Might I suggest a Chromebook? In this case, being partly crippled is a feature.

Indeed. Remote tech support for people who will regularly need it is bad enough, when they're your relatives it can be worse (and you can't bail).

Declare it to be an American drone strike and recruit a dozen more?

Al Quaeda has lasted for decades, and will continue for the foreseeable future. They're mostly harmless and a useful tool for keeping the population loyal and unified. ISIS is not merely using terror but have become actually dangerous. Guess what comes next?

That's a conservative talking point, not a conservative tenet. (at least if by "conservative" you mean "Republican" like most people do)

To clarify my point, terrorism still ranks below peanuts on lethality. It's already a drop in the bucket.

Why would any leader want to do that? It instills unity and patriotism, and gets people to overlook the leaders' flaws.

As usual, the headline is misleading. What's less usual is that they totally undersensationalized the news.

Torvalds: No Opinion On Systemd
vs
Torvalds: UNIX Philosophy is Obsolete

I hear a bunch of individuals only marginally related to Russia, are attacking the Ukraine. No? Well, unless the country fesses up, you have to rely on a preponderance of various sorts of evidence. The first hint will be a powerful attack with sophistication and resources. I could see it being much harder to get beyond that when it comes to cyberwarfare, but you still have to hunt down the perpetrators and identify them, whether they're a government or not, so it's not a meaningful difference until then.

But I don't know where it crosses the line from espionage to act of war. I think the standard solution was for the current leader to ask the magic convenience ball.

The sad thing is that nowadays if you have the sniffles you can't get antibiotics without going to a doctor, and yet if your pet guppy isn't looking so good you can get some for your aquarium. And farmers seem to think antibiotic is an essential nutrient, no problem so long as it's not for humans! But try to get some for yourself and you'll get the lecture about antibiotic resistance. Unless it's for your soap.

On the other hand, at least they have a few antibiotics reserved for humans in real trouble, but on the other hand antibiotics everywhere breed antibiotic resistant bacteria, and many of the mechanisms bacteria use for antibiotic resistance give them total or partial immunity to other antibiotics.

Doesn't matter if part of the debt is held by Americans. The government could, should they choose, replace the one dollar bill with a trillion dollar bill, and reimburse only Americans (as a handout) for the resulting inflation. Then pay each of our foreign debtors one dollar, and keep the change. Of course that would be a dick move on the government's part, but that wouldn't be new. A bonus of doing this is that people won't want to lend the US money, and therefore they'd finally have a balanced budget.

If we decide we can't (or don't want to) pay our debts, it won't be us that is screwed.

There currently is no distinction -- things are programmed to behave like they're intelligent, because in all these decades no one has figured out how to make them actually intelligent. (This applies somewhat to people too)

Unlikely that they added the ability to fret. More likely that they gave it the rule "prevent any automaton from falling into the hole" rather than "prevent as many automatons as possible from falling into the hole". Thus in the former case if it can't find a solution that saves both, it would keep looking forever. If you wanted one that looked more like indecision, you could give it the rule "move the automaton closest to the hole away from the hole".

The trouble with computers is that they do as they're told, and do not attempt to figure out what you want. I suppose you could write a program that will instead of doing what it is told, tries to identify what you want and do that instead. But I expect that would go horribly wrong...

Your system has too many vulnerabilities. The worst is its reliance on criminals to be loyal and diligent, any one of whom could compromise your entire organization's communication. Almost as bad is using a 2 byte encryption key (the index to a book). And then you want them doing steganography, and by hand? They'll be raising every red flag there is.

On the other hand, you could simply use private/public keys. Each person has their own set of keys, and the key itself is encrypted with a decent password.

When developing a good AI is outlawed, outlaws will be the first to develop a good AI. And it will likely go poorly, but not like the pathetic rogue AIs of movies.