MilSpec Semiconductors, Tax payer ripoff.

Defense Department procurement weenies insist that all military electronics be built with MilSpec semiconductors. Which cost ten times as much as commercial semiconductors. Are MilSpec semiconductors better than commercial semiconductors? No.
Many years ago I was on the design team for the anti ballistic missile radar at Raytheon. We were doing a big phased array radar for Mech Island in the Pacific. The contract called for a "brassboard" radar to be built and tested at the factory, and a second "deliverable" radar to go to Mech Island. To save money we built the "brassboard" using commercial semiconductors. We got the brass board working, and past the government acceptance tests. Then we started construction of the deliverable. Same circuit boards, same technicians, in the same shops, to the same drawings but all the semiconductors were MilSpec instead of commercial.
The deliverable didn't work. Argh. Trouble shooting revealed that the MilSpec semiconductors had lower gain, higher leakage, and could not withstand as much voltage as the commercial devices. It was so bad that we had to redesign some of the circuits to make them perform when built with lower quality MilSpec transistors.
Not only were the MilSpec devices lower performance, they had a lot of duds. I can remember going thru a brand new box of JAN2N5109TX transistors with a Simpson 260 meter and finding one in ten devices didn't work at all. That's 10 percent duds. For this we paid ten times the price of good commercial parts.
And, turns out, a fair number of MilSpec devices are counterfeit. The scammer buys good commercial parts, wipes off the commercial marking with solvent, and repaints the devices with the JAN-TX markings. Presto, chango, we turn honest commercial devices into pricey MilSpec devices. Several cases of this made the news over the years. In the last case, the defense department admitted that the counterfeit devices were as good as MilSpec and they had no intention of recalling the equipment (some of which was in outer space in satellites) to replace the counterfeits.
We could save defense money by scrapping the whole MilSpec semiconductor "thing" (boondoggle actually). Semiconductors never wear out. If the system powers up and runs and makes it thru high and low temperature testing, the semiconductors are good and will last forever.
It ain't like it was with vacuum tubes.

Nearly all 4200 passengers & crew got off safely

We should be thankful that so few died in such an enormous sinking. The survivors on TV speak of confusion and ignoble actions, but in the end, they got nearly everyone off alive. Not too shabby.

It's warmed up.

We have 25 above this morning. A LOT warmer than yesterday's four below.

Words of the Chuckleheads

Been hearing a few. "The ship was evacuated" (referring to the Italian liner sinking) You abandon ship, you don't evacuate it. Ships don't "crash" they sink. Aircraft crash, but not ocean liners.

Chuckleheads on TV News

Just heard one on Fox. He was saying, "We don't get our oil from the Persian Gulf, so we can let the Iranians close the Straits of Hormuz and it won't make any difference to us."
Right. That's a chucklehead. Of the brain dead variety.
The people that do get their oil from the Persian Gulf will do anything to keep their houses heated and their motor vehicles running. They will start buying oil from all over the world. Suppliers all over the world will start rationing by price, i.e. they raise the price to reduce demand to what they can supply.
$200 a barrel oil. $10 a gallon gasoline and furnace oil. We can't afford that.

We can keep the straits of Hormuz open. The Navy will have no trouble sinking anything Iranian that floats or flies. For good measure they can take out Iranian nuclear facilities and anything else of enough value to be worth the cost of flying the mission against it. The Straits of Hormuz are an international waterway which makes it just like the high seas. Interfering with shipping on the high seas is an act of war, and has been since Thomas Jefferson's time.

Words of the Weasel Part 25

Impact, used as a verb. On NPR this morning "The tornado impacted Joplin Missouri". Proper English is "The tornado hit (or struck) Joplin Missouri".
Impact is a noun (the impact of a bullet) or a condition of teeth (the dentist extracted four impacted wisdom teeth.)
Bureaucrats love "impacted" because it sounds so benign. "The regulations impact business" sounds so much better than "The regulations hurt business."
I dislike people who say "impacted". I figure they are attempting to conceal something unpleasant from me. The common word for people like that is "liar".

It's still COLD

It's four below zero F this morning. Colder than yesterday. If I have four below up here, then it will be 8 below down in the valley. Fortunately the cars have gotten much better at starting in cold weather and my car is snug in my garage where it's always 20 degrees warmer than outside.