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The Supreme Court will continue to operate in the diminished state of only having eight justices. In the event of a tie, the lower court ruling would stand. Where the federal circuits are divided on an issue that results in an even split, the Supreme Court fails to establish precedent and a patchwork of laws across the country results in a lack of guidance for lower courts. Alternatively, the Supreme Court may decide to schedule the case for re-argument, but this further delays certainty for the courts and the immediate parties.Legal experts from across the political spectrum are urging the Senate to fill the vacancy because failure to do so will undermine the rule of law. Last week, 21 Attorneys General wrote: “The states and territories have a unique and pressing interest in a full and functioning Supreme Court. We rely on the Supreme Court to resolve questions of federal law, to resolve disputes between the states, to evaluate the constitutionality of state laws, and to ensure that federal and constitutional law are interpreted and applied uniformly across all states and territories. The Supreme Court not only resolves disputes that implicate States’ vital interests, it often does so in closely divided cases.”

Without an elaboration given, I can only assume that the question refers to the division between ‘enlisted’ men who make privates and NCO’s, and commissioned officers: where there is very little promotion between these classes, except by way of battlefield commission(extremely rare these days- last time it was done in the US Army was during the Vietnam War) or going through some form of officer candidate school.In that case… that would be a very very bad idea.An instructor busy grilling an officer candidate in the USMC Officer Candidate School at Base Quantico.Now, first things first- I’m not going to use US military training programs as an example of why this is a bad idea. US officer training tends to be terrible for the purpose of raising capable leaders(we’ll talk on why that is the case in a moment): and thus it would be atrocious for the purpose of talking about why it is indeed a bad idea to get rid of the officer-enlisted divide.I took a random week near the middle of training from an 2008 USMC OCS schedule, the fifth week of training, and grouped the time spent according to purpose.In that week, they have spent 13 hours on learning things related to leading men, 3.5 on exams, 6 on a combat course, 2.5 on close order drill, and 10.5 on martial arts and fitness.Close order drill, something of extremely little value to an officer and fitness and martial arts, which are useful but don’t help the officer do what his main job is, took as much of the training as the actual meat and bones of being an officer- for the twelve weeks that the OCS lasts. And the above example is relatively light on that: in the same schedule, once the admittance and settling in process of the first couple days are past, the first actual week of the new candidate from Thursday to next Wednesday has six hours of close order drill and sixteen hours of athletics.That, right there, is exactly why the US Army’s(or the Marine Corps’) fresh from school second lieutenants are notoriously incapable of proper leadership and require immense reliance on the(hopefully experienced) NCO. That is exactly why the infamous ‘butterbar’ is the butt of every joke in the US military for the past century- and deservedly so.Self-explanatory.I heard it from a Marine veteran himself, that the only way anyone could possibly fail the OCS for academics is if their time management is so atrociously bad that they did not have the time to study the material at all, and on top of that were falling asleep in the class. Another stated that only a moron would fail the Marine OCS academically. Indeed, the vast majority of those who fail the OCS or drop out of it are those who fail to live up to the exacting toll of the rigorous physical exercise- very few fail it because of academic standards.Seriously: look at it. The ‘ideal’ 2nd Lieutenant, the ideal platoon leader, is considered to be the one who delegates everything to the platoon sergeant and watches and learns how to lead. You know- after allegedly graduating from a course supposed to teach him that. The 2nd Lieutenant who can outrun every man in the platoon, yet can’t actually properly lead.That’s a disaster. And just so you don’t think me with a bone to pick with the US- this abysmal state is nowhere near exclusive to the US.So… Why is the focus on athletics a bad thing, and why is it a bad idea to do away with the two-tiered rank system?Because what a soldier is taught in his training is not just meant to be what he needs to do the job he will have on graduation- it is the core of what he will still be doing half a dozen promotions later.And the job of NCO’s and enlisted men, and the jobs of commissioned officers, and thus the root of what they must know, are completely different. Enlisted men and NCO’s have one field of expertise, whether it is infantry warfare or training new enlistees: where they have command duties, it will be in a small and immediate scale and will not progress beyond that.The primary duty of a commissioned officer is to lead: starting from a platoon and ending with brigades if not armies. The only reason a commissioned officer needs to be able to himself perform as well as a private in physical abilities and firearms usage is to not be a burden: the ability of the company commander to fight himself is of very little difference to the company alone, and from Major and up, the officer won’t even see direct combat unless things go to hell in a handbasket. A commissioned officer does not need to be any faster, any better a shot, or any more of an expert in how to use a squad machine gun than the minimum he needs to be to carry his own weight: more is surely nice, but to focus on that detracts from the officer’s job of leading.Enlisted men and NCO’s do, while commissioned officers make others do it as efficiently and as good as possible. The skills necessary to do something does not necessarily make you any good(or even any better) at making others do something, and these two skillsets largely do not translate into each other. Being a good fighter and being a good leader are separate skills, and teaching the same person to excel in both are largely surplus to requirements.This man, as the caption clarifies, is a Wehrmacht lieutenant. To get as far as that, he had to go through the sixteen week basic training, an evaluation by a select team of officers and psychiatrists to judge his temperament and ability, a nine-month course largely similar to NCO training for general leadership, another nine-month course for advanced leadership specific to his branch, and if after 1942, two six-week combat tours as an officer cadet- holding a NCO-equivalent rank. That process, giving the officer candidate everything he needed to build upon as he progressed up the ranks, made the German officer corps at the time better than any other of the era- and arguably, still any officer corps in the world today. That man was taught to be a leader far more than he was to be a soldier: he was unlikely to be any more able an athlete than the troops under his command. But he actually knew how to command them.Especially in the US Army, though definitely not exclusively at it, officers are already taught too much of how to fight and how to look good(close order drills… trim them down, please) and too little of how to lead. Seriously: an 2nd Lieutenant fresh out of OCS has spent twelve weeks learning how to be a leader. Not every nation in the world has an OCS-equivalent program: but of those who do, Singapore has an 38-week one, OCS Portsea in Australia had 44-week courses back when it still operated…Worldwide, and especially in the US, officers are already being taught far too little of leading and far too much of fighting and running and looking good. This is bad enough of its own. Scrapping what little leadership training those men receive and filling those ranks with straight promotions from enlisted men would take every issue the US Army and Marine Corps are having with their notorious ‘butterbars’, multiply them by ten, and in the process also obliterate the career NCO corps that rein in the butterbars and teach them what their officer candidate schools didn’t.The end result would be disaster.

I assume that you're building to learn, since you are also seeking an interesting problem to solve.GroupLens provide the classic data set(s), in my opinion, for playing with recommenders (http://grouplens.org/node/12). All of the data sets are smallish (100K-10M data points). They are unusually clean and dense. Their topic, movie ratings, are easy to understand and evaluate intuitively.For experimentation, the following are also interesting and of a scale that is still appropriate for experimentation on one machine:BookCrossing (http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~cziegler/BX/)Jester (http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/jester-data/)Libimseti (http://www.occamslab.com/petricek/data/)To have fun with much larger data sets, I'd suggest that StackOverflow and Wikipedia's public data dumps are fantastic and reach sources of more "real" data -- large, a little noisy, sparse.I'm the primary author of Apache Mahout's (http://mahout.apache.org/) recommender implementation. It contains both a Hadoop-based distributed implementation and simple non-distributed pure Java implementation of many recommender algorithms (user-based and item-based neighborhood methods, to matrix factorization approaches). I believe Mahout to be perhaps the most popular open source recommender framework out there, and think you would not go wrong to start there. The book Mahout in Action walks through this in detail.I don't mind pointing out that I am building my own take on a next-generation recommender system as the Myrrix project (http://myrrix.com). One of its goals is to be even easier to set up and run. It's also open source and a quite simple way to prototype a recommender system.Also pretty strong in my opinion are...Duine (http://www.duineframework.org/)easyrec (http://easyrec.org/)To evaluate recommendations, really, you have to run empirical tests. Make recommendations to live users, check the click-through / conversion rate that results from one approach vs another.Offline, in the lab, a common approach to evaluating a recommender is to see how well it can predict ratings. Some data is held back as a test, then the recommender's estimates are compared to real values. The average absolute error or root mean squared error are popular measures of how accurate the estimates were.This only works if your recommender input is something like ratings, or if the recommender operates by predicting ratings. Not all do. In that case you must resort to simple precision / recall tests, and derivates like F1 / normalized discounted cumulative gain.These are problematic tests for recommenders, but are better than nothing. Why that is is enough to fill another question and answer.