>Put specific ID requirements (driver's license is a common one since there's not a whole lot of reason to have a driver's license if you have no car)
What utter fucking horseshit. You cannot live in our modern society without some form of government-issued ID. How the hell would those poor people cash their paychecks? Or even their welfare checks? Same bullshit excuse trotted out every fucking time. Go vote in Chicago sometime, that'll be a gas.
The engineers that made it would not disagree with you. The lander's design was constrained by many factors but the biggest was simply a lack of information - nobody has landed on a comet before. Recall that they thought the Lunar regolith might swallow a spacecraft whole, like quicksand, before the first soft-lander probes were sent to test the theory. That's why the comet lander had that harpoon system nobody was sure would work, or how - it was a best guess based on available data. The thrusters didn't fail - with such incredibly weak gravity, failure of the harpoons to anchor the probe on the rock was going to lead to crazy high bounces no matter what, even with a very gentle touchdown.
Every envelope pushing mission encounters these things. Sometimes they're positive, like the wind-clearing events on mars keeping Opportunity's solar panels clean and the rover operating for 49 times longer than planned. In that case, the scientists learn. Or the spacecraft systems fail, and the science returned, however valuble and novel, pales in comparison to the technical telemetry which will enable future landers to land better and transmit longer. In that case the engineers learn. Thus it has always been, and shall always be.
When it was first announced all the Learned Men immediately sneered at it, cited Conservation of Momentum, and went on their way. And they were right to do so. You see, such things almost invariably fall into one of three categories: amataurs making honest mistakes in experimental sensor calibration, outright cranks or thieving charletans. The first quickly prove themselves wrong, the second are swiftly discredited and the third's foolishly transparent charades to avoid peer review speak for themselves (that cold fusion clown comes to mind.)
But the learned men are still sneering now, well after the EmDrive has outlasted the usual crackpot idea's lifetime.
For starters: someone else came up with the same idea around the same time; the "Cannes drive." His theory for why it worked was different than the Emdrive guy's... and both explanations have been proven to be bunk. It has all the marks of something stumbled across honestly. Furthermore there is at least one plausible and testable hypothesis that could explain it, which also matches seperate observations. Most tellingly it survived its first brush with NASA - a brush that convinced them they'd have to "go dark" to produce a definitive study on it untainted by media WERPDORIVE!!1! bullshit.
I am not a scientist - but I can make reasonable inferences. It is no longer reasonable to pass the Emdrive off as a "calibration error" or even a likely false alarm. The bitch of it is that 90% of the enthused are - to quote someone upthread - "lining up with their Star Trek lunchboxes to book a ticket to Andromeda." But as others have noted, it doesn't have to work as a thruster to be interesting. It doesn't have to do a damn thing. Something strange is going on here, something seemingly inexplicable. The most exciting words in science are not "eureka!" but "huh, that's funny..." And I really wish more scientists would resist their irritation with the Hype Crowd and remember that, even when their natural inclination is to tell them to shut up and pipe down.
Considering that the V-2 ripped of John Goddard's gyroscope design without paying a cent in royalties, you could call it a simple matter of debt collection.
They also utterly failed to successfully move past the Zero, as the aircraft was not a remarkable innovation, but a steep gamble; trading durability for performance. The underdeveloped nature of domestic Japanese aero engines forced their hand on this - and it's also why they failed to produce anything better than the Zero in numbers that might have mattered. They produced several good airframes, and all of them came to naught for want of a decent powerplant. As the 1:1 kill ratio between the Zero and the Wildcat demonstrates, they had to make this compromise just to achieve rough parity - and once the US threw its industrial might and genius into the war, they surpassed them rapidly.
Most Japanese small arms worth a damn were copies of French weapons, usually of Hotchkiss manufacture. The same for their anti-aircraft guns; this is one reason their woefully insufficient 25mm gun was never improved upon or augmented (the closest they got was a copy of a Bofors 40mm captured off a British ship at Singapore; a prototype was found postwar. It never reached full production.) They failed to produce a decent submachine gun in any significant quantity, their best attempt at an autoloading rifle was a copy of the M1 Garand they could not make work (The Type 4,) and their domestically manufactured service pistols ranged from poor and flawed (the Nambus and Type 26 revolver) to outright dangerous to the user (the Type 94 Nambu.) Their ships weren't much better. Their submarine aircraft carriers were moronic; incredibly expensive, easily detected, slow-maneuvering submarines that could deliver a pitiful amount of ordinance. Their naval guns were upgraded copies of British guns on ships the British had been paid to build for them pre-war, and their much-vaunted cruisers only achieved their performance by being floating treaty violations half again as heavy as was allowed. The oxygen-based torpedo was a truly remarkable achievement, but its technical brilliance has been overblown by the comparative idiocy of the US Navy's Ordinance Bureau, which produced a brilliant weapon (the magnetic detonator) and then sabotaged it by negligence worthy of a firing squad (they conducted exactly two test firings of the torpedo pre-war, one of which failed - and then ordered full-rate production of a weapon that their laughably insufficient test had given a 50% failure rate.) It is rarely mentioned that the oxygen torpedo itself was a deliberate trade-off avoided by other navies due to its danger; more than a few Japanese ships fighting battle damage were sunk by their own torpedoes, and at least one was sunk outright by a lucky hit from an escort carrier's fan-tail peashooter (at the Battle off Samar.) Add to this that the Long Lance's power was most keenly felt in the early war by dint of its surprise factor; ships were nailed by them at ranges far in excess of normal torpedo range (the Dutch suffered a particularly crippling defeat due to this.) Once the advantage of surprise was gone and the Allies knew to maneuver in response to possible torpedo attack their effectiveness dropped sharply.
[*] The "ballistic" part is a misnomer, because the missile has terminal maneuvering. But that is always how it is referred to as.
Complete bullshit. Being able to nudge its trajectory a bit in the final terminal moments of flight is enough for it to hit a ship moving at 30 knots - not enough to re-target an entirely different batch of ocean. The weapon is ballistic in every sense of the term that matters. There's been several stories - a few on slashdot, even - about Chinese efforts to develop "hypersonic glide vehicles" which could make much more significant course changes at much higher altitudes specifically because of this. Much like the Japanese Long Lance before it, the DF-21 is a modification of an old concept - they took a ho-hum SRBM and put a radar sensor on it to track a moving target. Whuppity fucking doo. Holding it up as an example of Chinese brilliance is silly.
How would we "hear" from them? Our own radio broadcasts aren't really resolvable past a very short interstellar distance - not even ten light-years, if memory serves. And even if there was a civilization out there, there's no guarantee that I Love Lucy will come in with enough coherence for them to determine it's an artificial signal. And already our civilization has moved from blasting radio waves willy-nilly into space to much more efficient, lower-power, higher-fidelity communications; microwave links to satellites, cable land-lines for Internet, etc. Look at how startlingly brief our own period of rampant radio communications was.
It's only in the last two decades that we've actually been able to detect planets around other stars - and only the big ones, at that. We could be surrounded by intelligent civilizations and unless they were millions of years more advanced than us, capable of significant exoscale engineering projects - or deliberately attempting to communicate with nearby candidate stars, consistently and repeatedly for thousands of years - we wouldn't have a fucking clue.
This race is really about how bad a two party system is. Trump and Bernie made massive inroads because neither party is delivering on their promises.
I am so sick of people who fail to understand our two-party system that I want to fucking scream. The small parties that exist in any parlimentary system (labor party, green party, consumer party, religious party, businessman's party, etc,) all exist in our system as well, but because first-past-the-post voting is our system, they all have to band together into the biggest coalition they possibly can in order to have a chance at winning. So the party primaries tend to produce candidates with very broad appeal across their respective side of the spectrum. Thus whoever wins the Presidency has at least 50% of the country supporting them to begin with, as opposed to a parliamentary system where the "winners" try to hash out a coalition post-facto and they pick a chief executive, not the voter. The "winners" have a much narrower segment of the populace behind them - a much smaller mandate - and the Prime Minister pick is the result of politicians doing horse trading, not the will of the people.
The fact that Bernie got so far - and that Trump actually bucked the establishment party entirely, like the Bull Moose before him - just demonstrates the flexibility of the system. The Scary Party Apparatus was unable to stand against him, because they stood against the will of the voters.
You need to learn how it all works, as you gain experience you become qualified for higher and higher end projects.
The entire history of our nation disagrees with you. On average, Presidents win the Presidency about 15 years after their first significant electoral victory. Long-time career politicians, like Senators, do not win the Presidency very often at all. (Obama didn't even serve a full term as a Senator before running for the top job.) That's because people don't vote for candidates with too much baggage; and career politicians have traded too many horses and used cars to be very convincing when they claim to have strong principles on this or that. The people who tend to win the Presidency tend to be powerful personalities with clear-cut agendas - and they are not, as a rule, career politicians.
This is by design. See Federalist Paper No. 70, specifically the concept of "energy in the executive." Congress is the domain of the deal-making career politician; where compromise rules and change is implemented very gradually. The executive branch was intended by the Founding Fathers to be a fire under Congress's ass; for the office - and the holder of that office - to provide the impetus and energy that Congress, by design, cannot have.
The President is not a god damned Prime Minister. They're not some balding bureaucratic asshole picked by other balding bureaucratic assholes. They're a powerful - and individual - expression of the popular will, and that's important considering the incumbency rate of Congress is over 90%. Please, I implore you, and everyone else - do some fucking reading about our god-damned political system before you sit there and spout off more fucking bullshit about how unutterably awful you think our system is. It isn't fucking rocket science. It's all available online. You can buy the Federalist Papers in paperback form for a few bucks off Amazon. You fancy yourself an educated voter? Go get the fucking education.
: the steady drift to more militarized law enforcement.
The police could have approached the suspect without fear of injury from his rifle fire if they had what is known as a "SWAT tank;" generally just an armored vehicle, often a modified version of a military Armored Personnel Carrier. They're used to get police into a building or close to a suspect despite them being armed. They could have fired tear gas canisters from the shielded rifle ports in the side of the vehicle, that sort of thing, and not have had to use the bomb on the robot to kill him.
These vehicles are stupidly expensive - unless you buy a military surplus MRAP, which is pretty much the same thing. But then you are "militarizing the police" and demonized for it.
I see you didn't click any of the links. For starters, the this one clearly explains that these "drive-bys" are not, in any way, shape or form, mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy. They're a tool for enhancing traditional diplomacy. This link explains the legal nuances of the freedom of navigation operation in much greater detail, and describes the legal and diplomatic needle the operation was threading. Sailing a single destroyer past an island is hardly a flexing of military muscle. Flexing muscle is when you sail an aircraft carrier battle group through the strait of Taiwan. As for the hacking, please note the lede paragraph of this story:
Chinese state-backed hackers have carried out a string of cyber espionage attacks on U.S. companies, violating a pact signed by the two countries to stop carrying out this kind of activity, according to a cybersecurity company.
The two-way street you suggest has already been attempted, and it has sadly resulted in jack diddly. Attempts to bridge these gaps by inviting China to participate in the major US-and-allies annual pacific naval exercises were similarly undermined by the Chinese sending an uninvited spy ship.
You see, there is no lack of diplomatic effort being made regarding American-Chinese relations - but time and again the Chinese have declined to reign in their aggressive efforts to enrich themselves at the cost of others. It is only natural that the United States has been taking measures to re-assert their commitments; (diplomatic, economic, and defense-wise) to their many regional allies in the face of ever-more-bold Chinese demonstrations of military power and diplomatic hardball.
It is pretty idiotic that our foreign policy and military establishment seem intent on picking periodic fights with China over stupid little things rather than trying to elevate the relationship to become close allies.
Have you been living under a rock for the last several years? The Chinese have been using dredgers to build artificial islands atop coral reefs in the South China Sea, and these islands are now equipped with huge runways for operating military craft from fighters to patrol aircraft to medium bombers; all so they can project firepower over the entire South China Sea. To simply claim the entire Sea right up to the coasts of their regional neighbors as their own is one thing, but China has invested in a massive military build-up to back up their claims with raw force. Many of those nations are our regional allies, especially the Philippines. And if that's not enough, the Chinese have long engaged in hostile cybercrimes against the United States, not only hacking critical military defense information (like the information on the F-35 they stole) but also an ongoing government-ran campaign to steal American commercial trade secrets that mirrors their complete and utter disdain for Western Intellectual Property rights.
I understand that some people are deeply suspicious or even disdainful of America's role in world politics; but when you try to make out the 800 pound gorilla of Asia - who's busy mugging everyone it can get its hairy paws on - as the poor victim here, you just come across as a moron.
"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
"Extreme surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgement, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary."
"No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgement of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgement."
"You underestimate humankind's love of freedom."
"The individual desires judgement. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your god, and you will make it with your own hands."
This is encouraging news - thank you for the information. The FAA is notoriously... unfriendly towards the Common Man, but the issue of commercial drones is very much in the national spotlight, and something much closer to home for the average citizen. Maybe this will affect a significant change in how the FAA deals with the populace.
Slashdot Mirror
I would never suggest you invest in a $200 tax stamp and a box of .22 primer-only ammo.
It looks like Google Chrome, it acts like Google Chrome, it is Google Chrome. Now tell me, what the reason for Firefox existence?
SCROLLING. TAB. BAR.
"Just sweet-talk the insane power-mad dictators, that'll surely work!"
No matter how many times I hear it, you left-wingers blow my fucking mind with your delusions.
>Put specific ID requirements (driver's license is a common one since there's not a whole lot of reason to have a driver's license if you have no car)
What utter fucking horseshit. You cannot live in our modern society without some form of government-issued ID. How the hell would those poor people cash their paychecks? Or even their welfare checks? Same bullshit excuse trotted out every fucking time. Go vote in Chicago sometime, that'll be a gas.
0.02 rubles have been deposited into your account
The engineers that made it would not disagree with you. The lander's design was constrained by many factors but the biggest was simply a lack of information - nobody has landed on a comet before. Recall that they thought the Lunar regolith might swallow a spacecraft whole, like quicksand, before the first soft-lander probes were sent to test the theory. That's why the comet lander had that harpoon system nobody was sure would work, or how - it was a best guess based on available data. The thrusters didn't fail - with such incredibly weak gravity, failure of the harpoons to anchor the probe on the rock was going to lead to crazy high bounces no matter what, even with a very gentle touchdown.
Every envelope pushing mission encounters these things. Sometimes they're positive, like the wind-clearing events on mars keeping Opportunity's solar panels clean and the rover operating for 49 times longer than planned. In that case, the scientists learn. Or the spacecraft systems fail, and the science returned, however valuble and novel, pales in comparison to the technical telemetry which will enable future landers to land better and transmit longer. In that case the engineers learn. Thus it has always been, and shall always be.
I think we're well past that point.
When it was first announced all the Learned Men immediately sneered at it, cited Conservation of Momentum, and went on their way. And they were right to do so. You see, such things almost invariably fall into one of three categories: amataurs making honest mistakes in experimental sensor calibration, outright cranks or thieving charletans. The first quickly prove themselves wrong, the second are swiftly discredited and the third's foolishly transparent charades to avoid peer review speak for themselves (that cold fusion clown comes to mind.)
But the learned men are still sneering now, well after the EmDrive has outlasted the usual crackpot idea's lifetime.
For starters: someone else came up with the same idea around the same time; the "Cannes drive." His theory for why it worked was different than the Emdrive guy's... and both explanations have been proven to be bunk. It has all the marks of something stumbled across honestly. Furthermore there is at least one plausible and testable hypothesis that could explain it, which also matches seperate observations. Most tellingly it survived its first brush with NASA - a brush that convinced them they'd have to "go dark" to produce a definitive study on it untainted by media WERPDORIVE!!1! bullshit.
I am not a scientist - but I can make reasonable inferences. It is no longer reasonable to pass the Emdrive off as a "calibration error" or even a likely false alarm. The bitch of it is that 90% of the enthused are - to quote someone upthread - "lining up with their Star Trek lunchboxes to book a ticket to Andromeda." But as others have noted, it doesn't have to work as a thruster to be interesting. It doesn't have to do a damn thing. Something strange is going on here, something seemingly inexplicable. The most exciting words in science are not "eureka!" but "huh, that's funny..." And I really wish more scientists would resist their irritation with the Hype Crowd and remember that, even when their natural inclination is to tell them to shut up and pipe down.
Considering that the V-2 ripped of John Goddard's gyroscope design without paying a cent in royalties, you could call it a simple matter of debt collection.
They also utterly failed to successfully move past the Zero, as the aircraft was not a remarkable innovation, but a steep gamble; trading durability for performance. The underdeveloped nature of domestic Japanese aero engines forced their hand on this - and it's also why they failed to produce anything better than the Zero in numbers that might have mattered. They produced several good airframes, and all of them came to naught for want of a decent powerplant. As the 1:1 kill ratio between the Zero and the Wildcat demonstrates, they had to make this compromise just to achieve rough parity - and once the US threw its industrial might and genius into the war, they surpassed them rapidly.
Most Japanese small arms worth a damn were copies of French weapons, usually of Hotchkiss manufacture. The same for their anti-aircraft guns; this is one reason their woefully insufficient 25mm gun was never improved upon or augmented (the closest they got was a copy of a Bofors 40mm captured off a British ship at Singapore; a prototype was found postwar. It never reached full production.) They failed to produce a decent submachine gun in any significant quantity, their best attempt at an autoloading rifle was a copy of the M1 Garand they could not make work (The Type 4,) and their domestically manufactured service pistols ranged from poor and flawed (the Nambus and Type 26 revolver) to outright dangerous to the user (the Type 94 Nambu.) Their ships weren't much better. Their submarine aircraft carriers were moronic; incredibly expensive, easily detected, slow-maneuvering submarines that could deliver a pitiful amount of ordinance. Their naval guns were upgraded copies of British guns on ships the British had been paid to build for them pre-war, and their much-vaunted cruisers only achieved their performance by being floating treaty violations half again as heavy as was allowed. The oxygen-based torpedo was a truly remarkable achievement, but its technical brilliance has been overblown by the comparative idiocy of the US Navy's Ordinance Bureau, which produced a brilliant weapon (the magnetic detonator) and then sabotaged it by negligence worthy of a firing squad (they conducted exactly two test firings of the torpedo pre-war, one of which failed - and then ordered full-rate production of a weapon that their laughably insufficient test had given a 50% failure rate.) It is rarely mentioned that the oxygen torpedo itself was a deliberate trade-off avoided by other navies due to its danger; more than a few Japanese ships fighting battle damage were sunk by their own torpedoes, and at least one was sunk outright by a lucky hit from an escort carrier's fan-tail peashooter (at the Battle off Samar.) Add to this that the Long Lance's power was most keenly felt in the early war by dint of its surprise factor; ships were nailed by them at ranges far in excess of normal torpedo range (the Dutch suffered a particularly crippling defeat due to this.) Once the advantage of surprise was gone and the Allies knew to maneuver in response to possible torpedo attack their effectiveness dropped sharply.
[*] The "ballistic" part is a misnomer, because the missile has terminal maneuvering. But that is always how it is referred to as.
Complete bullshit. Being able to nudge its trajectory a bit in the final terminal moments of flight is enough for it to hit a ship moving at 30 knots - not enough to re-target an entirely different batch of ocean. The weapon is ballistic in every sense of the term that matters. There's been several stories - a few on slashdot, even - about Chinese efforts to develop "hypersonic glide vehicles" which could make much more significant course changes at much higher altitudes specifically because of this. Much like the Japanese Long Lance before it, the DF-21 is a modification of an old concept - they took a ho-hum SRBM and put a radar sensor on it to track a moving target. Whuppity fucking doo. Holding it up as an example of Chinese brilliance is silly.
Like Japan before it, China i
$0.02 Yuan have been deposited in your account.
Yeah, we kept nukes on Iwo Jima for most of the Cold War for shits and giggles, right?
The Russians who used anti-tank dogs in WWII felt the same way. They would have preferred to use Chechens, but they cannot be trained.
How would we "hear" from them? Our own radio broadcasts aren't really resolvable past a very short interstellar distance - not even ten light-years, if memory serves. And even if there was a civilization out there, there's no guarantee that I Love Lucy will come in with enough coherence for them to determine it's an artificial signal. And already our civilization has moved from blasting radio waves willy-nilly into space to much more efficient, lower-power, higher-fidelity communications; microwave links to satellites, cable land-lines for Internet, etc. Look at how startlingly brief our own period of rampant radio communications was.
It's only in the last two decades that we've actually been able to detect planets around other stars - and only the big ones, at that. We could be surrounded by intelligent civilizations and unless they were millions of years more advanced than us, capable of significant exoscale engineering projects - or deliberately attempting to communicate with nearby candidate stars, consistently and repeatedly for thousands of years - we wouldn't have a fucking clue.
How the fuck do non-informative, knee-jerk "nuh uh" shitposts like this still get modded up?
This race is really about how bad a two party system is. Trump and Bernie made massive inroads because neither party is delivering on their promises.
I am so sick of people who fail to understand our two-party system that I want to fucking scream. The small parties that exist in any parlimentary system (labor party, green party, consumer party, religious party, businessman's party, etc,) all exist in our system as well, but because first-past-the-post voting is our system, they all have to band together into the biggest coalition they possibly can in order to have a chance at winning. So the party primaries tend to produce candidates with very broad appeal across their respective side of the spectrum. Thus whoever wins the Presidency has at least 50% of the country supporting them to begin with, as opposed to a parliamentary system where the "winners" try to hash out a coalition post-facto and they pick a chief executive, not the voter. The "winners" have a much narrower segment of the populace behind them - a much smaller mandate - and the Prime Minister pick is the result of politicians doing horse trading, not the will of the people.
The fact that Bernie got so far - and that Trump actually bucked the establishment party entirely, like the Bull Moose before him - just demonstrates the flexibility of the system. The Scary Party Apparatus was unable to stand against him, because they stood against the will of the voters.
You need to learn how it all works, as you gain experience you become qualified for higher and higher end projects.
The entire history of our nation disagrees with you. On average, Presidents win the Presidency about 15 years after their first significant electoral victory. Long-time career politicians, like Senators, do not win the Presidency very often at all. (Obama didn't even serve a full term as a Senator before running for the top job.) That's because people don't vote for candidates with too much baggage; and career politicians have traded too many horses and used cars to be very convincing when they claim to have strong principles on this or that. The people who tend to win the Presidency tend to be powerful personalities with clear-cut agendas - and they are not, as a rule, career politicians.
This is by design. See Federalist Paper No. 70, specifically the concept of "energy in the executive." Congress is the domain of the deal-making career politician; where compromise rules and change is implemented very gradually. The executive branch was intended by the Founding Fathers to be a fire under Congress's ass; for the office - and the holder of that office - to provide the impetus and energy that Congress, by design, cannot have.
The President is not a god damned Prime Minister. They're not some balding bureaucratic asshole picked by other balding bureaucratic assholes. They're a powerful - and individual - expression of the popular will, and that's important considering the incumbency rate of Congress is over 90%. Please, I implore you, and everyone else - do some fucking reading about our god-damned political system before you sit there and spout off more fucking bullshit about how unutterably awful you think our system is. It isn't fucking rocket science. It's all available online. You can buy the Federalist Papers in paperback form for a few bucks off Amazon. You fancy yourself an educated voter? Go get the fucking education.
: the steady drift to more militarized law enforcement.
The police could have approached the suspect without fear of injury from his rifle fire if they had what is known as a "SWAT tank;" generally just an armored vehicle, often a modified version of a military Armored Personnel Carrier. They're used to get police into a building or close to a suspect despite them being armed. They could have fired tear gas canisters from the shielded rifle ports in the side of the vehicle, that sort of thing, and not have had to use the bomb on the robot to kill him.
These vehicles are stupidly expensive - unless you buy a military surplus MRAP, which is pretty much the same thing. But then you are "militarizing the police" and demonized for it.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, pal - or did you forget how the left wing was blaming the Gabrielle Giffords shooting on "tea party rhetoric"? If the left wing can do it, what makes you think the Right won't learn from their playbook?
"Ignore the law-breaker behind the curtain."
Instead Ryan and his friends are running away from this, and almost nobody has the balls to challenge him on that and ask why.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." -- Napoleon
Wish I had mod points for you.
I see you didn't click any of the links. For starters, the this one clearly explains that these "drive-bys" are not, in any way, shape or form, mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy. They're a tool for enhancing traditional diplomacy. This link explains the legal nuances of the freedom of navigation operation in much greater detail, and describes the legal and diplomatic needle the operation was threading. Sailing a single destroyer past an island is hardly a flexing of military muscle. Flexing muscle is when you sail an aircraft carrier battle group through the strait of Taiwan. As for the hacking, please note the lede paragraph of this story:
Chinese state-backed hackers have carried out a string of cyber espionage attacks on U.S. companies, violating a pact signed by the two countries to stop carrying out this kind of activity, according to a cybersecurity company.
The two-way street you suggest has already been attempted, and it has sadly resulted in jack diddly. Attempts to bridge these gaps by inviting China to participate in the major US-and-allies annual pacific naval exercises were similarly undermined by the Chinese sending an uninvited spy ship.
You see, there is no lack of diplomatic effort being made regarding American-Chinese relations - but time and again the Chinese have declined to reign in their aggressive efforts to enrich themselves at the cost of others. It is only natural that the United States has been taking measures to re-assert their commitments; (diplomatic, economic, and defense-wise) to their many regional allies in the face of ever-more-bold Chinese demonstrations of military power and diplomatic hardball.
It is pretty idiotic that our foreign policy and military establishment seem intent on picking periodic fights with China over stupid little things rather than trying to elevate the relationship to become close allies.
Have you been living under a rock for the last several years? The Chinese have been using dredgers to build artificial islands atop coral reefs in the South China Sea, and these islands are now equipped with huge runways for operating military craft from fighters to patrol aircraft to medium bombers; all so they can project firepower over the entire South China Sea. To simply claim the entire Sea right up to the coasts of their regional neighbors as their own is one thing, but China has invested in a massive military build-up to back up their claims with raw force. Many of those nations are our regional allies, especially the Philippines. And if that's not enough, the Chinese have long engaged in hostile cybercrimes against the United States, not only hacking critical military defense information (like the information on the F-35 they stole) but also an ongoing government-ran campaign to steal American commercial trade secrets that mirrors their complete and utter disdain for Western Intellectual Property rights.
And you're going to tell me that America is the one "picking fights" because we dared sail a ship too close to a few of their sand-castles? Freedom of Navigation exercises are run frequently, all over the globe, and are NOT mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy.
I understand that some people are deeply suspicious or even disdainful of America's role in world politics; but when you try to make out the 800 pound gorilla of Asia - who's busy mugging everyone it can get its hairy paws on - as the poor victim here, you just come across as a moron.
"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
"Extreme surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgement, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary."
"No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgement of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgement."
"You underestimate humankind's love of freedom."
"The individual desires judgement. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your god, and you will make it with your own hands."
And to provide the counterpoint, a very brief warning from Twitter as to how quickly it can all go wrong.
Came here just to post this. I'm getting tired of these god damned FUD articles that gloss over details like this.
This is encouraging news - thank you for the information. The FAA is notoriously... unfriendly towards the Common Man, but the issue of commercial drones is very much in the national spotlight, and something much closer to home for the average citizen. Maybe this will affect a significant change in how the FAA deals with the populace.