*without good reason, that is. (Feel free to bash me for that one.:])

Please, don't be an asshole, at least not for good reason.
Why you would think one particular ancient metaphor in one particular language must be known by all the 7 billion people in all corners of this planet is beyond me.

(You do know you're on the Internet, don't you?)

Lack of familiarity with any specific specialist field has no bearing on intelligence, dumbass.

What? That completely misses the point of this entire excercise.
The point is to design and test a system that is capable of walking across such obstacles, just like you are, when it does become necessary. Once such a system is implemented, it will still make just as much sense to design the robot to avoid obstacles when it can, except now it can still keep going when it can't.

In other words, these guys are trying to design a better support and locomotion system for future robots, instead of making a robot that knows where not to go.

I'm surprised I seem to be the first to say,

Noooooooooooooooo! :(

Assuming he is from the USA, your statement isn't really defensible. Higher education in the USA is not available for lower classes (I have a hunch that now includes a large part of the former middle class as well), so his only choices were either "put yourself in debt" or "don't get an education". I can't really see how that is his fault, given that he has no way to influence the system (and no, voting doesn't count). It's easy to say "your fault" for those who grew up in the 1st world (but not in the USA) and so are perfectly used to things like education and healthcare, but in the (present-day) United States the situation is entirely different: one of the major incentives for people to not rock the boat too hard and continue working throughout their entire adult life is to earn the right to higher education for their children. If you don't manage to save up enough for them to go to university, they'll have to become worker drones (or, well, criminals) as well, and this goes on until one generation finally builds their stack high enough to reach the first latch on the poverty trap.

In other words, the topic of higher education in the United States differs significantly from the same topic in relation to most other countries. You can not extrapolate from what you experienced: the cards are stacked heavily against maximizing the number of educated people available (which would normally be the goal).

They're already well aware of that. Which is precisely why they're taking this so seriously: they cannot allow this knowledge to spread too far and throw the legitimacy of polygraph tests into question.

If it was a demonstrably legitimate way to learn if someone's telling the truth, they wouldn't need public perception to prop it up.

I can't ignore the amount and similarity of these reports. This can't just be some paranoid group of people losing their rationality thanks to the War of Terror, as I had previously thought - reports indicate that these exact same rules are showing up in schools all over America, and they seem to be progressing at the same rate as well. (Remember when they only lost it when an 8-year-old said "I'll kill you all" out of rage? Yeah, now it seems rational in comparison...)

You can't help but wonder how all those millions of children currently being put through elementary in the USA are going to reconcile being shown exceeding amounts of pointless violence all throughout their childhood on TV, with seeing adults go nuts with fear the moment they point a finger at their buddy and go "boom".

At the very least - if you ignore all those who will grow up simply being confused - it's going to create a generation of actual terrorists.
What is it that neglected children crave? Anything that is rewarded with an immediate and strong reaction from their surroundings (especially their parents and teachers), just look at teenage vandalism. Now all these children are going to learn how to make adults immediately afraid of them without actually doing anything. They're going to use this knowledge, and once they finally get something actually dangerous in their hands, they will:
1) become intoxicated with power (see: abused kids who buff up during adolescence),
2) not realize their actions will have consequences (as harmless finger-pointing gets the same kind of response as a real gun), and finally, once the threat becomes real,
3) be gunned down mercilessly by over-trained SWAT teams in broad daylight.

And of course this will, in turn, reinforce fear in everyone else and "prove" to the citizens that military population control methods are necessary for their safety.

Yes, those are probably even worse... It makes me wonder how they were taught to write English. Nowadays you almost semi-automatically pick up on English just by hanging on the Internet a lot of the time, even if you've never met a native English speaker. One would expect grammar to be improved by it as well, but apparently not...

By the way, I learned two new words from your post, thanks :)

THIS, a thousand times this!
I'm not much of a grammar nazi, as I view communication to be the primarry purpose of text and not syntax... but "should of" actively takes chunks out of my brain every time I read it. It honestly makes me feel like I'm trying to talk to a retard, it just makes so little sense.

The worst part is, while currently it's almost exclusively native English speakers who make this mistake (which is pretty odd), soon enough people like me who learnt by practice are going to start using it en masse, and then it'll be here to stay (like "could care less" - another one perpetuated by native speakers, btw).

That was a very interesting read, thank you.

...and me at:

Exactly what is it about stealing data from everyone that is "perfectly fine"?

Moreover, what is it about being within the borders of one arbitrary country that makes the above suddenly "no longer perfectly fine"?

lol, that is allowed in your country? Whoever thought that was a good idea? :) (I mean the 16 bit, I bet there's a law against the texting...)

You forget the fact that the only reason these people are injecting this shit is because they're hooked on heroin, and can't get any of it.

Addiction at this level is not like how most Slashdotters seem to imagine it, it's not just a strong craving "that you will weather if you are smart like me". The physical pain is just one part; the psychological addiction part is the one that will short-circuit your rationality by simply changing your thoughts (pretty much all the time) from how bad or dangerous this is, to how good it feels when you do it. And when you're deciding whether or not to do something, and the only argument your mind even takes into consideration is "it feels fucking awesome and I want to feel it again", it doesn't matter how smart you are; you're going to do it.

...let me be the first to say: oh shit!!!

Aside from the obvious screaming lunacy of militarizing even Earth orbit, I have to wonder what the hell the "leaders" of this new Amerikan Union are trying to accomplish with this. Surely if they were responding to a threat, they wouldn't be announcing it for the whole planet to know. They want the whole planet to go "fuck, I'm scared of those Americans".

Well, I am. The USSA is terrifying at this point. But that's not going to make people think, "ooh we better be nice to the Americans so they don't kick our asses" - what they're going to be thinking will be more along the lines of "the Americans are dooming us all, we must do something to stop them".

Which, come to think of it, might be exactly what they want: a war that they didn't start.