If there is an off-ramp that might prevent what now appears to be the inevitable reduction of Ukraine to rubble, then Western leaders should not block it with bellicose talk and weak half-measures.

The people of Ukraine have a chance because they are armed. Imagine if they had been training with these weapons their whole lives. //

The world is captivated by Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion, especially since much of Ukraine’s resistance comes from ordinary citizens taking up arms in defense of their homeland.

Ukraine has a fighting chance in part because it has taken dramatic steps to provide its people firearms. More than 25,000 automatic rifles and 10 million rounds of ammunition have been distributed to volunteers in Kyiv.

In the United States, even supporters of draconian gun control are announcing they “stand with the brave Ukrainian people” in their armed resistance. The glaring contradiction between these positions — supporting gun confiscation one day and gun distribution the next — seemingly hasn’t dawned on many of these ideologues. //

Ukraine is certainly moving in the right direction on gun rights, something that can’t be said of the entire United States. The chairman of Ukraine’s parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, says the new law is meant “to ensure that every citizen receives the sacred right to self-defense.”

The people of Ukraine have a chance because they are armed. It’s a lesson the world should never forget.

Trump not only successfully deterred Russia from acting against Ukraine, he effectively deterred a lot of bad behavior across the planet. //

Arecent Harvard-Harris poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump were still in the Oval Office. As former senior intelligence officials under President Trump, we agree with that view. //

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 when George W. Bush was president. Russia took Crimea in 2014 when Barack Obama was president. Russia has now invaded Ukraine with Joe Biden as president. However, when Donald Trump was president, Russia did not seize territory from any of its neighbors. //

We believe the long answer begins with these ten ways that Donald Trump projected American strength and kept the bad guys in check:

Rebuilt the American Military
Crusaded for American Energy Dominance
Set the Tone by Launching Surgical Missile Strikes in Syria in Early 2017
Developed Strong Relationships with Middle Eastern Nations Based on Mutual Interests
Was Ruthless with the Taliban While Winding Down the Afghanistan War
Crushed the ISIS Caliphate
Demonstrated a Consistent Willingness to Take out the Bad Guys
Stood Up to China
Strategically Used Unpredictability as an Asset in Foreign Affairs
Advanced Tough Russia Policies and Provided Lethal Aid to Ukraine while Maintaining an Open Dialogue

This action-packed movie captures the desire and adventure behind treasure hunting, even if it does come off as a little cliché.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to pile further pressure on chip manufacturing as a squeeze on the supply of rare gases critical to the production process adds to pandemic-related disruptions.

Ukraine supplies about 50 percent of the world’s neon gas, analysts have said, a byproduct of Russia’s steel industry that is purified in the former Soviet republic and is indispensable in chip production. //

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, neon prices shot up by at least 600 percent. Companies have said they can tap into reserves, but the rush to find suppliers that are not in eastern Europe is causing shortages and price hikes, not only of neon but also other industrial gases such as xenon and krypton.

Forty percent of the global supply of krypton comes from Ukraine. The price of the gas, which is used in semiconductor production, rose from ¥200-300 ($1.73-2.59) per liter to nearly ¥1,000 ($8.64) per liter by the end of January, according to Date. //

Gas mixtures that include neon are used to power lasers for etching patterns into semiconductors. Shifting away from Ukraine is difficult because it has to be refined to a 99.99 percent purity, a complex process that only a few companies around the world can do — including some based in the Ukrainian port of Odessa.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made an announcement on Thursday that he’s been waiting to make for several months now: his wife Casey is cancer-free.

“I have a positive update about my wife Casey DeSantis,” he announced in a video on Twitter. “After going through both treatment and surgery for breast cancer, she is now considered cancer-free.”

Unlike other companies that are taking a moral stand against Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, CNN’s reason for no longer broadcasting Russia is, well … kind of hilarious. According to a report from Reuters, CNN decided to pull out of Russia after a new law was passed there, threatening jail for anyone who intentionally spreads “fake” news. //

This is probably as close as we’ll get to CNN admitting that they are fake news.

Nixon would play a pivotal role in protecting the Jewish state, as Nixon recognized that the defeat of Israel was unthinkable for US interests. Nixon went to Congress to request authorization for emergency aid for Israel despite the Gulf States announcing a price increase of seventy percent in the wake of the Arab assault. After Nixon went to Congress for authorization, the Gulf States responded vigorously, announcing a total boycott of the United States, causing the oil shock of 1973.

The Gulf States’ retaliation simply served to further entrench the opposition of many who had fought to slow or halt the shipment of weapons to the Israelis (the former being represented by Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Kissinger, the latter being represented by Secretary of Defense Schlesinger). Nixon hit the roof when he learned that Kissinger was delaying the airlift because of a concern that it would offend the Russians. Despite the opposition of his national security and foreign policy brain trust, Nixon ordered the airlift, saying, “We are going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for three hundred,” and later in exasperation at the slow start of US support, said “Use every [plane] we have—everything that will fly.”

Finally, after several days of internal politicking amongst the upper echelons of the Administration, Nixon got his airlift: “Operation Nickel Grass.” Over the course of the airlift 567 missions were flown, delivering over 22,000 tons of supplies, and an additional 90,000 tons were delivered to Israel by sea. Later in her life, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir would admit that upon hearing of the airlift during a cabinet meeting, she began to cry.

Nixon’s loyalty drove him to save a US ally from the threat of utter destruction despite the real risk of economic crisis, and political cost to himself. To borrow the phrase from the Kennedy clan, Nixon’s decision to aid Israel was a true “profile in courage.”

HuMo-genealogy is a free, open-source and multilingual server-side program that makes it very easy to publish your genealogical data on the internet as a dynamic and searchable family tree website.

HuMo-genealogy was created and is being constantly developed by Huub Mons in the Netherlands and all credits for this wonderful program go to him. If you are Dutch-speaking, please visit Huub's site instead. This English website is brought to you by Yossi Beck and aims at the international public. For a brief note you can contact me through the contact button on the top menu. For assistance with the installation and use of Humo-genealogy, please join the English Forum.

HuMo-genealogy is classified as a Gedcom to PHP program. This means it knows to take a Gedcom file (files that can be created and exported by all major genealogy programs) and convert it to PHP files, that display dynamic webpages on the internet.

To complement and contrast the two most popular answers, . ~/.bashrc and exec bash:

Both solutions effectively reload ~/.bashrc, but there are differences:

. ~/.bashrc or source ~/.bashrc will preserve your current shell session:

Except for the modifications that reloading ~/.bashrc into the current shell (sourcing) makes, the current shell process and its state are preserved, which includes environment variables, shell variables, shell options, shell functions, and command history.
exec bash, or, more robustly, exec "$BASH"[1], will replace your current shell with a new instance, and therefore only preserve your current shell's environment variables (including ones you've defined ad hoc, in-session).

In other words: Any ad-hoc changes to the current shell in terms of shell variables, shell functions, shell options, command history are lost.
Depending on your needs, one or the other approach may be preferred.

Note: The above applies analogously to other shells too:

To apply the exec approach to whatever your default shell is, use exec $SHELL
Similarly, the sourcing approach requires you to know and specify the name of the shell-specific initialization file; e.g., for zsh: . ~/.zshrc

[1] exec bash could in theory execute a different bash executable than the one that started the current shell, if it happens to exist in a directory listed earlier in the $PATH. Since special variable $BASH always contains the full path of the executable that started the current shell, exec "$BASH" is guaranteed to use the same executable.
A note re "..." around $BASH: double-quoting ensures that the variable value is used as-is, without interpretation by Bash; if the value has no embedded spaces or other shell metacharacters (which is likely in this case), you don't strictly need double quotes, but using them is a good habit to form.

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webtrees is open-source software, which means it’s constantly improved by a community of developers and costs $0 - yes, that means totally FREE! All you need to use it is a website with PHP and MySQL installed.

It works from standard GEDCOM files, and is therefore compatible with every major desktop application; and it aims to be efficient and effective by using the right combination of third-party tools, design techniques and open standards.

The ability to mobilize civil society, through media in particular, can tip the scales towards victory or defeat as much as bombs and tanks.

Established in in 1985, Blackstone Laboratories strives to provide an easy-to-use, understandable, fast, and accurate oil analysis program.

At the heart of our program is ICP (inductive coupled plasma) spectrometry, database averages for comparing wear, and a comments section on each report that explains — in plain English! — what your results mean.

To get started, just fill out our kit request form for a free sampling kit. The cost of analysis is $30.00. We also have a discount analysis program, if you’re interested in a price break.

Fortunately, the United States also maintains a nuclear triad that can strike all of Russia, providing a strong deterrent to a Russian attack.

The difference is that while Russia has modernized its nuclear forces about 90% of the way through, the U.S. still relies on platforms built during the Cold War. For instance, the U.S. is still squeezing life out of the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile that was designed in 1960.

Programs to replace these outdated capabilities with modern systems are just getting underway, and each year must overcome opposition from far-left members of Congress. //

Bottom line: As much as U.S. policymakers might like to wish away nuclear weapons from existence, unfortunately, the enemy gets a vote. Putin’s recent inflammatory rhetoric, nuclear saber-rattling, and military actions in Ukraine are proof of the need for a strong, modern U.S. nuclear force.

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Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA's Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their "very poor" performance in developing these vehicles.

Martin said that the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion. This is, he said, "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable." With this comment, Martin essentially threw down his gauntlet and said NASA cannot have a meaningful exploration program based around SLS and Orion at this cost.

Later in the hearing, Martin broke down the costs per flight, which will apply to at least the first four launches of the Artemis program: $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, $568 million for ground systems, $1 billion for an Orion spacecraft, and $300 million to the European Space Agency for Orion's Service Module. NASA, Martin said, had checked and confirmed these figures.

What is striking about these costs is that they do not include the tens of billions of dollars that NASA has already spent developing the Orion spacecraft since 2005 and the Space Launch System rocket since 2011. If one were to amortize development costs over 10 flights of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, the $4.1 billion figure cited by Martin would easily double. //

Later during the hearing, US Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), asked whether the incremental costs of flying more than one Artemis mission a year would bring the cost down. Martin said he did not know for sure. Moreover, NASA is not planning to fly more than one Artemis mission a year, so the question is somewhat moot.

Martin, however, appeared to doubt that there would be significant cost savings due to the inefficiency of the program and its large aerospace contractors.

"Part of it goes to the efficiencies of the underlying contractors, like Boeing," Martin said. "One of the problems we saw in development of the SLS and Orion—it's a challenging development of course—but we did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing's part, poor planning, and poor execution."

Then, unprompted, Martin continued to criticize the programs set up by Congress to fund the rocket and spacecraft. House and Senate members told NASA to use "cost-plus" contracts, which ensure that companies involved in the development and operation of these systems receive all of their costs, plus a fee. This tends to disincentivize timely work completed within a set budget. (Remarkably, NASA was told to continue using cost-plus contracts even after the development program.)

"We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using to develop that combined SLS-Orion system worked to the contractors' rather than NASA's advantage," Martin said. //

In reality, no one should expect Congress to care about the high cost of the SLS and Orion program. The legislature created the programs this way. //

In fact, key members of Congress have been critical of NASA every time the agency has tried to break free of cost-plus contracting and use a more commercial approach through fixed-price contracts. That congressional skepticism has persisted even as the commercial approach has borne fruit. As tensions with Russia rise, for instance, NASA only has independent access to space because of the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Lest anyone doubt this, House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) took aim at NASA's commercial space efforts in her opening statement at the hearing. The context of her statement concerns NASA's desire to purchase commercial services for spaceflight in the future rather than oversee their development in-house like it did with SLS and Orion.

"I find the sum of these actions to be very troubling," Johnson said. "And it raises the question of whether NASA will even retain the capabilities and workforce within the agency that will be needed to get US astronauts to Mars if all of these privatization plans are realized."

At least it answers the question of where congressional priorities lie.

Even if you are the most committed Putin fluffer getting paid by the hour to plague political blogs and post nonsensical statements about Russia’s awesomeness, you have to admit that nearly 2,100 casualties over seven days of a “cakewalk” (to coin a phrase) operation are a lot. That is 300 troops per day (the equivalent of a Russian infantry battalion). When you consider that most of the casualties will come from the front-line troops, and that is especially true in this war as Ukraine has demonstrated an inability to hit Russian rear echelons with anything other than a handful of drones, the loss of a few hundred soldiers can take on immense importance.

Let me take a moment to explain. I commanded an infantry company in a Light Infantry Division (read the history of how we came to be here). The division had a personnel limit of 10,000 soldiers. //

When a Light Infantry Division deployed, it had 3,375 men on the front line and 6,625 troops supporting, supplying, and commanding them. At the level of wastage the Russians are experiencing in Ukraine, an American Light Infantry division would cease to be combat effective in less than a week. By the way, two days ago, I estimated the Russians would lose at least 100-200 men per day, and I was poked fun at by the pro-Russian trolls that have started infesting our comments list. Right now, I feel pretty good about my estimate. //

The US invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, and the “official” war closed with the fall of Baghdad (population 7 million versus 3 million in Kiev) //

This is a total of 20 days. While I can’t find a source to do a day-by-day count of casualties (the graph on page 11 of the link indicates about 30 dead and 130 wounded in March and April combined), the US military suffered from March 2003 through December 2003 468 killed and 2,416 wounded //

It is doubtful that an army with 498 dead has only had 1,600 wounded. That number should be around 2,500 and probably over. UNLESS Russian medical care is so inept that many men who should have survived died.

I would submit that if the Russian casualty list is high enough to admit to over 2,000, the actual number is higher.

Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark gives his insights on the West’s response to Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine and what the US should do now.

Musk steps to the plate with essential tech support for assets threatened by Russia after its invasion didn’t go as swiftly as originally planned.

TechCrunch first discovered the vulnerability as part of a wider exploration of consumer-grade spyware. The vulnerability is simple, which is what makes it so damaging, allowing near-unfettered remote access to a device’s data. But efforts to privately disclose the security flaw to prevent it from being misused by nefarious actors has been met with silence both from those behind the operation and from Codero, the web company that hosts the spyware operation’s back-end server infrastructure.

The nature of spyware means those targeted likely have no idea that their phone is compromised. With no expectation that the vulnerability will be fixed any time soon, TechCrunch is now revealing more about the spyware apps and the operation so that owners of compromised devices can uninstall the spyware themselves, if it’s safe to do so.

Given the complexities in notifying victims, CERT/CC, the vulnerability disclosure center at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, has also published a note about the spyware.

What follows are the findings of a months-long investigation into a massive stalkerware operation that is harvesting the data from some 400,000 phones around the world, with the number of victims growing daily, including in the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Jamaica, the Philippines, South Africa and Russia.

On the front line of the operation is a collection of white-label Android spyware apps that continuously collect the contents of a person’s phone, each with custom branding, and fronted by identical websites with U.S. corporate personas that offer cover by obfuscating links to its true operator. Behind the apps is a server infrastructure controlled by the operator, which is known to TechCrunch as a Vietnam-based company called 1Byte.