Zunum Aero Developing Electric Powered Aircraft for Regional Flights
April 5th, 2017They’re actually going to be hybrid to start, according to the Zunum Aero website:
Did you know that short-haul flights produce over 40% of aviation emissions? With our aircraft, we believe these will be largely eliminated within twenty years. Our aircraft are “hybrids to electrics” that sip fuel only when they have to, will use even less over time as batteries upgrade, and will one day go completely without — so that flying will be kind to the Earth.
Via: USA Today:
Zunum Aero announced Wednesday it is developing electric aircraft to get travelers out of their cars and into planes for regional commercial flights of up to 1,000 miles.
The Kirkland, Wash.-based company is working with Boeing HorizonX, an arm of the jet manufacture that invests in innovative technology, and JetBlue Technology Ventures to develop 10- to 50-seat aircraft for flights that could begin in the early 2020s. The goal is to return flights to smaller communities that lost air service during the last 30 years as regional airlines consolidated routes aboard larger aircraft.
“We believe that the industry is on the cusp of a golden era on regional air,” Zunum CEO Ashish Kumar told USA TODAY. “Air used to be a much larger factor of the travel over these distances.”
Despite flying lower and slower than airliners, Zunum officials hope to cut airfares and overall travel times in half with more-efficient planes flying mostly out of general-aviation airports. Passengers would carry their luggage straight from their cars to the planes, rather than pass through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.
“The cabin is designed to bring all your bags on board,” Kumar said. “It’s much more like a bus or a train.”
Related: Electric Plane Using Siemens Motor Sets 2 New Speed Records
Florida’s Money Laundering Suburb
April 5th, 2017Via: USA Today:
In a community known mostly as a getaway from the urban problems of Miami, the flood of drug money has confounded law enforcement agencies.
“We always thought we would get to it at some point,” said Charlie Blau, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the first money laundering sting in Miami. “We knew it would be a bigger problem.”
Federal agents say the criminal organizations use many methods to launder their money, including overseas bank wires and cash smuggling over the border.
They also have turned to other laundering areas, like the garment district in Los Angeles and the jewelry centers in New York City, to clean millions in drug profits.
But the export shops west of Miami remain among the oldest conduits in the country to launder money — and the most difficult to infiltrate and shut down.
Twice, local law enforcement task forces targeted the area, but no business owners were arrested nor were their shops closed.
Internal records of the most recent sting operation, in 2012, show for the first time the stunning amount of money that moved through the businesses and their importance to powerful drug organizations.
Tens of thousands in cash bundles were dropped off at a cellphone outlet tucked inside an aging storage center on the edge of town. Hundreds of thousands were wired into the bank account of a computer store with a glitzy showroom on one of Doral’s busiest thoroughfares.
In just three years, at least $25 million in drug money was funneled through 201 exporters by the police sting — just a fraction of the total number of businesses that were used to launder hundreds of millions in the past decade, according to records and former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.
Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading
April 5th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
It was Amazon that drove America’s warehouse operators into the robot business.
Quiet Logistics, which ships apparel out of its Devens, Mass., warehouse, had been using robots made by a company called Kiva Systems. When Amazon bought Kiva in 2012, Quiet hired scientists. In 2015 it spun out a new company called Locus Robotics, which raised $8 million in venture capital. Last year, Locus unveiled its own warehouse robotics solution called the LocusBot—first using it for its own business, then selling them to companies that ship everything from housewares to auto parts.
Now, Locus has landed a bigger fish: It’s selling its robots to DHL Worldwide Express, the world’s largest third-party logistics company. DHL will use the machines at a South Haven, Miss., location to help ship surgical devices to operating rooms across the country.
To do that, Locus’s software directs a LocusBot to a shelf where the specific item is located. A human worker meets it there, reads a description of the item off an iPad, and drops it into a plastic bucket mounted on the machine. The idea is that the robot does the majority of the traveling, while the worker simply patrols a specified zone.
“The first trend was to try to replace humans,” said Rick Faulk, chief executive of Locus. “Now it’s about humans and robots working collaboratively.”
Teardown of Tesla Drivetrain
April 4th, 2017Multiple groups are working on jailbreaking it.
Via: Jehu Garcia:
Ideology Test and Mobile Phone Shake Down to Visit U.S.?
April 4th, 2017Via: MarketWatch:
Foreigners who want to visit the U.S., even for a short trip, could be forced to disclose contacts on their mobile phones, social-media passwords and financial records, and to answer probing questions about their ideology, according to Trump administration officials conducting a review of vetting procedures.
The administration also wants to subject more visa applicants to intense security reviews and have embassies spend more time interviewing each applicant. The changes could apply to people from all over the world, including allies like France and Germany.
The measures—whose full scope haven’t yet been publicly discussed—would together represent the “extreme vetting” President Donald Trump has promised.
Top Obama Adviser Used NSA Intercepts to Learn Names of Trump Associates
April 4th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”
Tesla’s Market Cap Surpasses Ford’s
April 3rd, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk poked fun at short sellers as his electric-car maker’s stock surged to a record, vaulting its market value past century-old rival Ford Motor Co.
“Stormy weather in Shortville…” the chief executive officer tweeted Monday, as Tesla shares climbed as much as 5.8 percent. The maker of Model S sedans and Model X crossovers saw its capitalization surge to about $48.2 billion, $3.1 billion more than Ford, the No. 2 automaker in the U.S. after General Motors Co.
Super SEALs: Elite Units Pursue Brain-Stimulating Technologies
April 3rd, 2017Via: Military.com:
At a conference near Washington, D.C., in February, the commander of all Navy special operations units made an unusual request to industry: Develop and demonstrate technologies that offer “cognitive enhancement” capabilities to boost his elite forces’ mental and physical performance.
“We plan on using that in mission enhancement,” Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski said. “The performance piece is really critical to the life of our operators.”
Szymanski expanded on his remarks in a brief interview later, saying he has his eye on a number of technologies, including pharmaceutical aids. But the results of one breakthrough involving the direct application of electrical stimulation to the brain have particularly caught his eye.
“In experiments, people who were watching these screens … their ability to concentrate would fall off in about 20 minutes,” Szymanski said. “But they did studies whereby a little bit of electrical stimulation was applied, and they were able to maintain the same peak performance for 20 hours.”
Transcranial electrical stimulation was one of the technologies touted by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in July 2016 as part of his Defense Innovation Unit (Experimental), or DIUx, initiative. Since then, multiple SEAL units have begun actively testing the effectiveness of the technology, officials with Naval Special Warfare Command told Military.com
“Earlier this year, Naval Special Warfare units, working with DIUx, began a specific cognitive enhancement project with a small group of volunteers to test and evaluate achieving higher performance through the use of neuro-stimulation technology,” Capt. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the command, said in a statement.
The elements testing the technology include Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the unit known more popularly as SEAL Team Six. Other teams are also conducting tests, Salata said. He declined to confirm how many operators are participating in the testing, or to cite specific findings to date. But there have been positive outcomes so far, he said.
“Early results show promising signs,” he said. “Based on this, we are encouraged to continue and are moving forward with our studies.”
The company that makes the brain-stimulating device — a headset that could be mistaken for a pair of Beats by Dre headphones — is Halo Neuroscience. And the technology offers not cognitive enhancement, but neuro-priming, Chief Technology Officer and Company Co-Founder Brett Wingeier told Military.com.
Cyborgs at Work: Employees Getting Implanted with Microchips
April 3rd, 2017Like many of you out there, I first heard about this technology in the 1990s. Decades later, a passive microchip implant seems like a practically innocuous fairy tale compared to the privacy hell that has metastasized all around us.
In terms of technologies of political control, think of a chip implant as something like a Soviet era Skoda. A modern “smartphone” would look like the Starship Enterprise in comparison.
At first glance, one might think that the chip implant’s lack of capabilities are to blame.
The chip implant can’t record your conversations, and other audio in its vicinity.
The chip implant doesn’t have multiple video cameras to watch you and your surroundings.
The chip implant doesn’t serve as an extension of your brain, recording all of your searches, shopping habits, web activity, etc.
The chip implant doesn’t help the state create a proximity chart of your social network.
The list goes on and on…
But the most disturbing advantage that the smartphone has over a chip implant (as a technology of political control) is that, while the chip implant remains creepy, even after decades of fluff media stories promoting it, like the one below, even people who know better tend to own smartphones. I’d guess that the overwhelming majority of smartphone owners, maybe 99% of them, not only don’t know about the diabolical privacy threats posed by smartphones, but wouldn’t care anyway.
So, scoff at the imbeciles who willingly take the chip, as you read this (and I write this) using an operating system from Microsoft or Apple, or a Linux operating system on a device compromised down to the silicon, or perhaps on a jewel encrusted crack pipe, tamper proof vending machine, designed-from-the-start-as-a-surveillance-platform mobile device.
This is definitely tipping over into another self loathing and pointless rant about a hopeless situation, so I’ll stop here.
Have a nice day.
Via: AP:
The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee’s hand. Another “cyborg” is created.
What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.
The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted.
“The biggest benefit I think is convenience,” said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and CEO of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door by merely waving near it. “It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys.”
The technology in itself is not new. Such chips are used as virtual collar plates for pets. Companies use them to track deliveries. It’s just never been used to tag employees on a broad scale before. Epicenter and a handful of other companies are the first to make chip implants broadly available.
Eleven Killed in Suspected Suicide Bombing on Russian Metro Train
April 3rd, 2017Via: Reuters:
A blast in a St Petersburg train carriage on Monday that killed 11 people and wounded 45 was carried out by a suspected suicide bomber with ties to radical Islamists, Russia’s Interfax news agency cited a law enforcement source as saying.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was in the city when the blast struck, visited the scene of the explosion late on Monday night and laid a bunch of red flowers at a makeshift shrine to the victims.
Witnesses said they saw passengers who were bloodied and burned spilling out of the train, the door of which was buckled by the force of the explosion, and lying on a platform while smoke filled the station.
Russia has experienced bomb attacks carried out by Islamist rebels from Russia’s North Caucasus region in the past. The rebellion there has been largely crushed, but Russia’s military intervention in Syria has now made it a potential target for attacks by the Islamic State group, security experts say.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Officials said they were treating the blast as an act of terrorism, but there was no official confirmation of any link to Islamist radicals.
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