In the 1960s, GE engineers developed the Cybernetic Anthropmorophous Machine, or Walking Truck. In 1966, the US Army awarded GE a contract for building the experimental vehicle. However, its hand and foot controls not only fatigued operators, but were impractical for prolonged use on the battlefield, so the project was discontinued. Kevin Weir at flux machine recently reanimated the Walking Truck so the mechanical beast could gallop once more.
Here’s another thing I made for GE! Imagine this fearsome beast ambling after you on the battlefield. And then tripping over a pine cone and exploding everywhere. Also imagine a walking truck ice cream truck.
David Millar will miss the racing when he hangs up his cleats. Photo: Graham Watson | www.grahamwatson.com
COMPIEGNE, France (VN) — David Millar (Garmin-Sharp) wants to savor every moment of his final season among the pro ranks, even if that means suffering for seven hours over the cobbles at Paris-Roubaix.
The 37-year-old Scot will race “The Hell of the North” on Sunday as part of a swansong season that will also include stops at the Tour de France, the Commonwealth Games, and, if he makes the selection, the world championships in Spain in September.
With two young boys at home, and most of his peers retired or driving team cars as sport directors, Millar realized the time was right to step away from the sport. He’s proud he’s been able to retire on his terms, without injury or facing the prospect of not finding a contract, and wants to hit the highlights in his final season.
During 18 years inside the peloton, Millar has seen and lived all the good, bad, and ugliness of professional cycling. He was immersed in the doping culture at Cofidis, resulting in a two-year racing ban that saw him fall into disgrace. When he returned in 2006, he vowed to race clean, and became an ambassador and the unofficial voice of “new cycling,” not only redeeming himself, but helping to pull the sport into a cleaner, more credible future.
VeloNews spoke to Millar on Friday evening to talk cobbles, controversies, and retirement. Check the next issue of Velo Magazine for more of the interview:
VeloNews: Why chose to punish yourself with one more run across the pavé at Paris-Roubaix?
David Millar: They tricked me into it. The day before Milano-Sanremo, [Garmin sport director Robbie] Hunter said, ‘What do you think about Roubaix? It’s your last year, you should do it.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ I prepared for it, and when I went on the recon, I was feeling good on the cobbles. I am glad I decided to do it. Everything’s going to be special this season.
VN: What are your expectations for Sunday?
DM: I am looking forward to it. I am feeling good on the bike, and it’s going to be dry. I think I am going to enjoy it, as much as you can in a race like Roubaix. I have only done it twice in my career, and I never finished. I would really like to arrive to the velodrome.
VN: After such a long career, what do you think you will you miss most?
DM: I will definitely miss the racing. I know I will never get that thrill again in life; that risk, that camaraderie, the sharing of success and defeat with your teammates. The emotions you get on the bike, you can only get that with racing. That’s one of the privileges of being a pro. When you’re racing, it can feel like the be-all, end-all. Nothing else exists in the world. It almost feels like a life-and-death struggle. That’s something you can never get in everyday life.
VN: If we can believe what we see today, the peloton’s a very different place. Are you surprised how fast the peloton has changed from within?
DM: When I came back from my racing ban in 2006, I said then that I thought it would be 10 years before we had a clean sport. I think we’re three, four or five years ahead of that. Ryder [Hesjedal] won the Giro in 2012, that was only six years after I came back, and the Giro is considered the hardest physically of the grand tours. And when you consider that at one point the Italians were the pioneers of doping in cycling, Ryder winning that Giro was a watershed moment for the sport. That proved that you can win the biggest and hardest events in the sport clean.
VN: In the fall of 2012, you said that the Lance Armstrong scandal was the best thing that could happen for cycling, but there’s been a lot of negative backlash. Do you still believe that’s true?
DM: I still believe that, because eventually this story will die off. If it hadn’t come out, there would always be questions, investigations, doubts, but now, slowly over time, it will just fiddle out and die. People are talking about it less, and talking about what’s happening today. That’s been good for cycling.
VN: Are you a bit envious of young riders coming into the sport who don’t have to face the choices that you did when you a rookie?
DM: I would have loved to come into the sport like it is now. In 1997, I was a neo-pro, the peloton was a completely different place. I never had that option. It just was what it was. I am very happy that today’s young pros don’t have to go through what myself and peers had to.
VN: Also during the arc of your career, British cycling has emerged as a world power. Did you ever expect to see that?
DM: It would have seemed unimaginable when I was starting out. That’s why I moved to France when I was 17, because there was no future to develop as a cyclist in the UK. Now we have the Olympic program and Team Sky, which in itself has led to mass participation and interest in cycling. I don’t think anyone in the late 1990s could have imagined it would have grown as massive as it has. I remember when I told people in the early 2000s that I was a cyclist, they would ask what I did as my real job. Now people treat cyclists like footballers.
VN: You’ve seen the best and the worst of cycling. What kept you around so long?
DM: I love the racing. It’s always been about the racing. Training has gotten much more difficult as I’ve gotten older. It’s more difficult to go out there and suffer, and number-crunch my training days away. But when I have a number pinned to my back, I am a completely different person. I simply love racing. I might as well be 18 again.
VN: What does your post-race future hold?
DM: I am still constructing that. I have some clear ideas, but I am still working on it at the moment. It does not necessarily involve pro racing. I will definitely not be a sport director. I would be terrible at it. I wouldn’t have the patience. I don’t think I would be very good at managing pro cyclists.
Original source
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: “Alex Mayyasi reports that in the parking lots of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, expensive cars gleam in the California sun and a closer look reveals that the cars share a mysterious detail: they nearly all have a custom license plate frame that reads, ‘Member. 11-99 Foundation.’ Are the Bay Area’s wealthy all part of some sort of illuminati group that identifies each other by license plate instead of secret handshakes? The answer is the state highway patrol — the men and women that most people interact with only when getting ticketed for speeding. A number of the frames read ‘CHP 11-99 Foundation,’ which is the full name of a charitable organization that supports California Highway Patrol officers and their families in times of crisis. Donors receive one license plate as part of a $2,500 ‘Classic’ level donation, or two as part of a bronze, silver, or gold level donation of $5,000, $10,000, or $25,000. Rumor has it, according to Mayyasi, that the license plate frames come with a lucrative return on investment. As one member of a Mercedes-Benz owners community wrote online back in 2002: ‘I have the ultimate speeding ticket solution. I paid $1800 for a lifetime membership into the 11-99 foundation. My only goal was to get the infamous ‘get out of jail’ free license plate frame.’ The 11-99 Foundation has sold license plate frames for most of its 32 year existence, and drivers have been aware of the potential benefits since at least the late 1990s. But attention to the issue in 2006-2008 led the foundation to stop giving out the frames. An article in the LA Times asked ‘Can Drivers Buy CHP Leniency?’ and began by describing a young man zipping around traffic — including a police cruiser — and telling the Times that he believed his 11-99 frames kept him from receiving a ticket. But the decision was almost irrelevant to another thriving market: the production and sale of fake 11-99 license plate frames. But wait — the CHP 11-99 Foundation also gives out membership cards to big donors. ‘Unless you have the I.D. in hand when (not if) I stop you,’ says one cop, ‘no love will be shown.'”
Cloudflare is reporting that it’s its very difficult, if not practically impossible, to steal SSL private keys with this attack.
Here’s the good news: after extensive testing on our software stack, we have been unable to successfully use Heartbleed on a vulnerable server to retrieve any private key data. Note that is not the same as saying it is impossible to use Heartbleed to get private keys. We do not yet feel comfortable saying that. However, if it is possible, it is at a minimum very hard. And, we have reason to believe based on the data structures used by OpenSSL and the modified version of NGINX that we use, that it may in fact be impossible.
The reasoning is complicated, and I suggest people read the post. What I have heard from people who actually ran the attack against a various servers is that what you get is a huge variety of cruft, ranging from indecipherable binary to useless log messages to peoples’ passwords. The variability is huge.
This xkcd comic is a very good explanation of how the vulnerability works. And this post by Dan Kaminsky is worth reading.
I have a lot to say about the human aspects of this: auditing of open-source code, how the responsible disclosure process worked in this case, the ease with which anyone could weaponize this with just a few lines of script, how we explain vulnerabilities to the public — and the role that impressive logo played in the process — and our certificate issuance and revocation process. This may be a massive computer vulnerability, but all of the interesting aspects of it are human.
Oh,
Rolling Stone, you silly goose. Although we love Julia Louis-Dreyfus, putting that iconic John Hancock signature at the bottom of her ‘shopped U.S. Constitution tattoo was not your smartest move. John Hancock didn’t sign that document, after all. You’re thinking of the Declaration of Independence. Oops.
To be honest, we weren’t planning to cover this image because the Photoshopping itself isn’t horrible… but then we woke up to find our inbox stuffed with emails about it. The tribe has spoken! Thank you to everyone who sent this in.
PARIS (AFP) — International Cycling Union (UCI) president Brian Cookson said he is mulling over the idea of installing cameras on professional racers’ bicycles to bring fans closer to their heroes.
Already, Belgian broadcaster
Sporza has experimented with dashboard cameras in certain team vehicles at Gent-Wevelgem and the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders) with great success.
It is one of the few recent cycling innovations to have received almost universal approval, capturing the emotions of the sport directors and team officials at key moments in the races, as well as hearing first hand some of the orders barked out at riders.
Now Cookson wants to extend that trial to putting cameras on bikes looking at a rider’s face during a race.
“We need to embrace innovation and sell our sport,” said Cookson in a UCI statement. “How do you progress and embrace innovation in order to make the spectator and viewer feel even more engaged?
“We will look at technology such as cameras on bikes and in team cars to see how they can be used to enhance the viewer experience. Imagine being able to share the view of Chris Froome as he rode up Mount Ventoux or came up the Champs-Elysees to win last summer’s Tour de France.
“And why stop at cameras — what about having microphones on bikes or sharing rider data on screen.”
Such innovations have worked well in sports like rugby, where the referee has a microphone and television spectators can hear his exchanges with players, or Formula One in which broadcasters can tune into radio contact between teams and their drivers.
Original source
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: “The U.S. Navy’s new railgun technology, developed by General Atomics, uses the Lorentz force in a type of linear, electric motor to hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 — in excess of 5,000 mph. The weapon has a range of 100 miles and doesn’t require explosive warheads. ‘The electromagnetic railgun represents an incredible new offensive capability for the U.S. Navy,’ says Rear Adm. Bryant Fuller, the Navy’s chief engineer. ‘This capability will allow us to effectively counter a wide range of threats at a relatively low cost, while keeping our ships and sailors safer by removing the need to carry as many high-explosive weapons.’ Sea trials begin aboard an experimental Navy catamaran, the USNS Millinocket, in 2016.”
