Oh no, a manufactured thing with long lead times has more demand than forecast and might be in short supply for a few years, surely a greater disaster has never befallen mankind!
Like many other aspects of how cars took over our cities, I'd argue the reason we used lead so long is because the conveniences of people inside a vehicle have long been collectively judged to be more important than the lives of people outside the vehicle.
The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.
Ships
- ships big enough to do material damage would be very small in #
- ships big enough to do material damage would have a (somewhat?) professional crew
- whatever damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas - only where water & land meet, only where substantial public or private investment had been made in docks/etc
- operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging ship or 3rd party property (public or private)
Cars
- in some countries the ratio of cars to people is approaching 1
- a vanishingly small portion of vehicles have professional drivers
- car operators expect to be able to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of land in cities, excepting only land that already has a building on it, and sometimes not even that.
- car operators rarely held liable for damage to public property, injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums
I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at risk.
> I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph.
I don't understand this reasoning. License plates don't stop speeding from happening. Removing license plates wouldn't prevent enforcement of speed limits either. A cop can pull over and ticket someone without a license plate just as easily as they do now.
At best they're good for a small number of situations where they help identify a car used in a crime (say a hit and run) but even then plenty of crimes are committed using cars that can't be linked back to the driver (stolen for example) or where the plates have been removed/obscured.
I’m not arguing that license plates solve the problem of the danger of cars, simply that as long as cars are dangerous to people not inside the car, there will be political pressure to have some way, however imperfect, of identifying them and their owners/operators.
Even the least sophisticated criminals know that you should buy a stolen Kia or Hyundai for ~$100 and use that to commit your crime. I suspect most of the crime these Flock cameras are catching is red-light runners and maybe hit and runs if it happens to be caught on camera.
A hit and runner hit me in front of such camera and totalled my truck. Police refused to investigate, they're not interested in using camera for such reasons nor is there much incentive that's in it for the police to do so.
I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.
If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.
Developing land is not cheap, but that’s not a good reason for government to make it more expensive.
If archeology surveys are in the public interest, then they should be funded by the public at large through property taxes of all homeowners and land owners, rather than just a handful who will live in a specific new building.
If the public at large is unwilling to stomach an increase in property taxes to pay for archeology surveys, then that is a pricing signal that public does not actually value those surveys at all. (except in so far as they make the construction of additional housing, more difficult and more expensive, which was probably the point all along.)
I can just about guarantee it has nothing to do with targeting and a lot to do with making Venezuela unsure when strikes are about to start, both for security of the forces launching the eventual strikes (if any) and to harass/wear-down Venezuelan air defenses by keeping them very alert.
If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times.
We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.
I live near JBLM in Washington. I am routinely overflown by helicopters and planes (C-17s) often with their transponders off (I have an ADS-B receiver running on a VM). These are training flights that are not going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound region. For added fun, I'm also pretty close to several Sea-Tac approaches.
> is significantly more precise than what you will get with radar
Is that increase in precision much larger than the plane itself? If it's not then it couldn't possibly matter in this application.
Further radar is not a static image. The radar is constantly sweeping the sky, taking multiple measurements, and in some cases using filtering to avoid noise and jitter.
> GPS Lat & Long Barometric Altitude Ground speed & track angle Rate of climb/descent
You get or synthesize every one of those with radar as well.
Yes, ADS-B is significantly more precise than civilian primary radar returns. That's why the FAA is trying to move away from radar. The JetBlue near miss was about 150 miles from Curacao ATC which is beyond what most ASR systems cover (around half that).
Military radar is a different beast, but even then you're still trying to figure out what the returns mean. ADS-B explicitly says hey there are two aircraft in a tiny space. Civilian radar is likely not precise enough to identify two aircraft that close.
Isn't altitude information also one of the important things about ADS-B that radar lacks?
Although ADS-B is self reported and "vulnerable" to bad/spoofed info.
My CFI and I once saw ADS-B data from one of the startups near Palo Alto airport in California reporting supersonic speeds... at ground level, no less.
Edit: still have it in my email, heh. It was a Kitty Hawk Cora, N306XZ, reporting 933kts at 50'.
Even good stereopair like a WWI navy guns rangefinder, will give you all that info, of course not precise enough to lock a missile - well, transponder also wouldn't let you to anyway, and thus all that transponder precision is pointless in that context.
A missile only needs to get close enough for its sensors to take over for the final approach right? Transponder data should be quite enough for that, especially for a kc-46
Any of the methods i mentioned is enough to get missile close, except may be microphones as limited speed of sound means that the plane would have moved significantly from the observed position, though again even that would have allowed to put missile into the vicinity and in general direction.
Watching Ukraine videos there is new game in town though - relatively cheap IR cameras. Using IR, day or night, you can detect a jet plane from very large distances and just guide missile to the plane computer-game-joystick style.
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