Robot submarines locate wreckage from still unexplained disaster but flight recorders remain missing Pieces of wreckage from an Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009 with 228 people on board have been recovered by underwater teams, according to French investigators. A fourth attempt began last month to locate remains of the aircraft, and particularly its flight recorders, in the hope of determining the cause of the still unexplained disaster. The wreckage was recovered at the weekend by a salvage vessel equipped with unmanned submarines, the French air accident investigation agency, the BEA, said on Sunday night. The agency said the pieces were identified as parts of flight 447, which crashed on 1 June 2009 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. In what was the worst loss of life involving an Air France plane in the firm’s 75-year history, those who died included more than 30 nationalities. Search operations that took place in the wake of the crash led to the recovery of 50 bodies as well as hundreds of pieces of the aircraft, including its torn-off tail, but the last search ended in May 2010 after it had failed to find the plane’s voice and data recorders. The latest search, which is being carried out using a deep-sea vessel called Alucia and is being financed by the plane’s manufacturers, Air France and Airbus, has been designed to cover an area of approximately 3,900 sq miles. Robotic equipment has been used to forage in depths of up to 4,000 metres in an area of the ocean floor between Africa and Brazil. Finding the black boxes is seen as essential to help crash experts and relatives understand why flight 447 plunged into a remote part of the Atlantic during an equatorial storm. “This is very good news because it brings with it the hope that at last we will get some information on what caused this accident, which to this day remains unexplained,” Air France-KLM’s chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said. Speculation about the cause of the crash has focused on the possible icing-up of the aircraft’s speed sensors, which appeared to give inconsistent readings seconds before the plane vanished. But an accident report said it was impossible to establish a clear cause without further data held in the missing recorders. “We do hope that the discovery will lead to the retrieval and reading of the two recorders because this data is essential for the understanding of this accident,” said a spokesman for Airbus. A passenger jet carries two recorders, one for cockpit voices and another to log data from the aircraft’s systems. Air France and Airbus were both placed under formal investigation over the crash last month as part of a French criminal investigation into the causes of the crash. Groups representing victims’ families have criticised the way previous searches were carried out. Plane crashes France Europe Air transport Airline industry Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Paul Ryan Says ‘Shame on Them’ to Democrats if They Go After Him for His Budget Proposals
April 3, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Paul Ryan admits here that the cuts he’s going to propose to our social safety nets, or as he calls them “entitlements” will end up giving the Democrats some fodder for political ads against him in the next election, but claims they’ll have to lie and demagogue the issue in order to do so. I think all they’re going to have to do is let people read his plan for themselves and run back the recordings of interviews like this one . If he thinks turning Medicaid into a voucher system and privatizing Social Security are somehow going to “save” them, he’s been drinking too much of his own Kool-Aid. WALLACE: Last question, as you look ahead, and a lot of people would say look, the answer is you’re not going to get this budget passed. It’s really setting up an issue and a sensible debate for 2012. As you look ahead to the next election, aren’t Democrats going to be able to say “Look at Paul Ryan, look at the House Republicans. They want to kill Medicare. They want to kill Medicaid. They want to gut the programs that you depend on.” Aren’t you playing into the Democrats hands? RYAN: We are. We are giving them a political weapon to go against us, but they will have to lie and demagogue to make that a political weapon. Look, we don’t change benefits for anybody over the age of 55. We save Medicare. We save Medicaid. We save these entitlement programs. We repair our social safety nets and we get our country a debt free country for our children and grandchildren’s generation, and we get jobs. We get economic growth. They are going to demagogue it and it’s that demagoguery that has always prevented political leaders in the past from trying to fix the problem. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. The president has punted. We’re not going to follow suit and yes, we will be giving our political advisaries things to use against us in the next election and shame on them if they do it. Sorry Paul, but I say shame on any of them if they go along with your plan.
Continue reading …Crucial’s M4 / C400 SSD reviewed, hitting store shelves in late April for an undisclosed sum
April 3, 2011 No Comment
When Micron’s RealSSD C300 came out, there were no competitors in sight — 355MB / sec read speeds and a SATA 6Gbps interface made for an unbelievably spritely (though also finicky ) solid state drive. Today, that’s simply not the case, as Intel’s SSD 510 and OCZ’s Vertex 3 are furiously fighting for the crown in the high-end consumer SSD space. On or about April 26th, the C300′s successor will hit the market branded as the Crucial M4 , but this time it won’t be the cream of the crop, as even though it’s assuredly a speed demon, it’s actually shown up by its predecessor in a few tests. In particular, AnandTech noted that the drive seems to have sacrificed sequential read performance in exchange for faster write speeds — and was worried slightly about Crucial’s delayed garbage collection routine — but overall, reviewers are coming away fairly happy with the speedy performance they’re seeing. Still, the most crucial variable, price, has yet to be revealed — over a year later, the C300 remains an expensive drive, but the new C400 uses Micron’s 25nm NAND flash , which could make solid state storage cheaper. Read – AnandTech Read – The Tech Report Read – Hardware Heaven Read – Tom’s Hardware Crucial’s M4 / C400 SSD reviewed, hitting store shelves in late April for an undisclosed sum originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Fatigue cracking has been found along the entire 5-foot section of a Southwest Airlines jet that ripped open on Friday, forcing an emergency landing in Arizona. The NTSB says that mechanics will cut a 9-foot by 3-foot section of the plane and send it to Washington, DC, for testing. Southwest…
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Charlie Sheen was heckled, booed and abandoned by the crowd on the opening night of his comedy tour in Detroit on Saturday. Many of the audience members chanting “refund” and heading for the exits even before the show abruptly ended. (April 3)
Continue reading …The Tasmanian devil is nobody’s idea of lovable. The combative screeching marsupial was once the most reviled animal in Australia. But now that the creature is on the brink of extinction , Australians have found a well of sympathy for the little devil, the LA Times reports. The devil’s snarling face…
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If you’ve never seen the rise and fall of humanity as told by a series of pulleys, levers, and CO2 rockets, now’s your chance — a team of Purdue engineers have built a contraption that not only tells the history of the world through the end of days, but is also a contender for the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine. The Purdue team’s “Time Machine” catalogs a history of dinosaurs, war, and rock ‘n roll before finally culminating in a cataclysmic inferno and efflorescent renewal in 232 steps — narrowly beating out the previous record of 230 set by Ferris State University in 2010. Impressive, but not officially the “world’s largest” just yet– the team is submitting a video of a flawless run to Guinness World Records to certify the historic thingamajig, hopefully eking out a victory with its two step lead. Rube Goldberg Machine to set new world record, bring forth apocalypse originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …As forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara prepared a final push to drive Laurent Gbagbo from power in Ivory Coast, the UN was evacuating some 200 staffers from its oft-targeted headquarters in Abidjan. And as the UN moved out, an additional 300 French forces moved in, reports the AP, claiming control…
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Two suicide bombers target visitors to a shrine in the Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab province Two suicide bombers struck a shrine in Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 40 people gathered there, as part of a campaign of attacks against places of worship that extremists consider un-Islamic. The practice of praying, singing and meditating at the shrines of holy men is widespread across Pakistan. However, extremists consider it a deviation from the austere Islam they espouse. Several thousand people were attending celebrations to mark the anniversary of the Sakhi Sarwar shrine in the Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab province when the bombers struck crowds outside the complex, said government administrator Iftikhar Saho. A stampede followed the bombings, but it was unclear whether that caused any casualties. Footage on state television showed emergency services travelling to hospitals and volunteers helping blood-soaked victims. Shrines in Pakistan range from one-room tombs in small villages to large complexes in cities that attract thousands every day. There has been a series of bloody attacks on themshrines, including one that killed 47 people at the nation’s most revered shrine in Lahore last year. Local and foreign Islamist militants have carried out hundreds of attacks in Pakistan over the last three years, targeting government buildings and security forces, western targets like embassies and hotels as well as religious minorities and Muslim sects they consider heretical. The government and the army have tried to crack down on the militants, but have struggled to unite the nation against the threat, and face persistent allegations that they are protecting extremists. Many Islamist politicians do not publicly criticise the militants, preferring to spread conspiracy theories that American or Indian agents are responsible. These views are widely aired, often uncritically, in some media. Pakistan Global terrorism guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …You know, when I lived in Orange County, I used to drive by the Nixon Library off the Imperial Highway all the time. It never occurred to me to actually ever stop in, although I was assured by my Republican friends that it was a very nice and fitting place for the former president. It wasn’t until this week that I read this article that I realized that such a major part of both Nixon’s personal and America’s history was completely elided at the one place meant to house and showcase Nixon’s legacy . Where once there was revisionist history and deserved scorn from critics, there are now renovations and the truth about Watergate. The newly opened, interactive exhibit at the Yorba Linda, Calif. library cost the taxpayer-funded National Archives $500,000 to establish. It’s a small price compared to what the dirty tricks scandal cost the late President Richard Milhouse Nixon, who was forced to resign in shame on Aug. 9, 1974. The exhibit features the lock-picking tools used by burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. on June 17, 1972. Nixon was eventually implicated in a coverup of the role his closest advisers and other Republican party members played in the affair. The library had been founded in 1990 as a private venture by friends of the 37th U.S. president, who died in 1994. Its previous Watergate exhibit offered only a Nixon-approved perspective on the scandal, which had been embarrassing and divisive for a country already embroiled in the costly, polarizing Vietnam War. The museum prolonged that humiliation. Determined to right that wrong, the National Archives took over in 2007, and succeeds with its analysis of the so-called “smoking gun” tape, its 18½ minute gap in conversation explained away by Nixon sympathizers as a mechanical failure of the covert recording system he installed in the Oval Office. Given that there seems to be a willful ignorance on the part of some politicians not to remember, much less learn, the lessons of history, I’m all for bringing out the truth and reminding Americans of the dangers and consequences of taking executive power too far.
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