Pentagon Wants 80 to 100 Long Range, Nuclear-Capable Bombers That Can Operate With or Without a Pilot in the Cockpit
May 24th, 2011Via: Los Angeles Times:
Deep in the Mojave Desert, surrounded by tiers of barbed-wire fence, the nation’s largest defense contractors work in secrecy designing and building the latest military aircraft at Air Force Plant 42.
The military’s top weapons buyer quietly visited the Palmdale facility this month to talk with leading aerospace executives about plans to build a fleet of radar-evading bombers that the military hopes to have ready for action by the mid-2020s.
The plane would be the first long-range bomber built in the U.S. since the last of the 21 bat-winged B-2 stealth bombers by Northrop Grumman Corp. rolled off the assembly lines at Plant 42 more than a decade ago. The Air Force owns the 5,800-acre industrial park and leases space to aerospace contractors.
Now on the Pentagon wish list is a proposed fleet of 80 to 100 nuclear-capable bombers that could operate with or without a pilot in the cockpit.
Pentagon weapons acquisition chief Ashton Carter met separately with representatives of Northrop, Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said. These companies are expected to vie for the estimated $55-billion contract that is expected to provide jobs and decades of work for Southern California’s aerospace industry.
Libya: British and French Attack Helicopters to be Deployed
May 24th, 2011Via: Telegraph:
British attack helicopters will be deployed in Libya within days in a significant expansion of the military mission against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces.
The Daily Telegraph has learned that Apache helicopters will fly into Libya from a Royal Navy warship, in a joint operation with the French.
As many as 18 British and French helicopters will be deployed to support rebels trying to consolidate gains against Gaddafi’s forces.
The helicopter operation – expected to be supported by Special Forces troops – will take the allies closer still to a full ground operation in Libya.
Whitehall officials said that later this week, the Apaches will begin flying missions in from HMS Ocean, a helicopter carrier in the Mediterranean.
Their use was authorised by David Cameron at a meeting of the National Security Council after the Prime Minister asked military chiefs for new ways to increase the pressure on the Libyan regime.
Obama Regime’s Information Operations: Rapid Response to Unfavorable Stories
May 24th, 2011Via: Huffington Post:
The Obama administration has created and staffed a new position tucked inside their communications shop for helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community.
Facebook Is Coming for Your Children
May 23rd, 2011Via: Today:
Wearing the mantle of education reform, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told attendees at a recent summit on innovation in education that, “My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.”
A really, really good way to do that, Zuckerberg said, is to let kids ages 13 and under join Facebook.
Research Credit: afterhours
Zimbabwe Considering Commodity Based Currency
May 23rd, 2011Via: MineWeb:
Zimbabwe’s central bank governor Gideon Gono on Thursday proposed the introduction of a gold-backed local currency, which was destroyed by hyperinflation and replaced by multiple foreign currencies in January.
A unity government formed by rivals President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in a bid to end a political crisis introduced multiple foreign currencies to stop sky-rocketing inflation and revive the economy.
But Gono, a Mugabe ally whose reappointment last year has been opposed by Tsvangirai, says the shortage of foreign currencies in the country was hurting economic recovery efforts.
In an article he wrote in the state-controlled Herald newspaper, Gono urged the re-introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar to ease the liquidity crunch, but said this was not a call for “a blind return to the money printing press”.
“Rather, what I am calling for is the guarded reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar where such a new currency will be fully backed by credible, tangible and locally available assets, such as gold, diamonds or platinum, among several other possibilities,” Gono said.
NSA Collects as Much Data as Is Stored in the Entire Library of Congress Every Six Hours [???]
May 23rd, 2011I try to avoid the black/grey/white propaganda narratives surrounding the alleged Bin Laden assassination. The whole thing is so absurd that it’s just impossible for me to take it seriously at all. However, in my routine monitoring of stories about the NSA, I came across the claim that the agency is processing an amount of data that’s equivalent to what’s stored in the Library of Congress every six hours.
Ok, so I tried to figure out how much data a Library-of-Congress-every-six-hours represents.
It turns out that the claim is completely meaningless! It tells us nothing about how much data the NSA is intercepting/archiving/processing because there are no digital versions of vast portions of the full Library of Congress collection.
Read this: How ‘Big’ Is the Library of Congress?
So it begs the question, just how “big” is the Library of Congress, in terms of our content, but especially if one tried to equate it to the digital realm?
I won’t go into any of the specific claims that are being made, but they’re easy to find out there in the ether, and suffice it to say that the Library would stand behind very few if any of them. There are certain things we can quantify, but far more that are purely speculative.
For instance, we can as of this moment say that the approximate amount of our collections that are digitized and freely and publicly available on the Internet is about 74 terabytes. We can also say that we have about 15.3 million digital items online.
Some may be tempted to extrapolate that those digital items represent a precise percentage of the nearly 142 million items in the Library’s physical collections, and then estimate some kind of digital corollary. But comparing digital and physical items is apples and oranges, at best. A simple example of that fallacy would be represented by a single photograph online depicting several physical objects.
Another source of digital estimates is likely based on the number of books and printed items in our collections, which is currently about 32 million. One could attempt to establish the average length of those items (pages, words, characters, etc.) and extrapolate the digital equivalent of those 32 million physical items.
Assuming one could do that with any degree of accuracy — and that’s a big assumption — it overlooks the fact that those 32 million books represent only about one-quarter of the entire physical collections. The rest are in the form of manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, globes, moving images, sound recordings, sheet music, oral histories, etc. So how does that other three-quarters of the Library equate digitally? Can one automatically assume the digital resolution at which all maps or photographs, for instance, would be scanned? Those are major wildcards indeed.
And then there are our motion pictures, videos and sound recordings alone — around 6 million items stored at our new Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va. What is their digital equivalent? Most people who record television programs onto a computer or DVR know that a hard drive with hundreds of megabytes or even a terabyte or more can quickly fill up.
So, there you have it: A nonsensical claim, effortlessly woven into the tapestry of other nonsensical claims, to go with your morning coffee.
Via: The Baltimore Sun:
Parachini of RAND said the rule of thumb has been that every six hours, NSA collects an amount of information equivalent to the store of knowledge housed at the Library of Congress.
“The volume of data they’re pulling in is huge,” he said. “One criticism we might make of our [intelligence] community is that we’re collection-obsessed — we pull in everything — and we don’t spend enough time or money to try and understand what do we have and how can we act upon it.”
Fukushima: Workers Suffer from Internal Radiation Exposure
May 23rd, 2011Via: Mainichi:
The government has discovered thousands of cases of workers at nuclear power plants outside Fukushima Prefecture suffering from internal exposure to radiation after they visited the prefecture, the head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.
Most of the workers who had internal exposure to radiation visited Fukushima after the nuclear crisis broke out following the March 11 quake and tsunami, and apparently inhaled radioactive substances scattered by hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.
The revelation has prompted local municipalities in Fukushima to consider checking residents’ internal exposure to radiation.
Nobuaki Terasaka, head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told the House of Representatives Budget Committee on May 16 that there were a total of 4,956 cases of workers suffering from internal exposure to radiation at nuclear power plants in the country excluding the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, and 4,766 of them involved workers originally from Fukushima who had visited the prefecture after the nuclear crisis. Terasaka revealed the data in his response to a question from Mito Kakizawa, a lawmaker from Your Party.
Disney Ride Now Includes “Security Check Area, Similar to a TSA Checkpoint”
May 23rd, 2011Absolutely breathtaking.
Via: Mouse Planet:
The second room of the queue is now a security check area, similar to a TSA checkpoint. The two G-series droids are still there, G2-9T scanning luggage and G2-4T scanning passengers… While we won’t tell you why, you’ll enjoy paying a lot of attention to what the scans of the luggage show is inside. When it’s your turn to go through the passenger scan (a thermal body scan), you may be verbally accosted by a security droid.
The World’s Largest Man-Made Floating Object
May 23rd, 2011Via: Popular Science:
Shell is making good on its promise to build the largest object ever to float on water, announcing Friday it would build the Prelude FLNG Project to harvest offshore natural gas fields. The gargantuan ship will suck up the equivalent of 110,000 barrels of oil per day.
The floating liquified natural gas facility will dwarf the biggest warships, weighing in at 600,000 metric tons. By contrast, the U.S.’ next-generation Ford-class supercarrier will displace 101,000 metric tons of water. Shell says its ship will be able to withstand a category 5 typhoon.
Tornado Destroys Joplin, Missouri
May 23rd, 2011Via: Missourinet:
Emergency responders from throughout Missouri have descended on Joplin after a mile-wide tornado devastated the Southwest Missouri town. Twenty four are confirmed dead, dozens are still missing.
