Two teenagers who posted a malicious "fire in the hole" prank on YouTube were slapped with a court order to post an apology on the same video-sharing site, according to a report in Florida Today.
The sentence, devised by the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, was created to serve as a deterrent to what is viewed as a growing problem of youths filming malicious, or violent, acts and posting them online, in the hope of generating notoriety.
In this particular case, a 23-year-old Taco Bell employee was stationed at the drive-up window, when a car loaded with teenagers drove up. After taking their order and handing the group their drinks, the teens yelled "fire in the hole" and threw a 32-ounce soda at the employee as she handed them their change.
The employee initially thought it was a personal attack, until learning from customers that a video of the prank had been posted on YouTube. The employee then engaged in a little sleuthing and tracked down the teens.
From the YouTube video, she found the boys' MySpace pages, where they had bragged about the incident. While keeping her identity secret, she befriended the boys and confirmed that they were involved in the attack, according to the Florida Today report.
Using a phone book, she located the mother of one of the teens, who identified the others involved in the prank.
The driver, who threw the drink, and the teenager who filmed the attack were charged with two counts of battery and one count of criminal mischief, according to the report.
As part of their sentence, the teens had to write, film, and post their video apology on YouTube, as well as pay $30 to clean the restaurant and serve 100 hours of community service.
A fire has destroyed an historic Silicon Valley building at the center of a preservation fight.
Building 25 at IBM's Cottle Road campus in San Jose, Calif., was destroyed in an early morning blaze Saturday.
(Credit: Preservation.org)The 40,000-square-foot building was also hailed as precursor to the modern high-tech campus for "creative engineers"...built "in true California style, (with) patios between the wings (that) give the effect that offices and laboratories extend out-of-doors," according to historical descriptions from IBM. "Decorated in quiet pastel shades, the interior is casual yet austere, creating an atmosphere conducive to contemporary concentration."
After the building was closed in 1996, a chain link fence was erected when it became a frequent target for vandals and a haven for the homeless.
Preservationists had been battling with the city of San Jose, which had sided with big-box retailer Lowe's to raze the structure and build a 180,000-square-foot store on the site. A deal in the works between Lowe's and preservationists would have allowed for a portion of the building to be remodeled to share the site with the store, the newspaper reported.
"There's no remodeling that," fire Capt. Dave Parker told the newspaper as he glanced at the smoldering building.
At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.
Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).
If you're curious to see what Fire Eagle can offer, though, ignore today's news about it. Fire Eagle itself does not, yet, have a useful interface. But since it's now open to developers, we should see cool apps soon. We heard this morning that Dopplr will have Fire Eagle integration shortly, and that the Bug Labs geolocation module will support the API. We'll report on these new applications when they show up for trials. Update: Dopplr has implemented the link to Fire Eagle. Very cool.
Your location checks in...
But it don't check out. Yet.
Read also:
TechCrunch: Yahoo's "Twitter For Location" Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality.
ReadWriteWeb: Location Aware: Smart Rollout for Yahoo! Fire Eagle.
(Credit:
VirTra Systems)
If your fair-weather friends are getting bored with your in-home theater, bowling alley, and bevy of indentured pedicurists, you may want to step up to a VirTra Systems' mobile live-fire training simulation trailer.
The trailer is based on the Houston company's IVR (immersive virtual training) simulation technology and offers a three-lane marksmanship simulator and "full-featured judgmental-use-of-force scenario" with both laser-based and live-fire training, including full auto in anything up to .50 caliber. Depending on your preferred quarry, it's available in either a police or military version.
"We remain committed to offering the training community innovative, high-tech, immersive small-arms training simulation products at extremely competitive prices," retired Major Gen. Perry V. Dalby, VirTra Systems' chief executive officer, said in a press release. The company sells "situational awareness" training equipment and virtual-reality systems to military and other clientele, such as General Motors and Red Baron Pizza.
The live-fire trailer is reasonably priced at between $250,000 and $500,000, depending on accessories.
(Credit:
Metal Storm)
After years of development, a new class of weapon that uses computer-controlled electronic ignition instead of primers to fire projectiles may be finally taking its much coveted place in the U.S. military inventory.
Brisbane, Australia-based Metal Storm has delivered a four-barrel weapon to the Naval Surface Warfare Center for testing that uses a small electrical current instead a conventional firing pin to deliver stacked rounds at an astounding rate.
How astounding? Try 1 million rounds per minute. That's the rate, by the way, not the volume; still, there's no way you want to be anywhere near the wrong end of one of these puppies.
One version, the Redback, features a remotely operated 40mm that can automatically track targets by slewing around at almost 2 complete revolutions per second, according to the company. "The employment of Metal Storm's stacked round technology for a U.S. military weapon system is a huge step for us," Metal Storm CEO Lee Finniear said in the company's press release.
Electronically fired weapons and the general concept have been around for awhile--Austrian company Voere offers an electric, bolt-action hunting rifle--but nothing has approached Metal Storm (PDF). Metal Storm weapons use multiple, "lightweight, economical barrels" mounted in pods on a variety of platforms that can fire a wide selection of munitions.
The projectiles are stacked in-line in the barrel--nose to tail--so there are no magazines, no shell casings, and no mechanical components. This makes them ideal for unattended area denial or picket duty. They are also easily adapted to light vehicles and robot platforms. In fact, the company just signed an MOU with iRobot Government & Industrial Robots to combine its robot platforms with Metal Storm's scalable systems.
"Together with Metal Storm, we aim to develop a superior next-generation weapons platform that ensures absolute safety and always places a human in the decision loop," iRobot's Joe Dyer promised in announcing the agreement. "When you are talking about weaponizing robots, there is no margin for error."
Especially at a million rounds per minute.
Where are you right now? It's a simple question for humans to ask and answer, but for Web services, location is a complex and sometimes fuzzy concept. Right now, I'm in San Francisco, and I don't care who knows it. Where in San Francisco? That's not so public. I started writing this at home, with a specific address that I don't want to print here but that I'm OK with my friends knowing. Where's my house? It's in the Noe Valley neighborhood. Although, a real estate agent might be able to get away with saying I'm in Twin Peaks.
There are two interesting projects that are making headways into handling the ambiguity of location and the conditional access most people want to assign to theirs.
Fire Eagle
First, there's the Yahoo Brickhouse project, code-named Fire Eagle. It's a location information clearinghouse. The idea is that you (or your application) tells it where you are, and then it conditionally releases that information to other apps and people. It handles data at varying levels of granularity going in and out. For example, if you have a GPS-equipped cell phone feeding it data, it will get precise info about where you are. But if you're using Facebook to update your location and you just type "San Francisco," it knows a lot less. In the latter case, it will denote your location as a bounding box framed by several latitude/longitude coordinates, in this example the boundaries of the city of San Francisco.
Your location info is locked in to the Fire Eagle data store and is only released to the apps and the people who you authorize, and only at the detail level that's OK with you. For example, you can specify that photos being fed in to Flickr with Fire Eagle data (the project was based on Zone Tag for photos) get the most precise data, but that location data about you, from your cell phone, is doled out differently to different people: Your spouse can see exactly where you are, perhaps, but random Facebook friends can only tell what city you're in--or maybe only what state.
Fire Eagle will be a set of APIs designed for developers, but Brickhouse's Salim Ismail showed me how it will also have controls for users, so they can grant or deny access to their data from specific applications, and set the granularity level for various people or groups.
Google's OpenSocial API also supports location data, but the Fire Eagle really looks like a complete and robust solution for collecting and distributing geo data. I predict a lot of Web apps will use it. It should be released to public shortly, and will likely be renamed.
What's in this for Yahoo? As Ismail says, "It enables us to provide superior services." In other words, ads. Not directly, of course. But services that use the API will be able to deliver more targeted messages to their users.
Urban Mapping
Fire Eagle handles fairly unambiguous data about location. For location data that's open to interpretation, there's another company, Urban Mapping, in the business of resolving the ambiguity. Urban Mapping has a database that knows that one person's Marina District is another's Cow Hollow, and that any specific address will actually exist in multiple neighborhoods, depending on whom you ask. Since many commerce and tourism sites locate businesses by neighborhood, getting this information right is a big deal. Urban Mapping tracks the social agreements that loosely define the boundaries of neighborhoods, and supplies that data to travel and business-finder sites. The Urban Mapping team keeps up with new colloquial neighborhood names (like RAMBO in New York and SOFA in Miami) and can place business in those locations, as a Web service, to its customers. My favorite restaurant-finder site, OpenTable is, sadly, not yet a customer.
Speaking of overlapping information, Urban Mapping got its start making lenticular city maps. As you tilted the map toward or away from you, you would see different layers of info, like subways, streets, or neighborhood names. CEO Ian White is planning to bring this cool product back soon, but in the meantime he's nursing his neighborhood disambiguation service, which is already cashflow positive.
(Credit:
NASA/MODIS Rapid Response)
Disasters are social: They affect large groups of people, all thrown together by circumstance or location. So when I was at a dinner with Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale two weeks ago and he said, "The next disaster will be Twittered," I thought he was spot on. What better use could there be for a social media site like Twitter than to support people with a dire need to connect to each other and share information?
So how's social media doing in the current disaster, the Southern California fires (aerial pictures)?
As Allen Stern reports in Center Networks, many social media sites, like YouTube and Flickr, have impressive collections related to the fires. That's not exactly useful if you're in the middle of evacuating, although I don't think that homeowners will be scouring these visual reports once they have to start dealing with their insurance companies.
Wikipedia's SoCal fire page is getting updated frequently but is more encyclopedic than useful for people who need on-the-spot information.
Mark Hopkins on Mashable points out that the most useful social site during the fires is, in fact, Twitter. KPBS and the L.A. Times are sending updates out over their own Twitter feeds (in Twitter, "follow" KPBSNews and LATimeFires. These are professionally-collated news feeds, and in this instance the mainstream media seems to be doing a great job of fulfilling the public trust to keep people up to date on information that could save their lives.
Mainstream media is using social platforms to get the word out.
Not that the collecting Twitters from nonjournalists in the thick of the action wouldn't also be useful. But for the social angle to work, the voices need to be organized somehow. Unfortunately, while Twitter allows you to "track" topics and people, there is, to my knowledge, no agreed-upon keyword that people can use to indicate that a Twitter post is related to the fire. Media outlets would do a service to their communities by publicizing a keyword for people to use.
However, Web entrepreneur Nate Ritter is running a useful and sober Twitter feed on the SoCal fires (follow NateRitter. He's tagging all his posts "#sandiegofire.")
I would recommend that Southern California residents monitor these feeds from their computers or their mobile phones. Here are links to the mobile-friendly pages of the feeds mentioned (anyone connecting over a slow link might also find these useful):
- L.A. Times: m.twitter.com/latimesfires
- KPBS: m.twitter.com/kpbsnews
- Nate Ritter: m.twitter.com/nateritter
The L.A. Times also created a useful Google Maps overlay showing where the fire's hot spots are.
Robosaurus crushes a car.
(Credit: Universal Studios)The annual Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Ariz., is usually a place where car collectors and enthusiasts gather to admire scores of vintage Jaguars, Mercedes, Cadillacs and other fine specimens of automobiles made in years past.
Those types of cars will still be there when the event rolls around again in January, but there will be one rather disturbing lot that's bound to steal the show: a 40-foot-high, 31-ton mechanical dinosaur that throws 20-foot flames from its nostrils.
The Robosaurus, created 17 years ago by Monster Robots in Southern California, will be sold with no minimum price during the auction, which takes place January 12 to 20. The machine, which is controlled by a pilot who sits in a cockpit inside the dinosaur's head, comes complete with stainless steel teeth that can rip into and twist metal with 20,000 pounds of crushing force.
Not to be a party pooper, but does the idea of auctioning this thing off to the public trouble anyone? Little old ladies are getting their value-size bottles of perfume confiscated at the airport, while any schmuck with a bunch of money can buy a deadly machine that could take out an entire city block. How does that make sense?
(Credit:
Northrop Grumman )
The chances of your flight being hit by a shoulder-fired, laser-guided missile are good enough that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has spent more than $100 million looking into ways to prevent it.
Defense contractor Northrop Grumman just completed 6,000 hours of in-flight testing on its Guardian directed infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) system, all part of the DHS initiative to adapt existing military technology to protect commercial aircraft from attack by surface-to-air-missiles (SAM) similar to the U.S.-made Stinger.
The DIRCM system works by first detecting the attack, then directing an invisible, eye-safe laser to the homing/seeker device of the incoming missile, disrupting its guidance signals, which ultimately protects the aircraft, according to Northrop Grumman (video here).
Much of the testing has been conducted on FedEx MD-10 and MD-11 cargo jets, using a ground-based electronic missile surrogate to simulate the launch of a SAM at an aircraft during takeoff or landing. The Guardian performed as advertised by automatically detecting the simulated launch and mock missile, according to the company.
More than 40 commercial aircraft have been attacked by Man Portable Air Defense Systems (Manpads) since the 1970s, resulting in the loss of about 400 lives, according to the U.S. State Department.
In a report to Congress, DHS estimated the per-flight cost to be $65 more than it wants to spend, which is $300. That comes to about 70 cents per passenger on cross country flights.The unit itself cost around $1 million, but that's wholesale--orders of 1,000 or more please.
The industry has yet to get on board however. As one airline executive put it in an interview with Aviation Week, "Is this a prudent use of resources?" A plane could just as well be shot down by an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) or a .50-caliber machine gun. "Shouldn't we be doing more to go after the archer rather than trying to catch the arrows?" Then again, this is an industry allegedly too cheap to give its passengers fresh air.
Xcellery, a service that lets users collaborate on Microsoft Excel files in near-real-time, is for sale now on eBay. I covered the service in March.
I heard about the sale from the creator of the service, Reto Laemmler. He wrote to me, "There are no plans to shut down Xcellery, and in case of an acquisition [co-founder] Heng-yi and I will try to stay on board." However, the eBay listing says, "Xcellery is for sale because the founder team is focusing on other projects and cannot spend enough time on it anymore."
As of this writing, the bidding is at $202.50, and the reserve price has not yet been met. (Laemmler can't disclose what the reserve price is.)
My take: Going to eBay to sell a technology company with 10,000 (claimed) users, including some who pay for the service, is not a comprehensive business plan. A Web business is not a used car. It's not just code. It's people. It's customers. As a Web user, the idea worries me deeply. I wouldn't want to put any of my personal or business data on a Web service if I thought the founders would put access to that information up for sale on eBay. I'm not Pez, and I don't want the keys to my data sold like it is. Laemmler told me he'll aggressively reach out to his customers and give them the capability to remove their data before the company assets are handed over. But still.
I love it that people can start Web services these days with no outside money. And I think it's great the entrepreneurs can maybe make a buck from their hard work without paying the overhead of getting other people involved. But looking at the trend to unload businesses on eBay, I have to say that it makes me see more clearly the value of outside investment--and oversight--on Web businesses.
Other services that have been hocked on eBay include: Kiko, HuckABuck, and Trezr.
Laemmler is moving back to his native Switzerland and plans to build another Web collaboration company.
