It took more than 2, 000 pounds of explosives to bring down this 32-story tower in Frankfurt yesterday—roughly the same amount as a Mark 84 bomb. Thankfully, since we live in the age of YouTube, there are plenty of astounding videos of the demo. Read more…
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Behold One of the Biggest Controlled Skyscraper Implosions Ever
A man purchased a first-class ticket on China Eastern Airlines and enjoyed over 300 days of free meals and drinks at the airport’s VIP lounge at Xi’an Airport in Shaanxi, China. He kept changing the itinerary, which allowed him to feast without paying for nearly a year. When the airlines started to look into the matter, he cancelled his ticket and got a refund.
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Man uses first-class airline ticket to get free meals for almost a year
Google turned in a man who copied child pornography to his cellphone using Picasa. Raul Gonzales, 40, was charged with possessing more than 3,000 pornographic pictures of children on the phone. The FBI says the investigation began in March when Google’s hashing technology found two child porn pictures in his Picasa library. Picasa is a cloud-sharing platform for images owned by Google. From there, the company notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which says it found more images on a Tumblr account owned by Gonzalez. That’s when the feds took over. Agents say they also found pictures of a 9-year-old who is close to the family, and that Gonzales admitted to sexually assaulting the child. “When an image is found,” Google assured CBS, “an employee will inspect it to make sure it’s actual abuse and not just a picture of a child at bathtime.” It’s good to know that an alleged sexual predator was identified and dealt with, and it’s good to know that Google assigns individual humans to inspect our naked children for the authorities’ consideration.
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Google turns in child porn owner who used its cloud services
dsinc writes “The Transportation Security Administration announced it has finished removing from all airports the X-ray technology that produced graphic and controversial images of passengers passing through security screening checkpoints. The machines, which the TSA first deployed in 2008, provoked public outrage as the technology, better able than traditional X-rays to detect hidden contraband, also created images that appeared as if they were ‘virtual nudes.’ Critics called this an invasion of privacy and questioned whether the scanning devices truly lacked the ability to save the images, as the TSA claimed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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TSA Finishes Removing “Virtual Nude” X-Ray Devices From US Airports
Modern technology battles the force of erosion to unveil Bronze Age carvings on the surface of Stonehenge. [Read more]
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3D scan of Stonehenge reveals hidden ax-head carvings
The ultrathin, single-fiber endoscope boasts four times the resolution of existing designs and could result in minimally invasive surgeries for studying the brain, detecting cancer early, and more. [Read more]
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Stanford unveils high-res ‘micro-endoscope’ thin as hair
If you thought the Internet freaked out for a little bit and every site you went to was down, you’re not alone. Major websites were down: CNN, Huffington Post, ESPN, Gawker, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, etc. were all broken. Why? Because of a glitch with Facebook. More »
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A Facebook Bug Pretty Much Took Down the Entire Internet
Computer graphics have come a long way since a T-Rex ate that lawyer in Jurassic Park . But if these glimpses of what the next generation of CG has in store, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Cloth simulations with hyper-realistic wrinkling, modelling complex human hair using thermal imaging, and new approaches to smoke rendering will make our future blockbusters even more blockbustery. More »
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A Sneak Peek At the Mind-Boggling Future of Computer Graphics