Both Obama and the Democratic National Committee outraised their Republican counterparts in July.
Obama raised $51 million, as compared to McCain’s $27 million, and the DNC raised 27.7 million, as compared to the RNC’s $26 million, the first time that the DNC has outraised the RNC since 2004.
Happy dance time, though the combined cash on hand is about $94.3 million Obama + DNC vs $96 million McCain + RNC, because the DNC has spent a lot of money on Dean’s 50 state strategy.
I’m stunned. This time, when Jerome Corsi comes out with a book, the press is noting that his book is unsupported by the facts, and that Corsi is a bigoted cook kook.
As writer Greg Mitchell notes, even Nedra Pickler is saying that the emperor has no clothes.
You know that the economy is bad when you go broke filling people’s Jones for chocolate chip cookies, but Mrs. Fields cookies is filing for reorg under chapter 11.
The dollar is down a bit, because there is concern that the Fed won’t raise interest rates soon.
Honestly, they won’t raise rates before the election, because that is what the Fed does.
Oil is up a bit, on concerns of the effects of tropical storm Fay on rigs in the Caribbean.
Well, Georgia and Russia have now signed a cease fire agreement, and Russia will begin to withdraw troops on Monday.
What the Russians have always wanted is to be able to kick Georgia in the teeth regarding the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and they did, and under the terms of the cease fire, they get to keep troops there, and in a “buffer zone”.
What’s more, they are installing SS-21 missiles in South Ossetia, and possibly Abkhazia, which can cover most of Georgia.
Truth be told, nothing shows Georgia’s defeat more clearly than the words of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is now pleading to mend fences.
Saakashvili’s political platform has been almost exclusively about putting the boot back on the neck of the Ossetians and the Abkhazians (once again proving that there are no good guys in the Caucasus), and now he is trying to make nice with the Russkys.
Interestingly enough, if you believe in signs of the apocalypse, a Washington Post OP/ED is suggesting that the knee jerk anti-Georgian reaction is unwise.
Of interest to the war buffs, this article, if I read the numbers right, suggests that the number of Russian troops sent into the region were not hugely larger than the numbers for the Georgians, even though the Georgian military ceased to function as a fighting force within about two days of their intervention.
This means that Northrop-Grumman can resume work on the Naval drone contract, based on the Global Hawk airframe.
If you go to the full article, you see that the number of protests is skyrocketing, almost doubling over the past 4 years, which is raising costs, and pushing back schedules, on the projects involved.
The problem is that a contract award protest is risk free at this point, so throwing the dice for another bite at the apple is a good move from a business perspective.
It looks like the formation of the 8000 man Air Force Cyber Command has been put on hold.
This is probably a good thing. It’s an activity that is best done in a way that benefits all the services, and the USAF would no doubt spend much of the formative years of such an effort with a primary focus on making itself the sole provider of these services.
That’s what happened with drones, and Bob Gates slapped them down on that one too.
The CX is Japan’s indigenously designed replacement for their Kawasaki C-1 and Lockheed Martin C-130H transports, and it appears to be in serious trouble.
Normally, when a Japanese program is delayed, it’s politics and budget, but the CX prototype has significant technical problems, weakness in the horizontal stabilizer and cracks in the landing gear, in addition to a bribery scandal with regards to the engine selection.
Well, this is a breath of unexpected common sense.
Basically, they are currently looking at replacing their original bid with a 777 derivative, or replacing their current bid, a 767-200ERX, with a 767-400 derivative.
The latter would be less involved, but it would also have tail strike issues, and so would likely have less rotation angle and require a longer takeoff run.
If Boeing asks for more time for this, and my guess is that they would, it is likely that they would get the time requested, which means that the final decision would be pushed into the next administration.
The Indian government is requiring a 50% offset, and F/A-18E/F, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, Lockheed Martin F-16, the RSK MiG-35 and Saab Gripen have submitted proposals.
My money would still be on the MiG-35s, since they already operate the MiG-29, though the Gripen is probably best bang for their buck, and closest in size to the MiG-21s that will be replaced.
SES Lockheed’s A2100 bus appears to have a problem with its solar arrays, and insurers are getting skittish, because if the satellites fail, they are on the hook for a large chunk of change, seeing as how their are 35 in service.
At this point, it appears that only two of the satellites have experienced enough power loss to degrade their performance, but you know how insurers are.
I’m an engineer, that this makes me feel like a complete lamer.
Why do we pretend that sex is as dangerous as plutonium?
Galrahn at Information Dissemination has review the Navy budget, and found a nugget, that the Navy is intending to upgrade the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class ships to be able to launch the Standard SM-2 missile.
The lack of this capability was given as one reason to can the entire class, and Galrhan is angry that the Navy, upon canceling the program, did not tell Congress about the upgrade proposal.
Me, I’m upset that the navy was willing to accept delivery of a ship that was incapable of defending itself. I’m even more upset that they did so knowingly.
Well, we have more schedule slips in the F-325 Progam.
We have, ailures of the engine bay cooling fans, though this may be unique to AA-1, which is not production standard, and Failures in the engine and transmission for the STOVL variant, which are delaying the build down tests to vertical landing, and there are still doubts as to whether the aircraft will overheat on hot days on the ground, which was also a problem in the F-22 program.
It looks like those build down flights will be delayed from Q1 2009 to Q2, at best, which will delay shipment to the first customers, the US Marines.
So the first first littoral combat ship got underway at the end of last month, more than a year behind schedule, and at twice the forecast cost.
The ships, the size of a large corvette or small frigate, are intended to work in coastal waters.
Interestingly enough, the Israelis are considering the conventionally hulled LCS as the basis of a ship for their navy, but they are ditching the modular weapons system, because they feel that it leaves the ship too lightly armored.
Ares Homepage: “The End of the NRO?
Posted by Bill Sweetman at 8/14/2008 8:15 AM CDT
“Radical change” is an over-used phrase, but the proposals of the Allard Commission on US national security space – previewed by commission member Gen. Ed Anderson at the Space & Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville on Wednesday, are certainly radical.
The commission recommends eliminating the National Reconnaissance Office – the agency that helped win the Cold War, and whose very existence was secret until the early 1990s – as a separate entity and removing executive authority for space systems from the Air Force, transferring both functions into a single new organization.”
The National Security Space Independent Assessment Panel, aka the “Allard Commission,” is proposing that the NRO and the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) be folded into a completely new agency.
Basically, the feel that the existing agencies are doing a piss-poor job, with the NRO recent history being disasterous, and the USAF constantly pulling resources to support its aircraft programs.
My take? Deck chairs, titanic.
In yet another indication that the Diamond-Thielert split is permanent, Diamond Aircraft showed its 168-hp. AE 300 Austro Engine diesel at Oshkosh.(Paid Subscription Required)
It is based on the same block as the Thielert, the Mercedes A-class four-cylinder engine, but heavier, since they replace some of the aluminum parts with cast iron for greater reliability, which has always been the Thielert Achilles heel.
It’s currently being test flown in 3 aircraft.
Constant Volume Combustion (CVC), pulse detonation and constant detonation, should be about 10% more efficient than conventional combustors, and they are looking for the technology to bridge the gap between the top end limit of turbines and the bottom end limit of scramjets.
They are looking at an 80k lb demonstrator, and the turbines would be cocooned at around Mach 3, and the CVC would operate from Mach 1.5 to Mach 4+.
While I am familiar with the PDE, the CDE is new to me:
Various CVC concepts are likely to be proposed, says Bussing. “We’ve left the door open. They include classic [pulsed-detonation engines] in which tubes can be arranged axially, valved at the front and back, or they could be rotating or stationary, or they could be valveless.” By contrast, the CDE (sometimes called a continuous-detonation wave engine) typically includes a combustion chamber consisting of an annular cylindrical tube with one end closed and the other open. A mixture of fuel and oxidizer is injected from the closed end through a ring slit or a number of regularly arranged small holes, and the detonation wave travels in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Exhaust products flow toward the open end and discharge through a diverging nozzle at supersonic speeds.
The guy who came up with this will, of course, be drummed out of the service, because there is no defense contractor profit in it.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Ray Stetler using, “a soldering iron and six feet of cable”, created a Voice Over Secure Internet Protocol communications system for the MQ-1 Predator drone.
It plugs into the radio from the helmet, and they can talk to base, as opposed to, for example, typing in text messages asking for permission to fire.
Have I mentioned that Randall Munroe is a genius?
H/T xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
First, the obligatory Real Genius reference:
Of course, the conceit of that movie was that it could make a human being vaporise from orbit.
Well, this laser ain’t gonna do it.
Nor will it, as this PowerPoint presentation implies, allow one to kill someone with plausible deniability.
First, one needs to understand the language of weaseling in defense procurement, and PowerPoint presentations are the slate upon which weaseling is written.
Then, there is the baisc physics: Human beings are basically water bags, and water is hard to heat, the specific heat of water is: 4.186 joule/gram-°C, which means that the laser, which is supposed to be in the 100KW range, would take about 3.14 seconds to heat up 75 kg (165 pounds) of water from body temp to boiling.
Human reaction time is around 200ms, so in order to burn a hole through someone (100cm deep x 1cm 1cm, 100 g water), you would need about 2.09kw, but once the tissue started to ablate, the resultant steam cloud would start degrading the beam.
Also note that you would carbonize the tissue, and carbon melts at 3500°C, and a person being lasered would be a reducing atmosphere, so it would burn.
Additionally, you would need to hit a vital part. When you hit a liver or a femoral artery with a bullet, death follows in minutes (or less) with a bullet, but a laser wound would be cauterized, so basically, you need a heart or a head hit, and even then the damage is localized along the beam path.
The physical characteristics of a laser wound mean that any post mortem would point to a laser, which in turn, given the cost of lasers, would point back to the US, after all who is going to drop all that money on a few tons of chlorine, hydrogen peroxide, and iodine.
So this won’t be a people killer.
Basically, it’s easier to poke holes in or cut tissue, and more difficult to vaporize tissue relative to metal (Steel’s specific heat is about 0.5 joule/gram-°C, 1/8 that of water)
On the other hand, if you used it on something like a SAM missile motor to trigger an explosion, it might work, or to set off an explosion in an ammo dump, it might very well work.
As the technology gets smaller, and lighter, and cheaper, I could see more applications though.
Posts by David Hambling here and here, and Boeing’s press release here.
I would say, as is de regeur with the USAF, they are overselling the technology.
What Mr. Hambling noted as a scenario, from an orbiting aircraft, with all the shaking involved, along with a claimed 20km of air currents bending the light, is not credible:
According to the developers, the accuracy of this weapon is little short of supernatural. They claim that the pinpoint precision can make it lethal or non-lethal at will. For example, they say it can either destroy a vehicle completely, or just damage the tires to immobilize it. The illustration shows a theoretical 26-second engagement in which the beam deftly destroys “32 tires, 11 Antennae, 3 Missile Launchers, 11 EO devices, 4 Mortars, 5 Machine Guns” — while avoiding harming a truckload of refugees and the soldiers guarding them. It reminds me of how the Lone Ranger could always shoot the gun out an opponent’s hand without injuring them; if that could really be done from an aircraft circling overhead, it would certainly be an impressive feat.
It is potentially useful in limited circumstances, but in most circumstances, something like a missile will do just as well for a lot less money.
When a solid state laser can do something north of 5KW, you will start to see wider application of the technology.