"And, I'm sorry, how long have we been tracking it. I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't want to reveal sensitive information. But I will say we have been tracking it for some time. And we have had custody of it the entire time it has been over U.S. airspace, entered the continental United States airspace a couple of days ago."
I think it only makes sense for battlefield surveillance if its augmenting some small gap in existing ISR operations, combined with UAVs + satellites + whatever other aircraft. it definitely would not replace any of those aforementioned vehicles/technologies wholesale.
I don't think so. I don't know what altitude its at but I imagine aerodynamic control surfaces would not be that effective. F-22 would be better, which is what we deployed.
the ISR payload tends to be massively less as well, with a balloon compared to a satellite, since balloon payloads need to be really small. they are basically an obsolete technology since the development of reconnaissance satellites, UAVs, etc, so I really doubt this is collecting much valuable intelligence. also shooting down satellites is definitely a sketchy area (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon) because of in-space collisions etc.
also note in the DOD press briefing they stated that this was markedly different than previous incursions due to primarily the duration of loitering.
also what are these comments..? openly lauding an adversarial state which is conducting flagrant surveillance operations in the continental united states? yikes.
Not that I know of, but I guess elements of the USCG can be seconded by the USN to assist in a law-enforcement capacity? it makes sense that the maritime forces get to play together though.
Thats interesting. I assumed narco subs fell into DHS/USCG jurisdiction and since they have no ASW/ASuW functionality (I think?), getting the USN involved seems kinda overkill? Am I wrong?
As an engineer I can't help but be kind of impressed with narco subs, especially traversing the atlantic from south america to europe. I wonder where this arms race will go: unmanned narco subs? weaponized narco subs?? yikes.
kind of amusing to say that, given the reason this is occurring is because the US is an incredibly popular country for immigrants to flock to improve their QOL and give their kids the best opportunities even though they know they're entering on non-immigrant visas. Yeah USCIS is infamously glacial and the visa situation these people are in is extremely frustrating, yet they persevere to live in the US.
This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO.
Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.
Modern Fortran is honestly a joy to work with. A large part of this is due to FPM; I've had a lot of problems in the past with building more complex Fortran projects (with FoBiS mainly) and dependencies have always been a bit of a hassle.
The flow of Jobs' voice is a little off, but wow this is incredible. But also incredibly concerning. Its cool tech, and I guess nothing can stop the inevitability of new technology, but the ability to replicate people's voice, speech patterns, and how they look to a pretty accurate degree is mega sketchy. I guess to future proof yourself, just minimize your audio and visual data online...
It's interesting the very different roles hair has played in philosophical movements: the bald Buddhist monks, the beard-growing Greek philosophers, and here the growing of long hair in Confucianism.
Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.
Maybe because the initial reporting got so much traffic, Citizenlab pushed far more resources into investigating NSO products? Maybe its political in nature? I can't imagine the reasoning is technical incompetence by NSO (have you read the FORCEDENTRY writeups? its insane). Maybe NSO's clients more haphazardly pursue targets, so there is a higher probability of recovering some forensic evidence?
Even that comparison is a bit of a reach because the US does not have conscription, so the professional/education pipelines are just massively different.
Precisely. Its easy to criticize an agency when one is only privy to the failures. What the public sees is such a tiny fraction of what actually goes on, including positive publications. Its a tough aspect of working in the intelligence community honestly, and especially concerning when many people want to de-fang US foreign intelligence.
"And, I'm sorry, how long have we been tracking it. I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't want to reveal sensitive information. But I will say we have been tracking it for some time. And we have had custody of it the entire time it has been over U.S. airspace, entered the continental United States airspace a couple of days ago."