A given intelligent being is most likely to be alive during the most populous times of the species. My existence here and now thus suggests were are near the maximum and it's down-hill from here, I'm afraid to say.

or almost all the civilizations the aliens know about formed around red dwarf stars. It's nice and stable there for very long periods of time.

Red dwarfs tend to spew a lot of radiation in their habitable zone, and probably tidally-lock the planets there also. However, it's hard to say if non-microscopic life can work around those obstacles.

Lady Gaga is the evidence. She is not from this planet.

The issue there seems to be the failure of the police to act, or perhaps your weak laws on squatting. You could take matters into your own hands, but presumably the squatters are thinking the same thing and in your example already have a gun pointed at you. So assuming you carry yours all the time you had better hope you can draw faster than they can pull the trigger.

I don't seem to have "Rogue Bolo" in my sci-fi book collection, but the cover on Amazon looks familiar. I think I might have given it away one Halloween decades ago living in Princeton, NJ when I gave the option of getting books instead of candy to some trick-or-treaters (several teens there seemed to prefer the books).

Your point on a Bolo singularity makes me think about the Asimov universe, and how his robots there eventually interpreted the three laws in a way "The Zeroth Law" that gave them lots of independence, and that saw themselves as in a way more "human" than humans, and also caused them to start intervening in history behind the scenes. There is no set of laws or constitution that ultimately does not need some intelligent judge to interpret the meaning or spirit of the words in a present day context, and once some intelligent entity (including an AI) starts creatively interpreting "rules" including "metarules" about how rules can be changed, who knows where it will end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Inspired by your post, I've been looking through my Bolo books. I started rereading "Ploughshare" by Todd Johnson in "Bolos: Book 1: Honor of the Regiment" where "Das Afrika Corps" and other Mark XVI C Bolos act a bit odd due to a spilled milkshake by the "Director's son" in the "White Room" psychotronics lab and the use of "DK-41" cleaning fluid to fix that mess up. Another case of the unexpected...

I liked "Bolo Rising" novel which has a Bolo Mark XXXIII series HCT called Hector. That is an interesting novel of a Bolo regaining its operational capacity after being infiltrated and locked down by alien technology. There is another XXXIII in "Bolo Strike". But while those mega-Bolo stories are interesting in their own sort of over-the-top way (maybe your point about "the other guy"), I like the diversity in the short stories in "Honor of the Regiment" by a variety of authors covering the whole history of different Bolos of various capabilities and their unfolding increasing sentience and self-directedness. What does "Honor" or "Service" means over time and shading into a meta-level? For example, are whistleblowers like Manning, Snowden, or Kiriakou honorable and engaged in service and fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution? Or are they traitors? Complex questions... Perhaps "Rogue Bolo" goes deeper into such issues? As a lesser example, "Bolo Brigade" explores the issue of a conflict between "rules of engagement" and a Bolo's desire to get its job done. Conflicts between priorities are not something that only humans will face...

It is not clear where the singularity of emerging AI and technologically-expanded-or-narrowed humans and so on will all lead in reality -- especially with Bolo vs. Beserker as an option. I forget the plot of "Bolo Strike" as I look at my Bolo books, but the blurb on the back says "as Bolo faces human-Bolo hybrid in a cataclysmic showdown". So there are other ways automated systems can cause change, either their own independence or by empowering some few independent humans. As I essentially say near the end of the 2000 post to the Unrev-II Engelbart Bootstrap mailing list, corporations are like vast machine intelligence at his point. And like the present day, what is the real difference to most people if the Earth is laid waste, the seas polluted, the mountains leveled, the oceans strip-mined, and most of the people kept down in their aspirations for a decent life by "aliens from outer space" or by some 1% of vampire-like human-machine-hybrid-organizational "aliens" who have become specialized in "extracting wealth" by privatizing gains and socializing costs (including the cost to the worker of unpleasant work environments)? Even without human-Bolo hybrids, there can be vast technological/bureaucratic enterprises that make use of humans as parts much the same as the "!*!*!" of "Bolo Rising" tried to do in their quest of "efficiency" -- "efficiency" to what end and to whose benefit? So much of sci-fi is a way that people can reflect of concerns of the day, but at a safer intellectual distance.

Anyway, reminds me I should try playing with my kid this old Metagame I have around somewhere and have not played in decades and was inspired by the Bolo series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Someone always mentions this mysterious, vaguely defined bug in every /. discussion of Firefox but my understanding is that all the major memory issues were fixed long ago. I certainly never have problems these days.

Can you be more specific? A link to the Bugzilla page or a forum thread perhaps?

I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.

You are missing 120 fps along with strobing, especially in indie games like Path of Exile, or Minecraft where the games haven't been properly optimized.

A nVidia GTX 780 Ti is the best performance for $700 without breaking the bank.

When did that happen?

Last time I checked, they caved to public pressure. Their mission hasn't changed at all.

It's Slashdot. Logic and reason clearly have no place here.

Every single person outside of Mozilla, you say?

Universally hated, you say?

Not much of a thinker, are you?

Oh, wow! That's FUNNY! I can't stop LAUGHING!

Yeah, Mozilla sure does make frequent updates to their browser! HILARIOUS!

Nothing tickles the ol' ribs more than regular software updates!

Target store is going to change its name to Kick Me.

The US launched a captured V-2 into space (but not orbit) in 1946 with a camera. Perhaps there were USAF-built rocket space missions after these V-2 experiments, but I am not aware of any until the "Sputnik scare" pushed military rockets into space use for a brief time until NASA took that over.