You don't always get to choose where you get attacked. As someone pointed out further up the threads, imagine someone got even a few 10s of these drones into a US city, each one carrying 1 hand grenade and the waypoint at which to drop it and then to return to collect more grenades - especially if the pick up is automated as well so you don't have to be there when they find that pickup location.

Only looking for the most destructive defense possible limits the locations where the defense can be deployed. Basically, you are trying to defend in active warzones, while the most obvious place for a mass of drones would be high density population centers well away from active warzones because that's where they would be more affective.

So I'm inclined to be brutal because brutal works

You would use a massed drone attack because you don't control the land you are attacking, you'd get within drone range, hit the attack button then retreat.

That means from a defense point of view, you are going to be facing a massed drone attack at low altitude over Forward Operating Bases, Friendly Populations etc. Is that where you want to be firing frag shells into the air? You'd cause more damage than the drones would have.

It's been mentioned above, but shot would seem the obvious answer, limited range but that range limit is what you'd want to avoid as much collateral damage as possible.

You don't have someone come look for you.

Radar tracks the trajectory of the mortar round, calculates it's original (since it's only a ballistic flight arc, that is trivial) and can feed that co-ordinate back to friendly units instantly

With automated fire control system, the return fire is normally in the air before you fire the second round.

Who says language has to be vocal?

After all, human being the designer of the AI, everything the AI does (thinks, calculates, ponders, measures, decision making, everything) it is a poor copy of human thought process

Everything a human does is limited by our biology, there is a limit to how quickly we can be trained, with more advanced subjects taking ever longer to understand. For example, whats the average age to acquire a PhD?

There is a limit to how much information we store for processing, and a limit to how quickly more information can be fed in.

The beauty of an AI system is the system can be designed from the ground up avoid the restrictions we have. Even if it were true that human's couldn't create something smarter than us, we certainly can create something which matches our intelligence but without the hardware restrictions we have ourselves.

2. There are two reasons why America's work force has gained skill at a slower rate than in the past -- A. The new immigrants to America are simply not as smart as the immigrants that moved to America decades ago Previous waves of immigrants to America came from Europe Current waves of immigrants who land on American soil came from Latin America and the Islamic countries

Bollocks, the first waves of mass immigration into America were from Europes poorest groups, low education, subsistence farmers in a lot of cases or groups with poor relationships to local authorities for whatever reason.

I'm not sure how you plan to measure the gain in skills between people now and then, unless there were lots of scientific studies conducted back then to record how long a new skill takes to learn which can be repeated now.

If you think about it, that was always going to be the outcome.

There is a cost to hiring, training and retaining each employee, so if advances in technology made a task which required 2 men a week to complete, can now be done with 1 man in the same time, it will be cheaper to have 1 man work full time rather than 2 men work part time.

The more specialized the job, and hence the more training needed, the more that is true.

In tasks where the training requirement is very low, you have zero hour contracts being increasingly used. It has higher hiring costs, but the training costs are low and the retaining costs are pretty much non-existent.

As a result of it being cheaper to hire one highly skilled employee full time, but cheaper to hire many lower skilled employee's part/no time, you end up with a growing divide between the bottom and top, with those in the middle get dragged either up or or down and slowly the middle is removed entirely.

You can get central heating boilers (I've certainly seen gas fired ones in the UK) that are actually mini-generators, the heat almost being a bi-product of the electricity generation. More pricey than the normal boilers but an interesting technology.

If you can setup your roof solar panels (be they solar thermal or solar PV) to follow the sun that should increase efficiency, but it might be marginal. I've also seen a lens system fitted over a solar panel that concentrates the solar radiation.

Next is to try and cut down on your power usage ... LED lights have come on in leaps and bounds over the last five years and greatly reduce your power consumption, though they are not cheap to buy. The upside is that they are supposed to last a LOT longer.

Air-to-Air heat exchangers might be an option too, and certainly using heat exchangers to try and not flush your heat out might be worth a look.
EG when you have a shower the water that goes down the plughole is only a handful of degrees cooler than when it came out the shower head. Could you use a heat exchanger to take heat from the 'waste' water and pre-heat water going into your hot water cylinder?
EG If you run a clothes dryer, are you venting the air directly? Could you run that through a heat exchanger to pre-heat fresh air coming in?

Either they totally overestimated the speeding issue, or they underestimated the dissuasive effect of those cameras (which means they work actually pretty well... assuming they are correctly placed).

In both cases, a data set of vehicle speed at the site in the year before and after the cameras were introduced would be very useful.

Case 1: No change in traffic speed
Case 2: Dramatic reduction in traffic speed

Assuming they had that data set.

Case 1: would be kept as quiet as possible because it means the camera were either not needed for safety or not put in for safety.

Case 2: would be shouted from the rooftops (from both the local authority and the company running the scheme) because it would have shown a positive safety effect which is how these scheme are always sold as being a benefit to the community.

I'd start with the Jubilee Line, as the JL Extension has trackside barriers already (the trains pull in and the train doors line up with doors in the tracksdie barriers). If they could roll those barriers out along the rest of the Jubilee Line it'd be one less 'safety' thing for the union to get their panties bunched about.

Piccadilly Line next as it services Heathrow and that seems like a useful target for (approaching) a 24hr service.

Line by line will take some time and hopefully natural wastage (ie people retiring) should lessen the blow on the drivers, but they're not going to like it and make life hell for Londoners as this progresses.

Maybe the answer would be to insist on a new contract that stops them striking over anything to do with the introduction of automation. Obviously, we can't expect them to not strike when drivers are sacked for being drunk so there'd be no point trying!

Funniest thing of all, after how many years of driverless trains on the DLR (also in London) is the Tube Driver's Union saying it won't be safe!
[rubs chin thoughtfully] Hmmmm. I wonder if they've got an ulterior motive?

Stand by for the Tube Driver's Union holding London to ransom again ... [sigh]

I know it's unlikely, but if the shore was made up largely of vertical walls rather than slopes, then a tide wouldn't change the shore line much but could reveal sub surface shelves.

Or a harbour in New Zealand if anyone pisses off the French!

Even if that was actually safer to exceed the limit at that point?
By the time it's asked you "Do you want to allow me to potentially save your life by exceeding the local speed limit Dave?", and you've noticed the question and answered it, it could well be too late!
So let's assume you've given it permission to save your life by exceeding the speed limit, and something happens and your GoogleCar guns it and saves your life, but your vehicle is spotted and you get a ticket. Who pays?
If GoogleCar had decided the safest thing to do (for you, at least --- hmm this raises another question I'll come back to) then I'd feel somewhat aggrieved if I got a damn ticket for doing it!
... and do these GoogleCars follow the Asimov Laws of Robotics? Would it career into a queue of children to protect you from truck?

The system and safety protocols are working precisely as they were designed.

Actually, the faults were found by chance, there wasn't a specific check for this which could be scheduled and signed off, it was just an engineer noticed something odd while doing other inspections.

So while you are right in that this is not a huge safety issue and we weren't minutes from disaster, I wouldn't agree that the system and safety protocols are particularly brilliant either.

The stories would be of the form:

As a user, I want to change my password...

But they generally won't say that the means to do that should be a link from the user account page or what the steps of the process would be. Now for something simple like a a password change, there are generally well defined industry best practices that both the developer and the end user are probably aware of and so both have a common conception of what should happen. That isn't true for functions specific to the application or domain.

There is a big gap between User Story and implementation specific documentation.