If there were GoPros when I was the Navy you’d get to see videos of me chipping paint, buffing passageway floors, putting down floor tile, and other exciting work! LT Evan Levesque, a Navy fighter pilot, used his to show us what it’s like to launch off an aircraft carrier’s catapult in an F/A-18 Super Hornet.
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Looks like fun, doesn’t it?
TheDrive has the background on the pilot and his videos.
Love, sex, and political intrigue. A great read.
Lisa Howard had been waiting for more than two hours in a suite of the Hotel Riviera, enough time to bathe, dress and apply makeup, then take it all off to get ready for bed when she thought he wasn’t coming. But at 11:30 p.m. on that night in Havana—February 2, 1964—Howard, an American correspondent with ABC News, finally heard a knock at the door. She opened it and saw the man she had been waiting for: Fidel Castro, the 37-year-old leader of the Cuban revolution and one of America’s leading Cold War antagonists.
“You may be the prime minister, but I’m a very important journalist. How dare you keep me waiting,” Howard declared with mock anger. She then invited Castro, accompanied by his top aide, René Vallejo, into her room.Over the next few hours, they talked about everything from Marxist theory to the treatment of Cuba’s political prisoners. They reminisced about President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated just a few months earlier. Castro told Howard about his trip to Russia the previous spring, and the “personal attention” he had received from the “brilliant” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Howard admonished Castro for the repressive regime he was creating in Cuba. “To make an honorable revolution … you must give up the notion of wanting to be prime minister for as long as you live.” “Lisa,” Castro asked, “you really think I run a police state?” “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”
Source: ‘My Dearest Fidel’: An ABC Journalist’s Secret Liaison With Fidel Castro – POLITICO Magazine
I’ve only seen carrier flight operations from the perspective of my destroyer sailing behind it, acting as plane guard. This is a good overview of what is actually happening there.
LCDR Joe “Smokin” Ruzicka, the last F-14 Radar Intercept Officer to fly the Tomcat Tactical demonstration, is back to walk us through exactly what it took to strap on a 70k pound F-14 Tomcat in the dark of night and successfully get flung off the front of a US Navy super carrier via one of the ship’s mighty steam-piston catapults.
I walk closely behind Corky through the passageway, making sure I have all of my gear strapped down while there is still a fraction of light. Once you step outside the hatch to the flight deck, it’s likely the only real light will be a partial moon hidden behind some clouds. Corky told me to grab the back of his survival vest once we stepped out onto the flight deck and not to let go. The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is simply too dangerous for a new guy to wander around on, especially at night and alone.
Immediately after you step outside, your senses strain to help your brain figure out what is going on. Your eyes see nothing. It’s too dark. You better have your flashlight out and pointed at the ground or you will step on something dangerous. Your ears hear the high whine of other airplanes turning just above you. The first thing you smell is jet fuel. Lots of it. The fumes are everywhere, but it’s not suffocating, just omni-present. Mostly, you just feel the rush of wind interspersed with an intermittent burst of jet exhaust. The wind might be hot or it might be cold, depending on the time of year and the location of the ship, but the exhaust is always hot. In any case, the air is definitely moving and it creates a noise inside your helmet that can be partially deafening.
Source: How To Successfully Get Launched Off A Carrier At Night In A F-14 Tomcat
Yet another security flaw with Intel chips.
Intel has addressed a vulnerability in the configuration of several CPU series that allow an attacker to alter the behavior of the chip’s SPI Flash memory —a mandatory component used during the boot-up process.
According to Lenovo, who recently deployed the Intel fixes, “the configuration of the system firmware device (SPI flash) could allow an attacker to block BIOS/UEFI updates, or to selectively erase or corrupt portions of the firmware.”
Source: Intel SPI Flash Flaw Lets Attackers Alter or Delete BIOS/UEFI Firmware
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that law enforcement agencies are “increasingly unable to access” evidence stored on encrypted devices.
Wray is not telling the whole truth.
Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials. Many of the documents were obtained by Motherboard using public records requests.
Source: Cops Around the Country Can Now Unlock iPhones, Records Show – Motherboard
When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tried to describe the difference between “surveillance and what we do.” “The difference is extremely clear,” a nervous-looking Zuckerberg said. “On Facebook, you have control over your information… the information we collect you can choose to have us not collect.”
But not a single member of the committee pushed the billionaire CEO about surveillance companies who exploit the data on Facebook for profit. Forbes has uncovered one case that might shock them: over the last five years a secretive surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed.
Source: These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database
Would being asked to pay Facebook to remove ads make you appreciate their value or resent them even more? As Facebook considers offering an ad-free subscription option, there are deeper questions than how much money it could earn. Facebook has the opportunity to let us decide how we compensate it for social networking. But choice doesn’t always make people happy.
In February I explored the idea of how Facebook could disarm data privacy backlash and boost well-being by letting us pay a monthly subscription fee instead of selling our attention to advertisers. The big takeaways were: Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook will remain free to everyone, including those who can’t afford a monthly fee, so subscriptions would be an opt-in alternative to ads rather than a replacement that forces everyone to pay Partially decoupling the business model from maximizing your total time spent on Facebook could let it actually prioritize time well spent because it wouldn’t have to sacrifice ad revenue The monthly subscription price would need to offset Facebook’s ad earnings. In the US & Canada Facebook earned $19.9 billion in 2017 from 239 million users. That means the average user there would have to pay $7 per month.
However, my analysis neglected some of the psychological fallout of telling people they only get to ditch ads if they can afford it, the loss of ubiquitous reach for advertisers, and the reality of which users would cough up the cash. Though on the other hand, I also neglected the epiphany a price tag could produce for users angry about targeted advertising.
Source: The psychological impact of an $11 Facebook subscription | TechCrunch
When I first confronted my GERD stomach issues a few decades ago I had a choice: I could simply take an antacid pill each day for life or I could get surgery to fix it. The pill would’ve been easy, painless, and relatively inexpensive but I chose the surgery simply because I didn’t want to be dependent on Big Pharma.
This Golden Sachs analyst’s remarkable candor shows, in a nutshell, what’s wrong with a capitalistic health care system. What’s good for the patient is not always good for the investor. In fact, pretty frequently it’s not.
If you had any illusions about the true motivation of the medical industry you should now know the truth.
Wall Street greed is often why we can’t have nice things.
Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”
“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”
Source: Goldman asks: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
North Carolina native, talk show pioneer, and fellow explorer Art Bell has passed away, or as we in the amateur radio field say, W6OBB is now a “silent key.”
I started listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast show back around 1995. Much of what I heard was off-the-wall nonsense but some of it was truly amazing. Life-changing amazing, in fact.
He was always a gentleman on the airwaves, no matter whom was his guest. In the depths of those dark nights you always felt like you had a friend out there, somewhere in the desert of Nevada.
Thanks for all the stimulating conversation and for shining a light on some of the most interesting topics imaginable.
He was awake when most of the country was asleep, cultivating a loyal following while sharing his fascination with the unexplained on his nighttime paranormal-themed show.
For the better part of two decades, longtime late-night radio personality Art Bell was his own producer, engineer and host of his show, “Coast to Coast AM.” He later launched his own satellite radio program from his Pahrump home after retiring from full-time hosting duties in 2003.
On the airwaves, Bell captivated listeners with his fascination for the unexplained, such as UFOs, alien abductions and crop circles. He died Friday at his home at the age of 72.
“As he begins his journey on the ‘other side,’ we take solace in the hope that he is now finding out all of the answers to the mysteries he pursued for so many nights with all of us,” Coast to Coast said in a statement Saturday.
Source: Pahrump-based radio host Art Bell dies at 72 – Las Vegas Review-Journal
I recently formatted my home NAS with the XFS filesystem, then was mystified when some NFS exports worked fine while others didn’t. It turns out it’s an XFS quirk and needs a tweak to the /etc/exports file, as detailed in this blog post below.
I fixed it by adding fsid=1, fsid=2, … to the export options of each share in /etc/exports so that NFS could individually identify them. Kind of a bother but it works!
I recently turned up a new RAID array and plopped an XFS filesystem down on it. I didn’t bother setting any specific tunings when I created the filesystem. However I couldn’t for the life of me export any subdirectories from the volume over NFS. Local access was fine and I could export via netatalk and samba.On the server I saw messages like this in the logs:
Feb 14 13:08:43 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.50:1003 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:08:57 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.50:1002 for /opt/music (/opt/music)Feb 14 13:15:19 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:717 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:20 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:1001 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:22 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:1002 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:26 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:801 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:34 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:967 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:44 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:794 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:15:54 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:855 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:16:04 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:863 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:16:14 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:932 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)Feb 14 13:16:24 monolith rpc.mountd[3092]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.20:830 for /mnt/music (/mnt/music)On the client I would get two different behaviours, depending on whether it was NFSv4 or NFSv3 that was being used. With NFSv4 it would mount the directory, but any attempt to read from it would give a ‘Stale NFS handle’ error:
root:~# mount -t nfs -v 192.168.1.10:/mnt/music /mnt/mount.nfs: timeout set for Fri Feb 14 16:49:39 2014mount.nfs: trying text-based options 'vers=4,addr=192.168.1.10,clientaddr=192.168.1.20'root:~# ls /mnt/ls: cannot open directory /mnt/: Stale NFS file handle
Source: NFS Exports And XFS’s inode64 Mount Option – mmacleod.ca
