Indeed, presumably neither Reservoir Dogs nor Straw Dogs

Indeed. We've had heat-seeking missiles, proximity fuses, radar-controlled guns for ages. They all seek and destroy targets without human control. This is just a more advanced version of the same.
In fact, AI-controlled weapons could be more moral, if they were able to make some informed choice of say whether a target was advancing or retreating.

A schoolboy in the 60's, I got to run FORTRAN programs an 1130 at a nearby college once a week. The most exciting thing was it's complete lack of hardware protection. You want to overwrite the operating system? No problem.

AIs may be extensively educated and trained to graduate level, but IMHO they have a mental age of about 9. Lots of knowledge, but no experience. Most sensible people would neither give a pre-teen unsupervised access to a gun or a car, nor put them in charge of software development and operation. Kids caught doing wrong have one of two responses - "It wasn't me", or for the smarter ones "I must confess, it was I who chopped down the cherry tree".

Not sure I see the point of ripping off an open-source project. Said project remains, and will be significantly cheaper, probably free, compared to any commercial rip-off thereof. While you might be able to copyright the rip-off, you can't patent it, and the open-source version remains under whatever licence it has, so the rest of us can just raise a finger to the rip-off merchant.

The problem is that little word "large". Storing GWh's of electricity isn't just a question of batteries. There are lots of directions being tried (flow batteries, energy storage as heat, and other's I've not bothered to read about); one of the standard ones in use is pumped water (two big sites in the UK), but even they can't hold enough to be considered a "solution".

With a real dog:
"You are in a dimly lit forest groove. A squirrel ...
That's not going to end well.

Actually, I'm sure trained guide dogs are squirrel-proof, for most values of "squirrel".

IMHO, given the number of coins Satashi is supposed to hold, "he" would have spent at least a few. So either "he" is dead, or actually it was a group of people who had shared ownership, but one or more have died so they no longer have all the key parts.

IIUC Linus counts minor version numbers using his fingers and toes using unary arithmetic - hence, no minor version numbers above 20. Now if he used binary - easily implemented with fingers (straight = 1, bent = 0), we could have 1024 minor versions before we'd need a major bump. That would save 98% of useless articles like this on slashdot and no doubt many other outlets.

(Note, using binary in this way impacts typing, so perhaps Linus would pull changes less often. This needs to be factored into any savings.
There's probably a research paper on the cost-benefit of 10, 9, ... 1-finger typing lurking here.)

Yeah, but we're talking about China, not the USA.

... like the other side of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Trust might have gone down a bit, methinks.

The trick is to get AI to watch them as well.
Like the joke PVR which records all the films you hate, and plays them back while you're out.

emojis belong in comments,such as:
# The following code is 100% reliable :-)

I could see that idiom appearing in lots of my code. :-(

My first thought too, especially as there was a recent report somewhere, I think on the BBC but maybe not, on using Sterling engines for energy recovery.

A few years ago I saw a residential canal boat where the owner had made a small Sterling engine and just parked it on the boat's engine exhaust pipe. All it did was turn a fan, so I guess the aim was to circulate some warm air. Very little power, maybe enough to light an LED.

Snap. There's Greek word for it, but who cares?
Are you also a mathematician? My theory is that people good at maths subvert the brain's facial recognition to spot patterns in mathematical statements.