In the case of Ukraine, the success rate is very high because anybody in range is likely an enemy soldier.

Israel's success rate may be as low as 0.1%. That tells us that robots can't tell civilians from military. A large enough stockpile of human shields would be a serious problem.

And we know drones et al are vulnerable to GPS spoof attacks, making such an attack risky against a technologically advanced enemy with intellectuals and engineers forming a scientific take on special forces.

Why bother with a missile? You're here, so a geek. You know GPS jamming is effective, as is GPS spoofing. All you need is a parabolic dish and a high power transmitter. There's simply no possibility of a wide-angle transmitter on a satellite matching a narrow beam that's broadcast from a hundredth of the distance. Sure, there'll be authentication keys. And social engineers have compromised most of the world's governments, which means the keys will be for sale somewhere.

The only way I can the robot army being effective is if they flatten everything at long range, indiscriminately. And that is going to cause its own problems. Especially if the software gets hacked prior to install. Which will happen, because hiring and training an army of hackers in Mitnick-style social engineering tactics costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of maintaining a wall of tactical nukes that can EMP the robot forces.

The robots work OK, but the AI doesn't. Israel is using AI extensively to target Hamas at the moment, with the very best AI that exists and the very best military minds the world can produce. The success rate is somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

Face scanning tech also depends on the data set being valid. The DOD has been compromised many times by airwall violations, security violations, improper screening, and extremely buggy software from Cisco and Microsoft.

All the enemy needs to do is write a rootkit that flips a couple of bits. The robot army now faces the other way and friends are identified as foe. I wouldn't put it past a group like the Lazarus hackers to be capable of such a stunt. We already know the enemy is capable of GPS jamming and GPS spoofing, because they've done so to hijack US drones, and that's another potential vulnerability.

US military robots are also known to have severe problems identifying that a person dressed as a tree is a person, not a tree. A skillful enemy could walk through US robot army lines without impediment, unless the US robots shoot indiscriminately. But if the US robots are genocidal, mutually assured destruction becomes a viable tactic. You can't be more than dead, after all.

And if the US includes a death switch, given that US defence contractors don't always wipe hard drives and the military don't psychologically screen very well (Manning was known to be seriously mentally unstable prior to deployment, for example), there's absolutely no guarantee the enemy won't simply learn it and spoof it.

I just don't see how the US think this could possibly work.

Its success rate in Israel stands at somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

One gun can shoot at one target at any one time. If your AI-guided robot army is shooting up chicken farmers and goat herders, it's ergo not shooting at the army that's flanked it which threatens to overrun the opposing side's now largely undefended turf.

A robot army can also be taken out by EMP weapons - basically tax nukes. Since robots can't distinguish between soldiers, civilians, and cake stands (AI is pretty dumb), the defending side already faces complete genocide. You can't get any deader than that, so there's no incentive to not flatten the enemy with nukes and a very slim chance they won't fire back, because it's hard to maintain an expensive nuclear defence and an extremely expensive robot army at the same time.

(Basically, same reason the US is now outgunned on fighters, the new ones are so expensive they can't afford that many. The US relies utterly on them being more destructive faster, but again, what's the point in NOT invoking MAD when your enemy has demonstrated they're genocidal and no respectors of the norms and laws of war?)

In this case, the “The company said it sent the alerts...at 12pm Pacific Time Wednesday” would be a pretty good indication that if you received a notice from “Apple” at that exact moment that it’s probably legitimate. I agree that your advice/question is valid in general, but these users have confirmation.

Also, there was no call to action, other than to be aware and be careful, so there’s no risk of phishing, which is a hallmark of legitimate messages.

Not QUITE correct.

the issue, is that adding nitrogen to soil causes rapid CARBON depletion. This has been observed in agri-science literature since at least the 30s.

https://grist.org/climate-ener...

"Fully Automating" nitrogen addition, without a commensurate increase in carbon addition, will result in destruction of soils, not improvements.

Not that this little factoid would in any way dissuade the big agribiz folks for even an attosecond. They will just slap an "ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY! NOW CARBON NEUTRAL!" sticker on their new active algal fertilizer organism treatments, and people will eat it right up.

SIR, that is NOT ammonia YET-- That is a can of salty piss, sure, but that requires room temperatures and access to air to get ammonia!

VMS has a versioning filesystems, which is a useful thing to have. It's also pretty secure (once you disable scripts in mail subject headers).

I'd contend it has a role in server systems, but really it's a struggle to think where else it would fit.

Pawn to Deep Space Nine. Check.

Those sneaky bggrs are forever altering memory to avoid consequences.

It's not what it lacks. It's because it uses newer components. As you make the transistors smaller and reduce the voltages, you increase the damage a cosmic ray strike will do. Yes, the chips are rad-hardened, but anything that gets through will have greater impact and have a greater risk of frying a component versus flipping the bit. The rad hardening will also have improved, but the risks will have increased faster than the protections.

However, there will undoubtedly be better error-correction in NH at circuit level, Voyager only error corrected the communications not the processor or memory. So I fully expect bit flips to be fixed silently, so I expect data to be of greater robustness. So in terms of quality of output, I expect NH to beat Voyager by a long way.

(I'm ignoring the efforts by the anti-science lobby to shut down NASA and the Deep Space Network. If they succeed, all communication will be permanently lost. But that won't be a technological fault, that will be a massive social fault on a scale comparable with Crusaders destroying the Imperial Library in Constantinople.)

Linux won't capture the desktop market unless Microsoft is broken up due to them repeating antitrust activity they have been repeatedly convicted of. But that won't happen because the US is too dependent on its supply of what's basically electronic heroin.

If you include Chrome PCs, that's been and gone.

Sun tried to go the Networked Computing route and bankrupted themselves.

Internet connectivity is far too slow and far too unreliable for most tasks. Worse, most apps still use TCP and UDP, despite better transport protocols existing. And IPv4 is still mainstream, despite IPv6's benefits.

The Internet is also not secure, due to NSA demanding the IETF withdraw IPSec as a mandatory requirement for IPv6.

No, thin clients with overpowered central servers (the mainframe architecture) was abandoned for good reasons and every attempt to return to centralised computing has failed for good reasons. Companies are now even starting to abandon the cloud.