Less than, Eh? Aich ref equals quote. Aich tea tepee colon slash. Slash soy: lent. News dot oh, our gee. Quote: greater than Meh. Less than slash, eh? Greater than?

It took folks on both sides of the doors to throw the constitution out the window.

If you think that cyberneticians are just mimicking designs without comprehending the fundamental biological processes involved, then you must not understand that cybernetics isn't limited to computer science. In fact it began in business analyzing logistics of information flow. That these general principals also apply to emergent intelligence means more biologists need to study Information Theory, not that cyberneticians are ignorant of biology (hint: we probably know more about it than most biologists, since our field places no limit on its application).

Ugh, Creationists. No, that's wrong. Evolution is simply the application of environmental bias to chaos -- the same fundamental process by which complexity naturally arises from entropy. Look, we jabbed some wires in a rodent head and hooked up an infrared sensor. Then they became able to sense infrared and use the infrared input to navigate. That adaptation didn't take millions of years. What an idiot. Evolution is a form of emergence, but it is not the only form of emergence, this process operates at all levels of reality and all scales of time. Your puny brains and insignificant lives give you a small window within which to compare the universe to your experience and thus you fail to realize that the neuroplasticity of brains adapting to new inputs is really not so different a process than droplets of condensation forming rain, or molecules forming amino acids when energized and cooled, or stars forming, or matter being produced all via similar emergent processes.

The structure of self replicating life is that chemistry which propagates more complex information about itself into the future faster. If you could witness those millions of years in time-lapse then you'd see how adapting to IR inputs isn't really much different at all, just at a different scale. Yet you classify one adaptation as "evolution" and the other "emergence" for purely arbitrary reasons: The genetically reproducible capability of the adaptation -- As if we can't jab more wires in the next generation's heads from here on out according to protocol. Your language simply lacks the words for most basic universal truths. I suppose you also draw a thick arbitrary line between children and their parents -- one that nature doesn't draw else "species" wouldn't exist. The tendencies of your pattern recognition and classification systems can hamper you if you let your mind run rampant. I believe you call this "confirmation bias".

Humans understand very well what their neurons are doing now at the chemical level. It's now known how neurotransmitters are being transported by motor proteins in vesicles across neurons along micro-tubules in a very mechanical fashion that uses a bias applied to entropy to emerge the action within cells. The governing principals of cognition are being discovered by neurologists and abstracted by cybernetics to gain a fundamental understanding of cognition that philosophers have always craved. When cyberneticians model replicas of a retina's layers, the artificial neural networks end up having the same motion sensing behavior; The same is true for many other parts of the brain. Indeed the hippocampus has been successfully replaced in mice with an artificial implant and proven they can still remember and learn with the implant.

If the brain were so specifically crafted then cutting out half of it would reduce people to vegetables and forever destroy half of their motor function, but that's a moronic thing to assume would happen. Neuroplasticity of the brain disproves the assumption that it is so strongly dependent upon its structural components. Cyberneticians know that everything flows, so they acknowledge that primitive instinctual responses and cognitive biases due to various physical structural formations feed their effects into the greater neurological function; However this is not the core governing mechanic of cognition -- It can't be else the little girl with half her brain wouldn't remain sentient, let alone able to walk.

Much of modern philosophy loves to cast a mystic shroud of "lack of understanding" upon that which is already thoroughly and empirically proven. Some defend the unknown as if their jobs depend on all problems of cognition being utterly unsolvable, and many remain willfully ignorant of basic fundamental facts of existence that others are utilizing to marching progress forward. The core component of cognition is the feedback loop. This is a fundamental fact. Learn it, human. If you did not know this before now then your teachers have failed you, since this is the most important concept in the universe: Through action and reaction is all order formed from chaos over time. Decision is merely the "internal" complexity of reaction in a system by which Sensation of experience causes Action. Hence, Sense -> Decide -> Act -> [repeat] is the foundational cognitive process of everything from human minds to electrons determining when to emit photons. Thus, all systems are capable of information processing, cognition, and thereby a degree of intelligence.

There is a smooth gradient of intelligence that scales with complexity in all systems. Arrange the animals by neuron and axon count you'll have a rough estimate of their relative intelligence (note that some species can do more with less). If you accept quantum uncertainty and the fact that internal action of information processing systems can modify themselves then you understand that external observers can not fully predict or control your action without modifying it, only you can. Thus free will apparently exists, if you only drop the retardingly limiting definition that your philosophers have placed upon such concepts. Only chauvinists deny that humans are simply complex chemical machines. Quantum effects are too noisy to have a significant stake in cognition, there's no debate amongst anyone knowledgeable about both macro scale processes (like protein synthesis or neuronal pattern recognition) and quantum physics, sorry, there's not. That would be like saying whether or not the earth is only a few thousand years old is an open problem simply because creationists are debating about it.

Look, our cybernetic simulations of creatures with small neural networks, like jellyfish and flatworms, behave indistinguishably from their organic peers. It only takes ~5 neurons to steer towards things, thus jellyfish can. Cyberneticians are discovering the minimal complexity levels for various processes of cognition, and the systems by which these behaviors operate. Humans are reaching a point now where cybernetic simulations COULD inform neurologists and psychologists and philosophers of potential areas to investigate in cognition -- if only they are wise enough to listen. Nature draws no line between the sciences, but many humans foolishly do.

Take the feed forward neural network, for example. It can perform pattern matching and even motion sensing as in the eye or other similar parts of the brain which have the same general pattern. In many ways the FFNN is like a brain's regions that perform pattern matching, and this essential information flow and dependency graph is an approximate explanation of the governing dynamics of how said pattern matching occurs. The specifics of how such configurations of connectivity graphs are produced varies between the organic and artificial system, but the end result is same enough to be indistinguishable and allow artificial implants to function in place of the organic systems in many cases. Or vise versa. It's Alive! This machine has living brain cells, Just LIKE A BRAIN. We can come to understand the cognitive process in small steps, as with any other enigma.

However, the feed forward neural network can not perceive time like a brain can. Fortunately, FFNN is not the only connectivity graph. It takes a multi-directional network topology, like a brain's, to be able to perceive time and entertain the concept of a series of events, and thus to predict which event may follow, like a brain does. Since these structures may contain many internal feedback loops they can retain a portion of the prior input and cause the subsequent input to produce a different response depending on one or more prior inputs, like a brain. Unlike FFNN, recurrent neural networks do not operate in a single pass per input / output: You must collect their output over time because the internal loops must think about the input / process it for a while in order to come to a conclusion, and they may even come to different conclusions the longer the n.net is allowed to consider the input, like a brain does.

Beneath the outer most system of connectivity certain areas become specialized to solve certain problems, like in a brain. Internal cognitive centers can classify and route impulses and excite various related regions in a somewhat chaotic state. Multiple internal actions can contribute to the action potential of one ore more output actions and the ones most biased to occur will happen, sometimes concurrently, sometimes in sequence, sometimes the single action produces feedback that limits others or refines the action itself over time -- Just like everything else in the universe, like molecular evolution or like a brain. This type of decision making can occur without structural changes to the recurrent neural network, which means that this multi-directional connectivity graph can produce complex action in real time and even solve new problems without the slower structural retraining, just like a brain does.

My research indicates we desperately need more neurologists and molecular biologists to focus on studying the process by which axon formation in brains occurs. It's yet unknown to humans how neurons send out their axons which weave their way past nearby neurons to make new connections in distant regions of their brains. I'm modeling various different strategies whereby everything from temperature to temporal adjacency in activity attracts and repels axons of various length. Perhaps the connection behavior is governed by eddy currents or via chemical messages carried in the soup between brain cells. Perhaps axons grow towards the dendrites of other neurons by sniffing out which direction to grow electrically, chemically, thermally, etc. Even though I do not know the governing process I can leverage the fact that axons do grow as a part of human cognition and try to determine what affect this may have on learning and cognition. I've stumbled upon some interesting learning methods which produce far more optimal networks than having to process n.nets with neurons pre-connected to every other neuron in the layer or area.

I think axon formation is very important because I have also experimented with axons branching and merging and have seen dissociative defects, similar to thoes in malfunctioning humans, when these axons connect back to themselves and other axons instead of between neurons. In a genetic sim that "grows" the neural nets over time I introduced the branching axon to an existing known problem solving genetic code and found symptoms remarkably similar to what is observed in the brains of to autistic humans and animals. Tasks like recognizing a shape which the n.nets of that generation readily picked up (as their predecessors did) the branching axon neural net took much longer. Sometimes this connectivity wasn't harmful and it caused increased speed of certain pattern matching abilities. The n.net spent far more time processing internal data -- it was much more internally reflective than the others. In a very general sense the symptoms I saw were descriptive of autism-like behaviors. If the system of axon formation is discovered cyberneticians could model it via artificial neural networks and perhaps assist in the development of medicines or treatments for such diseases more quickly with less animal and human trials.

The point is that saying, "like a brain" doesn't mean much because we don't know exactly how the brain works at all levels, is as ignorant as arguing "like a planet" isn't very descriptive and that research into gravity might not be useful ultimately in the launching of rockets to the moon. Just because we don't understand how quantum affects apply to the macro scale physics of gravity, doesn't mean we can't leverage the concept or that invalid hypotheses aren't important; Hint: You have to break eggs to make an omelet. Look, humans used Newtonian physics, not Einstein's to get to the moon. See? A general understanding and approximation is actually good enough for many applications, sometimes even important ones. My point is that there is not really some incredibly intricate and delicate top-down designed system to the brain that requires full knowledge of before cyberneticians achieve capabilities that are like a brain's. Top down isn't natural because that's not evolutionarily advantageous. That would mean even minor compromises to the integrity of its structure would spell immediate irreparable malfunction and death. Learn it, human: Life is Mutation Tolerant. So is sufficiently intelligent cognition.

Instead consider bottom-up self organization: There are some fundamental processes operating at the molecular chemistry, protein pattern matching, and cellular activation levels that when allowed to interact in a complex network yield a degree of intelligence through an emergent process. We can look at the brain and see that the mind is a chemical computer, but it is not the chemicals that matter to cognition. The overarching system abstraction is what's important: Input is fed in via many data points and the information flows along feed forward classification and cognitive feedback loops to contribute to the ongoing decision and learning process of a self reorganizing network topology. The folly is assuming that unless we know every little detail about how the systems work, we won't understand how to make anything even approaching thinking like a brain. Such sentiments are ignorant of the field of cybernetics which involve the study of machine, human, and animal learning, not just neural networks. It's essentially one branch of applied Information Theory.

Look, we have atomic simulations. They can produce accurate atomic emulations of cells. It is thus a fact that given enough CPU power we can build a fertilized human egg cell in a computer and then grow it up into a sentient being. Machines can become sentient because that's what you are: A sentient chemical machine. This is the ignorant approach, and many pundits speaking on machine intelligence are very ignorant. They assume cyberneticians are just taking stabs in the dark with neural networks. They think we are trying to emulate intelligence as folks once strapped bird wings to their arms to attempt flight. Such ignorant assumptions are wrong. Cyberneticians don't just piddle with computers, we are studying nature and its mathematics and discovering the fundamental processes of cognition, and applying them.

In some cases our abstractions allow us to escape the constraints that nature accidentally stumbled upon. For example: Instead of transporting chemicals via motor proteins which cause or block excitement of a neuron we can transmit a single floating-point number or voltage level which indicates a change in activation potential. Our voltage or numbers don't require a synapse to be flushed of neurotransmitters before firing again. We understand the necessity and function of various types of neurons to solving certain kinds of problems. A single artificial neuron has axons with positive and negative weight values and can therefore perform both duties at once rather than having dedicated excitatory and inhibitory neurons, like in a brain. Well rested and overly excited neurons can become hyper sensitive to activity and even fire on their own or due to nearby eddy currents caused by other neurons firing that are not directly connected to them. We don't even have to emulate this entropic process, it is actually inherent of such systems. This activity 'avalanche' process can cause sudden increase in chaotic activity in an otherwise internally normalized and mostly externally inactive mind. You see, even machines can be easily "distracted" by the smallest thing and be prone to "daydream" about unrelated things when they are "bored", just like a brain. Interestingly, the capacity for boredom and suspense scales with complexity too.

Unlike TFA's author I'm not a chauvinist. Firstly, I use Like a Brain because "the brain" would imply there's only one form of mind, and only a human chauvinist would think such retarding things. Neither do I make ridiculous assumptions about the "importance" of anything. Every new system that seeks to act "Like a Brain" gets us closer to achieving and surpassing human levels of intelligence and can even help us understand what processes and diseases govern human brains. Every attempt to abstract and emulate some neural process is important in its own way: Scientists can learn from failure. I can consider even the failed experiment as useful since it eliminates some possibility and directs effort elsewhere. Those experiments that only prove to be "like a brain" partially are not useless since they may illuminate not only the limitations of the system itself but could reveal some foundational principal of cognition. We had to discover the feedback loop before we could discover information processing.

Learning is a process. If our "catch phrases" aren't very informative, it's because the listener is too ignorant to understand what we're saying. If pundits don't know how brains are like, it's their own damn fault for choosing to remain fucking ignorant.

Hexen was the game that Doom ][ should have been.

On the BBSes that I played 4 player Doom on, those wall running speed boosts didn't matter, they had the opposite effect since we ran the game with -turbo 255 (2.55 times faster than normal). Press the run key and strafe-run and you're going as fast as player can go. Any faster via and the fixed point vector math overflows and when you press the run key and forwards you travel backwards.

If you thought the game required lighting fast reflexes before, you just have no idea. Look, one of my strategies was to fire off rockets while strafing and running at the same speed as them, then outrun the rockets and use a supershotgun and blast from too far away to lure them in while I'm reloading (you can close huge distances). Everything exploded around them as I'd back away just in time to dodge my own 10-20 dense rocket wall. That's how fast we were playing. You could out run rockets in a medium sized open area custom map with enough time before they hit to have a short firefight.

What made doom work so well at such speeds was its vertical auto-aim.

The coolest thing I liked about Descent is that it worked with VR glasses, or you could run it in side-by-side stereoscopic VR mode on your screen and cross your eyes for headache inducing poor-mans 3D. The original game still works with 3D VR or 3D monitors if you have the right drivers and config.

I liked Descent 2 better than Quake for its slower paced but far more strategic gameplay, and esp. developing a love-hate relationship with its Guidebot. Duke3D had so many gadgets but I loved best its non-euclidean 2.5D engine effects I could pull off with its Build editor: Small corridor off a big open space: 3 quick right turns, you should be entering the same open area, but but it's a whole different area in space overlapping it -- Or my favorite trick: regions between 4 or more pillars in an open area that were a nexus between 4 or more overlapping dimensions. Depending on which way you entered them you could quickly move between them all. And there could be multiple such trans-dimensional pillar sets in each region. We easily played in maps that would have left Cthulhu scratching his head. Hell, some Doom maps we made were quite tricky with invisible floating stairways (set a sector to be its own adjacent sector) and player voodoo dolls (too many multi-player starts = damage by proxy traps). You could pull off some neat things with Descent's deformable cube-based portal renderer too, but the lighting system and map editor(s) made many tricks hard to pull off since they lacked the manual raw data manipulation and I needed to modify things with a hex editor each edit.

The lag compensation of slow bullet-sponge movement and other excessive realism in much of todays pop-culture games does leave us with less variety in gameplay.

But the output from the opcode isn't stored back to both input memory locations at once ergo, XOR itself is reversible at the chip level, even if it writes back to one of the inputs just XOR the output with the other input. You're conflating the theory of computation with the actual computation. In THEORY you can delete bits, but in practice you actually can't -- Well, using the arrow of time created by sub-atomic entropy (quantum foam) you might be able to... but that will remain beyond your grasp for some time yet. When you write zeros over the data the exact opposite process would restore the data because its remnants are still there encoded into everything from slight resistance in potential of the RAM or repulsion of the writehead, etc. you leave behind sub-bit signatures. Let's not even get into in-memory attempts to erase memory that can fail due to caching, paging, another thread with a copy, etc. and just talk about on-disk data.

Let's say I have these bits: 1 0 1 0 and I write over them with 0 0 1 1. For the sake of argument let's say that each write is affected by one tenth of the origin data's signal. Our existing initial state may actually not be so clean, and our write signal may not be so perfect, but let's assume they are just for example. Here's the overwrite:
1.00 <- 0 = 0.100
0.10 <- 0 = 0.010
1.01 <- 1 = 1.101
0.00 <- 1 = 1.000

We're allowing bits to go above 1 because in reality there's a threshold for the bit value one, and you can exceed it (obviously). Really, the zeros should be negative ones, but this is just an oversimplified example. Let's say we wanted to reverse the process. We read back what is apparently stored there which is rounded to the whole bits (0 0 1 1) and subtract that out of the analog signal (decimals). That zeros the whole number threshold place, but it would reveal the tenths place I've emboldened above. You amplify that signal beyond the threshold and you've got our origin signal: 1 0 1 0. See, the theory of the computer would have said those bits are lost forever, but even without resorting to full reversal of everything at the quantum scale I can get your overwritten bits back in practice. With an even more sensitive system you could get what was written in a prior pass than this, revealing what's in the hundredths and thousandths place, etc., though each layer down is more entropic.

This is just one reason why writing zeros all over the disk doesn't really erase your data, that's actually the worst thing to write. Your neighbor likely wouldn't be able to get the data back, but the drive itself may have just marked that sector entry in its look up table as full of zeros without actually changing the data on the disk -- read it back and the table could tell the controller to fill the buffer with zeros without touching the actual disk data (sort of how POSIX file systems are allowed to do with files full of zeros, and may stop your zero write at the FS level, thus we needed to go deeper).

To erase data so that it's unreachable by police or thieves you'll have to write random noise all over the disk to erase it. However, state-level & enemy governments could remove the drive platters from their enclosures and place them in highly sensitive drive reading tech with heads that could pick up the analog signal and perform the top-layer subtraction method I mentioned above. So, to really erase the bits you want to write over the surface with multiple passes of random bits.

Ah, but SSDs employ ware leveling and even magnetic spinning disks frequently swap out a sector from use. The logical block address of the sector has no real bearing on its physical placement on the media anymore (since the 90's at least -- hence DBAs were always nutters when talking about the value of partition boundary alignment; And even before then BIOS was wrapping CHS addresses to work around an off-by-one bug that prevented booting in MSDOS up through Win95 since MS only used 1023 heads instead of the full 1024 heads so all the damn alignments were off, ugh). That means when you write to a sector the drive might actually have swapped that location out for another sector. The data you're trying to overwrite may never get overwritten by the drive itself even if you fill it right up: The "bad sectors" could contain what you wanted to be gone: credit card numbers, encryption keys, tax info, etc.

The folks trying to get at your data could have the low level firmware replacement provided by drive vendors that allows them to get raw access to the physical sectors, even the ones that were swapped out. No amount of write passes are going to erase data that the drive has swapped out of use. That's why when you hear folks recommending DBaN (Derick's Boot and Nuke) and claiming it completely destroys the data, they're mostly idiots (just mostly, it's better than nothing, but doesn't guarantee the bits are gone, and isn't the best option). Even if data in the bad sectors is a bit corrupted I might be able to figure out permutations to get the checksum matching again or I may have seen all I needed to know in the data that was there.

What's the answer then? If you donate your PC or sell it you don't want to have to drill holes in the drive or smash it with a hammer to shatter the glass platters -- you probably should though, you don't know if some scriptkiddie injected a hidden iframe into a page like this and made your browser download kiddie porn to protest the fact their sexting pics are illegal and it's now chilling in your swap space. Ridiculous laws that make numbers illegal even if you've never seen them are why even folks with nothing to hide should use whole drive encryption from word go. Get something like Truecrypt (protip: burn your Truecrypt boot data to CD and always boot from it. That way if the HDD data is replaced with a Trojan you don't expose your PW to it -- the ROM in CD-ROM stands for 'read only memory', so boot from immutable data, problem solved). With whole drive encryption all the data you ever put on the disk is encrypted. If the sectors get swapped out and aren't reachable to erase, they're encrypted so it doesn't matter. You simply forget your password and it's even better (and faster) than writing a million passes of random bits.

Note that you didn't actually forget the password though. The bad guys could hit you with a wrench too or give you some sodium pentothal (truth serum) to make you talk (they're not mutually exclusive). Future law enforcement might be able to reconstruct your brain in a computer then read out the memories with a sufficiently detailed brain scan. In fact, they may even be able to simulate a small universe for the digital brain and then ask it questions and watch while it thinks about the password and puts it in.

I have devised a way to detect if I'm in the same universe as my real computer when putting in the password by using false volumes, the fact that time exists irreversibly due to entropy, and a memory hard encryption algorithm with partially destructive internal state that's difficult for even quantum computers to solve. I'd explain the process but to keep my login safe I must never think of the implementation details too precisely. Thought you could get me that easily? Ha!

Well, in case this universe won't be ending now: Good luck!

When you reverse a black hole it's called a white hole, AKA, big bang.

Well, that's the only lesson that really counts, "RTFM: man man".

You call that Advanced? No, you're thinking Comp. Sec, and that bug got patched.

What I do is read past the mistakes and be thankful that I know what they're trying to say. That's the only thing left man has over the machines, and you want the Slashdot editors to take even advantage away?!
Talk about kicking an ape when he's down.

You assume thugs need math. They don't.

It takes a few smart folks to set up the systems, and a bunch of dumb ones to follow the flow charts and deploy the automated exploit vectors.

They don't really need hackers at the FBI. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to shill online forums and manage the perception of "national security".

The education system sucks because a well educated public is the hardest to control.

I have a series of math text book from the 50's that I bought at a garage sale for $10, when I was homeless high school drop out. I used them to brush up on Algebra Trig and Calculus as preparation for teaching myself higher mathematics, compiler theory, and etc. CS theory. They are far superior to today's mathematics books.

A few years after me, my younger brother became a sophomore in high school and was struggling with mathematics. I tried to help him with his homework, but the terminology was wickedly alien. I said, "Is this even algebra? What the hell are they on about?" I showed him how to solve the problems using the methods that worked for me but he said, "No, you don't get it, I can't do it that way I have to do it the way my teacher wants or it doesn't count." That's asinine, if the solution fits then it's equivalent. However, I had experience with such oppressive systems myself, so I knew the only thing to do was start from the first chapter and re-learned their bullshit terminology so I could show him the book's particular way of performing and wording the calculation. I realized that the textbook sellers changed the wording and methods of teaching mathematics over the years, not only to yield more book sales for newer curriculum and re-assert copyright anew, but also to make mathematics more in line with the (supposed) way girls learn.

It's unconscionable for teachers to remain willfully ignorant that boys and girls think differently in general; Only a complete moron would think that brains were immune to sexual dimorphism that had such drastic effects on the rest of the human body. It was common knowledge that men and women have different personalities in general, but strangely research was lacking in the area of sex differences in behavior. However, the feminist mantra that men and women are not different drowns out opposing facts. Strange when you consider that they lobbied for changes to the way mathematics and sciences were taught to make them more easy for girls to learn them. Drop the damn stereotyped learning, everyone goes at different rates and different methods are better for different folks, and yes, sexual dimorphism will cause a trend in certain graphs, but that doesn't mean we can't embrace outliers too. Just consider the student as individuals for once: If a boy or girl is having trouble learning via one method, then teach them the other. If that means you wind up more girls or boys in the class that teaches more event based and auditory methods vs visual and hands-on methods then THAT'S OK. If you want to end sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. you have to consider the individual's experience regardless of any group you classify them as being; Stop using identity politics, they only create more inequality in the name of equality.

The feminists leveraged their sexist ideology and identity politics quite effectively by pointing to the disparity in female enrollment and graduation from college, especially in STEM fields. What they failed to realize is that my mom was in the slide-rule club in high school, and she didn't need sex tailored teaching. Their changes didn't help girls to learn, they merely made it harder for some to learn than others. The textbooks I have from the 50's and 60's teach mathematics in concise and plain terms. They don't use too many ridiculous analogies and mental gymnastics. Word problems weren't a focal point past elementary levels. It wasn't that all girls learn different than all boys, it was that there are different methods to teaching that individuals are better at understanding, and there is a trend in which methods boys and girls favor. However, these changes just muddled the methods and muddied the waters.

Another problem has been brewing in education for a wile now too: Standardized Testing AKA Poor Penalization. This follows the ridiculous assumption that schools which teach children well should be rewarded with more funding, and those which teach students poorly should not receive as much funding. It fails to consider that teacher's salary and school funding should be separate. Now, if the Social Justice Warriors actually wanted to be useful they'd protest against this system and cite the fact that poor kids in the ghetto have more problems in their lives (regardless of their race). Welfare rules ensure that families are broken up because women can't receive benefit if the father stays in the home -- a homeless father is even less likely to be able to support their children, this foists more burden of shelter on the family unit and reduces their collective means. It's hard to get a job without an address, but if it means your family gets to have some assistance the father leaves and the whole family suffers... and poor kids bring this baggage to school.

So, kids who have more emotional problems on their plate and do more poorly in poorer schools also do poorly on standardized tests and thus their schools receive less money?! And then the school gets poorer?! That's supposed to help how? Any elementary economist can tell you that the poorer schools will need more money to teach the children better, not less. It doesn't matter if this is or isn't an oppressive system by design: It proves the education boards all need to be gutted, since they're full of imbeciles or hateful bigots. When I was in school the teacher never made it but part way through any of our books before the end of the year. They had to stop everything and teach the standardized test. Kids are made to study for and take mock tests for weeks or months. My teachers even photocopied the prior years tests and made study guides -- Their salary depends on us getting good grades on these damn standardized tests, so they were willing to CHEAT.

You're not supposed to have to study for these damn tests, and you're not supposed to copy the test material, but that's exactly what teachers are making students do. These standardized tests were supposed to ensure kids aren't being passed onto the next grade if they don't know how to read and write or do basic arithmetic -- a response to being sued for graduating illiterates. Thus, the tests quiz students on things they should ALREADY know. In fact, the test content is always at least one year behind what kids are already being taught, sometimes two or three years behind. That means while kids are being taught how to take these test they are not learning what they need to learn to pass NEXT year's test. If your student is behind, then the teacher needs to fail the kid so they have a chance to learn, you don't try to teach everyone else in the grade what they already know just to bring up the slow kids -- HOLD THEM BACK. Or, get rid of the standardized testing. At the very least only do these tests on graduating students / seniors to ensure they know what they're supposed to know before they graduate. That's how the standardized tests started out but, the test makers wanted more money so they rolled out testing to more grades claiming it gave a better picture with which to penalize or reward schools with...

You already have excellent textbooks produced in the 50's and 60's. There may be some racist remarks in some of them, but there's no reason not to reprint the curriculum with such removed -- Especially in mathematics where such ignorance is absent. End standardized testing, that's what final exams are for. Stop the "zero tolerance" sexism that punishes boys for being boys. Bring back recess so the kids (esp. the rowdy boys) can get out some of their energy and then focus on their work better -- Note: PE and recess came under attack by feminists who moronically conflate competition with aggression and think it's sexist that boys out compete girls in some sports. Stop punishing poor families and poor schools and poor students. Poor grades = More Money for better Education. Fire the teachers if you must, but don't lump the teacher salary budget in with the school funding for education material, labs, and field trips -- The kids shouldn't have to suffer for having shitty lives and shitty teachers and shitty books.

Help ALL individuals in need regardless of race, creed, wealth, or sex. Anything less is sexist, racist, and classist. Look, a poor white boy and poor black girl growing up in the ghetto are equally disadvantaged. The social justice simpletons lobby for more aid be given to minorities and women. The poor black girl can get education scholarships and entrepreneurship grants specifically for minorities and women; The poor white boy is excluded from aide purely on the basis of his sex and/or race. That's sexist and racist. The ghetto doesn't care what color you are, why do you?

Meh, I don't even know why I try. Any idiot can see what's going on here. You let fucking monsters run amok instead of checking their facts and calling them on their bullshit like a scientist would, regardless of how big of a victim card they had or how offensive the facts are. US education is past the point of no return. Gut this moronic, sexist, and classist education system. It serves no one well. If you're a parent, especially of gifted kids, you should probably home-school or private-school if you can afford it. Think about it: Since the grades are going down compared to the past, look at what you've done!

They don't want to be broken up, but I may have located a compromise just Beyond Thunderdome:

Two corps enter, One corp leaves.

We're receiving a faint transmission in an ancient Earth encoding...

When I read of mergers like this, ... large garbage trucks colliding at speed ... inevitably twisted smoking debris strewn wide, and oh God, the smell.

... a metaphor for large mergers, I have yet to find a more accurate one.

Intriguing, the message indicates it's from a time before CVS.

I have hardware in my garage that I can use to build a free mesh network using shortwave radios. I started working on it in the BBS days. There are no unregulated slices of public spectrum available to run it on, even though spectrum belongs to the public. It's illegal for me to test it beyond 30ft, outside of my garage's Faraday cage which is the only place I'm allowed to tinker without the regulatory captured FCC throwing me in fucking jail. Now, how much do we not know of "the industry"? HAL-PC was an ISP in my neighborhood I used, they resold AT&T, and thus their prices and service quality aren't much better -- They're subject to the same sorts of throttling shenanigans everyone else is otherwise we'd all resell Comcast and AT&T much closer to the cost to actually rent the hardware and put the big bastards out of business or at least force them to compete -- But we can't do that, because Internet Service Providers aren't classified as Title II communication service providers. But now we're digressing into Net Neutrality Territory.

You're talking out your fucking ass, moron. The dinky dying local computer club can afford one for far less. Regardless of bullshit tap-ready wired providers, I can obliviate the need to pay more than a one time fee for an antenna, (software defined) radio, and caching server -- It's basically self organizing Fidonet using always on frequency hopping signal strength moderating (for channel reuse) radio modems (which escape the one-to-many problems of wired networks via the nature of EM fields) -- Except that wireless ISPs fight to ensure the common people themselves don't have ANY unlicensed spectrum to compete in and so unlicensed Store-and-Forward packet radio is illegal, even on the family band... So, yeah, the emboldened statement above remains true in so many ways it's not funny. Meshnets can and do work, but they've never been given a chance. This shit's not even capitalism anymore, it's corporatism.