Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

One of the problems America currently faces, is that we're still getting far too much science done, it's not costing us enough money, and the money it does cost is being wasted on paying the salaries of scientists instead of personally paying whoever contracts to kick back the most to political appointees.

I believe this will help solve all three problems.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Every single day, it seems like the White House does something to keep the ongoing Epstein Obstruction Scandal in the news. It's been the top story for months and every single day there's new news about it.

On Thursday, Todd Blanche, presumably acting under orders, spent all day obstructing the release of the information. And then he did the same thing on Friday. And now there's this UFO story, looking almost custom-made as a silly distraction. Blanche or Trump clearly wants to keep the illegal obstruction on voters' minds, as an evergreen topic so that it never goes away. But why?

What does Trump get by working so hard to persuade every American that he disagrees with a law that he signed, implying that laws is a bad idea and shouldn't be applied or enforced? What advantages are gained by an explicitly pro-crime agenda? What's the advantage of campaigning on releasing the files but then breaking my campaign promise?

I (naively?) think if I were in his position, I would comply with the law so that I don't go to prison for obstruction, and so people wouldn't notice every day that I'm still casually and continuously committing crime. I would let, no make the files come out, so that everyone can see the criminal witnesses confused me with the actual rapist, Biden. That would put me in a position where I'm seen as pro-law instead of anti-law, and it would also put to rest all the speculation that the "Epstein" files are actually mostly about me. Seems like that would be good for everyone, including myself.

So why commit obstruction when the releasing files will exonerate you and make all the problems go away? This strategy doesn't make any sense. What could I possibly be missing?

I feel like there's something incredibly obvious that everyone with a more-than-50 IQ has figured out about the president's lily-white innocence, but somehow I'm just too fucking stupid to figure it out. It's humbling, and makes me question my deeply-held faith in the president's genius.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.

Then We The People need (or have needed) to become post-newspaper, indeed post-any-sort-of-centralized-media, since all centralizations are pressure points for coercion and compromise.

Make Usenet Great Again? There is No Cab-NO CARRIER

I'm not sure what confuses you here: everybody has an EoL, age related if nothing else, and they don't live on either through their class or their descendants. What do you gain by throwing more poor bastards into a sucker's game when you could just not?

Yeah, it's ultimately a matter of taste and what becomes economically and strategically feasible; but I figured that there is at least a conceptual distinction between weapons that are better at being obedient(basically any attempt at stable aerodynamics on the low end up to electromechanical gyroscopic stuff, to TERCOM and GNSS guidance; but you specify where you want it to go and the guidance system attempts to minimize or counteract outside influences), weapons that can independently follow a very specific instruction(at least the simpler acoustic and IR seekers where you need to point them toward a particular loud/bright object but they can compensate for it moving, to a degree); and finally the ones that can take fairly generalized instructions of the "anything that looks like a target in this area" flavor; which seemed like the best candidates for 'autonomous'.

I realize that it's a better hype piece if we assume that the 157000 'agents' are fancy chatbots; but this is just an HTTP API; on what basis are they distinguishing between 'agents' in the currently trendy sense and someone's little script around cURL or whatever?

I, for one, completely trust this objective and disinterested report from a company that has no stake in the ease of ramming datacenter approvals through.

We decided "I really really don't want x to happen to me, so I won't x someone else." And then we agreed that x will be categorized as "terrorism" instead of "war."

Then recently (yesterday?) we Americans apparently changed our mind about whether or not it would be ok if Iran (or anyone else) blew up America's civilian water supply infrastructure, no big deal, so we're doing that now, telling the whole world that it's acceptable. It's just war, what can ya do?

For now, people can worry about what type of weapons to use and whether or not certain types should be banned.

But in the future, all the debates will be about will be "how do we pick just the right grid squares in which to Kill All Humans?"

This is obviously a matter of degree, and what you feel like calling a 'drone'; but it seems implausible to say that it's a 'first'.

Something like a Mark 60 CAPTOR entered service in 1979 and is an enclosure for a torpedo that uses acoustic sensors and onboard signal processing to decide if/when to launch the torpedo which then homes in on whatever its acoustic sensors deem high priority. The human deploying the mine defines the search area since they control where it is placed; but everything after that is pure killer robot.

A slightly more recent system would be something like the Bofors/Nexter Bonus, entered service in 2000. 155mm artillery shell that releases two submunitions that use IR and LIDAR to look for vehicle signatures and explode to send an explosively formed penetrator into them. The artillery operator defines the search area by choosing the shell's path; but once they pull the trigger on it selection of who/what in the search area gets a dose of top attack is 100% automated. The German SMArt 155 is a similar concept with similar development and deployment dates.

Obviously how cheap and easy to deploy it is makes a vast difference in practice; there's a certain amount of restraint imposed by something costing $100k+ a pop and being manufactured in boutique quantities that is not imposed by vastly cheaper systems; but it's not the killer robot aspect that is novel.