I want a CPU made of carbon nanotubes. Such CPUs would be tiny carbon sinks to help tie up some carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere. That would help fight global warming. I also ride a bike AND buy only plastic furniture made from petroleum products.
Even a brief layman's overview of XDI reveals that it includes in the design of the protocol what are called "link contracts", but which are really just a thinly disguised excuse to place restrictions - rights management - on how remote data on the Web can be accessed and shared. This is yet another step, begun with things like Macromedia's Flash, to obfuscate and control content on the Web. Gone will be the days when any file accessible on the Web is inherently FREE, as in beer. You'd think the open source movement would be all over this, blocking XDI and spinoff crap like OpenID just as fervently as they've fought the broadcast flags and all the rest... so why aren't they?
If XDI or some spinoff existed in wide use today, the Angelides and the Democrats in California wouldn't have been able to access those damning racist comments by the Governator.
If this is the real agenda of Web 2.0, to end the open-source nature of the Web and HTML for good, then no thanks, I'll stick with Web 1.0 for just a while longer.
... so how could they be expected to develop software that is? It might be argued that missing both the Big Picture *and* the devilish details is the equivalent of blissful ignorance (or at least deniability), so please don't take that away from me!
Is this supposed to be Microsoft "innovating" again? I've been using the HTTP proxy filter Proxomitron for years to do exactly what this describes... among many other HTTP things like blocking ads, managing cookies, protecting my privacy, and even reworking Web pages to suit my weird tastes. Privoxy does virtually the same thing, and I gather there are yet others. Both of these are "free", though Proxomitron isn't yet open source (the family of the deceased author may yet open-source it).
If Microsoft really wants to "help", perhaps it should contribute to enhancing Privoxy or acquire rights to Proxomitron and then fully open-source and enhance it, rather than reinventing a proprietary solution that promises marginal utility and guaranteed lock-in and vendor dependency (if "vendor" is a strong enough word to describe Microsoft).
Apparently the OP thinks the entire world lives and breathes *NIX, so much so that he couldn't be bothered to mention the OS platform requirement? Thanks for wasting the time of those readers who may not yet have a Linux system with which to use it.
With bizarre logic like that which he parades around in his article, you can bet that the author is also so unerringly objective that he believes in the Tooth Fairy and Santa and a whole pantheon of other improbable things... simply because believing it makes him feel special.
As the author admits, strat guides have been around almost as long as computer-based games. However, the simplest answer is almost always the correct one, just as water follows paths of least resistance: strategy guides got more complex because the games themselves became more complex, driven purely by consumer demand for uniqueness and avoidance of boredom. There's no conspiracy here between strat guide authors and game developers (well, maybe there is a conspiracy, but not this sort).
Game developers like to do what game developers do best: design games that challenge people. The bar gets raised every time an existing game becomes routinely easy. Strat guide authors like to do what they do best: ride the coattails of the game developers making piles of cash from impatient dupes from whom said cash is easily parted.
Snakemeister should have selected his SECOND, alternate topic and written about that instead.
So then there's no functional purpose for depression, no reason why it exists other than as a punishment from God upon the wicked? Are they CERTAIN it performs no useful function for creatures at all, say perhaps as a way of forcing them to take time and reflect on mistakes and learn something from them?
That's all we need, having mad (genetic) scientists running around "curing" genetic "disorders" without REALLY being certain that in fact they are disorders and nothing more. They want to do the same with "autism", in spite of the fact that this spectrum of traits also happened to produce some of the greatest minds and scientific achievements we now enjoy... people like Einstein and Archimedes and many thousands in between.
Eugenics is a dish best left to Mother Nature to prepare. We don't have a complete recipe.
So, was O.J. Simpson guilty or innocent? Did you wait until AFTER the trial was concluded before you rendered your own personal verdict, or did you leap to one based on merely what evidence you could glean from obviously entertainment-focused media news?
Here in the United States, public majority opinion is STILL that Simpson was guilty, in spite of the fact that he was acquitted by a jury after a VERY detailed and lengthy trial. How DARE you reach any verdict in such a situation, when you had access to only a fraction of the evidence available to the actual jury, and at that only what tidbits the media concluded were entertaining enough? How arrogant can you possibly be, to presume that YOU ALONE, STANDING OUTSIDE THE COURTHOUSE, are a more capable and discerning judge and jury than the judge and jurors inside?
What is happening in South Korea is an Internet-ized version of that same stupidity. The Internet, of course, facilitates and speeds any sort of mass interchange, so it simply magnifies an existing human behavior. It's made worse in South Korea because it's emerged from a bit of a "dark age" and so people are using the 'Net to overcompensate for their previous repression. Things will eventually return to the norm (if you can call the lesser stupidity elsewhere the norm), though it may take a painful decade.
Excellent memory = "expert"?
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that they're equating expertise with little more than rote memorization, of what amounts to tricks of the trade.
Is that really all that expertise is about, merely memorizing a bunch of facts and being able to recall them? What happens when one is faced with a completely new situation, for which there is no stored facts to suggest a course of action? All the associative memory in the world won't help if the neurons for sustained reasoning are absent. Unless there is advanced reasoning, an ability to extrapolate and interpolate, the new situation could result in failure (or embarrassment or death).
On the other end of the spectrum, which this article seems to have ignored or overlooked completely, are people who have unreliable or highly "selective" memories but also possess abnormal reasoning abilities. You might call them "Pretenders": they can quickly analyze and discover needed facts on the fly, rather than remembering and merely recalling. It's quite possible such people develop that reasoning ability as a compensation for poor memory, in much the same way that a person who loses one sense often develops more acute responses from the remaining ones.
There once was a term for these alternative types of "experts": jacks of all trades. Rather than being expert specialists, they're expert generalists. Personally, I think it's a shortsighted mistake to value one so disproportionately to the other... the species needs both.
... and they were called turn-based strategy games.
Lo and behold, tho', the game publishers have come to discover that there just isn't much of a market for games that actually force one to think and strategize and plan. People would much rather play social or mindless - or mindless social - games instead.
So, yes Virginia, there are highbrow video games, but you'll likely find them at abandonware sites or in the used games aisle at your local old-school gaming store... you know the kind perhaps, with actual gaming tables and a high-caffeine soda vending machine in a back room of the store? You certainly won't find them at your local Game Stop store.
Flash is killing the original open-source nature of the Web, taking otherwise fully readable sites and pages and hiding them behind a veil of proprietary secrecy. It's analogous to what DRM is doing in other aspects.
I find it laughable that people are having wild hand-wringing fits over so-called "'Net neutrality" while Flash and a few other technologies have been busy for years destroying the very fabric of what was once called the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is almost dead: welcome to the Corporate Web.
The reason developers prefer to develop for consoles has very little if anything to do with piracy, although their real reason is still based on economics and the bottom line: it's the lure of the fixed hardware platforms that consoles represent, and the resulting dramatic reductions in development time and increases in profit margins. Why should they develop complex visually oriented software for a platform that allows perhaps AT LEAST 100 possible display configurations and all the innumerable design variables that presents, when popular platforms with ONE single configuration exist?
Kevin Cloud knows full well what this real motivation is, but he's too much the coward to voice it publicly and face a hostile backlash... instead he takes the easy political detour and lies and invents another target to point the finger at.
Whatever you want to believe is fine. MY "boycott" of Firefox will last only as long as it takes Mozilla to comprehend the stupidity of their choice. Whether that becomes permanent or not is up to Mozilla. I don't particularly like Opera, but I dislike Real Networks even more, and any group that would partner with it will quickly find itself on my personal blacklist until they disentangle themselves.
The end (promoting Firefox) does not justify the means (allying with a known unethical company). What's next for Mozilla, then... partnering with Doubleclick or Zango because it suits their short-term goals?
It's quite amusing to see someone who cannot spell ILLITERATE correctly accusing others of being stupid or unable to use language. I think psychologists call that "transferrance".
Last time I checked, Mozilla hadn't made marketing arrangements to climb into bed with Microsoft. Further, apparently you fail to grasp the basic definition and purpose of boycotts: it's a TEMPORARY action, intended to send a message and elicit desired behavior, just as when your parents sent you to your room without dinner. Are you still trapped in there, or did they let you out when your behavior improved?
Right after I finish this I'm going to quit using Firefox and uninstall it and switch to Opera exclusively until Mozilla cancels this agreement and makes it very public (as in I'll read about it here). Real Networks has been an unprincipled mob from the start, and any agreement like this supports and implicitly encourages Real to continue being the same unprincipled mob.
THE GOAL DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE MEANS. Do you hear that, Mozilla?
It virtually always requires more input energy to create stored potential forms of energy than can be recovered from it later to perform useful work. We got petroleum "for free", because it was created by biologic and geologic processes over millions of years. Solar cells and batteries require energy-intensive industry to manufacture and maintain, and ethanol and biodiesel require processing and, if produced and used in quantities comparable to petroleum, would completely deplete soils to the point of making them useless.
There is no free energy lunch.
This is why we've met no extraterrestrial aliens: they passed their own peak-oil crises without first establishing a self-sustaining presence in space, and were then stuck on their respective rocks with the consequences of their shortsightedness. It's what we're about to do as well... peak oil for us is likely to arrive before we even get a base on the moon at the rate we're going.
Get used to subsistence farming and horse-drawn buggies, because they'll be enjoying an unexpected renaissance soon enough.
Apparently he's only a legend in his own and a few other sycophantic minds. A truly legendary game designer is someone like Steve Jackson. Compared to him, this Romero is a badly self-disfigured, desperate-for-attention Michael Jackson.
John Romero is an idiot savant who thinks he's more savant than idiot.
We select the candidates for our juries - who are asked to make life-and-death decisions regarding others' fates every day - by a random selection process, after which we wean them down by a bit of bipartisan examination. Can you imagine what would happen if we selected juries by election, where only those MOTIVATED (i.e. having some emotional vested interest) enough to desire it could become jurors? Can you imagine how that would impact the judicial process, if the parents of raped girls were allowed to "run" for the juries in trials of accused rapists and child molesters?
Now let's look at the state of our governmental electoral process: that happens to be exactly how we currently acquire our leadership. Only those ambitious, alpha-male-ish, charismatic, and egotistical enough are even considered for governmental leadership. By definition, people so ambitious are almost always those who possess the LEAST ethics: they're willing to do ANYTHING to achieve and retain the desired seat of power.
Witness the plight of Dean Cain, a candidate who was supposed to be more ethical than average: at one point he made honest statements about his less-than-typical existential beliefs, which was a good, forthright, and ethical thing, but then - when it became a public relations mess for him as he realized it would hurt his campaign - he soon backpedalled and tried to reinvent what he'd said earlier. What other candidates have done and will do is far worse than that.
I suggest that what we need is in fact NOT a popular-vote "tyranny of the majority" electoral process, but rather a lottery system analogous to the one we use for selecting juries. It would involve ALL the Americal people in the process, as anyone might be selected for consideration. It removes the inherent unethical advantages that career manipulators and the wealthy have enjoyed over the process.
Thomas Jefferson, I recall, was the one who coined the term "tyranny of the majority", and feared the lack of ethics inherent in any unchecked simple-majority rule; it was the reason the founders selected a republican form of democracy. Jefferson and other founders had good reason to fear it: they weren't part of the majority. Jefferson, for instance, was not a typical Christian, though he called himself one publicly for fear of public reaction: he was a Deist at best, who didn't believe Jesus was anything more than a man and great "philosopher", and was so bothered by the "mystical" elements in the New Testament that he wrote his own "Jefferson Bible" with just the history, philosophy, and ethics he so admired.
Though I've been preaching this notion to anyone who'd listen for years, I'm neither the first nor the only person to invent this idea: it was proposed in an article in the national Mensa Bulletin in, IIRC, the summer of 2005.
An electoral lottery would likely prevent charismatic and cunning but otherwise stupid and illogical people from having an unnatural advantage in the process. I for one would much rather take my Presidential chances with some average (and perhaps more ethical) Joes than the likes of George W. Bush and John Kerry. The current process effectively excludes both ethical and intellectual people.
A: Yes, there's a ride a Magic Mountain in southern California, but I don't know that they'd keep it running for you months at a time, and it would cost you a bloody fortune in ride tickets and daily admission.:-)
Actually the cliche has it wrong: the world's oldest profession is politics. Of course, politics and the ambition that enables it is still fueled by sex... just ask Clinton and Kennedy and all the Congressmen guilty of having a bit too much interest in their interns, at the least. You can work your way down the food chain from there and find all the proof of the connection you need. Politics is just a way of manipulating yourself higher into the gene-pool pecking order when you have little else objective to offer it (the pool, that is).
There is no set-in-stone law or regulation required in order to do this matter justice. If the "community" truly judges the program to be as worthless and valueless as some of their authoritarian-type public figures apparently do, then public opinion will effectively enough see to exactly the same result that those figures are demanding via legislation.
And if public opinion ISN'T in synch with that of these vocal public figures, then they have no business imposing THEIR own personal mores on the public via said legislation, do they?
Slashdot Mirror
I want a CPU made of carbon nanotubes. Such CPUs would be tiny carbon sinks to help tie up some carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere. That would help fight global warming. I also ride a bike AND buy only plastic furniture made from petroleum products.
Even a brief layman's overview of XDI reveals that it includes in the design of the protocol what are called "link contracts", but which are really just a thinly disguised excuse to place restrictions - rights management - on how remote data on the Web can be accessed and shared. This is yet another step, begun with things like Macromedia's Flash, to obfuscate and control content on the Web. Gone will be the days when any file accessible on the Web is inherently FREE, as in beer. You'd think the open source movement would be all over this, blocking XDI and spinoff crap like OpenID just as fervently as they've fought the broadcast flags and all the rest... so why aren't they?
If XDI or some spinoff existed in wide use today, the Angelides and the Democrats in California wouldn't have been able to access those damning racist comments by the Governator.
If this is the real agenda of Web 2.0, to end the open-source nature of the Web and HTML for good, then no thanks, I'll stick with Web 1.0 for just a while longer.
... so how could they be expected to develop software that is? It might be argued that missing both the Big Picture *and* the devilish details is the equivalent of blissful ignorance (or at least deniability), so please don't take that away from me!
Is this supposed to be Microsoft "innovating" again? I've been using the HTTP proxy filter Proxomitron for years to do exactly what this describes... among many other HTTP things like blocking ads, managing cookies, protecting my privacy, and even reworking Web pages to suit my weird tastes. Privoxy does virtually the same thing, and I gather there are yet others. Both of these are "free", though Proxomitron isn't yet open source (the family of the deceased author may yet open-source it).
If Microsoft really wants to "help", perhaps it should contribute to enhancing Privoxy or acquire rights to Proxomitron and then fully open-source and enhance it, rather than reinventing a proprietary solution that promises marginal utility and guaranteed lock-in and vendor dependency (if "vendor" is a strong enough word to describe Microsoft).
Apparently the OP thinks the entire world lives and breathes *NIX, so much so that he couldn't be bothered to mention the OS platform requirement? Thanks for wasting the time of those readers who may not yet have a Linux system with which to use it.
With bizarre logic like that which he parades around in his article, you can bet that the author is also so unerringly objective that he believes in the Tooth Fairy and Santa and a whole pantheon of other improbable things... simply because believing it makes him feel special.
As the author admits, strat guides have been around almost as long as computer-based games. However, the simplest answer is almost always the correct one, just as water follows paths of least resistance: strategy guides got more complex because the games themselves became more complex, driven purely by consumer demand for uniqueness and avoidance of boredom. There's no conspiracy here between strat guide authors and game developers (well, maybe there is a conspiracy, but not this sort).
Game developers like to do what game developers do best: design games that challenge people. The bar gets raised every time an existing game becomes routinely easy. Strat guide authors like to do what they do best: ride the coattails of the game developers making piles of cash from impatient dupes from whom said cash is easily parted.
Snakemeister should have selected his SECOND, alternate topic and written about that instead.
So then there's no functional purpose for depression, no reason why it exists other than as a punishment from God upon the wicked? Are they CERTAIN it performs no useful function for creatures at all, say perhaps as a way of forcing them to take time and reflect on mistakes and learn something from them?
That's all we need, having mad (genetic) scientists running around "curing" genetic "disorders" without REALLY being certain that in fact they are disorders and nothing more. They want to do the same with "autism", in spite of the fact that this spectrum of traits also happened to produce some of the greatest minds and scientific achievements we now enjoy... people like Einstein and Archimedes and many thousands in between.
Eugenics is a dish best left to Mother Nature to prepare. We don't have a complete recipe.
So, was O.J. Simpson guilty or innocent? Did you wait until AFTER the trial was concluded before you rendered your own personal verdict, or did you leap to one based on merely what evidence you could glean from obviously entertainment-focused media news?
Here in the United States, public majority opinion is STILL that Simpson was guilty, in spite of the fact that he was acquitted by a jury after a VERY detailed and lengthy trial. How DARE you reach any verdict in such a situation, when you had access to only a fraction of the evidence available to the actual jury, and at that only what tidbits the media concluded were entertaining enough? How arrogant can you possibly be, to presume that YOU ALONE, STANDING OUTSIDE THE COURTHOUSE, are a more capable and discerning judge and jury than the judge and jurors inside?
What is happening in South Korea is an Internet-ized version of that same stupidity. The Internet, of course, facilitates and speeds any sort of mass interchange, so it simply magnifies an existing human behavior. It's made worse in South Korea because it's emerged from a bit of a "dark age" and so people are using the 'Net to overcompensate for their previous repression. Things will eventually return to the norm (if you can call the lesser stupidity elsewhere the norm), though it may take a painful decade.
It seems to me that they're equating expertise with little more than rote memorization, of what amounts to tricks of the trade.
Is that really all that expertise is about, merely memorizing a bunch of facts and being able to recall them? What happens when one is faced with a completely new situation, for which there is no stored facts to suggest a course of action? All the associative memory in the world won't help if the neurons for sustained reasoning are absent. Unless there is advanced reasoning, an ability to extrapolate and interpolate, the new situation could result in failure (or embarrassment or death).
On the other end of the spectrum, which this article seems to have ignored or overlooked completely, are people who have unreliable or highly "selective" memories but also possess abnormal reasoning abilities. You might call them "Pretenders": they can quickly analyze and discover needed facts on the fly, rather than remembering and merely recalling. It's quite possible such people develop that reasoning ability as a compensation for poor memory, in much the same way that a person who loses one sense often develops more acute responses from the remaining ones.
There once was a term for these alternative types of "experts": jacks of all trades. Rather than being expert specialists, they're expert generalists. Personally, I think it's a shortsighted mistake to value one so disproportionately to the other... the species needs both.
... and they were called turn-based strategy games.
Lo and behold, tho', the game publishers have come to discover that there just isn't much of a market for games that actually force one to think and strategize and plan. People would much rather play social or mindless - or mindless social - games instead.
So, yes Virginia, there are highbrow video games, but you'll likely find them at abandonware sites or in the used games aisle at your local old-school gaming store... you know the kind perhaps, with actual gaming tables and a high-caffeine soda vending machine in a back room of the store? You certainly won't find them at your local Game Stop store.
Flash is killing the original open-source nature of the Web, taking otherwise fully readable sites and pages and hiding them behind a veil of proprietary secrecy. It's analogous to what DRM is doing in other aspects.
I find it laughable that people are having wild hand-wringing fits over so-called "'Net neutrality" while Flash and a few other technologies have been busy for years destroying the very fabric of what was once called the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is almost dead: welcome to the Corporate Web.
The reason developers prefer to develop for consoles has very little if anything to do with piracy, although their real reason is still based on economics and the bottom line: it's the lure of the fixed hardware platforms that consoles represent, and the resulting dramatic reductions in development time and increases in profit margins. Why should they develop complex visually oriented software for a platform that allows perhaps AT LEAST 100 possible display configurations and all the innumerable design variables that presents, when popular platforms with ONE single configuration exist?
Kevin Cloud knows full well what this real motivation is, but he's too much the coward to voice it publicly and face a hostile backlash... instead he takes the easy political detour and lies and invents another target to point the finger at.
Whatever you want to believe is fine. MY "boycott" of Firefox will last only as long as it takes Mozilla to comprehend the stupidity of their choice. Whether that becomes permanent or not is up to Mozilla. I don't particularly like Opera, but I dislike Real Networks even more, and any group that would partner with it will quickly find itself on my personal blacklist until they disentangle themselves.
The end (promoting Firefox) does not justify the means (allying with a known unethical company). What's next for Mozilla, then... partnering with Doubleclick or Zango because it suits their short-term goals?
Apparently you ARE still trapped in your bedroom going hungry... and I can't say that I blame your parents for keeping you there.
"... or to force acceptance of ceretain conditions."
"... or as a means of coercion."
Would you like to try again? Not a terribly convincing counter-argument, when it actually winds up supporting what I said....
It's quite amusing to see someone who cannot spell ILLITERATE correctly accusing others of being stupid or unable to use language. I think psychologists call that "transferrance".
Last time I checked, Mozilla hadn't made marketing arrangements to climb into bed with Microsoft. Further, apparently you fail to grasp the basic definition and purpose of boycotts: it's a TEMPORARY action, intended to send a message and elicit desired behavior, just as when your parents sent you to your room without dinner. Are you still trapped in there, or did they let you out when your behavior improved?
Right after I finish this I'm going to quit using Firefox and uninstall it and switch to Opera exclusively until Mozilla cancels this agreement and makes it very public (as in I'll read about it here). Real Networks has been an unprincipled mob from the start, and any agreement like this supports and implicitly encourages Real to continue being the same unprincipled mob.
THE GOAL DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE MEANS. Do you hear that, Mozilla?
It virtually always requires more input energy to create stored potential forms of energy than can be recovered from it later to perform useful work. We got petroleum "for free", because it was created by biologic and geologic processes over millions of years. Solar cells and batteries require energy-intensive industry to manufacture and maintain, and ethanol and biodiesel require processing and, if produced and used in quantities comparable to petroleum, would completely deplete soils to the point of making them useless.
There is no free energy lunch.
This is why we've met no extraterrestrial aliens: they passed their own peak-oil crises without first establishing a self-sustaining presence in space, and were then stuck on their respective rocks with the consequences of their shortsightedness. It's what we're about to do as well... peak oil for us is likely to arrive before we even get a base on the moon at the rate we're going.
Get used to subsistence farming and horse-drawn buggies, because they'll be enjoying an unexpected renaissance soon enough.
Apparently he's only a legend in his own and a few other sycophantic minds. A truly legendary game designer is someone like Steve Jackson. Compared to him, this Romero is a badly self-disfigured, desperate-for-attention Michael Jackson.
John Romero is an idiot savant who thinks he's more savant than idiot.
We select the candidates for our juries - who are asked to make life-and-death decisions regarding others' fates every day - by a random selection process, after which we wean them down by a bit of bipartisan examination. Can you imagine what would happen if we selected juries by election, where only those MOTIVATED (i.e. having some emotional vested interest) enough to desire it could become jurors? Can you imagine how that would impact the judicial process, if the parents of raped girls were allowed to "run" for the juries in trials of accused rapists and child molesters?
Now let's look at the state of our governmental electoral process: that happens to be exactly how we currently acquire our leadership. Only those ambitious, alpha-male-ish, charismatic, and egotistical enough are even considered for governmental leadership. By definition, people so ambitious are almost always those who possess the LEAST ethics: they're willing to do ANYTHING to achieve and retain the desired seat of power.
Witness the plight of Dean Cain, a candidate who was supposed to be more ethical than average: at one point he made honest statements about his less-than-typical existential beliefs, which was a good, forthright, and ethical thing, but then - when it became a public relations mess for him as he realized it would hurt his campaign - he soon backpedalled and tried to reinvent what he'd said earlier. What other candidates have done and will do is far worse than that.
I suggest that what we need is in fact NOT a popular-vote "tyranny of the majority" electoral process, but rather a lottery system analogous to the one we use for selecting juries. It would involve ALL the Americal people in the process, as anyone might be selected for consideration. It removes the inherent unethical advantages that career manipulators and the wealthy have enjoyed over the process.
Thomas Jefferson, I recall, was the one who coined the term "tyranny of the majority", and feared the lack of ethics inherent in any unchecked simple-majority rule; it was the reason the founders selected a republican form of democracy. Jefferson and other founders had good reason to fear it: they weren't part of the majority. Jefferson, for instance, was not a typical Christian, though he called himself one publicly for fear of public reaction: he was a Deist at best, who didn't believe Jesus was anything more than a man and great "philosopher", and was so bothered by the "mystical" elements in the New Testament that he wrote his own "Jefferson Bible" with just the history, philosophy, and ethics he so admired.
Though I've been preaching this notion to anyone who'd listen for years, I'm neither the first nor the only person to invent this idea: it was proposed in an article in the national Mensa Bulletin in, IIRC, the summer of 2005.
An electoral lottery would likely prevent charismatic and cunning but otherwise stupid and illogical people from having an unnatural advantage in the process. I for one would much rather take my Presidential chances with some average (and perhaps more ethical) Joes than the likes of George W. Bush and John Kerry. The current process effectively excludes both ethical and intellectual people.
A: Yes, there's a ride a Magic Mountain in southern California, but I don't know that they'd keep it running for you months at a time, and it would cost you a bloody fortune in ride tickets and daily admission. :-)
It has no means of external user replenishment?
Two words: planned obsolescence.
Nano-lube runs out == time for a new drive. Period.
Actually the cliche has it wrong: the world's oldest profession is politics. Of course, politics and the ambition that enables it is still fueled by sex... just ask Clinton and Kennedy and all the Congressmen guilty of having a bit too much interest in their interns, at the least. You can work your way down the food chain from there and find all the proof of the connection you need. Politics is just a way of manipulating yourself higher into the gene-pool pecking order when you have little else objective to offer it (the pool, that is).
There is no set-in-stone law or regulation required in order to do this matter justice. If the "community" truly judges the program to be as worthless and valueless as some of their authoritarian-type public figures apparently do, then public opinion will effectively enough see to exactly the same result that those figures are demanding via legislation.
And if public opinion ISN'T in synch with that of these vocal public figures, then they have no business imposing THEIR own personal mores on the public via said legislation, do they?