Ukrainian Air Disaster

The shoot down of Malaysian Air Flt 17 in the Ukraine is a horrible tragedy with shocking loss of life. My sincerest sympathy to the families of the victims.
The airliner was at normal cruising altitude, 33,000 feet, call it six miles up.  No man pack rocket can reach that high.  By the time you pack that much fuel into a rocket, it is too heavy for a man to carry.  It had to be a bigger missile, probably vehicle mounted.   
   For a regulation SAM, 33,000 feet is easy.  The first Soviet SAM, SA-2 Guideline we called it, knocked down Frances Gary Powers at 70,000 feet over Sverdlovsk in the late 1950's.  We flew against SA-2 in Viet Nam.  The newsies have been calling the missile "sophisticated".  Not really, it's a capability SAM has had for 50 years.  In fact Obama just called them sophisticated on TV.
   The newsies have been speculating that the SAM is so complicated to operate that the Ukrainian "rebels" could not work it.  Not likely.  Plenty of guys were drafted in Russia and Ukraine and got trained on the missile during their hitch in the service.  They ought to be enough veterans with missile training  kicking around the Ukraine to operate a single launcher vehicle. From either side. 
   It could have been an accident.  Figuring out what little dots of light on a radar screen mean can be difficult to get right.  They may well have believed they were launching against a military cargo flight, but zapped the airliner instead.
   I'm dubious about equipping airliners with anti missile defenses.  It would be a windfall for BAE down in Nashua, but I dunno if it would do much good on airliners.  The systems we built in Nashua went on helicopters flying combat in Iraq.  The Common Missile Warning System was four TV cameras looking down and out to see the flash of a missile motor.  When they saw a missile heading for them, the system computer got on the aircraft intercom and cried "Missile! Missile! Missile!".  The pilot then took violent evasive action and launched a bunch of decoy flares.  This worked in helicopters, our shops all featured photographs of big choppers, with the whole crew standing in front of them, and hand written letters to the effect that our missile warning system saved their lives.  No so sure if the violent evasive action works when you are flying a Boeing 777. 

Antique Laptop revived, XP lives

Couple a weeks ago, getting ready for a trip, I pulled antique laptop out of his carry bag and fired him up to charge his batteries and update his software.  You know how it is, leave the laptop on the shelf for a little while and every piece of software needs an update. 
   Arrgh.  he would not fire up.  LEDs blinked but the screen stayed dark.  So Antique Laptop stayed home and then sat out on the table for a couple of weeks 'til I got around to him today.  Antique goes back quite a ways.  I gave him to youngest son to go to high school with.  That was maybe ten years ago.  Youngest son is hard on his gear, and it shows.  Scratches, scraped off paint, ding marks.  Somewhere along the line, youngest son bought a hotter new laptop to make his games run faster.  Antique Laptop came back to me.  So I cleaned the games and craplets off the hard drive, zapped endless virii, applied my list of Windows fixes, and he ran pretty well.  Ran my C compiler, Office, and my CAD programs.  What's not to like?  And he runs XP, which is higher performance that the follow ons, Vista, 7, and 8.
   Thinking back over Antique's life, I remembered youngest son showing me an electronic module behind the screen bezel that had given trouble in the past.  Why not?  I  pulled two screws and popped the bezel loose.  The module was right there where I remembered.  So I unplugged it, blew some dust out of it, and plugged it back in.  Voila, screen lit up, XP booted, and happiness roams the land.  I don't have to learn Win 8, replace elderly software that won't run on 8.     Motto of the story.  The most likely failure in electronic stuff is connectors.  Over time air gets in, oxidizes the pins and sockets, and they stop conducting electricity.  Connecting and disconnecting often wipes the oxidation off, and it works again.  If it just stops working, take it apart, and put it back together.  You have a pretty good chance of fixing it.
   It's an HP Pavilion ZE4900.  Still looks pretty good.  In fact I bought him a new battery this winter. If you are looking at buying a used laptop, this one is durable. 
 

Aviation Week on the Ex-Im bank

According to Aviation Week, the Ex-Im bank makes a small profit each year.  Their loan default rate is 0.211%  (which is pretty good considering they are making loans to overseas borrowers who are usually immune to American courts)  So, Ex-Im  facilitates $30 billion a year in exports and costs the tax payer nothing.  What's not to like?
  And, all the other countries in the world operate their own versions of Ex-Im.  If we stop doing it, they will keep on with it.  And sales that might have come to American companies, and kept American workers employed will go to our overseas competitors. 
   As you might imagine, Aviation Week is something of an industry mouthpiece.  On the other hand, they are quite reliable when it comes to facts.  I've been reading them for 40 years and they are straighter than the mainstream media ever was. 

Ex-Im bank, part 2

Listening to the liberal Diane Rahms (sp?) show on NPR this morning.  Long talk about the Ex Im bank.  They chatted on and on.  Not once did anyone say how much running Ex-Im cost us taxpayers.  General agreement that Ex-Im helped US industry.  All the lefties on the panel decried Ex-Im because it helped companies, they feel companies should be burned to the ground rather than helped.  Trouble with that sentiment is that most of us make our living working for companies.  What's good for our company is good for us. 
   The real issue, as I said last week, is the cost to taxpayers.  If Ex-Im makes a profit, or doesn't use much taxpayer money, it's a good thing.  If it is swallowing billions of tax payer dollars it's a bad thing.
  One number did come out.  Ex-Im finances $30 billion worth of exports a year.  For that, I would fund Ex-Im with perhaps $30 million a year and call it a good deal for the country.  A thousand fold return on investment isn't bad business. 
  Does anybody know what Ex-Im really costs us to run?

So sue me.

Trouble is, they want to sue Obama over something that I (and many others) approve of, namely delaying the evil day of employer mandates.  Far as I am concerned, we ought to scrap employer mandates entirely.  Delaying them for a year or two isn't as good, but it isn't a bad thing.
   Obama's methods, pure executive orders, are not kosher, no doubt about it.  But, do we really want to bet the government on a matter of process?  What he did has broad support.  How he did it has broad disapproval.  But do we want to make a last ditch stand over methods (how he did it) rather than substance (what he did)? 
   Most of the unkosher things he has done amount to easing a little of the pain of Obamacare, implementing the Dream Act by executive order after Congress voted it down, sicking the IRS on the Tea Party, Fast & Furious, and Solyndra.  The first two have a lot of support.  The last three, not so much. 
   Thomas Sowell, writing in the Union Leader editorial page today, suggests that suing Obama (or impeaching him) will merely distract the easily distracted newsies from covering the Obama administration's real problems (Iraq, Israel, the economy, the deficit, unemployment, Ukraine, China, etc, etc).

Shepherd Smith never took chemistry

Good ole Shep is reporting on the kid that claims the nickel in his IPod/IPad causes his allergy.  Listening to Shep it is pretty clear that Shep doesn't know what nickel is, the difference between compounds and elements, or even what an element is. Pretty serious ignorance in a newsie.  Looks like he skated thru high school and college and never had a single course in chemistry.
  I like Shep, he is witty.  But you gotta watch out for a guy that is that ignorant.

Ukraine tries to suppress separatist rebels.

Nice article in the Economist.  There is a photograph at the top of the article, showing a senior officer, in uniform, addressing his troops.  The senior (let's guess he is a colonel) is wearing nice new American style digital cammies, desert tan combat boots and no hat.  Which is against Anglo American military custom.  You are supposed to wear a hat out of doors, in uniform.  His troops are standing in line, at attention, and to a first glance seem well equipped.  Look a little harder, all except one man are wearing combat boots.  The man in the middle is wearing Adidas running shoes, with the white stripes.  Half the combat boots are the desert tan and the other half black leather.  The men in the front rank (except for one) are wearing hats, but every man is wearing a different hat.   The men all carry their rifles American style, clipped to web gear on their fronts, muzzle down.  Of the front rank of eight men, I see three different styles of rifle. 
   These guys might have a chance against separatist rebels, but I think Russian regular troops could eat them alive.