1961: Two Nuclear Bombs Nearly Detonated in North Carolina
June 12th, 2014Via: CNN:
On a January night in 1961, a U.S. Air Force bomber broke in half while flying over eastern North Carolina. From the belly of the B-52 fell two bombs — two nuclear bombs that hit the ground near the city of Goldsboro.
A disaster worse than the devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have befallen the United States that night. But it didn’t, thanks to a series of fortunate missteps.
Declassified documents that the National Security Archive released this week offered new details about the incident. The blaring headline read: “Multi-Megaton Bomb Was Virtually ‘Armed’ When It Crashed to Earth.”
Or, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it in back then, “By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.”
…
The B-52 was flying over North Carolina on January 24, 1961, when it suffered a “failure of the right wing,” the report said.
As the plane broke apart, the two bombs plummeted toward the ground. The parachute opened on one; it didn’t on the other.
“The impact of the aircraft breakup initiated the fuzing sequence for both bombs,” the summary of the documents said.
In other words, both weapons came alarmingly close to detonating.
Weapon 1, the bomb whose parachute opened, landed intact. Fortunately, the safing pins that provided power from a generator to the weapon had been yanked — preventing it from going off.
Weapon 2, the second bomb with the unopened parachute, landed in a free fall. The impact of the crash put it in the “armed” setting. Fortunately — once again — it damaged another part of the bomb needed to initiate an explosion.
While it’s unclear how frequently these types of accidents have occurred, the Defense Department has disclosed 32 accidents involving nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1980.
Tesla Allows Rivals to Use Its Intellectual Property to Develop Electric Vehicles
June 12th, 2014Via: Tesla Motors:
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.
When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.
At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.
At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.
American Scientists Recreate Deadly Spanish Flu Virus
June 12th, 2014Via: Independent:
The extinct influenza virus that caused the worst flu pandemic in history has been recreated from fragments of avian flu found in wild ducks in a controversial experiment to show how easy it would be for the deadly flu strain to reemerge today.
Scientists said the study involved infecting laboratory ferrets with close copies of the 1918 virus – which was responsible for the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people – to see how easy it can be transmitted in the best animal model of the human disease.
But other researchers have denounced the research as foolhardy and dangerous. Critics said that any benefits of the attempts to recreate 1918-like flu viruses from existing avian flu strains do not justify the catastrophic risks if such a genetically engineered virus were to escape either deliberately or accidentally from the laboratory and cause a deadly influenza pandemic.
Idiocracy: “Forget to Flush? There’s an App for That”
June 12th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
Come home to a hot iron and smoldering clothes this afternoon? Soon, it may not be a sign of forgetfulness, but rather evidence that you’ve been hacked.
In coming years, your smartphone will be able to lock your house, turn on the air conditioning, check whether the milk is out of date, or even heat up your iron. Great news, except that all that convenience could also let criminals open your doors, spy on your family or drive your connected car to their lair.
“As these technologies become more sophisticated, it opens up a broader spectrum of threats,” said Gunter Ollmann, chief technology officer of IOActive, a tech security firm in Seattle. A world of connected devices makes it possible “for the bad guys to have permanent entry into your household.”
Iraq Militants, Pushing South, Aim at Baghdad
June 12th, 2014Via: New York Times:
Sunni militants consolidated and extended their control over northern Iraq on Wednesday, seizing Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, threatening the strategic oil refining town of Baiji and pushing south toward Baghdad, their ultimate target, Iraqi sources said.
As the dimensions of the assault began to become clear, it was evident that a number of militant groups had joined forces, including Baathist military commanders from the Hussein era, whose goal is to rout the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. One of the Baathists, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was a top military commander and a vice president in the Hussein government and one of the few prominent Baathists to evade capture by the Americans throughout the occupation.
Dryers Waste $4 Billion a Year in Energy Costs
June 11th, 2014I almost thought that they were going to get away with not mentioning clotheslines in this article. So, after reading about the billions of dollars wasted and how upgraded appliances should be purchased, etc, you need to stick around until the last sentence for the dash of sanity:
Best yet, he says, they can save the most energy with old-fashioned line drying.
haha. Of course, there’s a good chance that using a clothesline is against the law if you are reading this from inside the U.S.
Via: USA Today:
U.S. consumers are wasting $4 billion annually to power clothes dryers that, unlike other common household appliances, have barely improved their energy efficiency since the 1970s, a report today says.
A typical electric dryer may now consume as much energy per year as the combined use of an efficient new refrigerator, clothes washer and dishwasher, reports the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. Homes pay more than $100 annually to run an electric dryer and $40 for a gas one, its report finds.
“Dryers have gone largely unnoticed,” says Noah Horowitz, NRDC senior scientist, noting regulators have focused on other appliances. Since the 1970s, he says U.S. efficiency requirements have been updated seven times for fridges but only three times — each one modest — for dryers. As a result, new fridges — and dishwashers and washing machines — have more than halved their energy use.
Yet, he says Americans spend $9 billion annually to operate inefficient dryers, 75% of which are electric. He says they could save $4 billion of that — and reduce heat-trapping carbon-dioxide emissions — if all electric units were updated to the most efficient hybrid heat pump model sold overseas, mostly in Europe.
Ars Tests Internet Surveillance—By Spying on an NPR Reporter
June 11th, 2014If you are a non technical computer user, this article does a good job of explaining how much of your online life is like an open book for any man-in-the-middle observer. This observer could be your ISP, an intelligence organization, the police, anyone who has access to the network infrastructure between you and the Internet.
Tor is good for thwarting this type of surveillance if the observer is not an intelligence agency. If the observer is an intelligence agency, I have far less confidence in Tor (circa 2007).
Via: Ars Technica:
Our experiment would answer the question: could a passive observer of Internet traffic still learn much about a target in this post-Snowden world?
Henn dialed up Porcello and put him on speakerphone as we finalized the location and setup of the PwnPlug. As I snapped in an Ethernet cable, Henn turned on his iPhone and connected to the PwnPlug’s Wi-Fi network. Porcello watched remotely as data from Henn’s network suddenly poured into a specially configured Pwnie Express server.
“Whoa,” Porcello said. “Yep, there’s Yahoo, NPR… there’s an HTTP request to Google… the phone is checking for an update. Wow, there’s a lot of stuff going on here. It’s just thousands and thousands of pages of stuff… Are you sure you’re not opening any apps?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Henn replied. “My phone is just sitting here on my desk.”
He checked his phone and found that Mail, Notes, Safari, Maps, Calendar, Messages, Twitter, and Facebook were running in the background—and making connections to the Internet. The Safari Web browser proved the most revealing. Like most people who use the iPhone, Henn had left open dozens of websites; when his phone had connected to the PwnPlug’s network, the browser had refreshed them, revealing movies he was checking out for his kids, a weather report, and research he was doing for work.
In the first two minutes of our test, we had already captured a snapshot of Henn’s recent online life—and the real surveillance hadn’t even begun.
Militants in Iraq Take Over Four Cities, Make Off with Arms Cache and Nearly Half a Billion Dollars
June 11th, 2014Mission accomplished.
Via: Irish Times:
Iraq is facing its gravest test since the US-led invasion more than a decade ago, after its army capitulated to Islamist insurgents who have seized four cities and pillaged military bases and banks, in a lightning campaign which seems poised to fuel a cross-border insurgency endangering the entire region.
The extent of the Iraqi army’s defeat at the hands of militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) became clear yesterday when officials in Baghdad conceded that insurgents had stripped the main army base in the northern city of Mosul of weapons, released hundreds of prisoners from the city’s jails and may have seized up to $480 million in banknotes from the city’s banks.
Iraqi officials said two divisions of Iraqi soldiers – roughly 30,000 men – simply turned and ran in the face of the assault by an insurgent force of just 800 fighters. Isis extremists roamed freely yesterday through the streets of Mosul, openly surprised at the ease with which they had taken Iraq’s second largest city after three days of sporadic fighting.
HP Labs Attempting to Build Revolutionary Computer Architecture
June 11th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
That’s what they’re calling it at HP Labs: “the Machine.” It’s basically a brand-new type of computer architecture that HP’s engineers say will serve as a replacement for today’s designs, with a new operating system, a different type of memory, and superfast data transfer. The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years or fall on its face trying. “We think we have no choice,” says Martin Fink, the chief technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at a conference Wednesday.
Google to Buy Satellite Company Skybox Imaging for $500 Million
June 11th, 2014Via: Reuters:
Google Inc said on Tuesday it is acquiring satellite company Skybox Imaging for $500 million in cash, the Internet company’s second high-profile acquisition of an aerospace company this year.
Google said that Skybox’s satellites will provide images for Google’s online mapping service. Google, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine, said that Skybox’s technology could also eventually be used to provide Internet access and help with disaster relief.
The acquisition of the five-year old company comes as Google and rival Facebook Inc are racing to snap up satellite and drone companies in an expensive effort to expand the reach of their businesses.
In April Google acquired Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico-based maker of solar-powered drones, for an undisclosed sum. Google has also launched a small network of balloons designed to deliver Internet access over the Southern Hemisphere.
Facebook, the world’s No.1 Internet social network, announced in March that it had created a special “Connectivity lab” project tasked with developing satellites, drones and other technology that could be used to beam Internet connectivity to people in underdeveloped parts of the world.
Skybox has built satellites packed with sensors and camera electronics that take high-resolution images and video of the earth but which it says are smaller and lighter than traditional satellites. The company, which like Google is based in Mountain View, Calif, has launched one satellite and had planned to launch a constellation of 24 satellites, according to the company’s website.
Skybox or Skynet? Google’s New All-Seeing Satellites Have Huge Potential—For Good and Evil
