People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.
Gadhafi’s Son Built a Ship With Deadly Shark Tank Inside. Hannibal Gadhafi–son of the assassinated Libyan dictator–built a ship with a 120-ton sea water aquarium inside. Why? To put six sharks inside, including two bull sharks and two whites, the most dangerous in the world. [Wired News]
Sadly, the article doesn’t address the question sure to be on everyone’s mind: do the sharks have laser beams attached to their heads?
The U.S. military has a non-lethal heat ray. No details on what “non-lethal” means in this context.
In this context it means “able to torture an entire crowd of people simultaneously at the push of a button.”
I think it would be cool to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Hopefully not at the point of impact.
Elon Musk
A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.
Scott Chacon, Pro Git
Seen in a job listing on Craigslist:
Knowledge of C+ and Visual Basics is required.
[…]
A certified Micro Soft programmer is preferred but not required.
For someone who wants to work for people with such an impressive degree of technical illiteracy that they probably think their CD drive is a cup holder.
Suspected Carjacker Slices His Neck During Police Chase. A man suspected of stealing a car at knifepoint (and later using that same knife to slice his own neck for unknown reasons) was hospitalized after leading police on a chase through South Los Angeles into the Mid-City area. [LAist]
“Unknown reasons,” really? I think the reason is pretty obvious and am only surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Anyone who’s not either completely delusional or has spent the past ten years living under a rock knows that the US government routinely tortures prisoners. Unless you’re a masochist, why wouldn’t you try to kill yourself if facing capture by Americans?
I just watched part of a bad alien invasion movie which seemed to be about who could die of stupidity first, the aliens invaders with surgically attached rifles (what happens if their weapon malfunctions?) or the US Marines who were sure the alien invaders didn’t have air support (I suppose they walked to Earth).
I came across this dumpster with a peculiar sign on it recently. I wonder if this is something that comes up often?
It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
Penn Jillette
A Year Later, Mysterious Space Plane Is Still in Orbit. The Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane gets more mysterious by the day. Designed to spend up to nine months skipping across orbits on its unspecified errands, the second copy of the Boeing-made craft has now been in space for a year and two days — and is still going strong. The endurance milestone is unqualified good news for America’s space force at a time when its funding and future missions are in doubt.
[…]
The latest rumor has the Air Force extending OTV-2′s time in orbit in order to perform close passes on the new Chinese space station, which has been in orbit since September but does yet have astronauts on board. Some analysts have noted that the X-37′s path nearly intersects with that of the Tiangong station. Others point out that the two spacecraft would pass each other at thousands of meters per second, making useful surveillance impossible. [Wired News]
It would make an attack quite effective, though–all the X-37 would have to do is launch a bucket of gravel in the right direction. It seems to me that this is meant as a message to the Chinese government, saying “Put astronauts on your station and we can murder them any time we feel like it.”