Hong Kong: Police Raid Tiananmen Square Museum

Only if the warship is at flanking speed directly away from the battle, commonly referred to as "running away". In which case, you've won.

> People whinge about being censored but don't care enough to run a website?

People talking about "whinging" usually do so because they can't come up with a logical counter-argument. That pattern holds true here.

> Nobody is owed being on a private platform, and it's total bullshit to say that we should force companies to.

If a private platform holds a near-monopoly on speech online, and actively uses anti-competitive behavior to hold people on their platform (as Facebook does, at least) - yes, individuals are owed the right to be present on that platform, because (as stated repeatedly before) it's a monopoly. Facebook is one of the largest sites in the world and enjoys the network effects of being the largest social media site in the world, as well as the lens through which millions of people perceive the world around them, and does its best to keep people there through a variety of anti-competitive strategies - if, at that scale, they decide that they want to ban people for non-illegal content, then the only sane thing to do is to break them up so that they no longer have a monopoly position, which is clearly not happening.

> It's not a "de facto public square"

It is. It has the properties of a public square, namely public visibility, generally available access to the population, a design that allows for and encourages conversation between individuals, and a design meant to emulate a public forum for discussion. Even though it's not legally a public square, it's a de-facto one because it has all of the properties of one and is treated as one - that's what "de-facto" means.

> it's an advertising platform, first and foremost.

Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Ultra-scale social media platforms have the properties of both advertising platforms and public fora. You don't like the classification of the latter? Well, it's going to remain one until it's broken up or changes its behavior or suddenly loses users.

> So @Jack said it was a public square - in the context of the ideal. Did he make that statement to a court? Because I'll bet being deposed, he'd say that was flowery talk.

You're intentionally being obtuse. Of course the CEO of Twitter wouldn't stand behind his claim in court - but only because that'd be disadvantageous to him (in any court case likely to come up in the next several years), not because he didn't mean it. Nothing you said has any bearing on the fact that he said that it was a public square and meant it. You can't explain this away - it literally came from the CEO, the strategic lead for the company. If he says that Twitter is like a public square, that means that he's directing the company to that effect.

I think that depends on the mission.

1) China doesn't need to destroy US ships; it merely needs to keep them distracted long enough to take control of Taiwan. If China moves quickly, the Taiwanese leadership are deported to Beijing, and there are boots on the ground, it's a done deal. Once that's done, it will be like Crimea. There's no way the US is getting drawn into a land war in Asia.

2) Ten minutes, at a dozen shots a minute, means a gun firing at 10 RPS can take out 6,000 drones. That's 0.6% of a flock.

3) You can't run circles around a flock of millions of drones, no matter how fast you go. A flock can cover a lot of space. The best you can do is run away, which would take US forces out-of-commission.

4) The Taiwan Straight is simply not that large. It's not hard for China to be aware of everything that happens there, even with a fleet of small, cheap AUVs. Heck, they could drop a few hundred thousand of these as well, if they wanted to.

5) It's equally not hard for China to communicate with a flock of drones. A directional spread spectrum link isn't easy to jam. At that range, even an optical link is practical, and not something where we have countermeasures.

6) A million drones can effectively blanket the whole Taiwan straight.

7) In terms of stealth, I'm not sure how technology will progress, but I'm pretty sure that building drones indistinguishable from birds on radar just wouldn't be that hard. I'm also pretty sure a flock of drones could be made to emulate other forms of craft, on radar.

8) I'm also pretty sure China wouldn't telegraph what they're doing. It's not like we can prepare countermeasures. I gave one example of a disruptive technology; there are dozens of others. To be honest, I have no idea how AEGIS would deal with a million targets, nor what having that many targets would do to its ability to track things like Chinese landing craft, unless the US were explicitly prepared for this particular threat.

Also, the C-RAM price-per-round is about $30. With a $1000 drone, things are cost-neutral if about 3% of rounds hit. At 10 kilometers, it would take rounds a little under 10 seconds to arrive. Even modestly chaotic trajectories would dodge most rounds.

Frankly: the discussion point of "suicide drones" is pretty ignorant.

25mph drones will not hold back a warship. They can't effectively close range at 10km out, let alone at 5km, 1km, or shorter. As I stated earlier: warships are literally faster than that.

The "meta" under discussion, by serious people (including Chinese investments / Chinese saber rattling) is the missile. 500mph cruise missiles, 1000mph supersonic missiles, and 3000mph hypersonic missiles.

If you're going to "suicide drone", you do it at 3000mph to impress people. You don't do it at 25mph. Even at 500mph and 1000mph, the methodology is so clearly ineffective that China has spent billions making 3000mph missiles instead.

The minute you start thinking about how these drones are going to take off, refuel, get their payloads (etc. etc.), is the minute you realize how impractical the whole proposal is. What kind of launch platform will these drones take off in? What's the effective range of a drone?

US Destroyers have tomahawk cruise missiles that can reliably hit targets 2000km away, and these missiles fly at 500mph+. How long does it take for your 25mph drone to cover the 2000km range that these Destroyers are at defending Taiwan?

By the time your drones get there, the Destroyers have already launched all their missiles and have gone home.

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How do you even find the warships in the first place? You keep saying "hundreds of drones", but drones flying at 10km high can only see 300km out.

Secondly: if you fly "like a bird" at say 1000meters, you can only see 100km out before the horizon blocks you. It'd be impossible to track down the warships firing from 2000km away.

At these ranges, the E2 Hawkeye of the Carrier will see your drones, and an appropriate response will be dispatched. Most likely, the warships will just avoid the drones. Hiding behind the horizon.

What kind of drone are you using to even try to tavel 2000km over water? I'm pretty sure that your typical $1000 drone simply don't have the range or speed to even get to the warships.

You're describing any hegemonic power structure. But my point was not that Democratic/Republican parties are worse than the CCP (on domestic power at least - they are worse than the CCP on foreign policy, but I digress...). My point was that it is easier for Americans to make change in their own country. So why not start there? That's something Americans (and people from US-aligned countries, to some extent) can actually do something about. The CCP is much harder problem that requires international solidarity to overcome. We need to set a positive example for dissidents in China, beating the war drums will not help them.