IrateAnteater

I do industrial controls. The software we are forced to use is usually proprietary, sometimes old, and always very poorly written. Plus there's the networking issues. A huge amount of stuff is just statically addressed, so I might be switching the ethernet port on my laptop from an 89.89.x.y subnet, to a 10.10.i.j subnet, to a 192.168.a.b subnet, and back again multiple times a day. When IT first took admin rights off our laptops, it took away our ability to change IP addresses. There may have been some small amount of malicious compliance.

IT tried to get super strict with that at my company, but they relented when ticket volumes went up by a couple thousand percent.

Ah, but didn't you hear? Corporations are people, and since they're the biggest and loudest (money is speech after all) people, they get all the attention.

It's astonishing how much damage those two decisions have caused.

Oh I can think of many examples. That was just the latest one.

There was also the time that IT decided that industrial controls technicians didn't need the ability to manually set IP addresses, or the time where they managed to have %Documents% point to a network share, while they were simultaneously trying to sort out wifi coverage issues.

I'm guilty of using WSL to bypass what the IT department has done, but that's partly due to our IT department being borderline useless. To prove my point to them one time, I took a project and compiled it in Windows normally, in a fresh Windows VM, and in WSL. A 20 second compile in WSL took 2 minutes on the Windows host.

I was going to suggest that maybe a person managed to simply have absolutely zero online presence, but then I realized that having zero online presence probably gets you on a watchlist itself.

That's assuming that wherever you are going to or coming from has an internet connection. It's likely that there will be a connection, but it's still not a guarantee. And if there is a connection, the size of the files you're carrying may make using that connection impractical.

A real genie would have turned him into a crab.

If I want to launch a lot of drones that don't require runways, what would that ship look like?

I'm not saying that surface ships are suddenly better than aircraft, I'm saying that what constitutes air superiority has changed. A fighter jet is useless in defending against a drone swarm.

They didn't stop building battleships due to opponents just flying around them; they stopped building battleships because aircraft were far more effective weapons than any of the big guns on the ship. Hence, aircraft carriers took the place of battleships. With improved missiles and now drones, that aircraft advantage is no longer as clear cut as it was.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the US does have lasers that are ready for prime time. There's been plenty of examples in the past of them managing to keep higher tech stuff out of public knowledge until it's already been obsoleted.

If they are using the lasers as missile/drone defense, then they theoretically could withstand thousands of drones.