Some cruise missiles have the ability to choose their own target. For example the Russian P-500 & P-700Anti-Ship Missile can be fired in a swarm of 4 to 8 missiles. The missiles will skim along the surface, with one popping up to identify, designate and illuminate the target for the other missiles. It can prioritise multiple targets, and choose which one to hit. So one cruise missile is choosing targets for the other cruise missiles.

This is not new. This is 1970s-1980s technology.

So tell me again how killer robots are new?

This is a very interesting post, I have always thought the debate on global warming/climate change is very similar to the creation/evolution debate. In both cases you cannot claim independence:
1) If Climate change is true, it affects us in how we live and is a cost to us, we need to reduce pollution.
2) If Creation is true, and there is a Creator God, that has an effect on how we live our lives.

We need to accept that in both of these debates we are not independent third parties, but the outcome has a direct impact and cost on our lives and therefore we are likely to have a bias coming into these discussions.

These jammers do not only affect mobile phone users (people), but any equipment that uses the 2G/3G mobile phone network for communication. A bus may have a 3G connection for the ticketing system, for monitoring the location and/or 'vital signs' of the bus. Devices on the side of the road may be affected by the jammer - that big electronic sign may be controlled via a 3G connection. Or their might be equipment around that runs on a neighbouring licenced band. The 2G and 3G networks are not just used for mobile phone calls.

This is why we have laws like this, it is for the benefit of the public that these frequencies cannot be blocked by anybody.

Yes the Cobra is fairly worthless air combat wise, but there are a number of related manoeuvres, that require the same airframe capabilities which are. As for Russian radars, the Russians were the first to have an airborne PESA (Passive electronically steered array) in the Mig-31, and whilst they don't have a AESA (Active electronically steered array) airborne yet or any new fighters since the su-27/mig-29/mig-31, they have been developing a number of new radars in the last two decades. The Su-27 also has the advantage of it's size , it can fit a larger and more powerful radar unit and more fuel, the su-27 family never carry drop tanks (I have never seen a picture of one with external tanks) and it has a range that is as good as, if not better than American fighters like the Eagle fully loaded with fuel tanks. On the other hand you are correct that the have a lot of non flying aircraft due to maintenance issues, but over the last few years they have been trying to fix that, and it is not like they are short of aircraft either, they still have about 1000 modern fighter jets.

Supercruise is not the magic ticket you think it is. While a number of fighter jets can travel faster than the speed of sound in a clean configuration in level flight, the F-22 does have the advantage that it can get up to ~Mach 1.7, and can carry weapons internally, IIRC the PAK-FA will have supercruise as well. But supercruise is nothing special, all it takes is having enough thrust from your engines for the drag of the airframe. And don't be fooled that the cruising speed is supersonic, due to the higher drag you still consume more fuel. Now the advantage of supercruise in close combat is that you can force your opponent to use the afterburner and make them run out of fuel (the F-22 did this in some mock engagements with F-15s and F-16s). The problem here is when we put the F-22 up against the Mig-31, a Russian Interceptor without supercruise, due to the extra fuel that the Mig-31 carries, not only does it have a higher top speed of over Mach 2.8, but at the F-22's supersonic cruising speed of about Mach 1.7, the Mig-31 has more range on afterburner, so the 'advantage' of supercruise is negated by the fuel capacity of the Mig-31.

(Yes I know the Mig-31 is an interceptor and not a dog fighter, and is inferior in it's dogfighting ability - it was not designed for that - but it's dammed fast)

Not necessarily,

Previous posters have mentioned that a lot of the costs in the software version is bitwise operations (reversing buses and the like). These are very expensive in software, but in hardware they can be implemented very cheaply. Encryption is particularly efficient on either a dedicated chip or a FPGA because it is a reasonably straight forward (if complicated) process. There is no need for the branching and general purpose processing of a computer, on a FPGA you could set up the decryption in a pipeline so that you can be decrypting multiple words at once - basically what you are doing is reimplementating the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) chips that are already in use on a FPGA. Granted a FPGA won't have the same performance of a ASIC, but I would imagine that the HDCP ASIC are not very big.

With quite a few installer programs the licence is stored as a text file licence.txt, what is stopping me from modifying or replacing the license file with something else? I also recall either a program or registration on a web page where the licence was in a text box that was editable - so you could just select the whole license and delete it or change it as you saw fit.

To me it seems that you can't prove that someone accepted a EULA - or with a computer with multiple users, who accepted it. I think at least when you agree to an EULA, it needs to record your name and what you agreed to, and send it back to the company, ignoring the privacy issue for the moment, just so that the licenser has a copy of the agreement the licensee agreed to and who that licensee is.

IANAL, but I think that you need to agree to the license before you get the software, rather than after.

I understand people complain because everywhere else in the SI system is base 10, except with computers who like to count in base 2. So therefore people think to be compatible with the SI system bytes need to be counted in base 10 instead of base 2. The obvious problem is that computers count in base 2, but what I find interesting is that bytes are not SI units nor could they be derived from the SI base units. Furthermore SI units are not always that consistent, for example, there are seconds and micro seconds, but never kilo or mega seconds. Also the base unit for mass is the Kilogram, not the gram, yet we don't have a milikilogram or a kilokilogram, maybe we should fix these up first before we look at bytes and bits.

It does not make sense for people to demand that bytes be scaled as a SI unit when they cannot even be related to the SI base units, and are not expressible in the SI system.