Effing F-35

F-35

I never liked the F-35. The idea of dragging around a giant fan that only gets used for VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) seems like a really dumb idea. They should have built the thing to land on it's tail like a Flash Gordon rocketship. Yes, it would have been a trick, but with modern electronics and controls it should have been cheaper, lighter and easier than carrying around this stupid fan. Modern jet engines are plenty powerful enough to support vertical takeoffs. In any case we have a story about a couple of problems the F-35 is having with heat:

F-35’s Cooling Crisis: Design Flaws Fuel $2 Trillion Dilemma for Pentagon by Mike Fredenburg

Then again maybe I'm just jealous that I wasn't in on the development of all the fancy software that went into this machine.

Previous posts about the F-35. I was surprised there were so many.

Fly Away

Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away (Official Music Video)
Lenny Kravitz

Heard this on the radio this morning. Came out in 1998.

Close Call

Driving north on Jackson School Road this morning, I see a man jogging on the sidewalk. He is also heading north and he is on the portion of the sidewalk closest to the road. You might think he is going the wrong way if the normal rule of 'keep right' applies, but this sidewalk is special. The left lane, if you can consider that sidewalks have lanes, is for bicycles and the other one or two lanes are for people walking.  Jogging is not walking, so you might consider jogging in the bike lane the correct choice.

As I catch up to the jogger, he encounters a woman walking a couple of dogs and one of the dogs takes exception to the jogger and makes a lunge toward him. Was the dog just trying to say hello, or was he trying to take a bite out of him? I couldn't say. I only saw this for a split second, long enough to see the startled jogger take a step toward the road. If he had taken two steps we would have collided.

I did not even think about braking until I was past them and there was no bang or bump, so I just drove on. Disturbing to say the least.

Sukiyaki

Kyu Sakamoto - Sukiyaki (Lyrics + HQ)
mzyxetp3

This song showed up in the USA in 1963. I'm surprised I remember it, I was only 12 years old at the time but I remember it vividly.

Spinny

How fast can a HDD spin
Cskirt

If I don't get enough sleep I become a zombie and end up spending hours watching YouTube short videos and you get this one. I never wondered about this because I assumed that the electronics would be designed to work at a certain speed, so there would be no point to changing the speed of the disk. Even if the electronics could be adapted to work with a faster disk, it wouldn't make a significant difference in performance because the limiting factor is the time it takes the heads to move to a different track.

Russian Missile Fired at Ukraine

Here are a couple of video of warheads from a big Russian rocket impacting in Ukraine. Some people think the missile was an ICBM, other people say no, it's just a big rocket. But the first video says it's a MIRV - Multiple, Independent targeted Re-entry Vehicles. Watching the video, it looks like there are like six groups each containing maybe six elements. Groups are spaced about one second apart. An American ATACMS missile travels about 1 kilometer per second, and ICBM travels at like 7 kilometers per second. I don't understand how either one could deliver multiple blows at one second intervals. I think I'm missing something.

BREAKING:

New video shows a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) striking Ukraine.

The video shows reentry vehicles from its MIRV hitting the city of Dnipro.

It’s the first time in history that an ICBM is used in war. pic.twitter.com/o198cJXvXm

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 21, 2024

This footage captures a major attack unfolding in Ukraine, with Zelensky claiming it was caused by an ICBM—missiles designed to deliver nuclear or conventional warheads and nearly impossible to intercept.

This marks the first-ever deployment of an ICBM just days after Ukraine… pic.twitter.com/kaLwLIDFsd

— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) November 21, 2024

 

Bravo Zulu

Stolen entire from Borepatch:

The Bad Guys are on a losing streak

Earlier this week we saw a bunch of Russian hackers sentenced to prison, now we see Interpol execute a massive take down of multiple groups of Bad Guys:

Interpol is reporting a big win after a massive combined operation against online criminals made 41 arrests and seized hardware thought to be used for nefarious purposes.

Operation Synergia II – the follow up to the first Synergia raids that were announced in February – saw cops in 95 countries crack down on phishers, ransomware extortionists, and information thieves around the world. The operation was carried out in conjunction with the corporate world, specifically Group-IB, Trend Micro, Kaspersky and Team Cymru.

In addition to the arrests, Interpol revealed 65 people are still under investigation and claimed to have shuttered 22,000 IP addresses, taken control of 59 servers and 43 other computing devices.

Bravo Zulu, y'all.

Bravo Zulu? Navy term for 'well done'. 

Cyber criminals are the worst. The Beekeeper springs to mind, as does the ransomware attack on an engineering firm I hired a couple of years ago. On one hand you could blame the victims for not ensuring their computer systems were secure, but on the other hand with exponential growth of the computing industry, is it even possible to make your system absolutely secure? Well yes, if you cut all the wires and lock it in a Faraday cage. Okay, it needs to be secure, but it also needs to be usable, so we have to balance these two requirements and when we do, sometimes security gets short-changed. That's why we've got to wade through these annoying identification protocols when you call most any business about most anything at all.