I want to see a computer play Mornington Crescent.

Making decisions like this requires consideration of the consequences, which is the very definition of sapience.

If the robot is non-sapient, but simply has a configured list of users who it may or may not serve alcohol, the decision was made by the person who configured it. This would be an acceptable solution, although cumbersome and inflexible. Probably wouldn't work well enough for public bartending, but a robo-butler could work this way.

If the robot is sapient, it would be capable of making such decisions on its own. In fact, you might see robots refuse to serve alcohol at all, claiming moral reasons. On the other hand, you might see libertarian robots refuse to *not* serve someone alcohol, if they value people's right to self-determination. This would also be acceptable, but we are nowhere near this level of AI.

If the robot is non-sapient, but still expected to identify children and alcoholics on its own, problems will result. Detecting children is possible, with some false-positives (it's hard to tell a 20-year-old from a 21-year-old by appearance) and false-negatives (dwarfs/midgets/little people/hobbits/whatever the current PC term is), but how do you detect an alcoholic by their appearance?

The obvious solution for non-sapient robots requiring more flexibility than simple whitelists/blacklists, since alcohol is already a controlled substance, is to have robots require you to present ID for alcohol, and perhaps add a feature to IDs to show "recovering alcoholic, do not give alcohol" if we decide that's something that's important. Then again, we've not felt the need for that yet, with human bartenders, so maybe this whole debate is over something we've already as a society decided isn't an issue.

ASW aircraft are essentially specialized to the point that ALL they can do is ASW, and they do not operate solo. Strategically, you can treat them more as an ASW component of their carrier ship, than as individual participants in the battle.

I'm not going to argue your main points, but as a less partial party I need to raise some points of my own. This is less aimed at you (I'm sure you know everything I'm about to say), and more aimed at the other readers, to give them a more objective viewpoint.

1. The natural counter to a submarine is another submarine. Russia and China may not be able to match us fleet-for-fleet, but assuming they're the aggressors, they'll be able to bring all their force to bear at one point, outnumbering us in the battle but not the war. Do we have half our submarine fleet or more near Taiwan at all times? If not, they can make a reasonable attempt at crossing.

2. Submarines and aircraft basically can't touch each other (specialized ASW aircraft notwithstanding). If the entire Russian Tu-95 fleet flies over the entire US submarine fleet, neither one will do anything to the other. They might not even notice each other. Fleets and aircraft carriers are declining in primacy as aircraft ranges increase. We flew a B-52 combat mission from America to Iraq and back without landing - aircraft carriers, and thus navies in general, are no longer the sole way to project power. If America and Russia finally go to war, the winner will probably be the one who wins the air war, not the one who wins the sea war or land war. (Of course, with nuclear missiles in play in a US-Ru war, the real winner would be China, unless one of us decides to nuke them anyways while we're at it).

3. Consider the effect of naval drones. How many small boats is an aircraft carrier able to fight off? Imagine a USS Cole scenario, except instead of just one suicide boat masquerading as a civilian, it's dozens or even hundreds of suicide drones. You don't need to take my word for how effective these would be, there were Navy wargames for asymmetric warfare that had a "fleet" much like I proposed take out the entire Blue-team fleet, which was basically a full carrier group (the brassholes decided this was "cheating" and ordered the wargames to continue according to a script guaranteeing Blue-team victory) [citation: look up "Millennium Challenge 2002"]. Surface drones may be no threat to our subs, but our subs are similarly no threat to them, and eventually someone will get submarine drones usable. At that point, they're basically just really smart torpedoes with trans-Atlantic range. I'm not sure what the counter for *that* is, except for "not being in the water" (see point 2).

When your main means of detection is listening, yes, it is.

Submarines, when they really don't want to be found, shut down. If diesel-powered, they shut the engine down and run off battery. If nuclear, they run the reactor at as low a power as possible. They turn off as much machinery as possible. They stop the screw and stay still - resting on the surface, or just floating in the middle of the ocean.

Submarines are actively moving. Plane wreckage falls to the bottom and stops.

Since when does facebook offer a reasonable expectation of privacy? If you don't want it to be public, it shouldn't be on facebook.

Addendum: this is no longer the case on the front page, but page 2 is now broken in the same way. It seems to be caused by the image on "Listnr Wants to be 'Your Listening Assistant' (Video)".

I do not recall having problems with video posts before, so I still suspect some recent CSS changes are breaking things that were once working. Was the lesson not learned after Beta? Don't break things that currently work.

Did nobody at DICE test the CSS changes? Because the front page is broken on a 960px-wide window now, and it wasn't yesterday. Since that's a window pinned to half of a 1080p screen, and /. doesn't come close to actually needing a full 1920px, I'm sure there's a lot of people browsing the same way, and I'm sure a lot of them won't be browsing back if you keep fucking basic shit up like this.

Movies still have audio compression, but it's higher fidelity than most audio streams people listen to. Blu Ray offers 2-3 lossless formats, but, unless we're looking at a concert Blu Ray or something, I would be surprised to find that they're using those codecs.

He didn't give us the loudness wars. Mix engineers have very little to do with the loudness wars. Here's an example (yes, again, the irony of using YouTube for examples such as these is not lost on me), using an album that Scheps was recording engineer and mix engineer on, where the levels are drastically different due to the different mastering engineers.

Mastering is a difficult process, but for about 15-20 years, the sole goal has seemed to be to keep the "volume" the same from one track to the next, and make sure that it's as loud as possible. I still blame the multi-disc CD changers for the real kick off of the loudness wars.

Being an audio engineer, it pains me that this is considered good enough. That being said, my response was spurred because, in the post I replied to, you referred to it as HD audio. If what you get off YouTube (even in HD video) is considered HD audio, then iTunes has been selling people the equivalent of 4k ever since they did iTunes Plus.

As far as loudness wars are concerned, we've passed the peak of the wars imho. Albums are getting released with consideration for dynamics these days. I still look for an album mastered for vinyl because the lathe just can't handle the loudness that a lot of modern albums come out at.

You clearly do not know what HD audio is, YouTube doesn't even qualify as decent audio. Very good explanation from an audio engineer (ironically, found on youtube) is right here