That rules out a 'bot from Apple, Microsoft (Linux), and Google (evil). Who's gonna make it?

Any cell phone company, but under contract with Verizon.

Does toughening drunk driving laws actually reduce drunk driving? Or is it just a moneymaker for the police departments running all the checkpoints and stuff?

Mostly it just gives the authoritarians a cheap thrill.

So you're expecting that someone is just going to hand you an opportunity?

Thing about opportunities is by definition (and despite the platitudes of self-help writers) you can't create them ex nihilo. They have to arise for you to take advantage of them.

Doesn't that mean there's an opportunity to make college affordable?

No.

You expect to elevate yourself with a 9 to 5 job? Isn't there an opportunity to find people jobs?

No, recruiters often find themselves unemployed as well. It's not a matter of the jobs being there and the people being unable to find them; in many cases an appropriate job simply isn't unavailable. Simple pigeonhole principle: if there are more job-seekers than jobs, someone's going to be left out in the cold.

You don't suppose there's someway to elevate yourself by finding a way to help people respond to natural disasters?

FEMA and "anti-gouging" laws prevent that.

You don't suppose there's someway to elevate yourself by fixing bridges? By improving health care?

Nope. Fixing bridges take money, a lot of it. Improving heath care doesn't work because there's far too many entrenched interests enjoying the broken system, and the other powerful players simply want it broken differently.

19. Maryland, $8,908

They call Maryland a "top public university"? Ha! US News is slipping.

Room and board add another $10K, BTW.

...goes to Germany, with the V1 buzz bomb launched on June 13, 1944.

Going from imperative to declarative programming models.

Oh, are Fortran and Lisp still fighting it out?

Worrying complex caching issues.

1960s

Understanding GPU programming models, shaders, and using matricies to transform vector spaces.

Pioneered by SGI in the 1980s and 1990s. Except using matrices to transform vector spaces, which has been around longer than the computer.

Asynchronous programming models.

Ancient.

Concurrency models. Strategies for distributed state propagation.

1980s at the latest.

Various database technologies and their pros and cons.

As old as databases.

Mobile application development involving complex state management, and having to worry about power efficiency.

A novel combination I'll admit... app programmers having to worry about what embedded programmers were worrying about all along.

Anyway, the details have changed on all of these things, but most of these don't involve new concepts.

Senate Bill 47 (Yee) expands the definition of âoeassault weaponsâ to BAN the future sale of rifles that have been designed/sold and are equipped to use the âoebullet buttonâ or similar device, requires NEW âoeassault weaponâ registration of ALL those semi-auto rifles that are currently possessed to retain legal possession in the future, and subjects these firearms to all other âoeassault weaponsâ restrictions.

I wondered WTF a "bullet button" was, so I looked it up. Apparently, California has some law banning rifles where you can remove the magazine without using a tool. So someone came up with a magazine release where a bullet would work as a tool. Now as long as you happen to have a bullet with you (and hey, who doesn't?), you can reload quickly. Make stupid bans, people find workarounds.

The significant fact of that measurement is that it's the highest one they've ever recorded.

And they've gotten a new highest one almost much every year since they started in 1958. I don't know if it's "significant", but it's not unexpected. The 400 is pretty much arbitrary.

The distinction between rebellion and civil war sometimes eludes me.

A rebellion becomes a civil war when it becomes clear it won't be quickly quashed.

In that case the pen is mightier than the sword.

The pen is only as mighty as the number of swords it can summon.

And I mean it sincerely. Sure, the DSM just categorizes sets of symptoms. But the problem with basing diagnoses on actual conditions is we have little idea what those actual conditions are, and not for lack of research.

This would require vast storage, incredible database crossreferencing, would imply certain kinds of information be available not only without warrants, but without ever needing to pull the original data. Not only would warrants be redundant, so would National Security Letters.

No. Data taken from warrants and NSLs can be used in court and the FBI can admit they have it and not worry about giving away their capabilities by acting as if they have it. Data taken in a dragnet like this could only be used secretly.

All without a single patriot in the government going public and blowing the lid off this, yet simultaneously putting this information in the hands of someone willing to shoot their mouth off on CNN.

Except that it has been revealed. People just seem to keep forgetting, like they forget the Tuskeegee experiment, like they forget the Gulf of Tonkin "incident", or various other nasty things the government has done.

What you said:
"The very same day, the head of the NRA said that all americans should be trained in automatic weapons for the eventual day when we have to take over our government."

What NRA President Jim Porter ACTUALLY said:
"And I am one who still feels very strongly that that is one of our most greatest charges that we can have today, is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so that when they have to fight for their country theyâ(TM)re ready to do it. Also, when theyâ(TM)re ready to fight tyranny, theyâ(TM)re ready to do it. Also, when theyâ(TM)re ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and the weapons to do it."

So training, yes. With automatic weapons, yes. But to take over our government... well, are you suggesting we're living in a tyranny, tovarisch?

So no, the NRA is still not in that category of organizations which advocates the violent overthrow of the United States government. Nice try, though.

If Syria wants computers that are available on the open market anywhere in the world, they'll get them. Even if every company in Dell's supply chain was 100% committed to upholding the export rules (which, obviously, they aren't), all the Syrians would have to do is set up a company in a non-restricted country to buy them by lying to a distributor about being Syrian owned, then ship them over the border themselves.