You're right. Maybe not so much for us, but it certainly did much more to educate our adversaries not to fuck with us.

The watermark is in the pseudorandom number generator that makes the words, genius. You can copy it in purple crayon and it will still show up if the text is long enough.

Unless they get some serious competition they can just up the price of their launches and close that revenue hole at their own leisure.

Alternatively they can shut down their production line tomorrow and reconstitute it next year. Because they own almlst all of it.

I wouldn't pit too much stock in prognosticating either way.

Government subsidized red pills...government government subsidized blue pills...government-mandated vascectomies...same thing.

And I have it on good authority that you can legally print all kinds of conspiracy theories in a newspaper's opinion section if in fine print you explicitly state that you're just expressing an opinion.

So a russian satellite sees the sun glinting off high altitude clouds over the US near a known missile silo and signals a missile launch alert. The duty officer says bullshit...no one starts ww3 with a single missile...must be a false alarm...and declines to push the big red button and start ww3 himself.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The unilateral disarmers spin this story as a reason to unilaterally disarm. The guys who totally don't have all their eggs in the defense stocks basket spin this as a reason to build more and better launch warning satellites.

I spin this the way Heinlein spun it in Starship Troopers: if you build and deploy a widget on the battlefield, you damn well better train your people how to use it properly or all you've done is fielded a magic rock.

Could certainly do with a bit more of a paddlin' around here. Just sayin

Had to look that up. Apparently the journos have been using that term for over a decade amongst themselves.

Not surprising that the chatbots are giving these guys a run for their money. Not the best look when the nominal humans in the room do things like make up their own twinspeak I have to look up. Instead of, ya know, communicating to the public in clear language for the purpose of informing them.

Impenetrable in-group vocabulary as a form of meat-space model collapse?

Subtract out the drunks and the octogenarians who can't see over the steering wheel and compare again.

We know how to take away these people's car keys. For whatever reasons we just choose not to. Taking away *everyone's* keys would certainly solve the problem, but so would using a grenade to kill a single fly in your kitchen...

People can and do get *scary* good at using it to do all sorts of things. But it's still a limited tool compared to a general purpose digital computer.

Mechanical engineers build weapons; civil engineers build targets.

Take it from someone in the business. Aerospace ain't exactly a magnet for peaceniks.

Yes. "Cock-up" has had both of its meanings entrenched for a long time for a good reason.

Back to "officer joe claims you were acting suspicious and that's good enough for the judge," then?

Same. -ish. Pair of NJ national guard F16s flying a training mission off the coast of Atlantic City back in the summer of 2000 or 2001. One went crash into the ocean. Pilot ejected and the other one circled until the coast guard found him and picked him up. Watched the whole thing off the beach while on vacation.

I don't know this guy. I haven't even googled him or looked at his linkedin. All I see is his incentive structure and see him acting exactly the way I'd expect someone to act if their expectations of their career progress weren't meeting harsh reality, and there was a quick buck to be made talking trash about The System.

More food for thought: Oppenheimer was scared shitless of the bomb and Einstein opined on World War 4 being fought with sticks and stones. The future isn't written, but neither ww3 nor ww4 have come to pass as predicted.