big help.
Views are too diverse for such a coalition to work for much together. The only thing I believe these groups would work together on is voting reform, to tackle their common institutionalized problem of being underdogs. (I describe the problems with the voting system briefly elsewhere in this thread.) They'll never agree to becoming a united political force.
What we need to break up the Duopoly, and keep it from reforming, is a change in how we vote. Plurality voting encourages "strategic" voting leading to a Duopoly, because one vote can only decide between two things. So people do a "runoff" in their head, based on what the media and society seem to be saying, and vote for the least objectionable of the two remaining options because that's where they think their vote is "most effective". This is unfortunate, because if you don't vote what you believe you'll never get what you want. We need Condorcet voting. If every vote were equally effective in every electoral race, candidates would be competing based on merit alone. It might take awhile for people to get used to that concept, but I think it would break the two-party stranglehold.
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That's what I was getting at. If a non-Mac system tried to retrieve a Mac text file "foo", the Mac should fold the two forks into one and deliver a file called "foo.txt". If a Mac gets a single-fork file from a non-Mac called "foo.txt", it should split it out into two forks (making reasonable assumptions/tests of the content to get the metadata right) and save a file called "foo". All this could be done transparently by the OS or whatever service is running the file transfer. Seems to me this would be the type of behavior the average joe would expect - it should "just work" - exactly what Apple is known for. Of course there'd also be "raw data" transfers for the techies that needed that sort of thing, but that's not what I'm talking about.
And doesn't OS X use the (stupid) file extension primarily these days, rather than metadata? In most ways OS X is a big leap forward, but in some ways it feels like going back to the stone age.
OK, I didn't know when firmware was invented. I guess we can't do that, then.
Ahhh, but for the purposes of this thought experiment, that's not important to us. Sure, maybe the limitations of the time would force us to scrap such "idealistic" concepts (if we still wanted to produce a Mac on an affordable 1984 budget), but we want to discuss what we would do to build a Mac using 2005 knowledge and 1984 technology.
The data/resource fork idea is a fairly elegant one. If the remote systems didn't communicate directly to the Mac disk but through the Mac OS, why couldn't the Mac OS just return the file single-fork-ized to non-Mac systems?
I was under the impression that MFS was used even on the first Mac HDs. Sure, an altogether different format could be used for extremely low-capacity devices like floppies.
Exactly. I did mention that memory was the limiting factor when designing the OS. RAM was just too darn expensive at the time, so PE MT just wasn't a realistic option. I don't know if modularity would have been practical (having not studies OS design), but if it had been, the ability to swap out just the lowest level of the system and gain PE MT would have been very nice. Maybe modularity like this is even more resource-intensive than a monolithic PE MT design, I don't know.
Sure, squeezing the OS into ROM was kind of a crutch, but it allowed them to ship the product within project parameters. So it was a great way to solve a big problem they faced. But did the hardware have to be built to boot exclusively from ROM? Couldn't there be a switch built into firmware somehow, without that much extra work? It would have made the hardware more flexible down the road.
I'm not dissing the choices of the engineers of 20 years ago. Not at all! I'm simply saying that since we do know today much more than we did then, how would it be done differently with the same hardware limitations? If the engineers then had known that RAM limits would quickly rise, that color was going to be standard, etc, all the things that seem obvious to us now in hindsight, might they have made different choices?
Turbo Color, ooo I think I'm jealous.
I got a bunch of older Macs as freebies from doctors (and some nurses) when I worked at a hospital - personal machines they were getting rid of. (I cleaned them up for donation, so they were happy to let me have them.) I saw one NeXT (and several other Macs that weren't quite as old) that the hospital itself was having recycled. That's a shame, but I understand that it's cheaper to pay to have the thing hauled away and disposed of "properly" than paying a tech to wipe the drive thoroughly and strip whatever parts may be useful. I'd've happily signed an agreement to dispose of any possibly confidential data on the drive if I could have taken the machine.
Yes, starting with HFS (even HFS+ perhaps?) would have been nice, but MFS wasn't around for long. I would also have used some Unix conventions like "/" as the path delimiter instead of ":", with its root at "/" instead of "". I would also have used "\n" instead of "\r" as the line terminator. Obviously this would have made efforts such as A/UX and the OS X switch, as well as interoperability with any Unix system, much easier.
I think what really held Apple back from a PE MT system (other than greater development time) was the fact that it would require more RAM for the OS to manage it, and that meant more expensive. Most people recognize the low RAM and only being able to run one program at a time as the two biggest problems of the first Macs. If I could have designed the OS to be highly modular, so that a pre-emptive kernel could be dropped in when cheaper RAM became available (maybe by 1986?) without sacrificing compatibility, I definitely would have done it. It could have been like Copland, except 10 years sooner - obviating the need to switch to OS X.
If the machines weren't hardwired to boot MacOS, that would IMO be a bonus, too.
But you're right. The fact that the OS lasted in basically the same form for 15 years, despite what we consider to be serious limitations, is a testimony to how much Apple did get right.
Very cool. I ran my site on a SE/30 with NetBSD too until the fan noise in my office started to drive me crazy. I moved it to my G3 and powered down the SE/30 until I have different project for it.
Sure, but it's fun to speculate.
I've never really looked at the Lisa, except I know it was retrofitted to sell as a Mac XL, had a hard drive, and was hideously expensive.
Wish I could get a NeXT or Sun for cheap. I've heard so much good stuff about them. It would be neat to see first-hand what it's all about.
Linux can only boot on Macs with a paged memory management unit. This includes all the Macs with a 68030 or 68040, and the Mac II (one of the two Macs built with a 68020). The original 68000-based Macs cannot run Linux. The requirements are basically the same for running *BSD on old Macs. Until recently NetBSD required a FPU also (now there is a build with software support for those math functions); I don't know if 68k Linux has a similar requirement (NetBSD and A/UX are the only Unices I run on my 68k boxes because of the small install footprint).
Sometimes I wonder what the MacOS would have looked like if those engineers would have known where it was going to go in the future, and knew all the modern techniques of programming? Alternatively you could ask, how would we design the Mac today if we limited ourselves to hardware available in 1984?
Would the filesystem have been designed differently? Would there have been more emphasis on preemptive multitasking? Would certain conventions from other systems have been adopted to ease interoperability when networking came on the scene? How would certain missteps admitted by Apple engineers been avoided?
You said it: price. Most people use less than half the capabilities of Word, less than a quarter the capabilities of Excel, and have no need at all for presentations, databases, or groupware. If I could pay $50 for something that did only those things as well as MS does them, yeah, I'd probably pony up the $50. Until then, anything else looks better than a $400 MS Office suite.
Or JOnAS!
That's the problem! We have only one chance to express a preference, and when there are more than two options, that is insufficient. We need to change the voting system to allow more expression of voters' honest preferences, as I state elsewhere in this thread.
I do tend to think the Duopoly parties are very similar. They are both statist, differing only slightly on what they should use government power for. I think part of the problem is that most people think of the political spectrum as one-dimensional. It isn't. There are as many dimensions are there are issues. Practically speaking, however, positions on many separate issues seem to come together based on general worldviews.
I consider the Constitution Party to be basically a libertarian party that believes it is "freedom of religion" not "freedom from religion" and is pro-life, whereas the LP has a vocal atheist fringe and does not take an official stand either way on abortion. Other than that, they are very similar in promoting a return to limited government. The rationale behind the desire is different, based on whether you consider the Judeo-Christian God a valid concept or not, but that's relatively immaterial as far as actually implementing policies to reduce gov't and keep it in check. Whether liberty is simply a pragmatically good idea to keep some from harming others, or God's will to keep sinful people from harming others, both groups want to work toward it.
I left out the issue of loops causing no clear winner being determined because I don't think it is a huge problem. Yes, in theory, they can occur. With a single voter it is easy to illustrate. (I like A over B because of his policy on education, and I like B over C because of her stance on criminal justice, but I like C over A because of his support for tax cuts.) However, you can't actually vote a cycle with rankings. Either they tie, or they don't. You can't create a loop. I think with such large numbers of people involved it would be very very unlikely that such a loop would exist. I don't have any mathematics to back that up, however.
I don't think IRV is a "secondary" solution, as it does not solve the third-party "spoiler effect" problem, it just disguises it. It has other problems of its own. Individual IRV sums cannot be summed together like Condorcet can, making it impractical for large (districted) elections that depend on sub-tallies. Mathematically, IRV meets even fewer of the criteria for a fair election method than plurality does. One I just mentioned, but the biggest one is that it is non-monotonic - meaning that if you rank your favorite candidate lower, it may actually help him win, and ranking a disfavored candidate higher may cause him to lose. Such an illogical and unintuitive system should be rejected outright. This problem is much more blatantly offensive than the possible issue of loops arising in a Condorcet vote, because there's no way to fix it. Resolving a loop may seem a little bizarre, but the rational basis for how it's done makes sense - basically if you can't find a single candidate that won the most, find one that lost the least (to state it very nontechnically).
IRV gives a convincing illusion that third parties are included fairly, but until one becomes a major party it will always be excluded, and only the relative ranking of the two major parties (for the final round) makes any difference. The system does not evaluate all preferences simultaneously but sequentially, discarding part of your ballot as it goes. If the system throws out part of your vote, then it's no longer using your honest vote, which defeats the whole purpose! Our current system is basically a runoff system in a way, with all rounds prior to the last taking place in the media. Everybody "knows" that the only choice that matters is R-v-D, so that's the only one they bother with.
If we seriously can't go to a Condorcet voting system, I'd rather use Approval voting. Sure, the uneducated masses may continue to vote only "D" or "R" and ignore other unknown candidates they'd likely agree with, but those who are informed can at least vote honestly without wasting their ballot. We'd have a truer indication of the support that third parties have, which means they'd get more coverage. Over time, this feedback loop may actually enable a third party to win. (Imagine what would happen to the left and the right if they suddenly discovered that Ralph Nader or Michael Peroutka actually did have the support of 30% of the electorate. I bet the Duopoly would be furiously scurrying to head off another 20% waking up to the fact that there are other options.) A bonus to Approval is that it can work with current voting machines.
So you're saying we need to make it worse, so that people will see the need to make it better?
I agree that a multi-party system is better. The way to do this, as I've said elsewhere in the thread, is implement a voting system that encourages honest voting and gives a fair result. Every view (to the extent that is reasonable) should be represented. There are more than two, after all, yet we seem stuck with only two parties.
Here's a list of ideas for voting and representation reform.
The first two I'd place roughly equal and very high in importance, the last two roughly equal but less important.
You are correct. I was oversimplifying somewhat. Obviously honest voting is absolutely essential, but simple plurality voting will always cause problems.
I know it is argued that IRV could be used as a "stepping stone" to Condorcet, but I don't buy it. If we "fix" the voting system once to something supposedly better than plurality (and IRV is demonstrably worse not better) I think there would be strong resistance to fixing it a second time. Even though the second stage fix would be completely transparent to voters in terms of UI. It might be a tough sell but if we only get one shot to make it right, we have to really make it right!
I really don't think Condorcet is hard to explain, as long as you don't use the "math-y" terms such as "pairwise comparison matrix". If you just say 1) rank the candidates in the order you like them, and 2) you take everybody's rankings to decide which candidate can beat all the others in a head-to-head contest, then I think the average joe can grok the concept.
All that Condorcet needs to be accepted is a change of the definition of winner from "has more votes than anybody else" to "can defeat anybody else in a one-on-one". You can use an extreme case of Duverger's law (which you alluded to) to illustrate: imagine 10 candidates, all well qualified, 9 of them conservative (just for example), splitting an overwhelmingly conservative vote. Can you imagine a liberal who was backed by only 15% being able to defeat 9 other guys one-on-one? If not, how can you say he is really the preferred choice for the position? Obviously, the conservative 85% would probably take any conservative over the liberal - which is precisely what is proven when they vote strategically/dishonestly for the one perceived to "have the best chance" even if he's the least conservative of the options. But why should you have to sacrifice your own conscience based on your assumption of what anyyone else will do? You shouldn't have to - this isn't democracy-by-peer-pressure. Condorcet is the solution.
I could not possibly agree more. If we manage to fix the system and it hurts "my" side or "your" side worse than the current system, we'd live with the fact that doing the right thing hurts sometimes. If the system is designed fairly, at least then we know for sure if our views are popular or not. With our current system nobody really has an honest chance, and those willing to "game" the system accumulate (dangerous) power to themselves.
I'll check out the site you mentioned, too. Thanks.
There's more than "both" (two) sides.
Maybe they were responsible enough on their own that they didn't need it detailed out for them? The Bill of Rights isn't for the people so much, it's for the government - to remind it very clearly where it's boundaries are. The powers delegated to Congress define pretty well what its responsibilities are. Individuals usually can't get into too much trouble on their own - shirk your responsibilities and it will come back to haunt you. Government, though, is an untamed beast that will feed and feed and grow and grow as much as it can unless kept on a tight leash under strict watch.
Amen! It's not so much what the goobermint is trying to do with the power, the problem is the fact that it keeps accumulating more and more power! Even if you agree with one administration, another is bound to come along that will misuse it (in your opinion, or mine). The only thing you can do that is fair to everyone is to keep governmental authority to the bare minimum necessary. Repealing the 16th and 17th amendments would be a good start.
I was going to say the same thing. Opera's not OSS, but it's worked hard to become the leader in this market. Is this just a case of NIH syndrome? Apple and Nokia will spend more on developing something on their own.
You're right, Duverger's Law (spoiler effect) is a feature (bug!) of the system itself, not any inherent flaw in the platforms of the minor parties. If we used Condorcet voting (not the same as IRV), every party could stand on its own merit. There would be no advantage inherent in being an incumbent party, or having the perception of being one of the most popular.
Of course, if everybody voted honestly instead of strategically there wouldn't be a problem either. But since that's awfully hard to do when the system encourages strategic thinking, we ought to change the system so that it encourages honesty. I don't know how we can have truly representative government if the people don't vote how they really think.
Politics isn't one-dimensional, so why do we think two parties can accurately reflect all political views? Politics is n-dimensional, for the n different issues that have become political. A strong multi-party system where everybody has a representative voice would be a big help.
Views are too diverse for such a coalition to work for much together. The only thing I believe these groups would work together on is voting reform, to tackle their common institutionalized problem of being underdogs. (I describe the problems with the voting system briefly elsewhere in this thread.) They'll never agree to becoming a united political force.
What we need to break up the Duopoly, and keep it from reforming, is a change in how we vote. Plurality voting encourages "strategic" voting leading to a Duopoly, because one vote can only decide between two things. So people do a "runoff" in their head, based on what the media and society seem to be saying, and vote for the least objectionable of the two remaining options because that's where they think their vote is "most effective". This is unfortunate, because if you don't vote what you believe you'll never get what you want. We need Condorcet voting. If every vote were equally effective in every electoral race, candidates would be competing based on merit alone. It might take awhile for people to get used to that concept, but I think it would break the two-party stranglehold.
Last few years? It's been happening longer than that.
Sound like a classical liberal to me. Many today call these people libertarians, since the term "liberal" has been coopted by leftists.