Your point regarding REASONABLE search being at issue is well taken. However, I don't think that the US Constitution gives the federal government blanket authority to ban practices that would make the federal government's exercise of constitutional powers easier. One could easily imaging a clause in the constitution saying something like "The federal government may make laws restricting the people's exercise of their rights when such restrictions are necessary to make the federal government's exercise of duly constituted powers easy/efficient/effective." I think the founding fathers would have quailed at the rather trivial potential for overreach in such a clause. Since the so-called Bill of Rights is not meant to be strictly enumerative of rights held by the people, but rather examples of the restraints on the federal government's powers, the fourth amendment's example of what is protected clearly can be extended to cover information held in newer technologies than existed in the 1700s. Since the US Constitution doesn't provide the power to restrict the people's exercise of their rights except in very specific ways, the use of encryption to protection information is a right, just as would have been the use of a safe to lock up information, or the use of a box of papers hidden in a burlap sack buried in the middle of the woods.

Perhaps few people in the United States listened directly to Goddard. But von Braun's efforts were informed by Goddard's work, so von Braun's subsequent work in the United States is in some ways a continuation of what Goddard started, just by a somewhat circuitous route.

I don't think Robert Goddard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard was a Nazi.

I know that Robert Goddard's time came before the "Space Race". I just want to make the point that we Americans didn't just have our prize from WWII, Wernher von Braun to inform us about rocketry.

In the interests of full disclosure, I was born and raised in Massachusetts, which may explain my more immediate familiarity with Robert Goddard.

Don't confuse "Doesn't have ..." for "Doesn't know how to build...". I grew up in the northeastern United States, the state of Massachusetts, to be exact. The Route 128 corridor was a hotbed of computer/electronics development. The phone system was antiquated, however. When I relocated to Tennessee, in the south of the country, a place considered to be relatively "backward" to the northeast (by people in the northeast, anyway) I was quite surprised that I could get ISDN phone service for less than what I had to pay for analog service in the northeast. The difference was that the telephone infrastructure in Tennessee was fairly new, and had been built using more current standards, materials, and technology. The infrastructure in the northeast was much older, having been built right around the time telephony was invented. I'm not claiming that older infrastructure explains all differences, but iI think it is a significant factor in many comparisons between infrastructures in long-developed countries against infrastructure in newly developed countries.

The acronym STEM breaks down into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; and this is a good way of categorizing the different kinds of learning that lie behind really knowing computer science and other STEM disciplines.

A "computer science" degree at an accredited 4-year college should cover topics related to computer science in all four of these areas:

Science: The science behind the technology, including chemistry and physics necessary to implement the technology that is used to build computational devices

Technology: Hardware and software technologies, including: logic gates, CPUs, memory (primary and secondary), communications interfaces, operating systems, compilers, databases, programming languages, etc.

Engineering: techniques for analyzing problems and engineering solutions to those problems (using software, typically)

Mathematics: binary math, formal logic, formal language theory, etc.

All of these together provide the grounding to enable the student, after matriculation, to go forth and do good things. As with all disciplines, the better prepared the student, the more deliberate the graduate's approach to solving problems and being productive.

I have an aquaintance who was (by her own admission and grades) fairly poor at her CS studies, but who was exposed to lots of core computer science STEM material in college. She is now an excellent practitioner/manager in a software development position. She is often frustrated by the plethora of "programmers" (both young and old) who didn't get exposed to the full range of computer science material. They don't know how to think about different ways to solve problems, or what the machine is doing, or how their code is translated into lower level instructions, and this limits their ability. Using tools at a higher level of abstraction is absolutely essential for achieving modern rates of productivity in programming (i.e., Java instead of assembler) but doing so without an understanding and appreciation of what your tools are doing for you is like running a race with blinders on.

I'm sympathetic to some of the ideals of the Tea Party. I believe that the 2nd amendment describes a pre-existing individual right to keep and bear arms for private defense as well as to maintain the security of a free state. I tend to vote conservative. I was aghast at some of the provisions of the Patriot Act and other similar legislation when they were proposed and stunned that they were voted into law.

I am certainly a person, although you may claim that I'm not a "true Tea Party person" because I'm not rabidly foaming at the mouth in support of the entire platform. I was opposed to those programs well before 2009.

I think actual people's beliefs are more nuanced than the overly broad "left wing", "right wing" labels would suggest, and that there are a number of "right wing" folks who are very concerned about privacy and freedom, not willing to trade it away for an illusive security benefit.

I had responsibility for a corporate data network a number of years ago, when cross-country link speeds were substantially lower than they are now. About 80 sites distributed across the US. We charged a flat rate based on number of "subscribers" (network users) at each location to put a location on the network as part of our cost-recovery strategy. The CIO asked me to develop a traffic-based charge instead/in addition to the subscriber charge. We analyzed the situation as follows:

If the source of traffic is charged for providing data to the network, it will limit the services that the source chooses to provide, even if those services are very beneficial to the rest of the network.

If the sink for the traffic is charged for the data it receives from the network, it can cause the sink to be charged for data it didn't request or cause that site to stop using services that create a better overall result for the corporation as a whole.

Locations subscribe to the network because they want access to services and because they want to be able to provide services. Charging by traffic would force providers and consumers into a level of analysis and complexity that would ultimately limit the usefulness of the network, and stifle creativity and growth. On top of that, adding cost-accounting to the network based on traffic would add about 30% to the cost of operating the network.

All kinds of "unfairness" exist in the network world. Our more distant locations thought it very unfair that they had to pay big bucks for a lower speed connection than our customers located at a corporate hub site, even though our actual cost to connect those customers was several times what we charged them, for example. Because we were a corporation, we could decide that the cost of the network was a pooled cost that benefited everyone, and that the best cost-model for the corporation's benefit was the flat-rate subscriber cost regardless of distance.

The commercial world is a little bit different than the corporate world, because the sources/sinks are more polarized (I'm suspect NetFlix puts more traffic onto the network than they pull off of the network). But the arguments seem similar in nature. Consumers on the network are there specifically because they expect to get traffic from providers. Verizon would have a much harder time selling Verizon's services (especially higher download rates) if the rest of the Internet didn't have other firms providing data that Verizon's consumer customers wanted to download. The value of the network is in both the sourcing and sinking of the traffic flows combined. Focusing the accounting on just one direction of flow ignores that value.

I'm only an armchair cognitive scientist, but my interpretation of this result is that it shows how an expert player has integrated the knowledge of how to play as a skill. The player no longer has to think through each situation and plan a response, the brain recognizes patterns and produces a response automatically. This allows for a higher-level of play because the player's conscious mind is free to act at a higher level, producing better tactics and strategy.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but how is this much different than some of the justifications used by the US government for applying the "interstate commerce clause" of the constitution to things that are obviously not interstate commerce?

I thought that the number of rotors had to be even so that the torque canceled out. Canceling torque being the reason why multi-rotor aircraft don't need a separate vertical rotor like an ordinary single horizontal rotor helicopter. Forgive me if I missed some obvious pun and focused on the odd number relationship instead.

Executable content from an uncontrolled source. Sheesh! Why do the folks who design/build entertainment electronics have such a limited understanding of the digital world? Going back to the invention of the Compact Disc as a music medium, the industry consistently demonstrates an inability to think broadly about the opportunities and consequences of the digital world.

People with home networks (i.e., lots of folks) and a TV that permits executable content that was received from an uncontrolled RF source to run on a CPU that has access to the TV's in-home Local Area Network connection will be so screwed it isn't funny.

If all TV's end up with this capability, we'll have to firewall off our TVs from the rest of our home networks. The last thing I need when I get home from work worrying about the unholy intersection of jackass hackers and jackass software vendors is my TV going rogue and hacking into the rest of my carefully secured digital castle through the television.

Is the US government asleep at the switch? Here is the opportunity to nip in the bud a huge threat to national security (ever see how many TVs there are all over all federal buildings these days?). If they can't understand basic Information Systems security enough to understand that executable content MUST be either be from a controlled/trusted source OR MUST be securely isolated from trusted network connections, then we need a new set of policy folks.

One way to stop this idiocy would be to convince the masses that this threat is too great to ignore. If no one buys the TV sets (which are essentially Trojan Horse wormholes), the manufacturers will certainly take notice. If we get the entertainment electronics journalists on board ringing the danger bell, that might put enough of a dent in sales to get their attention.

If I were a student living in one of the rental units, I would want to a) disconnect from restricted access network, b) have the cost credited to me in the form of lower rent, and c) get my own unfiltered Internet access. I think I would even be willing to go to court over it, and maybe even make it a class-action lawsuit.

I would feel the same way if the rental units provided cable TV service, but chose to limit access to certain freely available channels (i.e., local terrestrial broadcast stations), or of the rental units provided a shared FM antenna system but chose to restrict or control access to certain FM radio frequencies.

Whether the FCC has gotten around to making it legally so or not, access to the Internet should be provided as a common carrier service. The intermediaries (such as the rental company in this case) should not be able to try to get a cut of the action above and beyond simply recovering the cost of the service in the rent.

That's my opinion, however. I'm sure others have their own. What the people who control the rental units should bear in mind is that others may share my opinion, and if enough of them do it could get very sticky for them. Restraining people's access to freely available media doesn't go over well.

The child production strategies with which I am most familiar leave no doubt as to the female DNA source. The male parent's genes have a more difficult time ensuring that child-rearing resources are spent on the right combined DNA complex. Should we be surprised at the existence of various strategies to decrease the probability of the male DNA source rearing the wrong DNA complex?

A sniper may be able to avert a major action by removing an important player relatively surgically. He or she would be doing this at great risk to him/herself, by infiltrating an enemy-held area with no backup support other than his/her spotter. That's cowardly? I think the use of snipers is a lot more nuanced than is being presented here.

Interesting. I suppose that if I were being attacked by drones, I would consider it within the rules of war to discover where the drones were being operated from and to attack each and every location that I thought the drones were produced, supplied, and commanded from until they stopped attacking me. That seems to mean that anyone using drones is inviting attacks like that upon themselves.