ColdWetDog writes: You’ve always wanted one, of course. Zombies, the occasional alien infestation. The neighbor’s smelly roses. You just need to be prepared for things. You can get freeze dried food, AR15’s, enough ammo to start a small police action (at least here in the U.S. — YMMV), but it has been difficult to get a modern, portable flamethrower until now. CNET has a brief explanation on the XM42, which doubled its Indiegogo funding target in just a few days. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Commercial Flamethrower Successfully Crowdfunded
The oldest lightbulb in continuous use was installed before the Wright Brothers took flight, is 110 years old, and is still as beautiful as the day she was born. In fact, it’s likely the oldest electrical device in continuous use period . Take a moment and consider just how much the world has changed around this one, singular device. Read more… 
New submitter RobertJ1729 writes The Rhode Island Comic Con (RICC) is in the middle of a complete meltdown as hundreds are turned away at the door or denied reentry due to the event organizers selling far more tickets than the venue can accomodate. The Providence Journal reports that “According to Providence Fire Chief David Soscia, too many people were being let in at a time and the organizers were not correctly counting them. That led to over-congested areas in the building which has a maximum capacity of 17, 000 people.” Meanwhile the Rhode Island Comic Con Facebook page is being flooded with comments from angry attendees describing chaos both inside and out of the convention center. RICC initially posted, “Hello RICC fans! WE ARE NOT OVERSOLD!, ” and promised to honor tomorrow tickets sold for today. That post generated several hundred angry comments before eventually being deleted (though it survives in part on RICC’s twitter feed). Commenters are alleging that RICC is deleting negative Facebook comments. Users are tweeting at #ricomicconfail2014 to vent their frustration. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
If you thought 8 TB was plenty , think again. Western Digital just announced that it has added a 10 TB hard drive to its HelioSeal product line. Read more… 
Watch then-Senator Joe Biden from 2006 directly refute each point made by his now-boss, President Barack Obama, about the NSA surveillance program at a news conference last week. Dave Maass and Trevor Timm at the Electronic Frontier Foundation write : After a leaked FISA court document revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is vacuuming up private data on millions of innocent Americans by collecting all the phone records of Verizon customers, President Obama responded by saying “let’s have a debate” about the scope of US surveillance powers. At EFF, we couldn’t agree more. It turns out, President Obama’s most formative debate partner over the invasiveness of NSA domestic surveillance could his Vice President Joe Biden. Back in 2006, when the NSA surveillance program was first revealed by the New York Times , then-Senator Biden was one of the program’s most articulate critics . As the FISA court order shows, the scope of NSA surveillance program has not changed much since 2006, except for the occupant in the White House. Watch this video , as Senator Biden from 2006 directly refutes each point President Obama made about the NSA surveillance program at his news conference last week.