cmdr_burr
6 hours ago
Ha ha! Great story, Colonel! Takes me back to my enlisted days, when, as an E-3, I was assigned to buff a passageway (with no prior instruction). I got whacked in the 'nads right off the bat (but only once).

Nos Nevets

Only once! Castrated, huh?

Pointy Haired boss: I hear we need more eunuch programmers.
Dilbert: That's "UNIX".
PHB: Oh. If the company nurse comes by, tell her nevermind.

MC
2d ago

In the nineties, Martinair Holland reconfigured some of their MD11 freighters to transport passenger due to higher demands in the summer period. In the off peak season, it configured back to freighter. //

The closest thing I can think of was back in the 1960s when the Boeing 727-100 QC(Quick Change) variant was developed. The this 727 variant was designed with high utilization in mind. Flying passengers during the day and flying cargo during the night,this aircraft had passenger seats,galleys and lavatories on pallets over a roller bearing floor. The switch from passenger to cargo configuration (and vice-versa) could be done in 30-45 minutes.

NEW DELHI—Two thousand years ago when there was no internet, no social media, and no matrimonial apps for cross-cultural and cross-national alliances, a 16-year-old princess from India sailed to Korea to meet her husband in a journey that changed the course of dynastic history and continues to drive forward the diplomatic and cultural relations of India and South Korea.

The marriage of Indian princess Suriratna, know as Hur Hwang-ock to the Koreans and King Kim Suro of the Gaya Kingdom in 48 AD started the Karak dynasty to which six million Koreans today historically trace their ancestry.

Fission energy can change America's power for the better -- and we’re finally seeing progress in revitalizing the field across the country.

Tesla has the experience, data, and the miles to prove that it is going to be the top dog, and it is going to be difficult to knock them off of the pedestal. Tesla had over 3 billion miles driven on Autopilot in May, and Wood says the company is coming up on 20 billion real-world miles. Google only has between 20 and 50 million, she added, according to Seeking Alpha.

Delta's research is based on its business customers saying what they're going to do in the future. 40% say they'll be back to normal flying by 2022. I don't even know how I'm going to behave next week. //

Then again, I do believe there'll soon be enormous enthusiasm for getting away from it all to anywhere sunny that'll let us in. Just so we can breathe quietly and forget 2020.

Wouldn't it be a beautiful twist of fortune if, in the near future, companies worked far harder at getting their employees to fly away and relax with their loved ones, rather than to eat steak and drink whiskey with someone they don't even like?

CBS’ Catherine Herridge is dropping some intriguing information from the U.S. State Department. They’ve come out with a fact sheet with previously unknown facts about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

What immediately catches your attention is this incredible passage:

1. Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):

The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.

Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.

The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.

The fight to allow women to find meaning in their careers has resulted in denying them the same pride in finding meaning outside of the workplace. //

For the many women who have found that career simply isn’t enough, however, it can feel like you have let down your sex. It can feel you’ve taken for granted those women who fought for equality in the workplace years ago. As much as feminists insist women are shamed into staying at home, the situation today is often exactly the opposite. //

The feminist idea that women only stay at home because they are oppressed or that the wage gap exists because women are discriminated against hurts their pursuit of happiness. I know several women, including me, //

Even though it’s entirely natural for women to want to mother their children or make the choice to work part-time so they can more involved at home generally, women are made to feel that their natural impulses are inauthentic, self-harming, and wrong.

In truth, women are not discriminated against in opportunities. More women than men attend college and get degrees. The gap between the degrees women hold and the actual careers they pursue shows what so many women actually want, and how that often changes when they get married and begin to raise a family.

N905NA
The first Boeing 747 that NASA purchased was a -100 variant previously registered as N9668. According to Planespotters.net, American Airlines initially took delivery of this aircraft in October 1970. It was one of 16 747-100s that the carrier operated between 1970 and 1985. However, American soon found it was struggling to fill these mammoth airliners. //

NASA eventually withdrew N905NA from use in 2013, a year after the final shuttle-carrying flights. The following year, it was dismantled and then transported to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for preservation. Since 2016, it has been on display in an area of the center called ‘Independence Plaza,’ with a replica Space Shuttle attached to it.

N911NA
NASA did not obtain its second Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, N911NA, until 1988, shortly after the Challenger disaster in 1986. Planespotters.net reports that this 747-100SR (‘Short Range’) came from Japan Airlines, where it had entered service on high-capacity domestic routes in 1973. Its original registration was JA8117. //

Despite being the newer of NASA’s two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, N911NA was the first to be withdrawn from service. This occurred in February 2012, and, before preservation, NASA used the aircraft as a spare parts source for its ‘SOFIA‘ flying telescope 747SP. N911NA eventually entered preservation two years later and is now on display at the Joe Davies Heritage Air Park in Palmdale, California.

Sometime in the early 2000s, a young Canadian filmmaker by the name of Brent Leung found himself struck by a number of facts:

The media and education establishment had instilled an obsessive fear of HIV and AIDS—not just in him—but in his entire generation.
He didn’t have a clue about the difference between HIV and AIDS or even whether there was one or, for that matter, what either is even precisely supposed to be.
Neither did virtually anyone else.
It is, of course, very unlikely that Monsieur Leung was the first to recognize this all-too-common gap between the general public’s certainty about some topic and their paucity of any actual knowledge that might warrant it.

Be that as it may, Leung’s proactive response to his befuddlement certainly was unique.

He went to the trouble of contacting all the major experts on HIV and AIDS and somehow got every single one of them to appear on camera as he asked the most basic questions about what those two acronyms represent and the relation between them.

The result of Leung’s dogged determination to get to the bottom of this disease he’d been taught to obsessively fear is about the most fascinating, can’t-stop-watching-even-if-you-want-to, 90-minutes of video that you’re likely to encounter.

That would be so even if the massive worldwide upheaval we experienced in 2020 had been nothing more than an awful bad dream.

What we’re witnessing is the dangerous normalization of a dystopian concept of “freedom” in which government dominates your life “for your own good.”
By Carina Benton
When the Australian state of Victoria issued a 48-hour warning on New Year’s Eve that its border with the neighboring state of New South Wales would be indefinitely closed, it likely secured the award for the most egregious measure by a western government to curb COVID-19. //

The dramatic border closure, and the devastating consequences for affected residents, betrays a steady, unnerving trend of human rights violations corrupting western nations. Freedom of movement and free speech, freedom to earn a living and provide for one’s family, all hallmarks of a thriving democracy, are now dismissed as superfluous. Efforts to safeguard them are decried as divisive, destructive, and dangerous. “Health and safety” have taken precedence over liberty, a horrifying trend that that has caught too many off guard and is spiraling out of control.

After tech behemoths like Twitter moved to ban Trump and thousands of other far-right accounts, millions moved to apps like Signal and Telegram for their encrypted messaging services.

There's one rub, though: Telegram, unlike Signal, doesn't have end-to-end encryption by default.

End-to-end encryption means that only the message sender and receiver can read the message. Even the server that hosts it, such as Signal or iMessage on Apple devices, can't decrypt and read what someone wrote. If those servers were ever hacked, hackers wouldn't be able to read the messages, either. It's safe to say, then, that end-to-end (e2e) encryption is an imperative element to secure messaging.

Across the internet and social media I’m reading a variety of stories about how the Justice Department and the Courts are managing the process of arresting dozens — maybe a hundred or more — persons being charged in connection with protesters storming the Capitol on January 6. Let me clear up some confusion on the process and how things are playing out in the initial proceedings which are happening in courts all across the country — and that is the first issue everyone needs to understand about what is taking place.