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The amphibious transport ship USS Ponce has been patrolling with a prototype 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System since late August, according to officials. The laser is mounted facing the bow, and can be fired in several modes — from a dazzling warning flash to a destructive beam — and can set a drone or small boat on fire.

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Even before Ebola, Ammo Grrrll only flew under extreme duress. Funerals. Emergencies with sick parents. For business, I have driven from Minnesota to West Virginia, Maryland, and Texas. I enjoy long road trips. There is nobody to complain when you play the same Toby Keith disc for 3 hours, followed by Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto and then The Best of Bread ($1.99 in a bin). Eat your heart out, Brahms. Here comes “Baby, I’m-A Want You”.

Flying itself is wretched enough, but nowadays the TSA Experience begins the fun. It apparently is my karma always to be singled out for the full wanding and gunpowder residue tests on my hands. Tests I am terrified I am going to flunk because of the frequency of my shooting, despite Lady Macbeth-level scrubbing.

A woman after my own heart.

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The home creating space is increasingly moving from the garage to the desktop, and the latest evidence is Carvey, a CNC machine the size of a microwave that can carve pretty much anything you want out of wood, metal and other materials.

It’s a bit like 3D printing, where you start out with a design file on your computer. But instead of building an object from the bottom up, Carvey carves it out of a solid block of material.

And you thought computerized sewing machines were bad.

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Phone in hand, you next need to load it with a credit card, either by taking a picture of your credit card or by approving an existing card that’s already tied to your Apple Store account. Apple is the first vendor to support this loading system—possibly because it may be the first to get permission from the credit card brands to do so.

But this is where things get interesting. When the iPhone scans the number off your card, it doesn’t store it locally, or even on Apple servers. According to Apple sources, Apple mediates a connection to the payment network or issuing bank associated with your card, which then provides a Device Account Number.

If I understand it correctly, and I may not, this is similar to the Kerberos computer network security protocol. In operation, it is much like the way personal information, like passwords and social security numbers, are handled in secure computer systems: what is stored is not the actual information, but a hash of that information; for authentication, a hash of the submitted information is compared to the hash of the stored information — no actual information is either stored or transmitted.

Using per-device tokens means that only the bank that issued the card (or its payment network) ever has your card: You don’t have to trust Apple with it.

I would not hesitate to use such a system.

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About five minutes by car from where I sit.

Read it. And for sure watch the video.

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Read it. And watch the video.

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Despite presumably spending much of their time around caloric and fattening foods, many of the men who built fast-food companies into the empires they are today lived into their 80s and beyond. Coincidence? Probably. Not to mention that these wealthy fellows likely had access to better-than-average health care and could afford food well above the dollar-menu variety.

But maybe eating your greens is overrated.

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“We can’t have them in the cafeteria for sale, period,” said Scott Teaman, food services director with Sodexo Inc., the district’s contracted food provider. “The guidelines for snacks are very strict, and there is no wiggle room.”

Remind me when the Federal government was granted authority to dictate what meals are served in local schools. Oh, yeah, they take Federal subsidies so they have to dance to the Federal tune. And of course no one is crazy enough to suggest that they not take money from the Federal government — after all, it’s Free Government Money!

“The [school] district has received at least 100 calls and emails from Illinois, Hawaii, Minnesota, New York, Montana and Canada from people who want to taste or have something to say about” the cookie, according to yesterday’s Telegram.

The district is now trying to figure out the logistics of shipping the cookies around the country, but won’t begin baking until after Labor Day. They’re also thinking about making the cookie smaller, so that it contains less calories, and can be reintroduced at the school.

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A lot of fast-food joints have been doing this effectively for years — what is an Egg McMuffin but a breakfast cheeseburger, only with ham or sausage, plus an egg? — but BK has decided to come out of the closet.

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On the northern edge of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, past the security checkpoint and high-tech stations for refurbishing nuclear submarines, is a derelict warehouse that once doubled as a sawmill. Building 129’s corrugated metal exterior is rusted and overgrown with bursts of ivy. Broken glass in some of the windows has been replaced with clear plastic. Inside, it takes a moment to adjust to the cavernous silence and dim orange lighting, but one immediately senses the hulking presence of the hangar’s inhabitant: a vessel called Ghost.

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Would that other politicians did useful things.

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Of course, the ‘gender issue’ dominates this Voice of the Crust treatment, but achievement is achievement no matter how it comes up.

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Every revolutionary age produces its own kind of nostalgia. Faced with the enormous social and economic upheavals at the nineteenth century’s end, learned Victorians like Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church models and played the bishops of Western culture, with a monkish devotion to preserving and transmitting old texts and traditions and turning back to simpler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape. Compiled by Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the compendium of literature, philosophy, and the sciences, writes Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine, served as a “monument from a more humane and confident time” (or so its upper classes believed), and a “time capsule…. In 50 volumes.”

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Loeb Classical Library, online. Who could ask for anything more?

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Annotated with the results of an interview with Wolfe. Radical Chic was one of the first lampoons of Political Correctness, and remains one of the best.

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I love Manhattan’s skybridges, the kind that connect two buildings over busy streets. They’ve always reminded me of a future New York as imagined in the early 1900s, a time when it seems everyone expected the city’s thoroughfares to ascend with the tallest skyscrapers.

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If you’re interested in the famous Oak Island ‘buried treasure’, here’s a web site dedicated to it.

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A new iridescent plastic that reveals hidden images with a breath is described in a recent paper published in Advanced Materials. Researchers at the University of Michigan hope to use this technology for anti-counterfeiting purposes, replacing the ubiquitous hologram stickers used on things like luxury handbags and passports with a humidity-activated logo (or celebrity).

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California is one of a handful of states that allow apprenticeships like Mr. Tittle’s in lieu of a law degree as a prerequisite to taking the bar and practicing as a licensed lawyer. In Virginia, Vermont, Washington and California, aspiring lawyers can study for the bar without ever setting foot into or paying a law school. New York, Maine and Wyoming require a combination of law school and apprenticeship.

The programs remain underpopulated. Of the 83,986 people who took state or multistate bar exams last year, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, only 60 were law office readers (so-called for the practice of reading legal texts as preparation). But at a time when many in legal education — including the president, a former law professor — are questioning the value of three years of law study and the staggering debt that saddles many graduates, proponents see apprenticeships as an alternative that makes legal education available and affordable to a more diverse population and could be a boon to underserved communities.

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This is pretty slick. And anything that can be done to decrease the ugliness of the typical parking garage is a step in the right direction.

Actually, what I’d like to see is a giant map of the parking spaces showing what’s empty and what’s occupied, that you can see on your way in. Now THAT would be useful.

If you don’t subscribe to Savage Chickens, you’re missing one of life’s great pleasures.

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A Maryville, Tennessee restaurant owner says her business has only increased since she posted a “Guns Are Welcome” on the front door.

Owner Sharma Floyd said she posted the sign after a restaurant in Durham, North Carolina posted a “No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms” sign and was subsequently robbed at gun point.

According to CBS Charlotte, Floyd said: “And that got me to thinking. I lost a whole group of motorcyclists because they thought I didn’t allow weapons. But I believe it’s okay to carry as long as you have a permit.”

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General Electric has a bright idea for keeping the lights on even when the electrical grid short-circuits. The 122-year-old company wants to bring clean, reliable, affordable energy to the masses with hyper-efficient fuel cells , and in a rare move, is launching a startup to do it.

On Tuesday, the energy and electronics conglomerate unveiled GE Fuel Cells, an internal startup that’s working to commercialize fuel cell technology that runs on natural gas, creating energy that’s not only cleaner than dirty power plants, but more energy efficient, too. In the race to create a more environmentally sound alternative to power plants, fuel cells have emerged as a viable option, alongside solar and wind power. But unlike solar and wind power, fuel cells can provide steady, nonstop energy that doesn’t fade when the sun goes down or when the wind stops blowing.

Just, you know, remember.

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You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.

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When Barbie appeared in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue earlier this year, it ignited newfound controversy over Mattel’s 50-year-plus tradition of using the doll to prop up absurd body image standards. Lost in the debate was the indisputable fact that her typical outfits are entirely inappropriate for storming a castle — but thanks to 3D designer Jim Rodda, that’s been resolved. Rodda has created the “Faire Play Battle Set,” comprising three full sets of 3D-printed battle armor for the iconic figurine. The designer has previously designed a number of 3D-printable items of a medieval persuasion, including functional miniature ballistae and catapults for tabletop gaming.

And nary a chain-mail bikini in sight.

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Lance Corporal Brandon Dieckmann says on their first day, his team took the robot through some thick brush, which an internally transported vehicle could not go through.

“A lot of people don’t think it will be able to handle the terrain that it does, I’d see about 70 to 80 percent of what we can go through it can actually get through,” Dieckmann said.

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My kind of woman.

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Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

Admittedly, of limited appeal.

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The Leading Resource for Historical Fencing and Medieval & Renaissance Combat Skills, it says.

Mark Steyn does what he does best.

So “workplace violence” on US Government property now covers everything from Major Hasan opening fire while shouting “Allahu akbar!” to environmentalist bureaucrats defecating. The government seems to take the latter more seriously than the former, judging from the EPA statement.

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Witnesses tell the Post that the man was chatting on his cellphone and appeared composed despite the knife in his back.

I’ve had performance reviews like that.

Read UNSHELVED. Every day. I tell you three times.

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On January 20 Breitbart News reported PTR Industries was leaving Connecticut for the greener and more gun-friendly pastures of South Carolina. On June 18 Breitbart News sat down with PTR Industries vice president of sales and administration John McNamara, so he could update us on where his gun company–which builds roller-lock rifles–stands in relation to South Carolina and firearm production.

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I am not making this up.

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According to CNN Money, Colt sold “twelve times as many handguns early this year than it did in 2013.”

The impetus behind handgun popularity is a combination of self-defense concerns and concerns over the Obama administration’s penchant for gun control.

The Bluebird of Bitterness reminds us of the importance of this vital piece of American culture.

HEIDI (noun) – Greeting.

HIRE YEW (verb and pronoun) – Complete sentence. Remainder of greeting. Usage: “Heidi! Hire yew?”

BARD (verb) – Past tense of the verb “to borrow.” Usage: “My brother bard my pickup truck.”

JAWJUH (noun) – The state north of Florida. Capitol is Lanner. Usage: “My brother from Jawjuh bard my pickup truck and took it to Lanner.”

BAMMER (noun) – The state west of Jawjuh. Capitol is Berminhayam. Usage: “A tornader jes went through Bammer an’ left $20,000,000 in improvements.”

MUNTS (noun) – A calendar division. Usage: “My brother from Jawjuh bard my pickup truck, and I ain’t heard from him in munts.”

THANK (verb) – Cognitive process. Usage: “Ah thank ah’ll have a bare.”

BARE (noun) – An alcoholic beverage made of barley, hops, and yeast. Usage: “Ah thank ah’ll have another bare.”

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The first “confirmed” jackalope specimen was secured by one Douglas Herrick, who in 1932 found a dead one sprawled in his shop in Douglas, Wyoming. If you want to get technical, though, it was an ordinary dead rabbit next to some deer horns on the floor. But Herrick mounted the rabbit, horns and all, thus begetting a slew of taxidermic jackalopes in bars all across the West.

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I am not making this up.

I got yer alternative energy, right here….

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It is one of the most charming characteristics of this great country of ours that people bother with this sort of things.

Of course.

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When we women were younger, we could convince ourselves that we could possibly fight our way out of trouble. We were undoubtedly grievously mistaken. Testosterone is just a terribly unfair advantage! But, once we hit 60, say, no matter how many Zumba classes we have attended, it becomes crystal clear that we are sitting ducks. And, make no mistake, thugs go for the easiest targets. Counting on a thug to say, “Oh, Jeez, I didn’t see your wheelchair, there, never mind,” is a pipe-dream. Ladies, forget your traditional friends, Ben and Jerry. Count on Mr. Smith, Mr. Wesson or their Austrian cousin, the super-reliable Mr. Glock.

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A new offering from Amazon, called Prime Pantry, aims to alleviate some of this guilt. The service, which launched Wednesday, lets Prime members fill a large box with up to 45 pounds of household items (automatically calculating how much space is left in their box as they shop) and get it delivered for $5.99. Eligible items are available “in popular pack sizes that are cost prohibitive to ship for free,” meaning you can buy one box of Cheerios instead of 12. The program means that Amazon now carries a selection of groceries that are only available to Prime members. A non-Prime member can’t buy that one box of Cheerios or one can of tomatoes.

Full disclosure: I own stock in Amazon, and this sort of thing is why.

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Reddit user wheatley_cereal has posted a factoid that we have no doubt is widely known among Mountain West residents, but of which the rest of the country is almost certainly unaware: It’s possible for a fish to swim directly from the Pacific to the Atlantic without having to dodge Panamax ships in the canal zone.

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I remember the days when we actually thought there would be space colonies. You know, before government decided to suck up all the money and use it to buy votes.

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In its shipping form, a three-serving bag of Soylent clocks in at 2,010 kcal, with 630 kcal from fat—that’s with the combined package of canola and fish oil added into the mix. Altogether, a full day’s worth of Soylent 1.0 will give you 1,050 mg of sodium, 3,465 mg of potassium, 252 total grams of carbs (including 24 g dietary fiber and 6 g of sugars), and 114 g of protein. There’s no cholesterol in the dry ingredients; the oil mix adds about 15 percent of your daily recommended cholesterol intake (specific numbers on the oil aren’t included as part of the label).