There are a couple of issues with the drug industry that people conflate.
The first issue is that drugs cost a lot of money to discover. That is just a fact, and while people would like to wave their hands and change it, you can't legislate the cost to discover drugs unless you let people just sell snake oil. The cost to actually find a drug that ACTUALLY WORKS is very high. So, any sane policy has to ensure that those who are supposed to do this discovery actually have the money to spend, otherwise it simply won't happen. Now, once you accept this there are lots of ways it could happen - it could be public, private, and either way there are lots of ways to direct the money to where it might do good.
The second issue is who pays all that money. The patent system basically makes the recipients of a drug pay for the upfront costs. That tends to be a fairly regressive approach. However, it is also fairly impartial - you don't have bureaucrats deciding who lives and dies - you have accountants deciding and they don't care who they take money from as long as it is green (so this is good for conditions with a social stigma, but not so much for conditions that primarily affect the poor). It also provides an incentive to succeed - companies take risks and often fail, but they have to succeed to have something to sell and make their money. The obvious alternative is to have taxes pay for the costs, so that they can be applied in a more progressive manner. An issue with that is how you decide who receives that tax money. Under many tax-based systems there might not be an incentive to succeed, or there could be disagreement over what to invest in.
Personally I'd advocate for a twofold solution. Part 1 of the solution is maintain the status quo - if you come up with a drug with your own money you can patent it and make whatever you can from it. Part 2 would be to have the NIH do R&D, and then fund drug candidates from soup to nuts and then hold the patents on them. Those drugs would be licensed out and would be sold at cost within the US, within countries that reciprocate in kind with similar investments in drug discovery, and within countries that have limited means. I think the result is that over time the status quo system would basically die off gradually, but the transition would be a lot smoother than just abolishing patents.
Here is the problem with that argument: If you look at any drug on the market today, and all the results necessary to demonstrate that the drug works and is safe, then you could probably reproduce those results for maybe $50M or so. However, the company that did the work originally probably spent closer to a billion dollars to do it the first time.
Why is this the case?
Well, much of that money gets spent on drugs that turned out not to be safe or effective. From a customer standpoint that was a waste, but until somebody figures out how to reliably predict whether a drug would work without actually testing it the fact is that lots of stuff will get tested and not work out (and if you could work out how to predict whether the drug would work then there would be no need to test any of the drugs in the first place).
Then you have a lot of testing that ultimately isn't strictly necessary, but it is done to defer costs or risk to people. Imagine you run a screening lab for some rare disease. To reliably test for that disease costs $2000 per test. However, there is a $30 test that sometimes erroneously indicates somebody has the disease when they really do not, but it never misses the actual presence of the disease. If you wanted to do the testing most efficiently you would run the $30 test on everybody, and then only run the $2000 test if that test came out positive. In a majority of cases the testing costs $30, and in a minority of cases the cost is $2030. Now, anybody who looks at the $2030 bill might argue that the test should only cost $2000, since the $30 really didn't add any value. However, when you look at the big picture it is obvious that only an idiot wouldn't do the cheaper screening. In the pharma industry there are lots of animal-based tests which cost a fortune, and save human lives, but in the case of drugs that turn out OK they actually add no value whatsoever. They only are useful for all the drugs that don't work out, and which consequently don't get tested too much in humans at significant cost and risk to people.
Finally, the fact is that legally you don't have to repeat even the $50M worth of tests that were needed to show the drug was safe and effective in the first place. If you want to introduce a new generic medication in most first-world nations you only need to demonstrate that the drug enters the body in the same way as the original drug does. The cost to do this is far less.
Imagine you're a baseball fan and you want to be present at any game where your favorite team wins. If your team wins 10 games and the cost per ticket is $10, then a naive person might say the cost to attend those games is $100. However, if there are 100 games in the season and your team only wins 10% of the games, then the fact is that you need to attend all 100 games to be certain of attending the 10 winning ones. That is the problem with the drug industry - you can't choose to only research good drugs - you have to test the bad ones to figure out that they're bad.
I'm all for increasing competition and for finding ways to make the costs apply more progressively. However, the only way that the costs are going to go down is through a technological revolution. I'd love to see that happen, but you can't just pass a law in the hopes that it will happen.
The jets originate near the event horizon, not inside. The matter near the horizon is very hot moving quickly, leading to all kinds of magnetic interactions/etc. However, I don't think anybody fully understands how jets work - hence the desire to get better imaging of the area around the event horizon.
Once inside the black hole nothing escapes, except in the form of hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is VERY weak in general, and shouldn't have any significant effect on things like jets that operate on a galactic scale.
The one thing I don't really see reflected in your treatment of the physics is time.
If I fell into a black hole, I'd accelerate towards the center. By the time that I got there, would anything still be left there? I'd never encounter matter before the center, since it would be falling in ahead of me and so would any force carriers it emits in my direction. From my own frame of reference little time would have passed by the time I reached the center. However, from the external universe's perspective quite a bit of time would pass. So, could the entire black hole dissipate via Hawking radiation before I get there?
Of course, who knows how physics works inside a black hole in the first place. I just think that when you factor in time the picture of the inside of a black hole likely gets quite a bit more complicated.
I thought Stross presented an interesting concept of space combat in Singularity Sky. The element he didn't really use was drones, and I think that would be important and need to be factored in.
Assuming that war doesn't break out while opposing fleets happen to be parked next to each other, they're going to have to approach each other from extreme range. At long range information travels at the speed of light, as do energy weapons. To destroy a an enemy ship you need to direct enough energy at its position. As ships get closer they have more information about the location of their enemies, since there is less light delay. That means that the volume of space they could occupy is lower, and therefore there is less volume of space to direct weapon fire into. When the volume of space the enemy could be within becomes less than the volume of space the ship can target with lethal energy flux then the enemy ship is destroyed. You can of course take shots from farther away and then things become a matter of probabilities, but on large scales luck cancels out and you still have effective ranges.
There are a number of strategies you can use to gain an advantage:
1. If you can expend more energy with your weapons then your effective range increases, since you don't need to narrow the enemy's position down as much.
2. If you can maneuver to a greater extent, then you deny the enemy information about your position. Your position is a somewhat-conical shape centered around your velocity vector, and the size of that volume is a function of your ability to change velocity and your distance from the enemy's sensors. So, increased maneuverability basically makes your range from the enemy effectively farther from the perspective of their trying to target you.
Sensor capabilities would be important on the strategic scale, but not the tactical scale, as long as you can detect enemies beyond your effective weapons range.
I would think that the pace of space battle would be like a submarine engagement today - it could take quite a bit of time to stalk a target until suddenly somebody gets within range and it is over. You might even see an enemy coming for hours or days but be unable to do anything about it if they are sufficiently able to maneuver.
Now, if ships aren't able to maneuver (which is the case with modern technology) then stealth is about all you have. Effective ranges would be MUCH longer since you could direct laser fire at an enemy halfway across the solar system.
If you could figure out how to make an autonomous drone capable of engaging a modern fighter plan and avoiding common air defenses for less than 1M each, you should go into business.
The US already has a drone capable of avoiding common air defenses (at least as well as an F22) - the BGM109 Tomahawk. It is a drone capable of flying hundreds of miles at low altitude to penetrate air defenses. I'm not sure if either it or the F22 would really stand up to a modern air defense. Its cost is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1M.
As far as anti-air goes - the AMMRAM or some of the better SAMs come to mind, though they don't have much range compared to what most people think of as a "drone." If you took an AMMRAM, beefed up its radar, gave it a good IR sensor, and hooked it up to a solar-powered prop aircraft it probably would be fairly effective. Just have the missile be powered by the solar cells and use its sensors to find targets, and when one gets within effective range it would discard the rest of the drone and launch at the target. If you could make the aircraft stealthy enough it might make sense to just make it IR only - it would rely on stealth to get within range and then launch at its target.
Keep in mind that a drone is just an autonomous weapon - we've been building those since World War II.
You don't need all that much in the way of "AI" - they need to detect targets, IFF them, allocate them to missiles, and launch. Just think of them like mines floating in the air instead of being moored underwater. They could operate as an area denial weapon, especially if they have high endurance. They could also be fairly stealthy.
And that EW aircraft would be just as effective against the manned fighters. It isn't like they don't require sensory information, control, and coordination as well. You could even use a drone as an EW platform.
SA-2's are SAM radio command guided missiles - not "kamikaze drones".
Missiles are drones. There is no difference at all. A missile launched from another drone isn't all that different conceptually from a missile that has two stages, or especially from a multiple warhead missile.
Just take a missile and add a wing and prop so that it can loiter for long periods of time, then detach and sprint to the target. Put the fancy radar/sensors in the missile itself. It can't be any more expensive than a cruise missile.
That 3d environment is almost entirely empty space. Anything it sees it is either a friend or a foe, so you just need IFF. That isn't that difficult a problem. Just keep the drones stealthy and fly them in barrier formations - chances are they'll spot the F22's IR signature before the reverse.
Dogfight? Dogfights are passe. A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit. Drones are relatively cheap - especially compared to the F-22.
They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now. Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.
Sure it was wrong in the 50s and 60s. I have yet to see proof that it is still wrong today. The Apple Newton was a failure, the Apple iPad was a success. One was too far just ahead of its time.
Back in the 50s and 60s missiles had very short range and were not reliable, radar wasn't all that reliable, and command/control was poor so you couldn't be sure of what you were shooting at. Today if you are the target of a missile that was fired within effective range, then it is VERY likely that you won't have a plane fairly soon.
Sure, the F22 has stealth, but who is to say that the drones it engages won't have stealth as well? It has to be easier to make a small drone radar invisible than a big manned aircraft.
As far as numbers go - an F22 costs $200M. Suppose you can build a much less capable drone for $100k. For the same investment an opposing force could field 2000 drones for each F22 the US fields. Suddenly that 72:1 hypothetical kill ratio isn't all that great.
I wouldn't argue with the fact that the F22 is the best air superiority aircraft around today. I think it is well up to dealing with today's threats. However, I wouldn't say that 10 years from now there isn't much risk that this will change. I also wouldn't say that the F22 was the best possible use of the funding that went into it - perhaps sinking all that money into air superiority drones would have had much better results.
how about a cluster missile that races in and then spawns 50 mini missiles that wipe out the drones en-masse? that's of course hypothetical (AFAIK), but if i can think of a countermeasure to your "wave after wave" of drones,
That's a great idea. Why don't we give that cluster missile a special name. How about "drone?"
You're simply suggesting that the solution to drone warfare is to deploy drones - not manned fighters. You're just arguing about basing the drones on an aircraft rather than a base on the ground.
I actually don't mind probation terms that are perhaps a bit paternalistic and rehabilitative, if they ultimately work in the interests of the person who was just released. However, they should be fairly short-term in their application. They certainly shouldn't be dumb things like "don't use the internet" - even if they committed a computer-based crime. The goal is to reintroduce criminals into society and help them to reintegrate so that they don't go around hurting other people. Treating them like outcasts and lesser humans does NOT accomplish that.
And I don't think any "crime" should be punished if there isn't even a victim.
You realize these probation terms are very common for people who commit fraud via computer right?
Yes. That doesn't make it right.
If you signed a legal contract saying you would not watch television, would you go buy a new flatscreen and watch it every night? He isn't in trouble for browsing the web for a few minutes, or using a gps device to plan a trip. He didn't "accidentally" post video to youtube. It was a flagrant violation, and he most certainly knew that.
First, I wouldn't sign a legal contract saying I would not watch television unless there was quite a bit of consideration in it for me. Second, regardless of what the contract said, for it to be enforced after a violation the party petitioning the court should have to show that they were somehow harmed.
I could care less if his posting to youtube was a "flagrant" violation. Putting a condition that somebody can't use youtube on a parole is a FAR more flagrant abuse of government power than anything this guy did.
If somebody commits a crime, then punish them. Don't let them out of jail and then follow them around for years telling them they can't do things that are completely harmless.
Suppose I pass a law stating that it is illegal to breathe. You say something bad about the President, and a cop notices you and arrests you for breathing.
Face it, you were breaking the law. Rot in jail...
That's the problem with this kind of logic. When you allow government to treat people in arbitrary ways simply because they are criminals, the next step is to just classify everybody as a criminal.
If the guy committed a crime while on parole I'd be fine with revoking his parole. However, he did not commit a crime - he just violated the conditions of his parole. I'm not a big fan of having conditions on parole in the first place - unless they are purely rehabilitative in nature (report in every day for job training, or whatever).
I'd never use nuclear blackmail to assert power over somebody else. However, there are plenty of people that would. Sure, I agree that the world would be a lot nicer if everybody just got a long. The problem is that lots of people aren't content with that, and as a result we live under a constant threat of attack, which can only be deterred by a threat of counterattack.
I'd love to live in the kind of world you describe, the problem is that a fairly large number of people would not allow me to do so. And it isn't like any of us are morally perfect either - to some extent we all perpetuate the problems that manifest themselves at the level of society.
How does the fact that every big company out there is allowed to get with murder have anything to do with this particular policy being dumb.
The problems that you brought up have solutions, but they don't involve giving companies incentives to waste electricity. If tax policies are messed up then fix them, don't try to make up for them by messing up energy policy as well.
And what value does preventing him from using the internet serve, or from using a pseudonym? If he were to defraud people out of money, I'd be fine with punishing him for it. However, just because the guy committed a crime on the internet or using an alias, I don't see why that is reason to bar him from doing those very generic and completely legal activities.
Just because a process was involved does not make it right.
I don't dispute that the US has a process for doing these sorts of things. I was simply stating that it is morally wrong.
He's a felon on parole. There are conditions to that parole. If a felon offered parole doesn't want to agree to the conditions of his release, he is welcome to stay in prison, where he can continue to say whatever he would like.
Wow. The USA. Where you can speak freely as long as you don't mind saying it in prison.:)
What is the point of putting people in prison in the first place? What is the point of letting people out with crazy rules like "you aren't allowed to use a computer?" Either the guy is rehabilitated or he isn't. I'm fine with revoking parole when people commit crimes that are real crimes while on parole. However, putting conditions on parole that restrict fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, or which make it difficult to obtain gainful employment simply is morally wrong. If it is standard practice, that just makes all of society morally wrong.
Yes, he really is being jailed for his actual wrongdoings. You are not allowed to use aliases on probation. He used an alias and did something infamous with it.
If he committed an actual crime and was arrested and gave an alias to the police, I'd be all for considering that a crime (that should be a crime regardless of probation).
Using an alias to post a video on a website or youtube shouldn't be considered a crime no matter what some judge might declare. Just because judges can legally get away with this stuff doesn't make it right.
Almost all of those "ironies" make the same falicious assumption - that just because two applications of a technology share the same underlying technology, they must be equally expensive.
why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
With a single nuclear ICBM I can force an entire nation to bend to my will - an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers for a medium-sized country, let alone a big one. With the same ICBM I could lift a habitat not much bigger than a tent into space and maybe keep it supplied for a few months.
For all the talk of history in this article, you miss a fairly important principle - it always has been much easier to destroy than to create. I've heard it said that those who beat their swords into plowshares will till the earth for those who do not.
Sure, I'm all for getting the US out of all those interventionist wars. However, that won't magically turn the US into a post-scarcity society. And, even if that happens, unless something changes it will simply mean that we'll all end up serving those who own the machines.
"Microsoft forces utility board to reduce ludicrous fine by $10,000."
That might have been a great Slashdot headline since it is wrong. The fine was reduced by $150k. The fine was originally $210k, MS could have avoided it by spending $70k, and in the end the fine was reduced to $60k.
Microsoft could have just met the contractual obligation by paying what it had promised to pay.
MS offered to pay the cost of the electricity, but the utility insisted on payment of the fine as it was stated in the contract. MS said, sure you can do that, since that is in the contract. However, the contract ALSO allowed MS to simply use the agreed-upon amount of power instead, so they just burned a ton of power up.
MS completely complied with the agreement. That doesn't change the fact that the agreement was dumb, bad for the environment, and bad even for the general public, who would have benefitted if MS were given the "break" since the utility gets $70k either way, but if they just took the money they'd have $70k worth of unused electricity to sell elsewhere and make even more money with.
The policy is dumb, and nobody with half a brain will have a problem with under-utilization when it costs less to waste power than pay the fine.
MS was fine with keeping the promise - they offered to pay for the unused power. The regulators wanted MORE than the cost of the unused power. So, MS just used the power, keeping their promise, in a completely wasteful manner.
Why should the penalty for non-use be HIGHER than the cost of the power itself? It isn't like the utility could have gotten more money if they didn't sell it to MS. If that were the case, they wouldn't have sold it to MS in the first place.
If you read the NYT article you'll find quotes like the local government considering it arrogant of MS to complain when they weren't meeting deadlines to deploy a substation expansion. Apparently MS needed more capacity that it was presumably willing to pay for, and they planned for it to be available on-time, and the government wasn't delivering it on-time, and they had the "arrogance" to complain about that.
And it wasn't like MS just decided to burn the electricity - they called up the regulators and told them that the rule didn't make any sense and asked for an exception. The regulator dragged its feet or felt that a $210k fine for not burning through $70k of electricity was a good idea. MS just demonstrated why it wasn't.
If my local water company sent me a letter saying that I'd pay less on my bill if I used MORE water, I'd just open the nearest faucet and leave it running all day. You just have to wonder how many misincentives are out there...
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I think you raise valid points.
There are a couple of issues with the drug industry that people conflate.
The first issue is that drugs cost a lot of money to discover. That is just a fact, and while people would like to wave their hands and change it, you can't legislate the cost to discover drugs unless you let people just sell snake oil. The cost to actually find a drug that ACTUALLY WORKS is very high. So, any sane policy has to ensure that those who are supposed to do this discovery actually have the money to spend, otherwise it simply won't happen. Now, once you accept this there are lots of ways it could happen - it could be public, private, and either way there are lots of ways to direct the money to where it might do good.
The second issue is who pays all that money. The patent system basically makes the recipients of a drug pay for the upfront costs. That tends to be a fairly regressive approach. However, it is also fairly impartial - you don't have bureaucrats deciding who lives and dies - you have accountants deciding and they don't care who they take money from as long as it is green (so this is good for conditions with a social stigma, but not so much for conditions that primarily affect the poor). It also provides an incentive to succeed - companies take risks and often fail, but they have to succeed to have something to sell and make their money. The obvious alternative is to have taxes pay for the costs, so that they can be applied in a more progressive manner. An issue with that is how you decide who receives that tax money. Under many tax-based systems there might not be an incentive to succeed, or there could be disagreement over what to invest in.
Personally I'd advocate for a twofold solution. Part 1 of the solution is maintain the status quo - if you come up with a drug with your own money you can patent it and make whatever you can from it. Part 2 would be to have the NIH do R&D, and then fund drug candidates from soup to nuts and then hold the patents on them. Those drugs would be licensed out and would be sold at cost within the US, within countries that reciprocate in kind with similar investments in drug discovery, and within countries that have limited means. I think the result is that over time the status quo system would basically die off gradually, but the transition would be a lot smoother than just abolishing patents.
Here is the problem with that argument: If you look at any drug on the market today, and all the results necessary to demonstrate that the drug works and is safe, then you could probably reproduce those results for maybe $50M or so. However, the company that did the work originally probably spent closer to a billion dollars to do it the first time.
Why is this the case?
Well, much of that money gets spent on drugs that turned out not to be safe or effective. From a customer standpoint that was a waste, but until somebody figures out how to reliably predict whether a drug would work without actually testing it the fact is that lots of stuff will get tested and not work out (and if you could work out how to predict whether the drug would work then there would be no need to test any of the drugs in the first place).
Then you have a lot of testing that ultimately isn't strictly necessary, but it is done to defer costs or risk to people. Imagine you run a screening lab for some rare disease. To reliably test for that disease costs $2000 per test. However, there is a $30 test that sometimes erroneously indicates somebody has the disease when they really do not, but it never misses the actual presence of the disease. If you wanted to do the testing most efficiently you would run the $30 test on everybody, and then only run the $2000 test if that test came out positive. In a majority of cases the testing costs $30, and in a minority of cases the cost is $2030. Now, anybody who looks at the $2030 bill might argue that the test should only cost $2000, since the $30 really didn't add any value. However, when you look at the big picture it is obvious that only an idiot wouldn't do the cheaper screening. In the pharma industry there are lots of animal-based tests which cost a fortune, and save human lives, but in the case of drugs that turn out OK they actually add no value whatsoever. They only are useful for all the drugs that don't work out, and which consequently don't get tested too much in humans at significant cost and risk to people.
Finally, the fact is that legally you don't have to repeat even the $50M worth of tests that were needed to show the drug was safe and effective in the first place. If you want to introduce a new generic medication in most first-world nations you only need to demonstrate that the drug enters the body in the same way as the original drug does. The cost to do this is far less.
Imagine you're a baseball fan and you want to be present at any game where your favorite team wins. If your team wins 10 games and the cost per ticket is $10, then a naive person might say the cost to attend those games is $100. However, if there are 100 games in the season and your team only wins 10% of the games, then the fact is that you need to attend all 100 games to be certain of attending the 10 winning ones. That is the problem with the drug industry - you can't choose to only research good drugs - you have to test the bad ones to figure out that they're bad.
I'm all for increasing competition and for finding ways to make the costs apply more progressively. However, the only way that the costs are going to go down is through a technological revolution. I'd love to see that happen, but you can't just pass a law in the hopes that it will happen.
The jets originate near the event horizon, not inside. The matter near the horizon is very hot moving quickly, leading to all kinds of magnetic interactions/etc. However, I don't think anybody fully understands how jets work - hence the desire to get better imaging of the area around the event horizon.
Once inside the black hole nothing escapes, except in the form of hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is VERY weak in general, and shouldn't have any significant effect on things like jets that operate on a galactic scale.
The one thing I don't really see reflected in your treatment of the physics is time.
If I fell into a black hole, I'd accelerate towards the center. By the time that I got there, would anything still be left there? I'd never encounter matter before the center, since it would be falling in ahead of me and so would any force carriers it emits in my direction. From my own frame of reference little time would have passed by the time I reached the center. However, from the external universe's perspective quite a bit of time would pass. So, could the entire black hole dissipate via Hawking radiation before I get there?
Of course, who knows how physics works inside a black hole in the first place. I just think that when you factor in time the picture of the inside of a black hole likely gets quite a bit more complicated.
I thought Stross presented an interesting concept of space combat in Singularity Sky. The element he didn't really use was drones, and I think that would be important and need to be factored in.
Assuming that war doesn't break out while opposing fleets happen to be parked next to each other, they're going to have to approach each other from extreme range. At long range information travels at the speed of light, as do energy weapons. To destroy a an enemy ship you need to direct enough energy at its position. As ships get closer they have more information about the location of their enemies, since there is less light delay. That means that the volume of space they could occupy is lower, and therefore there is less volume of space to direct weapon fire into. When the volume of space the enemy could be within becomes less than the volume of space the ship can target with lethal energy flux then the enemy ship is destroyed. You can of course take shots from farther away and then things become a matter of probabilities, but on large scales luck cancels out and you still have effective ranges.
There are a number of strategies you can use to gain an advantage:
1. If you can expend more energy with your weapons then your effective range increases, since you don't need to narrow the enemy's position down as much.
2. If you can maneuver to a greater extent, then you deny the enemy information about your position. Your position is a somewhat-conical shape centered around your velocity vector, and the size of that volume is a function of your ability to change velocity and your distance from the enemy's sensors. So, increased maneuverability basically makes your range from the enemy effectively farther from the perspective of their trying to target you.
Sensor capabilities would be important on the strategic scale, but not the tactical scale, as long as you can detect enemies beyond your effective weapons range.
I would think that the pace of space battle would be like a submarine engagement today - it could take quite a bit of time to stalk a target until suddenly somebody gets within range and it is over. You might even see an enemy coming for hours or days but be unable to do anything about it if they are sufficiently able to maneuver.
Now, if ships aren't able to maneuver (which is the case with modern technology) then stealth is about all you have. Effective ranges would be MUCH longer since you could direct laser fire at an enemy halfway across the solar system.
If you could figure out how to make an autonomous drone capable of engaging a modern fighter plan and avoiding common air defenses for less than 1M each, you should go into business.
The US already has a drone capable of avoiding common air defenses (at least as well as an F22) - the BGM109 Tomahawk. It is a drone capable of flying hundreds of miles at low altitude to penetrate air defenses. I'm not sure if either it or the F22 would really stand up to a modern air defense. Its cost is somewhere in the neighborhood of $1M.
As far as anti-air goes - the AMMRAM or some of the better SAMs come to mind, though they don't have much range compared to what most people think of as a "drone." If you took an AMMRAM, beefed up its radar, gave it a good IR sensor, and hooked it up to a solar-powered prop aircraft it probably would be fairly effective. Just have the missile be powered by the solar cells and use its sensors to find targets, and when one gets within effective range it would discard the rest of the drone and launch at the target. If you could make the aircraft stealthy enough it might make sense to just make it IR only - it would rely on stealth to get within range and then launch at its target.
Keep in mind that a drone is just an autonomous weapon - we've been building those since World War II.
You don't need all that much in the way of "AI" - they need to detect targets, IFF them, allocate them to missiles, and launch. Just think of them like mines floating in the air instead of being moored underwater. They could operate as an area denial weapon, especially if they have high endurance. They could also be fairly stealthy.
And that EW aircraft would be just as effective against the manned fighters. It isn't like they don't require sensory information, control, and coordination as well. You could even use a drone as an EW platform.
SA-2's are SAM radio command guided missiles - not "kamikaze drones".
Missiles are drones. There is no difference at all. A missile launched from another drone isn't all that different conceptually from a missile that has two stages, or especially from a multiple warhead missile.
Just take a missile and add a wing and prop so that it can loiter for long periods of time, then detach and sprint to the target. Put the fancy radar/sensors in the missile itself. It can't be any more expensive than a cruise missile.
That 3d environment is almost entirely empty space. Anything it sees it is either a friend or a foe, so you just need IFF. That isn't that difficult a problem. Just keep the drones stealthy and fly them in barrier formations - chances are they'll spot the F22's IR signature before the reverse.
Dogfight? Dogfights are passe. A drone knocks out the other guy 100 miles out and if it doesn't, who gives a shit. Drones are relatively cheap - especially compared to the F-22.
They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now.
Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.
Sure it was wrong in the 50s and 60s. I have yet to see proof that it is still wrong today. The Apple Newton was a failure, the Apple iPad was a success. One was too far just ahead of its time.
Back in the 50s and 60s missiles had very short range and were not reliable, radar wasn't all that reliable, and command/control was poor so you couldn't be sure of what you were shooting at. Today if you are the target of a missile that was fired within effective range, then it is VERY likely that you won't have a plane fairly soon.
Sure, the F22 has stealth, but who is to say that the drones it engages won't have stealth as well? It has to be easier to make a small drone radar invisible than a big manned aircraft.
As far as numbers go - an F22 costs $200M. Suppose you can build a much less capable drone for $100k. For the same investment an opposing force could field 2000 drones for each F22 the US fields. Suddenly that 72:1 hypothetical kill ratio isn't all that great.
I wouldn't argue with the fact that the F22 is the best air superiority aircraft around today. I think it is well up to dealing with today's threats. However, I wouldn't say that 10 years from now there isn't much risk that this will change. I also wouldn't say that the F22 was the best possible use of the funding that went into it - perhaps sinking all that money into air superiority drones would have had much better results.
how about a cluster missile that races in and then spawns 50 mini missiles that wipe out the drones en-masse? that's of course hypothetical (AFAIK), but if i can think of a countermeasure to your "wave after wave" of drones,
That's a great idea. Why don't we give that cluster missile a special name. How about "drone?"
You're simply suggesting that the solution to drone warfare is to deploy drones - not manned fighters. You're just arguing about basing the drones on an aircraft rather than a base on the ground.
Mod parent up.
I actually don't mind probation terms that are perhaps a bit paternalistic and rehabilitative, if they ultimately work in the interests of the person who was just released. However, they should be fairly short-term in their application. They certainly shouldn't be dumb things like "don't use the internet" - even if they committed a computer-based crime. The goal is to reintroduce criminals into society and help them to reintegrate so that they don't go around hurting other people. Treating them like outcasts and lesser humans does NOT accomplish that.
And I don't think any "crime" should be punished if there isn't even a victim.
You realize these probation terms are very common for people who commit fraud via computer right?
Yes. That doesn't make it right.
If you signed a legal contract saying you would not watch television, would you go buy a new flatscreen and watch it every night? He isn't in trouble for browsing the web for a few minutes, or using a gps device to plan a trip. He didn't "accidentally" post video to youtube. It was a flagrant violation, and he most certainly knew that.
First, I wouldn't sign a legal contract saying I would not watch television unless there was quite a bit of consideration in it for me. Second, regardless of what the contract said, for it to be enforced after a violation the party petitioning the court should have to show that they were somehow harmed.
I could care less if his posting to youtube was a "flagrant" violation. Putting a condition that somebody can't use youtube on a parole is a FAR more flagrant abuse of government power than anything this guy did.
If somebody commits a crime, then punish them. Don't let them out of jail and then follow them around for years telling them they can't do things that are completely harmless.
When did he give a false name to authorities? He posted a youtube video under a name other than his own, but youtube isn't "an authority."
Suppose I pass a law stating that it is illegal to breathe. You say something bad about the President, and a cop notices you and arrests you for breathing.
Face it, you were breaking the law. Rot in jail...
That's the problem with this kind of logic. When you allow government to treat people in arbitrary ways simply because they are criminals, the next step is to just classify everybody as a criminal.
If the guy committed a crime while on parole I'd be fine with revoking his parole. However, he did not commit a crime - he just violated the conditions of his parole. I'm not a big fan of having conditions on parole in the first place - unless they are purely rehabilitative in nature (report in every day for job training, or whatever).
I'd never use nuclear blackmail to assert power over somebody else. However, there are plenty of people that would. Sure, I agree that the world would be a lot nicer if everybody just got a long. The problem is that lots of people aren't content with that, and as a result we live under a constant threat of attack, which can only be deterred by a threat of counterattack.
I'd love to live in the kind of world you describe, the problem is that a fairly large number of people would not allow me to do so. And it isn't like any of us are morally perfect either - to some extent we all perpetuate the problems that manifest themselves at the level of society.
How does the fact that every big company out there is allowed to get with murder have anything to do with this particular policy being dumb.
The problems that you brought up have solutions, but they don't involve giving companies incentives to waste electricity. If tax policies are messed up then fix them, don't try to make up for them by messing up energy policy as well.
And what value does preventing him from using the internet serve, or from using a pseudonym? If he were to defraud people out of money, I'd be fine with punishing him for it. However, just because the guy committed a crime on the internet or using an alias, I don't see why that is reason to bar him from doing those very generic and completely legal activities.
Just because a process was involved does not make it right.
I don't dispute that the US has a process for doing these sorts of things. I was simply stating that it is morally wrong.
He's a felon on parole. There are conditions to that parole. If a felon offered parole doesn't want to agree to the conditions of his release, he is welcome to stay in prison, where he can continue to say whatever he would like.
Wow. The USA. Where you can speak freely as long as you don't mind saying it in prison. :)
What is the point of putting people in prison in the first place? What is the point of letting people out with crazy rules like "you aren't allowed to use a computer?" Either the guy is rehabilitated or he isn't. I'm fine with revoking parole when people commit crimes that are real crimes while on parole. However, putting conditions on parole that restrict fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, or which make it difficult to obtain gainful employment simply is morally wrong. If it is standard practice, that just makes all of society morally wrong.
Yes, he really is being jailed for his actual wrongdoings. You are not allowed to use aliases on probation. He used an alias and did something infamous with it.
If he committed an actual crime and was arrested and gave an alias to the police, I'd be all for considering that a crime (that should be a crime regardless of probation).
Using an alias to post a video on a website or youtube shouldn't be considered a crime no matter what some judge might declare. Just because judges can legally get away with this stuff doesn't make it right.
Almost all of those "ironies" make the same falicious assumption - that just because two applications of a technology share the same underlying technology, they must be equally expensive.
why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
With a single nuclear ICBM I can force an entire nation to bend to my will - an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers for a medium-sized country, let alone a big one. With the same ICBM I could lift a habitat not much bigger than a tent into space and maybe keep it supplied for a few months.
For all the talk of history in this article, you miss a fairly important principle - it always has been much easier to destroy than to create. I've heard it said that those who beat their swords into plowshares will till the earth for those who do not.
Sure, I'm all for getting the US out of all those interventionist wars. However, that won't magically turn the US into a post-scarcity society. And, even if that happens, unless something changes it will simply mean that we'll all end up serving those who own the machines.
"Microsoft forces utility board to reduce ludicrous fine by $10,000."
That might have been a great Slashdot headline since it is wrong. The fine was reduced by $150k. The fine was originally $210k, MS could have avoided it by spending $70k, and in the end the fine was reduced to $60k.
The "ludicrous" bit was spot-on though.
Microsoft could have just met the contractual obligation by paying what it had promised to pay.
MS offered to pay the cost of the electricity, but the utility insisted on payment of the fine as it was stated in the contract. MS said, sure you can do that, since that is in the contract. However, the contract ALSO allowed MS to simply use the agreed-upon amount of power instead, so they just burned a ton of power up.
MS completely complied with the agreement. That doesn't change the fact that the agreement was dumb, bad for the environment, and bad even for the general public, who would have benefitted if MS were given the "break" since the utility gets $70k either way, but if they just took the money they'd have $70k worth of unused electricity to sell elsewhere and make even more money with.
The policy is dumb, and nobody with half a brain will have a problem with under-utilization when it costs less to waste power than pay the fine.
MS was fine with keeping the promise - they offered to pay for the unused power. The regulators wanted MORE than the cost of the unused power. So, MS just used the power, keeping their promise, in a completely wasteful manner.
Why should the penalty for non-use be HIGHER than the cost of the power itself? It isn't like the utility could have gotten more money if they didn't sell it to MS. If that were the case, they wouldn't have sold it to MS in the first place.
If you read the NYT article you'll find quotes like the local government considering it arrogant of MS to complain when they weren't meeting deadlines to deploy a substation expansion. Apparently MS needed more capacity that it was presumably willing to pay for, and they planned for it to be available on-time, and the government wasn't delivering it on-time, and they had the "arrogance" to complain about that.
And it wasn't like MS just decided to burn the electricity - they called up the regulators and told them that the rule didn't make any sense and asked for an exception. The regulator dragged its feet or felt that a $210k fine for not burning through $70k of electricity was a good idea. MS just demonstrated why it wasn't.
If my local water company sent me a letter saying that I'd pay less on my bill if I used MORE water, I'd just open the nearest faucet and leave it running all day. You just have to wonder how many misincentives are out there...