Gawker: valleywag, america, fuck yeah

Meet Boeing's deadly frickin' laser, now with more "plausible deniability"

Jackson West — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:40:00 EDT

When America rains death from above, it gets messy. The bloody masses of maimed civilians, the lingering radiation from depleted uranium casings, not to mention our signature calling cards — live cluster bomb shells and shrapnel. Lots of shrapnel. Thanks to engineers at Boeing, Team USA may have solved that "problem" with lasers. And they won't just be mounted in planes: A "Laser Avenger" system is being tested which would mount on a Humvee, thereby creating the greatest thing to wildly fire in a drunken stupor ever (and God help us when we make humanity's final, fatal flaw and put them in the hands of the robots instead). Best part?

It's silent, deadly and leaves no trace, making it the ultimate in plausibly deniable weapons for the discrete diplomat. Except for a brief vacuum some guy our intelligence apparatus mistook for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used to be, there will be nothing left to have to explain. Of course, the photographs from the Air Force are all fictions, because you wouldn't actually see the laser necessarily. So who's winning the Photoshop proganda war now, suckers?

Be all that you can be — on the Internet

Paul Boutin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:40:00 EDT

The U.S. Army does indeed get 70 percent of its recruiting leads online now. But not necessarily because aspiring soldiers watched one of the Army's videos produced by ad agency MRM. Still, the Army's most popular clip, "Basic Combat Training." is worth a watch. Don't miss the part between 0:25 and 0:30, where a new female soldier uses the word "fun" twice to describe her experience, over footage of trainees firing semiautomatic rilfes and machine guns in mock battles. Hmm, when was the last time anyone I know in tech described their job as "fun?"

A week in which we sang the body electric

Jackson West — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Sure, the English may have invented the national founding document, parliamentary democracy, the bicameral legislature and baited their bears to extinction with bulldogs. But who taught those bulldogs how to ride skateboards? Yanks from California. We just took one of the ten best fireworks displays from IAC's Vimeo and used Apple's genius Final Cut Pro to luma-key the footage over clips of skateboarding bulldogs found with Google search on YouTube. The audio quality isn't as good as it could be, but at least we're having more fun than evil foreigners — if not the olds.

Mahalo enables Freedom of Speech

Paul Boutin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:00:00 EDT

We hold these Truths to be self-evident: Wikipedia's Tyranny of the Mob sucks. Every time I run an item about Jimmy Wales, my page gets hacked. So what about Jason Calacanis's pursuit of happiness over at Mahalo? Former Uncov blogger and army of one Ted Dziuba has posted a step-by-step pictorial guide to practicing your First Amendment rights using the search index's new open editorial system. Try this on Wikipedia, and someone from the armed and unregulated Militia of Truth will likely kill your edits on sight. But on Mahalo, only Calacanis's paid mercenaries will bother to fix pages. At $10 an hour, there's no way they'll be able to keep up. Let freedom ring!

Iran's plan to kill "corrupt" bloggers

Paul Boutin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:00:00 EDT

From Global Voices:

On Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.” The text of the bill would add, “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,” to the list of crimes punishable by death.

Hoo boy, I can hardly wait for Michael Moore's take on this one. More coverage by Iranian-American radio reporter Cyrus Farivar. (Photo by AP/Saman Aghvami)