Fleets of balloons to interfere with aircraft has been tried before. With higher flying aircraft it becomes impractical to teather to the ground (per Wikipedia), and filling several million cubic feet with balloons packed close enough to have a good probability of hit is impractical (and temporary if they're not tethered).

Somehow I don't think the US wants to encourage a do-it-yourself SAM competition.

I hope you will shortly be returning to Europe, and leave the Americas to their indigenous peoples. The only reason white people are here is because they couldn't make their own shitty countries work.

If you are in Europe, I hope you're not an Irish protestant, English, Normand, Breton, or from the south of Spain, or many other places in Europe, I have bad news for you too.

I used to think that too, but then I learned assemblers and even machine code can have bugs. Now I write all my software on the cloud!

How to make a nuclear weapon is (as far as I know) not particularly hard to figure out. Even in the Manhattan project the major hurdle wasn't the bomb design, it was acquiring the necessary nuclear materials. E.g. they were so confident in the design dropped on Hiroshima they never tested it in advance.

Now, of course, it's even easier. Apparently in the 50s the US government wanted to see how easy it would be for countries to acquire the bomb, so they had a couple newly minted physics Ph.D.s attempt to design a nuclear weapon based on publicly available information. It took them 2-3 years, and they ended up with a design which likely would have worked.

I think you've re-invented the guided missile.

Which is what the article says is actually occurring. China is not immune to making short-sighted policy decisions.

They also forced the women to throw with the opposite hand. They were trying to control for difference in training between men & women. The full conclusion was the average man can throw better than the average woman, the raw talent of the average men and average women is the same. But a multi-part conclusion like that doesn't really fit well into the Confirmed/Plausible/Busted format they use.

I'm just relaying what the DARPA doc says: the reason for the disappearing requirement is for operational security. Apparently something which "disappears" by burning into a fine ash is also out for similar reasons.

In the actual request for proposals they mention parachutes (it sounds like this is what's currently used). Apparently in many situations of interest the parachute would need to be packed out by the sniper or Special Forces teams being resupplied. The goal is to create a system which doesn't need to be packed out, doesn't give away the position of the people receiving the supplies.

Note the balloon is to simplify the challenge. The proposal needs to include discussion on deployment from other air platforms, especially high speed, high altitude aircraft. It also needs to include calculations of the anticipated maximum drop airspeed, and any anticipated modifications which might be required to drop the vehicle at airspeeds exceeding the anticipated maximum drop airspeed.

Per other comments you can't drop parachutes from the edge of SAM range.

In terms of regular or anticipated natural disasters, the UK has it pretty tame. There's flooding to worry about, and that's pretty much it. On the other hand much of the US and Canada is either in an earthquake zone, or gets regular hurricanes, both of which can knock natural gas (as pointed out by GP). And many backup generator scenarios cannot be solved by a second site outside the disaster area. Hospitals come to mind immediately, and I know someone who's condo uses a backup generator for emergency power.

Sure, but in this case Mechanical is probably leading, and Software is just implementing according to specs provided by Mechanical.

You need to look at the rational for granting patents. The original rational was that by providing a monopoly on an invention for a limited period of time, it would encourage inventors to publish new and useful inventions instead of keeping those inventions as trade secrets. So the original inventor would be guaranteed exclusivity for a period of time, and in exchange everyone would benefit after the exclusivity period had expired.

But now people have started filing for patents which do not describe an invention in a useful manner, and then suing anyone who makes a similar invention. This basically reverses the intended purpose of patents.

Analogy: patents were intended to protect invention prospectors from claim jumpers, but instead are being used by speculators who see an idea railway going a certain direction and buy up all the mindspace in its way.