You are missing the point. It's not about the violence.

In chess, you win the game by capturing the king.
All the other pieces are dispensable, it doesn't matter how many you lose. Pawns can be made rooks and knights and bishops and queens, but when the king is captured, it's game over. Everything hinges on protecting the king.

It's a single point of failure. The goal is to exploit it.

Eventually.
Because while the Mongols were busy capturing Nanjing, the Chinese were capturing Ulan Bator.

And the Manchu dynasty didn't have an "unbroken lineage" either, let alone to ancient times.
There were a lot of revolts, revolutions, palace revolutions, palace coups, changes of dynasty, historical revisions, wars, and civil wars.

That's not the point.

The point is: There is no king to capture in Go. No single point of failure to exploit.
While you are busy capturing an area, you opponent is putting your eyes out.
While you are busy putting eyes out, your opponent is busy encircling you.

That's why any would-be conqueror ends up speaking Mandarin.
Not because of the Heavenly Mandate. If you pay attention, China doesn't even have an emperor anymore.

While Britain and Russia were playing chess, China was playing Go.

It really doesn't.

Chess is the game of kings, mostly because it's all about the king, but also because it is a model of warfare, which used to be what kings concerned themselves with. But chess doesn't model logistics, it models battles.

Go is a much simpler strategy game. It has no pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, queens, or kings, all with their own move set. It only has two rules, everything else follows from that. Which makes it much harder to master.

Everything affects everything else. A wrong move early in the game can lose you the whole game down the line.

Poker isn't a strategy game at all. By rules alone, it is purely a game of chance.

There are other differences as well. It's not a board game, it's a card game. It's not one-on-one, any number can play. It's not a perfect information game, it involves bluffing and guessing.

You don't misdirect an opponent by hiding an attack by feigning another attack. You don't attack at all.

More to the point: There is no strategy. There is no planning.
The cards that you are dealt do not depend on what you did before.
It is more advantageous to lose often and early, and to win rarely but big. (And to let your opponents win often and small.)

So, while the USA were busy bluffing, everyone else was counting the cards.

It does explain some things in history.

There's an old saying in diplomacy:

Russia and Britain play chess. (Open board, an early mistake can lose the late game, and it's all about the king.)
China plays Go. (Open board, and there is no king, only area.)
America plays poker. (All about bluffing, cards kept close, every round is a new game, and it doesn't matter how often you lose, but how big you win.)

"PC gaming has long been associated with a single dominant platform, but that's changing"

So the Atari game crash of 1983 has caught up with them?
That can't be right. The 2600 was not a PC.

Oh, wait, they are talking about browser games.

They are preparing to take the plunge and switch away from Macromedia Flash?
What are they betting on? Java applets, ActiveX, Silverlight?

SMIL?

Italy's Piracy Shield exists only because of the USA.
It is Hollywood that demanded that all the world respects the DMCA, and it was the WTO and the USA trade representative who blackmailed anyone they could into implementing the required measures on penalty of trade tariffs.

That is why the EU has decided to allow internet censorship. (Yes, they did say "think of the children!")

And Cloudflare have broken Italian law. That is what they are being fined for.

The EU does not fine companies to make money. That's not how governance works. (The fine is in Euros, not dollars.)
And the EU did not ask for American companies to open subsidiaries in Europe. (Actually, Ireland did, with their flat tax and being extremely lax about enforcing European privacy law. Because of the NSA's PRISM requiring USAmerican companies to share user data with them, the legality of any American company operating in the EU is dubious at best. Especially after the one-man office for compliance with the "save haven" agreement was closed last year.)

After Microsoft locked out a civil servant for being involved in an international law case, the EU has sped up moving away from American Big Tech companies.

And EU privacy law makes it illegal to share any European government data with USAmerican citizens or with any device or person in the USA.

The USA have tried to DNS poison European companies before. Last I heard was about streaming football matches in Spain, and it was the DoHS who did it, or maybe ICE. Ever since then, European ISPs have been careful about pulling DNS changes from the root servers, all of which have come under control of the USA during the previous decade. (Note that the USA do not have jurisdiction in Spain, or anywhere in Europe.)

The USA have weaponised their monopolised web services, which means that their blocking European services will not harm the EU, it can only harm American citizens. Same as their trade tariffs. There is no longer a reason for anyone in the world to comply with the DMCA or the WTO.

Cloudflare challening the legality of this Piracy Shield is reasonable.
Nobody in the EU will be sad to see it dismantled. (Except the purveyors of censorship/surveillance devices, of course, but the majority of their business is with the friendly dictatorships that the USA have set up around the world anyway.)

No, that's automation.

Sure. Everybody needs a hobby.

Haha :D I'd love that. Unfortunately, Hesiod didn't include any schematics, and Heron's text books are perserved only fragmentary.

You can take my AmigaOS from my cold, dead hands!

Good questions. This is getting very philosophical.

Pygmalion's statue/daughter/wife was not built as an android, but really just a statue that looked alive, and then by divine intervention came to life. That's why I said she probably doesn't count. But of course that is a matter of interpretation, I didn't say that she definitely doesn't count. (Humans are programmable, aren't they? Free will just means not under coercion, it's one of those things that can only be proven by absence.)

In contrast, the Golem was built as an automaton for doing simple tasks (as befits a golem), programmed by written instructions placed in its head, not unlike punch cards or paper tape.

Seeing how Hephaistos later married Aphrodite, and, although the elder gods paired them as a joke (Hephaistos was born crippled, and Aphrodite was the sex goddess, and the others found that juxtapositon amusing somehow), it was a happy marriage for both, I don't think he was a fool. He also had a reputation for fooling others with his practical jokes, which he did for revenge. I'm sure he knew something that the others didn't. (And the sex toy was probably not it's entire volume filled with gold. Plus, seeing how machines get warm from entropic waste heat, it may have even been warm to the touch. Who knows? While myths and legends often have a kernel of historic truth, this one may be entirely fictional.)

Yes, TFS mentions that.

The singular form is "automaton"; "automata" is plural, and is the name of the book on the subject by Heron of Alexandria (circa 1st century).

Robots are automata.

The International Standards Organisation defines robots as programmable machines with at least three degrees of freedom. That falls within the scope of Heron's automata.

Around the 16th century, when Heron's book was translated into Italian, androids (automata that looked like people, what today we might call animatronics, or puppets) became popular with show people. Those who built and operated them were known as necromancers. (Although at least one Christ-shaped temple machine was in operation since the late middle ages.)

The word "robot" is younger, of course, as the fine summary mentions, and in Capek's play it didn't refer to automata, but rather to mass-produced variants of Frankenstein's creature. (From the book, not the Hammer Films adaptation, which is very different, and also quite a bit later.) In his books, Isaac Asimov distinguished between androids (made from organic tissue like Frankenstein's creature and Capek's robots) and robots (ambulatory positronic computers, sometimes humaniform).

The Golem of Prague also perfectly fits the description of a robot, although it is centuries older than the word.
(The word "golem" meant someone who does menial tasks. That particular golem happened to have been a programmable machine, made from clay in an imitation of the story of Genesis, so a sophisticated form of necromancy. Although there is no evidence that the story isn't science fiction.)

There's an even older story from China, about a puppet that is so human-like that the king doesn't believe that it isn't a human, until the creator dismantles his work to prove it, destroying it in the process.

Going further back, Hesiod describes the Greek god Hephaistos (Vulkan in the Roman adaptation) as creating different kinds of automata, including tables that move around by themselves, and even a sex bot made from gold. (The story of Pygmalion probably doesn't count, it's just about a life-like statue that miraculously comes to life.)

Automation saves lives.

The less you have to think about the details, the less opportunity you have to screw it up. Especially when its a problem that has been solved corretly before.

That's just nonsense.

The two bombs dropped on Japan didn't require any keys to be turned.

Most nuclear weapons are vertically deployed anti-personell devices. They usually just have a switch to arm them.

American ICBMs require that thing with the simultaneous keys, but that's not all the nuclear weapons on this planet, only most of them.

The Russian Dead Man's Hand can launch ICBMs autonomously. It requires human intervention to prevent a launch, in case there is a false alarm. The idea is that there might be nobody left alive to do that in case of an actual attack.

You are making the assumption that everyone has the exact same disposable income.

Those 5000 are the average, and the average tends to be skewed by outliers in the top 1%.
Which means that for most people, and the median, 500 is significantly more than 10%.

More realistic is that there are a bunch of people who wouldn't even notice that amount missing behind their couch.

A very small percentage of people, but enough to support this kind of business model.

(And they probably all know each other.)

Not according to the CIA Factbook.

There are cultures where the family of the bride is expected to pay for the wedding, and it is those in which sons are valued more than daughters.
China is not one of those.

Besides, the one-child-policy was in the 1960s. That hasn't been relevant for decades.
With the 2020s they now have a pro-natalist policy.

Nobody is going to buy Zoom.

Matrix can do everything Zoom can do, and do it better, and without the security holes.
And it is already open source. Free software, even.

I already have a perl script that is reading webcomics for me.

There is no such thing as a tragedy of the commons.

It was invented by a eugenicist.

Someone looked at the facts regarding his claim, and it turns out that Garrett Hardin was wrong. Who would have thought.

It only becomes a tragedy as soon as someone puts a price on commons. In other words, the problems start when the commons are privatised. When they stop being commons.

So what would you use, gamma rays? https://xkcd.com/273/
IR is higher frequency than microwaves.