There are definitely solutions but they all involve giving a Russian agent direct knowledge of troop movements.
Starlink terminals are activated using a unique identifier. It’s how billing works.
SpaceX knows which terminals have been provided to Ukraine. We know they can geofence service. Geofencing the Ukrainian theater to terminals that were provided to Ukraine shouldn’t be a massive technical leap and doesn’t provide any information they don’t already have.
As long as you don’t need particularly tight tolerances or fine details, it works perfectly fine. The setup really isn’t anymore complicated than I described. I have done it just because I wanted to see how difficult the process is. It’s around $100 in startup costs assuming you have access to a printer. After that it’s mostly just waiting and occasionally measuring cut progress.
Check out the Rack Robotics Powercore as well. It’s a low cost wire EDM system that uses cheap 3D printers as a motion platform. It uses a very similar principle to cut metal using wire as the cutting tool. May or may not be more suitable depending on your exact use case. Still pretty rough around the edges though; SendCutSend makes more sense for most people that need things cut from flat stock for the most part.
The majority of components in these things typically are printed. It’s just the pressure bearing components like the barrel where ECM is being used.
The FGC-9 discussed in the article is notable because it was explicitly designed to be manufactured using components that are not regulated as firearms parts under European law. So there are non-printed parts in it, but everything is dual-purpose and can be acquired through unregulated channels, e.g., the hydraulic pipe that gets used as a barrel.
The reality is this is one of a handful of emerging technologies that are going to reshape a lot of things about the world in the future in ways I don’t think society, as a whole, is cogniscent of, let alone prepared for.
This is one of them. The battlefield use of small drones is another.
I tend to say that the world we’re living in now is one where gun control is increasingly obsolete. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s not a statement on whether that’s a good or bad thing. It’s just what I think we’re going to increasingly find to be the new reality: the rise of small scale, low cost, divertible manufacturing technologies is going to make traditional supply-side approaches to regulation untenable. That genie is out.
(Drones are in a similar, if distinct space: low cost, commodity, and divertible from low/no regulation supply chains in a way that makes it nearly impossible to cut off supply without shutting down other legitimate economic activity).
I don’t know what the right answer is. I do think it’s going to take a pretty fundamental rethink of how we approach these problems. I don’t think the full ramifications of these types of technology have really reached the wider zeitgeist, and, frankly, I kind of worry about how people will react. There are a lot of pretty scary paths this could take, both in terms of how the technology gets used and in terms of what attempts to curb them could look like if they’re not carefully thought through.
Machine is borderline overselling it.
The ECM process works by pumping water containing an electrolyte through a metal part. When a current is applied to the water, exposed metal gets slowly etched away.
What these groups are doing is starting with high pressure hydraulic pipe and inserting 3D printed jigs that are basically a negative mask to bore out the pipe to their desired diameter, cut the chamber, machine in rifling, etc, with the end product being a functional barrel. As far as I’m aware, so far this has been limited to pistol caliber cartridges; rifle calibers are a step up in pressure and come with a whole host of different engineering challenges.
The “machine” is really nothing more than a bucket, an aquarium/pond pump, and a desktop power supply. It’s honestly a really clever approach to the problem from an engineering standpoint.
The ECM process isn’t suitable for manufacturing ammunition.
In general, you’d still be generally reliant on the traditional manufacturing supply chain there. There is development happening in that space, but nothing anywhere near as complete as the FGC-9.
Jake Hanhrahan of Popular Front has done really extensive reporting on the general topic of 3D printed firearms. He’s interviewed both people in the design community and people involved in the fighting and manufacture in Myanmar.
You tell them you don’t work for $500.
Or you tell them that you do.
Per hour.
But since they’re clearly such great mates with dad, you can cut them a deal.
Crowdstrike is very entrenched in healthcare. Hospitals were routinely at capacity in 2020.
The outage this weekend probably killed some people due to disruptions in delivering care. It definitely would have then.
This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.
It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.
Would think it depends on the terms.
If seized Russian assets are used as collateral, then I’d think a potential default by Ukraine would just result in the Russian funds being claimed.
Free Stars is being made by the original creators of the series, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. They had nothing to do with SC3 or Origins.
The reason why it’s not using the Star Control name is because the IP ownership around the whole thing is messy. The short version is that Paul and Fred owned the rights to the universe, but Atari owned the rights to the Star Control name.
When Atari went bankrupt, Stardock bought the name. They thought they’d bough the universe. This resulted in Stardock spending the next couple of years trying trying to use the courts to bully Paul and Fred into turning over the rights to them and generally being dickheads.
This finally ended in a settlement and work on Free Stars has been happening quietly for the last couple of years.
It’s a shame that the game systems are so polarizing because it legitimately has some of the best written characters I’ve seen in any game ever.
From the article:
Carmakers like Tesla which rely heavily on new tech will have to decide if NCAP’s five-star rating is worth reversing its interior design. Tesla’s latest Model 3 has force-touch buttons to activate the turn signal instead of the usual toggle — the kind of change the safety body is hoping to end.
Call them whatever you want, they’re literally one of the things NCAP is identifying as a problem and considering in their safety ratings.
Putting it on the wheel purely to be different is a bad design no matter what you call it. You’ve turned a critical control into a tiny moving target. People having trouble locating them and have to take their eyes off the road is a common complaint about these things.
And, FWIW, I absolutely consider a capacitive sensor distinct from a physical button. An arbitrary flat spot on the steering wheel is substantially more difficult to locate and identify by feel. Especially when your hands are moving around the wheel while doing highly uncommon things like, I don’t know, steering.
Newer Teslas don’t have a turn signal stalk. They’ve put the turn signals on capacitive touch elements on the steering wheel because of course they have.
You can also just spend $10 on a domain name with a registrar that offers dynamic DNS. Offhand, both Namecheap and Cloudflare do. I have no idea what my public IP address is because my router just updates it automatically for me. Plenty of DDNS desktop clients around if your router can’t for whatever reason.
One thing this overlooks is that the rigid mounted bed of the V2 causes thermal expansion issues. There’s a lot of really bad lore that gets repeated in the community re: bed heater power because the V2 tends to want to taco the bed if it’s heated too quickly.
The WhoppingOrchard kinematic mounts are a solid option for addressing the issue.
The Trident is the overall better design with a higher performance ceiling.
Flying gantries are a solution forever in search of a problem. They can work okay and they’re fine at the speeds that were common when the V2 was first designed, but there’s a reason why the community has converged on fixed gantry designs. They’re neat to watch operate but they don’t offer any practical advantage. The V2 tends to be relatively slow by modern standards, especially in terms of accel.
The Trident isn’t without flaws but it’s a perfectly fine starting point and the huge community does mean that most of the bigger design issues either already have a usermod or somebody working on cooking something up.
It’s more in Ukraine’s interest to limit the use of Starlink to only those terminals that have been vetted through official channels than to allow blanket use and try to filter out things through other means due to… the exact kinds of situations this article is talking about.
Sure. And part of the reason we know Starlink is entirely capable of geofencing is because Elon’s done it explicitly to stop Ukraine from being able to operate near Crimea. That whole kerfuffle lead to military usage being pushed over to Starshield and a contract with the US government that gives them explicit say on when and where Starlink works in Ukraine.
Elon is dumber than a bag of hammers but it’d be next level stupid even for him to willingly break a DOD contract, especially when people were already floating the idea of invoking the Defense Production Act last time around.