Yes and no. In a practical sense you're right and I said as much in the second paragraph. As for the legal definition of PII:

NIST Special Publication 800-122 defines PII as "any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual‘s identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother‘s maiden name, or biometric records; and (2) any other information that is linked or linkable to an individual, such as medical, educational, financial, and employment information."

Part 2 is pretty much met given the data that's being sent to doubleclick. But Part 1 isn't being met. This is an AND statement, so for this to be PII, both parts have to be true.

Not everyone goes to college to learn how to code. Believe me, I worked at a university for a number of years and nobody there could write code.

My FIL hired developers out of the local community college for his business. AFAIK they were paid well enough (this was upstate NY) and they were using COBOL, but they did a good job and his business grew. Not every coding position means you'll get $90,000 and options.

But your larger point is still true. Maybe he should have said 'higher paying', but it's all relative.

The example that the EFF gave listed general information about a person, but there's nothing that would directly identify the person. No SSN, no address, no name.

Yes, doubleclick and others could use that with other information they already have and determine with some probability who the person is. But that's a separate discussion on expanding what PII is or limiting what kind of data can be stored about a person, either of which I'd be in favor of.

Community college gives a few things:

1) a stepping stone to a college they might not have been able to get in before
2) a way of getting two low-cost years, then move to a better school and only pay for two more expensive years
3) two more years of education

We have an awesome tech school near my house. Nobody thinks that the graduates are going to become astronauts and doctors, but not everyone has to be a doctor or astronaut. We still need plumbers/electricians/carpenters/mechanics/welders in this country and those kinds of jobs should pay well enough to put a family in the middle class.

I got CE for like $30 or $40 back in the day/ Even accounting for inflation, AA is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE. Even after the purchase by Adobe, I think the cost to existing CE users was in the hundreds of dollars. They may have added cool things for power users but for casual users I'd rather wrestle with Audacity.

I hear it's involved in the production of nuclear weapons. How terrible is it? Hitler was addicted to the stuff.

Quit making these dumbass comparisons between everyday products and something scientific unless there's really something to be concerned about. Crap like this leads to people like Foodbabe telling us that the same ingredients in water are also used to degrade iron. It's true, but the fact it's true doesn't mean that water will cause us to rust.

If you don't know who those people are (and I'll admit I don't) then this isn't for you. It's about getting younger people involved and voting. Older people already vote more regularly, with people in their teens and 20s not voting with much regularity (see 2014). If Obama can reach those voters and get them interested in the process, then he's laying a base for Democrats going forward.

As for the 'all other problems being solved' nonsense, take a look at the schedule for Congress over the past few years and see what tough issues they spent their time working on.

AMD was the only company directly competing with Intel on the desktop/server markets. NVidia and ARM were embedded or other and thus didn't compete directly. Remember that the only reason we're still using x86 hardware instead of Itanium is because AMD bolted 64-bit on and it became a hit. Enough so that Intel uses it now.

AMD likely has (well had) cash from all the other things they did, just like other chipmakers.

So who serves on juries of those who are mentally unstable, or politicians (or am I repeating myself?)

They help go toward intent and mood of the conversation. There's a difference between "I'll kill you" and "I'll kill you :)" as part of a conversation.

I had a university as a client last year and they had at least one Windows 3.1 system still in operation in a research capacity. XP is still all over the place.

Research data usually needs to be kept for 7-10 years after the conclusion of the grant, then usually stored much later after since the people involved have left and nobody knows what to do with it. In our research of a 2PB file server, over 1/2 of the data hadn't been touched in over a year. The desire there is to move the data to cheaper tape backup and free up spinning disk. The problem with that is it's cheaper to buy more spinning disk than it is to buy a brand new tape array that will last for 10-15 years and be able to store a few PB of data. Think of it as initial vs. incremental cost.

But the part about employees leaving and not knowing what to do with their data is a big one. I'm sure there's leftover data from when I parted ways with my previous employer - I was there for 11 years and did a lot of work for them during that time, with data scattered all over the place. But since I'm gone there's no way they can ask me to come back and help, so all they have is what's left and if they delete any of that they have no idea what they're going to lose.

Not much more to be said about it. The staff will know how to react when there's real problems rather than searching for passwords and documentation for some system they haven't touched in 6 months..