It should also be pointed out that at the time they were conducting the Able/Baker tests, they didn't realize just how nasty the effects of nuclear weapons against warships is. The military scheduled three tests as part of Operation Crossroads - Able, Baker, and Charlie, held at Bikini Atoll. It was considered important to know how effective nukes would be against ships, and what sort of defenses could be employed, how long they could survive, etc. Various animals were used in place of crew members at different points around the ships, with radiation measuring devices.

Able was an air burst, and for the most part the ships survived, partly because it missed its target, the Battleship Nevada, though it was judged based on the data that the Nevada would have been a floating coffin from the radiation. So the ships got hosed down and the second test, Baker, was conducted, with a nuke detonated some 90 feet below the water, which not only sunk multiple ships, but sprayed the radioactive byproducts pretty much everywhere, and it got into everything on all the ships, to the point that they had to cancel the third test because it was judged impossible to clean them up at that point.

So in short, they intended to clean up the surviving ships and recycle them, but the nature of the test served to make that impossible.

If the climate isn't ideal for growing almonds, maybe we should grow them somewhere else? Nah, that's a crazy thought.

The question becomes how maneuverable one is, versus the other, as well as the question of speed.

In fact, let's we have a rocket powered drone, that has its own guidance systems, and an explosive charge, that is trying to hit the jet, or come reasonably close to it and explode that charge, in order to destroy the jet. ...and now let me point out that these "Drones" have been in regular use by armies worldwide for over fifty years. They're called guided Surface to Air Missiles.

That's just what a Rules Nazi would say.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what took Thompson down was not online harrassment, twitter trolling, or IRL threats of violence/rape/etc - it was clear-headed dissection of his poor arguments and the legal sanctions against his own atrocious behavior. In short, he was given enough rope to show himself up as the idiotic demagogue he is/was. Twitter trolling, sending pizzas to his house, and other Anon-style pranks may have made people feel better, but they probably had no positive impact in the court of public opinion. At the very least, that sort of behavior wasn't going to convince anyone that didn't already hate him.

On the other hand, what about Anita Sarkeesian? Can we really say she's been responded to in any sort of rational way? No, what the public sees is a bunch of juvenile attempts to shout down a critic. We're not even talking about how inappropriate rape or death threats are, we're talking about how counterproductive it is to let the conversation change over to that, rather than pointing out how she's wrong, her criticisms are overblown and uninformed, etc. Hell, I would never have even heard of her if it wasn't for the threats and harassment, because THAT'S the story the media keyed in on.

That's why her accusations stuck, not because anyone was evaluating them on any merits, but because a bunch of trolls turned it into a conversation about her being attacked, which caused people to take her side. I'm sure it helped that she was in the role of "feminist critic under attack" rather than "overly litigious lawyer" and thus much more sympathetic in nature, but the ultimate point is that the Gamergate trolls' behavior isn't just objectionable on its own merits, it's also proved rather counterproductive.

Nevermind many of the various "voyages of discovery" that European nations conducted from the 1400s onward that went into uncharted territory, spending long times at sea, with the only outside contact being potentially hostile.

Really though, isolation is only a real problem when you get down to small numbers. One person by themselves will go insane, but a large enough group isn't exactly unusual or unnatural. How many people do you really deal with in an average day, after all? The only real question is what comprises a healthy number. I'd say if we get somewhere in the 6-7+ range, it's really not going to be an inherent issue psychologically (personality issues and such may vary, of course, based on which people we're talking about).

I disagree. The internet of 25 years ago, and the internet of today, are very different things. Even the internet of 10 years ago is noticeably different than today, partly because I can take it with me in the palm of my hand, in ways that weren't possible then (or were limited to the ridiculously wealthy) - and that's not solely a function of computing power increases. It's improvements in a lot of things, from battery storage capacity and size to spectrum use to the establishment of robust wireless data networks and so on.

Furthermore, the advance of technology isn't about "major breakthroughs" so much as it is about iterative improvement in all things. For instance, guns were invented a long time ago, but the difference between guns in 1500 and guns of 1750 is pretty big. Even the difference between guns in 1900 and 1950 was noticeable, nevermind 1950 and 1975, or 1975 and today. The same sort of thing can be seen in all sorts of fields and technologies - the rate of improvement has been increasing, regardless of whether it comes in the form of things that you notice, or things you don't, from cars to jets to medicine and so on.

The pace of technological advance has been accelerating for some time, and "Moore's law" was not the driving force by any means, because the phenomenon started long before the invention of the transistor or integrated circuit.

Let's compare 0 AD and 1000AD. Sure, there are some advances and changes, but by and large not too different. Jumping from one time to the next, technology is going to be the least of your concerns as far as difference.
Now let's go from 1000AD to 1500AD. Changes are a little more apparent, from gunpowder to better ships, but still not that much farther forward.
1500 to 1750AD - Still pretty similar, but things are visibly more advanced.
1750 to 1850AD - Railroads, early industrialization. Noticeably more advanced.
1850AD to 1900AD... and the further ahead we go, the more changes and advances we see in a shorter and shorter time period. At the moment, things are changing so rapidly that the difference between today and 25 years ago looks more like the difference between 1500AD and 1750AD, if not moreso.

Part of the reason that people kept heirlooms for generations and generations is not only that they were built to last, but they were expected to have designs that lasted, because things didn't change in design or function for hundreds of years at a time.

You would need someone with some connection to you, just one that would not be readily apparent such as family. Some sort of amount of trust, both in wanting the money, and in the fact that either one of you can spoil the whole thing for the other, but also based on a third factor. A mistress you're planning to run away with, that nobody knows about, would probably be the most ideal, as they're romantically attached to you, and this helps them get what they want, which is to tie you to them. It's certainly not foolproof, but better than soliciting some random person.

Needless to say, of course, this is all highly illegal, and would constitute criminal conspiracy in addition to whatever other laws are broken, so I'm not suggesting anyone do this - merely red teaming the scenario.

I'm not sure what it looks like from where you're sitting, but there were some pretty obvious shenanigans at play with the whole Comcast/etc vs Netflix deal. Traffic to/from a particular site doesn't suddenly degrade in quality only on a particular ISP, and only when an argument about getting paid extra starts, only to magically vanish the moment that site agrees to pay up, all on its own. And that's after all the lawsuits that were launched to overturn previous, far less extensive regulatory attempts.

Unregulated? Without any act of Congress? You do know that "Title II" refers specifically to a law, passed by Congress, as updated to cover modern telecommunications, right? And you do know that they tried doing stuff before, and the Courts told them "you have to use Title II classification to do this," right?

I'm not even going to start on the fact that you think sending data is somehow not "telecommunications."

No, the problem is in how you:

A) Definite it clearly enough to include one and exclude the other
B) Make it sufficiently in the interest of all countries to want to do so.

It's B that's really going to be the hard part. Weapons generally don't get banned because they're morally horrifying or repugnant, they get banned because countries come to the conclusion that using them really just isn't worth it, and that we'd be better off agreeing to not do so, EVEN IF SOMEONE ELSE DECIDES TO VIOLATE THAT.

Consider Chemical Weapons, something that despite their widespread proliferation, generally was never employed in warfare with the exception of WWI and the Iran-Iraq war. In both of the wars CW were employed in, they were generally indecisive in the outcome of the war. They're also rather prone to affecting your own troops, and one can employ countermeasures without employing the weapons yourself. In short, they're not worth the trouble, expense, and time to maintain them.

Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are clearly quite potent, and useful as a tool of state preservation (or at least perceived to be). Despite how horrible these weapons are, and how incomprehensibly awful it would/will be if they ever get used again, the best we've managed to do is reduce the number of them (because again, they're expensive, and we can spend less while still maintaining the same effect).

Now consider another weapon - Land Mines. These are banned by the Ottawa Treaty, which has an impressive number of signatories... but notably lacks the participation of the USA, China, or Russia, or of certain countries with significantly hostile borders such as India/Pakistan and North and South Korea. Basically, anyone who still thinks they might need these weapons.

So where does that leave highly autonomous combat systems? Well, my take is that war has long been a factor of three things - population, technology, and production capacity. We're talking about something that takes one of those almost entirely out of the equation. Does that seem like a potentially powerful thing, or something that no one would have any interest in ever using?

There are no Mars Climate Model deniers, because we haven't found oil/gas there.

Yet.

The solution to that was proposed years ago.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/481/

This is a key point. No military in the world is going to want a weapon system that they have zero control over. Limited control, maybe - but we've had that for decades in the form of long range guided cruise/ballistic missiles, and even then there's a human "in the loop" (in the decision to launch/fire). Some of those may also have a self-destruct/abort, but the early ones certainly didn't.

Furthermore, trying to draw an artificial line between a present-day cruise missile that gets launched from a ship, flies to its target and blows up, and something like the X-47 drone that launches from a carrier, flies to its target, drops a bomb that blows up, then flies back to the carrier... I'm not really seeing the difference, nor the a reason why countries are going to want to ban one and not the other, or at least why every advanced country would want to ban one, and not the other.

You know what, maybe there's even something bad in there - but by now, I'm so fatigued by hearing the incessant parade of outrage and supposed scandal that it's like the boy who cried wolf. I'm just not listening anymore.

It's not just with the Clintons, either. Obama has been subjected to the same stream of crap, trying to put together some sort of scandal or conspiracy, or even flat out making things up ("Obama is coming for your guns!") when they've got nothing better to go on. During the 2008 primaries, I even thought at one point "Better Obama win than Clinton, because he doesn't have that baggage, and it's better if we don't have to relive that whole deluge of minor non-scandals and animosity." It was such a ridiculously naive thought, because it had nothing to do with the Clintons personally, and everything to do with there being a Democrat in the White House.