Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced late Sunday that employees of Elon Musk’s SpaceX will head to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia on Monday as part of the Trump administration’s promise to make “rapid safety upgrades” to the nation’s aviation systems.
In a post on X — another of Musk’s companies — Duffy said a team from SpaceX will “get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.”
Duffy added that the task of revamping the system will require “the brightest minds in America” that may include “any high-tech American developer or company that is willing to give back to our country.” President Donald Trump previously said he envisioned two or three companies overseeing the infrastructure, instead of the dozens that have been incorporated over the years working together to keep various systems afloat, and had tasked Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team to get to the bottom of it.
Taipei – The U.S. State Department has removed a statement on its website that it does not support Taiwan independence, among changes that the island’s government praised on Sunday as supporting Taiwan.
The fact sheet on Taiwan retains Washington’s opposition to unilateral change from either Taiwan or from China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own.
But as well as dropping the phrase “we do not support Taiwan independence,” the page has added a reference to Taiwan’s cooperation with a Pentagon technology and semiconductor development project and says the U.S. will support Taiwan’s membership in international organizations “where applicable.”
The United States, like most countries, has no formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan but is its strongest international backer, bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.
“We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side,” the State Department website reads in the update posted on Thursday. “We expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the (Taiwan) Strait.”
I definitely see the bad but some good may come of this. NSA has the data on the parasite which has infested our country. Used properly, they can target all of it simultaneously and remove it. This could happen with a big splash or be done quietly with almost no one noticing. Either way, the result would be a much cleaner and more efficient nation with much less violence. Time will tell. ABN
Taiwan Semiconductor, the biggest chip manufacturer in the world, is now in talks to partner with Intel to produce chips in the United States to avoid President Trump’s tariffs.
Taiwan’s President also encouraged Taiwanese companies to begin investing in America, “In light of President Trump’s concerns about our country’s semiconductor industry, the government will carefully respond and strengthen communication with the U.S. The government will also strengthen guidance and encourage Taiwanese companies to invest more in the United States.”
TARIFFS ARE WORKING, and they haven’t even been implemented yet.
Family Heirloom, Transformed: 1147cc CBX from Laurent Heraux x JDMAX…
As far as production motorcycle engines go, few can claim the mystique, visual presence, and soundtrack of Honda’s six-cylinder CBX1000 engine. The 1047cc “slant six” boasted dual overhead cams with eight bearings each, 24 valves, and a maximum output of 105 howling horses.
The annual tradition of visiting an auto mechanic to get an inspection sticker could come to an end if a group of Republican lawmakers succeed in repealing Maine’s auto inspection requirement.
Under a bill introduced by Rep. Ann Fredericks (R-Sanford), the mandatory safety inspection requirement would be repealed for the majority of cars that are driven by Mainers on a daily basis.
“Other states have already abolished this antiquated requirement that is an inconvenience,” Fredericks said.
From Frederick’s perspective, advancements in safety standards and auto-making technology mean that annual inspections should no longer be necessary for most personal vehicles, as they’ve become more of a nuisance than a guarantor of public safety.
The bill would not alter inspection rules for commercial vehicles, trailers, semitrailers, and fire trucks, according to the official summary of the legislation.
Less than half of states nationwide currently have mandatory safety inspection policies in place.
This is an excellent speech and I hope Vance, Trump and USA live up to it. Vance broadsides European ‘leaders’ who are trying to control AI and information in general. He warns China and others there will be serious consequences for using AI to steal or undermine USA. He promises USA will promote and protect full free speech on USA platforms. I see no other intelligent way forward but to go for it full steam and agree with how Vance has put it. ABN
A 19-year-old DOGE worker and ‘acolyte’ of Elon Musk known online as ‘Big Balls’ has been elevated to a new role at the State Department, eliciting fury from some within the agency.
‘Big Balls,’ whose real name is Edward Coristine, first made headlines when he was identified as one of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) prodigies working to slash government waste.
Coristine, along with a gang of other young men aged 25 and below, have been credited with analyzing the data of major federal agencies to streamline workflows, identify wasteful spending, and recommend changes to DOGE leadership.
Now, the Washington Post reports that Coristine has been tapped to become a ‘senior adviser’ at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.
This new position is in addition to the 19-year-old’s current roles at DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management.
The bureau serves as the IT hub for the entire State Department and it maintains the data and communications coming in from U.S. diplomatic outposts around the world.
Feb 10 (Reuters) – A consortium led by Elon Musk said on Monday it has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, months after the billionaire sued the artificial intelligence startup to block it from transitioning to a for-profit firm.
Musk’s bid could ratchet up longstanding tensions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of the startup at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology.
Altman promptly posted on X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
The two are already embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit. Musk criticized a $500 billion OpenAI-led project called Stargate announced with great fanfare at the White House just after President Donald Trump returned to office, suggesting the investors involved lacked the funding for the project.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in the press release. “We will make sure that happens.”
This technology could advance security, monitoring, and remote sensing.
Anew LiDAR system has been developed that may see through fog and smoke to reveal hidden objects and provide highly detailed remote sensing capabilities. This technology could advance security, monitoring, and remote sensing.
This uniquely designed LiDAR system is based on “single-photon time-of-flight” technology to acquire high-resolution 3D images of objects.
Interestingly, the new system can clearly image a human face in 3D up to half a mile away.
“This type of measurement system could lead to improved security and monitoring systems that could, for example, acquire detailed depth images through smoke or fog and of cluttered scenes,” said Aongus McCarthy from Heriot-Watt University in the UK.
“It could also enable the remote identification of objects in various environments and monitoring of movement of buildings or rock faces to assess subsidence or other potential hazards,” added McCarthy, who is the study’s first author.
Therefore, totalitarianism is inevitable. Advances in technology are now and will continue to be used by KOBK players against each other and against any and all potential rivals, including the masses.
That’s all there is to it. Nothing can stop it.
The only options are better or worse totalitarianism. I can imagine a fairly decent state with very low crime and a thriving population. I can also imagine something really bad.
A really bad state would lobotomize any potential enemy within, even for minor disruption. Lobotomies are already being used to control populations in many parts of the world, including USA. There will be even more of it. There will be less need to cut off your digital dollars or monitor your face because it’s much easier to simply lobotomize you without your permission or knowledge.
Who will be in ultimate control? Whichever group is strongest, most cohesive, most ruthless. How will we know them? Secrecy is to their advantage, so it’s highly probable we will never know who they are.
Who was in control of the Biden administration? Who controls US IC, Five Eyes? How much power do Jews really have? How much power do European royal families really have? How much power does Putin or Xi have?
Empires are inevitable due to the basic reality of KOBK game theory — that players in KOBK conflicts do not know for certain how powerful they are vis-a-vis their adversaries or how powerful their adversaries are. Moreover they do not know for certain the aims, motivations, and/or methods of their adversaries.
This is why hierarchies always grow and always strive to become more powerful. There is not going to be a multipolar world in any other sense than more than one empire competing with the other(s). Within each empire, totalitarianism. Total control. ABN
Talent, competence, little to no government experience, at an age when complex mathematical learning happens fast: These are the factors that will produce excellent results. These guys give me more hope than anything that DOGE will succeed and USA will benefit enormously from it. The best of all possible outcomes is DOGE, plus whatever else Trump does, creates a peaceful Second American Revolution, which remakes our beautiful nation in its own best image and seals the deal by reorganizing government in a way which prevents the grotesque levels of corruption we have been experiencing. Thomas Jefferson called for a revolution every twenty years. Maybe that’s what we will need. I’ll take what we can get. It should be possible, however, that well-programmed AI coupled with open source and procedural transparency will be able to stop massive cheating and corruption within the US government. ABN
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.
American Buddhist Net 