I read it as being more specific than one overarching "position". Long-range strike drones are arguably "offensive action" even in a clearly defensive war, interceptor drones are clearly "defensive action". Midrange strike against targets in occupied Ukrainian territory are a bit of a grey area.
Of course, Starlink/Starshield is already unavailable for long-range strike due to geofencing, and the speed limit was clobbering interceptors right when they needed that speed to cope with the new jet-powered Gerans, so it's still a daft stance overall.
Ukraine's position has been that starlink is used exclusively for drone defense, i.e., interceptors. That is sensible because that's within the contracted terms. However, there is intentional obfuscation of starlink and starshield in all of this. Ukraine also claims that it doesn't use star-anything for offensive drone attacks, which is kind of unbelievable. The contention started when the White House told Ukraine that refineries were off limits, and then Ukraine struck refineries anyway. It seems clear to me that 1) they are using the technology, however it is branded, to reach and possibly cross the border, and 2) this was a signal to abide by the temporary restrictions, as the tri-lateral talks are being negotiated.
The white house agreed to terms with Russia without involving Ukraine. Russia bombed ukraines energy infrastructure literally within hours of Trump saying that the ceasefire was effective and Ukraine waited three days before bombing energy infrastructure in Russia again.
Trump and Musk are being petty because they can't control a foreign nation with a fake agreement that's in the middle of a war. Tried to twist Ukraine's arm. Disgusting shameful behavior. I hope they rot in jail.
Hmm, not immediately clear how this avoids potential privacy leaks, such as drawing DOM hyperlinks to the canvas and then scraping their visited-status colour from the pixel data.
Or maybe I'm behind the times; I've not done serious webdev for a long time.
Eh, Nanite rasterisation is still happening on the GPU, it's "just" implemented in shaders rather than using the fixed-function pipeline. "Software rendering" is becoming less useful as a descriptor as graphics hardware becomes more general.
I'm missing something - why would you be wanting to intercept balloons over someone else's airspace? The 2023 incident was in US (and Canadian) airspace.
Sorry, I should have explained it: you want to intercept a spy balloon before it enters your airspace, not after it has already entered and possibly gathered any information.
Well there's a whole lot of ocean one doesn't need to be stealth to fly over but really, your comments read like endless goal-post shifting from someone who has a preferred solution in mind and is working backwards to justify it. Also the SR-71 was never stealth, only reduced observability. The USSR was very aware of the overflights taking place.
It seems no one else offered any other concrete uses that would justify the efforts that went public regarding the frame reuse.
That likely concentrated the discussions towards this single idea I presented. However, I'm not actually that committed to it. If you have any other, I would very much would like to hear about it.
This is a NASA/JPL project; there are a limited number of airworthy SR-71s, they are not modernized for combat, and they cannot scramble to intercept. The M-21 variant has a well-documented conversion to a mothership[0] that can ferry payloads externally to-altitude and at high speed. This is incredibly ideal for testing captive ramjet/scramjet technology, since they require Mach 3+ speeds to attain ram pressure through the engine.
Sending the SR-71 into denied or uncontrolled airspace seems like a terrible idea, in 2026. Chinese and Russian naval interceptor missiles could shoot down the plane at it's maximum speed and altitude; it's not going up against 1980s missiles anymore. The risk is absurd, and there's not enough SR-71s to treat them like they're expendable.
I don't have access to any privileged information, here. My best bet is that DARPA is lighting a fire under JPL's ass to explore variable-cycle engine technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_cycle_engine
The US has tested ramjets before, but mostly in the context of missiles and boost-glide vehicles. The "holy grail" of efficient propulsion would be to taxi/accelerate with a turbofan engine, bypass into a ramjet for Mach 3-to-6ish, and then transition to a liquid-fuel rocket motor for the last Mach 6-10 climb. An engine like that could escape the Earth's atmosphere without sacrificing efficiency at lower altitudes. I realize that "space fighter engine" is also a longshot, but China has ramped up investment in variable-cycle technology quite a bit in the past 2 years. Simply solving the turbofan-to-ramjet transition would be a huge boon for high and fast flight.
Issacman's quotes in that article suggest, to me, that he wants to reboot the SR-72 program (or something similar) with cleansheet propulsion as a feature. The SR-71 could be the engine testbed, and a future airframe could be designed around the requirements of the engine. Just my $0.02 though.
> Consider a video game sun passing behind a video game tree. The sun pixels touch the tree pixels directly, yet the tree does not burst into flames. This is because the sun pixels are independent of the tree pixels.
With apologies to Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an explanation.
lol yikes. Some of the other illustrations quoted seemed OK esp if you already have a layman's understanding of the major concepts... but this just seems.... bad.
Theft was historically very scale-sensitive. In England you'd face execution for "grand larceny" if the goods in question were worth more than twelve pence. This was on the books from the 13th century until 1832 (!).
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, execution for stealing 12 pence worth of stuff? That's crazy! Adjusting for inflation[1][2], that would be the same as nowadays being executed for stealing £5!
Printing is a good constraint against getting too long, both the physical and cost constraints. Though the Harry Potter series in full still managed to reach a million words.
For another comparison, the Bible is around three quarters of a million words, and tends to use special paper (20–40gsm/30–50 micron) so it works in one volume.
Handwriting is also a good idea for encouraging keeping lengths down; typing and dictation make verbosity too easy; and as for LLMs, words are clearly far too cheap there.
I don't think "volubility" means what you think it means. The usual meaning of "voluble" is "talkative" (gesprächig if your username is accurate). I'm not quite sure what you're going for here or in an earlier comment, but suspect it's something more like "ergonomic", i.e. the language being easy/natural to write and not getting in your way.
Of course, Starlink/Starshield is already unavailable for long-range strike due to geofencing, and the speed limit was clobbering interceptors right when they needed that speed to cope with the new jet-powered Gerans, so it's still a daft stance overall.
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