altharaz

> I have never heard of this service

Maybe because it's French eheh. We don't have the same politics to go global!

For their pricing page, you buy Drops, which is like fuel for your car. They offer a better documentation here: http://doc.clever-cloud.com/pricing/ It will go from $600 (classical apps) to $2400 (huge apps) a year.

They designed their offer to be cheaper than AWS with same or better performances.

I'd definitely recommend http://clever-cloud.com/

It scales automaticaly, analyzing the resource you need on your server, and you only pay what you use, like electricity.

It supports actually PHP, Scala, Ruby, Java, Node JS, and it's still upgrading. Also they have deployed PostgreSQL, MySQL, CouchBase and they are working on MongoDB integration, and ElasticSearch as well.

This company is pretty young, so they have a good support, as they care for their customer. I don't hesitate to send them an email and then give a call, or to tweet their account. Usually I get an answer under 2 hours.

Short story: I used to work with Play 2.0 and MongoDB, and had several issues on Heroku because of a problem on their side with the MongoDB driver. They didn't help in 3 days. With Clever-Cloud, everything worked perfectly, and they even helped me to deploy my app the first time. I immediately migrated my apps from Heroku, no regrets since.

While I agree that a program could be made to build sort of counter-countermeasure, I think that we are still not conscious of all the information we get from our environment thanks to our brain. And as we don't have this knowledge, we can't give it to our products, like this program.

Now, let's say that we have such a program, able to reach its target most of the time. In that case, people would still have to focus on higher level tasks as you said, like global offensive strategy. Even for this task, I think that a spirit forged with mathematics will certainly be more efficient, with better logics and intuition. But my opinion might be influenced by the fact that in France, our best military schools do have high maths expectations for the entry exam.

I think it's not just about time. Computers are way faster than humans for multiplications and elementary arithmetic, but it doesn't "think". Computers are just doing some calculus, with less information on their environment than we get with our human brain. Computed missile guidance will in most cases fail if its target fires the right countermeasure, when a human guiding the missile would more likely avoid it and reach the goal.

Also, I do think that basic understanding of mathematics seriously enhances human intuition, which then helps develop better strategy.