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Sadly, he's wrong about the Democratic agenda. They aren't trying to impeach Bush. They are too worried about keeping their seats in government to bother with impeachment. Sure, they raise a stink in response (always in response) to Republican words & actions, but it's always a short-lived, impotent stink. They don't follow through.
It's ironic that Johnson claims the Democratic Party has no ``moral compass' & is concerned only with gaining more power. It may be true, but it's an ironic complaint coming from a die-hard Republican.
I am fully aware that, in my life time, there will never be a definition of ``intelligence'' which pretty much everyone accepts, & that even if I do see such a definition, it will not have originated in my mind. Nevertheless, plenty of people have suggested definitions of intelligence, & every programmer interested in artificial intelligence, plus every fuckwit with a mouth, have parroted whichever of those definitions they've most recently heard. Therefore, I have the right to suggest yet another definition.
intelligence : The ability to achieve goals by employing information processing (& possibly other techniques).
I'm tempted to append ``and minimizing the use of physical force''.
For example, Wordsworth, my cat, was snooping around my cup of coffee. I didn't want him to stick his nose in it, so I put a CD box on it. The CD box weighs little enough that Wordsworth could have pushed it off the cup, but as far as he was concerned, the cup was sealed.4.1
At another time, my other cat, Suizette, was nosing around my cup of tea. Again, I covered the cup with a CD box. Unlike Wordsworth, Suizette did push the CD box off the cup & stick her nose in the cup.
So Suizette displayed more intelligence than Wordsworth.4.2
Another example: If the dike springs a small, persistent leak, then:
Some guy named Hiro, living in a cyberpunk universe, uses his computer to solve really amazing problems, like designing life-saving vaccines & figuring out who dunnit before Holmes does. So Hiro with his computer is very intelligent.
If Hiro is separated from his computer, he's less intelligent. In a world where peeps spend more time without their computers than with them, maybe Hiro isn't all that intelligent, but in a world where peeps spend more time with their computers (maybe by using wearable computers), Hiro is effectively very intelligent. In a world where Hiro's computer is surgically implanted in his body, his intelligence is even more difficult to dispute.
The other day, a coworker showed me Google Sets (or something like that). With that service from Google, you may enter a few terms, press a button, & some software at Google figures out what set describes those terms, obtains some more elements of that set, & displays those new elements.
I think one of the examples my coworker showed was an input of ``red, green, blue'' which fetched an output of ``yellow, brown, orange'' (or something like that) as well as the original ``red, green, blue''.
We also did a few examples with the names of entertainers & political activists.
When I saw this, I was impressed with the intelligence of the software. And it is damned smart...within the world of extrapolating sets from information on the web. After a moment of thought, when you consider the things it can't do, such as drive a car, find food, hold down a job, & scratch an itch, you realize it isn't intelligent at all.
Similar stories describe everyone's first experiences with chess-playing programs, NPC opponents in computer games, & expert systems. As any book about artificial intelligence will tell you, programs like these are very intelligent in a microscopically narrow domain.
My definition works with these programs as well as does any other, including one's own ability to detect intelligence by being amazed at it. All these definitions of intelligence will tell you that the chess-playing program, the AI opponents in games, & expert systems are intelligent in a microscopic domain & stupid in the domain of every-day life.
In days when peeps are making nifty discoveries like that, let's not forget our brothers on the other side of the fence, who strive to raise the rest of us from the ignorance which makes us believe dinosaurs really existed:
To be fair, that writer's claim that ``evolution is a faulty theory based on a faulty premise'' is more defensible, less ludicrous, than the standard claim that ``evolution is just a theory''. The ``just a theory'' morons don't seem to know the definition of scientific theory.
From the article: ``Neanderthals: The Biblical Patriarchs Neanderthals are true humans made in the image of God / Neanderthals lived to be hundreds of years old / Age related changes in the head and face explain Neanderthal morphology''. Damn, but that link is broken. Sounds like a fun & interesting piece of fiction (I'm serious), but the link is busted.
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who can't find anything useful in the UDDI registries, & that maybe it's not my fault. (Mister Allen says they aren't comprehensive, anyway.) WS Finder is a notable exception.
Gene Michael Stover 2008-04-19