The constitution is supreme. No law can over-ride the amendments to the constitution. It takes an amendment to do that. The Patriot act is unconstitutional lawyer games which nobody in their right mind would allow (except a lawyer and their definition games where things like the supreme court ruling tomatoes are vegetables by their own unscientific definition.)

This shockingly sane unanimous ruling must be a result of their experience with smart phones. Some might not mind trashing the constitution or nation but when that could involve THEMSELVES... that is another matter.

These kinds of scholarships are completely marketing BS anyway. Give them out for any reason whatsoever. Like car insurance, I get a "discount" for just about anything.. but only 1, I can't stack them (since they have such a long list the sales person can choose from to make you feel special.)

Sports have no place in college. period. It is simply embarrassing the way we irrationally defend them. Just say you do it because you like the sport and want an excuse to get young men to play and prep for the pro sport (ok, and a few women for the few successful sports they have... and no! we do not need equality; it is bad enough we do this crap for the men.)

So if you want to equate video games with sports; go right ahead. They are equally meaningless recreational activities with no academic purpose whatsoever. Teamwork and thinking on the spot-- just a rationalization to pull something of merit out of it-- it has nothing to do with why sports programs exist. (if that is the excuse then tons of things are equivalent, including being in a GANG. probably more thought goes on in a criminal gang...)

In the USA, your state college funding is actually influenced by how well a college football team does. seriously! (not by ticket sales, it's the legislature doing it.)

Things can be agreed upon before the official formal agreement happens. This is not unusual. Business meetings do this all the time before the lawyers get into the details of writing up the formal agreement which can literally take months to get a final deal.

This this means is that officials and governments have signed on to the basics the financial industry bribed them to do. It is more likely they will follow thru officially later one because of the power of the banksters over the world.

Also, I do not claim to understand how all governments function; some of the governments may be capable of officially "signing on" to open ended deals before they are formalized. A dictator for example could do something like this (and just as easily break their word later on;) a verbal general agreement would be possible.

The few AP courses available to me in high school were CRAP. They taught to the test; I got out of 2 semesters of Calc. I took Calc in college anyway and it was almost a different world.

All people care about are simplistic certifications - which is what the AP stuff is. It will gravitate an education into a certification training course and there is a big difference between the two of those. Forget actual understanding or building up skill level (aka IQ) in the area.

I would recommend AP Statistics not because I know anything about it but because statistics are so important today so any increased understanding (even if it is just at a shallow certification level) is better than NOTHING which is what most people have. Perhaps a better understanding will help to undermine the meritocracy we continually try to prop up using a poor understanding statistics (and that is just part of the problem... the other is the idea that all aspects of life can be quantified and ranked as well as being programmed by laws/policies we blindly adhere to like good little authoritarians we are raised to be.)

I don't know about AP CS. I have taught a programming course in a high school and I'm confident I went way beyond whatever AP covers in terms of practical skills. I teach in a university now and it is similar because it's me but also differs greatly because I can extract many hours outside of class from my students which was never possible in high school.

As others (quietly) say all the time-- if you put college into the high schools then that reflects BADLY upon high schools and colleges!!!!

It is unrealistic to think we will have new jobs to replace the ones that technology has taken from us - optimistic capitalists and consumerists with no concept of limited resources or limited consumer demand. You can't grow forever but we built everything around infinite growth.

2/7 people in the world are poor and it is is NOT their fault; the % who are to blame for their plight is not insignificant. This is today's numbers, that ratio will go up. If you think I'm exaggerating, you are probably an American (there are billions of poor worldwide and they are not lazy scum.)

Most people didn't care all that much but when it starts impacting everybody... the way to sustain it will have to involve segregation, along with tribalism. History and the present show us the path humans will continue upon until it becomes impossible. It is going to be difficult to isolate those who have decent jobs from those who do not as the ratio increases... I suppose a blind eye cognitive dissonance will develop, like you see in India where the middle and upper class have a difficult time not being aware of the less fortunate but find rationalizations to essentially defend their success at the expense of others.

There is no clock speed. It is asynchronous and analog. Even if it had some kind of natural timing to it, some things will fire faster others slower. Chained signals will have delays along the path. The result is something without any clock speed with operations happening at the speed of analog (as fine grained as the physics allows... so in other words, crazy fast to capture it all in digital.)

Absolute precision will not be required just as analog audio doesn't need to be converted at the rate the individual molecules move and as they differ -- that level of detail is "noise" even if it is not actual random noise. You can get plenty good approximations with a decent sampling rate... but for this kind of stuff I doubt it's even 200Hz let alone 80Hz. The degree of the signal sent by neurons is not binary... so if you were thinking maybe it's 8bits... somehow I can't see how creatures which can hear better than 8bit 11 Khz audio would think at a slower rate. (ok i realize the ear is physically doing the FFT so the brain only gets the spectrum.)

The USPS lost on letters but it gained in package shipments. The actual numbers show they've only grown as a result; plus netflix helped a bunch with letter mailings.

Thing is they are under attack by the GOP who is ideologically against them in addition to corps funding the attack upon them. Like the 2006 scam to fund their pension out 75 years in advance which put them into debt and forced all these budget solving ideas we hear about to save them money. They are required to not lose money; by fools in congress, but the constitution defines their existence because they are THAT important to the nation. They are prevented from trying new things like more package friendly trucks or a massive electric fleet... or pricing things based upon distance traveled instead of merely doing it by weight. I can ship in state for 1/3 as much using a local private company because they don't subsidize airmail cross country (think about how such a change would shake up the economy. good? maybe.)

Just think what will happen when they ruin the middle class jobs at the USPS.... the USPS is the 2nd largest employer in the USA! (and largely self funded, but it is congress's duty to fund them at a loss if need be--- and they really should be. Like for example, how they used to deliver newspapers for free.)

Me I wouldn't think they should compete with internet; I think modern packages should also include data packets and the USPS should be our packet delivery ISP too (don't give me crap about privacy, nothing stopped the NSA and I don't like comcast spying on me so they can threaten me if somebody downloads something they police on my open wifi. There is also no reason they couldn't still have private ISPs run just run the lower level network.)

Volvo only makes trucks- the company dumped the car division but let it keep the name. Ford bought it, sucked out everything of value it could then sold it to the Chinese for 1/6 the price. Your 2001 was a Ford Volvo-- a few years of Ford shaking things up then it probably got better but not the same as it once was as ford extracted whatever value they saw before dumping it cheap on the Chinese. Something I believe was a $5 billion loss for Ford over like 7 years or something... they must have got something out of that deal rather than just straight up losing that money... Notice Fords got better during the time -- could be they moved all the good people/tech over.

Come on, by now you realize the NSA never does anything until they are forced to backtrack from a leak! They've proven themselves to lie as much as possible while doing damage control and the media machine backs them up instantly. Then another Snowden leak makes the backtrack. It has happened many times already and should be getting more attention but instead we have to remember and track it ourselves since the media isn't bothering to point it out except some comedians who will make some jokes about it (if they can find the humor, they end up doing more actual analysis than all of the media.)

It is not likely they kept copies of all IRS emails and if they did, kept them long enough. Now with their expanded data capability, perhaps. Of course we assume they don't have more hidden capacity already-- their budget is many times that of the CIA and that is the formal amount; nobody knows where the hidden budget goes.

Reality is that all government operations should be archived by a 3rd party, something like the IRS but for public accountability. Then the IRS can't incompetently "lose" evidence-- sure, it means you can't quell BS investigations and just about every real world decision can be taken out of context... So one could make a strong argument for having wiggle room; but at the same time, if your politics degrade that far one has to wonder if the system is really all that functional in the first place. (So, today it wouldn't work as any innocent target of scrutiny could be brought down in scandal. Remember, we've had officials taken out with fabricated evidence already... it isn't much of a leap to imagine out of context emails easily taking out any competent honest official or scientist.) Also, what is amazing is how officials send emails without signing them-- making it easy to plant or forge emails in their name! Sure good forensics could detect it but good planting is possible and if one didn't invest the investigation time it would be easy.

Note that I did mention vendors expect us to scrub our storage data to correct errors to catch and repair losses... I don't remember being told... but then I've not read any paperwork that came with a HDD in a long time.

I talked about ECC RAM because it is a similar problem. We are raising our demands on the tech so the reliability level (includes associated techniques) has to increase to meet our higher demands. The fact we are noticing this more to me indicates either that we have more discussion of the problem or that the reliability has not been scaling at the pace of our increased demand on the technology.

I do remember experiencing LESS bit rot in my storage in the past; I had less data in the past... but I also accessed that smaller data set more.

When I had 5.25" floppy disks I had errors happen and I noticed them... likely all of them. The impact was huge when data was low and code was high. Plus, I didn't have much storage to keep track of so I was able to spot it. Today, I have more data storage than I have time to review it.

The natural entropy of magnetic storage does far more harm to modern data densities than the old floppies. One would expect more data is required to correct errors at the same integrity levels because of the densities involved today and the nature of the physics involved is different (more chaotic) than in the past... but we expect to use a % of the newly discovered storage so integrity would go down.

I dug up the study.
"End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study"
Zhang, Rajimwale, Arpaci-Dusseau

Cosmic rays do happen; odds go up as elevation increases. I would guess location also matters.
other looking provided this gem:
Google reports that more than 8% of every DIMM gets error, each year. Google found that the error rates were several magnitudes larger than small scale studies showed.

RAM may have a low error rate much better than HDDs or SDs. That does not mean that you won't have errors even if you have a good brand and treat it well. Bit-level errors can and do happen all the time without us knowing; other times it happens in the wrong place and we notice (but think it is something else) it isn't until it gets really bad that we notice.

Example, say your RAM has a 1% bit loss rate (ignore that is insanely high) well if 90% of your data is not touchy code but data, the odds are that you may not notice 1 bit getting flipped that often. Then you have the fact that RAM could maintain that error rate over decades of smaller faster RAM but now you are storing MORE data and cycling it MORE than was possible on the older computers. So, if you had 1 bit error every gigabyte of throughput on a slow 1Mhz computer with 1MB of RAM it would take a long time for that 1% bit flip to happen (and if you noticed you'd still not likely blame the RAM) -- but today pumping though in seconds what that old machine would take a year; the error would occur quite often. SAME problem with storage but with an additional problem in that they still have the same lifespan requirements - RAM can be refreshed can checked.

Something else to be considered, the error correction schemes being used today are being pushed by the demand for higher density storage. Your HD isn't doing huffman or any of those old simple bit recovery schemes they've moved beyond that long ago to the next gen stuff from what your 56k modem was doing to fight phone line noise. They could make it better... but you would be giving up significant storage space. Perhaps somebody with a good marketing scheme and enough upset consumers could get you to pay MORE for less storage space... I know I would buy into it.

Essentially, we are at a point where HDDs expect you to scrub them for errors every year to avoid the bit rot... which is what I now do... haven't detected an error in years... however, the block level checksums the HDD uses has false positive error rate (just like CRC16 does) and the odds of a false positive may be poor--- again, we are working in the trillions now-- up near it's limitations (I'm assuming whatever they use now scaled... but it may not have which is why more people are talking about these issues. We know it's unlikely industry has adapted to the trends evenly over the decades... it's likely become a minior problem before they are forced to change devices to a newer proprietary checksum and error correction scheme. )

Do serious work? use ECC RAM. I'm still waiting for some low power AM1 motherboard that supports ECC so I can build a ZFS server... the AM1 chip supports ECC but no motherboards do.

Term limits are bad. So are age limits; agism is just simply bigotry!

I used to like the idea but I've grown up since that time. The reality is that an entrenched corrupt crook is not alone; they have a large network of corruption supporting them. If you give them the boot, the network puts up a replacement; there never is a shortage of corrupt selfish lawyers! Then you have gerrymandering of house seats which has kept that from being democratic (as in democracy) for quite some time; you can't fix that with limits - any nutcase or idiot can get in for life until they break a law and then leave "to spend time with family. Michele Bachmann being a recent example.

On the other hand, you have great politicians who are reasonable honest or at least good at supporting their voters and those people are RARE especially in today's broken system. They shouldn't be lost when you are lucky enough to find one - despite that; some powerful people won't take it and these types end up in "accidents" or are just assassinated. So even without a term limit, if they are extremely effective and popular (assuming the voting system works, they'll be populist) they have a good chance of getting killed by the corrupt before retirement. Bad luck does them in as well-- you could be perfect but if you have a rare disaster and you didn't stock up on gear you shouldn't ever need to buy...

As far as all the other issues... those should be addressed in other areas. Trying to fix everything with 1 policy is a foolish move - you can't make term limit policy solve all the other problems.

Exactly. We keep having debates framed by PR firms and their $$$ so we avoid the real issues and get stuck into weaker positions. Net Neutrality doesn't make phones(SIP) equal to crappy video streaming (http.) Actually we should be yelling at network admins fire walling everything outside port 80! netflix should be using rstp or something identifiable as video streaming- their abuse of http should be the reason their service has troubles not because comcast is into extortion.