Much of the state is rural areas with rural students whose ambitions didn't go beyond spending their lives working the family farm just like their daddy and grandaddy; many of whom were traditionally "home schooled" until Arkansas introduced much more stringent requirements on home schooling in the late 90s. The old joke that when it's 12:30 in Little Rock, 15 minutes outside the city it's 1950, isn't really much of a joke as it's not far from fact. That's what drags down the statistics. But those statistics are actually great for the state as the money that keeps coming in to "fix" the "broken" education system (thanks to Arkansas native Bill Clinton's "No Child Left Behind" act, funny how that works out huh?) doesn't go to a town in Monroe Country whose high school graduating class is 12 and has an annual budget of 3 paperclips and a mule. It goes to the schools in the growing business hub cities that were already fairly good so overall, the schools in such cities are now well above average, but with districts carefully designed to include enough rural and impoverished kids to keep the test score averages and graduation rates from looking too good.

This is just another of the measures Arkansas is trying to entice more tech companies to move to Arkansas. It's a dirt cheap place to do business and a dirt cheap place to live (I bought a new, high end 3200 square foot home in 2010 for under $300k) with plenty of undeveloped areas to grow out. They've been working to build out tech infrastructure in Little Rock and between Bentonville (Walmart HQ) to Fort Smith (a manufacturing and shipping hub) for most of the past decade. Now, they're trying to develop the workforce to further support it. And, as you mentioned, Arkansas would absolutely love to attract businesses who sell coding crap or do any other kind of tech stuff. They've been grooming the state for such businesses for years. Get the people selling coding crap here and the people who make coding crap will follow.

Today? No. In 20 years? Almost certainly as by then they should be perfected enough that they'll be a lot safer than sharing the road with vehicles operated manually by a 19 year old who thinks they're such a fantastic driver that they can safely fly down the highway at 120MPH. When I was a tow truck driver just out of HS I watched the CHP spray what was left of such drivers off the road at least once a week.

I'd expect we'll have systems that identify any warm blooded creature entering the roadway and instantly apply braking and take evasive maneuvers that human reaction times couldn't possibly compete with and that they'd be more reliable and consistent than human drivers have ever been and they'll be able to communicate what they're seeing and doing with other vehicles nearby so they can measures to ensure they react appropriately as well.

You probably wouldn't be liable in such a case. The car maker would be. Just as they are now if a flaw in the car causes an accident. But with an automated car there'd be no way for the car manufacturer to claim it was the driver's fault so it'd take a lot less litigation to assign such liability.

Machines are already better at identifying black ice than humans via the use of things like thermal imaging and reflective laser analysis. And if you see a patch of black ice, there's no guarantee the guy behind you will see it. But if automated cars became the norm, once one car (or a satellite or drone) sees a patch of black ice, every other car in the area can be notified to avoid it and they could even automatically dispatch an automated service vehicle to remove it.

Why wouldn't the car see the person and stop while sending a signal to all the cars behind it to do the same and avoid a pile up? A car will never be too busy changing the radio station or messing with their phone or driving drunk or fatigued or subject to panic so, even when someone does foolishly run out in the road, the number of times where the option will be "Run over the person or crash into something" will be far rarer than it is today with human drivers.

My car can already parallel park a lot better than I can. And there's already systems for planes that allow them to safely fly and land in conditions it'd be nearly impossible for a human to safely do so. And humans aren't known for making good decisions, especially when they're required to make them quickly. So yeah, once the technology matures to the same point as automated parallel parking, automated cruise control and Automatic braking have, I'd trust it to drive.

As much as I like humans, and as much fun it is creating more of them, there are IMHO too many physical and mental limitations for even a supposedly sane human to do as quickly and accurately and make judgements based upon the available data as a well programmed machine can.

I agree. Animals, weather and normal road hazards aren't much of a problem. But automated vehicles will never be good enough to reliably handle all the stupid and unpredictable things humans do while driving. It'll likely take a major societal shift where individually owned vehicles become a thing of the past and all the vehicles on the road are publicly owned and automated before automated vehicles are really viable. But it'll almost certainly happen one day and I doubt that day is more than 3 or 4 decades away at the most.

In the US, the biggest reason that I've heard from people as to why "they don't want their vote to be counted" is because registered voter pools are what's used in most jurisdictions as the jury duty pool. If they don't register to vote, they won't ever get summoned for jury duty. And there's a lot of incentive to avoid being summoned, at least in my jurisdiction.
Here, when you get a summons you have to call the day before your summons date to make sure you'll still be required to appear and if not, your summons date will just be pushed back a week or two rather than be rescinded. That often happens several times before you actually get ordered to appear but, not knowing if that'll be the case each time and most employers requiring at least a week's notice for time off, that means someone being called in might miss numerous days of work even if they aren't ever selected to sit on a jury. And of course, since so many people stay out of the voter pool, being called for jury duty isn't a rare event. Last year, half my 15 paid vacation days were used to get paid for days I had to request off due to jury duty summons. Not a big deal for me as I don't use vacation days anyway (my employer allows us to cash in unused days at the end of the year) but for non-salary people that don't give paid vacation days, that can be untenable and you have to actually be told to appear before you can get a hardship exemption (which they rarely approve). Worse, being an at-will work state, being called for jury duty can even cost people their jobs entirely if their employer is particularly sleazy as it's impossible to prove they fired someone for not getting out of jury duty when, as long as they don't try to challenge granting them unemployment benefits, no one will ever even question it and even of they are questioned they can just say "That's not why I fired them. I just didn't like their personality." and that's the end of it.

Mandatory voting is a stupid idea as Americans don't like mandatory *anything*. It's a great way to ensure Grumpy Cat is voted in as our next President. To increase voter turnout they need to remove any perceived penalty like allowing voter registration pools to be used for anything other than voting that discourage people from registering to vote and they need to make voting more convenient. Use driver's license registrations or taxpayer information for jury recruitment. And put voting booths at places like Walmart, Costco, indoor malls or stadiums and such that are made to comfortably accommodate large numbers of people rather than putting them in some tiny classroom at a local elementry school with 3 parking spots within a half mile of the place where people will have to stand in line outside in the November cold for a couple hours before they can vote. But, none of that is in the best interests of politicians as they rely on the old, wealthy and zealous to keep them in office as normal people wouldn't vote for many of the nutjobs that currently hold office across the US.

That's about the size of it. Science isn't getting things wrong any more than usual. In fact, it tends to be even more accurate than usual as there's a much larger and much faster avenue for peer revue via the internet.
It's people who try to present themselves as doing science, who ignore or dismiss any contradictory evidence that refutes their conclusions, that are getting things wrong all the time and always have. It's just that these days it's a lot easier to find someone with some supposed repute (like the media or politicians) to widely disseminate bad science as fact.

In short, science has become more like a religion to the general public to support their faith in whatever reality they'd like to believe in rather than the systemic study of observable evidence to form a complete conclusion or theory it should be. If you want to believe the moon is made of cheese, you'll likely be able to find some source that purports to have done science that proves the moon is in fact made of a mixture of many types of exotic gourmet cheeses and that any reports to the contrary are part of a vast government conspiracy to artificially maintain exorbitant cheese prices..

It's way too late to keep modified genes out of the environment. Every plant on Earth has already been fouled by genes modified through selective breeding and the use of chemical and radioactive substances to force mutations.

Virtually every item of produce in your local Whole Foods was created by human intervention, not nature. The corn we buy is vastly different than the natural plant man developed it from, teosinte. The same goes for beets, carrots, corn, beans & potatoes, to name just a few. The originals are either inedible, poisonous or so poorly suited to agriculture we'd all starve to death if farmers didn't grow the modified versions.
Over time, we turned grey wolves into french poodles. Given enough time Monsanto could likely have bred plants that are immune to Round-Up as well. But a business plan that requires a few hundred years of selective breeding and forced mutation to have a good chance of obtaining and stabilizing the desired genetic profile wouldn't be a sustainable business plan in modern society. Plus, with modern methods there's less risk the resulting plant will have unfavorable genes like the one that makes wild almonds astringent tasting and poisonous instead of non-toxic and delicious like our selectively bred versions.

Scuba divers, welders, athletes, people with medical issues and fad businesses like Oxygen bars routinely exchange money for air.

Obama doesn't have the power to do any of those things. That's Congress' show. Despite the rhetoric, Obama isn't a dictator with unlimited power.

Precisely.

Yeah. The feds have mostly left the legal marijuana industry alone.
They will of course jump on anyone who goes outside what the laws allow, like those that think it's ok to ship cannabis to other states or countries or who aren't operating within the law in some other manner. Enforcing laws between states and foreign countries is what the Feds are supposed to do. Doing it isn't violating the administration's stance.
With only a couple of exceptions, mostly cases that were likely already in progress when the announcement was made, no one who was raided has been prosecuted for anything that was legal under state law. A few are up for weapons charges, a few are up for illegally transporting cannabis across state lines, a few for distributing cannabis via USPS, a few for distribution of non-cannabis drugs and a few were suspected to have foreign cartel ties.

That's called a government.

AliExpress is irrelevant to investors. Alibaba owns the Chinese equivalents of Ebay, Amazon and Paypal. That's the part they're interested in.
That, and Alibaba's B2B sales. I know several local clothing stores, ecig retailers, mall kiosks & boutique shops which get all their stock almost exclusively via Alibaba.com and I'm sure there's a ton of places I don't know about that do the same. The same applies online. Half the stuff on Ebay and Amazon's marketplace likely come from Alibaba suppliers (many of them use images with alibaba watermarks ffs) so investing gets an investor a small piece of the US retail market as well.

Federal Article III Judges may rubber stamp warrants for Government law enforcement, but state and local judges are either elected or appointed by elected officials . A judge at that level who rubber stamps warrants is taking a big risk for almost no promise of a reward. A judge can make cops work a little harder to establish solid probable cause with little risk of consequence while a judge who routinely enables cops to do things like tear apart some innocent old couple's home looking for drugs based on a tip that turns out to be a crank call is not likely to get reelected or reappointed when their term ends. It does happen of course, but it's a lot more rare than people seem to think it is.

As for cops, there were over 460,000 local cops in the US in 2010. According to the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, In 2010 there was 6,613 officers accused of misconduct. Of those, only about 3000 were accused of on-the-job misconduct towards citizens (the rest were things like domestic violence, drug use, or DUI committed while off duty that still violate police codes of conduct). The rate of perpetrators of violent crime among normal citizens was 429.4 per 100k while among cops it was 409.3 per 100k,

Cops are utterly average in how "bold" they are compared to regular citizens. They're just people doing an extremely necessary job for which they get paid crap, are exposed to constant risks and get nothing but disrespect and derision from those they work for in return. I'm amazed more of them aren't complete assholes.

The cops already had some kind of information or evidence that the person was in possession of child pornography. Whatever it was, it was enough to convince the judge probable cause existed. That information or evidence was is what the judge went on when he issued them a search warrant to look for it.

Since the cops were specifically looking for child porn, memory sticks would certainly be a part of the search warrant. Since that's what they were looking for, they were going to look to see what was on it no matter where it was found. Leaving it on a desk would only have made it easier for them to get their hands on it. By hiding it there was at least a chance the cops wouldn't find it.
And he might have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling memory sniffing dog.

Cox has limits in their ToS, but they very, very rarely enforce them.

I got an email every month for over a year that I'd gone over as I always went way over my 250gb cap, often by 2x-3x. 2 teens with Netflix and Hulu accounts, Steam, Youtube... it adds up quick. But I never once got anything more than an automated e-mail when I went over the cap. I did end up getting one of their home office plans last year (which they've apparently recently discontinued offering) since in my area it was the same price for the same speeds (25/5), without any data caps and with business class service (I can, and have, had a truck here within an hour at 3am to fix an outage).

I've heard that some people have had service suspended where they have to call to get it reactivated; but that seems to mostly be relegated to when they detect people's bandwidth being used nefariously without their knowledge and is used more to force people to call in so they can be walked through doing a virus scan. So far anyway. They're likely just waiting for TW and/or Comcast to jump through all the hoops first before they start trying to milk the caps themselves.

Farther north and your weekend is filled with the sounds of snowblowers and chainsaws, the ping of salt and gravel bouncing off of undercarriages and windshields, the scrape and roar of plows etc...
I started in the central valley of California but temps up to 120F in Summer, where opening your front door felt like getting punched in the face by an angry fire god, got annoying. So I moved to Northern Pennsylvania and found that shoveling 2 feet of snow every morning to get the car out of the driveway, spending all night listening to the sound of trees exploding from -20 temps and having to don 80lbs of clothing before opening the front door got annoying even faster.
So I moved to the midsouth. Temps rarely go beyond 100F for more than a couple days at a time in summer, very rarely go below 0 in winter and a couple inches of snow shuts down the entire region. And if bikinis are your thing, you can always find a fat woman in a bikini at 3am in the local Walmart winter or summer! :)

They'll obviously give you the option of having a physical credit card.... for $20/month extra.