This is one of DeepMind's recent papers, Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning [PDF]

The problem with remotely piloted vehicles is the up and down links are the weak link. If you take out your opponents comm links with jamming or by shooting down their relays you take out their entire drone capability at least until you can restore the comm links.

If you are going to depend on drones the only solution is they have to be autonomous. The only other solution is they have to be manned and introducing pilots entails increased cost, lowers mission duration, increase risk of loss of life and capture.

I would think there probably are already autonomous offensive drones flying, they are probably just restricted to targetting predetermined GPS locations. They desperately need the ability to discern people or vehicles (cars, armor, ships, planes) which are the desired target without having to rely on a comm link or pilot.

It is nearly an inevitable technological evolution now that drones are out of Pandora's box. If the U.S. doesn't do it everyone else will.

Yea, but look at the pretty, well dressed, blond haired blue eyed CEO⦠as I wave in the general direction of Marissa Mayer and you are slowly hypnotized in to forgetting about everything else Yahoo does wrong.

JP Morgan had been planning to acquire WaMu for a West coast expansion prior to the crisis and they were gifted with them during the crisis by the Republicans.

Your interpretation is the simplistic one, maybe its accurate, maybe its not. There are accusations it was an engineered crisis and gifting of WaMu's assets to JP Morgan for cents on the dollar.

The only thing that is clear is JP Morgan came out of the crisis much bigger and more powerful, with fewer competitors than when they went in so it was a win win. Same is true of B of A and Wells Fargo.

Yes they've been paying fines but the Fed has made it so easy for them to make massive amounts of money every quarter since the crisis all the fines are inconsequential to them.

It is a market based solution, a bad one since participation is nearly mandatory and being compelled by punitive taxes.

The fact that multiple private insurers are running it and they compete on the exchanges makes it market based.

If it were single payer funded entirely by taxes and government paying all the bills like Medicare it wouldn't be market based.

Last I heard establishment politicians redistricted Kucinich out of Congress. Kucinich was an outlier and the establishment finally figured out a way to get rid of him because they didn't want to hear his inconvenient truths, or worse have Americans hear them.

If anything Kucinich is proof that in fact we do have a one party state posing as two. Establishment Democrats hated him as much as anyone.

The Tea Party is probably the only actual second party we have and its been coopted by a bunch of crazy, opportunist, demagogues like Palin, Beck and Bachman so its regrettably turned in to kind of a bizarro train wreck. It was completely despised by our establishment one party state, and if it hadn't been completely derailed it would have been the greatest threat to that one party state since the Progressive movement a hundred years ago.

It was a MASSIVE economic intervention none-the-ess which is something the GP said Republican's didn't do. The Bush administration indulged in massive picking of winners and losers during the whole crisis.

Lehman, Bear Sterns, WaMu and Merril Lynch losers.

Citi, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo massive winners thanks to Republican help.

You notice that the Republican Treasury Secretary came from Goldman Sachs and was one of the people responsible for lobbying to allow banks to leverage up to 30-1 so they would be doomed the second a crisis hit? And when the crisis did he he funnelled billions in tax payer money through AIG to keep his old firm from collapsing?

If Republicans were the free marketeers they claim to be AIG, Citi and Goldman Sachs would be dead now.

It was designed by a Republican Treasury Secretary. I think his first draft was give me $800 Billion dollars and trust me.

Every third party in this country is aggressively suppressed by the two parties and the media. Its hard for third parties to get and stay on all the ballots in 50 states.

You see many candidates from third parties in debates? Perot and Anderson are the only two I can remember and Perot got there because he was filthy rich and made for good TV.

Only reason Ron and Rand Paul run as a Republicans is because they know they would be doomed to obscurity on a third party ticket and would never get elected if they didn't. That's the whole reason the Tea Party is infiltrating the Republican party because they can get elected running inside the two party system as parasites.

"But what DHS deals with ? "

Anything and everything? It should be a source of concern that they have a massive budget and you don't actually now what their overarching mission is.

You should be worried about them at least as much as the NSA and DOJ. If there is another big excuse (i.e. Katrina, Occupy or 9/11) there is a fair chance their VIPR teams are going to be the ones frisking you if you try to travel.

One of the things you should be most concerned with is they are pumping large quantites of money in to local police departments all over the country in order to miltarize them (i.e SWAT teams, military grade weapons, armored vehicles, surveillance)

I hope you are being sarcastic. Its laughable to blame the mess this country is on voters when neither party ever fields candidates that are worth voting for.

When someone does comes along who has principals and might be worth voting for the parties and the media quickly dispose of them one way or another before they ever reach a point they can do any damage to the status quo.

More typically great people who would actually make a positive difference have enough sense to realize its a total waste of time, really dangerous and they will probably be destroyed by the system before they manage to make a difference.

I'm kind of hoping Elizabeth Warren might prove me wrong but the jury is still out. A senator can do more damage than just about anyone other than the President but still 1 Senator can't do much beyond slowing stuff down.

How did you make that list and leave DHS out? A few of those agencies are part of DHS but seriously DHS is THE homeland security agency since 9/11 and
"homeland" and "national" are synonymous.

"It's why communism spread like wildfire in Europe but couldn't get so much as a toehold in the United States"

The U.S. was pretty left leaning during the progressive era and the Depression.

World War II and the permenent ascendence of the miltary industrial intelligence complex aided and abetted by J. Edgar Hoover, McCarthy, Reagan and friends who engaged in no holds barred witch hunt to kill communism, socialism, progressivism and unions. Back in those days "communists" played the scape goat role Muslim "terrorists" play today. In the World War I era it was "anarchists".

The problems with liberals and leftists in the U.S. were they were pretty much all pussies and they couldn't counterpunch with a master like Hoover. Hoover also had the power that comes from knowledge, and he had more knowledge than anyone thanks to all the files he had the FBI build on all of his enemies. If you think the NSA surveillence state isn't dangerous just look back at what Hoover did with a tiny fraction of the information the NSA has.

Joe Nacchio was sent to Federal prison because he had the balls to tell the NSA he wasn't going to let them spy on Qwest's customers, while ATT, Verizon et al just rolled over and let them do, and back then it was completely illegal, it was years later when Congress retroactively made it legal.

Nacchio is an unsung hero for having the balls to stand up to the survellience state when it first started and he paid dearly for it.

"With FBI withdrawing from "Law Enforcement", who is in charge of interstate criminal activities, racketeering, and so on ??"

Wall Street?