Sunday, April 24, 2016
The Navy’s new drone warship may change naval combat
The Pentagon is about to realize its dream of having a drone warship to hunt foreign stealth submarines.Meet the ACTUV (Antisubmarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel) — a crewless,140-ton, 132-foot-long robotic ship unveiled in Portland’s Willamette River on Thursday.
“This is a big, big, deal,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said.
“It looks like a Klingon Bird of Prey,” he added, admiring the vessel’s narrow bow.
“It’s extremely inexpensive compared to a manned system and it takes men and service women out of harms way. So why wouldn’t we want to do this?”
The ACTUV, pronounced “active,” costs $15,000 to $20,000 a day to operate, according to the Department of Defense. It was conceived in 2010 by Darpa, the Pentagon’s developmental wing responsible for testing emerging military technologies.
And those expenses are chump change compared with the operating costs of an aircraft carrier or submarine. For example, the USS George Washington, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, costs a cool $1.1 million a day to operate, the Navy told The Wall Street Journal. Staffing the ACTUV costs an estimated $684,900 a day.
“You can afford to use it in ways or think about using it in ways that would be too dangerous for a manned vessel,” Scott Littlefield, the ACTUV’s program manager, told Business Insider. “Like taking it into a minefield or taking it within range of somebody else’s weapons.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever get away from sailors on big ships,” he added, “but I could imagine a future in which we have a mixture of ...
MIT: Incandescents Now More Efficient than LEDs
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| The 110 Year-Old Light Bulb That's Never Been Turned Off |
Why is this interesting? About a decade ago, governments around the world developed a fetish for banning incandescents (through an efficiency rule) and replacing them with expensive LED technology and florescent bulbs. It happened in Europe first but eventually came to the United States. The last American factory to produce them closed in 2010, and they are ever harder to find in even the big-box hardware stores. (As with all such bans, there are exceptions for elites who desire specialty bulbs.)
The change has been seriously annoying for many consumers. It has even given rise to hoarding and...
IRS and Congress Ignore Job-Related Felonies – as Long as They Are Committed by Illegal Aliens
The hearing also exposed the failure of Congress to do anything to protect American citizens from massive illegal alien job-related identity theft, leading me to think that what needs to be done is to provide the Social Security numbers of all members of Congress plus the Social Security numbers of all IRS officials and their staffs to illegal aliens so they can file their taxes without stealing the identities of average American citizens.
IRS and Congress Encourage and Tolerate Illegal Alien, Job-Related Felonies
Three key points came from the interchange between Sen. Coates and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
- The IRS encourages and facilitates the commission of job-related felonies, including Social Security fraud, forgery, perjury, and identity theft as long as these crimes are committed by illegal aliens and their employers.
- The IRS places the interests of illegal aliens ahead of those of American citizens by forbidding its employees from notifying American citizens, including millions of American children, that their Social Security numbers are being fraudulently used by illegal aliens in spite of the fact that these Americans suffer serious harm.
- Congress is complicit since it has long been aware of the problem but has done nothing to protect American citizens from...
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Friday, April 22, 2016
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