What happens when the system hallucinates my card number?

Might help if you read my entire comment in good faith instead of just scanning for something to shout 'gotcha!' about for imaginary Internet points, but here we are.

Russia is pretty much a joke. The entire Ukraine invasion has proven they:

1) Can't keep a modern navy afloat, let alone actively engaged with an enemy.

2) Can't keep an army feed and supplied beyond their own boarders, zero logistics capability

3) Can't muster serious troop strength, they are literally running out of conscripts, and even low quality ones like prisoners and men generally beyond their best fighting years in age.

4) Don't have the manufacturing and supply chain capability to produce replacement weapons and armor, and their stocks of old mid-century junk are even rapidly dwindling.

About the only thing Russia has is ICBMs that _probably_ work. They have exactly nothing that has even the slightest chance of intercepting or blunting the harm of the inevitable reprisal if they used them in anger, so they can't unless they are at the murder suicide stage rather surrender level of insanity.

There is no need to for NATO for the US not even as a staging area to counter Russian forces. As far as Western Europe is concerned, Finland and Norway can probably defend themselves and the Russians would run out of food and fuel before they reached anywhere else. Never mind that most of the EU "powers" have proven they are as incapable and decrepit militarily as Russia with their little Libya attempt. Any conflict will be a sad little show of hasbeens slapping at each other with drone strikes on childrens birthday parties.

The 21st century power struggle will be in the Pacific.

First, GPS signals are relatively weak. Second, they come from 'up' - if you really want to avoid terrestrial jamming, then a bit of shielding that only exposes your receiver to the sky will help a lot.

The solution for creating interference is relaying legitimate signals from space, if you can't crack the encryption. By messing with timing carefully, you can severely degrade the position accuracy or cause it to drift to where you want it.

I find it interesting that GPS, Galileo and BeiDou share 2/3 of their base frequencies, but GLONASS doesn't - its overlap is additional frequencies. I'm not a comms guy, but I do wonder if that means Russia can interfere with GPS, Galileo and BeiDou simultaneously without affecting their own gear significantly.

It means less and less when it comes to military use though, since the military expects jamming and spoofing and has multiple methods of position fixing of various degrees of accuracy.

The problem with this approach is, it only works as long as someone does the checking. In practice everyone turns on 'safe update channel' and nobody actually tests the bleeding edge, ten days elapse, and the malicious code flows into the 'safe channel'.

It is like sending for help in a first-aide situation, you need to point at someone specifically, make eye contact and say "YOU! go get help" if you just shout 'someone get help' and go back to recuse breathing or whatever you're occupied with everyone will stand around on-looking assuming someone else is doing something.

I love Ruby, it is an elegant language and it has made great performance gains in resent years, but but bundler and the drama around rubygems is a really problem, for anyone trying to make commercial use of it. I hate to say it but if Ruby is going to survive it probably needs to find another major patron besides Shopify, that is willing take some ownership and investment in the outside the standard library supply chain. Bandages like this are not going to cut it, and pure community lead effort isn't likely to be able to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. Unless your project is Linux, Samba, Bind, Apache, level deployment scale it just does not work with the degree of attack surface something like package/module repository offers.

When I was implementing ALPR almost 2 decades ago, the projects were funded by insurance companies as long as the ALPR scans were linked to a database of expired insurance.

The cops couldn't keep up with the hits the system generated.

While I am not happy with the inevitable authoritarian creep of the system, I'm fine with my role in what happened to every uninsured driver who was pulled over.

Good came out of them... just not net good.

We should be cautious about germline genetic engineering, mostly because of the potential for causing harm to the individual, but also a broader fear of creating a larger divide between the haves and have-nots.

The idea that such caution should result in an absolute ban on such things is due to fear, and it's stupid and those fears should be discounted. If they aren't, the fears will result in what they are trying to prevent as the work continues in private.

If I were planning on having a child, and I had the money, nothing would stop me from having my offspring's DNA tailored as far as known genetics would allow to optimize their heath.

Stargate SG1 had a great setup for cheap production of an episodic planet-of-the-week show but that's hardly unique.

The Stargate isn't what made the show special, it was the self-aware humour and the charismatic cast. And the original cast is too damn old now, so you'd be rolling the dice with a remake.

In my opinion, it's better to build a new setting than try to reinvent the old one. At least that way you don't have baggage to worry about.

It's intellectual laziness. Our rulers are just people, after all.

The goal should have been self-sufficiency on critical infrastructure and food supply, then let non-critical trade build relationships and trust over time.

That and a global NATO-like club with a rule like "everyone is obligated to take action against a member who attacks another member" for military security.

It's still not perfect, because people lie, but there's nothing you can do about that.

There are some guns you can only fire once, so you save that shot for only the most existential of risks.

If you're the US you do it on a whim, and it not only never works again but you damage political and business relationships that reduce your nation's influence and hurt your economy.

You let them get too entrenched. Good luck with peaceful options, but I don't see the US' issues being resolved without internal violence.

War has always been about resources... for rulers, that includes human resources, the people they can get to implement their will for them.

Ukraine is just showing us how true this is - it doesn't matter what you attack the enemy with, you're trying to exhaust their resources before they exhaust yours. Better robots than people - maybe the next war can be entirely robotic and we can leave soldiers out of it.

It would be nice if technology could prevent the wars in the first place, but as long as there are humans in control I don't see that happening.

Our fundamental nature hasn't changed significantly since our distant ancestors were wandering around in small family groups.

Social structure flows from the fact that we're all social primates looking to have a popular / strong member of the group lead us against those 'others' we fear want our stuff.

Until that changes, you must assume that anything that can be bent to the task of benefiting one of us over others or one group of us over other groups will be. It takes a lot of effort to build up social structures to counter this and not much to tear them down.

It usually goes to the lowest-ranking person on the team or the one everyone's trying to keep away from actual coding.

It remains worth the effort to write a novel around your code - not just what you did and why you did certain things a certain way, but the meta-reasons. The more those who come after you understand, the easier it is for them to figure out and maintain your code. It also tends to focus you more on writing good code, because you don't want to document, "Well, it looked good enough and didn't immediately produce errors and I'm tired of this and want to move on".

AI code? Well, AI should be very good at generating plain-language documentation of 'what', but it is absolutely going to fail at 'why'.

The additional cost over a normal horizontal ducted turbine is, of course, the new shell and the actuator it requires.