Strange Things I Have Found
No porn movies on Virgin Galactic
THE boss of the world’s first space travel firm has revealed how a film producer attempted to hire the world’s most advanced space craft – to make a porn movie.
Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn has said he was baffled when he was approached by someone interested in hiring the whole spacecraft – only to find out he was a porn baron.
The Scots-born boss, who heads-up Virgin’s space tourism arm for Richard Branson, said that he didn’t know how much was on offer, but that money was clearly no object.
The 49-year-old said: “We hot approached by someone who turned out to be a porn-film maker who wanted to hire the whole ship.
“They wanted to make a sex movie in space."
Earthrace - Anti-Whaling Stealth Boat
Earthrace, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's new high-tech anti-whaling powerboat, rests in Auckland Harbor, New Zealand, ahead of its deployment for Perth, and then the Southern Ocean. The 80-foot trimaran features paint that deflects radar, allowing the vessel to approach whaling ships virtually unseen. Leaving Perth on December 7, Earthrace will join the Society's ship Steve Irwin on a three-month voyage protesting Japan's industrial whaling program.
Phyuck yeah!
Don't wear your jammies in Shanghai anymore!
Shanghai will host the World Expo next year, and city officials are preparing for the influx of foreigners with a campaign to ban citizens from wearing their pajamas out in the streets. An article in the Chengdu Business Daily expresses outrage over the campaign as a civil rights abuse. Snip:
Many Shanghai residents are used to loitering around the streets in their pajamas. But now the municipal government is making every effort to stop them from doing so, because it would be a "loss of face" for city authorities if a foreigner sees people walking the streets in pajamas during the 2010 World Expo.
Source: (BoingBoing)
NSA to store yottabytes of surveillance data in Utah mega repository
The NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.
On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.
Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015." Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.
