It's important to separate the short range quadcopters that are easily built in small workshops from the long distance winged drones that can weigh several hundred pounds (like the Shahed drones).
The latter, as they're built by Russia currently, require a decent size facility to build en mass.
It's not the kind of thing Hamas could build in their tunnel system, for example.
I agree with your second point that interceptors will become depleted though and this is a serious problem.
Ukraine is building long range drones as well. Look to the strike stats inside Russia, many well over 1000km.
The IRGC is significantly more resourced than Hamas, building enough to fire off 100s a week should be no issue for them. They can build ballistic missiles, they twice struck an oil refinery in Bahrain today: https://bsky.app/profile/elhamfakhro.bsky.social/post/3mgd5o...
I agree, it would be hard to stop Iran from producing a significant number of long range drones (hard to stop it from getting the parts it needs when it route them through the Stans or the Caspian sea).
Note that neither Ukraine or Russia have air supperiority. It would be much harder for IRGC to build and launch hundreds of drones with basically predators stalking the sky & strikes from manned jets availalbe on short order.
Until the ammo runs dry, those birds in the sky need something to fire, and contrary to what dear leader says, we don't have a forever supply and usage is significantly above production.
Presumably most NATO personnel will have a significant amount of data at higher restriction levels, arguably making these devices of little use to them.
It's a pain using a device that you can load some data, but not other.
> Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status?
Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".
It is not about whether or not it is available for free, at cost, or otherwise, but whether or not the activity has the character of commercial product development. It's what the product is used for, not what price it's set at. A 501(c)(3) directly developing, or funding the development, of commercial software is not engaged in charitable, educational, or other exempt activities.
For reference: This is exactly what happened to the Yorba Foundation, and numerous others since then.[1]
There's clearly a change going on in the US government, and it very well may be that organizations such as Mozilla, FreeBSD, and Apache could all lose their 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in years to come.
At the end of the day though, 501(c)(3) status is a purely US concept, doesn't apply to international organizations internationally, and doesn't necessarily mean that you "can't" do what anyone is discussing here. It just means that folks gonna have to pay taxes and "donations" can't be written off on the taxes of donors.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, not pursuing tax-exemption/charity status is a more honest approach. It certainly doesn't precluding doing any of what has been discussed, it just changes the financial efficiency.
Yes, of course the etching on silicon process has been refined to a level nobody thought possible. But this is more like a CNC process at a tiny level. What we don't have is additive manufacturing at nano scale. The nano assembler that Drexler and Feynman thought were possible is not panning out.
I'll have to look up that idea of the "nano assembler" that you're referring, but I'll just mention that there is significant additive manufacturing in a modern semiconductor GAAFET node, with the entire transistor being grown.
It's certainly not as powerful or universal as 3D printing and it might not even be "additive manufacturing" proper, but it is a lot more than just etching/subtractive manufacturing.
> The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though.
Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares.
I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.
> As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse.
Oh boy, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees.
When science was a hobby of the rich, there was no need to measure output. Only when "scientist" became a career and these scientists started demanding government funding (which only really crystallized in the 20th century), then we started needing a way to measure output.
You could try doing away with an objective measure of academic output and replace it with the "social fabric of researchers and institutes" (whatever the fuck that means) instead , but then all you'd have is a good ol' boys club funded by taxpayer money.
If the metric is publication and citation count and funding is awarded by panels of experts, how is that better than cutting out the flawed metric and continuing to award funding via panels of experts? Either it's a good ol' boys club or it isn't but I don't think a horribly flawed metric is going to change that.
That said, as far as I'm aware those metrics aren't explicitly considered by said panels (NIH for example). Any issue in that regard is presumably due to either unconscious bias or laziness on the part of said experts when exposed to such metrics.
> If the metric is publication and citation count and funding is awarded by panels of experts, how is that better than cutting out the flawed metric and continuing to award funding via panels of experts?
I agree it's not perfect but that's still several steps removed from "Billy is one of us, he should get that tenured position" and, as this article shows, it requires openly unethical behavior, which others can recognize and eventually prosecute (even if that isn't being done often enough).
It's almost like saying "well corruption happens anyways so why do we even criminalize it and have public hearings? Just skip those bits and openly auction votes instead".
> I interpreted "social fabric" to mean "panel of relevant professionals" which is what we currently have but perhaps you interpreted it differently?
That would be one way to implement his suggestion of getting rid of objective (if flawed) measures of a researcher's performance.
I agree that, inevitably, there will be a subjective human decision in there, but I argue that dropping all objective measures of performance and going just on vibes is kicking the door wide open for corruption, while it's merely cracked right now.
And the exploit mentioned in this article is a very public and explicit one, which is why other researchers were so aware of it and it eventually caught up to him. If it all gets moved behind closed doors instead, it will be even harder to detect and prosecute this sort of behavior.
> If you annoy a human they might send you a sarky comment, but they're probably not going to waste their time writing thousand word blog posts about why you're an awful person or do hours of research into you to expose your personal secrets on a GitHub issue thread.
The latter, as they're built by Russia currently, require a decent size facility to build en mass. It's not the kind of thing Hamas could build in their tunnel system, for example.
I agree with your second point that interceptors will become depleted though and this is a serious problem.
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