No, the Swedish investigation (first became public Aug. 20) came before the "Cablegate" releases (Nov. 28), not after. Assange controlled the timing of the Cablegate releases, it was his choice to have the come immediately after the Swedish issue came up (even while Wikileaks volunteers were expressing concerns about the rushed release - which ultimately led to a mass exodus of volunteers from Wikileaks). And after Cablegate blew up big, when being shown all of the headlines, he smiled big (on camera) and said "I'm untouchable now in this country."
Let's see if I've got your Lets see if I've got the Shadowy Conspiracy(TM) down pat. Your argument is that a British government program, using tactics from a document talking about Iran and the Taliban, and scheduled to have its staff trained in 2013, went back in time to 2010 to set up Assange. For reasons only beknownst to them, they can only nab Assange from Sweden, not any of the vast numbers of far-easier countries that Assange regularly globetrots to. No, it has to be Sweden, the one place in Europe that *doesn't* extradite people for intelligence crimes. Let's just take that as a given for some Unknown Shadowy CIA Reason. Now, Assange was applying to live in Sweden when the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy decided, "Instead of waiting until we're ready to nab him for our charges, since he's planning to live here, wouldn't it be so much more fun to frame him for a crime that would f* up our ability to extradite him? Yeah! And let's pick a crime that has a pathetically low conviction rate! Let's not only frame him for rape, but let's frame him for rape but use a case that involves the women having consented to certain acts but not others, have delays and other issues that could potentially hurt their case, etc, just like in real rape situations, where victims don't live their lives as though they're about to be judged in a trial, instead of a phony "knife to the throat" hollywood-style rape case." Why? Because the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy just rolls that way, stop asking questions! And because our CIA psychics have foreseen this event for decades in advance, we can now activate Sleeper Agent SW who we've had spend decades misleadingly cultivating herself as a young Swedish museum worker with a lifelong paranoia about unprotected sex (hey, they've got a time machine, right?). Now, let's install our CIA Plant, Ms. Ny, to prosecute him - because of course, we at the C IA have infiltrated the top levels of all of the major governments' of the world 's judicial systems just for this purpose, as well as all of their courts, including the Swedish Supreme Court. But let's have the prosecutor take several weeks to get him, and let's let the news totally leak out during the time that they're getting ready to arrest him so that Assange can run. And let's just let him flee the country, and not tell Sweden so that they can stop him - instead, let's have all of the Swedish officials pretend that they think he's still in the country! Then when he exhausts his legal options in the UK and jumps bail to run into the embassy of a country with an anti-western leader who's a fan of his, let's do absolutely nothing to stop him.
Do I have the scheme down? Damn those evil time travelers at JTRIG!
They did try - naively assuming that Ecuador wouldn't interpret "a couple months advance notice" as "Meh, we can wait that out".
Beyond that, it's a really subpar situation, not only because of the various limitations that interviewing someone remotely puts on the interrogation process, but because the goal is to indictment him. They already have a court finding of probable cause in Sweden on all four (now one) counts - a court hearing initiated by Assange and involving a review of all evidence and defense from his attorneys. However, Swedish law has specific questioning requirements before an indictment can be leveled. If they were to question and then indict him, Sweden has strict, short limits on how long there can be between the issuing of an indictment and a trial, and it's illegal to try someone in absentia in Sweden. It's possible to get extensions on the time limit due to extenuating factors, even potentially indefinitely, but it's a very undesirable situation.
1) Waiting for a girl to fall asleep so that you can F* her in a way that she repeatedly stopped you from doing and told you not to do while she was awake (charge #4 on the EAW, the one that's still open) falls under my standard of "heinous", but to each their own.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they dropped". Eva Finne (who ironically Assange fans used to rail against but now apparently love) only closed part of the investigation (never the whole thing), and this in response to the backlash of her earlier bungling (filing an arrest warrant for Assange when he had never at that point refused to cooperate).
2) The partial closure itself was itself some pretty heavy bungling in that it involved victim statements that hadn't even gone into the computer yet and without having interviewed Assange on the topic either - which is some pretty fundamental stuff. Sweden has a strong victims' rights process which allows accusers to appeal the closure of a case that they feel was handled incorrectly. This brings it before a review board; about 20% of such cases are reopened. The women's (then-mutual) legal representative, Claes Borgström, filed such a request for them, and it was approved.
1) Someone surrendered under an EAW, in order to be extradited to a third state, requires the consent of both states taking part in the EAW request, rather than just one. Being extradited under an EAW only further complicates any attempts at third party extradition.
2) Sweden is one of the few countries whose extradition treaty with the US flatly bans extradition for military or intelligence crimes, and has a consequence long been a place to where defectors and spies flee (the most famous being Edward Lee Howard, the greatest CIA defector during the Cold War period)
3) Sweden was so mad at the US extradition program ignoring their ban on use of their airspace for extradition flights that they caused a diplomatic rift with the US in 2006 by disguising their special forces soldiers as airport workers to sneak aboard a suspected extradition plane. And how do we know about this event? Why, Wikileaks of course!
4) Sweden has the world's strongest whistleblower protections, so the point where it's not even legal to look for the source of a leak, let alone prosecute them for it.
5) While no country's judicial system is completely devoid of controversial cases (Sweden included), as a whole Sweden has one of the world's highest rankings on judicial fairness according to the peer-reviewed World Justice Project. They actually use it as an example of fairness when discussing how other countries can improve.
6) Assange himself thought so much of Sweden that he was applying for a residence permit there and repeatedly called Sweden his "shield". Funny how Sweden instantly became evil US lackeys the instant he was investigated for rape, isn't it?
BTW, if you're going to read any links, check out the last one - "Ghosting" by Andrew O’Hagan. He was Assange's ghostwriter for his book and spent months living with him, interviewing him and recording every conversation. It's a... very revealing read, to put it mildly.
People who are on our side, whatever side that may be, never rape. If they're charged with rapes, it's due to lying sluts making fake charges due to political motives. People who are against us however are never faced with false rape accusations. They're rapists, plain and simple. Even if they haven't been charged with rape.
Please keep these matters straight.
Also: It's easy to forget, but remember: rapists look like creepy guys who would jump out of the bushes with a knife. They never look like upstanding members of their community, and they never do things in their professional life that one can admire. Their whole life is dedicated to the pursuit of Rape and General Evil. We've all seen movies and TV shows, right? That's how rapists are in the real world too, because Hollywood is famous for accurate presentations.
It looks like these balls were first mass produced to block light, not to minimize evaporation, in order to reduce the formation of a carcinogenic byproduct of water chlorination of bromine-rich waters. So perhaps the color isn't ideal for its current role - but sufficient.
They reportedly considered a floating shade cloth, but found this to be a cheaper solution when all costs were factored in.
Why is it cheaper? Don't ask me. But it reportedly is.
IMHO, the "ideal" solution would probably be to use the area over the water for productive purposes, such as floating sealed algae farm or floating solar farm, so that you're both stopping evaporation and getting a secondary benefit with the same system. But the overhead times and costs would obviously be much higher for that.
unless someone sees fit to waste a very expensive anti-aircraft missile that can reach 32km for the purpose - and if such a missile could even target something with little radar signature and virtually no heat signature
32km isn't something you can reach with a MANPAD - even most vehicle-mounted SAMs can't hit that (for example, the BUK missile that shot down MH17 has a maximum height of around 25km). It takes a very expensive missile to hit that high. And the homing systems are designed for airplanes, not balloons of thin plastic. Just ignoring the limitations on the missiles themselves, even the targeting radars rarely can target planes over 30km, let alone balloons. Most military aircraft can't reach that high either. And it's not enough to just shoot it with bullets - contrary to popular myth, large balloons don't "pop", a hole only causes them to leak helium at a rather low rate - and it's not like it needs to be aloft for a long time, drone batteries don't last forever. With bullets, one would have to hit the electronics payload, and that's a pretty small target.
In short, they'd have to put forth a really big expense and effort to shoot it down; it's just not realistic. Now, jamming with electronic warfare capabilities, that is much more realistic. And indeed is probably what would happen in the DNR example if they learned about it in advance - otherwise, it'd probably happen partway through the run. But other conflict locations where the paramilitaries are not/i> backed by a large state actor probably would not have any sort of effective electronic warfare capability.
A lot of the unevenness issues of streaming video over 4G are not that the connection drops out completely, but that the bandwidth changes as the drone moves around. Ignoring the easy line of sight when your "tower" is overhead, one can deal with this problem simply by using an adaptive codec designed to deal with sudden drops in bandwidth via sudden drops in quality / framerate rather than lagging imagery.
As for latency, it depends on what sort of latency one demands. No, you're not going to get the sort of instant responsiveness of a direct RF link, but it's still going to respond to your commands in a fraction of a second. 4G ping times of around 50ms are typical on commercial networks. With their own private "cell tower", they should be under 20ms.
Basically, something like this. 1920x1080@30fps, automatic framerate reduction to prevent lag, and a bit over 150ms latency with latency reduction work in progress.
How are you planning to get signal to the drones so that screen can turn on?
Right where I wrote:
Give them a base station like a Google Loon balloon
Aka, basically a floating cell tower, with the drones using cellular dongles. And since the "tower" is overhead, it'd be very hard to lose direct line of sight; one would expect excellent signal quality (barring electronic warfare being used against the drones).
Obviously one chooses the hardware to meet the task and not the other way around. Loon balloons are designed to basically be a floating cell phone tower. Like a cell phone tower, a tiny pocket sized device (for example, a cell phone, or a USB cell dongle) can receive the signal from dozens of kilometers away and maintain a two-way connection at 4G speeds (tens of mbps, more than enough for high quality realtime streaming video)
Why, exactly, can this not be applied to drones? Are USB cell dongles somehow prohibatively heavy?
... but surely one could make it more interesting than that. I mean, these are net-connected drones - give them a base station with a lot of bandwidth and good response time, and the drones could be almost anywhere in the world, regardless of where their controllers are. Give them a base station like a Google Loon balloon - and more to the point, deliver them to the site by balloon - and you could operate them in an area no matter how hostile (unless someone sees fit to waste a very expensive anti-aircraft missile that can reach 32km for the purpose - and if such a missile could even target something with little radar signature and virtually no heat signature). For example, the balloon could enter a war zone, drops the drones which drop down to the surface, then try to achieve some (harmless) goal in the middle of an area where people are apt to literally shoot at them - with the competing drone pilots knowing nothing of where they are until the drop. So when it begins they're given maps, whatever intelligence is available, and a challenge. Eg: "Welcome to the Donetsk People's Republic! Your mission: deliver a Putin bobblehead, intact, as close as you can to Igor Strelkov, commander of the pro-Russian paramilitaries in the region, at his headquarters at the Regional State Administration building. Your drones have been painted in the colors of the flag of Ukraine and the words 'Gay Rights Are Human Rights'. Have fun dodging those bullets!"
I'll repeat: So we're to believe that Ukraine smuggled a BUK deep into DNR territory to shoot at planes when the DNR had no planes, and then convinced Strelkov that he had shot it down?
So we're to believe that Ukraine smuggled a BUK deep into DNR territory to shoot at planes when the DNR had no planes, and then convinced Strelkov that he had shot it down?
Strelkov's VK and Twitter accounts had long been the official social media mouthpieces of the DNR and had never been questioned. Strelkov can be heard making the same boast in a video. Russian media embedded with the rebels also echoed their shootdown claim, adding “Ukrainian military claim that the losses were caused by actions by Russia. The militia refuted this information, correcting that they had shot down the plane from a ZRK ’9K37M1 (better known as a Buk).” Numerous Russian news sources, even ITAR-TASS, carried the story.
If not for the sanctions, Russia would have the Mistrals today. Now they have to launch their own design program. It's tenatively scheduled to be done in 2020, which knowing Russia, means in reality somewhere between 2025 and Never.
The sanctions have also caused Russia to dramatically curtail their production estimates for new weapons systems like Armata.
BUK isn't a "Russian" missile system. It was developed by several USSR countries, including Ukraine.
Buk was developed by Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design of Zhukovsky, Russia and NPO Novator of Yekaterinburg, Russia. It is produced by Novator's Kalinin Machine-Building Plant. It is a Russian missile system. Russia is not the only country to own them, but they designed, made, and still make them, including the latest updated variants not available in former satellite states.
The paramilitaries issued a "don't fly in our skies, we'll shoot you down" warning days before the attack. Immediately after the attack, they announced shooting down the plane, before deleting the announcement hours later it after it was discovered to be civilian. The plane was shot down deep in DNR territory. The missiles have a maximum range of 20 kilometers, far away from the nearest Ukrainian troops.
I know it's great to want to be skeptical, but at some point you need to come down to Earth.
As for Putin succeeding at waiting it out... yes, the general American and European public have the attention span of a gnat, but even still, Russia's poll numbers have plunged around the world. Even Germany, Russia's "bridge" to the EU, is something in the ballpark 70% negative 20% positive in the last Gallup poll. Even if they're not closely following the conflict, they're no longer so willing to just put up with Russia's behavior.
The question comes as to what's going to happen next. Obama has been playing Ukraine with a very soft hand - they need (among countless other things) modern anti-tank weapons and long range counter-strike radars, but the most "provacative" things the Obama administration has been willing to provide are trainers and short-range radars not useful against most equipment used by the paramilitaries. Russia has some of their best tank and artillery models in Donbas, way better equipment than Ukraine has. But the Obama administration has been very cautious about "provoking" Russia. But whoever takes the White House next may choose a different strategy. The same applies to the ever switching governances in Europe. Some entities want to offer Ukraine whatever military equipment they want. Others want to throw Donbas, Crimea, and pretty much whatever else Russia wants to Russia and renormalize relations. These people are in a minority in Europe, but in certain parts of Eastern Europe they stand a chance at winning, and even one pro-Russian government can become a very big headache for the EU. There are even already a few moderately pro-Russian elements, such as the current governments of Greece and Hungary.
Of course, the whole game changes if Russia ratchets things up elsewhere. Belarus, formerly Russia's biggest European pal, suddenly seems to want to run away from them as fast as they can (although Europe doesn't seem to be in a rush to embrace them). If Russia involves Little Green Men in Belarus, the situation could escalate. And it most definitely would escalate if they involved them in NATO states like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
"Strategic location and natural resources"? Look, I'll be the first to argue that Ukraine has great future potential, if it can get past its huge problems of endemic corruption and end the situation with the Russian paramilitaries holding a chunk of the country. But as it stands, Ukraine is a basket case. Their per-capita GDP is under $3100 per year - that ranks it between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Palestinian Territories. Their largest source of economic activity is just letting Russian oil pass through their country.
They're doing a lot to try to remedy the situation, and in the future - given enough time period of stability without corruption - it has great potential for agriculture, manufacture, and energy production. But that's not going to happen any time soon. And probably would never happen under a scenario of the country being run by Russian puppets.
As for "strategic location", it depends on whose perspective you look at it as. Russia considers it "strategic" because they want to have a "buffer zone" and think in spheres of interest. The US and Europe however tend to think in terms of "hot spots" and having accessibility to those "hot spots" that they're heavily involved in, be they Afghanistan, Syria, etc. Ukraine isn't particularly useful in any of these regards. Nor is it a major energy producer (always a concern to the west), just an energy transporter from Russia - it's in neither side's interests to block the flow of energy, since Russia needs to sell it and the west needs to consume it. So what's the great strategic value?
Europe had a lot of interest in bringing Ukraine more into their sphere as a sort of "New Poland" - that is, a country that starts out as poor which can provide host to low cost manufacturing labor and low-cost raw goods, benefiting the wealthier countries while also allowing the new country to grow. Poland once served that role (along with a number of other Eastern European nations), but they've gotten too expensive as their per capita income has risen. But if there's anything the EU cares about more than economic growth, it's "not getting involved in potentially icky military action". There's no growth potential for a Ukraine with a simmering war inside its borders, but there's a lot of risk. Which, of course, Russia knows well; the Donbas conflict basically neutralizes their ability to get significant European investment. It also pretty much keeps them out of NATO, as NATO isn't going to accept a country that would cause an immediate Article 5 invocation against the country with the world's largest number of nuclear weapons.
You're absolutely right that it doesn't matter what they find in the wreckage. There will always be a Russian spin, and their media control will always allow them find a way to present that to their public as God's Own Truth. Even if they found a hand-signed letter from Putin to Igor Strelkov, with his DNA on it, praising Strelkov for his actions in Donbas and announcing the delivery of the Buk system, and a reply from Strelkov announcing the date, time, and location that they were planning to use it to try to take down an airplane... it still wouldn't make a whit of difference. I mean, given that Strelkov already publicly announced shortly after taking down the plane that they had just taken down a plane and there's videos of the rebels talking about the takedown, cheering, then slowly coming to the realization that it was a passenger liner... really, what effect could any more evidence have at this point?
Lastly, a minor correction: you're thinking of winter deliveries of natural gas, not petroleum. Beyond this, last year's mild winter left gas stocks high, and Europe has been working hard to increase their independence from Russian natural gas. Russia doesn't have nearly the leverage that they use to, and ongoing European efforts are only going to decrease this. They got complacent before and left themselves vulnerable, but they are adapting.
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By "remember", apparently you mean "display gross ignorance of even the most basic facts of the case".
No, the Swedish investigation (first became public Aug. 20) came before the "Cablegate" releases (Nov. 28), not after. Assange controlled the timing of the Cablegate releases, it was his choice to have the come immediately after the Swedish issue came up (even while Wikileaks volunteers were expressing concerns about the rushed release - which ultimately led to a mass exodus of volunteers from Wikileaks). And after Cablegate blew up big, when being shown all of the headlines, he smiled big (on camera) and said "I'm untouchable now in this country."
As for everything else, see here.
But before that,
Let's see if I've got your Lets see if I've got the Shadowy Conspiracy(TM) down pat. Your argument is that a British government program, using tactics from a document talking about Iran and the Taliban, and scheduled to have its staff trained in 2013, went back in time to 2010 to set up Assange. For reasons only beknownst to them, they can only nab Assange from Sweden, not any of the vast numbers of far-easier countries that Assange regularly globetrots to. No, it has to be Sweden, the one place in Europe that *doesn't* extradite people for intelligence crimes. Let's just take that as a given for some Unknown Shadowy CIA Reason. Now, Assange was applying to live in Sweden when the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy decided, "Instead of waiting until we're ready to nab him for our charges, since he's planning to live here, wouldn't it be so much more fun to frame him for a crime that would f* up our ability to extradite him? Yeah! And let's pick a crime that has a pathetically low conviction rate! Let's not only frame him for rape, but let's frame him for rape but use a case that involves the women having consented to certain acts but not others, have delays and other issues that could potentially hurt their case, etc, just like in real rape situations, where victims don't live their lives as though they're about to be judged in a trial, instead of a phony "knife to the throat" hollywood-style rape case." Why? Because the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy just rolls that way, stop asking questions! And because our CIA psychics have foreseen this event for decades in advance, we can now activate Sleeper Agent SW who we've had spend decades misleadingly cultivating herself as a young Swedish museum worker with a lifelong paranoia about unprotected sex (hey, they've got a time machine, right?). Now, let's install our CIA Plant, Ms. Ny, to prosecute him - because of course, we at the C IA have infiltrated the top levels of all of the major governments' of the world 's judicial systems just for this purpose, as well as all of their courts, including the Swedish Supreme Court. But let's have the prosecutor take several weeks to get him, and let's let the news totally leak out during the time that they're getting ready to arrest him so that Assange can run. And let's just let him flee the country, and not tell Sweden so that they can stop him - instead, let's have all of the Swedish officials pretend that they think he's still in the country! Then when he exhausts his legal options in the UK and jumps bail to run into the embassy of a country with an anti-western leader who's a fan of his, let's do absolutely nothing to stop him.
Do I have the scheme down? Damn those evil time travelers at JTRIG!
They did try - naively assuming that Ecuador wouldn't interpret "a couple months advance notice" as "Meh, we can wait that out".
Beyond that, it's a really subpar situation, not only because of the various limitations that interviewing someone remotely puts on the interrogation process, but because the goal is to indictment him. They already have a court finding of probable cause in Sweden on all four (now one) counts - a court hearing initiated by Assange and involving a review of all evidence and defense from his attorneys. However, Swedish law has specific questioning requirements before an indictment can be leveled. If they were to question and then indict him, Sweden has strict, short limits on how long there can be between the issuing of an indictment and a trial, and it's illegal to try someone in absentia in Sweden. It's possible to get extensions on the time limit due to extenuating factors, even potentially indefinitely, but it's a very undesirable situation.
A couple minor issues.
1) Waiting for a girl to fall asleep so that you can F* her in a way that she repeatedly stopped you from doing and told you not to do while she was awake (charge #4 on the EAW, the one that's still open) falls under my standard of "heinous", but to each their own.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they dropped". Eva Finne (who ironically Assange fans used to rail against but now apparently love) only closed part of the investigation (never the whole thing), and this in response to the backlash of her earlier bungling (filing an arrest warrant for Assange when he had never at that point refused to cooperate).
2) The partial closure itself was itself some pretty heavy bungling in that it involved victim statements that hadn't even gone into the computer yet and without having interviewed Assange on the topic either - which is some pretty fundamental stuff. Sweden has a strong victims' rights process which allows accusers to appeal the closure of a case that they feel was handled incorrectly. This brings it before a review board; about 20% of such cases are reopened. The women's (then-mutual) legal representative, Claes Borgström, filed such a request for them, and it was approved.
More to the point,
1) Someone surrendered under an EAW, in order to be extradited to a third state, requires the consent of both states taking part in the EAW request, rather than just one. Being extradited under an EAW only further complicates any attempts at third party extradition.
2) Sweden is one of the few countries whose extradition treaty with the US flatly bans extradition for military or intelligence crimes, and has a consequence long been a place to where defectors and spies flee (the most famous being Edward Lee Howard, the greatest CIA defector during the Cold War period)
3) Sweden was so mad at the US extradition program ignoring their ban on use of their airspace for extradition flights that they caused a diplomatic rift with the US in 2006 by disguising their special forces soldiers as airport workers to sneak aboard a suspected extradition plane. And how do we know about this event? Why, Wikileaks of course!
4) Sweden has the world's strongest whistleblower protections, so the point where it's not even legal to look for the source of a leak, let alone prosecute them for it.
5) While no country's judicial system is completely devoid of controversial cases (Sweden included), as a whole Sweden has one of the world's highest rankings on judicial fairness according to the peer-reviewed World Justice Project. They actually use it as an example of fairness when discussing how other countries can improve.
6) Assange himself thought so much of Sweden that he was applying for a residence permit there and repeatedly called Sweden his "shield". Funny how Sweden instantly became evil US lackeys the instant he was investigated for rape, isn't it?
This makes it sound like Sweden is highly restricted in what it can consider to be an obstruction of justice.
BTW, if you're going to read any links, check out the last one - "Ghosting" by Andrew O’Hagan. He was Assange's ghostwriter for his book and spent months living with him, interviewing him and recording every conversation. It's a... very revealing read, to put it mildly.
I think you're confused.
People who are on our side, whatever side that may be, never rape. If they're charged with rapes, it's due to lying sluts making fake charges due to political motives.
People who are against us however are never faced with false rape accusations. They're rapists, plain and simple. Even if they haven't been charged with rape.
Please keep these matters straight.
Also: It's easy to forget, but remember: rapists look like creepy guys who would jump out of the bushes with a knife. They never look like upstanding members of their community, and they never do things in their professional life that one can admire. Their whole life is dedicated to the pursuit of Rape and General Evil. We've all seen movies and TV shows, right? That's how rapists are in the real world too, because Hollywood is famous for accurate presentations.
Lastly: It's unfair to mention anything about Assange's past, so no mentioning his I am a god to women comments, his womens' brains can't do math comments, the accusations from whistleblowers working with him of misogyny and aggressive sexual behavior, accusations of cyberstalking a teenager before he got famous, his stopping an interview to oggle some pre-teens, or about 50 other things. Let's stick to the issues at hand: What a great hero he is! So kudos to him for his brave evasion of evil injustice!
One of the ironies is that the guy who's sheltering him calls his opponents rapists and is big on secret surveillance.
It looks like these balls were first mass produced to block light, not to minimize evaporation, in order to reduce the formation of a carcinogenic byproduct of water chlorination of bromine-rich waters. So perhaps the color isn't ideal for its current role - but sufficient.
They reportedly considered a floating shade cloth, but found this to be a cheaper solution when all costs were factored in.
Why is it cheaper? Don't ask me. But it reportedly is.
IMHO, the "ideal" solution would probably be to use the area over the water for productive purposes, such as floating sealed algae farm or floating solar farm, so that you're both stopping evaporation and getting a secondary benefit with the same system. But the overhead times and costs would obviously be much higher for that.
Which was, of course, followed by:
32km isn't something you can reach with a MANPAD - even most vehicle-mounted SAMs can't hit that (for example, the BUK missile that shot down MH17 has a maximum height of around 25km). It takes a very expensive missile to hit that high. And the homing systems are designed for airplanes, not balloons of thin plastic. Just ignoring the limitations on the missiles themselves, even the targeting radars rarely can target planes over 30km, let alone balloons. Most military aircraft can't reach that high either. And it's not enough to just shoot it with bullets - contrary to popular myth, large balloons don't "pop", a hole only causes them to leak helium at a rather low rate - and it's not like it needs to be aloft for a long time, drone batteries don't last forever. With bullets, one would have to hit the electronics payload, and that's a pretty small target.
In short, they'd have to put forth a really big expense and effort to shoot it down; it's just not realistic. Now, jamming with electronic warfare capabilities, that is much more realistic. And indeed is probably what would happen in the DNR example if they learned about it in advance - otherwise, it'd probably happen partway through the run. But other conflict locations where the paramilitaries are not/i> backed by a large state actor probably would not have any sort of effective electronic warfare capability.
A lot of the unevenness issues of streaming video over 4G are not that the connection drops out completely, but that the bandwidth changes as the drone moves around. Ignoring the easy line of sight when your "tower" is overhead, one can deal with this problem simply by using an adaptive codec designed to deal with sudden drops in bandwidth via sudden drops in quality / framerate rather than lagging imagery.
As for latency, it depends on what sort of latency one demands. No, you're not going to get the sort of instant responsiveness of a direct RF link, but it's still going to respond to your commands in a fraction of a second. 4G ping times of around 50ms are typical on commercial networks. With their own private "cell tower", they should be under 20ms.
Basically, something like this. 1920x1080@30fps, automatic framerate reduction to prevent lag, and a bit over 150ms latency with latency reduction work in progress.
Right where I wrote:
Aka, basically a floating cell tower, with the drones using cellular dongles. And since the "tower" is overhead, it'd be very hard to lose direct line of sight; one would expect excellent signal quality (barring electronic warfare being used against the drones).
Obviously one chooses the hardware to meet the task and not the other way around. Loon balloons are designed to basically be a floating cell phone tower. Like a cell phone tower, a tiny pocket sized device (for example, a cell phone, or a USB cell dongle) can receive the signal from dozens of kilometers away and maintain a two-way connection at 4G speeds (tens of mbps, more than enough for high quality realtime streaming video)
Why, exactly, can this not be applied to drones? Are USB cell dongles somehow prohibatively heavy?
... but surely one could make it more interesting than that. I mean, these are net-connected drones - give them a base station with a lot of bandwidth and good response time, and the drones could be almost anywhere in the world, regardless of where their controllers are. Give them a base station like a Google Loon balloon - and more to the point, deliver them to the site by balloon - and you could operate them in an area no matter how hostile (unless someone sees fit to waste a very expensive anti-aircraft missile that can reach 32km for the purpose - and if such a missile could even target something with little radar signature and virtually no heat signature). For example, the balloon could enter a war zone, drops the drones which drop down to the surface, then try to achieve some (harmless) goal in the middle of an area where people are apt to literally shoot at them - with the competing drone pilots knowing nothing of where they are until the drop. So when it begins they're given maps, whatever intelligence is available, and a challenge. Eg: "Welcome to the Donetsk People's Republic! Your mission: deliver a Putin bobblehead, intact, as close as you can to Igor Strelkov, commander of the pro-Russian paramilitaries in the region, at his headquarters at the Regional State Administration building. Your drones have been painted in the colors of the flag of Ukraine and the words 'Gay Rights Are Human Rights'. Have fun dodging those bullets!"
I'll repeat: So we're to believe that Ukraine smuggled a BUK deep into DNR territory to shoot at planes when the DNR had no planes, and then convinced Strelkov that he had shot it down?
Interesting, tell me more.
So we're to believe that Ukraine smuggled a BUK deep into DNR territory to shoot at planes when the DNR had no planes, and then convinced Strelkov that he had shot it down?
Interesting, tell me more.
Strelkov's VK and Twitter accounts had long been the official social media mouthpieces of the DNR and had never been questioned. Strelkov can be heard making the same boast in a video. Russian media embedded with the rebels also echoed their shootdown claim, adding “Ukrainian military claim that the losses were caused by actions by Russia. The militia refuted this information, correcting that they had shot down the plane from a ZRK ’9K37M1 (better known as a Buk).” Numerous Russian news sources, even ITAR-TASS, carried the story.
After the fact that it was a civilian plane came to light, Strelkov switched to conspiracy theory mode - still not changing from "we shot down the plane", but rather to the plane wasn't actually full of civilians but rather a bunch of already-dead bodies.
If not for the sanctions, Russia would have the Mistrals today. Now they have to launch their own design program. It's tenatively scheduled to be done in 2020, which knowing Russia, means in reality somewhere between 2025 and Never.
The sanctions have also caused Russia to dramatically curtail their production estimates for new weapons systems like Armata.
Buk was developed by Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design of Zhukovsky, Russia and NPO Novator of Yekaterinburg, Russia. It is produced by Novator's Kalinin Machine-Building Plant. It is a Russian missile system. Russia is not the only country to own them, but they designed, made, and still make them, including the latest updated variants not available in former satellite states.
The paramilitaries issued a "don't fly in our skies, we'll shoot you down" warning days before the attack. Immediately after the attack, they announced shooting down the plane, before deleting the announcement hours later it after it was discovered to be civilian. The plane was shot down deep in DNR territory. The missiles have a maximum range of 20 kilometers, far away from the nearest Ukrainian troops.
I know it's great to want to be skeptical, but at some point you need to come down to Earth.
As for Putin succeeding at waiting it out... yes, the general American and European public have the attention span of a gnat, but even still, Russia's poll numbers have plunged around the world. Even Germany, Russia's "bridge" to the EU, is something in the ballpark 70% negative 20% positive in the last Gallup poll. Even if they're not closely following the conflict, they're no longer so willing to just put up with Russia's behavior.
The question comes as to what's going to happen next. Obama has been playing Ukraine with a very soft hand - they need (among countless other things) modern anti-tank weapons and long range counter-strike radars, but the most "provacative" things the Obama administration has been willing to provide are trainers and short-range radars not useful against most equipment used by the paramilitaries. Russia has some of their best tank and artillery models in Donbas, way better equipment than Ukraine has. But the Obama administration has been very cautious about "provoking" Russia. But whoever takes the White House next may choose a different strategy. The same applies to the ever switching governances in Europe. Some entities want to offer Ukraine whatever military equipment they want. Others want to throw Donbas, Crimea, and pretty much whatever else Russia wants to Russia and renormalize relations. These people are in a minority in Europe, but in certain parts of Eastern Europe they stand a chance at winning, and even one pro-Russian government can become a very big headache for the EU. There are even already a few moderately pro-Russian elements, such as the current governments of Greece and Hungary.
Of course, the whole game changes if Russia ratchets things up elsewhere. Belarus, formerly Russia's biggest European pal, suddenly seems to want to run away from them as fast as they can (although Europe doesn't seem to be in a rush to embrace them). If Russia involves Little Green Men in Belarus, the situation could escalate. And it most definitely would escalate if they involved them in NATO states like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
"Strategic location and natural resources"? Look, I'll be the first to argue that Ukraine has great future potential, if it can get past its huge problems of endemic corruption and end the situation with the Russian paramilitaries holding a chunk of the country. But as it stands, Ukraine is a basket case. Their per-capita GDP is under $3100 per year - that ranks it between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Palestinian Territories. Their largest source of economic activity is just letting Russian oil pass through their country.
They're doing a lot to try to remedy the situation, and in the future - given enough time period of stability without corruption - it has great potential for agriculture, manufacture, and energy production. But that's not going to happen any time soon. And probably would never happen under a scenario of the country being run by Russian puppets.
As for "strategic location", it depends on whose perspective you look at it as. Russia considers it "strategic" because they want to have a "buffer zone" and think in spheres of interest. The US and Europe however tend to think in terms of "hot spots" and having accessibility to those "hot spots" that they're heavily involved in, be they Afghanistan, Syria, etc. Ukraine isn't particularly useful in any of these regards. Nor is it a major energy producer (always a concern to the west), just an energy transporter from Russia - it's in neither side's interests to block the flow of energy, since Russia needs to sell it and the west needs to consume it. So what's the great strategic value?
Europe had a lot of interest in bringing Ukraine more into their sphere as a sort of "New Poland" - that is, a country that starts out as poor which can provide host to low cost manufacturing labor and low-cost raw goods, benefiting the wealthier countries while also allowing the new country to grow. Poland once served that role (along with a number of other Eastern European nations), but they've gotten too expensive as their per capita income has risen. But if there's anything the EU cares about more than economic growth, it's "not getting involved in potentially icky military action". There's no growth potential for a Ukraine with a simmering war inside its borders, but there's a lot of risk. Which, of course, Russia knows well; the Donbas conflict basically neutralizes their ability to get significant European investment. It also pretty much keeps them out of NATO, as NATO isn't going to accept a country that would cause an immediate Article 5 invocation against the country with the world's largest number of nuclear weapons.
You're absolutely right that it doesn't matter what they find in the wreckage. There will always be a Russian spin, and their media control will always allow them find a way to present that to their public as God's Own Truth. Even if they found a hand-signed letter from Putin to Igor Strelkov, with his DNA on it, praising Strelkov for his actions in Donbas and announcing the delivery of the Buk system, and a reply from Strelkov announcing the date, time, and location that they were planning to use it to try to take down an airplane... it still wouldn't make a whit of difference. I mean, given that Strelkov already publicly announced shortly after taking down the plane that they had just taken down a plane and there's videos of the rebels talking about the takedown, cheering, then slowly coming to the realization that it was a passenger liner... really, what effect could any more evidence have at this point?
Lastly, a minor correction: you're thinking of winter deliveries of natural gas, not petroleum. Beyond this, last year's mild winter left gas stocks high, and Europe has been working hard to increase their independence from Russian natural gas. Russia doesn't have nearly the leverage that they use to, and ongoing European efforts are only going to decrease this. They got complacent before and left themselves vulnerable, but they are adapting.