it was before this actually... Anglo-Burma wars and Anglo-Boer wars towards the end of the 1800s saw wristwatches become popular with the british millitary officers as they found it difficult to use a pocket watch from the saddle or while trying to shoot a pistol.

not to mention the ad-revenue from "Real Robot Wars" would be amazing... I can totally see the corporate sponsorship getting behind war...

maybe they'll save lives by "killing" the enemy's robots?

Yes but usually both sides regard territory (or people within it) as their own... otherwise they would not be fighting about it in the first place. War is stupid. It would be better to let robots duke it out to decide who wins rather than having people kill each other. Maybe it would be more of a game and less of a human tragedy if we followed this crazy path instead of the crazy path we're already on.

definition of robot...

A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer

landmines on the other hand only have a few simple states, "safe", "armed", "detonated", "dud" they are simple single purpose constructs. It's not right to call them robots in any technical sense.

yup, if you build a death-bot, you want indiscriminate violence... everything chicken-sized and bigger shredded for completeness sake.

probably more of a land-mine-layer than a mine itself... unless it's got a pretty gnarly self-destruct sequence and a really low total cost of ownership. Also, I would hope that robots would be equal opportunity killers, slaying all in their path irrespective of age, gender etc... it'd be much simpler code for the IFF module not having to distinguish between short adults and tall kids for example. I wonder what OS they'd run... Windows 11 Terminator edition? Robobuntu?

Yes I could do as you say, but that is besides the point. The point is that the system works and does so within the resources limitations of a single board ARM computer despite the fact it is running systemd.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a systemd advocate, I don't have it on any of my work servers yet, but equally where I have used it, it has been stable and simple enough and I have not noticed any particular "RAM bloatyness".

I remain open minded about the whole debate, I'll use whatever comes along next as long as it is stable, simple and it gets the job done. Systemd is different to sysvinit and it takes a bit of getting used to but it hasn't done anything evil to my system (yet).

I take a pragmatic approach to this sort of thing, If you don't like, don't use it. The guys building the main distros seem to like it however so you may end up having to use it if you are a Linux admin.

I'm running Arch Linux ARM on a Wandboard Quad single board computer. The system runs apache, dovecot, postfix and samba for a small network. Systemd is in use as it was the default when I installed the OS. The machine only uses 224M of RAM, it has 1.6G free. systemd-journald is the biggest RAM-muncher with 64M is use, but I don't mind this because it's configured to not batter the flash by keeping current logs in RAM only.

Alas windows is harder to keep running smoothly than either Linux or OS X. The windows 8 users on our network account for 90% of all support requests. Our linux and OS X users the rest. Now consider that around 50% of our users have windows, 40% linux and 10% OS X. These numbers only inlcude personal computers, not servers.

The windows users always seem to be reporting issues with performance, networking, printing, ms office being random etc etc, maybe they are lower calibre users but if that were true why do the support calls stop when we migrate them to Ubuntu or OS X?

I don't have to reproduce the big bang to know that all of the observable universe is moving away from us and everything else... the big bang is STILL banging dude. The universe is expanding, you just need to OBSERVE this to know it is happening. This is actual evidence that is tangible, measurable and undeniable. We KNOW the universe was smaller yesterday than it is today we can see it expanding. On the other hand their is NO tangible, measurable evidence for the existence of any divine being nor has their ever been. Truth is, scientists love to disprove each other and do so all the time, whereas the religious ask us to have faith in the total absence of any good reason to do so. Scientists encourage critical thinking, they don't just believe any old crap because it's in a "special magic" book.

Scientists don't simply assume anything, they constantly try to disprove that which is disprovable in order to learn and develop their understanding of reality. Religion on the other hand tries to "keep the faith", immobile idiocy based on superstitions crud. Get thee behind me fuck-wit.

I cannot realistically, directly influence the house of lords, it is an UNELECTED body that has a measure of CONTROL over our laws and our Parliament. The church has held positions of power in our society for generations and unless we point it out for the utter rubbish it is it will continue to do so. What I can do is make sure that as I go about my life I educate my children and those around me, pointing out religion for the the unthinking twaddle that it is.

Just as I wouldn't sit and idly watch someone drink a bottle of bleach (I'd let them know it was a bad idea); I won't idly watch someone fill their head with religious lies without at least letting them know it's a bad idea.

I think that religion does impact my rights.

For example... here in the UK we have an unelected house of lords with a significant number of bishops in it there to represent the church. This group get to review and vito the descisions of the house of commons where the elected politicians ply their trade. I don't want a religiously deluded bishop to mess with the business of government.

It is not harmless to simply ignore religion and to allow it to continue to be presented as a valid alternative to science in our schools and universities. Like any stupid idea it should be pointed out as such in order to help our society to grow intellectually. Religion is superstitious rubbish that should not be given credability by education institutions allowing it room to grow.

I'm fairly sure the BS central you're looking for is church...

Not being a SAN appliance user myself, I'm curious to know what form of Java are you encountering? If they have a Java config application you install on your PC, then it sounds like they have a crappy UI and my guess is that a language change won't help them program a better one. If however they are serving up a Java applet from an embedded server within the appliance then I guess they could use an update because the last time I saw an applet in the wild I fell off my stegosaurus in shock.