The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35
March 21st, 2015And next up from the same imbeciles that brought you the F-35: Long Range Strike Bomber.
Via: John Q Public:
As Air Force senior officials prepare for posture hearings this week with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, the subject of modernization promises to be front and center. Core to that discussion will almost certainly be the limping, $1.4 trillion F-35 program.
Belying the conventional wisdom, which touts the Joint Strike Fighter as something of a futuristic aerial Swiss army knife, the F-35 is proving to be little more than a dull, bent, and unwieldy butter knife — a jack of no trades, master of only one: burning through taxpayer dollars at a rate that would embarrass Croesus.
The bloat of the program is now placing increasingly excruciating pressure on the entire Air Force budget, this despite the F-35 being years from genuine operational capability. The pressure it is exerting is leading to a parade of rhetorical and actual absurdity of the variety that should, under normal circumstances, alarm Congress and anyone else concerned about the future of American defense.
Take, for example, a recent account filed by the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), which exposes damning conclusions in the latest F-35 report from the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E).
Among the crippling problems highlighted in the DOT&E report:
Software glitches disrupting enemy identification and weapon employment.
A redesigned fuel tank that continues to demonstrate unacceptable vulnerability to explosion from lightning or enemy fire.
Departures from controlled flight during high-speed maneuvering, a six-year-old problem that apparently will not be solved without sacrificing stealth or combat capability.
Helmet issues fundamentally degrading pilot situational awareness.
Engine problems so severe they’re limiting sortie rates, impeding the test schedule, and generating risky operational decisions.
Nightmarish maintainability issues leading to over-reliance on contractor support.
As these and other issues mount, the F-35 Joint Program Office, led by Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, is apparently employing categorization and accounting schemes that overstate reliability and maintenance rates, masking the true nature of the crisis gripping the program.
U.S. Must Release More Abu Ghraib Photos: Federal Judge
March 21st, 2015Via: Reuters:
A federal judge ruled on Friday that the U.S. government must release photographs showing the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other sites.
Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan ruled that his order would not take effect for 60 days to give the U.S. Department of Defense time to decide whether to appeal.
The order is a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit against the government in 2004 seeking the release of the photographs.
“The photos are crucial to the public record,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said in a news release. “They’re the best evidence of what took place in the military’s detention centers, and their disclosure would help the public better understand the implications of some of the Bush administration’s policies.”
The Department of Defense did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
Caltech: Making Graphene at Room Temperature
March 21st, 2015Via: Caltech:
A new technique invented at Caltech to produce graphene—a material made up of an atom-thick layer of carbon—at room temperature could help pave the way for commercially feasible graphene-based solar cells and light-emitting diodes, large-panel displays, and flexible electronics.
“With this new technique, we can grow large sheets of electronic-grade graphene in much less time and at much lower temperatures,” says Caltech staff scientist David Boyd, who developed the method.
Boyd is the first author of a new study, published in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature Communications, detailing the new manufacturing process and the novel properties of the graphene it produces.
Graphene could revolutionize a variety of engineering and scientific fields due to its unique properties, which include a tensile strength 200 times stronger than steel and an electrical mobility that is two to three orders of magnitude better than silicon. The electrical mobility of a material is a measure of how easily electrons can travel across its surface.
France Decrees New Commercial Buildings Must Be Partially Covered in Plants or Solar Panels
March 20th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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While I’d be thrilled to see more commercial buildings with plants and solar panels on top of them, I’m not so thrilled with the strong arm legislation used to get there.
On the overall scheme of things, green rooftops and solar panel systems would be trivial expenses that save companies money. Why wouldn’t they just implement them? Why does it take a government to force them to do it?
Via: Guardian:
Rooftops on new buildings built in commercial zones in France must either be partially covered in plants or solar panels, under a law approved on Thursday.
Green roofs have an isolating effect, helping reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a building in winter and cool it in summer.
They also retain rainwater, thus helping reduce problems with runoff, while favouring biodiversity and giving birds a place to nest in the urban jungle, ecologists say.
The law approved by parliament was more limited in scope than initial calls by French environmental activists to make green roofs that cover the entire surface mandatory on all new buildings.
The Socialist government convinced activists to limit the scope of the law to commercial buildings.
The law was also made less onerous for businesses by requiring only part of the roof to be covered with plants, and giving them the choice of installing solar panels to generate electricity instead.
U.S. Customs Quietly Launches Facial Recognition Experiment at DC Airport
March 20th, 2015Via: Vice:
The next time you come back from overseas and flash your American passport at Washington, DC’s Dulles airport, customs officers might take a picture of you and use facial recognition technology to figure out if you really are who you say you are.
On March 11, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly rolled out a new facial recognition pilot program to help custom officers catch “imposters,” or people using a passport that isn’t theirs, an agency spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard on Wednesday.
The pilot is part of a larger effort to modernize US customs practices with the use of new technologies as part of the Apex Air Entry and E?xit Re-Engineering (AEER) Project. And it’s only the first of at least ?three experiments labeled “Targeted Biometric Operations,” according to a previously undisclosed CBP presentation obtained by Motherboard.
The goal of the pilot program, called “1:1 Facial Recognition Air Entry Pilot,” is to figure out if facial recognition can be a useful tool in catching these imposters, but civil liberties activists worry this is the first step to create a database of law-abiding Americans’ mugshots, which could create unforeseen privacy risks.
FAA Allows Amazon to Fly Drones Experimentally
March 19th, 2015Via: USA Today:
The Federal Aviation Administration approved Amazon Logistics Inc. on Thursday to fly drones experimentally.
The approval will allow the company to conduct research, development and crew training for deliveries called Amazon Prime Air.
The company is required to fly remote-controlled aircraft lower than 400 feet during daylight hours, and the pilot must have a private pilot’s certificate. Other restrictions include keeping the aircraft within view of its pilot or a partner, called a “visual observer,” and flying at least 500 feet away from people not associated with the experiments.
While Amazon is the highest-profile company to get FAA approval to fly drones commercially, the agency has granted 48 petitions through Friday for purposes such as movie-making, smokestack inspection, agriculture and aerial photography. But hundreds more applications are pending, as the industry urges faster regulatory action.
Google’s New Facial Recognition System
March 19th, 2015Via: Fortune:
New advances in facial recognition are a step forward for an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning.
“I never forget a face,” some people like to boast. It’s a claim that looks quainter by the day as artificial intelligence research continues to advance. Some computers, it turns out, never forget 260 million faces.
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As consumer robots, driverless cars and smart homes become real, deep learning will be there, too, providing the eyes, ears, and some of the brains for our new toys. DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research agency, is also investigating how deep learning techniques might be able to help it make sense of the streams of communications crossing intelligence networks everyday.
Something tells me it’s looking at Google’s FaceNet and getting pretty excited, too.
Related: How The CIA Made Google
Bill Gates Warns on Future Disease Epidemic
March 19th, 2015Via: BBC:
The world needs to prepare for the next major health crisis, Bill Gates has told delegates at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
While Ebola seems to be being kept under control currently, next time “we may not be so lucky” the Microsoft co-founder warned.
He said that there were plenty of technology tools that could be used to contain the spread of a virus.
And, he added, governments should learn from how nations prepare for war.
“Nato plays war games to check that people are well-trained and prepared. Now we need germ games,” he said.
He also called for a reserve “medical corps” similar to the reserve armies that civilians can join.
Some Northern California Farmers Not Planting This Year, Will Make More Money Selling Water to Los Angeles
March 19th, 2015Via: CBS:
The rice industry in the Sacramento Valley is taking a hard hit with the drought. Some farmers are skipping out on their fields this year, because they are cashing in on their water rights.
Oil Supplies Hit 80-Year High
March 18th, 2015Via: Yahoo:
WTI crude (CLJ15.NYM) prices are taking another leg down, hovering at the $42 a barrel level after the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that “U.S. crude oil inventories are at the highest level for this time of year in at least the last 80 years.”
EIA reported commercial crude inventories increased by 9.6 million barrels from the previous week. Now at 458.5 million barrels. This follows a huge inventory build of 10.5 million barrels, reported late Tuesday by the American Petroleum Institute. Analysts were expecting just 3.5 million.
