FEMA is Out of Money for U.S. Hurricane Victims After Its $640 Million in Migrant Funding Shore News Network| 10/3/24
While FEMA scrambles to find funding for hurricane survivors, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has just allocated over $640 million to assist with the arrival of noncitizen migrants. Yes, you read that right. Of that amount, $300 million will be distributed through the State and Local Assistance Program (SSP-A), while $340.9 million is set aside for competitive funding.
What does “competitive funding” mean? Competing with whom or what?
… While Congress did recently approve a $20 billion boost to FEMA’s disaster relief fund, it’s clear that this won’t be enough to cover the costs of recovery, especially with more storms on the horizon. Mayorkas was blunt: “We do not have the funds to make it through the season, and another hurricane is imminent.”
It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy The Mozilla Foundation | Sept 6, 2024 | Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov and Zoë MacDonald
… besides how you know Jen, Misha, and Zoë …
… all the trackers, cameras, microphones, and sensors capturing your every move. Ugh. Modern cars are a privacy nightmare.
Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels” for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants’ privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines. Machines that, because of all those brag-worthy bells and whistles, have an unmatched power to watch, listen, and collect information about what you do and where you go in your car.
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label — making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed.
Incredibly versatile active ball-joint gear is mind-bending New Atlas | September 23, 2024 | Joe Salas
The ABENICS active ball joint gear allows for extremely precise, high-torque movement
At its core, this system developed at Yamagata University in Japan uses a “simple” cross-spherical gear paired with a monopole gear to control pitch, roll, and yaw. Essentially, the same full range of movement you’d see in a rotator cuff (the shoulder) of a human. With clever gearing, coupling, and sliding motions, the ABENICS gear is extremely precise in its movements.
By adding a second monopole gear and differentials in tandem, connected to a ball joint, this system becomes even more robust. Operators are able to achieve very precise, high-torque movement on the spherical gear with incredible accuracy.
If attached with an output link – like an arm or a leg – this means finite control over a very realistic joint in robotics for smooth and natural movement. Generally in today’s humanoid robots, two or more motorized joints are used in tandem for a shoulder: one to control up and down, one for forward and backward motion, and a third to control rotation.
ABENICS – Active Ball Joint Mechanism With Three-DoF Based on Spherical Gear Meshings, as it’s officially called – could simplify these joint structures, combining a full range of motion into a single joint.
ABENICS can roll, pitch, and yaw in every direction Yamagata University This type of gear hasn’t been widely adopted in any commercial, medical or industrial ventures as of yet. Although its focus has been mostly in academia and research, the technology shows very high promise for future use in areas where high torque, high precision, and three-dimensional freedom of movement are needed.
The implications of what robots equipped with ABENICS joints could do are boundless.
The lubrication for gear boxes is centrally located, pumped out to all gearboxes, maintained in temperature (not too cold and not too hot), and the more the precision of motor speeds to the output rpm of that gearbox, (100 corrections per second) the more things get very, very, very, dicey. Better be careful because that motor will be hotter than Satan’s furnace after a few hours of that application connected to a VFD or servo. Several servo motors, one for each axis, connected to each other in motion control software like Allen Bradley Kinetix Drives would seem a whole lot smarter to me.
One motor with one output shaft connected to a dozen or so mechanically linked gearing applications has always been a hard crash disaster setup IMHO. To me this seems like a step backwards in technology.
At least troubleshooting will go easy. Getting everything back to zero or home will take hours. I just love a master servo motor with as many as hundreds of ethernet connected child axises always impressed me. Master motor homes in safe position. Each axis motor then home to matching safe positions. Then the system moves as one. A failure or crash triggers “Safe-Off”. Getting it all back is easy-peezy. The motor control software in Kinetix will even tag the axis that failed and the type of failure.
The only caveat is that your IT Department will have to give a few thousand dedicated (yet kept secret) IP Adresses for each axis for each machine in the entire factory. I had one machine with over 1,700 IP Adresses and 1,150 Axises to control. Cabinets and racks as far as the legs could carry me.
The most common downtime cause was when Kinetix and Poweflex would hit on duplicate IP Addresses. Some nitwit in an office would install his new printer or massaging chair and they would let an “install wizard” program snatch up an IP Address already in use. It may take an hour, day, or week, but when those duplicates check in with the master, you’re going down bigly. Then it takes days to find the unauthorized device on the network.
And you’re wondering why the IMAO site keeps going down.
Countess Lisl von Schlaf was the mistress of Milos Columbo, a Greek smuggler. Columbo asked Lisl to stage an argument with him at dinner, as an excuse for her to go off with Bond, to discover some information about him. Lisl and Bond spent the night together, and got on quite well. They went for a walk on the beach the next morning, and Lisl was tragically killed by henchman Locque.
Magda was the right-hand woman of Octopussy, and assisted her smuggling partner Kamal Khan on many occasions throughout the film. After attending an auction in which Bond stole a Fabegé egg, Magda was sent to sleep with Bond so that she could steal it back. After Octopussy found out that Khan tried to kill her, her cult of girls, Magda included, storm Khan’s palace.
Kristina Wayborn
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Match 2
Tina Hudson (Bianca) vs Tanya Roberts (Stacey Sutton)
Bianca was an MI6 agent assisting Bond in Latin America. She helped Bond disguise himself as Colonel Toro so that he could infiltrate a military base and plant an explosive on a Cuban spy plane. When the mission went awry and Bianca saw Bond being taken away as a prisoner in an army jeep, she went into action. She drove alongside the jeep, and flirted with Bond’s captors, showing off her legs to distract them while Bond pulled their parachute cords.
Stacey Sutton inherited the Sutton Oil company, which megalomaniac Max Zorin tried to take over. Zorin offered Sutton $5 million for her shares in the company, which she refused. Bond learnt of the cheque and confronted her at her home. Stacey was initially aggressive, pointing a shotgun at Bond. However, when some of Zorin’s henchmen arrived to persuade Stacey to sell, Bond sorted them out and gained Stacey’s trust. The pair escaped an attempt on their lives, and managed to kill Zorin.
Bankrupt Pizza Hut franchisee plans to sell all 127 stores National Restaurant News | September 25, 2024 | Alicia Kelso
From the comments:
They went full-on queer.
Haven’t had a Pizza Hut pizza since they embraced queerness.
Pizza Hut is crap now. Same thing with Papa John’s. It used to be better.
Pizza Hut made their worst mistake by changing the recipe for their sauce to a cheaper version. The original sauce was one that set Pizza Hut apart with the completion. That decision set their demise.
I had a friend who called it “ZA-U,” because those were the only letters that lit up on his neighborhood store.
New Docs Shed Light On Air Force’s ‘Goal’ To Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks DailyCaller | 9/19/24 | Jake Smith
The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. [Charlie] Brown — at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force — issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.” Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas.
