Video: Turning soda cans into liquid metal looks so fun

Video: Turning soda cans into liquid metal looks so fun


I'm not going to give my aluminum cans to recycling centers anymore. Instead, I'm going to melt them down to liquid metal and create awesome metal objects with them. All I need is a hair dryer and some charcoal to create this awesome mini metal foundry. It turns about 40 cans into a pound of aluminum.


Grant Thompson, the King of Random, shows you how to melt soda cans in the video below.




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What's Your Favorite Twilight Zone Episode?

What's Your Favorite Twilight Zone Episode?


We're smack dab in the middle of SyFy's New Year Twilight Zone marathon. And I truly wish I had time to watch it all. But this annual tradition always gets me thinking about what episode is my favorite. I honestly don't know how to decide!


There's the classics like "To Serve Man" and "Eye of the Beholder" and "Time Enough At Last" that are still fun to watch even if you know the twist endings. And then there's the culturally important Cold War stories like "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" or "The Shelter." Even some less celebrated deep cuts like "The Old Man in the Cave" and "Mr. Dingle, The Strong" are contenders in my book. I really don't know what to pick as a favorite.


So what's your favorite episode? And while we're at it, what's your least favorite? That might be an easier choice for me: "Black Leather Jackets" is so painfully unsatisfying I'm half-convinced it must've been written on an incredibly tight deadline or something.


Happy New Year, everybody!





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Watch a tiger jump impossibly high for meat in slow motion

Watch a tiger jump impossibly high for meat in slow motion


Holy crap. I'm pretty sure the fence separating the tigers from the humans does absolutely nothing because these tigers can easily out jump it. Look at them gracefully fly in the air and snatch the meat like a wide receiver catching a touchdown pass. These beasts are basically basically comic book superhero versions of regular cats.




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Why Not Just Breathalyze Yourself?

All I Want Out of New Year's Eve Is a Swingin' Party

All I Want Out of New Year's Eve Is a Swingin' Party


I listened to "Swingin' Party" by Kindness more than any other song in 2014. It's not really party music, and it's certainly not swing music. (It's not about swinging either, perv.) But the chill, let's-hang-out-with-our-favorite-friends vibe is everything I want out of my New Year's Eve.


"Swingin' Party" was originally released by The Replacements in 1985, though it's been covered countless times. Kindness did their the glitchy version in 2009, and Lorde did a moody rendition in 2013. But one line stands out in all of them: "Bring your own lampshade / Somewhere there's a party."


That's what I want. I want to go to a house party with my favorite friends and a bunch of lampshades. Sounds weird and cool and much better than cramming into Times Square and peeing my pants. If I see a stranger at the party without a lampshade, well they can have mine because that's the New Year's spirit. We're all in this together. [Spotify, iTunes, Amazon]



Image via Flickr




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The Science of How Champagne Gets Its Bubbles


Without its bubbles, champagne is ordinary white wine, unfit for sabering or smashing against new ships. So what gives sparkling wines their sparkle? A fascinating process called secondary fermentation.


Unlike most wines, champagne goes through an additional fermentation in the bottle. Sugar and additional yeast are added when the champagne is bottled, and the yeast then slowly starts converting the sugar to carbon dioxide. The American Chemistry Society's video has more about the science of champagne—just in case you're looking to impress someone at your New Year's Eve party. [ACS]






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NewEgg Flash - 50% off the RAZER Blackwidow Ultimate 2014 Black Gaming Elite Mechanical Keboard Refurbished

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With winter here, it's probably a good time to replace thoe old boots of yours. And does Amazon ever have a deal for all the men out there! Today only, save a whopping 50% off select Eastland men's boots and other shoes. Prices start as low as just $40 and include 4 different styles of boots, one trail shoe, a casual slip-on and a boat style. Hurry, sale ends at Midnight on 12/31/2014.



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Palestinians Move To Join International Criminal Court, Defying Israeli And U.S. Warnings

What U.S. Intelligence Predicted The World Would Look Like In 2015

Just Drink Prosecco

Just Drink Prosecco


It's New Year's Eve, which means that amateurs across the planet will be imbibing far more booze than they're accustomed to, and more likely than not, the intoxicating mixture will include a bunch of bubbly. Here's why it should be a cheap bottle of prosecco and nothing else.


Seeing the light at the end of the Andre


For years, if I wanted to drink "champagne" I just bought Andre because for the little money I had, I could buy a crap ton of it. A bottle of this California sparkling wine costs less than $5 most of the time, so when you're at the register, it feels like you almost can't regret it.


This is very wrong. Andre tastes terrible if you are anywhere north of completely blacked out. And even if you are too drunk to regret your Andre purchase when you're drinking it, the next day, YOU WILL REGRET THE ANDRE. He's like the annoying friend who's fun to hang out with until he's on your couch for 24 hours. Except that it's you on the couch, and your friend Andre is inside you head playing air hockey.


I admit that I didn't start drinking prosecco of my own accord, but instead because had this girlfriend with refined tastes who introduced me. We would drink it in the park on sunny weekends and to my surprise, prosecco was enjoyable, affordable, and didn't make me want to kill myself.


Stopping short of champagne


Though a critic will bristle at the over simplification, prosecco is basically just Italy's version of the pretentious French fizzy stuff. It differs from champagne in a few important ways, according to this informative article published at Fox News:



  • Region: Champagne is native to the Champagne region in northeast France, whereas prosecco comes from the Veneto region of northeast Italy.

  • Grapes: Champagne is made from a combination of chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier grapes. Prosecco is made from glera grapes.

  • Fermentation: Champagne is made by a traditional dual fermentation method. After making wine from the grapes, you then add a little more yeast to the final bottle, which gives it its fizziness. Prosecco on the other hand, undergoes secondary fermentation before bottling.

  • Taste: As a result of the above differences, the two beverages have different flavor. From the aforementioned article:



Prosecco is generally characterized by notes of green apples, citrus and white flowers that are usually light and delicate and not exceedingly complex. Some prosecco even borders on sweet, or what's known as off-dry. Champagne, on the other hand, has added complexity, due in part to additional time spent in contact with dead yeast cells during secondary fermentation.


These yeast cells give it a toasted brioche, yeasty bread dough or biscuit taste, in addition to fruit and other flavors, which can vary depending on the proportion of grapes used and can include – but is not limited to – citrus, apple, peach, honey, white flowers, cherry and raspberry.



Save a bunch of money


Both good champagne and good prosecoo are delicious varieties of flavor experience. Champagne is just way more expensive. Take roughly equivalent bottles of champagne and prosecco and you're going to pay way more for the champagne. For example, you can get a 90-point prosecco for $11! What does $11 get you in real champagne made in France? Nothing.


All of which is a long way of saying that if you want to get your money's worth for something of quality that you won't feel shitty about in the moment—or the next morning—go get a $10-$15 bottle of prosecco. Leave the Andre for the college kids, and save the champagne for the guy with an expense account.


And really, any champagne alternative will do


OK, so I've been focusing mostly on prosecco here because I personally love it, but basically you are going to get more bang for your buck with anything besides French stuff. Cava, for instance, is the Spanish version of bubbles made with Spanish grapes. There is some quality stuff for cheap. And even American sparkling wines have their moments: high-ratings for good prices, even if they lack the grave traditions of the European varieties.


New Years is a lovely holiday in which we get to celebrate the year past with great excess. This year resolve to keeping that excess tot he parts of your life that matter. Spend that cash wisely, friends. Salute!






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Brooklyn's Best NYE Tradition Ends Tonight 


If Times Square is too gaudy, crowded, and frankly insane for you, then there is another New York tradition worth your New Year's Eve—one that is, in fact, ending tonight. For the past fifty years, the Pratt Institute has set out its amazing collection of big old steam whistles out on the lawn of its Brooklyn campus. Tonight's your last chance to steam blast your way into the new year.


With the school closed for the holidays, Pratt's steam whistle New Year's Eve celebration is all-volunteer effort lead by the school's chief engineer, Conrad Milster. Milster been in charge of Pratt's collection for decades, salvaging steam whistles from trains, factories, ships (including the Normandie). He's even made a few of his own, including a calliope, an instrument akin to an organ but powered by steam (see video above.).


Merrymakers are free to go up to the whistles, pull on a rope, and let loose a blast that can be heard far and wide. In the 19th century, New Yorkers would have heard such a blast every time a ships and trains left or arrived.



Chief engineer Conrad Milster blows a steam whistle.


We're generally pretty anti-steampunk here at Gizmodo, but Pratt's steam whistle New Year's Eve celebration is the real deal historically. The Pratt Institute, now a design school, was originally founded to train engineers in 1887. It closed its engineering school in 1993.


Now, it's the end of an another era. Last year, the New York Times reported that Pratt was discontinuing the New Year's Eve tradition out of safety concerns. The school was allowing one last celebration in 2015. Milster considered making last year's celebration the last, but he seems to have been convinced to make one last hurrah.






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Want to have your server pwned? Easy: Run PHP

More than 78 per cent of all PHP installations are running with at least one known security vulnerability, a researcher has found.


Google developer advocate Anthony Ferrara reached this unpleasant conclusion by correlating statistics from web survey site W3Techs with lists of known vulnerabilities in various versions of PHP.


What he found is that many, many PHP-powered websites are using insecure versions of the interpreter – so much so that it's actually easier to find an insecure PHP setup on the internet than a secure one.


"This is absolutely and unequivocally pathetic," Ferrara wrote.


The two most popular PHP releases, according to W3Techs' statistics, were versions 5.2.17 and 5.3.29. Together, they accounted for 24 per cent of the total – and both are insecure.


More to the point, Ferrara found that for each major version of PHP from 5.3 through 5.6, only a small number of minor versions are not known to contain any vulnerabilities, but most systems aren't running those secure versions.


In Ferrara's findings, 93.3 per cent of all PHP 5.6.x installs were insecure, 63.4 per cent of PHP 5.5.x installs were insecure, 89.6 per cent of PHP 5.4.x installs were insecure, and 66.1 per cent of PHP 5.3.x installs were insecure.


As for PHP 5.2, just write it off. No versions of that branch are considered secure.


Curiously, however, PHP 5.1 actually fared rather well. Fully 94.8 per cent of all PHP 5.1 installations were running a secure version, according to W3Techs' numbers. But never mind that – PHP 5.1 is nine years old, and only 1.2 per cent of the sites surveyed were still running it.


This isn't to say, of course, that none of the other software packages that power the internet contain vulnerabilities. Ferrara found that, similarly, 38 per cent of sites running the Apache web server were insecure, as were 36 per cent of sites running Nginx, 22 per cent of sites running Python, and 18 per cent of sites running Perl.


But PHP's astonishingly bad security record really took the cake in Ferrara's study. Add to that the applications that run on top of PHP – 55 per cent of Drupal installs had their own security bugs, as did 40 per cent of Wordpress installs – and you could almost say that any server running the language is just an exploit waiting to happen.


Unless, of course, you happen to be one of those happy few who are running an airtight version. The latest releases of PHP 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 are all thought to be secure.


"Check your installed versions," Ferrara urged. "Push for people to update. Don't accept 'if it works, don't fix it.' ... You have the power to change this, so change it. Security is everyone's problem. What matters is how you deal with it." ®


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Space Station Crew Gets To Celebrate New Year's Eve 16 Times


Recovering from one New Year's Eve can be bad enough. Imagine experiencing 16 of them — all in one day. Such is the case for the crew on the International Space Station, which is in orbit about 220 miles above Earth. In one orbital day, as the space station zooms around the globe at 17,500 miles an hour, the crew will pass 16 times over a part of the planet where the clock is striking midnight. No need for a designated driver, however: Cmdr. Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his crew, which includes NASA's Terry Virts, Russian cosmonauts Elena Serova, Alexander Samoukutyaev and Anton Shkaplerov, and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, plan to celebrate with fruit juice toasts, NASA says. The new year starts officially for the crew at 7 p.m. EST Jan. 31, which is midnight by the Universal Time Clock (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). In a prerecorded video greeting from space, Wilmore and Virts sent best wishes from space. "Happy New Year's and a safe New Year's down there, and we'll enjoy our 16 New Year's Eve celebrations here on board the space station," Virts said.


It's not all fun and games. The crew spent much of New Year's Eve day working on a variety of experiments and preparing for the arrival of the next cargo supply ship. Launch of the Dragon resupply vehicle on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is schedule for 6:20 a.m. EST Tuesday.


IN-DEPTH


SOCIAL


— James Eng

First published December 31 2014, 12:26 PM







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Brother's Keeper

Not every country is similarly agnostic about the talent of the players it sends to compete. Ryan Murray, a 23-year-old from Glasgow who’d played in Celtic FC’s youth program before “heading down the wrong path” and winding up in prison, told me that he and his seven teammates were chosen from over 1,000 players at the Street Soccer Scotland Trials back in May. (Scotland has won two Homeless World Cups.) Other powerhouse teams earned the right to represent their countries by triumphing in national street soccer competitions.


While the rules of the Homeless World Cup state that all participants must be given “a reasonable amount” of playing time, this appears subject to interpretation; Brazil, whose second-stringers showed enough futebol artistry to humiliate most early-round opponents, stuck with their starters once they reached the knockout round. (Their dramatic 8-7 semifinal loss to hosts Chile was also the only time I witnessed a lapse in sportsmanship in a tournament where the overall comportment of players was so consistently civil that it makes your average rec. league game look like the Siege of Stalingrad.)


Critics of this unabashed in-it-to-win-it approach might object that sending a semi-pro team to an all-comers event might undermine the Homeless World Cup’s reformative potential. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to assume that that reformative potential is more likely to be realized when your squad is on the right side of an 11-1 blowout. But talent disparity at the Homeless World Cup is also a reflection of how the cause and definition of homelessness in place like Norway (whose men’s squad finished 30th overall) will be radically different than in Namibia (7th). At the risk of glossing over an incredibly complex problem, the general trend at the Homeless World Cup is that players representing affluent social welfare states are more likely to have a history of substance abuse than players coming from countries with widespread poverty. This makes for a different kind of soccer player.




The Cup. Photo: Martin Fritz Huber

“When they’re coming out of recovery, they’re never going to be necessarily the most talented footballers. That’s the way that homelessness and drug addiction structures itself in a country like, say, Switzerland,” Mel Young, the gregarious co-founder of the Homeless World Cup told me. Young, whose longish coiffure and protruding ears make him look like a mash-up of Rod Stewart and Yoda, explained that one of the central challenges of the tournament was finding a way to simultaneously accommodate the teams with novice, post-rehab players, and the teams that are overflowing with talent. Young compared his Switzerland example to “a country like Brazil where there’s so much poverty and people sitting in the category of homelessness that… the football is about the football; football is the driver out. So it’s because the definition is slightly different from country to country and the way that people use it [i.e. the Homeless World Cup] is different, it’s always a challenge for us.”


After the first few games, teams are put into groups according to skill level. Another round of play ensues before they are regrouped for the “Cup Stage,” where all teams are still competing for something, but only the best will be vying for the top prize. Such logistical maneuvering makes for thrilling late-stage matchups, like this year’s quarterfinal between Chile and the Netherlands, and helps prevent lopsided affairs like Chile’s opener against Argentina, whose roster includes an affable, fedora-wearing geriatric named Anibal.



Uniforms are hot commodities



Beyond the organizational hurdles the Homeless World Cup faces each year (e.g.: securing visas for hundreds of individuals who, as you can probably imagine, are not the folks you want waiting in front of you in the immigration line), the overriding objective of the tournament is to help demonstrate that animosity towards homeless people is ultimately a matter of perception.


Mel Young will tell anyone who cares to listen: give a homeless person a uniform and a tournament environment, and you are creating a context where, as Mel puts it, “people are cheering them, rather than walking away.” (Uniforms are hot commodities at the Homeless World Cup. I never witnessed greater jubilation than when Angela Draws, a 35-year-old, platinum-haired member of Team USA’s women’s squad scored a “Hellas” jersey from the Greek team; Ms. Draws hails from northern California, where “hella” is everyone’s favorite modifier.) When I was speaking to Sergei Newman, a 21-year-old player on Team USA who’d spent months on the streets of Portland, Oregon, begging for food money, we were interrupted by a young local woman who wanted a picture of Sergei holding her child.






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Walmart - Value of the Day: HAAN Swift Sanitizing Steam Mop $67

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With winter here, it's probably a good time to replace thoe old boots of yours. And does Amazon ever have a deal for all the men out there! Today only, save a whopping 50% off select Eastland men's boots and other shoes. Prices start as low as just $40 and include 4 different styles of boots, one trail shoe, a casual slip-on and a boat style. Hurry, sale ends at Midnight on 12/31/2014.



Stores: 20x200, 6pm, Amazon, Apple Store, American Eagle, Banana Republic, Best Buy


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A Young Steve Irwin Doesn't Bat An Eye As He's Bitten By A Snake

Our New Year's resolution is to be more like Steve Irwin. We still miss him.






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Cleaning Rust With A Laser Is Intensely Satisfying

Are there any problems a laser can't fix? Yes, many. But they're less interesting problems to look at than rust.






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World, face Palm: PDA brand to RISE FROM THE GRAVE

Remember Palm? The company that made the PDA a must-have item in the 1990s may be long gone, but it looks like the Palm brand may be due for a resurgence this year.


The eagle-eyed fanatics at webOSNation.com were the first to notice that the palm.com website – and indeed any subdomain of palm.com – now redirects to a site with the URL mynewpalm.com.


The new site contains nothing but the familiar Palm logo along with text that alternates between "Coming Soon" and "Smart Move."


DNS records indicate that the mynewpalm.com domain is owned by Wide Progress Global Limited – a shell company if we've ever heard of one.


Some digging by webOSNation.com forum members turned up this document, which reveals that HP – which bought Palm for $1.2bn in 2010 – has transferred all of its worldwide Palm trademarks to Wide Progress Global, which just happens to be incorporated in the British Virgin Islands at someplace called the "Offshore Incorporations Centre."


More telling is the "Smart Move" phrase, which just happens to be the slogan of Alcatel One Touch, the brand of smartphones marketed by Chinese electronics and appliance outfit TCL.


And sure enough, as the sleuths at webOSNation.com sniffed out, the Nicolas Zibell who signed the trademark transfer document on behalf of Wide Progress Global just happens to have the same name as the senior VP and general manager of Americas for TCL Communication Technology Holdings, who was previously president of Americas and Pacific for Alcatel One Touch.


OK, so Alcatel One Touch owns the Palm brand now, including all of the logos that it used before it was snapped up by HP. But what does that actually get it?


At the time, HP said it bought Palm mainly for webOS, the company's latter-day mobile platform. But when HP's own-branded webOS devices flopped spectacularly, it first open sourced the software, then eventually sold off the relevant trademarks and other intellectual property to LG, which now uses webOS to power the UI for its smart TVs.


That doesn't mean Alcatel One Touch couldn't make webOS smartphones using the open source version of the OS. HP was even said to have launched a stealth subsidiary to work on some kind of webOS devices in 2012, although nothing seems to have ever come of it.


More likely, though, Alcatel just wants to trade on the goodwill of the Palm brand, which is still fondly remembered by many who, much like former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, wish it had never been gobbled by HP to begin with.


We may find out what's really going on soon enough. The annual Consumer Electronics Show kicks off in Las Vegas next week, and if Alcatel One Touch has any big plans for 2015, that's probably where we'll hear about them. Or, if Alcatel needs a little more time to get its plans together, there's always the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March. ®


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A North Carolina town drops a possum at midnight on New Year's Eve

A North Carolina town drops a possum at midnight on New Year's Eve


New Year's Eve countdown balls tend to be large, sparkly. What they tend not to be are arboreal marsupials. Not so for Brasstown, North Carolina. In the "possum capital of the south," possums are the traditional marker lowered into a cheering crowd to symbolize the end of the year.


For the past 20 years, Clay Logan, a former tree specialist for the U.S. Forest Service, current owner of store called Clay's Corner, and eternal enthusiast of lowering possums from heights, has held a "Possum Drop" on the last night of the year. Logan suspends a box containing a possum five meters from a rope thrown over a light pole. The custom-made box he uses has air holes and images of the American flag. Prior to the lowering, there are bluegrass performances and an annual reading of a poem about possums.


The unconventional mountain town event draws thousands of people. It has also drawn the fury of PETA, provoking three lawsuits from the animal rights group.


Logan has been able to orchestrate his event in recent years thanks to a statute that suspends county wildlife laws from December 26 to January 2. PETA has sued the state for creating a "zone of lawlessness" by passing this law. This year, a judge issued an injunction against the law, and Logan has to get a wildlife license to drop the possum.


He hasn't applied for one, but Logan is adamant that the possum drop will go down even without a live animal. A few years ago, Logan held the drop with a dead possum instead of the traditional live creature after legal threats from PETA, so there may be another corpse lowered this year.


"We may have possum stew or something if we find one dead," Logan told the Charlotte Observer. "No live possums, let's put it like that."


The Los Angeles Times covered Logan's troubles carrying on his annual event, interviewing people from both sides of the possum war:



Jeff Kerr, PETA's general counsel in Washington, said: "We're amazed that something as ill-conceived and cruel as dropping an opossum in a box is still taking place in the 21st century. This is pure terror for a small wild animal that's shy and avoids humans at all cost."


The opossums are subjected to "capture myopathy," Kerr said, a condition he said can kill the animals. Logan's opossums probably die shortly after being released, according to Kerr.


Informed of Kerr's comments, Logan shrugged. "That's his opinion."



Logan names each possum "O.P." It stands for "Old Possum." On his website, he emphasizes his insistence that the animals are not harmed:


A North Carolina town drops a possum at midnight on New Year's Eve


Another message follows, below links to commemorative Possum Drop t-shirts: "Note: The opossum is not actually "dropped", it is lowered with great care. We treat our little friend with respect, hold him in awe, and do not inflict any injury or traumatize God's creature of the night.


Image via Wikimedia Commons






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New U.S. Stealth Jet Can’t Fire Its Gun Until 2019

America’s $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is slated to join fighter squadrons next year—but missing software will render its 25mm cannon useless.



The Pentagon’s newest stealth jet, the nearly $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, won’t be able to fire its gun during operational missions until 2019, three to four years after it becomes operational.


Even though the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is supposed to join frontline U.S. Marine Corps fighter squadrons next year and Air Force units in 2016, the jet’s software does not yet have the ability to shoot its 25mm cannon. But even when the jet will be able to shoot its gun, the F-35 barely carries enough ammunition to make the weapon useful.


The JSF won’t be completely unarmed. It will still carry a pair of Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air missiles and a pair of bombs. Initially, it will be able to carry 1,000-pound satellite-guided bombs or 500-pound laser-guided weapons. But those weapons are of limited utility, especially during close-in fights.


“There will be no gun until [the Joint Strike Fighter’s Block] 3F [software], there is no software to support it now or for the next four-ish years,” said one Air Force official affiliated with the F-35 program. “Block 3F is slated for release in 2019, but who knows how much that will slip?”


The tri-service F-35 is crucial to the Pentagon’s plans to modernize America’s tactical fighter fleet. The Defense Department hopes to buy 2,443 of the new stealth jets in three versions—one for the Air Force, one for the Navy, and one for the Marines. Versions of the jet will replace everything from the air arm’s A-10 Warthog ground attack plane and Lockheed F-16 multirole fighter, to the Navy’s Boeing F/A-18 Hornet carrier-based fighter, to the Marines’ Boeing AV-8B Harrier II jump-jet. But the F-35 has been plagued with massive delays and cost overruns—mostly due to design defects and software issues. There have also been problems with the jet’s engine. An F-35 was destroyed on takeoff earlier in the year when a design flaw in its Pratt & Whitney F135 engine sparked a fire.


Another Air Force official familiar with the F-35 confirmed that the jet won’t have the software to fire its gun until the Block 3F software is released to frontline squadrons sometime in 2019. Neither Lockheed nor the F-35 Joint Program Office responded to inquiries about the status of the jet’s gun.


Right now, the F-35’s software doesn’t support the use of the aircraft’s GAU-22/A four-barreled rotary cannon. The weapon was developed from the U.S. Marine Corps’ AV-8B Harrier II jump-jet’s GAU-12/U cannon, but it has one fewer barrel and weighs less.


It’s also supposed to be more accurate—when it can be fired, that is. The gun can shoot 3,300 rounds per minute, though the Air Force’s F-35A version can carry just 180 rounds for the gun.





“To me, the more disturbing aspect of this delay is that it represents yet another clear indication that the program is in serious trouble.”





The Navy and Marine Corps versions of the F-35 have differing configurations and rely on an external gun pod. The software won’t be ready for those jets for years, either. And while that gun-pod version for the Navy and Marines carries slightly more ammo, with 220 rounds, some in the military are complaining that it’s not enough. “So, about good for one tactical burst,” the first Air Force official said. “Hope you don’t miss.”


The lack of a cannon is a particular problem, as the F-35 is being counted on to help out infantrymen under fire. (This is known as close air support, or CAS, in military jargon.) The F-35 will lack the ability to mark a target or attack enemy forces in “danger close” situations, said one highly experienced Air Force fighter pilot.


“Lack of forward firing ordnance in a CAS supporting aircraft is a major handicap,” he added. “CAS fights are more fluid than air interdiction, friendlies and targets move... Oftentimes quickly. The ability to mark the target with rockets and attack the same target 10 seconds later is crucial.”


Typically, aircraft will work in pairs where the flight lead will make an initial pass to mark a target with rockets. A second aircraft will then attack with its guns. Incidentally, the F-35 won’t be armed with rockets, either, sources told The Daily Beast.


The reason pilots would choose to use guns over a bomb or a missile is simple. Basically, a pilot might not want to drop a bomb near ground troops in situations where the enemy has gotten in very close to those friendly forces. Even a relatively small 250-pound bomb could kill or injure friendly troops who are within 650 feet of the explosion.


By contrast, a gun will allow a pilot to attack hostile forces that are less than 300 feet from friendly ground forces.


Proponents of the F-35 within the Air Force leadership argue that the jet’s sensors and ability to display information intuitively will allow the stealthy new fighter to do the close air-support mission from high altitudes using satellite-guided weapons. But there are situations where that won’t work.


“GPS-guided munitions with long times of fall are useless when the ground commander doesn’t know exactly where the fire is coming from, or is withdrawing and the enemy is pursuing,” said another Air Force fighter pilot. “GPS munitions are equally useless when dropped from an aircraft when the pilot has near zero ability to track the battle with his own eyes.”


The lack of a gun is not likely to be a major problem for close-in air-to-air dogfights against other jets. Part of the problem is that the F-35—which is less maneuverable than contemporary enemy fighters like the Russian Sukhoi Su-30 Flanker—is not likely to survive such a close-in skirmish. “The jet can’t really turn anyway, so that is a bit of a moot point,” said one Air Force fighter pilot.


“The JSF is so heavy, it won’t accelerate fast enough to get back up to fighting speed,” said another Air Force fighter pilot. “Bottom line is that it will only be a BVR [beyond visual range] airplane.”


That means the F-35 will be almost entirely reliant on long-range air-to-air missiles. It doesn’t carry any short-range, dogfighting missiles like the Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder when it’s in a stealthy configuration. One pilot familiar with the F-35 added that “they will not have a large enough air-to-air [missile] load to be on the leading edge” of an air battle in any case.


Another senior Air Force official with stealth fighter experience agreed. “From an air-to-air standpoint, an argument could be made that the F-35A not having a functional gun—or any gun, for that matter—will have little to no impact. Heck, it only has 180 rounds anyway,” he said. “I would be lying if I said there exists any plausible tactical air-to-air scenario where the F-35 will need to employ the gun. Personally, I just don’t see it ever happening and think they should have saved the weight [by getting rid of the gun altogether].”


However, the Air Force official said that very fact the F-35 will not have a functional gun when it becomes operational is symptomatic of a deeply troubled program. “To me, the more disturbing aspect of this delay is that it represents yet another clear indication that the program is in serious trouble,” the official said. F-35 maker “Lockheed Martin is clearly in a situation where they are scrambling to keep their collective noses above the waterline, and they are looking to push non-critical systems to the right in a moment of desperation.”







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Windows Store attracts a third more active users in 2014

thumbs up


The Windows Store might still be a bit of a mess, and there aren’t anywhere near as many decent apps as those found in the Apple App Store and Google Play, but things are definitely improving.


Changes to the store in 2014 resulted in 30 percent more active users, and over 110 percent year-over-year increase in app downloads and gross sales. Microsoft says it has seen an 80 percent increase in registered developers and a 60 percent increase in app selection too, which is good news for the platform. The software giant has also revealed big plans are afoot for 2015.


Enhancements next year include expanded payment options in emerging markets with carrier billing, and more monetization options. According to Microsoft, in-app purchasing and in-app advertising currently account for 35 percent and 58 percent of Windows Store revenue respectively. The software giant plans to focus its attention on in-app advertising going forward, which is good news for developers, but less so for consumers.


Microsoft also intends to continue working to improve app discovery next year, which is something it was particularly poor at in the beginning (personally, I think splitting "New" from "Rising" would help tremendously here).


The next version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 10, will include a unified store for both Windows and Windows Phone apps, so making sure the Store is as efficient and as cleanly presented as possible will be essential.


Photo credit: Lighthunter/Shutterstock






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An Electromagnet Makes This Iron Man Fly, Not an Arc Reactor

An Electromagnet Makes This Iron Man Fly, Not an Arc Reactor


We're still wrapping our heads around the whole 'giant-headed figure' fad, but we can look past the distorted proportions of this Iron Man Mark II because it's the first Stark figure we've found that actually flies. Or floats, at least, thanks to an electromagnetic powered base that doubles as a lovely display stand.


An Electromagnet Makes This Iron Man Fly, Not an Arc Reactor


The Mark II also has glowing eyes and an illuminated arc reactor, and its mirror finish reflects glowing accents on the base making it seem even more alive. From the right angle you'd swear Iron Man was flying over a city at night, but in reality it's just a few millimeters above your desk. Available for pre-order for $180 it's a pricey collectible, but it's still far cheaper than what Tony Stark spent on his suit. [Hobby Link Japan via Albotas]


An Electromagnet Makes This Iron Man Fly, Not an Arc Reactor




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Stale pizza, backup BlackBerrys, payroll panic: Sony Pictures mega-hack

Sony Pictures has revealed a behind-the-scenes look at how it handled its recent megabreach to select media outlets.


Extensive accounts of the unfolding disaster by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal (here) and elsewhere reveal that Michael Lynton, the studio’s chief executive, communicated with other senior execs using mothballed BlackBerrys previously kept in a storage room in the basement of its Culver City, California headquarters, after regular communications systems were taken out by hackers. Computers on the firm’s network are laid low by a particular vicious outbreak of wiper malware that left the firm without email.


The attack, which hit three days before Thanksgiving in late November, also left the studio without voice mail or production systems.


Updates on the hack were relayed from person to person by text or call.


Technicians, who had begun working around the clock to contain the problem in an office subsequently littered with stale pizza, were debating whether to take Sony Pictures entirely offline. Meanwhile administrators brought out old machines that allowed them to issue physical payroll cheques after computer network problems made regular electronic direct deposit impractical if not impossible.


Despite the extreme disruption, the hacking was viewed as nothing more severe within Sony Pictures than a “colossal annoyance”. It was only when hackers leaked sensitive information that Sony Pictures realised it had to be more proactive and by then the movie studio was heading towards a dual operational and PR disaster.


Sony Pictures was starring in its own disaster movie, along the lines of the Poseidon Adventure, with a supporting cast and crew including FBI investigators, as the NYT explains.


By December 1, a week after Sony discovered the breach, a sense of urgency and horror had penetrated the studio. More than a dozen FBI investigators were setting up shop on the Culver City lot and in a separate Sony facility near the Los Angeles airport called Corporate Pointe, helping Sony deal with one of the worst cyberattacks ever on an American company.

Mountains of documents had been stolen, internal data centers had been wiped clean, and 75 per cent of the servers had been destroyed.


Everything and anything had been taken. Contracts. Salary lists. Film budgets. Medical records. Social Security numbers. Personal emails. Five entire movies, including the yet-to-be-released “Annie.”



Sony Pictures seemingly lacked anything approaching an adequate disaster recovery plan or any incident response capability. There was seemingly no plan B to switch operations to another location in extreme situations. And where were the several backups or backup systems of any kind? The studio is sadly destined to be a case study in what can happen in the absence of disaster recovery and incident response for years to come.


The studio’s handling of the PR shit-storm spawned by the mega-hack is scarcely better. The (subsequently reversed) decision to cancel the planned Christmas Day release for The Interview, the controversial film (that according to the official version, at least) provoked the North Koreans into launching a full-on assault at the studio, was a particular low point on the PR front. Sony was subsequently criticised by both President Obama and Hollywood celebrities for the perception it caved into vague threats invoking 9/11 from the hackers that movie theatres would be attacked if they showed The Interview.


The NYT reports that an email sent on 21 November by by “God’s Apstls” contained a demand for Sony to pay off the hackers before 24 November in order to avoid a more severe attack. The self-style Guardians of Peace hacking crew claimed responsibility for the attack. Internally the idea that North Korean might be involved was “little more than a paranoid whisper” around this time, the NYT adds.


Sony Pictures has sought to portray the attack as unprecedented and nigh-on-impossible to prevent since it was the work of state-sponsored hackers, who used compromised internal credentials and wiper malware to wreck havoc.


Security experts continue to question this interpretation of events as well as the official line that North Korea is to blame. The alternative theory that a disgruntled former employee teamed up with criminally minded hackers or politically motivated hacktivists is gaining currency. ®


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Christine Cavanaugh, Voice Of 'Babe' And Chuckie Of 'Rugrats,' Dead At 51

31 December 2014 Last updated at 04:22 ET

Voice actress Christine Cavanaugh, who brought to life characters including Babe and Chuckie on Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats, has died aged 51.


Her sister, Deionn Masock, confirmed the actress had died on 22 December at her home in Utah.


Ms Masock said the cause of death was not known.


"She was able to do incredible and amazing things with her voice and bring lots of smiles and many laughs to many people," her family said.


Announcing in the death in the Los Angeles Times, they wrote: "Her imagination, humour and intelligence were evident to anyone who had the pleasure of meeting her.


"Many know of her from the roles she played, but in each role there was a part of her showing through that the ones who truly knew her could see."


Cavanaugh was a prolific actor, providing the voices of dozens of cartoon characters in the 1990s.


She began her career with small parts on TV shows including Cheers, before landing her first big role in 1991 as Gosalyn Mallard on Darkwing Duck.


The same year she was cast as the cowardly Chuckie Finster in Rugrats - a role she would perform for a decade.


In 1995, she gave her voice to the title character in the hit movie Babe, based on Dick King-Smith's 1983 novel The Sheep-Pig, about a talking pig who wants to be a sheepdog.


Cavanaugh also provided the voice to kid genius Dexter in Cartoon Network's Dexter's Laboratory for seven series from 1996.


She was twice nominated for an Annie Award for the role, before finally winning the prize in 2000.


Over her career, the actress also provided voices for animations including Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Wild Thornberrys and The Powerpuff Girls.


She retired from voice acting in 2001 and moved back to her native Utah to be closer to her family.


According to her obituary, a memorial for Cavanaugh has been held on Antelope Island in Utah.






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T-Mobile US CEO on wearables: 'Apple Watch is the tipping point'

In a rash of annual predictions, T- Mobile big cheese John Legere claims that “Wearables and phablets will be the big device stories of 2015”.


He goes on to look at exercise and fashion products as being in the same space: “I love what Jawbone, Fitbit, Samsung, LG, Microsoft and others are doing in the wearables space. But we haven’t begun to see the potential of this category. It’s going to go from $1 to $20 billion in the next few years.”


Putting numbers on things is always dangerous, even if “the next few years” is a bit vague, but he clearly doesn’t see the Fitbit et al as a fad.


It’s the new Apple gewgaw, however, about which Legere has the most optimism: “And though we won’t see its full impact in 2015, I believe that the Apple Watch will mark the tipping point when wearables go from niche to mainstream.” He also sees a big future for bigger phones “At the same time, phablet sales will continue to sky rocket – up at least 50 per cent. This will have a couple of important side effects. First, phablets will continue to cannibalise the tablet market, and second, the rise of phablets – which are made for data hounds – will continue to fuel the exponential growth in mobile data use. And, of course, T-Mobile customers – who use the most data – will continue to lead the pack in mobile data use.”


Other Legere predictions include a repeat of his previous assertions that T-Mobile will overtake Sprint in the US market and that we’ll see an end of the subsidy model.


Analysis


The end of the subsidy model is a prediction that has been made for a long time. Your correspondent once organised a lunch for the UK and European heads of the top handset manufacturers to meet. Between them they had 90 per cent market share. We toasted the end of subsidy model as the cracks were beginning to show. That was led by the launch of Virgin Mobile, the year was 1999 and the bosses were the heads of Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. Predictions are dangerous.


You’ll also note that while Legere makes a lot of predictions for 2015, he doesn’t say who he thinks will own T-Mobile US by the end of it. ®


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Bring In The New Year By Watching The First Naked-Eye Comet

Office MACROS PERIL! Age-old VBScript tactic is BACK in biz attack

The dangers of allowing Office macros have been underlined by a newly discovered attack against European and Israeli companies.


Malicious Office macros were used as the launchpad of the so-called RocketKitten attacks presented at this year's Chaos Communication Congress hacking conference (stream here, relevant material starts around 20 minutes in). The technique is nothing new and still effective - even though it has been around for years and is straightforward to block.


Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is one of the easiest methods to deliver malware nasties: simply by dropping malicious code into an Office doc as a macro and attaching to an email. The victim would be lured by a plausible pretext into opening an Office file attachment delivered to them by email.


“It’ll often have ‘lure’ content that looks plausible, convincing the user to click the 'enable macros' alert, the macro runs, then we have lovely reverse shell and back door on their desktop,” explained Ken Munro of security consultancy Pen Test Partners. “This is usually easier than sending executables by email, as those are blocked by Outlook and/or may require local admin rights to install.”


The fix is easy, but hardly any organisations do it: simply block macros in Group Policy.


“Some departments need macros for spreadsheet and other operations, but at the very least restrict macro use to only those who explicitly need it,” Munro told El Reg. “Give special training on phishing attacks to those who do have macros enabled, and ensure they are particularly careful with Office files from external sources.”


“It’s often the finance department that relies on macros - ah yes, the department that has access to the company bank accounts and makes the ideal target for banking credential theft. The average user simply doesn't need them, so this isn’t going to cause much inconvenience,” he added.


Other mitigation techniques involve digitally signing approved macros after establishes policies that mean only signed macros will run.


The issue goes beyond the recent VBScript vulnerability, patched by Microsoft in early December. “There’s a far broader issue around VB and Office macros that seems overlooked by most,” Munro concluded. “It isn't new; everyone in the pen test space knows about it, but few IT security people in end user land seem to appreciate its significance.


“Office macro exploits are just about the only cool thing that Visual Basic gets used for any more,” he added.


Munro has put together a blog post - featuring tests on proof of concept malicious code - explaining the issue in greater depth here. ®


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Want to launch your own DDoS attacks? Just buy them from Lizard Squad

Lizard Squad start to sell DDoS attck service


You know what it's like. You have a niggling desire to launch a DDoS attack on a website but there are a couple of problems. You might not know how to do it, you might not want to run the risk of getting caught, or you might, you know, be too lazy to do it yourself. Never fear, Lizard Squad is on hand to help you out.


The hacker collective hit the headlines over the holidays after taking out the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. It then claimed to have had a (small) hand in the hack of Sony, but now the aim appears to be to monetize the whole venture. Lizard Squad has launched a service called LizardStresser that could be used to launch DDoS attacks.


Referred to as a "booter", LizardStresser is a service you can sign up for on a monthly or lifetime (five years really) basis. There are a number of packages available that can be used to "stress test" a particular server for anything from a couple of minutes to several hours at a time. As soon as one attack, er stress test, is over, more can be launched straight away at no extra cost, providing you are within the same billing cycle. With monthly fees ranging from just $2.99 up to $69.99, and lifetime subscriptions costing between $29.99 and $309.99, it's all very affordable stuff, ripe for abuse.


Of course, LizardStresser tool is not being directly marketed as a DDoS weapon. Take a look at the terms of service -- yes, even a DDoS tool has such a thing -- and you're told that:



Permission is granted to stress test dedicated servers and networks owned by you. This is the opportunity to make your firewalls better, not to misuse against the law.



Furthermore, the tool may not be used to "intentionally send a ddos flood to an IP address not owned by yourself". All clear? Jolly good.


LizardStresser was launched via Twitter to a flurry of interest:


The group was quick to boast about the power of the attacks that could be launched:


Lizard Squad has previously claimed that its aim is merely to highlight security issues, and the terms of service play up to this idea. But in reality it is hard to pretend that this is anything other than a DDoS for hire available to anyone willing to hand over the cash.


Photo credit: wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock






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Really, govt tech profit cash grab is a PRIZE-WINNING idea?

Worstall on Wednesday So, that favourite of mine and of Andrew Orlowski, Mariana Mazzucato, has been awarded a prize by the New Statesman in the field of political economy.


Given that her message is that government should be getting more of the pie, that's the sort of political economy you would expect the magazine to like. However, I find there's a gaping hole or two in her arguments. I'll concentrate on just one here: her insistence that all those tech billionaires becoming plutocrats is one reason why we need the State to be taking more of what is rightfully its own as a result of the basic research that those tech billionaires are implementing.


It's an argument that can sometimes be made. Those who lobby to create legislatively crafted and protected monopolies should, to my mind, have that wealth taken off them. That's preparatory to making sure that the State never makes such monopolies again, of course. I'm perfectly happy that when Ferdinand Marcos, the father of me old schoolmate Bongbong, was president/prime minister and carved up the Philippine economy that when he lost power he and his cronies then all lost some of their money.


But that's not quite what is being said here about those tech companies. What is being said is the following:



If policymakers want to get serious about tackling inequality, they need to rethink not only areas such as the wealth tax that Thomas Piketty is calling for but the received wisdom on how to generate value and wealth creation in the first place. When we have a narrow theory of who creates value and wealth, we allow a greater share of that value to be captured by a small group of actors who call themselves wealth creators. This is our current predicament and the reason why progressive parties on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to provide a clear story of what has gone wrong in recent decades and what to do about it.



Well, yes, possibly, but for that to be true then those innovators she's using as her examples of “wealth creators” would have to be coining it off what they're doing.



So why have we accepted such a biased story of the state’s role when, as the story of Apple shows, it has done so much more than “fix” market failures?



As she's using Apple as an example, then so shall we. And much of her book is directed at her investigation of how all of the technologies that came together in the iPhone had originally been government-funded.


Now there's no doubt that Steve Jobs (and others) did coin it out of Apple. Jobs at death was supposedly worth many billions, not all of which came from Pixar (and he made a lot less than he could have done at Apple as he got caught up in that options repricing scandal. That cost him billions alone in Apple stock*). So, he got billions, yes. But is that a greater share of value? A great share even? Or is it more like a pittance?


Fortunately we've a wonderful paper to tell us the truth here. I've mentioned it before: "Schumpeterian profits in the US economy".



The present study examines the importance of Schumpeterian profits in the United States economy. Schumpeterian profits are defined as those profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the returns from innovative activity. We first show the underlying equations for Schumpeterian profits. We then estimate the value of these profits for the non-farm business economy. We conclude that only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.



So WHO is making bank?


These are Schumpeterian profits - that is, the profits from innovation. And the question is: what fraction of the total value created ends up sticking to the hands of the entrepreneurs? No, not the financiers, the stock markets (ie, your and my pension funds) but to the Steve Jobses of this world?


The answer is truly astonishing. It's under three per cent. Of course that's an average, but it's still an astonishing number. And given the size of that number it's really very difficult to say that Jobs's mountain of cash was “large”.


Finance gets a few more per cent of that value created but the vast majority of it flows through to us, the consumers. We might say it's just the satiation of lust that comes from having a new Jesus mobe. More formally, consumer surplus means that value we ascribe to whatever over the price we've had to pay for whatever. But we've also something much more with these new technologies: what we go on to do with them.


For example, with smartphones (and agreed, this is projection, it's all too new to really know yet, but we think the effect will be like that of mobiles a decade and more ago), we're pretty sure that there's going to be a boost to growth in the poorer countries simply because of the existence of smartphones. If it's the same boost we saw with the introuction of basic mobiles (opinion differs, all say it will have some, but more or less than mobiles, well, snarl at each other over that), then for every 10 per cent of the population in a country without a decent computer/internet network, we should expect growth of 0.5 per cent in GDP per annum.


That's simply a vast number. Say the developing world is 10 per cent of the global economy: we're talking about a $35bn addition to human income for every 10 per cent of the population that gets equipped - each year, for every 10 per cent. That Steve Jobs ended up with however many billions it simply a capital sum - a once-off - that simply pales into insignificance beside that.


Or, as we might put it, Professor Mazzucato doesn't seem to understand the economics of who gets the money from innovation - which isn't all that useful an attribute in someone who wants to tell us all about the economics of innovation, is it now?


By the way, no one over on this free market side of the argument is trying to insist that Steve-o deserved all that money, not at all. We're only making the observation that if we allow someone who has increased global growth rates so markedly to keep his pile of cash, then this will encourage the next person with an idea that might boost global growth rates to get on with it. This is not a moral nor justice "deserved rewards" style argument. It's a purely utilitarian one regarding incentives that induce people to try.


And yes, economics is is all about incentives and perhaps we might expect a professor of the subject to grok that. ®


Bootnote


* For those who don't know it, a company can issue options to anyone it likes at any price it likes. However, if those options are in the money at issue (ie, at a lower price than the market stock price) then the amount they are in the money must be an expense against the profit and loss statement of the company (and also taxed as income to the option recipients). But number of companies decided to issue stock options on, for example, 15 Jan, but price them at whatever had been the lowest price of the last 30 days. Apple got caught up in this, issuing in the money options which didn't go through the P&L and didn't pay income tax, Jobs then declined that award of options and that lost him - or rather, failed to earn him - a number of billions.


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The hilarious ridiculousness of the new Star Wars' crossguard lightsaber

The hilarious ridiculousness of the new Star Wars' crossguard lightsaber


Like the rest of us, Machinima Happy Hour wondered what would happen after the crossguard lightsaber scene in the new Star Wars trailer. Unlike the rest of us, they created this hilarious animation imagination of how ridiculous that fight would be because adding light sabers to just anything is just crazy.


We're talking about a light saber battle scene with hula hoop light sabers, Medieval flail sabers, pizza sabers and so much more. I laughed so hard at R2-D2.




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from ffffff http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-hilarious-ridiculousness-of-the-new-star-wars-cross-1676694773

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