He does blogging and stuff. So this seems like a combination of unboxing, business expense tax deduction and simple expensive toys.
An honest setup could be had for much less. I think he could save quite a bit on his PC with custom built, screens by going smaller and more numerous, camera by going 1080p instead of 4k. That would be a perfectly good work from home setup but he wanted to go max and blog about it.
but tbh from the invoices i have seen for business 'expenses', 10k for a critical part of your work flow is forgiveable.
He explained that shifting from more smaller screens meant that he could remove the bezel from right in front of his face. Those big, curved screens are brilliant to use IMO. He might have passive income from Pluralsight courses, have his mortgage paid off and figure he might as well use the surplus cash to treat himself. Others might spend more than that upgrading a car they're suddenly using less than ever before.
I think this is somewhat analogous to the privacy issues around Google Street View. Almost nobody thought the image of the front of their house was really private, but the idea of it being catalogued and searchable bothered more than a few. Removing the barrier of someone having to physically do the work to get that information at least made them feel more vulnerable.
Has Street View been a problem for the world in that way? I haven't personally experienced that. That's probably why the DNA database idea doesn't scare me. If you want to live in the world it's essentially impossible to keep your DNA a secret. It seems to me that eventually someone will pick it all up and organize it.
Your street view doesn’t contain your entire genetic record (including propensities towards disease, mental and physical, which could very easily be used to discriminate against you). So they’re not really comparable whatsoever.
And what is with this “this terrible thing X will happen eventually, so why not have it happen now?” argument I keep seeing nowadays? Your argument was quite literally: “Eventually someone will collect all your DNA”, so who cares if it’s now or later?
> Your street view doesn’t contain your entire genetic record (including propensities towards disease, mental and physical, which could very easily be used to discriminate against you).
Isn't this a form of victim blaming? How is this different than saying Black people should try to hide their skin color since in many cases they will be discriminated against because of it? We should be working to suppress the discrimination at it's source, not it's target.
You're right, working to reduce discrimination at source is undoubtedly worthwhile. But data does not exist in a vacuum - it is collected on behalf of, and used by, people.
Until we reach zero intolerance nirvana, you can't ignore that personal data collection at scale simplifies discrimination, and also opens up new methods for discriminating. Will there be benefits to society from personal data collection at scale? Of course. But there are also costs. There are plenty of examples of people whose ideas or products became used in unforeseen ways and regretted their actions.
Discrimination should be suppressed at source and systems that simplify its manifestation in the real world should be handled extra carefully.
I'm a little confused about what exactly the point of debate is here.
* Is your DNA a secret? I think the fact that you leave it everywhere means no.
* Should people be allowed to aggregate that information? It literally cannot be stopped so I think the point is moot.
I guess what I'm missing is any addressing of the reality of the situation. I'm guessing from the content of your reply that you think that the practice of cataloging DNA should be banned. Great. What happens when they do it anyway?
I'm just looking for a helpful, actionable response. All I've seen so far is "X is bad" (not actionable) and "Let's ban X" (not helpful).
What good will it do you that there's an international ban on DNA databases when corporations use the impossible-to-stop one anyway to discriminate against and target you or the police use it anyway to throw you in prison.
The most helpful course of action imo is to learn how best to cope with this new reality. How should we set our expectations when our DNA is public and searchable? Are there behaviors that would once be safe but will not be in the future? I think those are the more relevant questions.
To your first point, you can go out to the street and bring home someone’s random dna, but there is no way you’d ever be able to know who’s dna it was.
... unless you were to look it up maybe, in this leaked dna database.
Dna is not inherently an identifier. It needs the lookup code in order to act as one. A database like this MAKES it no longer a secret.
I'm not talking about taking random samples off a sidewalk. I'm saying if you follow a person you know and collect something they've discarded, now they're in the database. Do that enough times and everyone's in it. That's the exact technique the police use to collect people's DNA without their consent.
> Is your DNA a secret? I think the fact that you leave it everywhere means no.
There is a complicated procedure to convert this skin scales to data. Not everybody is able to do it, so if is not a secret, neither is exactly open data.
> Yes your DNS is a secret, just like your fingerprint is a secret.
But is it really? I think the point being made here is that actually it is relatively easy to obtain someone's DNA. Is there a law that prevents someone who knows your name from picking up a discarded coffee cup and extracting your DNA? I think it's an interesting debate. Is your face private? Is the sound of your voice private? Those things are unique to you but anybody that interacts with you will be exposed to those features including possibly your DNA. I guess the concern is how the data is collected, what it is used for and in the case of DNA the impact it has on anybody that has a genetic link to us. I think it's fair to consider DNA in separate category. There's only so much that can be deduced from your face as compared to DNA. It's tricky...
By targeted reconnaissance effort do you mean trivial geographic correlation based on your phones location data. So if the Google Street View car had a DNA sequencer on the back and GPS recorded any fragments and location it could trivially reconstruct quite a bit. No one has done this yet, but it's utterly doable. DNA is not private information its the most public information you can imagine is not controllable in any way thats meaningful to traditional thoughts on data privacy.
If an action requires less investment and provides the same value, it will happen more frequently — economics. A database lookup requires less investment than a targeted DNA harvesting, sequencing, and location correlation operation.
So because it is supposed to be trivial to identify people based on GPS, phone and DNA (which I dont believe), it doesn't matter if one gets his data into a DB, which gets leaked to the internet and then can be found/used by anyone? I don't think I follow u our reasoning.
I'll also state that DNA is hardly the most public information there is, surely your face/skin color/size/other physical characteristics are more public?
Not really. Armor made of this material has to be much thicker than ordinary steel plate. Furthermore, ordinary steel plate is entirely effective against swords, except at the joints and articulations.
Against the immediate cutting, probably. But it also bends. And with bending, it could damage you really bad, including the part that removing them could become quite a trouble.
True, but cutting is what we're talking about here, and since the material they've invented in this article is made of aluminum foam, it'll bend even easier than steel of the same thickness.
First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.
For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.
Also, in WVR, the advantage goes to the side with fewer planes. There was a study from the korean war to show this. The reason is because if you and your buddy is fighting 20 bandits, you can shoot at anybody that flies in front of you, while the enemies have to visually identify. And the speed of jet combat makes it impossible to verify before you lose your opportunity.
>So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon
Yup. Just like in vietnam. We are gonna fly up there with our f4s afterburning to mach 2, then we will launch all our sparrows at the bandits, who would fly straight into our missiles because they are dumb, and then we will land just in time for lunch.
Oversimplified for sure, but I think "extremely wrong" is unfair. I think the jury is still out on whether or not a stealth-on-stealth fight (or a more conventional fight in an ECM-heavy environment) inevitably devolves into a WVR knife fight. There are a number of reasons why this doesn't have to be the case.
You're absolutely correct that ROE can force a VID, but it'd be pretty dumb to box yourself into a corner that would force you into a neutral-ish WVR fight, yeah?
I agree that supermaneuverability has the potential to be useful, but I think it's fair to say that it's very much an edge case, and even then more of an augment to missiles that already have HOBS capability than a replacement for them. It certainly isn't a game-changing capability the way HOBS was. Also, TWR only goes so far to help recover from an energy deficit, especially if you have to go into reheat to make it happen. Gas kills are a thing...
Yes and no. Against a well-coordinated, larger force it's really difficult to win, and I very much wouldn't recommend adopting it as a primary tactic. If you had a fight that magically began at the furball phase (admittedly, this is one potential outcome of stealth-on-stealth engagements, although I imagine we'd need to develop better and different technology to make it a reality), that would be more likely to favor the individual, at least until they run out of missiles (it's difficult to over-emphasize how difficult guns kills are against maneuvering targets, even for a hypothetical magic robot with near-perfect aim). Old-school fights like Korea were much closer to the "immediate, chaotic furball" side of the spectrum than current fights, and there was a much less well-developed set of intra-and inter-flight tactics. A modern 2v1 (even heaters-only) is far more lopsided against the 1 than it was during Korea. With good coordination, this scales. (Aside: a really good book about the air war in Korea is The Hunters by James Salter. Highly recommended--it's fiction, but based on the author's own experiences as a pilot there.)
For what it's worth, technology and tactics have improved in the last half decade (perhaps more than we can say about our judgement?)... The proliferation of certain technologies will force continual re-evaluation of tactics, but I think it's safe to say that BVR is reasonably mature and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. (That said, reports of the death of the air-to-air gun will always be greatly exaggerated.)
> A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.
Every American stealth aircraft equipped with a radar is designed to be able to use it. There's various tricks involved, which all amount to driving the signal of radar below the noise floor for the adversary, while still being able to have the radar pick out the signal return (which is possible because the radar know what signal was sent out in the first place).
> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.
The F-22 has a low probability of intercept radar. They've been testing a window for adding IRST too in recent years. It also has extremely sophisticated passive EW sensors. It was designed from day one to win BVR fights without compromising stealth.
> For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.
It's a very poor tool and should be seen as a last resort.
As for F4's in vietnam and such, the visual engagement rules there were unique and are not going to repeat.
I'd suggest reading CBSA's Future of Air Combat report to understand the realities of this stuff. Supermaneuverability is very close to useless other than an advertising stunt at air shows.
Manned fighters themselves are very nearly obsolete.
Then came the air war over Vietnam, and the fighter crews there soon realized that AIM-7 shots beyond visual range were often more dangerous to other Americans than to the enemy, because there was no (sure) way to identify the target as friend or foe.
During the Gulf War, the US Air Force launched AIM-7M and AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missile for BVR attack under the condition of "one-way transparency", but the hitting rate was less than 30 percent.
A low observable fighter using its radar is hardly analogous to a man turning on a flashlight at night. This isn't the 1960's anymore where air search radars were turned on for extended periods on a set frequency.
Modern low probability of intercept are designed to emit only intermittently and hop between frequencies. An adversary might be able to detect the signal but probably won't be able to use it for tracking and targeting.
Furthermore data links allow for cooperative engagement. So the shooting platform can leave its radar off and rely on targeting data fed in from other sources.
You have lost your mind if you think any fight that’s 2v1 or worse odds is going to go well for the underdog. I mean, it’s not like 2v1 ACM doctrine isn’t a thing. It’s practiced regularly by fighter pilots. The side with 2 wins an overwhelming amount of time once practiced. It turns out we’ve learned new lessons and adopted new techniques in the 70 years since the Korean War.
First, once you have VID you do everything you can to keep the bandit in sight until you have a shot opportunity. This idea that “jets are so fast you lose the opportunity by the time you can tell what it is” is completely unfounded.
Second, those other 20 planes aren’t all wildly trying to shoot you. If you’re chasing one of them, that one is flying defensive and describing the fight to their wingmen (“one circle, bandit co-alt, nose high…”) as their supporting wingmen take turns with who’s engaged aggressive and getting clear missile shots at you (since you’re really focused on only one of them).
Third, even if none of this were true, doing this kind of thing in an N-vs-1 fight for N >= 2 invalidates your entire premise. The guy who’s hanging still in midair doing fancy air-show tricks is just generating free shots for all those other aircraft.
> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.
This is simply not true for modern AESA radars. It's only true for radars built with an 80's technology level. Modern radars are capable of producing search beams so narrow that they cannot be reliably used for locating the source. When someone is using a LPI radar near you, you can tell that someone has a radar on, but you will only have a very vague idea of the direction they are in, and no idea at all of how far away they are. And since other planes near you (or even other detectors on your own plane) do not get to see the same beam, only the next one that comes after a random interval, you cannot use multiple detectors for deducing the origin of the beam.
The fact that this myth of radars telling everyone where your are is so persistent is annoying, but also somewhat useful. Simply because if someone repeats it, it tells everyone that they have not updated their ideas about how air combat works since the cold war ended and they should be ignored.
I guess that's technically correct, but it seems a little pointless; with sufficient negligence, accidents are a virtual certainty, and those who come to harm in such an event would find little solace in that knowledge.
In that sense, I don't want PIA planes falling on my own or anyone else's head, land, or property, anywhere in the world.
There's no reason to allow pilots and airlines to behave like that, and lots of reasons to sanction them very harshly if they do. After all, who's to believe they're current on their maintenance if they can't even make sure pilots respond when hailed?
Exceptionally unlikey a pilot would be able to crash a plane at 30,000 foot. Far more likely that a medical emergency would lead to a pilot landing at an unfamiliar airport and crashing the plane into block of houses.
Scenario: inexperienced/bad pilot misjudges fuel consumption (badly manages energy / height transitions) and requires emergency landing somewhere in EU because it cannot reach London
An honest setup could be had for much less. I think he could save quite a bit on his PC with custom built, screens by going smaller and more numerous, camera by going 1080p instead of 4k. That would be a perfectly good work from home setup but he wanted to go max and blog about it.
but tbh from the invoices i have seen for business 'expenses', 10k for a critical part of your work flow is forgiveable.