With its iconic “brrrrrt” sound and painted-on teeth, it is easy to distinguish the A-10 Thunderbolt II (affectionately referred to as the Warthog)—the plane built around a gun. Despite the love from its fans and high accuracy for close air support (CAS), there is still continuous debate as to whether to retire the A-10.
For starters, the plane is quite old. Created in 1977, the A-10 has seen its share of upgrades. Just one year after being created, it was upgraded with the Pave Penny laser pod, which can “sense reflected laser radiation from a laser designator.”1 Other upgrades include Global Position System navigation systems, multifunction display, and precision engagement upgrades. Each of these keeps the A-10 up to date with current technology, so why are there plans to retire it?
It is because it is still considered outdated and is “the oldest and least-ready aircraft” to modernize.2 However, the benefits of keeping the A-10 around outweigh the negatives. //
There are alternatives to using the A-10, but the Warthog still prevails through its many planned retirements because of its training requirements, design, weaponry, and ability to fly low and slow. The opinion by and large is that the A-10 is outdated, but this plane constantly proves why it has been around this long. No other plane is built like the A-10 or can do everything the A-10 does, and the US Air Force does not have any plans to bring any other plane to that standard. That is why no other plane would be able to truly replace the A-10.
Over two decades ago, Warren Buffett lectured at the University of Florida's school of business and gave students life lessons on happiness, careers, finances, and relationships.
Buffett urged students to do the things they know will enjoy throughout their lives and gave good counsel about making business connections with likable people. "I only work with people I like," Buffett told students. "If I could make $100 million with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I'd say no."
I urge you to work in jobs you love. You're out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it'll look good on your résumé.
Because you can't sell cars that have a 1 in 150 chance of randomly going boom.
A less discussed and yet critical issue involving the comparison between TVs and monitors is sub-pixel structure. Each and every pixel on any full-colour display is made up of a number of sub-pixels. The most common structure is known as RGB, which indicates red, green and blue subpixels in that order.
Almost all PC monitors are RGB – indeed, for computing, anything other than standard RGB is a problem. That’s because operating systems like Windows rely on sub-pixel structure to render fonts accurately and smoothly.
Many TVs also use RGB, but some stick with BGR (blue, then green and then red), and it means computing applications and browsers largely aren’t ideal – while more complex RBGW systems found on some TVs also tend to reduce detail and sharpness.
If a TV uses an IPS panel, it’s probably RGB, while a VA panel could be either RGB or BGR – but as TV makers don’t always list sub-pixel information, this can be much harder to discern with small TVs than with PC monitors.
Hardware failure and a careless user feeling adventurous with powerful utilities such as dd and fdisk can lead to data loss in Linux. Not only that, sometimes spring cleaning a partition or directory can also lead to accidentally deleting some useful files. Should that happen, there’s no reason to despair. With the PhotoRec utility, you can easily recover a variety of files, be it documents, images, music, archives and so on.
Developed by CGSecurity and released under the GPL, PhotoRec is distributed as a companion utility of Testdisk, which can be used to recover and restore partitions. You can use either of these tools to recover files, but each has a job that it’s best suited for. Testdisk is best suited for recovering lost partitions. //
Although initially designed to only recover image files (hence the name), PhotoRec can be used to recover just about any manner of file.
Even better, PhotoRec works by ignoring the underlying filesystem on the specified partition, disk or USB drive. Instead, it focuses on the unique signatures left by the different file types to identify them. This is why PhotoRec can work with FAT, NTFS, ext3, ext4 and other partition types. //
The greatest drawback of PhotoRec – if any tool that can seemingly pull deleted files out of the digital ether can have a drawback – is that it doesn’t retain the original filenames. This means that recovered files all sport a gibberish alpha-numeric name. If this is a deal-breaker for you, consider using Testdisk first to recover your lost files.
To Install Testdisk open a terminal window and first update the software repositories before installing testdisk.
Ethiopian Airlines has been the fastest-growing airline in Africa over the past decade or so. It has succeeded where many other airlines have struggled, largely due to a strong plan set out in 2010. In December 2020, it won the best African airline award in the Decade of Airline Excellence Awards. How has it risen to this level?
Jesse Kelly
@JesseKellyDC
Tried to warn everyone drastic measures should have been taken back when that pipeline got hacked. We paid a ransom and the administration basically said, “not much problem”.
We just DRIP weakness under Biden. They’re all coming for us now.
Jacqui Heinrich
@JacquiHeinrich
🚨BREAKING, thread:
The State Department has been hit by a cyber attack, and notifications of a possible serious breach were made by the Department of Defense Cyber Command.
7:52 PM · Aug 21, 2021
Sebastian Gorka DrG
@SebGorka
“America is Back”
This is a revisitation of a post that I published in 2011, with the title “The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox“ Here, I am expanding the calculations of the previous post and emphasizing the relevance of the paradox on the availability of energy for planetary civilizations and, in particular on the possibility of developing controlled nuclear fusion. Of course, we can’t prove that nuclear fusion is impossible simply because we have not been invaded by aliens, so far. But these considerations give us a certain feeling on the orders of magnitude involved in the complex relationship between energy use and civilization. Despite the hype, nuclear energy of any kind may remain forever a marginal source of energy.
Post revised and readapted from “The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox” — Published on “Cassandra’s Legacy” in May 2011
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/10/hubbert-hurdle-revisiting-fermi-paradox.html //
It seems clear that planets are common around stars and, with about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, organic life cannot be that rare. Of course, “organic life” doesn’t mean “intelligent life,” and the latter doesn’t mean “technologically advanced civilization.” But, with so many planets, the galaxy may well be teeming with alien civilizations, some of them technologically as advanced as us, possibly much more.
The next step in this line of reasoning is called the “Fermi Paradox,” said to have been proposed for the first time by the physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. It goes as, “if aliens exist, why aren’t they here?” Even at speeds slower than light, nothing physical prevents a spaceship from crossing the galaxy from end to end in a million years or even less. Since our galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, intelligent aliens would have had plenty of time to explore and colonize every star in the galaxy. But we don’t see aliens around and that’s the paradox.
Paradoxes are often extremely useful scientific tools. They state that two contrasting beliefs cannot be both true and that’s usually powerful evidence that some of our assumptions are not correct. The Fermi paradox is not so much about whether alien civilizations are common or not, but about the idea that interstellar travel is possible. //
But let’s imagine that an alien civilization, or our own in the future, avoids an irreversible collapse and that it moves to nuclear energy. Let’s assume it can avoid the risk of nuclear annihilation. Can nuclear energy provide enough energy for interstellar travel? There are many technological problems with nuclear energy, but a fundamental one is the availability of nuclear fuel. Without fuel, not even the most advanced spaceship can go anywhere.
The techno-uptopians keep promising us technological solutions to our myriad critical problems that either don’t appear, don’t solve the problem, create many new difficult problems, or keep getting delayed far into the future (fusion-based energy comes to mind). What they never seriously ask us to do is change the way we live. That must be a major reason their “solutions” find such a large audience of ready believers.
A fund started by radio host Glenn Beck raised more than $20 million in less than three days to help evacuate Christians from Afghanistan.
The Nazarene Fund is gearing up to extract approximately 5,000 people, mostly women and children, from Afghanistan as the country descends into chaos and the Taliban take over, according to The Blaze. //
According to their website, The Nazarene Fund exists “to liberate the captive, to free the enslaved, and to rescue, rebuild and restore the lives of Christians and other persecuted religious and ethnic minorities wherever and whenever they are in need.” //
"The Taliban is stopping you, checking your phone. If you have a Bible app or anything to do with Jesus on your phone, you’re instantly being killed. They are setting Christians on fire, those who have converted because they’re the worst, according to the Taliban.” //
“Please pray for these people,” Beck added, who later said most of the millions in donations were small ones.
author David Zweig asserts that the supposed science supporting the imposition of mask mandates isn’t as solid as the left would have us believe. For starters, he brought up a large-scale study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which analyzed the spread of COVID-19 in schools.
Zweig writes:
A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools.
However, the summary left out an important factor:
Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
The author points to similar results found in European nations such as Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and others. Each of these nations has not required children to wear face masks. The article notes that “there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S.” //
Even more interesting is the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) has provided guidance regarding mask-wearing that conflicts with the CDC’s recommendations and has found that forcing students to wear masks may actually have a detrimental effect on their development. //
Over the course of several weeks, I also corresponded with many experts — epidemiologists, infectious-disease specialists, an immunologist, pediatricians, and a physician publicly active in matters relating to COVID — asking for the best evidence they were aware of that mask requirements on students were effective. Nobody was able to find a data set as robust as the Georgia results — that is, a large cohort study directly looking at the effects of a mask requirement. //
The notion that the CDC would suppress information demonstrating that their narrative regarding masks for children lacks merit is telling. The reality is clear: The CDC and the left want your kids wearing masks whether they work or not. Why else would they hide this information?
This is a dishonest and despicable spin that no one, not even the author, believes. It is partisan hackery, it is stupid. But that, in a nutshell, describes our “foreign policy experts.”
Another day has passed and that means a fresh Ron DeSantis conspiracy theory must be birthed. The latest one (and the most serious charge in a while) comes from the Associated Press, which trumpeted that ‘DeSantis top donor invests in COVID drug governor promotes‘ in the headline.
Sounds awful, right? Clearly, the bad Florida man is promoting a COVID treatment so his top donor can make money off it and then redistribute funds back via political donations. And, to be sure, that’s the takeaway most took as the internet exploded with another cycle of accusing DeSantis of being everything from anti-vax to wanting people to die.
So what’s the real story? Well, it does involve a DeSantis donor, but not at all in the way it was being framed. Rather, the donor is a hedge fund manager that manages almost $40 billion in assets. The company in question makes up a tiny fraction of the total investments to the point where it’s irrelevant. In fact, they aren’t even really investments. Rather they are call options.
Further, the treatment in question…works. In fact, the article admits that, though, their headline was meant to give a different impression. ///
A Political Action Committee (PAC) can only donate $5000 directly to a candidate per election. If DeSantis was trying to do a "Pay for Play" he is doing it wrong. There are some very good examples on the other side of the aisle on how to do it a lot better!
The rhetoric around the First Amendment tends to be incredibly misinformed. On one side are the First Amendment absolutists who act like proscribing any speech—even hate speech, or even when the prohibition is made by a private company—is tantamount to an assault on the very concept of freedom and liberty. Usually, these absolutists are screaming at people on the other side who haven’t actually thought through how wide-reaching government restrictions on speech—“Ban Fox News!” “Ban people who lie!”—would lead to an utter dystopia.
Invariably someone shows up to say, “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” (which is not true—you absolutely can shout fire in a crowded theater, so stop quoting this line), and everybody turns off the television less informed than when they started.
The reality of our First Amendment freedoms is altogether more boring, and more nuanced. The government does and must have the authority to regulate speech in all kinds of situations. But that authority is and should be treated with deep skepticism. The government should always be challenged to come up with the least restrictive means to achieve its legitimate ends. But when courts adhere to that principle, when judges issue practical rulings that balance the right to free speech against the government’s legitimate interest in restricting certain kinds of speech, the cases don’t make the news.
That’s why the decision at the end of the Supreme Court’s term in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L.—better known as the “cheerleader case”—garnered comparatively little attention, even though the underlying controversy was widely publicized. At issue was a Snapchat post from Brandi Levy. As a first-year high school student, Levy failed to make the varsity cheerleading team. Disappointed, she posted a picture of herself with the caption “Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.”
Students who made the squad saw Levy’s post and showed it to the cheerleading coach. The coach then suspended Levy from the junior varsity team. Levy sued the school. //
It’s not hard to imagine an off-campus Snapchat post that could require in-school discipline. Most people would probably agree, for instance, that the school could punish Levy if she had joked about doing violence to her coaches, even if the message did not rise to the level of “true threat” required to get law enforcement involved. Other, more subtle forms of intimidation also might warrant punishment from the school. And yet Levy’s particular post was clearly not that, and schools should generally be prohibited from policing students after hours. That is the job of their parents, not the state.
The current federal standard for school restrictions on speech was set in Tinker v. Des Moines, in 1969. The Supreme Court ruled that students do not lose First Amendment protections simply by showing up to school, but they do not enjoy absolute freedom of speech either; schools can punish students whose speech “materially and substantially” interferes with school business. In the years since, Tinker has been extended to things like field trips, but it has never been applied to fully off-campus speech like Levy’s. And it has never contended with the age of social media.
In Mahanoy, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 8-1, ruled to protect Levy—and declined to extend the Tinker standard all the way off campus. In his majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer issued a limited and exceedingly pragmatic ruling that made clear that Levy’s conduct is constitutionally protected and sent a signal to schools that their authority to police off-campus speech is much more limited than their authority to police speech within their buildings. //
Breyer disagreed. Instead, he listed a number of instances in which a school may have cause to regulate off-campus speech, including when a student uses social media to bully or harass other students.
A former aide to former Vice President Mike Pence blamed racist views of a top Trump administration official for the inability of many translators and other allies to get out of Afghanistan before the U.S. withdrew troops. //
Miller said in a statement Saturday that "the sole reason that anyone is stranded in Afghanistan is because Joe Biden stranded them there in the single most imbecilic act of strategic incompetence in human history."
"All the desperate lying liars in the world can’t change that one inescapable fact," he said.
Miller's wife, Katie, who was Pence's communications director, tweeted out a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service showing the number of special immigrant visas for Iraqis and Afghans was higher during the Trump administration than during the last four years of the Obama administration.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R43725.pdf //
Olivia of Troye
@OliviaTroye
·
Aug 20, 2021
🧵There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7)
Olivia of Troye
@OliviaTroye
I tracked this issue personally in my role during my WH tenure. Pence was fully aware of the problem. We got nowhere on it because Trump/S. Miller had watchdogs in place at DOJ, DHS, State & security agencies that made an already cumbersome SIV process even more challenging.(2/7)
Pence, in a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, said the Biden administration’s “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-pence-biden-broke-our-deal-with-the-taliban-11629238764
Pence said Biden had no plan to "facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting."
State Department spokesman Ned Price this week said the Biden administration inherited a special immigrant visa system that had chronic shortages in staffing, lacked a coordinating official and had a bureaucratic 14-step process that was enshrined in statute.
At Biden’s direction, Price said, the administration added resources and made enough changes to shave more than a year off the average processing time.
The number of visas issued went from 100 in March to 813 visas per week recently, according to Price.
We are ruled by buffoons who embellish their incompetence with a disdain for Americans and Constitutional freedoms. They are protected by a deeply corrupt and highly partisan civil service that will deceive the American people to protect a Democrat and engage in the ruthless character assassination of any Republican. Top cover for both is flown by the fearless firefighters in our media who will never do anything beyond acting as stenographers for any Democrat administration. We are at the point where virtually any foreign government should be considered more reliable than our own. //
Genna
an hour ago
Every member of the Biden administration who spoke to us this week about the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan withdrawal lied to us, contradicted one another and dodged uncomfortable questions. While telling us the evacuation is going well, people on the ground in Kabul and videos shot in real time tell a very different story. Why should we believe the infrastructure bill is an important piece of legislation that will benefit the American people, the COVID vaccines are safe and effective and the southern border is secure
Memory test software, often called RAM test software, are programs that perform detailed tests of your computer's memory system.
The memory installed in your computer is very sensitive. It's always a good idea to perform a memory test on newly purchased RAM to test for errors. Of course, a memory test is always in order if you suspect that you may have a problem with your existing RAM. //
Memtest86 is a completely free, stand-alone, and extremely easy to use memory test software program. If you only have time to try one memory test tool on this page, try MemTest86.
Simply download the program from MemTest86's site and put it on a flash drive. After that, just boot from the USB drive and you're off.
https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm //
Windows Memory Diagnostic is a free memory tester provided by Microsoft. Very similar to other RAM test programs, Windows Memory Diagnostic performs a series of extensive tests to determine what, if anything, is wrong with your computer memory.
Just download the installer program and then follow the instructions to create a bootable floppy disk or ISO image for burning to a disc or flash drive.
After booting from whatever it is you made, Windows Memory Diagnostic will automatically begin testing the memory and will repeat the tests until you stop them.
https://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Memory-Tweak/Microsoft-Windows-Memory-Diagnostic.shtml //
Memtest86+ is a modified, and presumably more up-to-date, version of the original Memtest86 memory test program, profiled in the #1 position above. Memtest86+ is also completely free.
We'd recommend performing a memory test with Memtest86+ if you have any problems running the Memtest86 RAM test or if Memtest86 reports errors with your memory and you'd like a really good second opinion.
Memtest86+ is available in ISO format for burning to disc or USB.
As MemTest86 V9 supports only the newer UEFI platform, older PCs without UEFI support would be unable to boot MemTest86. In order to run MemTest86, PCs with legacy BIOS platform must use the older V4 release of MemTest86. The download links for the V4 downloads are still provided for those that prefer to work with the V4 bootable images.
“I just wish I could take all this fear on myself and go do this day for her!” she wailed.
I laughed. I knew how she felt. I knew what she meant. But in my head I wondered- if a magic genie suddenly offered me the chance to take on this nerve-wracking day in place of my daughter, would I actually do it?
I think it’s important to let our children face their fears. Overcoming fear, learning from fear, is a vital life lesson. It is better to let them discover those lessons in the relative safety of your own home and your own arms than to shelter them from discomfort and force them to learn those lessons under harsher, more adult circumstances in the future.