Even better - make it modular. You can do city driving on batteries, then swap them for fuel cells before going on a long trip. That will also help with battery replacement, which will need to happen eventually.

Yeah, but it's not like they can re-hire Steve Jobs to save them this time.

Automated weapons are already deployed - the Korean DMZ is guarded, in part, by autonomous sentry drones. If it moves, they shoot it - and they're armed with machine guns or automatic grenade launchers.

That's a good model. Don't try to make a drone that can distinguish targets from non-targets - make something that treats everything as a target, and deploy it only when you don't have non-targets to worry about. Or, to allow your own forces to operate in the area, provide an IFF transmitter to designate them as non-targets (civilians are still fucked though - so don't use it anywhere near civilians). Works fine for air, land and sea - we already have an established concept of "shoot to kill zones", this just replaces the soldiers under orders to shoot anything that moves with robots under programming to shoot anything that moves.

For automated weapons deployed outside such areas (or even ones within), I would say that a human still has to give the fire order. The automated system can identify targets, track them, pursue them, prioritize targets, do basically everything but pull the trigger, but it has to request permission to fire from a human operator. And for all legal and ethical purposes, that human operator can be considered the one who pulled the trigger. It's still some massive force multiplication even compared to modern drones, so I don't see why the military would have much problem with it.

Let's wait until after we get true AI before we try to give machines the responsibility to decide whether or not to kill someone.

Ease of use? Installing mods in previous games (UT99, UT2004 and UT3), while not particularly difficult for the tech-savvy, isn't exactly user-friendly, and when you mess up there's little information on how to fix it.

As for "why would you sell it on Epic's marketplace instead of on your own?", that's almost definitely going to be what most gamers will be using, so that's where all the customers are. I certainly wouldn't mind selling maps for a dollar a pop.

We're not at the level of Yakunovich. Yet. Give it another ten, maybe twenty years or so at the rate we're going, and we'll have no choice but for revolution.

I think it is somewhat naive to think that the US or EU did not play some part. However, the movement acted like a genuinely populist movement, so either the CIA is really, REALLY damn good at faking such things, or their role was limited to encouragement and advice, or perhaps putting some pressure on politicians at appropriate times. The revolution itself happened because the people wanted it, not because some other country wanted it to.

Crimea and the east seems fundamentally different. The rebels there are armed like a military, act like a military, and fight like a military. The Maidan was fighting with paving stones and molotov cocktails - the eastern "rebels" are taking down helicopters with anti-air missiles. The only thing that makes them not look like a military is the fact that they aren't wearing insignia on their uniforms (but most of them are wearing identical, military-looking clothes - a far cry from the "whatever is in your closet" the Maidan wore).

With you so far.

I have seen little evidence of US/EU covert operations in the revolution, and I've been following it closely. There was definitely propaganda support, maybe political pressure, perhaps even covert advisors trying to make sure that the revolution was successful, but it was by and large a Ukrainian revolution.

The thrust of the revolution was forcing out a government that was blatantly corrupt and increasingly dictatorial, not to join up with the EU. While I usually frown on getting involved in other country's problems, I don't think I could get too upset about lending a hand to a revolution that was forcing out such a government, particularly when the support is only aiding a revolution that would have happened anyways, not forcing a revolution that the people did not really want

Crimea is "majority Russian" only because Stalin forced out the native Tatars. And while there was a separatist movement (nonviolent) before the revolution, it was a secessionist movement, not a Russian one. There was no way they got the numbers they claimed legitimately.

Russia's tactics are different. Even if you assume CIA involvement in the revolution, they let the actual people perform the revolution - which means a good number of people had to be ready to fight for it.

Russia is sending in their own military. They are the ones fighting this counter-revolution - not the people they claim to be helping. This is by and large a Russian military intervention.

The western revolution was fought with molotov cocktails by students and retired veterans. The eastern revolution is being fought by armed and trained soldiers, following radio orders from Moscow. It's impossible to claim they're the same tactics, which means it is completely valid to treat them differently.

The CIA isn't mad that Russia is using the same tactics - they're mad because Russia is unable to find enough people to actually fight this war in Ukraine, so they're just sending in soldiers and pretending it's a popular rebellion.

And this is where I lost your train of thought, because it sounds like you read just enough of a history book to know what has happened before, but didn't read enough of them to realize that nations aren't people. They don't have long memories, and they don't act consistently.

No.

Crimea was pro-secession, but not by a significant amount, and they were most definitely NOT pro-Russian.

All of the movies were money-grabs. Hope, Empire and (to a lesser extent) Jedi were good movies regardless, but they were just as money-grabby as the prequels.

Oh, I'm aware of the danger (as well as the German use of it - I actually got the idea from the V-2 missile, which used an H2O2 monoprop rocket in the fuel pump).

It's still less dangerous than many alternatives (like nitric acid), particularly since I'd only be using a quarter-liter or so at most. And the marginally-safer oxidizers like LOX would be harder to handle.

But I can't really say that the safety issues didn't play a part in deciding not to go through with it.

My car (2013 Fiat 500) uses an ignition key, but has no accessory position (which is REALLY annoying). It also stops cranking automatically - I cannot hold it in the crank position to keep it cranking.

Trust me, even if they keep the current key system, they'll find ways to remove user control.

I recently considered getting back into model rocketry, but using more high-end rockets rather than little Estes kits. Since I've read plenty about rocket chemistry (read "Ignition!" if you like chemistry at all - it's worth it), I quickly figured out that a relatively easy* one to build would be a hydrogen peroxide monoprop - H2O2 decomposes into H2O + O2 in an exothermic manner, which can be used for thrust. It an also be used as an oxidizer with most fuels. For both you'll need high-strength peroxide - the CVS stuff is just a solution of like 1% H2O2 in H2O, but you'll want 80% or higher for rocketry. I decided to see how readily available it was, and how expensive it would be. It wasn't too expensive, and could be found fairly easily, but I wonder if I'm now on a watch list just for looking at a chemical that honestly wouldn't make a good terrorist weapon at all.

* This would be easy in comparison to, say, one using nitric acid or liquid oxygen. It would still be a very difficult thing to build, which is why I'm probably not going to actually build one.

Well, sure. Gotta secure that Republican vote somehow!

"Climate Terrorism"

Yet another hindsight bias. The American commanders had no knowledge of that - quite the opposite, in fact, since the Japanese were making active preparations to defend the south islands.

Consider also that there was a mutiny against the emperor attempting to *continue* the war. The Japanese military (at least in the upper command) was more than ready to keep fighting, and up to that point the Japanese military had pretty much ignored any attempt by the government to rein them in.