You are mixing a lot of things here. For one, taking a picture of a crime happening as capturing evidence overrules the right to one’s own image, as does the freedom of the press when capturing images of events of public interest.

However what is not okay, and I find that pretty reasonable, is taking a picture of someone else unaware of having their picture taken. I don’t want somebody taking a picture of me going about my life, no matter if I look goofy or wear an extremely cool outfit. You don’t get to take a picture of me, and I won’t take one of you either.

That does absolutely not imply that you couldn’t capture scenes of importance for whatever reason, and that happens literally all the time.

Germany sits on the 14th position of the press freedom index - the narrative you’re trying to construct about some kind of repression on documenting events in the public sphere is just not true.

>However what is not okay, and I find that pretty reasonable, is taking a picture of someone else unaware of having their picture taken.

That is covered by the law. Background subject? Okay. Foreground subject, picture taken covertly? Not okay. This is well understood.

>.. the narrative you’re trying to construct about some kind of repression on documenting events in the public sphere is just not true.

It’s only a matter of a generation or two, feeling entitled to privacy in a public space, until it is widespread ‘common knowledge’ that nobody can take pictures of anybody. That’s how these things work.

During a regular trip I observed some thugs harassing a woman and her dog in a public park in Berlin. I took their picture, they came to threaten me with violence and insist I delete it - I stalled long enough for the lady to make the call and I waited until the cops arrived.

The cops were grateful that there was a very definite picture of one of the thugs kicking her dog. They made the decision on the spot that I was not to be fined, and the lady thanked me. I sent her and the cops the picture, and I deleted it from my roll.

14th? Room for improvement, then.

It’s a breath of fresh air IMHO to be at places far away from any desire for posterity. Just remember yourself what you’ve seen instead of outsourcing that job to your phone for a while.

Careful what you wish for. The ticket to entry will (have to) be a proof of identity, the ultimate nail in the coffin of privacy and anonymity on the web.Outside of that, chaos.

No, just too corrupt for the EU.

More corrupt than Greece?

You jest, but if you've ever seen a wounded animal fighting like mad for survival, I wouldn't be so confident that won't be the exact same things that's going to happen.

You don't have to look into the animal kingdom, history works too. No ruling empire has fallen silently and without conflict. Changing the world order always included an aggressive transfer of power

The British Empire dismantling wasn't exactly peaceful, but it could have been much worse. Next to India, everything else becomes a rounding error.

It was mostly peaceful in itself. There was a lot of conflict that followed in the wake of it as borders and power structures were settled. Just in South Asia we had the partition of India, the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Sri Lankan civil war, and various smaller separatist conflicts.

Not to mention the whole Middle East mess is due to the British on how they drew the borders when they left

In the case of my country, USA, we are the ones wounding ourselves. We made the conscious choice to elect a government that prefers isolationism to economic competition, and which rejected near-peer military preparedness in favor of more deadlock wars with third world middle east countries. It’s not like we were somehow victimized by the EU.

The USA is repeatedly punching itself in the face over and over though, so it's not a fair fight.

Because the US is going to throw Poland under the bus without even considering once if it yields a short-term benefit.

Under the bus again, I might add

That's rich considering it was France and the UK that threw Poland under the bus despite having a signed defense pact. The US just came in to clean up the mess.

I am under impression that some other nation was involved in cleaning up. If you can even call it cleaning up.

I don't think they're talking about WWII.

If Stewie punched me, It doesn't mean Quagmire didnt.

WW2 ended with Yalta conference where Roosevelt agreed to Stalin's proposition of giving Poland to USSR's sphere of influence, making Poland (and rest of EE) their puppet state.

Churchil wanted to pressure Stalin to leave Poland (and at least parts of EE) independent and even considered "Operation Unthinkable".

At least that's what I think the guy above referenced.

That's pretty much what happened. Trouble was the stakes were already high, if Starlin didn't yield to a bluff (had one been pursued) it would have been an embarrassing backdown and a show of weakness on part of the allies.

"Bluff" because no one other than perhaps Stalin would have followed through—to essentially extend WWII (this time between former allies).

So pragmatism was the order of the day, thus Poland and EE were sacrificed.

Am I just too ignorant of Miltech, or is this that in large parts recreating Standard messaging primitives that other protocols and systems have been providing for decades already (so invented elsewhere?)

DDS sort of took over from CORBA in the military domain, and the statically-typed IDL was still quite similar to CORBA last time I looked at it, so that takes you back to around 1998 when CORBA was being used a lot in the military in my experience.

What other protocols and systems were you thinking of that can provide (depending on broker) hard-realtime delivery that can be used in safety-critical systems?

Stupid question, but why didn’t the DOD mandate IP compatibility for literally all comms like 20+ years ago? Is it pure corruption/incompetence or is there a good reason?

A lot of military comms are point-to-point or broadcast between radios where TCP/IP doesn’t really make sense. On top of that, you need to understand how much legacy military networking stuff is out there. This stuff long predates the internet. We had tactical data links and target tracking where a ground station could receive a target info from a remote radar array, and automatically direct fighters on autopilot on an intercept course with enemy contacts in like 1960 (see SAGE as an example). These systems have been around for decades and been continually improved on. There’s a lot of inertia to maintain compatibility. Because you really don’t want someone to die because your ally tried to warn you but their tactical data link isn’t compatible with yours.

I never said anything about mandating TCP too.

TCP/IP refers to the whole protocol stack, including UDP. That is a bit counterintuitive, but well established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

The DOD effectively can't "just mandate" things and it's because of politics (which is a superset of corruption and incompetence).

There's a very small number of major contractors and if you pick one of their APIs as the new standard, then you disadvantage all the others.

If you pick a greenfield project, then it will take a long time, and once you are done everybody will claim that they can't use it (see e.g. Ada; quick version they started working on a mandate for a programming language in 1975, mandated Ada in 1991 and by 1996 removed the Ada mandate).

actual or perceived realtime / determinism requirements

Every mil company designs unique bespoke things often with some exceptions, and even the "open systems" mostly aren't open by any stretch of the definition.

Obscurity is part of the allure, not a repulsive factor.

You don't want a hostile nation suddenly and easily understanding your systems.

On the other hand, its good to design systems where it wouldn't even matter if the hostile nation state knows exactly how it works.

This is a principle in cryptography, but carries nicely to other things.

I feel like this is always the best design whenever possible.

Asterix is an actual standard for radar data, coming from civilian radar systems. I wish it was updated somehow for 3d beam-steered (and moving) sensors, but still it covers most of the industry's needs... I keep hearing so many grumblings of replacing it (it is binary, unforgiving, quirky, very 80s...) and of course fragmentation is back in.

I have to assume that so many people require access to the specs that an interested party can surely acquire them.

World of Tanks has repeatedly had military personnel updating the technical specifications with details they have found in the secret manuals.

Are you not thinking about the wrong tank game? World of tanks has ancient tanks, not modern (game tank span basically end with the main battle tank making the game tank role division being made irrelevant).

Err yes. War Thunder.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605345

> I have to assume that so many people require access to the specs that an interested party can surely acquire them.

Those documents are often secret or top secret, or even more compartmentalized.

There are training docs in wide use today that are not publicly findable on the internet, nor are they seemingly in the datasets of LLMs.

I'm sure there are reasons for that, of course.

What you're talking about would have an even higher level of obscurity and secrecy, and probably Compartmented Information access.

Hat sounds like a particularly weak form of security by obscurity

Layers of an onion and all that.

Often connectors are even proprietary.

(This is partially to protect systems not from the enemy, but from the troops themselves...)

Also you do not want them to benefit from your smart design choices. You want them to suffer from their bad choices and not learn from your success. (Yes, of course you could have bad design choices that you don’t realize someone else has solved more intelligently.)

Bad design choice is probably why they open sourced it.

And who is to say that trigger hasn’t long been pulled? How do we know the agents haven’t found a way yet to modify their own code base similar to how Stuxnet manipulated the Iranian centrifuges and their control systems, stealthily recording data across generations?

If the trigger has already been pulled, then we're off the hook. That genie ain't going back in the bottle! Pop the champagne and order 3 more data centers, pronto.

No one. But we can take a wild guess that experiments are being done in this direction. And that requires intent and system design that enables the behavior to even happen (i.e., a finger on the trigger).

This is exciting! And even if the result isn’t suitable as the only building material, there’s surely composite applications or buildings without a need to hold atmospheric pressure.

I agree. (Of course Mars is just an example.) Inexpensive structures will be useful in lots of applications. I wonder if there might be ways to do something similar in micro-g, such as nearby or built onto a small asteroid?