I had each of them as a teacher in Denver when they taught there. Mr. Toebbe would tell me to stop “spinning my wheels” and try harder. I guess trying harder means selling nuclear secrets!
This reminds me of a chemistry professor I had in undergrad in his 50's who repeatedly made vague remarks regarding his prior career in military intelligence (when students showed up late to class, he'd sometimes talk about the days when "Uncle Sam" would wake him up at 2AM to get on plane to an unknown destination.) It always struck me because I came from a military community and many of my teachers had served at one point or another, but nobody bragged about it like this guy did.
A couple years after I left school, he was arrested for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in various microscopes and other lab equipment and selling it all online. It was so bizarre seeing his mugshot on the front page of the local paper.
This couple just wrecked their lives and you have a story to tell. But regardless of their curent reputation, he may have meant what he said and wanted to genuinely help you but in the wrong way.
Ouch, I did not know about that. This makes their situation radically worse. I almost feel bad for their mistake, greed got the best of them. Hope many will think twice before going for easy money. It’s not that easy after all
You know… It’s advice without context like this that isn’t helpful! Sometimes being under federal indictment is just as much luck and circumstance as it is hard work!
Wait for the jury trial because prosecutors lie and "national security" is the thing that gets lied about the most.
EDIT: The other thing to watch out for is an FBI sting where they convince a guy to do something he would never have otherwise done. It seems like every publicly touted victory from them ends up that way once the truth comes out.
You wanna wait to see additional context. Sometimes allegations are completely made up, sometimes there's an alternative explanation that isn't obvious.
They made multiple drops, one for $30,000, another for $70,000, following months of correspondence. There's plenty of context if you read the link -- unless you are for some reason accusing the FBI of wholesale fabrication of a story leading to the arrest of two relatively unimportant scientists.
Oh, and of course, US v. Reynolds, in which the state secrets privilege was invented, from whole cloth, based on fraudulent and perjurious claims of the US Government.
It looks like Toebbe had no contact with an informant. He offered information to the French Embassy and the French government turned this over to the FBI. So there will be no entrapment defense.
But otherwise you are correct, more than one of these sensational cases were hatched by commission-earning FBI informants: the Liberty City 7 (a few acquitted and the others out now), the mentally ill 17-year old who was convinced to blow up a saloon near Wrigley Field (A.Daoud); the Michigan militia plan to kill the governor of that State, many many others.
That vehicle is a sub-orbital vehicle with a re-entry trajectory similar to a ballistic missile . It reaches it's highest speeds only at altitudes where the atmosphere is more individual particles than a continuous gas (it's apogee of 62 miles is well above the Karmen line). The definition of Mach number only makes sense within a fluid. A vehicle that travels 20,716 miles per hour is NOT travelling Mach 27. You can say it's travelling roughly 27 times the speed of sound at sea-level like conditions to get a sense of the scale of the speed, but it is not travelling Mach 27. Once it slams into the atmosphere on re-entry, you can say it is travelling at Mach 27, but by then it's not undergoing sustained flight. This specific vehicle is merely gliding.
This distinction is important, because all of the difficulties associated with flying at hypersonic speeds are due to the problems associated with flying through the fluid. It's comparatively easy to accelerate to the high speeds of sub-orbital vehicles once outside a meaningful atmosphere.
Militarily this is an important distinction as well. An intercontinental ballistic missile needs to go significantly above the earth's atmosphere. During this phase, it's easily detectable, since the horizon is much further away. A vehicle flying much lower well within the earth's atmosphere at very high speeds gives much less early warning.
This specific vehicle strikes a sort of middle ground between these concepts. It's half sub-orbital ballistic missile (it's still required to go above a meaningful atmosphere), half hypersonic cruise missile. Although very critically it is not undergoing sustained flight at hypersonic speeds
I misspoke a bit here. For an orbital vehicle, yes absolutely. Since this vehicle has a relatively shallow suborbital trajectory, I assumed the vehicle has a 1st burn to reach an apogee of ~100km. Upon reaching apogee it orientates itself towards it's earth-bound target, and then executes a second burn. Thus accelerating under thrust towards it's target. Ergo it's maximum speed would occur somewhere between it's apogee and when it re-enters the atmosphere. At least that was my interpretation of the text in the article.
Air breathing hypersonic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles really shouldn't be compared. They have different operational uses. Air breathing missiles are slower but can also be significantly smaller and can fly for sustained periods at lower altitudes. This missile is more comparable to the Russian Zircon missile.
Wicking materials don't use PFAS (although see edit below). The properties that PFAS endows a fabric are pretty much of the opposite of what you need for wicking. Wicking fabrics such as Capilene and polypropylene must be wettable in order to work. PFAS reduces the wettability of fibers. That's its whole point.
PFAS is used in nearly all current water resistant fabrics, including clothing, upholstery, and carpet. The industry calls these Durable Water Resistant (DWR) treatments.
PFAS-free treatments are only just recently hitting the market, but there are only a few so far and they're expensive. The North Face's Futurlight, Helly Hanson's Lifa are the only ones I know by name, but I've heard that Marmot and Mountain Hardware have some PFC-free garments as well.
EDIT:
I searched "PFAS wicking" and I see a some underwear makers are claiming their DWR treated products have enhanced wicking properties. This is confusing marketing. The DWR isn't actually enhacing the wicking. Rather, it's keeping the surface of the fabric that's next to the skin dry, while the untreated bulk of the fabric wicks moisture away. This is sort of like the thin perforated polyethylene membrane used in Band Aids to keep the would dry and prevent adhesion of the dressing.
Nevertheless, it appears we now have to be wary of forever chemicals in our underwear. Lame.
I’ve put off buying a sleeping bag from REI because of DWR. I like to sleep outside as much as I can, and when temps are freezing a well-insulated bag is great. I’ve switched to wool blankets for now. I’m also more and more okay with going without various comforts; the cost of having whatever I want is too high.
It is strange! It's a recent thing in the US, yes. Probably in the past 4-5 years nearly all major brands put some sort of special chemical that gives it 'moisture wicking' (usually in partnership with Dow or 3M).
I just bought some new underwear from Marks & Spencer in the UK which has their "Cool & Fresh" treatment. I haven't worn it yet but this thread is putting me off.
M&S publish a Manufacturing Restricted Substances List [1] for their suppliers, which seems to ban the use of all per- and poly-fluorinated chemicals in the manufacture of textiles for them.
Either I'm misunderstanding, or some of these underwear treatments don't involve PFAs. Who knows what they use instead?
No, not in any normal sense. Plastics are extremely stable. Unless you're grinding your retainer down to <5microns, your retainer isn't a source of microplastics.
The pieces we're talking about either need to start small or need to be exposed to some sort of wear system - sun light, waves grinding plastic bottles together that can break down the polymer chain (actually rather hard to do).
The sunlight one[0] acts on timescales of years/decades, which is a problem for ocean and dumps because all those plastic bottles, we're starting to pay the price environmentally.
But personally, no your retainer is not a source you should be concerned with.
