WWI saw trench warfare, WWII saw highly mechanized assaults and WWIII will see AI-driven drones and land equipment hunting humans. Why risk hundreds of thousands of troops when you can cheaply manufacture thousands of weaponized robots to eliminate anything that moves in a specific area?

Even if Google chooses to implement ethical guidelines in military AI, you can be assured others won't.

My phone has several very good microphones, as does my computer. Both devices also have extremely good cameras. It seems silly to focus on devices like Alexa and Google Home when they have relatively small market penetration and are less capable of spying on us than the cellular and GPS-equipped monitoring devices we slip into our pockets whenever we go *anywhere*.

"The Snapdragon 710 is a direct successor to the Snapdragon 660 but comes with a new branding more worthy of the increased performance characteristics of the SoC."

Sometimes I wish I was in marketing instead of actually building things. The Qualcomm marketing team changed the product number from 6xx to 7xx to make it "more worthy of increased performance." I'm surprised they haven't discovered four digit numbers yet.

In English, the translation is "Department of cyber police." Serhiy Demedyuk is its head.

In the USA, Douglas Maughan is Director, National Cyber Security Division of the Office of Cyber Security & Communications. Try saying that fast five times.

Recording on 2-inch analog 24-track is different than digital. Tape exhibits saturation effects -- if I record a drum track onto tape, I can record it "hot" by turning up the gain so that the hardest hits saturate the tape. The result is a distinctive compression/limiting/harmonic effect. One of the reasons that people complained about sterile and thin digital sound when we shifted from analog to digital was that digital recorders don't behave the same way. That said, there are now some excellent digital plug-ins that emulate this effect.

That said, it makes sense to mix your 24-track analog recording to digital since the digital reproduction will be technically better than a dub of an analog 2-track tape.

Businesses will use their own digital assistants to answer calls, so we'll end up living in a bizarre alternate universe where computers phone each other and have conversations to schedule our lives. Abbreviated botspeak will eventually supplant standard English, as humans mimic the mannerisms and verbal shortcuts used by impatient digital assistant apps.

Software developers need to eat, and Microsoft's 95% revenue share will benefit thousands of small developers along with the larger companies. The notion that only free software is good software is myopic at best; the open source work I've done has only been possible because I earn a good salary from a commercial software company.

Reality check time.

1. The DPR borders both China and Russia. Both nations have massive and very capable military forces and don't want a US presence on their back porch.
2. Pyongyang is only 160 km from the Chinese border city of Dandong.
3. Seoul is only about 50 km south of the DMZ. South Koreans aren't keen on the North Korean military flattening residential neighbourhoods just outside the capital. It wouldn't be good for business, either.
4. China is actively seeking a diplomatic solution to North Korea by encouraging a shift from militarization to manufacturing and cooperation with China and South Korea. The easiest solution is to pay off Kim Jong-Un and and neuter his military by paying off everyone in power, then provide employment and increasing prosperity and modernization for the DPR.

Off-brand batteries don't suck, though. We use Amazon, Kirkland (Costco) and IKEA batteries rather than wasting money on Energizer/Duracell.

You joke, but altitude hypoxia can result in disorientation, hallucination and mental impairment. At 20,000 ft, your blood is only capable of carrying 2/3 the oxygen it can transport at sea level. Trying to breathe air at 35,000 ft can result in as little as 15 seconds of useful consciousness. Part of your cockpit scan when flying with a pressure demand flow system is a visual check of the flow meter (which works like the little windows at gas stations that confirm the fuel is running) and the oxygen PSI gauge. It's a surprisingly low-tech piece of gear with big green and red toggle switches because when you *absolutely* need to verify that it's working, you need a Fisher Price-level user interface.

People don't appreciate that:

1. It's much harder to create good industrial design than it is to copy it. When the Macbook Air was released, it was breathtaking. So were the first few iterations of the iPad and the iPhone. After the first big wins, it gets much harder to play the "smaller, faster, more storage and sleeker" game.

2. Technology matures. Many people rant that Apple's innovation around the iPhone and iPad has slowed. Of course it has, because all of the obvious things have been done over the last decade. It's like automobile technology -- once manufacturers figured out where all the basic components needed to go, they have cheerfully chugged along for decades with gradual improvement.

3. If you're the market leader, there is no value in going down-market. Apple does an outstanding job of maintaining margins without resorting to selling a bewildering array of phones at all price points in a desperate attempt to gain market share. Nobody wants a Samsung J3 or an LG K4. They're cheap pieces of junk that you only buy if you can't afford a decent phone.

4. Maintaining and developing iOS is a massive undertaking that Apple's competitors (with the exception of Google) don't have to undertake. We've seen Samsung's attempt at a third-party OS, and it was dismal.

Seriously, forget the kids. I'm more interested in the phone figuring out that I'm looped and stopping me from drunk texting. Or drunk shopping. Or drunk anything.

"Hey, this 2 year old car has only 60,000 miles on the odometer. We replaced the tires, gave it an oil change and shampooed the interior so it's as good as new. Yours for only 90% of the price of a 2018 model."

You don't buy tulip bulbs to spend them, you acquire them as an investment. Think long term -- tulip bulbs are a rare commodity that will only increase in price.

It astounds me that American politics has devolved into confused name-calling and an almost complete inability to form coherent and rational arguments. Let's bring things back to reality; both major American political parties expound right wing, authoritarian viewpoints and philosophies. The only thing that differs is the degree.

Faced with that reality, it's bewildering that half of the US population supports the elephant party, while strongly believing that donkey party followers are complete loons (and vice-versa). That's simply not a sane conclusion. Just because someone votes a certain way doesn't automatically make them a blithering idiot, nor does it mean that they're not allowed to disagree with some of the policies put forward by the legislators they vote into office.

It's also pretty clear to anyone with a reasonable grasp of the English language that President Trump is prone to frequent odd outbursts and declarations that are sometimes completely incoherent and provably false. That should be cause for significant concern, whether you're conservative or liberal.