the real world doesn't work that way
I'm sure the supreme court Trump cronies will disagree.
By the time it gets to them, it will have been an expensive, annoying court case for two or three years.
But without ISS, how will those poor defense contractors earn their corporate welfare? Won't someone think of the corporations?
But you miss the point of this entire effort, this is about kicking out the old defense contractors to start feeding the "new space" and "defense tech" contractors instead with commercial space station leases!
In case you somehow missed it, my post was sarcasm.
There are good reasons to keep ISS running, the most obvious one being that it exists and is up there now. It is useful as a location for space-based experiments, and now that they have stopped the leaky Russian module from leaking, the most critical reason for shutting it down no longer exists.
Mind you, given the political situation, it would be great to not have to keep paying Russia to keep their parts operational, but the most critical "Russian" parts were paid for by the U.S., so we own those parts. And the rest at least arguably don't matter, or could be replaced with new modules built by western companies.
So shutting it down means spending a rather large amount of money to replace the whole thing when all they really need to do is jettison any Russian modules that the U.S. doesn't own so that they don't have to keep paying Russia, and optionally replace them with new modules. It's like throwing away a whole computer because your hard drive got full, even though you have already cleaned up a bunch of stuff and now it is almost empty.
Shutting down a modular station because of some old modules never made sense to me. Open up contracts to replace the modules. Building commercial space stations also never made sense, because there isn't exactly a huge queue of companies wanting to do experiments in space, and space tourism likely won't fulfill the scientific mission of ISS.
A more reasonable approach would be to allow companies to build their space tourism stations and connect them to ISS so that ISS could be a lifeboat for them and vice versa in an emergency. Allow some limited access across the boundaries, but minimal resource sharing. If it becomes obvious that the commercial companies can render parts of ISS unnecessary by just paying them some money, then reevaluate those plans over time.
We should be ending the ISS, NASA needs the cash for other, far more important projects.
But without ISS, how will those poor defense contractors earn their corporate welfare? Won't someone think of the corporations?
"The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk."
With that much spin, I'm the Pentagon hasn't started emitting radio signals.
There's a word for this: extortion. The military has decided that if they cannot use Anthropic's technology in any way they please, that they will just ban all government use, in an attempt to force the company to violate their principles. Here's hoping Anthropic shows them that the real world doesn't work that way by spanking them with a volley of lawsuits that will keep government lawyers employed for the next decade.
From the very beginning, this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes
That's not a principle. That's a functional requirement for the software that you're buying. If it is spelled out in the requirements document when a company bid on the contract, then they are obligated to comply. If you failed to specify the requirements in such a way that you could do whatever you want, tough s**t. That's your mistake. Do better next time. It's no different than any other situation where the government buys something that isn't suitable for what they are trying to use it for. They should have understood what they were buying before they bought it. Period.
I think it is safe to say that if those requirements were in the contract, the military would have sued for breach by now. So what we have are a bunch of embarrassed generals who failed to do due diligence in their procurement contracts, are realizing how much money they wasted, and are acting in ways that likely violate any number of federal securities laws, among others, to try to force the company into accepting an amended contract or else watch their dreams of an IPO (rumored to happen soon) turn into a nightmare.
I believe that the maximum penalty for securities fraud is 25 years. Just saying.
The glassholes started the arms race. This is just responding to the attack.
No, they didn't, and no, it isn't. People do the same things with cell phones, yet you don't see people randomly walking up to people, grabbing their cell phones, and stomping on them, because that is not rational behavior. And yet there's no meaningful difference. People are assuming bad intent because someone has a particular piece of tech, and in my view, that is not reasonable, period.
For me, the spy nature of the glasses is quite different than the regular security cams.
That's because you're seeing a single possible use case and ignoring all others. They can also be:
and so on. Some of these things require cameras; some don't.
In addition, sometimes things go on in those places that people would like some "social privacy". Sometimes people have affairs, sometimes just dating, sometimes just a business dinner, sometimes people discuss business, sometimes the owner says no - it is their property.
Well, yeah. And that's their right, at least up to a point where it becomes an ADA issue, and then it isn't. But either way, I think you're vastly overstating the concern. Unless I'm there to specifically catch a person who is having an affair, me having a photo or video of that person having an affair is not going to affect that person's life in any way unless it somehow gets posted on social media and they are close enough to my friend graph to get auto-tagged.
And if someone is there to specifically catch a person who is having an affair, you can safely assume that the smart glasses are just a distraction from the actual camera, and even if that isn't the case, you can safely assume that they would be photographed with a zoom lens from out on the street when they walk out of the building. So you're not preventing anything by keeping the smart glasses out.
Record as you like outside, but if you want to record in the dressing room at the gym, some people might not like that. Some might find it in their hearts to do you physical harm.
Agreed. But there's a difference between recording and merely wearing something capable of recording.
There is no practical difference between someone with a pair of smart glasses and someone wearing a cell phone on a holster or shoved down into the back pocket of their jeans with the camera pointed outwards.
As soon as you allow cameras of any kind, you've lost any real hope of preventing people from capturing video surreptitiously. The only thing preventing it is the owner's lack of any particular desire to be a creepy person and record people without their consent.
Thus, banning smart glasses, at least prima facie, seems like an arbitrary distinction that once again doesn't prevent anything.
I'm not saying I like the idea of smart glasses, particularly when they are sending images off device for facial recognition, because there's always some chance that someone will figure out a way to break into those data streams, throw a little AI at the problem, and catch accidental images of people doing private things, but concerns about the technical security of these devices involve a very different level of privacy risk than concerns about the actual owners of the devices using them to spy on other people. The first is an actual security concern that necessitates technical solutions like encryption, fuzz testing, using on-device models instead of uploading when possible, etc. The second borders on paranoid fantasy, because the devices don't enable the owners to do anything that they couldn't already do, making it both a fundamentally unsolvable and IMO entirely moot problem.
There's a dramatic difference between a device that is fully intended to watch and record the surroundings and one which _could_ do so, if sufficiently hacked/modified/altered to do so.
No hacking needed if the cell phone isn't yours. Someone just runs the camera app, starts recording, and slips it in a shirt pocket with the camera facing out or whatever.
*Any* pair of smart glasses absolutely will be watching and listening - by design. Likewise, someone holding their phone up and pointing the cameras at me or someone else are likely recording - again, by design.
Watching and listening in what sense? The camera is running, but is it sending data beyond the local device? One from Facebook probably would, to be fair, but that's not *inherently* true.
Are you a software engineer? They big money is airlines. Some of those pilots can get up to $200k with experience.
For now.
Planes can already automatically take off, land, and fly, at least within certain limitations (wind speed and no mechanical problems being the big two). As far as I know, nobody has attempted automatic support for taxiing from the gate to the runway and vice versa, but remote piloting would be entirely plausible when you're still on the ground, so that's not a showstopper.
And it's worth noting that we have already seen demonstrations of fully autonomous cargo drones carrying several hundred pounds. I'd be shocked if there were not at least some cargo aircraft flying 100% autonomously on a daily basis in 15 years, and probably some passenger aircraft as well.
By contrast, an antenna could be located anywhere within several feet of the road
Just because the speed camera your local government puts up is in a massive box doesn't mean cameras in general need to be. There's no finite difference here. If someone installed a camera on the side of a street and made an attempt to hide it you won't find it.
You don't just need a camera. You also need electricity, a connection to the Internet, and hardware for compressing the video and sending it over the Internet. There are very limited places that have both a power supply *and* a clear view of the street, and if you go digging up the ground to run wires between somewhere that has power and somewhere that has a view of the street, there's a good chance that someone will notice you digging up and redoing the sidewalk or whatever.
And if you aren't within single-digit feet of line voltage, you will also likely need power conversion, because you're not going to be able to send that much current for a long distance at low voltages over a small wire. The smallest PoE cameras out there are roughly one-inch cubes, and can't get much smaller for thermal reasons.
99% of these wont get plugged into external screen and if they do it will work fine. God, people love to get their knickers in a twist about everything these days dont they.
You'd be surprised how many people plug their laptops into TV sets at hotels when they travel. And having one port that supports DisplayPort alt mode and one port that doesn't is going to badly confuse the sorts of people who barely understand computers. They will bring them to Apple saying that their port doesn't work, because that's the only adapter they have, and it works with one and doesn't work with others.
This is likely to be an expensive customer support mistake, wasting a surprising amount of genius bar time at the very least. If even 1% of people waste ten minutes of someone's time at a genius bar ($28+ per hour), that *still* might be more expensive than the bill-of-materials cost for supporting the port properly. If it is 10%, it almost definitely would be more expensive. A survey of frequent hotel guests a while back suggested that the number might be as high as two-thirds.
What percentage of people who frequently stay at hotels would be okay with a basic laptop, I couldn't say.
You're missing the point, a continuous carrier with a phased array is good enough to hit something with a HARM missile. It's a target lock, not just tracking. Tracking can be looser. Consider that part of the case against Abrego Garcia is that a license plate reader picked up the vehicle sometime a week earlier (news reports giving a specific number of days seem to have been redacted) in Houston, and that's part of the charges against him. Think more "We know it was in the neighborhood" than GPS coordinates at any given second. Just consider if all you have is sensors placed at traffic signals (so they have power). Even if they miss the vehicle occasionally, how much information could you gather on somebody with the only information being a hit at an intersection at a known time? I'd argue that one could come very close to figuring out where they live, where they work, where they shop.
Of course. I'm not saying it can't be used. I'm saying that because there is no continuous carrier signal, if the data were properly encrypted, an outside observer would know only that some unknown vehicle was there, not that a specific vehicle was there, and that they would therefore have to rely on something else, such as license plates, to recognize the vehicle, because even if they could initially identify the specific vehicle in some way, they would not have a continuous signal to follow from place to place, and would have no idea what that burst of noise data means, making the data mostly useless for any sort of tracking purposes.
Therefore, the lack of proper encryption is the only reason this is interesting at all.
And even if you have all of that working I guarantee some older kid will let the little ones use their account how do you tie the account to the person using it and verify that on demand, dna test?
Correct. The entire idea is fundamentally infeasible.
That said, chances are the kid did not buy the device, so if you have it at the operating system level, simply asking the user's birthday at setup time is likely adequate, because presumably if the parents care whether their kids have access to adult material, they will configure the device when they get it before giving it to their kids.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions work as well as the most insanely complex ones.
When I looked it up, the standard is every 30-60 seconds. Per sensor. Assuming more or less random timing, that would mean that, on average, you get a pulse every 15 seconds or so.
Even in a car, that is fast enough for good discrete tracking, even if it wouldn't be suitable for guiding in a radiation tracking missile.
Only if there aren't ten other cars nearby that are also chattering randomly in the same frequency band. You'd be as likely to track one as the next in the absence of any data specifically identifying a particular sensor as belonging to a specific car. That's why discrete bursts are critically different from a continuous carrier. With a continuous carrier, you can use a phased array that tracks the source of the signal precisely, and once you have locked it on a target, if it goes off center, it can instantly know which way the signal has moved.
...With your approach, the website knows who you are, knows what kind of porn you watch, because your identity is tied to your web browsing, and can take advantage of that to show very specific targeted porn ads for you when you visit other websites, can use it to extort you, etc.
Mandating an approach like that would violate California's constitutional right to privacy, and any OS vendor or website that tried to do it that way could be held civilly or criminally liable.
No, with my approach the user would get bounced over to their chosen age verification provider (their bank), they'd authenticate, then the bank would give them an auth token signed by the bank with a claim that says they are '18 or over' and that's it. No name, no address, no nothing EXCEPT that they are indeed a legal adult. The browser would present that token to the over-18 only website which could verify the digital signature on it and trust the claim in it and let them in.
Here's a list of open questions:
IMO, a privacy-protecting solution has to have a complete information firewall between the site and the age verification provider. And you also need some sort of shared agreement on what constitutes a trusted set of age verification providers that is standardized across websites, or else you create an access nightmare where what sites you visit depends on what bank you use.
And either way, that would all require all of the banks to agree on a shared OAuth realm that provides that level of information and only that level of information. It requires this to be standardized across all of the banks. It requires all of the websites to conform to that standard.
There are probably other nontrivial issues hiding beneath the surface.
A scheme in which the operating system determines whatever it needs to about your identity when you first create an account or upgrade your OS (globally, for all users), then allows browsers to verify age locally at any time without making any network requests is far preferable from a privacy perspective.
Keep in mind that there are 4 to 5 sensors transmitting. Once one knows all the sensors for a car, the average time between detectable events shortens considerably.
True, but the point is that it is still discrete bursts with likely random timing, not a continuous carrier.
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
