If you can't figure out for yourself what's wrong with ordering large numbers of men to their deaths, then I won't be able to explain it to you.

They could take that one step further: once your computer has compiled the appropriate shader for its particular combination of hardware/driver/etc, the game could upload that particular shader to a repository, so that the next install with the exact same combination of conditions could just download it instead of having to duplicate the work. I imagine there are a lot of people out there running functionally identical systems that would benefit.

I suppose they don't do that because they don't trust people not to repurpose the mechanism as a malware vector, or something.

He's probably not scared enough. Anyone old enough to remember Vietnam knows how the song goes from here. "We must throw another batch of American men into the meat grinder, otherwise the lives of the previous batch will have been sacrificed in vain", and repeat ad infinitum.

Turning to AIs for a ruling on who is human and who is not is an interesting inversion of the Turing test.

It could be that. What it definitely was, though, is that Sony thought they could make more money selling to data centers than to the public.

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

Or some other Weekly World News cast member?

Only the customers with fancy GPUs have anything worth farming, and they probably want to run games on them instead.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

True, but I don't see how that's a problem for anyone.

For something that's too far away to be of much use, it sure is getting a lot of use.

I think you're confusing fusion with fission. A Mullah (or any irresponsible person, for those who prefer not to sound like a bigot) who has access to grossly abuse a fusion reactor might at worse damage the reactor and sprinkle a trace amount of radiation around. They certainly wouldn't be able to make any kind of weapon out of it.