And how deceiving children is normalized in society, together with even worse forms of mistreatment. Because children are low status and can't fight back, adults and society in general can get away with doing all sorts of unjustified nasty things to them. That no adult would ever tolerate.
It really is a dominance hierarchy there, something we expect from animals. People are supposed to be better than that.
This UFO investigation stuff is just a giant bandwagon, which people get on to for money, influence and power.
I don't think there's any extra-terrestrial activity going on here on Earth, period. Maybe elsewhere in the Universe and probably not in our solar system either.
>I don't think there's any extra-terrestrial activity going on, period.
given that the universe is so large there's not a number that can accurately measure its true size or age, you mean to tell me you think that humans are the only intelligent lifeforms to exist currently, have existed, or will exist?
No one here is saying that. What so many are saying is that we're just not that interesting. Any highly advanced technological species that can build spaceships that can cross the vastness of space isn't going to take anything more than a passing interest, if even that, in a species that can't even get out of its own solar system.
To see so much conspiracy around here is sobering. This community loves to poke fun at things like religion while applying the same faulty logic to things like extraterrestrial UFOs.
I think that extraterrestrial UFO conspiracies are extra juicy because they also infer negative things about the US government.
> “What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”
I'm fairly confident about it because I've seen this pattern before, with moral panics, fairy tales, witch hunts and other group/herd behavior in people throughout history (and modern times as well).
Yes, I think it's sociological in origin and the UFOs don't exist. There are probably a core group of "true believers" that are absolutely convinced that aliens exist.
Of course, you get utterly depraved individuals who do absolutely atrocious things, e.g. cannibalism. You might get a dozen of them over the decades. And cults that can be nasty and do terrible things.
But the moral panic is where we see it everywhere, in the thousands, when it isn't. It's like a form of mass paranoia. And it's harmful not just because of the innocent people falsely accused, but that people were not letting their children out to play, out of fear of predators, which likely damages their development somewhat.
It's very disappointing, but all evidence indicates that we (a technological species) are alone, in this area, at this time. It even seems possible that we might be the first technological species in our Local Group.[0]
If someone could prove me wrong, I would be so excited!
No they're on the surface they're just invisible. Also they drive invisible cars. Oh and they are made out of a different kind of matter that just passes through normal matter.
But I believe that alien theory, alien simulation theory, etc.. are all our modern form of deism. Humans have a great need to find order from a higher power.
I will believe in god(s), aliens, or any other higher power when I am shown irrefutable proof. Until then, we are on our own folks!
I mean I thought this too but this is the one area, particularly under recent events, that I think it’s reasonable to start trying to come up with good non-prosaic explanations. You’ll probably find an increasingly surprising number of people talking and thinking about this in a serious way, because events seem to be pointing to something that isn’t just smoke and mirrors the entire way down. It’s smoke and mirrors to be sure in many ways. But it’s sufficiently uniquely weird that it is looking increasingly likely there is a significant non-prosaic thing going on here.
Hah, this is the second time in the last half a year where I've heard the "underground civilization" theory. The previous person mentioning it to me was totally serious too...
beats me. some people have emotional reactions to hypotheses around the UAP phenomenon. it's not that surprising given the implications of if it is due to non-human intelligence, but it's annoying that speculative theorizing about this is treated the way it is compared to other mysteries.
There are many regions/nations that are either hostile to the current international order or ungoverned. There is no chance of such a global conspiracy working for many decades to cover this up. Besides, just think what hostile countries would do to get access to alien technology or just prevent their enemies from it. That would be very, very noticeable.
Grusch doesn't know anything, he only repeats what he's been told, and what he's been told comes from the same group of Skinwalker Ranch/UFO grifters that have been blowing smoke up the backsides of Schumer and other credulous dupes for years. There is no reason to believe aliens are real in this scenario, or that whatever goes on in private briefings involves "real evidence" of such, as opposed to just passing on more nonsense that happens to be classified (like a lot of the already debunked UAP videos.)
Just because someone says something under oath, doesn't mean it's true. Just because someone says something in a SCIF, doesn't mean it's true. Just because a video seems to show a weird light or an orb or a triangle and the government says it hasn't been tampered with, doesn't mean the government is admitting that it shows proof of actual extraterrestrial craft.
The scenario presented in TFA is the simplest explanation that makes the most sense, even more so than it all being a distraction or intentional psyop to fool the Chinese or Russians. Maybe at the core of everything, there is some exotic foreign drone activity the Navy wants people to feel free to report, but the stigma of "UFOs" has gotten in the way. I can see some of this being part of a campaign by the military to make the phenomenon credible for the sake of national security, but not because actual aliens are involved.
David Grusch is supposedly in the process of writing an op-ed in which he reveals more about his actual knowledge. He was not allowed to talk publicly about his actual involvement.
As to "for the sake of national security", I am really not buying this angle. There are plenty of scarecrows to use for increased spending - Russia, China, Middle East, North Korea. The media has not covered this topic at all. You would expect more engagement if this was really a push for more money.
> intentional psyop to fool the Chinese or Russians
It might be partly that, but I don't think it's only that. Because Grusch says that Russians and Chinese themselves have the tech and are considering disclosure. Russia and China will know that's false, making it self-defeating.
I work with a lot of DoD analysts. The vast majority are ex-military, having spent time at the Pentagon doing basically the same job they do at our company now. And they are all, to the last one, some version of nutty.
Perhaps we should make exceptions for small scale growers? So royalties can only be extracted from those with large scale cultivation, and royalties should be taken from the profits made only.
In these investigations the authorities are seizing peoples digital devices, which is routine these days.
It's about time operating systems actively stop generating unnecessary forensic data. When we delete a file, it should be overwritten with zeros, not just unlinked. When we clear browser history, it should be gone for good.
And many temporary files and other intermediate data should be stored by default in RAM, so when we power off the device, it is gone. When a device is seized it should not be possible to tell what the owner was reading or searching for. If the user wants to keep weeks of browsing history, that should be an opt-in choice.
Our devices should be working for us, not snitches or informants for the state.
If they know frequency of drones (i.e. Lancet in this case) can they create something like a HARM drone, which will guide itself on source of the signal to intercept the drone itself?
Are they using any peculiar feature of the TinySA? From the photo it seems they're doing normal spectrum monitoring, but for that purpose a SDR dongle would work as well, For rexample the one by rtl-sdr.com.
Beside being much cheaper, it can be interfaced easily with also cheap *Pi-like single board computers and operated remotely to cover wide areas. But again I have no idea if the TinySA offers any advantage over a SDR receiver in that context.
The other reply to you is buried for some reason but as they said, a hand-held battery powered unit is more convenient than something that requires a computer.
Portability and effectiveness. Sure, for you a dongle is great. But not if you're in the trenches covered in mud and you have to dig it out of a pocket somewhere ..
A lot of the drones are off the shelf drones. This war is revolutionary from a tech POV, a lot of the solutions are cobbled together -> see "cope cages"
Definitely a real thing. Also, during WWII actress Hedy Lamarr developed a system for spread spectrum torpedo guidance to prevent jamming, but the general idea predates that.
Yes, it’s a thing. A long time ago, my work involved a frequency hopping, spread spectrum radio link. Can’t say much about it but I’m sure that the technology has improved since then.
Hopefully its not pedantic or unwelcome of me to make the distinction
between spread-spectrum and frequency hopping.
With frequency hopping only one frequency is used at once, and they're
selected according to a sequence that matches a shared PRNG. As I
understand it, that's what Bluetooth and some Wifi links do. They
switch between discrete bands very fast.
Spread spectrum is a little different. During modulation, as with FM a
series of side bands spread out. Normally we would limit these as
they're considered "interference". But with the right modulator you
can spread (and indeed encrypt at the RF link level) information into
some bands but not others. Although all sidebands are present, to an
observer who can't tell which ones carry the data at any moment, it
makes no sense to even try demodulating the signal.
Neither solutions are much use if you need to communicate back because
triangulation alone is enough to find you.
Curious if this tallys with your understanding, its over a decade
since I had anything to so with this sort of thing. The best summary I
recall was in Ross Anderson's "Security Engineering" book (first ed.)
>Hopefully its not pedantic or unwelcome of me to make the distinction between spread-spectrum and frequency hopping
Spread spectrum refers to any technique where a narrowband signal is deliberately spread to occupy a larger bandwidth.
Frequency-hopping is an example of a spread spectrum technique; they're not different things. Direct-sequence spread spectrum (which is what I think you're describing) is also a spread spectrum technique.
There are also other techniques; the most popular one is probably the chirp spread spectrum as used in LoRA.
No, it’s fine by me. I believe that it was thought that the combination of frequency hopping and spread spectrum would make it difficult to monitor and jam ( other than very wide band jamming).
My application was rapidly moving so triangulation would be difficult.
If I understand the capabilities of modern Software Defined Radio systems, then they can monitor many different frequencies at the same time which might defeat those old systems. It’s been a long time since I read up on the current ideas and capabilities.
There's the chilling effect, people not wanting to protest or organize against government overreach for fear of being put on a watch list. This allows the state to enact more draconian laws with less push back from the general public.
It's like a vicious circle that feeds itself, the more surveillance the government permits, the less the public are able to complain or fight back against it. Thus leading to even worse surveillance.
You are talking about the panopticon, where, in the perfect jail, anyone can be looked at but they themselves have no awareness of that fact. This changes behaviour. The implementation of technology we have is the panopticon across the whole of society. This is not accidental, it is part of the governance control system.
Generally, there is plenty of reasons to be worried:
- Firmware-wise (e.g., Intel Management Engine, Coreboot, Libreboot, system on a chip)
- Hardware-wise (i.e., Von Neumann architecture - Code + Data)
- Operating System-wise
(e.g., 0-click exploits, remote code execution to manipulate the CPU's instruction pointer,
stack overflow, Pegasus)
- Facility-wise (e.g., electromagnetic waves, cell towers, Faraday cloth)
- You (making mistakes)
What you can ultimately do is: rely on randomness (e.g., rolling casino-grade dice), Diceware, one-time pad, no computers of any kind.
Further, hope that time traveling backwards remains impossible.
Otherwise officers will travel back in time and can see what you wrote (e.g., unencrypted message) back then.
If you need some electronics go with analogue electronic devices.
Or, make your own computer systems from scratch with transistors etc.:
And Microsoft could have just kept the old menu system. With a single click to switch between the ribbon interface and the menu interface. It could have been as simple as that, saving countless users from so much frustration. Instead they decided to force the inferior interface on every single user, whether they like it or not.
The whole ribbon interface debacle looks like a classic case of enshittification, where the users are no longer the customers anymore.
What for me is really strange, in a way, is that the Mac versions of Office did keep the menu bar, and still do. Until I upgraded to Monterey late last year, I was still using Word 2011. It has the ability to completely hide the entire Ribbon. That suited me well.
But Office 2011 is 32-bit and no longer runs. Now, I only keep Word around. I've been forced to update to 2016, the oldest 64-bit version that'll run on macOS 11 (AIUI).
The menu bar is an inextricable part of the macOS UI so it would be hard to remove, but it demonstrates perfectly that Office for Windows could have kept both UIs, because the macOS version did.
My normal mode of operation in Word for Windows uo to 2003 is just to turn off all the toolbars, and the horizontal scrollbar, and the ruler. It runs well with nothing but a menu bar and every feature is usable.
It really is a dominance hierarchy there, something we expect from animals. People are supposed to be better than that.