Ever since I upgraded Ubuntu to v9.4 last Spring, my x.org has been crashing it anywhere from startup to a couple days uptime. There's no signs of trouble in the syslog, or any other logs, no signs of trouble anywhere until it freezes (cursor screenfreeze, but background processes like wget piped to madplay for streaming usually continue). I know it's x.org because if I disable (only) x.org and leave the console-only version running, it doesn't freeze even after a few days.
I'm running on an Dell tower with a P4/2.4GHz and integrated Intel graphics chip. I thought some upgrades in the past year would fix the bug, but they haven't. If there's no fix sometime after v10.4, I'll have to get new HW, and seriously demote my respect for Ubuntu.
I generally agree with what you said, even on the "56x" that I made. That 56x is a single fact among many, and not the point I made.
The point is that the calculation I criticized was based on entirely faulty numbers, GDP per capita. As I then detailed, with context.
The main point you and I both are interested in is how Chinese labor competes with American labor. When Chinese labor can charge $900 a year to be "middle class" (median income) while America's labor charges $32K, that's clearly a disadvantage - 56x. Of course, those numbers aren't a good model, either, because Chinese labor is already doing a lot of work Americans can't compete with at those prices. Americans do higher class work, and get paid for it.
Another problem with that point is that it's not comparing discretionary income. If capitalist Americans have to spend, say, 10% of income on healthcare but Communist Chinese don't, like any number of other expenses, the total incomes aren't comparable. If Americans spend 10% of our incomes on protecting our environment but Chinese people don't, that makes the total incomes harder to compare.
But when you look at standard of living, which includes health, safety, entertainment/culture, and free time (ignoring politics like freedom), Americans have a higher one. Which reconciles China's labor charging so much less, and spending less on their lives.
Your analysis rests on GDP per capita, as if that's how much workers mak, but it's not. GDP per capita might be $48,000 in the US, but it's not shared evenly by everyone. The median personal income is only about $32,100. Chinese median personal income is hard to find cited, but in 2003 urban median household income was about $900. In 2007, the US median household income was about $50,000. The American median is about 56x the Chinese urban median (rural China's large and poor population would make the difference even bigger, but they're not competing with Americans for factory jobs).
The GDP per capita is an average that includes all the money made by the few richest. All the profits on labor taken by corporations and investors. In America that disparity is pretty large, but in China it's larger.
Laws should work like computer programs, calling the "operating system" of the Constitution and acting on the "devices" of the real world under legal jurisdiction.
The problem is that bugs will cost lives and livelihoods. And the code review will be based on the comments, which will still be written by lawyers.
Can I run a Windows 7 virtual image (Virtual Clonedrive) on an Ubuntu PC somehow? On a P4/2.6Ghz/1GB-RAM machine? Fast enough to run Visual Studio 2010 and test Silverlight apps? How?
The people need the 21st Century Supreme Court to properly decide the correct balance between property rights and all kinds of other rights, like speech and other expression. And to decide correctly what is actual property and what is just a temporary government monopoly. To recognize that progress in science and the useful arts is promoted when our rights other than a synthetic "copyright" govern the market.
Or we can keep the 20th Century property privilege that the surviving old members of the Court find every excuse to protect.
We will see just how much change Obama truly brings. Or whether he's just a corporatist, who protects the only "right" a corporate person could possibly have: maximizing property and the power that comes with it.
ME: Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it
YOU: Which still requires that message to be distributed to several different servers. How does this not generate additional network traffic?
But I said just two sentences later
The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic.
Your last response is full of disagreements that I already "prebutted", but which you ignored in a decontextualized response, and only tangentially (or not at all) engaged in a later segment. You close asking me to read your posting history, but you're not even responding to this one with integrity. I could rebut (again) your disagreement by just quoting my previous posts again. But that's not a response to a legitimate argument. Except to say
This discussion looks like the common Web spiral where you're not interested in a working system, but in promoting your own. If your next post doesn't legitimately engage the tech and legal issues you're responding to, I won't be continuing in it.
Sure, beating spam is impossible. If you're wrong:
> Your post advocates a > (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante > approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following > may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before > a bad federal law was passed.)
The only thing you got right, though it's also market based (and uses existing legislation, where the FBI and other cops are concerned).
> (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
No they wouldn't.
> Specifically, your plan fails to account for > > (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
No central controlling authority is part of what I described.
> (X) Asshats
Asshats are irrelevant, too.
> (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
It works against them. Indeed, it uses their strength, massive distributed parallelism, to defend from them.
> (X) Extreme profitability of spam
It accounts for that by turning the same economics on them.
> (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
Again, irrelevant.
> and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
> (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
They're not that easy, and distributed trust defenses are practical.
> (X) Blacklists suck
The "blacklist" parts I described aren't simply black/white. That's why they don't suck.
> (X) Whitelists suck
No they don't, especially the grade way I described.
> (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
That's for people who write these stupid form responses. I just want to minimize spam.
>Furthermore, this is what I think about you: > > (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
Sorry dude, but the reasoning demonstrated in the way you completed this form makes me not care what you think about me. The people who'd have to do something to make what I described work understand the technologies and the issues, whereas you don't even fully understand that form.
No, you don't understand what I wrote. Or maybe you don't understand what is the load of the actual processing and transmission in the different cases.
Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it. They generate a hash and distribute it to the other machines receiving messages. Those machines need only generate a hash of incoming messages, which is not as intensive as scanning it for spam (like bayesian algorithms). The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic. The hash is probably something like 16 or 32 bytes, while the average spam is hundreds or thousands of bytes, in each message. Since unidentified spam usually means multiple messages (exact or similar), the prevented spam traffic is thousands of times bigger than the hash traffic that prevents it.
Besides, the hash traffic is nothing compared to the increasing video streaming traffic we're carrying, and all the other traffic (including legit email). And the whitelisting I described would remove even more traffic and processing. So it's really negligible. Especially since even an increase in traffic that slashed spam traffic by keeping it from clicking readers is a good investment.
As for the FBI and other US police, they do indeed have the jurisdiction. They routinely bust international crime rings with some operations in the US. They routinely operate in foreign countries at the foreign countries' request, often on crimes with no US activity. And when there is a jurisdictional boundary, there is Interpol and many other intercop infrastructures.
So it looks like you did read my post. What you don't understand is how the technology or the police work.
This discussion looks like the common Web spiral where you're not interested in a working system, but in promoting your own. If your next post doesn't legitimately engage the tech and legal issues you're responding to, I won't be continuing in it.
No, the network is just interconnecting the resources used by existing antispam applications. Which already scan entire mail queues - however much work and intrusion that might be.
I'm talking about making the existing resources vastly more efficient by eliminating the redundancy of separate recipients each scanning the same message to determine whether it's spam. And closing the percentage of missed spam by allowing multiple different scanners to spot it their way.
And indeed I also explicitly specified the FBI and other cops should go after the root of the problem: spammers.
So it looks like you didn't understand my post at all. Try reading it again.
I don't know why the superior resources of spam recipients aren't harnessed to overwhelm spammers and their spam.
Whenever a message is identified as spam, either by a server or by a recipient, that message should be registered in a database network shared among servers and recipients. Then all those servers and recipients in the network should automatically identify that message as spam.
The automarking should also mark messages very similar as spam. And the "votes" from immediate identifiers should count towards some metric that each server and recipient compares to some "confidence" in the network's accuracy. And whenever a message marked as spam is marked as "not spam", that vote should count.
Combine that system with default whitelisting, so only messages from known trusted senders are immediately shown, while unknown senders automatically put in a separate inbox and automarked spam in a separate spam box for review (and setting them as spam / not spam updating the message and sender's spam status).
With the 99.999999% of email users who are not spammers using that straightforward system, spammers would be overwhelmed. Their cost of spamming would exceed their revenue, since so little spam would get through - to only people who mostly aren't together enough to buy whatever the spam is advertising. Successful spammers would have to invest a large amount of money in a relatively large organization to get back small profits. Which would make them much more easily catchable by the FBI and other cops.
The processing doesn't have to stop with hydrogen as the fuel. The hydrogen can be converted into other chemicals with only a small energy cost. I prefer propane or "natural gas" (mostly methane), which burn very cleanly, especially in fuelcells, that already get over 40% efficiency (plus usable byproduct heat). There is already an extensive gas energy infrastructure, which we should grown to be universally available (perhaps with "last mile" as mostly electric to areas hard to pipe).
Cheap, networked fusion reactors and efficient energy storage are also very important. In fact they fit in well with propane fuelcells, since both the fuelcell and the fusion reactor might use hydrogen as the storage medium for energy at small and large scales, respectively.
But in this case, the H2 + O2 would combine in a controlled device designed to extract the maximum energy for directed use. Water + power. From sunlight, which is nearly all they have in the places that most need cheap water and power.
Taking inspiration from the way that plants use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, the MIT team led by Angela Belcher genetically engineered a virus called M13
The hydrogen generating virus was engineered by Angela Belcher. Who writes this stuff?
Why is the Education Department bad, even if all it did were collating info? It's the smallest Cabinet agency, with only 5000 employees in about 30 offices. Its work in organizing finance is of course essential, and has just been reformed to kick out the worthless middlemen banks previously given free profit for little work or value, recapturing all that money and reinvesting it in direct financing to students. Its other activity is in enforcing "No Child Left Behind", which is also being dismantled after a decade of failure. The total budget is about $70B, which it spends on those activities along with enforcing Federal privacy and civil rights laws ensuring equal access to education, and restricted access to personal information generated by our educational systems where most people spend at least 20% of their lives.
"Abolish the Department of Education" is, however, a bedrock agenda of Republicans. Is the reason you want it gone because you're a Republican?
You're unusual, because you pieced together seemingly every possible source of revenue and savings to pay for your tuition, which people around the 50th %ile of HS grads generally can't figure out how to do. And you did it by both working a job enough time while going to school that your loans were smaller than your income taxes, which makes it harder to get the most out of school - especially for people around the 50th %ile of HS grads. And you did it I expect without going to a public school as expensive as, say, UC Berkeley. But even a school like SUNY at Albany costs over $12,500 a year, for students commuting from their family home (ie. room & board is extra). $12,500 would be a lot for a $30K income family of five.
It's not impossible to get an education in the US for free (net after many years working to earn it, and not just in the classroom). Your achievement is a testimony to both your own effort and to the fact that it is at least barely possible. But what I described was a system that would increase the value of millions of Americans' entire future lives, every year, for half what we're spending on Iraq and Afghanistan; for about 5% of what we spend on our entire defense system - but which would create a lot more value even in just our national security. You yourself, under a system like that, would have spent probably up to double your time during college learning, instead of flipping burgers, and likely gone to a better college - even if the same school, but with more tuition money to spend on educating more students with more focus on their education.
That shouldn't be just possible. It should be the baseline.
Public school should be free at least through college. At the very least loans should have their interest rates set, or be refundable, depending on one's graduating scores.
If we spent $10,000 a year on only the (1.5 million) top half of graduating students for each of four college years, that $60B would buy more than the $120B+ a year we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan (plus the "business as usual" $TRILLION+ annual expenses for the Pentagon and intelligence budgets). That's free education and expenses for every American above the median performance. If we gave $1000 to everyone who graduated high school on time, and $500 to everyone graduating only a year late, cash and no strings attached, the extra $1.5B would pay for itself in the drop in people who instead "graduate to jail" at $40,000 a year (plus the cost of whatever damages put them there, and the loss of their taxable productivity).
And more Americans who can think and research for themselves would reduce how often we go into these expensive wars.
Education investment is the best investment. We've got plenty of places from which we can redirect the wasteful expenses instead into education, where the public is really building something that protects and benefits the public.
I'd buy a toilet with an upgradeable lab chipset that analyzed my health every time I used it. So long as I owned and completely controlled its data, sharing it with medical professionals sueable for privacy violations.
The millennia of humans only wondering "what's that smell?" without really knowing should come to a close in our lifetimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I upgraded. So far so good. Thanks.
I wonder when Ubuntu will support kernel v2.6.33+ . Ubuntu v10.4 seems to include b2.6.31 .
Of course I'm blaming Ubuntu. Even if other distros have this problem, then they're to blame on their specific machine.
I have Intel integrated motherboard graphics, and I have had Visual Effects turned off (they only crashed my system) and compiz* removed.
I swapped the RAM with the RAM from an identical machine, even though the Memtest+ showed no defects, but same problem.
I have found no other people with this problem, but it's hard to search for, since it has so few symptoms, just crashing.
The video HW worked fine under Ubuntu since 2004, and hasn't changed.
I didn't file a report, since I had no actual data to report.
Ever since I upgraded Ubuntu to v9.4 last Spring, my x.org has been crashing it anywhere from startup to a couple days uptime. There's no signs of trouble in the syslog, or any other logs, no signs of trouble anywhere until it freezes (cursor screenfreeze, but background processes like wget piped to madplay for streaming usually continue). I know it's x.org because if I disable (only) x.org and leave the console-only version running, it doesn't freeze even after a few days.
I'm running on an Dell tower with a P4/2.4GHz and integrated Intel graphics chip. I thought some upgrades in the past year would fix the bug, but they haven't. If there's no fix sometime after v10.4, I'll have to get new HW, and seriously demote my respect for Ubuntu.
I generally agree with what you said, even on the "56x" that I made. That 56x is a single fact among many, and not the point I made.
The point is that the calculation I criticized was based on entirely faulty numbers, GDP per capita. As I then detailed, with context.
The main point you and I both are interested in is how Chinese labor competes with American labor. When Chinese labor can charge $900 a year to be "middle class" (median income) while America's labor charges $32K, that's clearly a disadvantage - 56x. Of course, those numbers aren't a good model, either, because Chinese labor is already doing a lot of work Americans can't compete with at those prices. Americans do higher class work, and get paid for it.
Another problem with that point is that it's not comparing discretionary income. If capitalist Americans have to spend, say, 10% of income on healthcare but Communist Chinese don't, like any number of other expenses, the total incomes aren't comparable. If Americans spend 10% of our incomes on protecting our environment but Chinese people don't, that makes the total incomes harder to compare.
But when you look at standard of living, which includes health, safety, entertainment/culture, and free time (ignoring politics like freedom), Americans have a higher one. Which reconciles China's labor charging so much less, and spending less on their lives.
Your analysis rests on GDP per capita, as if that's how much workers mak, but it's not. GDP per capita might be $48,000 in the US, but it's not shared evenly by everyone. The median personal income is only about $32,100. Chinese median personal income is hard to find cited, but in 2003 urban median household income was about $900. In 2007, the US median household income was about $50,000. The American median is about 56x the Chinese urban median (rural China's large and poor population would make the difference even bigger, but they're not competing with Americans for factory jobs).
The GDP per capita is an average that includes all the money made by the few richest. All the profits on labor taken by corporations and investors. In America that disparity is pretty large, but in China it's larger.
Laws should work like computer programs, calling the "operating system" of the Constitution and acting on the "devices" of the real world under legal jurisdiction.
The problem is that bugs will cost lives and livelihoods. And the code review will be based on the comments, which will still be written by lawyers.
That practice, not recording each rep's vote, should be illegal.
Can I run a Windows 7 virtual image (Virtual Clonedrive) on an Ubuntu PC somehow? On a P4/2.6Ghz/1GB-RAM machine? Fast enough to run Visual Studio 2010 and test Silverlight apps? How?
The people need the 21st Century Supreme Court to properly decide the correct balance between property rights and all kinds of other rights, like speech and other expression. And to decide correctly what is actual property and what is just a temporary government monopoly. To recognize that progress in science and the useful arts is promoted when our rights other than a synthetic "copyright" govern the market.
Or we can keep the 20th Century property privilege that the surviving old members of the Court find every excuse to protect.
We will see just how much change Obama truly brings. Or whether he's just a corporatist, who protects the only "right" a corporate person could possibly have: maximizing property and the power that comes with it.
But I said just two sentences later
Your last response is full of disagreements that I already "prebutted", but which you ignored in a decontextualized response, and only tangentially (or not at all) engaged in a later segment. You close asking me to read your posting history, but you're not even responding to this one with integrity. I could rebut (again) your disagreement by just quoting my previous posts again. But that's not a response to a legitimate argument. Except to say
Goodbye.
Sure, beating spam is impossible. If you're wrong:
> Your post advocates a
> (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
> approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following > may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before > a bad federal law was passed.)
The only thing you got right, though it's also market based (and uses existing legislation, where the FBI and other cops are concerned).
> (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
No they wouldn't.
> Specifically, your plan fails to account for
>
> (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
No central controlling authority is part of what I described.
> (X) Asshats
Asshats are irrelevant, too.
> (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
It works against them. Indeed, it uses their strength, massive distributed parallelism, to defend from them.
> (X) Extreme profitability of spam
It accounts for that by turning the same economics on them.
> (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
Again, irrelevant.
> and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
> (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
They're not that easy, and distributed trust defenses are practical.
> (X) Blacklists suck
The "blacklist" parts I described aren't simply black/white. That's why they don't suck.
> (X) Whitelists suck
No they don't, especially the grade way I described.
> (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
That's for people who write these stupid form responses. I just want to minimize spam.
>Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
>
> (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
Sorry dude, but the reasoning demonstrated in the way you completed this form makes me not care what you think about me. The people who'd have to do something to make what I described work understand the technologies and the issues, whereas you don't even fully understand that form.
Please remove me from your list.
No, you don't understand what I wrote. Or maybe you don't understand what is the load of the actual processing and transmission in the different cases.
Instead of each machine scanning the same message, only a few machines that get it first scan it. They generate a hash and distribute it to the other machines receiving messages. Those machines need only generate a hash of incoming messages, which is not as intensive as scanning it for spam (like bayesian algorithms). The hashes do increase network traffic a little, but not nearly as much as the reduced spam effect decreases traffic. The hash is probably something like 16 or 32 bytes, while the average spam is hundreds or thousands of bytes, in each message. Since unidentified spam usually means multiple messages (exact or similar), the prevented spam traffic is thousands of times bigger than the hash traffic that prevents it.
Besides, the hash traffic is nothing compared to the increasing video streaming traffic we're carrying, and all the other traffic (including legit email). And the whitelisting I described would remove even more traffic and processing. So it's really negligible. Especially since even an increase in traffic that slashed spam traffic by keeping it from clicking readers is a good investment.
As for the FBI and other US police, they do indeed have the jurisdiction. They routinely bust international crime rings with some operations in the US. They routinely operate in foreign countries at the foreign countries' request, often on crimes with no US activity. And when there is a jurisdictional boundary, there is Interpol and many other intercop infrastructures.
So it looks like you did read my post. What you don't understand is how the technology or the police work.
This discussion looks like the common Web spiral where you're not interested in a working system, but in promoting your own. If your next post doesn't legitimately engage the tech and legal issues you're responding to, I won't be continuing in it.
No, the network is just interconnecting the resources used by existing antispam applications. Which already scan entire mail queues - however much work and intrusion that might be.
I'm talking about making the existing resources vastly more efficient by eliminating the redundancy of separate recipients each scanning the same message to determine whether it's spam. And closing the percentage of missed spam by allowing multiple different scanners to spot it their way.
And indeed I also explicitly specified the FBI and other cops should go after the root of the problem: spammers.
So it looks like you didn't understand my post at all. Try reading it again.
I don't know why the superior resources of spam recipients aren't harnessed to overwhelm spammers and their spam.
Whenever a message is identified as spam, either by a server or by a recipient, that message should be registered in a database network shared among servers and recipients. Then all those servers and recipients in the network should automatically identify that message as spam.
The automarking should also mark messages very similar as spam. And the "votes" from immediate identifiers should count towards some metric that each server and recipient compares to some "confidence" in the network's accuracy. And whenever a message marked as spam is marked as "not spam", that vote should count.
Combine that system with default whitelisting, so only messages from known trusted senders are immediately shown, while unknown senders automatically put in a separate inbox and automarked spam in a separate spam box for review (and setting them as spam / not spam updating the message and sender's spam status).
With the 99.999999% of email users who are not spammers using that straightforward system, spammers would be overwhelmed. Their cost of spamming would exceed their revenue, since so little spam would get through - to only people who mostly aren't together enough to buy whatever the spam is advertising. Successful spammers would have to invest a large amount of money in a relatively large organization to get back small profits. Which would make them much more easily catchable by the FBI and other cops.
The processing doesn't have to stop with hydrogen as the fuel. The hydrogen can be converted into other chemicals with only a small energy cost. I prefer propane or "natural gas" (mostly methane), which burn very cleanly, especially in fuelcells, that already get over 40% efficiency (plus usable byproduct heat). There is already an extensive gas energy infrastructure, which we should grown to be universally available (perhaps with "last mile" as mostly electric to areas hard to pipe).
Cheap, networked fusion reactors and efficient energy storage are also very important. In fact they fit in well with propane fuelcells, since both the fuelcell and the fusion reactor might use hydrogen as the storage medium for energy at small and large scales, respectively.
But in this case, the H2 + O2 would combine in a controlled device designed to extract the maximum energy for directed use. Water + power. From sunlight, which is nearly all they have in the places that most need cheap water and power.
Some other world where the oceans are full of the indium catalyst necessary for this process to work might be threatened, not ours.
Which means this is a weapons programme! So it's certain to receive way more funding than it needs.
The hydrogen generating virus was engineered by Angela Belcher. Who writes this stuff?
Why is the Education Department bad, even if all it did were collating info? It's the smallest Cabinet agency, with only 5000 employees in about 30 offices. Its work in organizing finance is of course essential, and has just been reformed to kick out the worthless middlemen banks previously given free profit for little work or value, recapturing all that money and reinvesting it in direct financing to students. Its other activity is in enforcing "No Child Left Behind", which is also being dismantled after a decade of failure. The total budget is about $70B, which it spends on those activities along with enforcing Federal privacy and civil rights laws ensuring equal access to education, and restricted access to personal information generated by our educational systems where most people spend at least 20% of their lives.
"Abolish the Department of Education" is, however, a bedrock agenda of Republicans. Is the reason you want it gone because you're a Republican?
You're unusual, because you pieced together seemingly every possible source of revenue and savings to pay for your tuition, which people around the 50th %ile of HS grads generally can't figure out how to do. And you did it by both working a job enough time while going to school that your loans were smaller than your income taxes, which makes it harder to get the most out of school - especially for people around the 50th %ile of HS grads. And you did it I expect without going to a public school as expensive as, say, UC Berkeley. But even a school like SUNY at Albany costs over $12,500 a year, for students commuting from their family home (ie. room & board is extra). $12,500 would be a lot for a $30K income family of five.
It's not impossible to get an education in the US for free (net after many years working to earn it, and not just in the classroom). Your achievement is a testimony to both your own effort and to the fact that it is at least barely possible. But what I described was a system that would increase the value of millions of Americans' entire future lives, every year, for half what we're spending on Iraq and Afghanistan; for about 5% of what we spend on our entire defense system - but which would create a lot more value even in just our national security. You yourself, under a system like that, would have spent probably up to double your time during college learning, instead of flipping burgers, and likely gone to a better college - even if the same school, but with more tuition money to spend on educating more students with more focus on their education.
That shouldn't be just possible. It should be the baseline.
Public school should be free at least through college. At the very least loans should have their interest rates set, or be refundable, depending on one's graduating scores.
If we spent $10,000 a year on only the (1.5 million) top half of graduating students for each of four college years, that $60B would buy more than the $120B+ a year we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan (plus the "business as usual" $TRILLION+ annual expenses for the Pentagon and intelligence budgets). That's free education and expenses for every American above the median performance. If we gave $1000 to everyone who graduated high school on time, and $500 to everyone graduating only a year late, cash and no strings attached, the extra $1.5B would pay for itself in the drop in people who instead "graduate to jail" at $40,000 a year (plus the cost of whatever damages put them there, and the loss of their taxable productivity).
And more Americans who can think and research for themselves would reduce how often we go into these expensive wars.
Education investment is the best investment. We've got plenty of places from which we can redirect the wasteful expenses instead into education, where the public is really building something that protects and benefits the public.
I'd buy a toilet with an upgradeable lab chipset that analyzed my health every time I used it. So long as I owned and completely controlled its data, sharing it with medical professionals sueable for privacy violations.
The millennia of humans only wondering "what's that smell?" without really knowing should come to a close in our lifetimes.