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?

When the Xbox CEO calls the Xbox CCO to meet... does she refer to it as a "Booty call"?

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.

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.

And, right on the equator, they just bob up and down.

On how long it is before this turns into some ridiculously exploitable data breach that gives hackers full access *everyone's* VISA account info, I mean.

Yes.

According to the Seattle Times, in April "four companies approached Seattle City Light about building five large data centers with a combined maximum demand of 369 megawatts — roughly one-third of what the city uses on an average day".

Considering macOS 27 is in beta, the issue may be accidental rather than an attempt by Apple to block Linux on its hardware.

Ya think?

Obviously pious concerns about fraud are...not...the motivating force here; but I'm curious where on the scale from 'secondary but real' to 'frankly absurd' the burner-powered fraudsters actually live.

It's not like bad prepaid phones are expensive; but, especially if you are actually burning them with any frequency, they aren't really cheap unless you are doing some sort of scamming rather more lucrative than spamming people about nonexistent aftermarket warranties with sub 1% response rates. Are actual SIMs, or even actual phones, remotely competitive with the VOIP equivalent of bulletproof hosting if you want an in to the phone network?

In a similar vein; what's the breakdown of phone-using criminals between people who actually go to the counter and pay cash, where the FCC now wants them carded, vs. the various PO box companies that tend to show up on weird phone charges? It's not a surprise that they are running with the excuse; but the idea that telcom enabled crime is actually substantially the domain of something as clunky as burner phones/SIMs, rather than more efficient services that nobody cares enough to chase down, seems very implausible.

I heard that the Chinese Embassy on Monday accused the U.S. of "overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies." It said Chinese companies observe the laws and regulations of the countries where they do business. "The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies," the embassy said in a statement.

I also heard that the Chinese Embassy on Monday accused the U.S. of "overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies." It said Chinese companies observe the laws and regulations of the countries where they do business. "The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies," the embassy said in a statement.

The GP was just regurgitating Faux News talking points which, as usual, have very little basis in fact.

While there is truth in that, you might also want to look further into where much of that "Soviet" weaponry came from.

Stalin thought they would have lost the war if it wasn't for US weapons manufacturing and Lend-Lease.

Basically any service you can think of only costs as much as it does because there are limits to how much quality and reliability it actually promises. Electrical utilities tend to keep the grid pretty stable most of the time; if you want better than that you end up talking to Eaton or similar and running increasingly involved onsite equipment; just as people who want internet access to be very reliable rather than mostly reliable end up buying redundant links.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where it would make sense for the utility to operate and sell the additional reliability, rather than the customer DIYing it, whether because there are grid topology things they can do to get the result more effectively or just because they have greater experience with alarming AC gear; but that would be a tier above the standard offering, not a concession that it's reasonable to run the entire grid at the level of the worst-case customers.

You could get into the same argument about water. Hospitals and precision chemistry applications often have fairly elaborate onsite setups to provide sterile or ultra low ion water for their particular requirements because that's not the standard to which utility water is normally held. In theory you could shuffle around ownership and responsibility for the additional processing steps, and in some cases it might even make sense; but it's not terribly compelling to run the entire water system as though it is being piped into a burn ward or a chip fab; and, at least in agricultural areas, there's often another tier below the 'standard' for non-potable irrigation where you can worry less about microbe counts and whether there's matching sewer capacity because it's just getting sprayed on fields.