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Niven and Pournelle were on it. Raygun started doing it.
https://www.newamerica.org/wee...

And there's an sf think tank...

Now, on the other hand, the folks here who here who think they know what sf is are ignorant idiots. SF is FICTION. It's written to tell a story. One of the classic definitions of what sf is is the literature of "what if?"

SF authors are not writing to Predict The Future, they're writing to tell a good story. Can some things in those stories create enthusiasm for science and engineering? We knw they do. Can they suggest lines of thought that might lead to new ides? Of course. But confusing the literature of sf and "predictions" is for the clueless.

The PLA anticipates that the advent of AI could fundamentally change the character of warfare, resulting in a transformation from today’s “informatized” () ways of warfare to future “intelligentized” () warfare, in which AI will be critical to military power. The PLA will likely leverage AI to enhance its future capabilities, including in intelligent and autonomous unmanned systems; AI-enabled data fusion, information processing, and intelligence analysis; war-gaming, simulation, and training; defense, offense, and command in information warfare; and intelligent support to command decision-making. At present, the PLA is funding a wide range of projects involving AI, and the Chinese defense industry and PLA research institutes are pursuing extensive research and development, in some cases partnering with private enterprises. Battlefield Singularity: Artificial Intelligence, Military Revolution, and China's Future Military Power

Indeed, the Chinese have been much better than many other countries, including the United States, in coordinating government, academia and industry in AI research. Whereas in the US, there is still a lot of friction between leading private sector AI companies and the DoD, in China, they are in lock step. And unlike other peer adversaries in the past, China is approaching parity, or even exceeding, Western nations in AI development.

I don't think the quality of education has deteriorated at all, rather many students are choosing to get totally worthless degrees because they feel entitled to pursue their passion.

I keep hearing this but does anybody actually have data to back it up? From what I can see with a quick look is that half of student debt is held by STEM and Business degrees. Only 8% is for arts, less than half the amount that Sciences have. Arts and All Other are less total debt than Science and Business despite slightly higher individual debts. Perhaps when you said "art historians, music therapists, and western philosophy majors" you meant to add in MBAs, chemists and engineers but forgot

So 100 attacks in the past 15 years? That's 6 or 7 attacks a year on average. Were these all successful attacks with casualties? Or were some "bunch of guys planned an attack but were stopped before they even put together a bomb"?

I looked up the numbers and found this source. According to them, there have been 180 attacks or attempted attacks since 2001. (The 9/11 attacks aren't included.) In those, 357 people have been wounded and 260 people have been killed. This is in the past 15 years, so averaging it out, about 41 people per year are injured or killed due to Islamic-based terrorism. For comparison, 40 to 50 people are killed by lightning in the US and many more get struck and survive. So you literally have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being killed/injured by an Islamic terrorist.

It is critical but

The big "but" is what laws would they enforce that are not well served today.

Voter fraud has yet to be shown to be a real problem.
Perhaps because all the metrics are measured by German VW engineering services.

The current laws on computer hacking make the breaches of HC and the DNC servers
totally illegal. But wait the hackers were from off shore and the US has no jurisdiction.

Flaws in systems and applications are not getting fixed because TLAs at times see their
knowledge of flaws a bits of power and are unwilling to disclose to vendors for repair.
  https://www.newamerica.org/oti...
Flaws that are seen as power by domestic TLAs are in fact national risks that need
prompt and aggressive repair. To some degree the Win10 roll out seems to be
a strong move to fix some issues but the anniversary update is changing some rules
that are effective contract issue from a year ago perhaps managed by John Deer and CAT.

In some cases the allegations are more politics than anything.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...

There's more information at Wyden's press release.

In addition to Senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., the original cosponsors are Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Jon Tester, D-Mont. I would hope Bernie Sanders would support the bill but I don't personally know how much one can read into him not being an original cosponsor.

The above press release includes a link to a readable (warning, PDF) 1-page summary. The last sentence lists other supporters/commenters of the bill:

For more information, see comments by ACLU, Google, EFF/Access, OTI, CDT, NACDL, the security researchers Bellovin, Blaze, and Landau, and the Agenda Books from the U.S. Courts.

I care neither how expensive it is to wire up the US as a whole nor how expensive it is to wire up Sweden as a whole. I do, however, care how expensive it is to, for example, wire up the New York metropolitan area and the Stockholm metropolitan area, or comparable low-density areas of the US and Sweden.

I don't give a fuck what you don't care about: the fact is that the USA has more people living outside of major metropolitan areas than the entire population of Sweden. If you don't think that's going to have an effect on broadband penetration numbers, then you aren't thinking, and no one should care what you have to say on this subject.

The USA has more people than the entire population of Sweden, period - heck, the state of Georgia has more people than the entire population of Sweden, as does the New York metropolitan area. The CIA World Factbook says that the urban population of the US was 81.6% in 2015 and the urban population of Sweden was 85.8% in 2015.

So rather a lot of the land area of which we have a lot doesn't have a lot of people in it, and a lot of those people aren't sprinkled all that liberally throughout that land area, and any thinking person would understand that asking how hard it is to wire up the areas where ~80-85% of the people live and how hard it is to wire up the areas where ~15-20% of the people live are separate questions that must be asked separately. The average population density of a country large enough to have Big Wide Open Spaces and dense cities is a statistic that any thinking person would realize is meaningless for any discussion of, for example, broadband penetration, because we're not talking about wiring up a country of an average of 35 people per square km evenly distributed throughout the country, we're talking about wiring up a country where ~80% of those people live in urban areas and ~20% don't. (BTW, Sweden's average population density, according to that World Bank page, is lower than that of the US, if you're into comparing statistics meaningless from the point of view of broadband penetration.)

So the first question is "Why is Internet service to metropolitan areas cheaper and faster in Asia and Europe than in North America?" The answer isn't "butbutbut look at how big the US is!" You don't have to wire up rural Montana to get cheaper faster Internet to San Francisco or Kansas City.

And it would also be interesting to see how different parts of the world do at wiring up their rural areas.

But people should just stop using "butbutbut look at how big the US is!" as a response to criticism of the quality, or lack of same, of US broadband. It's not as if all that land is uniformly populated; there's a very large variation in population density, so most of the US doesn't have a population density of 35 people per square km - most of it is either significantly above that value or significantly below that value. (Remember, the average human being has approximately one testicle and one ovary.)

"Wiring up the US for broadband" isn't a thing; we're not trying to wire up a large area with 35 people per km^2. For example, "wiring the San Francisco Bay Area for (better) broadband" is a very different thing from "wiring rural Iowa for (better) broadband"; the problems and solutions are probably going to be very different for those two projects.

If Verizon is allowed to abuse this as a loophole, others will follow, and sponsored content will reign.

Looks like infrastructure spending has been kind of ok.

Saying that NSA surveillance cannot prevent a 9/11 style attack is silly, although saying it most likely will not is far more accurate (IMHO). The New America Foundation think tank published a report claiming that of 225 investigations performed since 9/11, only 1.8% of them were initiated based on NSA bulk metadata surveillance and 4.4% of the cases were assisted by the NSA spying program. These are obviously low figures so by shear odds it is likely the next huge terror plot would not be caught by NSA metadata spying.

But considering PRISM allegedly cost $20 million of a total US intelligence budget of around $75 billion annually over the past few years, the NSA program could still be considered a bargain. Although probably not once you factor in $35 billion in lost GDP because of a new found lack of trust of USA companies abroad.

And once again, I was only playing devil's advocate and trying to explain the other side of the argument. I personally believe the costs to personal freedoms dwarf the benefits of all enhanced security related programs since 9/11.