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The iPhone

Something to hide, in Redmond.

Truth be told, I think that as a phone, the iPhone is merely adequate. But as a portable personal computing platform that also enables telephony, it’s top notch.

Got DAS?

The Kat asked me about the F-35 tonight at dinner. I started to tell her about engine choices and performance margins and such, but then I switched to the Electro-Optical Distributed Awareness System, or DAS.

As marketing goes, it’s pretty fricken’ cool.

We’ll see what delivers.

PS, she asked me: You miss it, don’t you?

Yeah. Yeah, I do.

Botnet

Spain and the FBI cooperated to shut down a botnet that had taken control of 12 million infected PCs, arresting ringleaders who had used a trivially advanced hacking skillset to siphon financial information and passwords from unsuspecting users:

(The) Mariposa botnet was principally geared towards stealing online login credentials for banks, email services and the like [...]

Electronic Flight Bag

The grotesquely named Apple iPad – which apparently broke the internets – has great potential as an electronic flight bag, and may well end up a category killer for legacy equipment.

There are pdf applications for Amazon.com’s Kindle that allow assiduous aviators to download airport diagrams, departure procedures, arrivals and approach plates, but from everything I’ve [...]

How to Cook an IED

Use a laser.

Now if we can just get the bad guys to leave them laying about in plain sight.

Warbird Bleg

Got the following email from an occasional reader in the UK that I feel unfit to service:

My question:  Broadly, in most propeller driven aircraft, what would happen if a pilot took off at full power (or even WEP in a warbird) and remained at full power throughout climbout and for the entirety of the flight?

The expert [...]

No Experience Necessary

What possible chance does a Silicon Valley start-up with no expertise in military intelligence have to create a solution that helps map out terrorist networks, their money flows and operational plans?

Pretty damned good, actually:

One of the latest entrants into the government spy-services marketplace, Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most [...]

Airborne Lasers

Occasional reader Potosi Joel turned me on to a Wired article about a company named Applied Electronics getting a contract to place ultra short pulse lasers on naval aircraft:

USP lasers shoot incredibly fast pulses of light that create channels in the air for electricity to travel to a target. The targets are vaporized so quickly [...]

Solar Powered Airplane

A Swiss team believes that they may be ready to fly a solar powered plane around the world by 2012:

Dr Piccard, who made history in 1999 by circling the globe non-stop in a balloon, says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies…

The flight would be a risky endeavour. Only now is solar and [...]

My Money was Always on the Hornet

Courtesy of The Scoop Deck, a Corvette ZR-1 takes on Blue Angle #7: 600 horses vs 32,000 pounds of static thrust.

No contest.

Still, that’s an awfully nice car.

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