Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 17, 2020
GOOD GRIEF: US Navy investigates potential LCS class-wide design flaw. “Repeated failures in the propulsion train on the Freedom-class littoral combat ships Little Rock and Detroit have raised the specter of a class-wide design flaw that could trigger an expensive reworking of a crucial component on 17 of the Navy’s small surface combatants.”
December 16, 2020
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Colorado’s public school enrollment has dropped by 30,000 students. That could spell financial disaster for districts. “Public schools reported a decrease in the number of students for the first time in 30 years, many of them in early grades.”
MOVING AT THE SPEED OF GOVERNMENT: The Orion spacecraft is now 15 years old and has flown into space just once.
Congress has pumped $23.7 billion into Orion for that single flight.
On the other hand:
SpaceX is generally considered one of the most efficient space companies. Founded in 2002, the company has received funding from NASA, the Department of Defense, and private investors. Over its history, we can reliably estimate that SpaceX has expended a total of $16 billion to $20 billion on all of its spaceflight endeavors. Consider what that money has bought:
• Development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy rockets
• Development of Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, and Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft
• Development of Merlin, Kestrel, and Raptor rocket engines
• Build-out of launch sites at Vandenberg (twice), Kwajalein Atoll, Cape Canaveral, and Kennedy Space Center
• 105 successful launches to orbit
• 20 missions to supply International Space Station, two crewed flights
• Development of vertical take off, vertical landing, rapid reuse for first stages
• Starship and Super Heavy rocket development program
• Starlink Internet program (with 955 satellites on orbit, SpaceX is largest satellite operator in the world)To sum up, SpaceX delivered all of that for billions of dollars less than what NASA has spent on the Orion program since its inception.
Impressive.
ANOTHER OBAMA-ERA RERUN: Remember Boko Haram? “Well, they just kidnapped 300 boys.”
THE DISASTER IS ALREADY IN MOTION: ‘We need a disaster plan’ for failing students. “Ruby Rodriguez, 14, is a ninth-grader at a Catholic school in Milwaukee. All classes are remote. ‘She doesn’t know what her classmates look like, because nobody ever turns on their cameras,’ and there’s no student conversation in class, writes Richards. She claims not to know her English teacher’s name. Ruby’s ‘grades have dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s’.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Listen to Tom Cruise’s Obsessed Social Distancing Rant.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: When is the first openly-gay cabinet secretary not the first openly-gay cabinet secretary?
Answer: When he’s Republican Richard Grennell and needs to be shoved aside so Pete Buttigieg can enjoy the media spotlight.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- It’s Cuomo vs Be Blasio for who’s the biggest dictator
- Fox News outdoes CNN on Wuhan Flu scaremongering – you can catch it from the Happy Birthday song
- Biden campaign deputy chief wonders why you Republican “bunch of f-kers” aren’t showing any unity
Bonus: Ayn Rand was right about the Left again.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Hunter Biden Appears To Have Known About Investigation Into Business Dealings Long Before He Claimed.
“One of the FBI documents from the laptop published by the Post ‘included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document — one with a grand jury subpoena number — appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.’ Hunter Biden claims he only learned of the investigation this past week, but these documents suggest otherwise,” Hemingway wrote.
As The Daily Beast reported late last week, much of what is now being reported about Hunter’s scandals began with the New York Post’s report that was suppressed by social media companies ahead of the 2020 election.
Yes, but the election is over now, and there’s a much more reliable hardcore progressive — Kamala Harris — waiting in the wings.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Americans Revolt Against Life in COVID-19 East Berlin. “As I write this, my hometown is under curfew from 10 PM to 5 AM. There is no logic or science to back this up as being in any way effective to combat the ‘rona, but many ‘Listen to scientists’ Democrats are fond of the curfews.”
SURE, THEY COULD, BUT WOULD THEY GIVE UP ALL THAT REVENUE HE GENERATES? Could Twitter Ban Trump Once He’s a Private Citizen?
KISS KISS FANG FANG: House Republicans Call For Eric Swalwell’s Removal From Intelligence Committee Over Relations With Chinese Spy.
“HPSCI handles some of the most sensitive information our government possesses, information critical to our national defense. As such, we urge you to immediately remove Rep. Swalwell from his position on the House Intelligence Committee,” it continues.
Citing Pelosi’s willingness to call for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation and a broader commission to “investigate his ties to Russia” following a series of meetings between him and a Russian ambassador, the letter calls out Democrats’ hypocrisy in pursuing issues related to national security.
“By your own standards, Congressman Swalwell is unfit to serve on the Intelligence Committee,” the letter states.
Democrats enjoy a different set of standards, if you could call them standards.
THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP: Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine Is About to Change the Game for Americans.
CYBERSECURITY: Academics turn RAM into Wi-Fi cards to steal data from air-gapped systems.
At the core of the AIR-FI technique is the fact that any electronic component generates electromagnetic waves as electric current passes through.
Since Wi-Fi signals are radio waves and radio is basically electromagnetic waves, Guri argues that malicious code planted on an air-gapped system by attackers could manipulate the electrical current inside the RAM card in order to generate electromagnetic waves with the frequency consistent with the normal Wi-Fi signal spectrum (2,400 GHz).
In his research paper, titled “AIR-FI: Generating Covert WiFi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers,” Guri shows that perfectly timed read-write operations to a computer’s RAM card can make the card’s memory bus emit electromagnetic waves consistent with a weak Wi-Fi signal.
This signal can then be picked up by anything with a Wi-Fi antenna in the proximity of an air-gapped system, such as smartphones, laptops, IoT devices, smartwatches, and more.
It looks like you’d need a friendly within feet of the corrupted system, or a dupe carrying a smartphone, laptop, etc, that had also been corrupted.
Still, a fascinating hack.
THIS IS NOT INDICATIVE OF A CANDIDATE WHO GOT 80 MILLION VOTES: Looks Like Sleepy Joe Only Had 52K Live Stream Viewers for His Boring Speech.
December 15, 2020
CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: The Corporate Media Ponders a Post-Trump Era and They Are Worried.
PETER QUILL, WE HARDLY KNEW XYE: Marvel’s Star-Lord is apparently now a polyamorous bisexual.
COLORADO: COVID-19: Feared Post-Thanksgiving Mega-Spike Didn’t Happen. “Fresh data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment shows that while cases, hospitalizations and deaths related to the novel coronavirus remain well above viral low points recorded over the summer, they didn’t surge over the Thanksgiving holiday by as much as officials had feared, offering hope for the upcoming yuletide season.”
And yet the most populated parts of the state remain under severe lockdown restrictions.