Cheaper Than Dirt has the details. The trigger reset issue will be fixed, and there will be some user interface enhancements. I think I might get one, eventually.
I don’t believe marijuana is a gateway drug, but I do believe bacon is a gateway meat.
Mmmm, bacon.
It will be replaced. If you try to steal the replacement, you will be recorded.
Have a nice day, thief.
A friend quipped on Facebook that if the US Government switched off the Internet, we’d have a new government within a day. Just so you know what that looks like graphically, Arbor Networks put together a graph of data traffic and Reason Magazine posted it. It’s amazing what can happen when power is centralized.
Speaking of, Sen. Collins of Maine is proposing a new Internet Kill Switch bill, designed to give the Federal Government the power to shut down Internet communications in the middle of a national emergency.
A couple questions:
The answer to the first is it doesn’t help, and it would exacerbate things. The answer to the second is only with our tacit consent.
This isn’t about the Internet. It’s about control.
Apparently, the J-20 prototype is flown by a Scientology believing, volleyball playing, Navy pilot named Tom Cruise.
Remember the Soviet Union? I once read that country described as a first world military supported by a third world country. Something about the Chinese strikes me the same way, except we never sold trillions of dollars in bonds to the Soviets.
Be concerned about their bankers, not their fighters or bombers.
I wonder if this is what it feels like to see someone sit on a barrel of dynamite and play with matches. Or perhaps it feels like this.
Dollars to donuts we’ll be asked to clean up at least one of these messes.
Skimming the headlines on Drudge, I see:
And there’s a snowstorm that’s dumped about three inches or so of the ugly, heavy, wet type of snow on the driveway.
I don’t know about you, but I’m more than ready for Spring.
It is Presidents like this one that make me wish for the old way of delivering the annual message to Congress – by sending over a printed copy.
Jennifer asked what the drinking game rules would be, and suggested taking a shot after every mention of the words “investment”, “green”, “competition”, or “jobs”. I pointed out that this would get us sauced under the table in the first ten minutes, and the only way we could afford it is to buy the cheap stuff, which we aren’t willing to do.
The previews of the speech say he will call for a spending freeze for five years. This isn’t serious, any more than the Republicans calls for 2.5 trillion in spending cuts over ten years – which is only 250 billion in cuts per year, when we are a trillion and a half behind per year. Neither of these two parties are going to get us out of our fiscal mire, because both of these parties got us into it. We have to cut entitlements, and neither party will do it.
Why can’t we have statesmen in office? Because we don’t vote for them. We settle for who will win in the general election from the party closest to our views. If we fought as hard in the primaries as we do in the general elections, we would see a better class of politician emerge, perhaps even rising to the level of statesman.
What is going on with NBC? First, they have Heroes, a comic book series that starts well but devolves into a series of twists and turns that try to fix various plot fallacies by retroactive continuity. The show gets canceled.
Then there’s The Cape, a series about an honest cop who gets pushed off the force by a crooked businessman intent on replacing the police with his own security business. The plot is so poorly written that even the excellent acting couldn’t get Jennifer and I to watch more than 50 minutes of the 2 hour pilot.
Then there’s Chuck, a longtime favorite. In the latest mid-season twist, Sarah goes off on a deep undercover assignment to destroy Alexei Volkoff’s secret organization and free Chuck’s mom, clearing her name at the CIA. She ends up in a dark place and we’re back to dealing with the awkward, hesitant Chuck trying to sort out his feelings for Sarah. Again.
Please, NBC, can we move away from the half-thought out comic book plots? I just want a geek-friendly series that realizes I can see a plot hole right in front of my face. Is that too much to ask?
The Chinese have been showing off their new stealth fighter, the Chengdu J-20, a plane that looks to me to be less than capable against an F-22 in an air to air battle. Now there’s news that it may have been reverse engineered in part from F-117 parts collected in Serbia.
Color me unimpressed.
The most difficult job in any engineering task is to apply the relevant mathematics to the problem at hand and get the right result. We were able to do that with the F-117, taking a Russian produced equation relating geometry of simple shapes to energy reflectance, and generalizing it to apply to any shape. After refining it with more math we were able to apply it to curved surfaces as well as intersecting planes, and we got the B-2. Repeating the process, we arrived at the F-22.
The Chinese didn’t do that work, so they do not have an institutionalized, intrinsic understanding of the fundamentals of stealth technology. They only know what they’ve learned from what they’ve gleaned. This is one reason why the J-20 will not be superior to the F-22.
That and the Raptor has thrust vectoring and can act as a mini-AWACs. No, the Chinese are not to be feared for their stealth fighter.
They are to be feared because of their bond holdings.