sleepingeights

Well, they needed both drones to locate the source of any sounds detected in the water. With only one drone, their tests can determine what sounds were made (and maybe some general vicinity), but not as accurately from where.

The Chinese already surprised a US carrier fleet by deploying a submarine fleet that "ambushed" a carrier when one of their subs surfaced in kill range to the carrier, undetected.

The US has never entered into a conventional war with another power close to their own. It is a 100% uncertainty if the US would win, even with the US' more expensive wartoys that are still unproven.

Just a cursory glance at US' military history the past century reveals the US has only engaged against powers that were greatly diminished (European Theater, Russia, JP), or in and against countries in regions that were relatively far less equipped and primitive in weaponry (Asia, Africa, Middle East, etc).

It's cheaper for them to buy "startups" while they're smaller and in a fledgling state. Once in a while you hear of the startup founders making off with millions, but that's like a 3% lottery.

In reality, doing the math, startups are major bargains since the teams are working for near zero and their work and health, etc... may not even come into play when a VC or another company purchases. Had the companies or VCs used their own professional teams, they would have had to have paid more to account for working conditions, health-care, salaries, equipment, insurances, etc...

edit: In a tldr; sense, the VCs and major companies can reap the benefits of the "startup" while having to pay nothing to little in the initial cost. This is why ZUckerberg and the rest of the SV hustlers tout "youth" over "experience" because the youth are far more likely to fall into their traps and scheming.

Rule of Thumb: Don't pass around those kind of projects, planning, ideas, etc on Google+, GMail, Facebook, Bing, hotmail, Yahoo, #Slack etc... unless you intentionally want/expect someone else to run with the idea, because if it is any good they will run with it.

Use E2E encryption to coordinate, communicate, etc but don't expect those services, software, and the hardware they run on to protect you or your company and ideas in any real meaningful manner.

"You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? They take them out and shoot them." - Primer (2004)

One of the biggest killers of sedentary professions is heart disease, which is the number one killer in the US. People who work at Microsoft have told me they give free soda, sugared "juices" with artificial flavors, coffees and teas for free to their employees. These all are sources of heart disease, but the young engineers drink it up like a lost caravan in the desert. It's likely not that different in any of the other areas as well.

The cost for ailments such as heart disease is known to be one of the most expensive in the US. It requires extensive testing, support, medications and visits to the doctors and hospitals. Considering the extremely high health care costs the US enforces, this places a huge dent on insurance premiums companies pay as well as accommodation, etc.

These companies want them out before they have to pay more premiums on health-care and other factors related to health, age, seniority, etc...

Passive RFID is powered by the incoming radio waves that is 1000x stronger than the signal transmission energy from the RFID tag.

There is no statement to the power requirement for passive WIFI from an active WIFI power source. The active WIFI transmitter may require outputting radio waves many times more powerful in order to receive a signal transmission from the passive wifi device.

edit: For that reason, I'm not that excited about this, and this is likely why it wasn't pursued earlier due to the power requirements of active <-> passive signalling. If it pollutes the EM spectrum with powerful radio waves that are magnitudes more powerful than what we're outputting today, then I hope it gets abandoned. If it's the same power consideration, then it's worth pursuing imo.

A real-time OS/app wouldn't benefit even with a 5 cycle Crit-section. Most, if not all, "true" real-time OSes require "real-time" data coming in from IRQs. Sure, there can be some complex synchronization if an IRQ line requires a certain number of cycles to read/write data where some queue logic can happen.

Email is becoming obsolete, and today's generations are using messaging apps which also provide PFS (fwd secrecy). PGP et. al. don't provide any of that.

Today's messaging services (Signal, Wire, Telegram, etc...) outpace email by a significant margin.

With as many SHA1/SHA256 etc ASICs, hopefully they change some of the hashing parameters to make this secure. The downside is the server has to match the hashing iterations.

Considering how emails can stay in service storage for decades , (even longer if archived by spies, etc), their security is now reaching the requirements of data on Hard Drives.