Passing the Turing test? (Fatally flawed because it's not double blind, btw.)
You're wrong about this, if it's properly administered. The point about a double-blind test is that the administrator of the test can't know because the subject can pick up on subliminal body language produced by the test administrator and be subconsciously affected by it, possibly triggering a placebo effect or distorted observations.
Remember that, in a Turing test, the person who's supposed to do the determination is isolated, communicating through a keyboard, and doesn't see who is on the other end. It's not like you can convince a human subject that they really are a computer simulation (although to get your AI to correctly act human, you may need to raise it in a simulated environment to make it believe it's human). So if you place a tester randomly in contact with either a human or computer subject, both types of subject will know what kind they are, but body language, voice intonations, and so on are not communicated to the person doing the avaluation. That limits it to a choice of words and, well, that's the whole point of the test isn't it?
If you've done the job right, 5 years after you've designed "data's head", the next generation design probably will run 4 times faster, and 5 years after that, 16 times faster. So within 10 years, you'll have a Data that can compress that "90% of the time" into 6% of the time and design his own body in a few years.
Nowadays even most podunk little towns are going to have a theater. Back in Shakespeare's day, few cities other than state capitals had any arts communities because that's where the aristocracy hung out and they were the only ones who could afford artistic diversions. Part of that is because modern technology has made music and drama/comedy reproduction cheaper. But mostly, the majority of people just didn't have as much disposable income before the 20th century, either (and even less in the primarily agrarian pre-Industrial Revolution world).
The point is that Sturgeon's law didn't apply 250 years ago because you had to have real talent to make a living off the arts. The competition wasn't warped by marketing and distribution oligopolies trying to maximize profit, even at the expense of quality. I don't have a problem with getting closer to that aspect of those days.
How do you explain the rich culture and works that were created before copyrights were even invented?
Again, this one is easy: far less work was produced, and far fewer people enjoyed it because it wasn't as widely available
It seems to me Shakespeare, Mozart and the like did OK. At the least the first two produced some popular works and their lack of distribution at the time was more due to technical limitations and Mozart himself was a violator of the content control mechanisms of the day. Yeah, you won't find a collection "Boy bands of the 1750's", but that's not a big loss.
However, the fact that this euphemism implies that the target is no doubt displaying a flaccid, tiny, shrivelled willy while everyone else is pointing their fingers and laughing at him can hardly be applied to the RIAA now, can it? Apparently you don't realize that outside the UK, people actually use underwear.
So the argument you're making, assuming my case regarding the existance of God for the sake of the argument, is that man has out-evolved God?
If God didn't exist, you argument makes sense. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to draw you out into an argument over the existance of God on Slashdot but notice that your reply rather hinges on God not existing.
Not really. God, assuming a) he exists and b) is an interventionist creator (and that's two big assumptions) has to work with the prophets he chooses, and his prophets and their understanding are molded by the environment they grow up in. I'd be a lot more convinced by the bible if Moses or another character had started talking about rules for septicimia avoidance by sterilizing with boiling water, centuries or millenia before the invention of the microscope allowed the concepts of germs and wound infection to develop. Even if God did try to get that point across, that part of the message was lost over time (be that a day or a thousand years) because enough people along the way couldn't understand it.
So I've got the feeling that Marshall McLuhan's observation that "The medium is the message" would also apply to God. While God may not need to evolve, his message needs to slowly evolve as mankind does because what he would say to a 21st century man couldn't be clearly communicated through one born at Christ's time or earlier, and a carved-in-stone fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible clearly doesn't allow that.
That takes us back to doctrines and immutable truths. Although I believe these two go hand in hand, secular society faces separately the questions of the existance of God and the existance of fundamental moral truths. Even if we're wrong about the existance of God, we may be right about morality, and those morals are not made invalid simply because Catholics hold them. I'm sure that's obvious as written, but in practice it's important that when non-Catholics react to statements like that of the Pope's, they don't simply say "Bah! It's the Catholics, I don't have to listen to them," but rather, "Is that right? Why or why not?"
True, enough. When I see that the Pope's railing against prophylactics limited their use in Africa and Asia, and aggravated the spread of AIDS in those populations, then I think that he's been seriously, even criminally, irresponsible. He's set an incorrect ideology above reality and his followers are the ones who paid the price. That seriously counters the good work he did do and, assuming his beliefs were correct, when he died, John-Paul II must have had some 'splainin' to do.
In a coldly analytical way, it's a self-correcting problem since his followers are getting sick and dying, and that negatively impacts the religion's spread. But I would much rather if those millions of deaths had never happened and that blood wasn't on anyone's hands. Benedict was one of those who advised John-Paul II, and who continues that policy today, so I don't feel his hands are any cleaner.
So as far as I'm concerned, it's the church that was incapable of dealing with failures of doctrine and that insisted they continue to be followed as immutable truths. Another doctrinal failure includes the continued insistance on celibacy for priests. What does evolutionary theory tell you will happen when you prevent the most strong believers from reproducing, assuming susceptibility to religious belief is an inherited trait? Does that explain certain problems the church is currently facing in getting candidates for seminary training and the priesthood? That wasn't really alleviated by keeping women out of the priesthood since they would just become nuns instead - it just kept them out of the power hierarchy. Yes, I realize that they instituted the rule to try to deal with concentration of church power within specific families, but over time it seems to have had an effect that is no longer compensated for through early indoctrination and exacerbated by smaller family sizes.
While we're at it, humanity is a pre-medieval institution. Where does that leave us? The bible, being the word of God, is theoretically immutable.
However, humanity evolves. There's been recent genetic studies indicating that there has been more new variation in the human genome in the last 5000 years than in the previous 50,000.
So while humanity may still be pre-medieval in many parts of the Earth, there's indication that it is more adaptable to modern times than a "fundamentalist" interpretation of the bible is.
Most religious texts are deemed immutable by their adherents. In practice, our understanding of the underlying wisdom that they contain can change over time, if we are willing to put in the effort to understand how and why their contents can help us as individuals and societies. The applicability of the reasons underlying religious guidance may change with the societal and technological context. What's right for a desert nomad may not always be right for a 21st century urban resident and vice versa.
Now, sometimes some parts of humanity have taken a wrong turn based on opportunities from new technologies (i.e. birth control), leading to dangers which more conservative religious groups have partly avoided. The rise of the sexual revolution facilitating the spread of new venereal diseases, for instance. But a wise person can balance the pursuit of new opportunities with consideration for the underlying reasons for the cautions and prescriptions in religions that have evolved with societies over the millennia.
Fundamentalist movements can be viewed as a sort of runaway societal immune response to new patterns of thought triggered by societal change. A denial of, and refuge from, the increasing pace of change. And while a certain resistance to change is part of the human condition (and even necessary to ensure sufficient time to determine which changes are positive and which are not), a runaway immune response preventing change can be just as harmful or deadly to an organism as a lack of response.
The success of humanity is caused by its ability to use tools to adapt and support itself in new and varied environments. Since fundamentalist religions are opposed to that, I know where I'm laying my bets on which survives.
No. What Bruce has realized is that, in the boardroom and the lunchroom (where almost nobody knows any better), security theatre often will kick the ass of real security practices because it's marketed by professional sales teams. It also often can be delivered for less (because it can be priced for what the market will bear).
If you want real security to be provided, you have to learn to sell it at least as well as the snake-oil. You have to make it sufficiently visible, but non-impeding, that people feel safe.
It's about understanding the human/political side of the equation that can make the difference between a successful deployment and a perceived failure.
The unaccountable segments of the EU, the EU commissioners, are the ones that keep putting forward the motions to "harmonize' copyrights with the USA entertainment lobbies' demands. The accountable MPs are the ones who, so far, have been shooting the law proposals down.
Up until now, the xIAA thought to save money by just lobbying the commission. I expect that during the next EU parliamentary elections, the entertainment lobbies will try to shift the power balance in the elected parliament to get their way. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.
The local European movie industries aren't as interested in DMCA restrictions: the DMCA is about controlling distribution and the MPAA member corporations' grip on US and European theatre and distribution channels has smothered local production in many countries. The MPAA don't do enough European filming to have the associated fiscal/employment clout they do in North America. Let's face it, the US Dollar doesn't go as far as it used to either, so that's not going to help either situation. The music business has similar issues outside of England.
Because there isn't as much justifiable financial European interest in copyright changes as there is in the US, MPs who support those changes will be vulnerable to charges of corruption by US interests. The US is currently perceived quite disfavourably by many in Europe, so that's likely to limit change for quite a few years even if a Democrat gets elected President and starts undoing the damage done by the Bush Administration to the USA's overseas reputation.
On the other hand, there's always hope that, before the European political landscape can shift, the financial clout of the RIAA and MPAA will be much diminished.
When religion doesn't get it right, people abandon it completely. Sometimes. And sometimes those who try to abandon the religion are called heretics, leading to persecutions and wars that last decades or centuries and cost thousands or millions of lives.
With science, when somebody's wrong, they might lose their grant and need to investigate something else.
There's lots to learn from religions about how to be happy and live with others as a productive part of society, to everyone's mutual benefit. But the world would be a lot less dangerous if everyone realized that religions are no more a revelation of truth than science is.
Actually I had one once over 10 years ago, or at least something that came damned close to it. You have to order it blue rare of course, and few places will cook it that way. It was with a mushroom burgundy sauce but the filet was full of flavor, the sauce only complemented it. It was so tender it almost melted in my mouth. Apparently, when I chewed twice on my first bite, my face took on a dumstruck/surprised look; it was so out of the ordinary.
I tried to go back to the same place a few times and order it again and they never did it as well again. Not even close. I'm resigned to the fact that it was a once in lifetime sort of thing.
Sort of. It depends at what point the cloning process occurs. The thing about Dolly was that she was cloned from a mature adult and had inherited the genetic damage that the adult had accumulated in its lifetime (including shortened telomeres). So if they clone them early before a lot of genetic damage has happened to the template organism, OK. If they clone them later, it's not certain what that genetic damage might have lead to. Over multiple generations, that damage could add up and affect quality.
In the long run, though, cloning your food animals is a bit of a cop out. It means you're trying to maximize your growth/production without establishing sufficient genetic diversity in your strain. As with cloned forests, you've got a highly homogeneous population that is much more susceptible to disease epidemics.
But I admit it would be tempting if they could guarantee a perfect filet mignon every time.
You're right. But I don't think you invalidate my point.:-)
Because CIOs need to support the business at the executive level, they also need to understand the business side. The CE/OO will prefer somebody who can talk in business terms and that's why the choices you pointed out are made because it's the CxOs who choose the CIO. But that doesn't mean my assertion about relevant experience is incorrect either. What percentage of IT projects fail again?
Well, Niven's government ordered organ collection stories may not have been too far off either if Falun Dafa practitioners are to be believed. There's been ongoing rumours of organlegging in Asia for a while, and even the UK is being more aggressive about organ collection.
The advantage of using your own stem cells instead of parts of some poor sap cut up for his crimes or beliefs, is that the former should be less subject to rejection. Assuming they ever get this approach viable for use in humans. I'm hoping so because, as the population becomes an increasingly aged one in Western countries, the pressure on organ banks is going to increase. And as the population becomes increasingly obese, the supply of healthy candidates for organ donations is only going to decrease.
Oh well, it could be worse. Transplants could have been available back when people thought debtor's prison was a good idea.
All true enough, but if you actually manage to step into CIO shoes without doing any of the intermediate steps, chances are you'll do a so-so job because you won't have a good understanding of the difference between theory and practice. Like vendors that over-promise and under-deliver. Difficulties in estimating projects. The human element.
Nope, the Clintons are probably too smart for this. But the people who might think whatever Republican candidate they prefer (McCain?) would have an easier time against Clinton than Obama? Check out the last seven years in the rear-view mirror and ask yourself again if some neocons might be stupid enough to think it's a bright idea.
I'm not saying that's the case, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand as tinfoil hat fantasies as quickly as you do either. There's a fair bit of motive and, with Diebold machines, a lot of means. Was somebody desperate enough to create the opportunity?
For starters, assuming you've got a democracy, you need an informed populace. That means you require media to cover substantial issues and differences in policy between candidates instead of horse races. You also require media to indicate where political rhetoric from candidates doesn't match their historical behaviour, instead of just playing he said-she said.
Good judges are usually good lawyers. They are usually very good at legal reasoning. They usually aren't good at memorizing 30,000 pages of text. I'd much rather have smart judges able to reason than judges who have memorized a huge book.
All true, and yet in states that elect judges instead of appointing them, that has nothing to do with whether judges get elected. In the current US societal environment, the successfully elected judge is quite likely to be the candidate who can be a more successful demagogue in firing up the populace, who can be showy to attract media attention and build name recognition. That has nothing to do with justice.
And if you're going to try to convince me that the USA populace is too sophisticated to fall for that,... well, you re-elected Bush in 2004.
Re:Intel's Business Code of Conduct
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Negroponte doesn't have a history of anti-competitive practices but Intel does. As a result, I'm willing to give Negroponte the benefit of the doubt. It's a smart move to make business decisions based on a potential business partner's history; banks and insurance companies do it all the time. Customers of companies like WalMart and Intel don't do it anywhere near enough.
That's what you get when you choose your judges based on a popularity contest instead of based on their ability to know the law. Competent governments appoint judges based on merit.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong about this, if it's properly administered. The point about a double-blind test is that the administrator of the test can't know because the subject can pick up on subliminal body language produced by the test administrator and be subconsciously affected by it, possibly triggering a placebo effect or distorted observations.
Remember that, in a Turing test, the person who's supposed to do the determination is isolated, communicating through a keyboard, and doesn't see who is on the other end. It's not like you can convince a human subject that they really are a computer simulation (although to get your AI to correctly act human, you may need to raise it in a simulated environment to make it believe it's human). So if you place a tester randomly in contact with either a human or computer subject, both types of subject will know what kind they are, but body language, voice intonations, and so on are not communicated to the person doing the avaluation. That limits it to a choice of words and, well, that's the whole point of the test isn't it?
If you've done the job right, 5 years after you've designed "data's head", the next generation design probably will run 4 times faster, and 5 years after that, 16 times faster. So within 10 years, you'll have a Data that can compress that "90% of the time" into 6% of the time and design his own body in a few years.
Why do you think they're called preventative measures?
Nowadays even most podunk little towns are going to have a theater. Back in Shakespeare's day, few cities other than state capitals had any arts communities because that's where the aristocracy hung out and they were the only ones who could afford artistic diversions. Part of that is because modern technology has made music and drama/comedy reproduction cheaper. But mostly, the majority of people just didn't have as much disposable income before the 20th century, either (and even less in the primarily agrarian pre-Industrial Revolution world).
The point is that Sturgeon's law didn't apply 250 years ago because you had to have real talent to make a living off the arts. The competition wasn't warped by marketing and distribution oligopolies trying to maximize profit, even at the expense of quality. I don't have a problem with getting closer to that aspect of those days.
It seems to me Shakespeare, Mozart and the like did OK. At the least the first two produced some popular works and their lack of distribution at the time was more due to technical limitations and Mozart himself was a violator of the content control mechanisms of the day. Yeah, you won't find a collection "Boy bands of the 1750's", but that's not a big loss.
However, the fact that this euphemism implies that the target is no doubt displaying a flaccid, tiny, shrivelled willy while everyone else is pointing their fingers and laughing at him can hardly be applied to the RIAA now, can it?
Apparently you don't realize that outside the UK, people actually use underwear.
So the argument you're making, assuming my case regarding the existance of God for the sake of the argument, is that man has out-evolved God?
If God didn't exist, you argument makes sense. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to draw you out into an argument over the existance of God on Slashdot but notice that your reply rather hinges on God not existing.
Not really. God, assuming a) he exists and b) is an interventionist creator (and that's two big assumptions) has to work with the prophets he chooses, and his prophets and their understanding are molded by the environment they grow up in. I'd be a lot more convinced by the bible if Moses or another character had started talking about rules for septicimia avoidance by sterilizing with boiling water, centuries or millenia before the invention of the microscope allowed the concepts of germs and wound infection to develop. Even if God did try to get that point across, that part of the message was lost over time (be that a day or a thousand years) because enough people along the way couldn't understand it.
So I've got the feeling that Marshall McLuhan's observation that "The medium is the message" would also apply to God. While God may not need to evolve, his message needs to slowly evolve as mankind does because what he would say to a 21st century man couldn't be clearly communicated through one born at Christ's time or earlier, and a carved-in-stone fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible clearly doesn't allow that.
That takes us back to doctrines and immutable truths. Although I believe these two go hand in hand, secular society faces separately the questions of the existance of God and the existance of fundamental moral truths. Even if we're wrong about the existance of God, we may be right about morality, and those morals are not made invalid simply because Catholics hold them. I'm sure that's obvious as written, but in practice it's important that when non-Catholics react to statements like that of the Pope's, they don't simply say "Bah! It's the Catholics, I don't have to listen to them," but rather, "Is that right? Why or why not?"
True, enough. When I see that the Pope's railing against prophylactics limited their use in Africa and Asia, and aggravated the spread of AIDS in those populations, then I think that he's been seriously, even criminally, irresponsible. He's set an incorrect ideology above reality and his followers are the ones who paid the price. That seriously counters the good work he did do and, assuming his beliefs were correct, when he died, John-Paul II must have had some 'splainin' to do.
In a coldly analytical way, it's a self-correcting problem since his followers are getting sick and dying, and that negatively impacts the religion's spread. But I would much rather if those millions of deaths had never happened and that blood wasn't on anyone's hands. Benedict was one of those who advised John-Paul II, and who continues that policy today, so I don't feel his hands are any cleaner.
So as far as I'm concerned, it's the church that was incapable of dealing with failures of doctrine and that insisted they continue to be followed as immutable truths. Another doctrinal failure includes the continued insistance on celibacy for priests. What does evolutionary theory tell you will happen when you prevent the most strong believers from reproducing, assuming susceptibility to religious belief is an inherited trait? Does that explain certain problems the church is currently facing in getting candidates for seminary training and the priesthood? That wasn't really alleviated by keeping women out of the priesthood since they would just become nuns instead - it just kept them out of the power hierarchy. Yes, I realize that they instituted the rule to try to deal with concentration of church power within specific families, but over time it seems to have had an effect that is no longer compensated for through early indoctrination and exacerbated by smaller family sizes.
There are more failures o
While we're at it, humanity is a pre-medieval institution. Where does that leave us?
The bible, being the word of God, is theoretically immutable.
However, humanity evolves. There's been recent genetic studies indicating that there has been more new variation in the human genome in the last 5000 years than in the previous 50,000.
So while humanity may still be pre-medieval in many parts of the Earth, there's indication that it is more adaptable to modern times than a "fundamentalist" interpretation of the bible is.
Most religious texts are deemed immutable by their adherents. In practice, our understanding of the underlying wisdom that they contain can change over time, if we are willing to put in the effort to understand how and why their contents can help us as individuals and societies. The applicability of the reasons underlying religious guidance may change with the societal and technological context. What's right for a desert nomad may not always be right for a 21st century urban resident and vice versa.
Now, sometimes some parts of humanity have taken a wrong turn based on opportunities from new technologies (i.e. birth control), leading to dangers which more conservative religious groups have partly avoided. The rise of the sexual revolution facilitating the spread of new venereal diseases, for instance. But a wise person can balance the pursuit of new opportunities with consideration for the underlying reasons for the cautions and prescriptions in religions that have evolved with societies over the millennia.
Fundamentalist movements can be viewed as a sort of runaway societal immune response to new patterns of thought triggered by societal change. A denial of, and refuge from, the increasing pace of change. And while a certain resistance to change is part of the human condition (and even necessary to ensure sufficient time to determine which changes are positive and which are not), a runaway immune response preventing change can be just as harmful or deadly to an organism as a lack of response.
The success of humanity is caused by its ability to use tools to adapt and support itself in new and varied environments. Since fundamentalist religions are opposed to that, I know where I'm laying my bets on which survives.
No. What Bruce has realized is that, in the boardroom and the lunchroom (where almost nobody knows any better), security theatre often will kick the ass of real security practices because it's marketed by professional sales teams. It also often can be delivered for less (because it can be priced for what the market will bear).
If you want real security to be provided, you have to learn to sell it at least as well as the snake-oil. You have to make it sufficiently visible, but non-impeding, that people feel safe.
It's about understanding the human/political side of the equation that can make the difference between a successful deployment and a perceived failure.
The unaccountable segments of the EU, the EU commissioners, are the ones that keep putting forward the motions to "harmonize' copyrights with the USA entertainment lobbies' demands. The accountable MPs are the ones who, so far, have been shooting the law proposals down.
Up until now, the xIAA thought to save money by just lobbying the commission. I expect that during the next EU parliamentary elections, the entertainment lobbies will try to shift the power balance in the elected parliament to get their way. It remains to be seen if they will succeed.
The local European movie industries aren't as interested in DMCA restrictions: the DMCA is about controlling distribution and the MPAA member corporations' grip on US and European theatre and distribution channels has smothered local production in many countries. The MPAA don't do enough European filming to have the associated fiscal/employment clout they do in North America. Let's face it, the US Dollar doesn't go as far as it used to either, so that's not going to help either situation. The music business has similar issues outside of England.
Because there isn't as much justifiable financial European interest in copyright changes as there is in the US, MPs who support those changes will be vulnerable to charges of corruption by US interests. The US is currently perceived quite disfavourably by many in Europe, so that's likely to limit change for quite a few years even if a Democrat gets elected President and starts undoing the damage done by the Bush Administration to the USA's overseas reputation.
On the other hand, there's always hope that, before the European political landscape can shift, the financial clout of the RIAA and MPAA will be much diminished.
When religion doesn't get it right, people abandon it completely.
Sometimes. And sometimes those who try to abandon the religion are called heretics, leading to persecutions and wars that last decades or centuries and cost thousands or millions of lives.
With science, when somebody's wrong, they might lose their grant and need to investigate something else.
There's lots to learn from religions about how to be happy and live with others as a productive part of society, to everyone's mutual benefit. But the world would be a lot less dangerous if everyone realized that religions are no more a revelation of truth than science is.
Hope she takes Obama as veep.
No chance. Politics says she would take somebody from the South. Possibly Edwards again (always the bridesmaid...)
Eh, you can only pardon those who have been convicted. And then they can't be prosecuted a second time since it constitutes double-jeopardy.
All your base are belong to us.
Actually I had one once over 10 years ago, or at least something that came damned close to it. You have to order it blue rare of course, and few places will cook it that way. It was with a mushroom burgundy sauce but the filet was full of flavor, the sauce only complemented it. It was so tender it almost melted in my mouth. Apparently, when I chewed twice on my first bite, my face took on a dumstruck/surprised look; it was so out of the ordinary.
I tried to go back to the same place a few times and order it again and they never did it as well again. Not even close. I'm resigned to the fact that it was a once in lifetime sort of thing.
Sort of. It depends at what point the cloning process occurs. The thing about Dolly was that she was cloned from a mature adult and had inherited the genetic damage that the adult had accumulated in its lifetime (including shortened telomeres). So if they clone them early before a lot of genetic damage has happened to the template organism, OK. If they clone them later, it's not certain what that genetic damage might have lead to. Over multiple generations, that damage could add up and affect quality.
In the long run, though, cloning your food animals is a bit of a cop out. It means you're trying to maximize your growth/production without establishing sufficient genetic diversity in your strain. As with cloned forests, you've got a highly homogeneous population that is much more susceptible to disease epidemics.
But I admit it would be tempting if they could guarantee a perfect filet mignon every time.
You're right. But I don't think you invalidate my point. :-)
Because CIOs need to support the business at the executive level, they also need to understand the business side. The CE/OO will prefer somebody who can talk in business terms and that's why the choices you pointed out are made because it's the CxOs who choose the CIO. But that doesn't mean my assertion about relevant experience is incorrect either. What percentage of IT projects fail again?
Well, Niven's government ordered organ collection stories may not have been too far off either if Falun Dafa practitioners are to be believed. There's been ongoing rumours of organlegging in Asia for a while, and even the UK is being more aggressive about organ collection.
The advantage of using your own stem cells instead of parts of some poor sap cut up for his crimes or beliefs, is that the former should be less subject to rejection. Assuming they ever get this approach viable for use in humans. I'm hoping so because, as the population becomes an increasingly aged one in Western countries, the pressure on organ banks is going to increase. And as the population becomes increasingly obese, the supply of healthy candidates for organ donations is only going to decrease.
Oh well, it could be worse. Transplants could have been available back when people thought debtor's prison was a good idea.
Both. It's a windshield made of bugs.
All true enough, but if you actually manage to step into CIO shoes without doing any of the intermediate steps, chances are you'll do a so-so job because you won't have a good understanding of the difference between theory and practice. Like vendors that over-promise and under-deliver. Difficulties in estimating projects. The human element.
Nope, the Clintons are probably too smart for this. But the people who might think whatever Republican candidate they prefer (McCain?) would have an easier time against Clinton than Obama? Check out the last seven years in the rear-view mirror and ask yourself again if some neocons might be stupid enough to think it's a bright idea.
I'm not saying that's the case, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand as tinfoil hat fantasies as quickly as you do either. There's a fair bit of motive and, with Diebold machines, a lot of means. Was somebody desperate enough to create the opportunity?
For starters, assuming you've got a democracy, you need an informed populace. That means you require media to cover substantial issues and differences in policy between candidates instead of horse races. You also require media to indicate where political rhetoric from candidates doesn't match their historical behaviour, instead of just playing he said-she said.
Good judges are usually good lawyers. They are usually very good at legal reasoning. They usually aren't good at memorizing 30,000 pages of text. I'd much rather have smart judges able to reason than judges who have memorized a huge book.
All true, and yet in states that elect judges instead of appointing them, that has nothing to do with whether judges get elected. In the current US societal environment, the successfully elected judge is quite likely to be the candidate who can be a more successful demagogue in firing up the populace, who can be showy to attract media attention and build name recognition. That has nothing to do with justice.
And if you're going to try to convince me that the USA populace is too sophisticated to fall for that,... well, you re-elected Bush in 2004.
Negroponte doesn't have a history of anti-competitive practices but Intel does. As a result, I'm willing to give Negroponte the benefit of the doubt. It's a smart move to make business decisions based on a potential business partner's history; banks and insurance companies do it all the time.
Customers of companies like WalMart and Intel don't do it anywhere near enough.
That's what you get when you choose your judges based on a popularity contest instead of based on their ability to know the law. Competent governments appoint judges based on merit.