Hoyt mentioned this before. It seems to grow on you- in that the more you think about it, the more sense it makes - especially if you have just taken a $40 cab ride from the airport, 15 minutes worth, that was only $15 when Bush took office.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22083/?nlid=1761 ... a version of it kinda reminds one of the "Johnny cab" in "Total Recall"... We are getting to the stage in "relative capability" that we will soon be able to trust computer intelligence, for many dangerous tasks - more than the human variety - at least as incarnated in the average cabbie. The "vision" subsystems are not there yet, nor is natural language parsing- but the decision-making ability of cheap computers is already superior in most regards - even in expert systems (like medical diagnosis, which is surprising). That should make this concept popular in Sacramento, among other progressive places (but there are no funds there to implement it, unless BO comes to the rescue)... A memorable quote from the flick - and it has weird relevance to sniffing out the real 'brains' behind the $250 billion cash bonus given to Big Oil by the Cheney, oops Bush Administration 'on the way out' (while blaming OPEC): "Howdy stranger. If things haven't gone wrong, I'm talking to myself and you don't have a towel around your head. Now whatever your name is, get ready for the big surprise. You are not you, you're "me"." Big Oil and OPEC - one and the same ? "if it walks like a duck..." you know the rest. Leading to this sentiment- which is too liberal for most of my friends on this forum, but for me, there is little good argument to counter the idea that the partial nationalization (of only the top 4-5) big oil companies would be in the national interest. They are already bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, so why not at least repatriate the profits to the taxpayers and make them more accountable for what they have done to our economic system? Jones
