In most States "teacher unions, firefighter unions, police unions, etc." are paid out of income taxes, property taxes and property taxes. Sales tax generally go into State general funds, and are used non-road infrastructure, road infrastructure, back funding of income tax cuts, Medicaid, and frivolous lawsuits over things like nullification of federal laws(albeit in Utah the States School land fund is used for this)

If you ask me SpaceshipTwo has great potential, Anything that moves us away from using upside down roman candles to get off this rock is an improvement.

Their are so many things that effect student performance outside of the classroom. The child's home conditions, parent involvement, etc. Yes testing can provide a certain measure of understanding, but using test scores exclusively or even as a large part of an overall evaluation of a teacher is incredibly flawed.

Teachers in my state at least(Utah) just are not paid enough in the first place(25-35k per year), if people want to implement merit pay based on some "report card" developed by a bunch of ideological extremists(like say the Utah Legislature) the end result isn't going to be pretty. All the tests will be designed to fail teachers and schools to push charter school rent seekers and likely used as an excuse to push privatization schemes.

Who knows any kind of toys they have barred in the NSA, and DoD. And given the amount of money that flies through defense contracts wouldn't be hard to hide that in a small line item somewhere(likely next to that Wayne Tech justice league space station *wink*).

http://www.sandpile.org/x86/opc_enc.htm its a mess, with 64bit we have a prefix byte , 1 to 4 bytes for the op, mod byte, and above that with avx we have the DREX byte, potentially imm byte. etc. I see no reason why intermediates can't occupy the space the next instruction would have and be aligned to the size of the fixed instruction length. that one exception to the fixed size rule shouldn't cause that much trouble for decoding of instructions.

ARM like any risc chip is great for a particular level of complexity, for a particular application, or situation.

Basically predictions of RISC eating x86 for breakfast were made over 15 years ago and never came to pass. Mostly by x86 morphing so that the difference was essentially irrelevant.

Exactly. x86 might be a pain to decode, but the fact that you can replace the backend arch that actually does all the work with one that fits the particular level of complication desired means that x86 unlike ARM(or any risc for that matter) can scale from simple 8086 with 29,000 transistors to that of a westmere-ex with 2,600,000,000 transistors. and go from 8bit to 64bits, or with SIMD 256bit. when they added large caches throw in instructions for cache control/hinting. What is really needed is a fixed instruction length CISC arch with an opcode address space large enough for future expansion, a means to deprecate old instructions, keep x86 addressing(the 64bit model that is), and an ISA that is designed to be easily decoded into whatever the chip is really running.

Also make it 64bit, attach a SIMD instruction set that doesn't suck balls, and a standardized implementation of an MMU would be nice.

Every RISC cpu is great for a particular level of complexity. And ARM is great for in order, no speculation, no branch prediction, ultra power sipping designs. Through smart use of their instruction set they have made themselves great for ultra low power, low IPC, low frequency platforms. ARM for a PC misses the point of why x86 has been successful, its easy to tack crap on the side without resolving to use of "co-processors", and the less commonly thought about advantage of x86 the fact that x86 instruction code is basically a hardware interpreted byte code at this point. No modern x86 actually runs x86 is breaks it down or decodes it into a RISC setup that is suited to the particular level of complexity of the current generation/transister count/die shrunkenness/frequency. If anyone truly cared to replace x86 they would design a fixed width CISC instruction set chip where the instructions are purposely designed to be a little higher level then risc and layed out in a way thats easy to decode into whatever the chip is actually doing the work in, so that when the next generation of chips come out you don't have to throw the whole thing out and start over like RISC has continually done over the ages.

"The reason this isn't happening is your medical associations artificially limit supply of doctors to drive rates up for the elite specialists." Complete BULLSHIT. What limits the supply of qualified doctors is the difficultly of the education and the cost of that education. It takes 8+ years of college, 2 years of residency, $250,000 to $400,000 dollars of student debt. All for a career that forces you into a specialist field if they plan to make any money what so ever as private insurance plays endless insufferable games, 20% of their customers never pay, and the consistent low profit side of the business(medicaid/medicare) that represents 70% of their business could easily be turned unprofitable by right wing loony's cutting the programs at any time.

1% of households more likely, so triple to quadruple that 1% to the actual number of people effected by the law, Also note that people most effected by the law are likely of voting age, along with plenty of non-directly effected people who can see the effects of this law by observation of those that are effected. I would bet after you weight some of these factors in that you have closer to that 10% you speak of, and if you count it based on voting eligible it is likely higher.

However in the enumerated powers congress is given to ability to raise taxes for the purposes of general welfare,... And the use of this power for the purpose of health care is supported as several founding fathers voted for and passed the "Act for the Relief of Sick Disabled Seamen July 1798", John Adams signed this into law as the then current president.

from Article 1 section 8,

"The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"