A lab accident quadruples battery life.
This reminds me of the discovery of vulcanized rubber.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Big Brother In Redmond
This seems like a good reason not to enable Cortana:
Section 7b – or “Updates to the Services or Software, and Changes to These Terms” – of Microsoft’s Services EULA stipulates that it “may automatically check your version of the software and download software update or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the Services, playing counterfeit games, or using unauthorised hardware peripheral devices.”
And they decide what is and isn’t “authorized.”
Russia Goes Reusable?
I doubt it, but Space Daily is reporting that. It’s a misleading headline and picture, though. They aren’t really resurrecting Buran. Looks like they plan on a fly-back first stage.
Got A Drone?
Here’s now to fly it by the FAA rules.
I’ve been thinking about picking up a cheap quadcopter just to play with, but probably not one big enough to require filing a flight plan.
[Late-morning update]
Man versus drone versus the law:
I personally like some of the quirkier aspects of old English law. I think limiting self-help against drones to thrown T-shirts would make a wonderful common law rule. If you can take it down by throwing a T-shirt at it, then it’s too damn close. If not, then tough luck.
“Excellent. We could call it the rule of ‘quod tangit tunicula.'”
Heh.
Hillary’s Emails
Do they all still exist?
The Denver based company that Hillary hired to watch over her server, Platte River Networks, says it is highly likely that a full backup of all of Hillary’s emails was made from her old server before it was wiped clean. This calls into question how truthful Hillary has been with the voters and law enforcement.
You don’t say.
Platte River networks is not a suspect in any crime and is cooperating fully with the FBI. Hillary must hate that.
Yes.
[Monday-morning update]
Just pardon Hillary now:
Not only would a pardon have legal consequences. It would have political ones. It would be a tacit endorsement of Clinton, a message to Biden not to run. Scrutiny of Clinton would fade. A few news outlets might continue to dig around—we at the Washington Free Beacon will never, ever stop—but most reporters, who’d rather not be writing about this scandal anyway, would turn elsewhere.
Obama would look magnanimous. The country would be spared years of Clinton drama it doesn’t want. A pardon would be a final display of Obama’s moral superiority to the woman he defeated long ago—exactly the sort of self-righteous gesture that most appeals to him.
As Elizabeth Price Foley notes, he’s not being serious, of course, but it is fun to tweak this gang of corrupt thieves and liars. As Nixon said, he gave his enemies the weapons they needed to destroy him. So has Hillary. And I suspect, at this point, one of those enemies is Barack Obama.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Former CIA operative: “You or I would be fired and maybe jailed for this.”
It’s almost as though, in these peoples’ minds, the greater the responsibility, the least the accountability.
[Update a while later]
Surprise! The discovery of thousands of emails that the State Department denied the existence of in 2013:
…this has to be either willful incompetence or a conscious effort to obstruct a court order. If they missed a few responsive e-mails, I’d chalk it up to incompetence; if they missed the most responsive e-mails in an avalanche of data, willful incompetence might still be a good explanation. This looks much more like obstruction of justice, and perhaps the judge in this case may be persuaded to haul State Department officials into court to testify under oath about it. The court can start with John Kerry and start working downward.
At least we still have a judicial branch. It doesn’t seem like we have a Justice Department any more.
If she’s not prosecuted for this, a lot of people who have been will have a good equal-protection case for clemency.
[Update a while later]
Who down-domained the information?
As noted, whoever it is should be questioned. Maybe with conditional immunity.
The Explosion(s) In China
A beautiful, despairing photo essay from the only reporter to get inside the perimeter.
Low Oil Prices
Surprisingly to many (and dismayingly to OPEC), they haven’t shut down shale production. Many wells are more profitable at low prices than many predicted.
Dave O’Neill used to scoff at me when I said that $100/barrel oil was an unsustainable price. Of course, he used to stupidly scoff at a lot of things.
“The Ferrari Of Rocket Engines”
This is what happens when a reporter has no idea what is going on, and is simply an uncritical stenographer for NASA PAO and officials:
“It is the most complicated rocket engine out there on the market, but that’s because it’s the Ferrari of rocket engines,” said Kathryn Crowe, RS-25 propulsion engineer.
“When you’re looking at designing a rocket engine, there are several different ways you can optimise it. You can optimise it through increasing its thrust, increasing the weight to thrust ratio, or increasing its overall efficiency and how it consumes your propellant. With this engine, they maximised all three.”
The resulting engine, according to Martin Burkey of the SLS strategic communications team, blows everything we currently have out of the water.
“They ‘maximized’ all three.”
Know what they didn’t optimize? They didn’t optimize on cost. Nowhere in that article does it mention that those are actually reusable rocket engines, from the Space Shuttle. But they’re going to throw them all away the next time they use them. Ferraris are expensive, too, but at least they don’t throw the car away each time they take it for a drive.
The Space Show
David Livingston is running an Indiegogo campaign to modernize the web site. There are two signed copies of my book available for $100 donors.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Lifeboat Foundation is also doing a summer fundraiser:
Peg Kay has generously offered to triple all donations made at
https://lifeboat.com/ex/summer.growth by August 15th which is
only 2 days away.
They’re both worthwhile causes.
Huma
It’s her turn to get grilled.
As someone noted on Twitter this morning, somewhere is an underpaid IT guy who’s not going to be willing to do time for Hillary. It’s really starting to look like the White House is getting ready to throw Hillary under the bus. Does that mean Biden? Hard to see who else they’d throw their support to. He’d be the natural one to be an Obama third term.
[Update a few minutes later]
A majority (and not just “likely voters”) want there to be a criminal probe. Because they’re not as stupid as the Democrats need them to be.
And it looks like she’s not going to get Ron Fournier back:
Where do I start? How about with the Clinton campaign’s ridiculous suggestion that coughing up the server and email were voluntary acts. We know that’s bunk—because Clinton herself said she wouldn’t surrender the people’s records without a fight.
As Safire noted in the 90s, she is a congenital liar. Of course, Democrats normally like that; so is Bill, but he’s a lot better at it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Democrats are in near-panic mode. This is hilarious:
Trippi said another Democrat might well get into the race, but that beating Clinton was a very different proposition.
“I don’t think Joe Biden has given up on his desire to run for president and I’m sure there are others out there who want to get into this race. I just don’t see a path yet for how you get to the nomination,” he said.
…That leaves many Democrats in a painful place: Believing that, in the end, Clinton will be the nominee but worrying that her vulnerabilities could negate the many advantages — from demographics to the electoral college map — that they believe the party nominee should enjoy.
The progressive strategist wondered “how much longer this drip, drip, drip” of controversy surrounding the emails would continue.
“There’s a hesitance that emerges in terms of her trustworthiness,” the source said. “At some point, people will start to ask whether this hurts her electability in the general election.”
You don’t say.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, this is hilarious, too:
But concerned Democrats keep coming back to the same question: Why did the Clinton campaign not simply hand over the private server when the controversy first erupted in March?
“It’s bizarre,” said the Democratic strategist. “Let me give you some simple strategic communications advice: Put everything out first, on your terms. If you wait, or you are forced to do it, you always lose and look bad. … That is exactly what is happening here, and I find it inexplicable.”
I know this sounds crazy, but try applying Occam’s Razor. She didn’t turn it over for the same reason she set it up in the first place, in order to protect and cover up a lot of sleazy/criminal/duplicitous activity.
[Friday-morning update]
To illustrate why this matters so much, perhaps you will forgive me an analogy? Imagine that you are writing a manuscript by hand, and that your initial draft contains all the crossings out, substitutions, and spelling errors that initial drafts tend to include. Next, imagine that having completed that draft to your satisfaction, you make a perfect copy — minus all the changes and mistakes, of course — and then, lest anyone be privy to your imperfections, you burn the original. In such a case, handing over the finished draft would naturally be entirely useless to anyone who wanted to find out what changes you had made. Indeed, it would be of use only to those who believed that you were a perfect writer. That, effectively, is what Hillary Clinton has done here. As I noted yesterday, she may still come a cropper. But if so, it will be because she didn’t get rid of the incriminating materials when she had the chance.
As I noted in comments, one can plead the Fifth without an implication that one has done anything wrong. One cannot destroy evidence without that implication. The fact that she took this much trouble to make sure that even FBI forensics couldn’t get access to it will be viewed in court as having criminal intent.
[Late-morning update]
From a Democrat: The Party’s ticking Hillary time bomb:
For the past five months, those of us old enough to have lived through the 1990s have been enduring a deeply unpleasant bout of déjà vu-inspired dread. First the news breaks, inspiring the unavoidable thought, “How could [insert member of the Clinton family here] possibly have failed to realize that this would be a problem?” Then the barrage of counter-attacks from the Clinton machine against the story, poking holes, impugning motives, kicking up just enough dust to convince fair-minded observers that maybe, just maybe, there’s less to the story than it originally seemed. And finally, because journalists make mistakes and actually care about being able to stand behind the truth of what they publish, even those who ran the original story begin to backtrack, express uncertainties, and air self-doubts.
And then: Ka-Blam! The story is back and bigger than ever. Oh, that server we wouldn’t give to you? You can have it now, cleaned up all nice and tidy. There certainly weren’t any classified documents on there. Oh, there were? Oops, well, only those two — oh, I mean four — and don’t worry about how that’s just a “limited sample” of 40 emails out of tens of thousands; the inspector general of the Justice Department just got lucky. And hey, we deleted them, so who cares? (Freedom of information is for suckers.) Yes, of course, my “shadow” had access to that server and those classified emails, too. Why is that a problem? What, are you a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?
Tick, tick, boom.
The amount of denial on display here is because they got away with so much in the 90s, the Dems just figure there is no limit to how much corruption, deception and cover up the American public will tolerate.