A good API is a work of art, an engineering masterpiece and a key success factor for adoption.

True, insightful, and comprehensive. Well said.

Interactions include communication, obstacle avoidance or leader following.

How about leader avoidance?

Maybe I want a certain number of slackers and deserters -- free thinkers -- in my swarm army.

Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart.

Harold Innis talked about this in his lecture series, and subsequent book, Empire and Communications. Excerpt:

The rise of absolutism in a bureaucratic state reflected the influence of writing and was supported by an increase in the production of papyrus.

See also Empire and Communications at Wikipedia. Excerpt:

The spread of writing hastened the downfall of the Roman Republic, he argues, facilitating the emergence of a Roman Empire stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. To administer such a vast empire, the Romans were forced to establish centralized bureaucracies. These bureaucracies depended on supplies of cheap papyrus from the Nile Delta for the long-distance transmission of written rules, orders and procedures. The bureaucratic Roman state backed by the influence of writing, in turn, fostered absolutism, the form of government in which power is vested in a single ruler. Innis adds that Roman bureaucracy destroyed the balance between oral and written law giving rise to fixed, written decrees. The torture of Roman citizens and the imposition of capital punishment for relatively minor crimes became common as living law "was replaced by the dead letter."

See also Harold Innis's communications theories.

Innis has his admirers -- John Brunner's epic Stand on Zanzibar opens with a laudatory quote from Marshall McLuhan about Innis.

But Innis also has his critics, who dismiss (or ridicule) the idea that the Roman empire fell because it lost access to Egyptian papyrus. See:

• The Roman Empire rose and fell because of papyrus?
• Papyrus and the Roman Empire: The story continues

Most of what I know about CIA mind control, I read in Journey into Madness by Gordon Thomas.

I don't have the book right at hand, but as I recall, Thomas made it quite clear that Dr. Cameron was valuable to the CIA precisely because he was Canadian -- an American doctor would be more closely scrutinized, more vulnerable to exposure.

Also as I recall, Dr. Cameron was quite vigorous about his business. He was not a tool to be deceived or coerced by American spooks. He did what he did of his own active volition.

His two lab assistants -- they were the super-creeps, the Igor assistants to Herr Doktor. The ones who spent a lot of time with patients, carrying out the doctor's orders, and whatever: drugging patients into comas, shocking patients into comas, drugging patients out of comas, making patients wear headphones repeating short loops of their own voices, over and over for hours ("psychic driving").

Of course, for "patients" read "torture victims".

Christ, what a world we live in.

I was thinking mind control, MK-Ultra, medically programmable assassins -- that sort of thing.

But okay, improved health would be a good peace dividend.

If common medications can do all that, just think what uncommon medications might do.

Weaponize it: soldiers who serve for home and memory.

Promis:

In the mid-1970s, Inslaw developed for the United States Department of Justice a highly efficient, people-tracking, computer program known as Prosecutor's Management Information System (Promis). Inslaw's principal owners, William Anthony Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton, later sued the United States Government (acting as principal to the Department of Justice) for not complying with the terms of the Promis contract and for refusing to pay for an enhanced version of Promis once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in separate federal courts and two congressional hearings.

During ensuing investigations, the Department of Justice was accused of deliberately attempting to drive Inslaw into Chapter 7 liquidation; and of distributing and selling stolen software for covert intelligence operations of foreign governments such as Canada, Israel, Singapore, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan; and of becoming directly involved in murder.

Later developments implied that derivative versions of Enhanced Promis sold on the black market may have become the high-tech tools of worldwide terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and international money launderers and thieves.

Reality is disappointing?

This is why we create fiction in the first place.

The JavaScript world meanwhile has developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome in which obvious weaknesses are spun around to become strengths.

Damn, this is both +Funny and +Insightful. Wish I had mod points, and the ability to assign two of them to your post.

"All but confirm" means "everything up to, but not actually, confirming".

So the "all but" includes "strongly suggests", "gives reason to believe", and similar suggestive (but non-confirming) phrases.

In other words: "We can't confirm (prove) the assertion, but we strongly believe in the assertion."

"Everything short of" is a similar phrase.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Attributed (questionably) to Edmund Burke.

Excellent quote; thank you.

I am reminded of a passage from A Tale of Two Cities, where Monsieur runs down and kills a young boy:

He took out his purse.

“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”

A Tale of Two Cities

I'm glad you had sardonic irony in mind; I made you a Friend with this in mind.

But damn, it's often difficult to tell, and somebody will usually take it literally. This is why I should stick to my rule: Don't comment on politics.