Well, I guess I won’t be afraid of the dark anymore. I WILL be afraid of radioactive mutant ooze creatures though. Gotta take the good with the bad, right?
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SOURCE LINK from Win!
Warm up your credit cards because Uncle Sam is having a garage sale! For the low, low price of $100,420, you could be the proud owner of the Sea Shadow prototype stealth ship! And that’s not all — by ponying up all that cash, you’ll also be agreeing to take possession of the Hughes Mining Barge (HMB-1), which was reportedly built to hide the CIA’s recovery of the downed Soviet submarine K-129. Two great pieces of outdated top secret history for the price of one!
The sale of the two craft is being handled by the General Services Administration’s auction site — think of it as eBay for government surplus. The auction only has five days left, a reserve of $10,000, and a top bid placed just this past Friday of $100,420.
Of course, there are some catches. In addition to the sky-high asking price and needing to take possession of both Seas Shadow and the HMB-1 simultaneously, the terms of the deal require that the winner of the auction completely dismantle the Sea Shadow for scrap. Sorry guys: No pleasure boating. From the GSA auction:
[All caps theirs] THE EX-SEA SHADOW SHALL BE DISPOSED OF BY COMPLETELY DISMANTLING AND SCRAPPING WITHIN THE U.S.A. DISMANTILING IS DEFINED AS REDUCING THE PROPERTY SUCH AS IT HAS NO VALUE EXCEPT FOR ITS BASIC MATERIAL CONTENT.
For those unaware, the Sea Shadow was built by Lockheed Martin and DARPA in 1985 to test automation and stealth concepts on naval craft. The comparisons between it and the angular design of the Lockheed F-117 stealth fighter are immediate to the eye, and probably intentional as the Sea Shadow was built only four years after the aircraft’s first flight.
The Sea Shadow has been paired with the HMB-1 since the stealth craft’s inception, and the floating drydock has continued to house the craft after it was removed from service in 2006. Since then, the pair have been quietly rusting in the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet, with the hopes that an interested museum would want to take on the strange vessel. There were, obviously, no takers.
The HMB-1 has had a bit of a storied history itself. A completely submersible drydock barge, it was built to work in conjunction with the Glomar Explorer as part of an elaborate CIA effort to raise the Soviet submarine K-129 called project Azorian. Built by eccentric mogol Howard Hughes, the barge featured a retractable roof and was meant to fit beneath the Glomar where a large mechanical arm would descend to the ocean floor and pluck the submarine from the depths. Though operation Azorian was only partially successful, HMB-1 found new life as the perfect way to develop and test the Sea Shadow away from prying eyes.
And if all that isn’t enough, the Sea Shadow inspired the ship used in Tomorrow Never Dies. If that doesn’t get you to plonk down a life’s savings than I don’t know what will.
Here’s the Sea Shadow today.
And this is the HMB-1, today.
Here’s the two of them together, in more hopeful times. The HMB-1 is on the left. (via)
(Defense Tech via Slashdot, top image via Wikipedia, all other images via GSA auctions)
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It’s starting to warm up here on the East Coast, and pretty soon we’ll be inundated with monstrous bloodsucking insects. You could spend a lot of money on nasty bug repellents, or you could do what entomologist Steve Schutz of the Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District did and build up a tolerance. Of course, he’s had over 15,000 mosquito bites a year for the for past ten years — but it’s never too late to start.
This video may be a bit on the old side, but Schutz’s powers of concentration are simply stunning. Look at him sitting there, casually reading a magazine while 50 or so mosquitos are sucking his blood.
Of course, Schutz doesn’t do this for fun. The mosquitos he’s feeding have been raised in captivity, and are used for experiments requiring a pristine control group. Despite a decade of being bitten, Schutz admits that he’s not completely impervious to the itching. From the Contra Costa Times:
“It kind of tickles or itches a little bit, but I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years, and I’ve developed a tolerance,” Schutz said. He easily resists the urge to scratch a mosquito bite, or 50, which only makes the tingling worse as you spread the itch-inducing mosquito saliva.
Our hat is off to you, Dr. Schutz; truly you are a god among men.
(via Discoblog, Contra Costa Times)
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Mass lawsuits have been one of the most effective weapons rightsholders have had against torrenters. By using IP addresses to identify infringers, rightsholders have not only been able to find a large supply of alleged infringers to take action against, but are also to attach names — and wallets — to instances of infringement. The problem is that these cases tend to operate with the pinpoint accuracy of a flamethrower, which is why New York Judge Gary Brown has ruled IP addresses are insufficient evidence to identify pirates, and has provided a lengthy and thoughtful explanation as to why that is.
The way these mass lawsuits tend to work is that rightsholders collect a bouquet of IP addresses, which in and of themselves, don’t exactly help them. The next step is that the rightsholders then take the IP addresses to court and try to get a subpoena for personal information about said IPs from Internet service providers. Once they get the names from the ISPs, they can move ahead with the case.
The problem here, clearly, is that the person who has the misfortune of having their name attached to the IP address in question isn’t necessarily the one who was doing the pirating. In fact, they often aren’t. That’s not to say they never are, but it’s a bit of a mess at best. There’s a plan in the works to start throttling Internet access to certain users this summer by using this kind of IP identification, but at the same time — using this very identification process — the RIAA’s own IPs have been caught infringing. Meanwhile, the RIAA says it was someone else using their IPs, which is exactly the same excuse they refuse to acknowledge when filing mass lawsuits. Like I said, a mess.
Judge Gary Brown, in his order, attempted to straighten things up a bit with a very detailed explanation of why, legally, IP addresses are not sufficient evidence to prosecute pirates. Essentially, it boils down to one major point; using an IP address used to be a pretty reasonable method to single out an individual, but it isn’t anymore. In the past, file-sharing could be tracked down to a single, wired access point that was registered to a single person and could only be used by one person at any given time.
The prevalence of wireless routers throws the logic of “IP address = person” — which was once reasonably valid — completely into question, or out the window depending on how you look at it. From the order:
“While a decade ago, home wireless networks were nearly non-existent, 61% of US homes now have wireless access. As a result, a single IP address usually supports multiple computer devices – which unlike traditional telephones can be operated simultaneously by different individuals.
Different family members, or even visitors, could have performed the alleged downloads. Unless the wireless router has been appropriately secured (and in some cases, even if it has been secured), neighbors or passersby could access the Internet using the IP address assigned to a particular subscriber and download the plaintiff’s film.”
It’s a pretty obvious argument, but one you see being made surprisingly infrequently in higher courts. Of course, all this really means is that mass copyright cases aren’t going to fly in the Eastern District of New York for the time being. However, the well made argument could have a positive influence on copyright cases and IP addresses in law overall. If nothing else, it’s good to see a decision that doesn’t support a shoot-first-with-a-flamethrower-and-ask-questions-later-maybe approach to dealing with piracy. Hopefully we can look forward to more in the future.
(via TorrentFreak)
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This is a music video for a track from Cut Copy called ‘Take Me Over’. Now I’m not sure if Cut Copy is a popular band or not, because I live under a rock. IN THE BACK OF A BEAR CAVE. Next to an animal carcass. Anyway, in the music video a little girl who’s getting bullied builds a sweet set of cardboard mech armor and then goes after the girls that were bullying her. The lesson? Don’t bully. And if any of you younger readers out there ARE bullies, heed my advice: when you grow up you will be a loser. “That wasn’t advice, dummy.” FINE — IT WAS A FORTUNE THEN, YOU LITTLE SHIT!
Hit the jump for the music video.
Last month, Mac users experienced one of the first widespread trojans since the platform regained popularity, the Flashback trojan. Apple was quick to release a security tool to remove the trojan, and now, Dr. Web, the security firm that initially discovered the trojan, notes that while computers are still infected by the trojan, the rate of infection is decreasing at around a staggering 100,000 computers per week.
Dr. Web chief executive Boris Sharov notes that the decrease is has been moving along slowly, but now the spread should be over in around a month. Dr. Web points out that the rate of new infections is fortunately now practically nonexistent:
Sharov also said he feels the disinfection rate has gone much slower than he thinks it would have for a widespread Windows infection, largely due to Mac users’ overconfidence in their machine’s security. Burn.
For those that don’t remember, or are just learning of the trojan for the first time, Flashback was being used for click fraud by redirecting traffic from Google search ads to its own ads, and ended up generating $10,000 per day. If you haven’t yet applied Apple’s Flashback removal tool, it’s probably a good idea to do so. And thankfully, according to Dr. Web, we can put this all behind us sometime quite soon.
(via Forbes)
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This is a visual comparison of all the water on earth compared to the actual size of earth, if all the water where held in a sphere. As you can see, it doesn’t look like very much. Weird, I could have sworn I learned in school that the oceans went all the way through earth’s core. “What the f*** what kind of school did you go to?” Home.
The picture…shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in comparison to the size of the Earth. You’re probably thinking I missed a decimal point when running my calculator since surely all the water on, in, and above the Earth would fill a ball a lot larger than that “tiny” blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas. But, no, this diagram is indeed correct.
About 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth’s water. But water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and…even in you and your dog. Still, all that water would fit into that “tiny” ball. The ball is actually much larger than it looks like on your computer monitor or printed page because we’re talking about volume, a 3-dimensional shape, but trying to show it on a flat, 2-dimensional screen or piece of paper. That tiny water bubble has a diameter of about 860 miles, meaning the height (towards your vision) would be 860 miles high, too! That is a lot of water.
Wow, with so little looking water I almost feel bad having a pool. Just kidding, I don’t have a pool. My bedroom does flood when it rains though. It makes the carpet smell ooky!
Thanks to beebs, who actually stumbled upon this graphic looking for an accurate moon to moon-cheese comparison.
Larry “Spiderman“ McBride rode into the record books last Friday when he made a quarter mile run on his Lawless Electric Rocket bike in 6.94 seconds at a staggering 201.37 miles per hour. The super fast run not only set a record for fastest electric motorcycle — a category I didn’t know existed prior to this morning — but also a record for electric vehicles overall.
Of course, it took some serious power to get McBride over the finish line in that record time. His bike, a joint project between Lawless industries and Orange County Choppers, packs a mean punch: Running at 355 volts, 4,000 amps, and 14.2 kWh. All it took was a 250 pound battery and 1,340 horsepower GE electric motor.
Just a happy reminder to people who gripe about how electric vehicles will never be powerful enough.
While the record is pretty amazing, the real jaw-dropper is watching the bike take off. Because it’s electric, it’s almost silent as McBride prepares his run, and just takes off without any warning. I don’t know if this is the future we’re looking at, but it’s pretty damn impressive.
(via Green Car Reports, National Electric Drag Racing Association)
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Damaged blood vessels are about as fun as they sound, and they tend to come part in parcel with other problems. Dialysis patients for example, who already have problems with their kidneys, get hit with the double whammy that dialysis is pretty rough on the blood vessels in the arm. Granted, the benefit is greater than the cost, but doing damage is never good. One possible solution to the problem would be replacing the damaged blood vessels with fresh, new ones. But how do you get those? If current research pays off, you get them by weaving them out of strips of artificially-grown human flesh. It’s as awesome as it is gory.
Cytograft has been working on this pursuit for a while, and they’ve made some pretty big advances. We’re still a far cry from widespread blood vessel transplants, but we’re headed in that direction. Originally, the idea was to take huge sheets of what is essentially lab-grown flesh and roll it into tubes. The problem that presented itself there was that the tubes needed to be fused shut somehow, to prevent leakage. The solution to this problem, it seems, is to take a whole different approach entirely and slice those sheets of flesh into strands, and then robotically weave dozens of these strands into a tube by wrapping them around a spindle. For science.
So far, Cytograft is doing pre-clinical testing in dogs and have found that the artifical vessels are quite robust and free of leaks. To boot, they typically aren’t rejected by the recipient since the woven tubes are made of cellular material but not the actual donor cells. Thanks to that, the implanted vessels generally aren’t seen as a threat by the patient’s nervous system.
The hope for the future is that this process can be perfected to the extent where hospitals could conceivably have “spare blood vessels” on hand somewhere. So far, Cytograft’s product is proving to be effective with no need to be personalized for the recipient in any way; these fake vessels would work just as well for me as they would for you. The main challenge now, aside from clinical testing, is coming up with a better way to grow the flesh, preferably into fibers that could be used right away. Somewhere, someone is thinking really, really hard about the best way to grow flesh. Though I guess if it’s for the good of sick people everywhere, maybe that’s okay.
(Technology Review via Discover)
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