News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Rolls Royce, the British engineering group that is one of the world’s largest suppliers to the commercial shipbuilding industry, says the time has come for crewless ships. 
These modern day Mary Celestes wouldn’t be mere drifting hulks providing fodder for mystery writers but 50,000 ton robots transporting goods and produce between the continents.
Oskar Levander, head of marine innovation engineering at Rolls Royce says the tech is here and only regulations stand in the way.
As Obama screw up follows Obama screw up leading to a complete collapse of everything and you wake up to find that the streets ruled by dune-buggy riding skin heads, what should you yon progressive hipster ever do?
Well if you have your trusty flint and steel, some dry wood and some water fear not if you have The Power Pot. Yes, this unique device converts boiling water to enough electricity to recharge a USB device. That’s right, just pop in the iPhone crank up The Lumineers — or whatever happens to be hip at the moment — and pretend it’s all not happening. That’s something you know you’re good at!
It’s just a mere $149.
Pot Provides Post-Apocalyptic Power
StartPage Claims Search Engine Privacy — Tom Flocco has sent us a link for Holland-based StartPage, which bills itself as the world’s most private search engine.
StartPage says it doesn’t store your IP address, use tracking cookies or make a record of searches; claims to protect you from NSA spying and gives 100 percent real Google results in complete privacy.
We’ve been using DuckDuckGo, which claims similar things. We are happy with DDG but StartPage sounds fine too.
Thanks Tom.
DuckDuckGo, a search engine competing with Google and Bing that was all but unknown two weeks ago, is getting a big boost from the revelations that the Obama administration has been in cahoots with those corporate one-percenters at Google/Microsoft/Facebook etc. to learn the web histories of just about everybody in America.
DDG boasts that it keeps no records of personal information of those making searches hence authorities have nothing to find in the event they should be subpoenaed. It says its revenue is from those paying for keywords in searches.
CEO Gabriel Weinberg explains it here.
The engine can be found here. It’s easy to make it the default with Firefox. One suspects, though, not so much with Chrome or Safari.
Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook and co-founder of Napster who has a net worth estimated at $2 billion, married his singer girlfriend and mother of his child, Saturday at a ceremony in Big Sur, California that cost $9 million.
Landscapers spent weeks building fake waterfalls, ruins and a $600,000 stone gate. The couple and guests were garbed by Oscar-winning designer Ngila Dickson.
Wow. How many poor children could he have fed with that money? How many illegal immigrants could he have supplied with health care?
OTOH, one supposes it beats giving it to Democrats as he had been doing.
Kids Still Like Radio — The most popular form of listening to music for those ages 13 through 35 remains old-fashioned AM/FM radio with 24 percent citing it as their primary means of doing so. Internet radio is second at 23 percent, followed by digital files — like those you’d find on an iPod — at 15 percent, on-demand services at 14 percent, CDs at just 9 percent and, satellite at 5 percent. Ten percent cited other.
House Bill Concerns 911 Wireless Funding — The Pennsylvania House. last week sent to the Senate a bill to restructure the E-911 Wireless Fund and ensure its viability in the future, reports State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129).
House Bill 583 would authorize the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) to provide counties with helpful suggestions to cut costs, including joint purchasing, regionalization and consolidation, all with the aim of freeing up funding in the E-911 Wireless Fund and saving individual counties a considerable amount of money, thus ensuring the continued availability of county 911 services.
The bill also eliminates the current back billing system in the E-911 Wireless Fund, whose budget is increasingly growing, and makes technical changes that would expand the spending authority for counties and their Public Safety Answering Points to ensure compliance with the 70 percent personnel funding allowed by law.
Computers Vending Machines At Drexel — Drexel University has a vending machine that allows those with a student ID to borrow a MacBook laptop computer for up to five hours.
There is a $5 charge for late returns. The program runs 24/7. The motive is safety for those concerned about carrying their own laptop around the West Philadelphia campus.
The machine charges and data-wipes returned computers.
Future Is United States? — “Foxconn City” the factory complex in Shenzhen, China famous for producing Apple products employs, by some estimates, up to 450,000 persons.
Apple is preparing to invest $100 million in a U.S. factory which will be primarily operated by robots.
No people means no health care cost and no unions, one observes.
The 14-mile stretch of the Delaware River bordering Delaware County, Pa. is now covered by Boeing Watchstander Integrated Security Solutions, which provides 24-hour surveillance, detection, identification and recognition at key sites.
“Delaware County is home to refineries, two-thirds of Philadelphia International Airport is in the County, plus the Delaware River runs parallel to an interstate highway and major railroad lines, which demands that we provide the most advanced security available for this region,” said District Attorney Jack Whelan.