I’ve got to admit that I’m not nearly as impressed with crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson, his Defense Distributed organization, or its 3D printable handgun, the Liberator, as the rest of the internet seems to be. Most everywhere I’ve looked for the last several days I’ve seen headline after overwrought headline claiming that this new handgun design is a radical game changer […]
On the opening day of this year’s Sea Air Space Expo, the wonder con for all things naval aviation, the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command announced a planned 2014 deployment of its long-awaited, functional solid state Laser Weapon System (LaWS). Scheduled for installation aboard the amphibious transport dock, USS Ponce, the production of an operational […]
According to the sales statistics of Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, everybody loves e-books. The economically-priced readers; the ability to store and transport an entire library effortlessly and less expensively; the added benefits of highlighting, annotation, simplified note-taking, searchable text, and inserted ancillary materials. It’s no wonder e-books are popular. With the rapidly […]
This weekend and this weekend only, the entire world is welcome to a festival made up of what are arguably the best movies ever made when the folks at Hulu put the fabulous Criterion Collection online for free (well okay, with commercials, but still, close enough). All of the Criterion movies are regularly available on […]
Israel-based ebook site Total Boox is introducing a new business model based on charging consumers by a per-page-read basis for the books they purchase. Company CEO Yoav Lorch believes this business model appeasl to readers, publishers, and writers, describing the per-page system as a “powerful marketing channel” to access new readers and increase revenue by […]
Today, in Bexar County, home to San Antonio, Texas’s lovely second city, they’re getting ready to open the United States’s first fully electronic public library. The new system will allow patrons to download thousands of e-texts from their homes. This digital library will also have a bright, shiny new high-tech central library branch where […]
“The only person who could ever miss with this gun would be the sucker with the bread to buy it.”– Peter (Ken Foree), Dawn of the Dead (1978) TrackingPoint, the Austin, TX-based manufacturer of high-end rifles for wealthy hunters has introduced its Precision Guided Firearm (PGF) to the public. Using technology based on the tactical […]
In these days following the brutal massacre of six adults and 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, the National Rifle Association, America’s original gun lobby, has been unusually quiet. The lobby’s highly professional website sits without updates, its Twitter feed remains untouched, and the Facebook account reduced to a single image of the NRA logo and […]
If the military conflicts of the last decade have taught us anything, it’s that the computer is one of the most dangerous weapons in the history of warfare. Computers have proven invaluable in offensive and defensive systems, simplified the gathering of real time intelligence, and have granted militaries with the technology that has the ability […]
Looking out across the Atlantic Ocean from the shore of Cape Canaveral, as far as the eye could see, the sky was gray with low clouds and a light rainfall pattering across the choppy waves. It had been raining the morning of November 14, 1969 and mission control at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had […]
