Y'know, Ronald Reagan was derided as being delusional, an idiot,

"He's pushing 'Star Wars' nonsense as if it could be real!" and so forth.

Right now an awful lot of media won't talk about this.  For some reason.

And, oddly, not a mention of lasers or similar that could disable a satellite without destroying it.  Hmmm....

Someday: "Sir, Dump Truck 3 is deploying nets and magnetic scoopers, they'll have it cleaned up fairly quickly."

I wrote about the Garmin Xero a while back,

Widener's did a comparison between it and the new Athlon chronograph.

You know 'Do not trust Google maps', but planning your hillclimb?

No, I don't think so.
Three hikers were rescued on Monday after they became stranded on Mount Shasta near Clear Creek Route.

The hikers told the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office they relied heavily on Google’s Gemini, an artificial intelligence assistant, for information about the route and what to pack, which the sheriff’s office called a "critical misstep."
I would guess so.

"They were advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required, especially when their planned 8 hour ascent became a multi-day ordeal," the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

I could see 'Show me on the map' in planning, but that's it.  They're lucky it didn't get far worse.

As the man says, the intelligence monopoly

is over.

Sounds interesting. Problem is it can also be used

to make sure nobody has video of what the cops are doing except the cops.  If they bother to wear cameras.

I very much get wanting to protect your officers; I also get that there's been enough garbage and flat-out lawbreaking by some agencies that, anymore, I automatically look for "Can they use this to hide any of their own criminal/possibly criminal acts?"

Found at Tam's place

A bit of tech I hadn't used before

From two previous PCs that died, I have the hard drives.  Looked like it was motherboard failures, near as I could tell, so the drives should still be good, and I wanted to check them without having to open up the case and put them in the current computer.  So a bit of searching led to this docking station, which some questions got good reviews, so I got one.

Works.  The only problem is the 'owners manual' stops at "Here are the parts, here's how you plug them in, insert the drive, and turn it on."  Not one damn thing further.  The 'support' on their website leads to a PDF of the same manual, and "You can call this number for help."  Bleep.  And the videos I found on YouTube did not show the same stuff that my pc did(of course).

Did get it figured out, and am able to use that drive to find any files I'd thought lost(I really need to do backups more often).  Now if I can remember where I put the other damned drive...

No, I will pass on an electric truck, thank you.

Lithium fires are horribly difficult to extinguish, and emit dangerously toxic fumes which can cause long term or even permanent dementia like brain injuries, along with a host of other usually reversible harms. Since lithium-ion fires are a chemical reaction they can only be cooled not extinguished. They end up burning for several days in some cases. To extinguish Lithium automobile battery fires, firefighters cordon off the area and spray a fine mist of water on the fire to try to keep the temperature down, then wait for it to burn itself out. Firefighters may need 30,000 to 40,000 gallons of water to contain a Tesla electric vehicle (EV) blaze than the 500 to 1,000 gallons of water they would normally use for a mainstream gas-powered car that was on fire.

A truly nightmare scenario is one in which an EV fire occurs in an underground parking garage beneath an apartment complex or a crowded office building. With the toxic fumes generated, how would the local fire department be able to respond to a fire that could not be extinguished even if they could get to it? Germany may be stepping up to the plate with a trend of banning EV’s from parking underground due to potential EV battery fires.
And that's on top of the, let's say 'slight' charging problems.  And just how they expect to charge all these things using using bird cuisinarts and solar panels.

On a day the only store I want to go into is a grocery store,

something very interesting:
How The Once Elusive Dream Of Laser Weapons Suddenly Became A Reality

Ah, the things they can do with some tech (link fixed)

Now, as Jeff Farrell reports for the Independent, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers—Latin, Greek, Arabic—but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record.

 

 

Rocket-assisted shell, 39 mile range;

At some point the Army's going to have to name some of this stuff the Slammer or the Drake, because we're getting closer to Hammer's Regiment all the time.

A bit of history on the 3rd bomb that wasn't dropped,

and the dangers of messing with plutonium.

Roman concrete,

she thinks she's figured it out.

The lamp is pretty much dead,

long live the lamp.  Or something like that.

What made me a believer in LED lamps was my porch light.  That sucker ate bulbs on a fairly regular basis; I've seen name-brand bulbs die in as little as a week.  So when I ran across some new-to-me LEDs at a store one day, I decided to give it a try: much more expensive than standards, but if I didn't have to keep climbing up to change the things it'd be worth it.

So a 60-watt lamp went in.

That was about six years ago, and it's been on most of that time.  It's still burning, but over the last couple of months it's become dim.  VERY dim.  So it was replaced the other day with a new one.  Same output, but the newer is smaller and lighter.

I don't know how many hours it works out to, but it was worth every penny.

Soon they'll find the remaining parts,

figure how the whole mechanism went together, the guy rebuilding it will assemble the last piece and start messing with it...

What's the best spray for Old Ones?

And the abuser said "See what you made me do!

You're a fascist!  You have wrongthink!  Your words are violence, so you're forcing me to attack and silence you!"
Ah, how Soviet of them.


Lots of people have played the "We just need to put more money into education, like California!" over time; yeah, that's worked.
A group of prominent lawyers representing teachers and students from poor performing schools sued California on Tuesday, arguing that the state has done nothing about a high number of schoolchildren who do not know how to read.

The advocacy law firm, Public Counsel, filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court to demand the California Department of Education address its “literacy crisis.” The state has not followed suggestions from its own report on the problem five years ago, the lawsuit said.
...
Assessments found less than half of California students from third grade to fifth grade have met statewide literacy standards since 2015. Both traditional and charter schools are failing, Rosenbaum said.
Of the 26 lowest-performing districts in the nation, 11 are in California, according to the lawsuit. Texas, the largest state after California, has only one district among the 26.

The defense:
Department of Education spokesman Bill Ainsworth said officials could not comment because the state had not yet been served with the lawsuit.
But he said in an email that “California has one of the most ambitious programs in the nation to serve low-income students.”
Yeah, how's that working out?
State assessments found 96 percent of students at the school were not proficient in English or math, according to the lawsuit. Only eight of the school’s 179 students were found to be proficient when tested last year.
David Moch, another plaintiff, is a retired teacher who taught at La Salle for 18 years. Moch said he had fifth graders in his kindergarten class.
Teachers were not given training or help to deal with the situation and programs that did seem to make a dent were discontinued, Moch said.
This is the end result of playing indoctrination instead of education. And kids and the whole society are paying for it.


Daughter recently ran into a problem with storing information on the cloud.  Which made me think even less of the idea.  Which brings us to a comment from Kim on the matter:
Here’s my take on all of this. If I were a corporate executive and one of my subordinates even suggested using Goggle Dox, Twatter or Fuckfacebook [sp?] to store and/or communicate our company documents, I’d fire him on the spot — because I think it is the absolute height of corporate irresponsibility to delegate those capabilities to any outside entity, let alone to these techno-bastards.


The school of journalism on a guy invited to speak at campus:
“I think we can find a speaker who will talk about free speech issues, without running the risk of offending students. We can still have a conversation with him if you want, but he is pretty extreme in his views,” Abramson’s email reportedly said.

Abramson told KGVO at the time that “the J-school does not have to invite people that we think don’t match with our priorities or our values as a tolerant, welcoming school.”
Because deity forbid some wannabe journalists have to face someone whose words might offend them.  Jeez, Abramson is a jerk.

One step closer to the Slammers

Trophy works like a mini Iron Dome, another Israeli wonder weapon that intercepts and neutralizes short-range rocket threats, like Russian GRAD rockets, from the skies.  It utilizes a combination of sensors and radar along with fire control technology and intercepting pellets to detect and neutralize incoming missile threats. A secondary feature enables the Trophy to accurately determine the source of fire and transmit the coordinates to nearby ground and air units through the Tzayad battlefield management system. All friendly units in the theater are instantly apprised of the enemy’s position making escape and evasion difficult.  

'Internet of Things'; not in my house

Hundreds of Internet-connected locks became inoperable last week after a faulty software update caused them to experience a fatal system error, manufacturer LockState said.
That's a problem.  A BIG problem.  And that was just a botched update, not intentional action.

I do NOT want my heating/cooling/locks/lights/refrigerator capable of being controlled by anyone who can sneak or hack into the system.  No, thank you.


I'm seeing a lot of crap on social media along the lines of "If you say 'Antifa and the National Socialists are both idiots', that makes you a Nazi sympathizer!"

Maybe in your idiot world, but not in mine, dumbass.  We need a meme saying "If you think yelling at both sides means you support one of them, you're a fucking idiot."

Stolen from a guy on Bookface:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a brick when it stops working." - Arthur C Clarke, while kicking his computer.

This is friggin' marvelous

Actual launch starts about 51 minutes in
Not only did the escape test go perfectly, but even with all that going off in the nose, the booster just keeps going.  And bleeping LANDS perfectly.

Well done, guys.

Oh yeah, another step:

11 satellites deployed to target orbit and Falcon has landed back at Cape Canaveral. Headed to LZ-1. Welcome back, baby!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2015

Not NASA, not some other .gov, private enterprise, baby.