To keep the long-delayed Air Force Ones and the Qatar-donated 747-8 flying for decades, the USAF has taken delivery of a perfectly fine Lufthansa jumbo just to carefully dismantle it in the Arizona desert and stockpile everything from the windshields to the escape slides //
The US Air Force has taken delivery of a former Lufthansa Boeing 747-8 that will have a very different second life from the one it enjoyed carrying passengers across the globe. The aircraft, registered D-ABYG and named Baden-Württemberg, has arrived in the United States to become a source of spare parts for the next generation of presidential aircraft. //
D-ABYG is the second of two Lufthansa 747-8Is purchased by the Air Force for about $400 million, but it is not destined to become an Air Force One itself. Instead, the aircraft is being incorporated into an organic parts pool that will provide components for the 747-8 fleet over the long term. Its sister aircraft, D-ABYD, has a different role and is being used as a dedicated trainer for aircrews and maintainers. The acquisition gives the Air Force relatively young 747-8 airframes that closely match the aircraft it is preparing to operate, while also providing a way to secure components for a jet whose production line has already closed, //
A government report on the VC-25B program noted in 2023 that commercial 747-8 aircraft had zero spares available in its windshield risk assessment. The report said the previous supplier had closed its factory, while Boeing had contracted PPG to develop replacement windshields that still required certification. Passenger windows have presented another manufacturing and quality challenge.
You can simply search for "Quick Assist" on Search or use the combination Ctrl + Win + Q to launch the app.
The next step depends on whether you're the one doing the helping or are being helped. The person doing the helping clicks "Help someone" on the app to generate a time-limited six-digit code, which they pass on by phone or by message.
The person on the other end, then, has to type in the code and allow screen sharing before anything shows up on the helper's screen. Once that's done, there's all there is to it. The helper can request control, and the sharer gets another prompt to either allow or deny. Nothing happens without the sharer's consent, and they can pull control back any time with "Cancel control." In the session, the helper also gets access to a few useful tools like a pointer, annotation tools, and a chat window for typed messages. //
Remote Desktop is unlike quick Assist, it's purpose-built for connecting to your own machines. The only catch is that it's limited to Windows 11 Pro and higher editions when it comes to hosting an RDP session, so if you want to reach your gaming PC from a laptop or jump into a Windows VM in Hyper-V, the host needs to be on Pro edition. The client side, however, works on any edition, so a Home machine can connect to a Pro host, just not the other way round.
Then, there's Windows Remote Assistant (msra.exe), which is the legacy option that predates Quick Assist by over a decade. The one real advantage it offers is that neither party needs a Microsoft account to use it. You can launch it from Run, send an invitation file, and the person on the other end can just connect with a password you've set. //
Ben
Rustdesk is my go to.
lacking a basic but very important feature "clipboard".
John Travolta’s former Boeing 707 is taking shape again at Australia’s HARS Aviation Museum, where a five-person crew from Worldwide Aircraft Recovery has begun reassembling the historic airliner following its journey from Georgia. At the end of March, we reported that John Travolta’s Boeing 707—once operated privately by the actor and former Qantas ambassador—was making its way to a new home in Australia. Donated to the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) in 2017, the jet was dismantled by Worldwide Aircraft Recovery at the Port of Brunswick in Georgia in March 2026 and prepared for shipment to the museum at Albion Park.
Once reassembled, Travolta’s former jet will go on permanent display at HARS, where it will be preserved as one of the last surviving examples of the rare Boeing 707-138B.
The J58 engine temperature limited the top speed. The speed limit for the airplane ironically had nothing to do with the airframe; it had to do with the engines. Right in front of the engine compressor was a temperature probe that reported the temperature to the pilot; when the temperature was around 427C, 800 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s as fast as they were allowed to go. //
David Peters, former SR-71 Blackbird pilot, explained to me;
‘A little clarification on the speed thing. You are absolutely correct on the 427C. The issue is that I have been limited to less than Mach 3 on a few occasions because the outside air temperature was quite above standard and 427C came up at about 2.95. On other occasions like the Murmansk deal I got above 3.4 (3.49 on the one occasion) and wasn’t close to 427C. The actual limiting airspeed is around 3.55 that is where the spike being at full retraction loses the intercept on the shock wave and can no longer position it correctly in the inlet. ‘Also the overflow of the shock starts to go over the wing and interfere with the flight controls. So the limiting speed as configured would be about 3.55 so long as you don’t exceed 427C.’
Mike Relja, who worked on in with the SR-71‘s for over 30 years, added;
‘I don’t know of any warranty that P&W had or any other parts manufacturer for that matter.
‘On the March 6th [Mar. 6, 1990] speed run Ed Yeilding stated that Don Emmons gave them permission to fly the max limit of 3.3 M, they asked Lockheed if they could exceed that number and Lockheed said no if the aircraft had an unstart above 3.3 it may go out of control and come apart hard to keep the pointy end forward. Also, no fuel flow limits established above 3.3 M were ever tested.
‘P&W did give them clearance to exceed 427 CIT for 30 minutes to a limit of 450 CIT but that wasn’t needed they stayed at the book limit of 427 CIT.’*
The engines maker Pratt & Whitney would not warrant or guarantee anything beyond 427; after that, all bets are off the engine could come unglued or you could shed turbine blades. The SR-71 crewmembers were too responsible to risk and exceeded the temperature limit. They wanted to keep the warranty on the engines, the J58’s.
*SR-71 pilot Ed Yeilding (who along with JT Vida as RSO flew the Blackbird during the speed run of Mar. 6, 1990) told me that another reason they didn’t exceed 3.2 is that they were afraid they’d run out of gas before they got to Dullas airport.
Title: The Public HatingTitle Record # 41026
Author: Steve Allen
Date: 1955-01-00
Type: SHORTFICTION
With $100 worth of gasoline, an internal-combustion-engine car would go 862 miles; with $100 worth of electricity, an electric vehicle would go 2,310 miles—nearly a threefold advantage for the EV.
For home heating, $100 would buy enough fuel for a gas boiler to provide 30 days of heating; it would also fund enough electricity for a heat pump to provide 42 days of heating—a 40 percent edge for the heat pump.
The figures are 2025 global averages from the IEA report, and the gaps are probably larger today with gasoline and natural gas experiencing price spikes that exceed rising electricity costs.
Global electrification trends also tell the story. The world used 16.7 percent of its final energy—meaning the energy consumed by the end user—from electricity in 2000, and that share rose to 23.4 percent in 2025, according to the IEA.
China has had the largest change, and North America was among the smallest in that period, a difference largely attributable to levels of renewable energy use and EV adoption.
President Trump has honored our nation and its noble veterans throughout both terms of his presidency. Now, President Trump is planning to complete a long overdue project to honor our nation’s veterans by building a monumental arch on Memorial Circle at the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery.
It is a national embarrassment that policy makers have neglected for more than 100 years to build a congressionally authorized monument on this circle to honor our nation and its veterans. As chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, I applaud President Trump’s historic efforts to build a monumental arch at Memorial Circle, and will vote to approve this project.
In 1925, Congress enacted a law authorizing the executive branch to construct a monumental project linking the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. The centerpiece of this project would be a monumental plaza on Columbia Island between Robert E. Lee’s home atop Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. //
The 1925 Act is still in effect and authorizes President Trump to finish this project. Indeed, as late as 1951, the government was still working on other aspects of the project, such as installing the massive Arts of War and Peace equestrian statues at the D.C. side of the bridge, which were accepted as a gift from the Italian government. //
The absence of a monument at Memorial Circle is a disgrace to our country and especially to our veterans. Congress intended Columbia Island to have a monumental plaza as a fitting entrance to the sacred ground of Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, there is nothing but an empty traffic circle that pedestrians cannot even access. //
President Trump’s Triumphal Arch will finally bring this project to completion. Like the monumental plaza envisioned in the 1925 act, the arch will signify American unity and greatness. The pillars of the arch will reach 166 feet, the exact same height as the initial columns, and will be topped with winged figures like the originals.
The inscription across the arch, “One Nation Under God,” perfectly captures the vision of great Americans going back to Jackson and Daniel Webster. And placing this arch at the entry of Arlington National Cemetery will show that our nation reserves its grandest monuments for an entryway to the graves of those who fought to defend her freedoms.
The arch will also offer veterans, families, and grateful Americans with unparalleled views into Arlington National Cemetery. And the military has determined that the arch is a necessary platform from which to provide advance defense capabilities for our capital.
Washington, D.C. is the only capital of a great nation that lacks a monumental arch. President Trump is finishing yet another project that has been allowed to languish for decades and finally providing an appropriately grand gateway to the final resting place of our brave men and women at Arlington.
George Gilder explains in the opening of his prescient book, Men and Marriage, how monogamy and male/female complementarity are essential for human civilization because male sexuality is categorically distinct from female. In fact, unbridled male sexuality is every society’s first and must fundamental social problem. Woman’s civilizing influence via normative monogamy is the natural answer. Humanity has called that marriage from pre-civilizational days.
In his first chapter’s opening sentence, Gilder states, “The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of the male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality.” He continues, “The prime fact of life is the sexual superiority of women” because “women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens, change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create.”
You undo that, and you undo life-giving civilization.
This is what the whole sexual revolution has always been about. Its ravaging architects have been warning us with every regressive advance. Their strategic appeal to our kindness through manipulative claims of tolerance has paved the way. We continue to fall for it. Polyamory is now advancing because good men fail to connect the dots. Women and children deserve better.
he Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) has been a rousing success.
The group of four reactor criticalities achieved during the early phases of the RPP mark a major step forward in the process of designing, developing, testing, iterating, refining and licensing new types of nuclear fission power plants that have not yet become commercially viable.
The program is not over; expect to hear additional announcements of major milestones during the next several months.
Perhaps the most important outcome of the RPP – measured over the long term – is that it provided the Department of Energy several opportunities to refine its processes for reviewing, approving, constructing and operating novel reactor technologies. That full authorization process has now been completed for four separate reactors with reviews continuing for participants in the RPP and Launch Pad that are at different stages of development. With experience and practice the process continues to improve. Exercising with real world projects is a terrific way to refine processes and procedures. //
The RPP has helped to restore the development process originally envisioned by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. That foundational piece of legislation provided a framework for Atomic Energy Commission reactor licenses that established appropriately differentiated rules and process requirements for licensing reactors that were still being developed and refined compared to the rules that govern licensing for reactors that were ready to compete in the commercial energy markets.
The next step is to begin exercising the transition between DOE R&D reactor authorization and NRC pre-commercial licenses under Class 104(c). Adequate rules are in place and do not need any immediate “act of Congress” or lengthy rule-making processes.
The RPP showed that the U.S. is capable of moving smoothly when building new nuclear power systems using appropriate levels of cooperation between government, government contractors and private enterprise. Major process steps have been developed and exercised. There is a daunting amount of work ahead but there are clear paths on which to take the next important steps in this rewarding journey.
So, now, how do I replace the hard disks and then update the sizes in my ZFS pool?
More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written.
The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line.
People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them.
Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent.
A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner.
Please take a moment to read my pastor’s essay.
Milt Windler, one of the four leaders of Mission Control who in 1970 directed the round-the-clock efforts to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth safely, has died at the age of 94. //
“Apollo was such a rapid pace that I don’t think people had the chance to think about it very much. It has only become more clear to me later on that we were making history,” said Windler in a 2006 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. “You’d do a mission and then you’d immediately turn around and get ready for another mission.”
“It was not [a] time for reflection,” Windler said. //
“If I did it again, I’d probably try to do something more about trying to pay more attention,” said Windler. “Apollo was — well, all of [the missions] were … bang-bang-bang. You couldn’t enjoy, really, in a way you couldn’t savor it, like maybe it would have been better to have done.”
When I first opened draw.io, I honestly wasn't expecting much. The interface looked clean and fairly basic. There wasn't a lot happening on the screen, and I initially wondered whether I had found a proper Visio alternative or just another lightweight diagramming tool.
I decided not to judge it too quickly and spent a little time exploring the interface. That was when I started noticing that simplicity was actually one of its strengths. //
After spending enough time with draw.io, I stopped thinking about what I was missing from Visio. Instead, I started focusing on what I could actually get done with it. That shift made a bigger difference than I expected.
Let's face it, most of us buy NAS drives on faith. I certainly did, and every hard drive in my NAS is a NAS or enterprise model because that's what you're told to put in one. Ask why, and the answer often comes back as a single firmware timeout that determines how long a drive keeps fighting a bad sector before it gives up. It's not the only specification you should pay attention to, but it's an important one for when using RAID.
That timeout goes by three names: TLER on WD drives, ERC on Seagate, and CCTL on Samsung and Hitachi. It's been a spec-sheet bullet since WD's RE4 server drive advertised it in 2009, and it's a big reason people tell you to buy the best hard drives for NAS instead of whatever's cheapest. So I asked my own drives what they were set to, and the number wasn't the one I expected.
Picture a drive hitting a sector it can't read cleanly. A desktop drive will keep rereading it, adjusting and retrying, because it assumes it holds the only copy of your data and giving up means losing it. That's the right call for a lone drive in a PC, and it's why desktop drives have traditionally shipped with the limit switched off.
In an array, that stubbornness backfires. Once you set up RAID in a NAS, another copy of that data sits on a different drive, and the array would rather rebuild the sector from there than wait. Hardware RAID controllers drop a drive that stalls past their command timeout, while Linux waits 30 seconds by default before resetting a drive that's gone quiet. A time-limited drive gives up early, reports the error, and lets the array fix it, saving you time and your data.
sudo smartctl -l scterc /dev/sde remembering that smartctl counts in tenths of a second:
sudo smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/sde
50 legendary internet rabbit holes you can spend hours exploring👇
- zoom.earth — Watch the world via live satellite imagery
- flightradar24.com — See every plane currently in the sky
- marinetraffic.com — Track all ships at sea in real time
- windy.com — Live map of winds and storms
- lightningmaps.org — Watch lightning strikes hitting Earth in real time
- earthquake.usgs.gov — Live list of recent earthquakes
- submarinecablemap.com — Ocean cables carrying the internet
- globalforestwatch.org — Watch forests disappear from space
- worldometers.info — The world's statistics, second by second
- internetlivestats.com — Current number of tweets and searches being posted
- thetruesize.com — Compare the true sizes of countries
- oldmapsonline.org — Maps from centuries ago
- davidrumsey.com — Archive of 150,000 historical maps
- openstreetmap.org — World map drawn by volunteers
- window-swap.com — Look out the window of a random person around the world
- virtualvacation.us — Virtual walks through cities
- mapcrunch.com — Teleport to a random spot on Earth
- atlasobscura.com — Catalog of the world's strangest places
- neal.fun — Interactive knowledge experiences
- htwins.net/scale2 — Scale journey from atom to universe (Updated HTML5 link)
- eyes.nasa.gov — Explore the solar system in 3D
- stellarium-web.org — Real sky map in your browser
- apod.nasa.gov — NASA's astronomy picture of the day
- images.nasa.gov — NASA's entire visual archive, free
- pudding.cool — Visual articles told through data
- ourworldindata.org — The state of the world with real data
- gapminder.org — What we mistakenly think we know about the world
- informationisbeautiful.net — Visualizing complex data
- data.worldbank.org — World Bank's open data
- data.tuik.gov.tr — Turkey's official statistics database
- archive.org — Archive of millions of books, films, and software
- gutenberg.org — 70,000 free books whose copyrights have expired
- openlibrary.org — Record of every book in the world
- loc.gov — U.S. Library of Congress digital archive
- europeana.eu — Europe's cultural heritage archive
- dp.la — America's digital library collection
- artsandculture.google.com — Tour museums from home
- rijksmuseum.nl — Download artworks in high resolution
- wikiart.org — Archive of 250,000 artworks
- publicdomainreview.org — Forgotten visual treasures of history
- openculture.com — Free archive of culture and education
- metmuseum.org — Met Museum's open collection
- musicmap.info — Family tree of music genres
- radiooooo.com — Pick a country and decade to listen to that era
- listen.hatnote.com — Turn Wikipedia edits into audio
- wikipedia.org — Random knowledge well
- timeanddate.com — Time, sunrises, and sky events
- sciencedaily.com — Live stream of science news
- arxiv.org — Free preprints of scientific papers
- observablehq.com — Visualize data with live code
Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports, evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers:
The new Northeastern study shows, for the first time, data flowing among the vehicles, the vehicle apps you download when you buy your car, and third-party companies, documenting exactly what kind of data gets siphoned from our vehicles and which companies are receiving that information.
Basically, your car’s manufacturer has you under constant surveillance, and they use that data against you.
Default date in form
^ # ^ Date of check ^ User Name ^ Description ^
<pagemod custom_check _before>| @@auto_inc@@| @@Date of check|@@today@@@@ | @@meta.user.name@@ |@@Check Description@@ |
</pagemod>
<form>
action pagemod _self custom_check
fieldset "New Entry"
textbox "Check Description" ^
hiddenautoinc "auto_inc"
hidden "today" "=%Y-%m-%d"
yesno "Need to enter your own date?"
fieldset "Enter your date" "Need to enter your own date?"
date "Date of check"
fieldset "√"
submit "√ Submit"
</form>
MKD Ars Praetorian
10y
433
Bash said:
As much as I'd love a future Democrat government to fix this fourth amendment violation, this is not a new policy as of our current president. The current administration may have 'invented' using this tactic for oppression and intimidation, but so far both the R's and the D's are in support of this violation of our constitutional rights.
"Both"? This goes back to Collection Act of 1789, so throw in some Fs (Federalists), Ws (for Washington and the Whigs), NR (National Republican), NU (National Union), and D-Rs (Democrat-Republicans) and those Founding Fathers in the first Congress who voted for it.
Section 24 of the Collection Act empowered inspectors by giving them the authority to execute a warrantless search of any maritime vessel for any undeclared cargo or merchandise that was not on the vessel's shipping manifest if they believed that the ship was concealing taxable items intended for sale. The Collection Act did not specify criteria for suspicion, apparently leaving this up to the individual customs agents to determine on a case-by-case basis. It allowed for appointed agents of the United States to detain and board any vessel in U.S. waters in an effort to discover undocumented cargo. Furthermore, if a search proved fruitful, agents could appropriate a warrant and perform a daytime search of any dwelling, house, storage facility, or other place if they believed operations defrauding the nation of revenue were occurring there.
Q. So is SpaceX just being selfish, or what?
A. SpaceX is a business, and like a lot of other businesses, especially publicly traded ones, the goal is to maximize revenue. From their perspective, it makes sense to remove distractions (such as Dragon and Falcon 9) and focus on the future of the company (Starship).
One way of looking at the last 20 years of spaceflight history, and NASA’s efforts to stimulate a low-Earth orbit economy, is to view SpaceX as the exception to the rule. In some sense, an economy based on astronauts in low-Earth orbit got lucky that SpaceX executed so successfully on Dragon. This allowed for the creation of a market around the idea of access at a price of $50 million per seat. At the same time, transportation competitors in cargo (Northrop) and crew (Boeing) struggled mightily. The best SpaceX’s competitors could do was nearly twice the price, and even then, not as reliably.
NASA seems to think Starliner, even at higher prices, will provide the guaranteed access it needs to low-Earth orbit in the 2030s for its astronauts. But in terms of a broader space economy in low-Earth orbit—which for decades the space agency has explicitly sought to foster—it is difficult to see Starliner providing a suitable solution. So yes, SpaceX pulling out of this market harms the industry. But should it be incumbent upon SpaceX to continue a line of business solely because it benefits its peers and competitors? //
Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
41,072
I mentioned this after another article on the topic. The problem was NASA simply assumed that Dragon would be available for them in the future. They were used to dealing with contractors who were beholden to NASA's (and the DoD's) purse strings. It never occurred to NASA that a private company might decline to do business with them when given the opportunity. Otherwise, NASA would have included an availability clause in their Commercial Crew contracts that required SpaceX to provide the craft they helped pay for. It was simply NASA hubris that never envisioned this possibility. //
afidel Ars Legatus Legionis
24y
18,341
Subscriptor
Asbestos Muffins said:
nasa was barred from doing anything like that though. the whole point was commercial operators, privately owned and maintained vehicles
No, they weren't. They could have put in optional buys into the contract requirements, say up to 30 launches in traunches of 5 or 10 with pricing not to exceed X% above the previous traunch. That's fairly standard contract language when a buyer is investing heavily in a product.