China accounts for 70% of global REE mining and 90% of the world’s REE processing/refining. These minerals are essential for weapons systems and electronics. Beijing’s export restrictions on 12 REEs could very well disrupt the global economy and pose a risk to the U.S.’s defense supply chains. This is unsustainable and dangerous—and it has gone on for far too long. Washington must decouple.

Beijing’s practice of weaponizing its REE dominance is straight from the CCP’s unrestricted warfare playbook, a concept first outlined in 1999—combining elements of resource warfare, economic warfare, and lawfare (the CCP’s uses laws and regulations to further its national interests, when and where it sees fit).

China’s announcement to impose export restrictions on resources that it has monopolized aligns with its ongoing demands over recent months, including the demand that the U.S. change its official language regarding Taiwan independence. //

Without a state that is capable of protecting its citizens from foreign and domestic threats, its foremost responsibility, as well as ensuring economic independence, economic prosperity is not possible. National and economic security are essential building blocks.

China’s tightening of export controls should serve as a reminder of the need to decouple. //

But tariffs alone will not break China’s stranglehold on minerals. Achieving this goal will require sustained government intervention—although unfavorable to us small government proponents, it is the best path forward during such a national emergency—and a rollback of environmental and licensing regulations that CCP-backed environmental groups have been fighting for (green warfare). It was the Chinese state’s aggressive subsidization and regulation of its REE industry—coupled with destructive globalist policies—that made this dominance possible.

I have everything up and running, except for the boot screen and how I like it. Currently, it says: Password:

In Truecypt, I could change the message. After some Googling, I found it's a setting in Veracrypt: Menu > System > Settings > Edit Boot Loader Configuration

Here is the code below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<VeraCrypt>
<configuration>
<config key="PasswordType">0</config>
<config key="PasswordMsg">Password: </config>

If no PIM value is specified, VeraCrypt will use the default parameters used in versions prior to 1.12 for PBKDF2-HMAC (see Header Key Derivation). For Argon2id, default parameters are equivalent to PIM = 12:

• PBKDF2-HMAC defaults:
  • For system partition encryption (boot encryption) that uses SHA-256, BLAKE2s-256 or Streebog, 200000 iterations are used which is equivalent to a PIM value of 98.
  • For system encryption that uses SHA-512 or Whirlpool, 500000 iterations are used which is equivalent to a PIM value of 485.
• For non-system encryption and file containers, all derivation algorithms will use 500000 iterations which is equivalent to a PIM value of 485.
• Argon2id defaults: Memory Cost = 416 MiB, Time Cost = 6 iterations (equivalent to PIM = 12) //

The PIM minimal value for short passwords is 98 for system encryption that doesn't use SHA-512 or Whirlpool and 485 for the other cases. For password with 20 characters and more, the PIM minimal value is 1. In all cases, leaving the PIM empty or setting its value to 0 will make VeraCrypt use the default high number of iterations as explained in section Header Key Derivation.

23 hrs
jakeSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: If You Don't Patch Your Devices/Software, You're Begging For It
"When I first got into computing there was no such thing as patching"

You must be very old indeed ... Here's a photo of a patched Harvard Mk I program tape that has been patched:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Harvard_Mark_I_program_tape.agr.jpg

One of the first jobs I had in computing partially involved physically cutting paper tape at the correct point(s), and then taping in either more code, or corrected code, or both, or occasionally undamaged paper with the original code after the tape got "eaten" by the machinery. The bits that got taped in were usually hand-punched. Yes, it was called "patching", for what I hope are obvious. //

21 hrs
that one in the cornerSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: If You Don't Patch Your Devices/Software, You're Begging For It
Jacquard loom cards: sew them up in a different order to patch the pattern on the patch of material.

Ian JohnstonSilver badge
Reply Icon
Many (35?) years ago I had to use a PDP-11 running a copy of Unix so old that one man page I looked up simply said: "If you need help with this see Dennis Ritchie in Room 1305". //

Nugry Horace
Reply Icon
Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message
Even if an error message can't happen, they sometimes do. The MULTICS error message in Latin ('Hodie natus est radici frater' - 'today unto the root [volume] is born a brother') was for a scenario which should have been impossible, but got triggered a couple of times by a hardware error. //

5 days
StewartWhiteSilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message
VAX/VMS BASIC had an error message of "Program lost, sorry" in its list. Never could generate it but I liked that the "sorry" at the end made it seem so polite. //

Michael H.F. WilkinsonSilver badge
Nothing offensive, just impossible
Working on a parallel program for simulations of bacterial interaction in the gut micro-flora, I got an "Impossible Error: W(1) cannot be negative here" (or something similar) from the NAG library 9th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver on our Cray J932. The thing was, I was using multiple copies of the same routine in a multi-threaded program. FORTRAN being FORTRAN, and the library not having been compiled with the right flags for multi-threading, all copies used the same named common block to store whatever scratch variables they needed. So different copies were merrily overwriting values written by other copies, resulting in the impossible error. I ended up writing my own ODE solver

Having achieved the impossible, I felt like having breakfast at Milliways //

Admiral Grace Hopper
"You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"
Reaching the end of an error reporting trap that printed a message for each foreseeable error I put in a message for anything unforeseen, which was of course, to my mind, an empty set. The code went live and I thought nothing more of it for a decade or so, until a colleague that I hadn't worked with for may years sidled up to my desk with a handful of piano-lined listing paper containing this message. "Did you write this? We thought you'd like to know that it happened last night".

Failed disc sector. Never forget the hardware.

Preconfigured Cummins BESS units provide safe and reliable energy storage in capacities ranging from 211 to 2280 kWh.

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Features a glycol-based thermal management system which maintains optimal battery temperatures more efficiently than air-cooled BESS units. This ensures uniform temperature distribution and increases performance while extending battery life and reliability.

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Equipped with three levels of safety systems:

• Real-time cell-level monitoring automatically halts cell operation when the safe temperature range is exceeded, enhanced by built-in liquid immersion protection for critical safety in extreme scenarios
• FK-5-1-12 fire suppression agent
• Internal sprinkler system designed for seamless connection to external fire hoses

Standard 10-foot container

• 211 kWh and 422 kWh.
  Standard 20-foot cube container
• 633 kWh, 1056 kWh, 1520 kWh and 2280 kWh.

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Offered in two architectural designs: a standard 10-foot and a standard 20-foot high cube container, each system includes an isolation transformer and power conversion system. The battery liquid cooling system efficiently manages heat dissipation and ensures uniform temperature control, improving performance and extending lifespan.

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Completely self-contained, with plug-and-play functionality, each unit is factory-pretested and validated and can deliver seamless integration with Cummins generator sets and controllers.

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Convention for Safe Containers (CSC) certification combined with standard containerized design allows for simple transportation including compatibility with cargo ships.

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BESS can operate either in grid-forming (VF) or grid-following (PQ) mode for maximum versatility and resiliency. Each unit’s power conversion system (PCS) is optimized for its respective power range.

Cummins preconfigured BESS units, with capacities ranging from 211 kWh to 2280 kWh, deliver plug-and-play functionality for safe and reliable operation.

But we haven’t yet talked much about the missing firefighters.

At least 3% of Los Angeles County firefighters lived outside the state as of 2022 — many of them senior commanders.

They reside in border states like Arizona or Nevada, and even as far away as Florida and Alaska.

There they can afford to own homes and can send their children to schools that don’t replace math lessons with gender-identity quizzes.

They fly in to do a 7-to-12-day shift, then fly home for several weeks off.

Who could blame them, given the Golden State’s exorbitant cost of living?

On the first night of the fires, when the winds turned a fever dream into a nightmare, the county put out an all-hands call for firefighters.

Everyone was asked to report to work as soon as possible, no exceptions.

But with 3% of the force residing in other states — and hundreds more firefighters living hours away, in Central and Northern California — the investigation may uncover some uncomfortable truths.

How many of our firefighters were missing in action as Rinderknecht’s fire raged beyond control?

How many homes burned because they could not take their posts when ordered?

Why hasn’t Los Angeles set any sort of residency requirement for its emergency personnel, like most other big cities do?

For a brief period of time, I had the honor of serving under General Raymond T. Odierno in Iraq. He was, without question, one of the finest officers I ever worked for—sharp, grounded, and with a great sense of humor that managed to shine through even in the worst of times. He was also hard to miss—towering in stature, both physically and professionally—and a proud graduate of West Point’s Class of 1976. I was only a year old when he graduated from the Academy, yet decades later I’d find myself in a war zone serving under his command.

I’ll admit, there was a time when one of his statements got under my skin. General Odierno once said, “We don’t need more M1 tanks.” As a young officer who grew up believing armored warfare was the backbone of modern combat, that rubbed me the wrong way. The M1 Abrams was sacred steel—a symbol of American power. The idea that we didn’t need more of them felt almost sacrilegious.

But with the benefit of time—and watching the tragic lessons unfold in Ukraine—I can now say he was right. When a $300 drone can take out an $8 million tank, the math doesn’t lie. Warfare has changed. The generals who understood that early on were thinking ahead, not backward. Odierno wasn’t anti-tank; he was anti-waste. He understood that technology, doctrine, and strategy evolve faster than the defense industry’s profit margins.

15107 —
Submitted 7 days ago

Tom Heaverlo 4 days ago
It's a legit livery. Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u_sXrTsYik

Jorge NoronhaPhoto Uploader about 13 hours ago
It's the livery made for the 2025 Tiger Meet in Portugal, this is a Portuguese F 16

Lockheed F-22 Raptor (02036)
Submitted 7 days ago

Raptor Demo Team
Captain Nick "Laz" Le Tourneau

And let's talk about wind turbines that they love. A slight problem, one of a few but this is the worst, yet one that the Democrats are too stupid and too arrogant to admit: The machines are lasting for one-third of their advertised life. It's an engineering issue that no one has solved and that I will explain presently. The issue has required bailouts of Siemens (#2 wind turbine producer, #1 market share in the U.S.) by the German gov't. Similar info for the others isn't publicly available but read on and you will see that ALL of them face it.

It's actually simple. Wind fields are mathematically chaotic. The flows are NOT uniform. Think of wind not as the unified force that we think we feel outside because we don't stop to analyze it, but as what it really is: an infinite number of constantly varying smaller forces. This means that the wind pressure that makes the blades turn varies GREATLY on the blades. Different not only the top vs. the bottom of the blades, but along their entire length, and constantly varying on each foot of each blade as the three of them turn.

As a result, the turbines wobble at the hub. The bearings and gearboxes are warranted for 20 years but are failing at 7 years. The issue has been known since the very beginning. Anyone here drive past wind turbines and notice how many of them aren't turning? That's why. Think it's one of those easy, boring things that the engineers in the basement can fix? Think again. They can't fix it, and as a result, today's wind turbines are tomorrow's white elephants. In utility lingo, "stranded costs." We will be paying those bills for decades.

Even when they are "working," wind and solar are the least reliable power sources. Democrats hate facts and ignore critical problems. Why not, when your solution is to just raise taxes? Mr. Teixeira, I love ya to death, but I'm afraid that, alas, your underlying thesis is tragically incorrect. The "progressives" who run the Democratic Party are every bit as hooked on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as they have ever been. They continue to lie their asses off at every turn, and to stick us with the bills for their crusade.

1. Countries are back-pedaling away from their climate commitments as fast as they can. Ten years after the Paris Agreement on reducing emissions—which as, David Wallace-Wells notes, had been treated by the U.N.’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, “as though its significance approached, if not exceeded, that of the U.N. charter itself”—leaders of major countries can’t even be bothered to show up at the U.N.’s annual climate change conferences. For the upcoming November conference in Brazil (COP30), the overwhelming majority of countries have not submitted formal decarbonization plans and, of those that have, most are not compatible with the ambitious goals laid out by the Paris Agreement.

2. The U.S. is not back-pedaling, but sprinting, away from its climate commitments. The Trump administration pulled out of the Paris Agreement and has eviscerated Biden-era climate policy, including the elimination of subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. There has been a thunderous lack of protest to these moves other than press releases from climate NGOs and garment-rending jeremiads from the usual suspects like Bill McKibben.

3. Despite decades of well-funded programs, mandates and targets, global progress on eliminating fossil fuels has been extremely slow. Today, 81 percent of world primary energy consumption still comes from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from renewables, less than half of which comes from wind and solar. The renewables share is higher for electricity generation, 32 percent, but electricity only accounts for 21 percent of global energy consumption. //

The euphoria of the 2015 Paris Agreement has run into the harsh realities of a global energy system based largely around fossil fuels that is very, very hard to change quickly. Nor should we wish to do so given the likely associated costs. As Vaclav Smil points out:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

This reality has begun to sink in for political leaders around the world. Not only is net-zero by 2050 not going to happen but their constituents have a remarkable lack of interest in seeing this goal attained. In the United States, voters view climate change as a third tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate and, if action on climate change it to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. Making fast progress toward net-zero barely registers. //

Roger Pielke Jr.’s “iron law of climate policy”—that when policies focused on economic concerns confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic concerns that will win out every time—remains undefeated. //

You’ll need to go to the Windows 11 Start menu, type Registry Editor, and then step through the folder file tree much like you’d do in the Windows 10 Settings menu. Here’s the directory you’re looking for: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Once you’ve entered the “Advanced” folder, right-click to create a “New” DWORD (32-bit) Value.

Name it Start_ShowClassicMode. Then right-click that value, select Modify, and set the “Value Data” to 1. You’ll then need to restart your computer.

Workers with ropes could make the moai "walk" in zig-zag motion along roads tailor-made for the purpose. //

In 2012, Lipo and his colleague, Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. //

Lipo was not the first to test the walking hypothesis. Earlier work includes that of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island in the 1980s after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. (Heyerdahl even participated in the experiments.) Pavel's team was able to demonstrate a kind of "shuffling" motion, and he concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues. //

"Pavel deserves recognition for taking oral traditions seriously and challenging the dominant assumption of horizontal transport, a move that invited ridicule from established scholars," Lipo and Hunt wrote. "His experiments suggested that vertical transport was feasible and consistent with cultural memory. Our contribution builds on this by showing that ancestral engineers intentionally designed statues for walking. Those statues were later modified to stand erect on ceremonial platforms, a transformation that effectively erased the morphological features essential for movement."

A 36-year-old man showed up to the emergency department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, severely unwell from a puzzling set of conditions. He had abnormalities in his lungs, intestines, blood, liver, and lymphatic system—and, of course, no single clear explanation. His case was such a riddle that a master clinician with an expertise in clinical reasoning was called in to help unravel it.

Liberia’s aviation safety systems have come under critical review following an urgent inspection tour of the Roberts International Airport (RIA) and the Liberia Civil Aviation Authority (LCAA) by House Speaker Richard N. Koon.

The Speaker’s visit was prompted by reports of malfunctioning navigation and safety equipment that have left Liberia’s only international airport vulnerable and below international standards. The tour also followed revelations that the country “failed miserably” during a 2022 audit conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). ///

The airport collects a lot of money for every passenger. Why doesn't that fund all this?

Yes it does.

Seems like a lot doesn't it?

But, we must consider scale.

A 747-400 carries around 63,500 gallons of fuel, which actually makes that gallon-per-second burn rate quite efficient when you think about it.

At cruising altitude (around 35,000 feet), a 747 burns approximately 5-5.5 gallons per mile.

Works out to about 0.2 miles per gallon, which sounds terrible until you consider that the plane is moving nearly 400 people and their luggage at about 550 miles per hour.

Break it down per passenger, and you're looking at roughly 85-100 passenger miles per gallon. //

Greyhound many years ago measured its bus transport efficiency in passenger-miles/gallon. Their goal was to …wait for it… get to and maintain that very 85–100 passenger-miles/gallon number range.

There's no consumer more averse to DRM-adjacent restrictions on computer technology than the data hoarders who buy NAS devices. Synology's thinking here was close to incomprehensible. When I read about it I assumed it had been sold off to private equity or hired an AI trained on a remote learning MBA syllabus as CEO.

"If you bring a charged particle like an electron near the surface, because the helium is dielectric, it'll create a small image charge underneath in the liquid," said Pollanen. "A little positive charge, much weaker than the electron charge, but there'll be a little positive image there. And then the electron will naturally be bound to its own image. It'll just see that positive charge and kind of want to move toward it, but it can't get to it, because the helium is completely chemically inert, there are no free spaces for electrons to go."

Obviously, to get the helium liquid in the first place requires extremely low temperatures. But it can actually remain liquid up to temperatures of 4 Kelvin, which doesn't require the extreme refrigeration technologies needed for things like transmons. Those temperatures also provide a natural vacuum, since pretty much anything else will also condense out onto the walls of the container. //

Erbium68 Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
8m
1,829
Subscriptor
The trap and what they have achieved so far is very interesting. I have to say the mere 40dB of the amplifier (assuming that is voltage gain not power gain) is remarkable for what is surely a very tiny signal (and that is microwatts out, not megawatts).
But, as a practical quantum computer?
It still has to run at below 4K and there still has to be a transition to electronics at close to STP. The refrigeration is going to be bulky and power consuming. Of course the answer to that is to run a lot of qubits in one envelope, but getting there is going to take a long time.

We seem to have had the easy technological hits. The steam engine, turbines, IC engines, dynamos and alternators all came with relatively simple fabrication techniques and run at room temperature except for the hot bits. Early electronics began with a technical barrier - vacuum enclosures - but never needed to scale these beyond single or dual devices, and by the time that became a barrier to progress, transistors were already happening and it was then a matter of scaling size down and gates up. The electronics revolution happened at room temperature, maybe with some air cooling or liquid cooling for high powers.

Now we have the issue that getting a few gates to work needs a vacuum chamber at below 4K. Scaling is going to be expensive. And progress in conventional semiconductors will continue.
This approach may be wildly successful like epitaxial silicon technology. But it may also flop like the Wankel engine - the existing technology advancing faster than the initially complex and new technology can. //

dmsilev Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
16y
6,561
Subscriptor

Erbium68 said:
The trap and what they have achieved so far is very interesting. I have to say the mere 40dB of the amplifier (assuming that is voltage gain not power gain) is remarkable for what is surely a very tiny signal (and that is microwatts out, not megawatts).
But, as a practical quantum computer?
It still has to run at below 4K and there still has to be a transition to electronics at close to STP. The refrigeration is going to be bulky and power consuming. Of course the answer to that is to run a lot of qubits in one envelope, but getting there is going to take a long time.

Compared to a datacenter computing system, it's actually not all that hugely power consuming. In rough numbers, 10-12 kW of electricity will get you a pulse tube cryocooler which can cool 50 or 100 kilograms of stuff down to about 4 K and keep it at that temperature with 1-2 W of heat load at the cold end. That's enough for a lot of 4 K qubits and first-stage electronics. Add in an extra kW for another pump and you can cool maybe 10 kg to ~1.5 K, with about 0.5 W of headroom. A couple more pumps at a kW or so each, some helium3 and a lot of expensive plumbing, and you have a dilution refrigerator, 20 mK with about 20-40 uW of headroom.

Compare that 10-15 kW with the draw from a single rack of AI inference engines.