STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

My gawd....

And I thought certain other accents were excessively hard to understand at times. Wow - the way they say "bro" is insane! LOL.

Yep, we have quite a few Kiwi's here in Oz and every second word is bro!

[MIKA27]

Apple’s Fingerprint ID May Mean You Can’t ‘Take the Fifth’

There’s a lot of talk around biometric authentication since Apple introduced its newest iPhone, which will let users unlock their device with a fingerprint. Given Apple’s industry-leading position, it’s probably not a far stretch to expect this kind of authentication to take off. Some even argue that Apple’s move is a death knell for authenticators based on what a user knows (like passwords and PIN numbers).

While there’s a great deal of discussion around the pros and cons of fingerprint authentication — from the hackability of the technique to the reliability of readers — no one’s focusing on the legal effects of moving from PINs to fingerprints.

Because the constitutional protection of the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” may not apply when it comes to biometric-based fingerprints (things that reflect who we are) as opposed to memory-based passwords and PINs (things we need to know and remember).

The privilege against self-incrimination is an important check on the government’s ability to collect evidence directly from a witness.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that the Fifth Amendment broadly applies not only during a criminal prosecution, but also to any other proceeding “civil or criminal, formal or informal,” where answers might tend to incriminate us. It’s a constitutional guarantee deeply rooted in English law dating back to the 1600s, when it was used to protect people from being tortured by inquisitors to force them to divulge information that could be used against them.

For the privilege to apply, however, the government must try to compel a person to make a “testimonial” statement that would tend to incriminate him or her. When a person has a valid privilege against self-incrimination, nobody — not even a judge — can force the witness to give that information to the government.

But a communication is “testimonial” only when it reveals the contents of your mind. We can’t invoke the privilege against self-incrimination to prevent the government from collecting biometrics like fingerprints, DNA samples, or voice exemplars. Why?

Because the courts have decided that this evidence doesn’t reveal anything you know. It’s not testimonial.

Take this hypothetical example coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence, turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act that doesn’t reveal anything you know.

However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it to them, that may be a different story.)

The important feature about PINs and passwords is that they’re generally something we know (unless we forget them, of course). These memory-based authenticators are the type of fact that benefit from strong Fifth Amendment protection should the government try to make us turn them over against our will. Indeed, last year a federal appeals court held that a man could not be forced by the government to decrypt data.

But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics — things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember — the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know.

Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply.

Biometric authentication may make it easier for normal, everyday users to protect the data on their phones. But as wonderful as technological innovation is, it sometimes creates unintended consequences — including legal ones. If Apple’s move leads us to abandon knowledge-based authentication altogether, we risk inadvertently undermining the legal rights we currently enjoy under the Fifth Amendment.

Here’s an easy fix: give users the option to unlock their phones with a fingerprint plus something the user knows.

[MIKA27]

IRIG HD | DIGITAL GUITAR INTERFACE

iRig HD is the first high-quality 24-bit audio interface that fits in your pocket and connects directly to your IOS device so you can listen to your hi-def jams on the go. The little device delivers superior digital audio quality, and offers a premium 24-bit A/D converter for a crystal clear digital signal that’s free from noise and crosstalk. It is compatible with the range of IK apps plus apps that support digital audio such as GarageBand. Another cool feature is it requires no batteries, it´s powered by your mobile device or computer. watch the video

You can get it in Europe here

[MIKA27]

Bugatti Grand Sport Vitesse Jean BUGATTI Edition

As the oldest son of Bugatti's founder, Jean Bugatti probably could have gotten by on his last name alone — but instead, he designed one of the most exclusive, coveted cars known: the Type 57SC Atlantic.

Drawing inspiration from his personal Type 57SC (referred to as La Voiture Noire), and made to recognize Jean Bugatti's professional achievements, the Bugatti Grand Sport Vitesse Jean Bugatti Edition ($3 million) is something to behold in all black carbon fiber.

This edition is limited to just three models, sports an incredible 1,200 horsepower, and features eye-popping details like a platinum grill surround and badges, a silhouette of the 57SC in the door inserts, a rosewood shifter, and twin five-spoke wheels.

[MIKA27]

Costa Concordia operation could spew toxic soup of rotting food and chemicals into sea

A toxic soup of rotting food, chemicals and other debris is expected to spew out of the Costa Concordia when the giant cruise ship is hauled upright tomorrow.

There are fears that the operation could pollute the pristine waters of Giglio, the Italian island where the ship capsized last year.

The Costa Concordia was at the start of a week-long cruise in the Mediterranean when it crashed and its larders and freezers were packed to capacity with vast quantities of fresh food, dried goods, drinks and other supplies for its 4,200 passengers and crew.

Trapped inside the upturned hull are more than 24,000lbs of fish, nearly 5,500lbs of cheese, 1,500 gallons of ice cream in tubs, 24,000lbs of pasta, 2,000lbs of onions, more than 2,000 pots of jam and nearly 17,000 tea bags.

Rotting beneath the waterline are more than 17,000lbs of raw beef, nearly 11,000 eggs, 2,346 hot dog buns, 815lbs of rabbit meat and more than 1,000 gallons of milk.

Some of the food and drink is sealed, presenting less of a pollution risk, including 18,000 bottles of wine, 22,000 cans of Coca-Cola, 1,000 bottles of extra virgin olive oil, 46,000 miniature bottles of spirits and 10 bottles of communion wine for the ship's chapel.

Much of the meat and vegetables is contained in giant fridges and freezers deep inside the bowels of the ship.

In addition to the rotting food, there are oils, lubricants and other chemicals inside the vessel, including 65 gallons of paint and 10 gallons of insecticide, as well as thousands of items such as mattresses, clothing, shoes, crockery and plastic sun loungers.

The whole lot is swirling around in a giant stew of debris, with an estimated 29,000 cubic metres of contaminated water expected to gush out of the vessel as she is hauled upright.

The ship's engine oil and diesel has, at least, been removed – 2,400 tons was extracted from fuel tanks in the months after the disaster by a Dutch salvage firm.

The bodies of a middle-aged Italian woman and an Indian waiter were never recovered and may also be inside the Concordia.

Underwater submarines known as Remote Operated Vehicles or ROVs will search for human remains, with salvage chiefs saying the recovery of the bodies is a priority.

Elio Vincenzi, 64, a maths teacher from Sicily whose wife Maria Grazia Trecarichi died in the disaster, said: "I don't feel hate or rancour. I just want to find my wife's body, to bury her at home in Sicily and to know what happened in those last minutes."

The ship is lying at an acute angle and it was considered not possible to try to extract the food stuffs and other materials, as divers, engineers and other experts worked over the last year to prepare the massive salvage operation.

"The removal of the products concerned from the wreck in situ would have brought more risks than benefits to the salvage operators. Therefore it was decided to wait until the wreck is upright again and then reassess the situation," Costa Cruises, the Italian company that owns the ship, said in a statement.

The ship, which capsized in Jan 2012 with the loss of 32 lives, is due to be raised on Monday with the help of a complex system of winches, cables and giant hollow compartments, in the biggest operation of its kind in maritime history.

The official go-ahead for the operation was given on Sunday. At a press conference on the island, officials were repeatedly pressed as to how confident they were that the ship would withstand the huge stresses of the operation and that it would be raised successfully.

“One hundred per cent,” said Franco Gabrielli, the head of Italy’s Civil Protection agency.

At 114,500 tonnes, the Concordia is twice as big as the Titanic, which capsized and sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912.

Salvage experts have said that loud cracks and bangs will be heard when the ship is pulled upright, as windows blow out and internal steel structures buckle and snap.

Salvage experts and officials from Costa Cruises are confident that the dirty water will be contained by absorbent booms on the surface of the sea and nets extending under the water towards the seabed.

"They will act like a giant underwater skirt," said Nick Sloane, the South African engineer in charge of the salvage operation.

The first four to five hours of the operation will be crucial and will determine whether it has been successful.

"That's when we will start to feel relieved," he said. "There are still a lot of unknown factors about the ship." The nightmare scenario is that the 950ft-long, rust-streaked cruise liner breaks up and sinks to the bottom of the sea.

The containment plan has been drawn up by Arpat, Tuscany's environmental protection agency, which said that the quality of the water surrounding the wreck would be monitored 24 hours a day, after the salvage operation gets under way at 6am local time.

Andrea Orlando, Italy's environment minister, last month demanded greater clarification on the "plan to manage the liquids present in the hull, the plan for the management of solid debris and the plan for dealing with any environmental emergency".

After living with what one local newspaper called "the white whale" at the entrance to Giglio's main port for 20 months, islanders are praying that the salvage operation goes according to plan.

"We're optimistic, although we know that there are risks. But we can't wait for the ship to be raised and towed away," said Aldo Bartoletti, from the Giglio council.

More than 400 journalists from around the world have been given accreditation to cover the event, which is unprecedented in its scale and ambition.

While Giglio has been buffeted by strong winds in recent days, forecasters say weather conditions on Monday should allow the operation, which is expected to take 10-12 hours, to go ahead.

"The wind and the sea conditions should be well within the limits set by the experts to be able to proceed with the removal. The wind will be below 15 knots and the sea swell will be less than 1.5 metres," said a statement from Centro Epson Meteo, a weather forecasting service.

The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, is on trial in the Tuscan city of Grosseto, accused of multiple counts of manslaughter and abandoning ship.

He has denied the charges, claiming that the rocks that the ship smashed into as it passed close to the island in a "salute" were not marked on his nautical charts.

[MIKA27]

How Did Odd Lobster Get Six Claws?

I dare you to high five this lobster.

Amazingly, you could. Lola, a 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) lobster with five claws on her left side, was caught off Hyannis, Massachusetts, last week by the F/V Rachel Leah (from the TV show Lobster Wars) and donated to Maine State Aquarium in Boothbay Harbor.

Claw abnormalities occur when a set of regulatory genes that dictate growth give the wrong signal. They also sometimes occur when a lobster regenerates a claw after losing one, experts say.

The multiclawed crustacean got to meet the public briefly before being pulled off display due to health concerns, aquarium manager Aimee Hayden-Roderiques told National Geographic.

Aquarium staff believe that Lola was in the molting process at the time she was caught and was acclimating to the aquarium system, she said.

“It’s standard protocol for us to pull any potentially molting lobster off exhibit for their protection.”

After they shed their exoskeleton, lobsters “become this soft, water balloon-version of a lobster,” and then hide until they regrow their shell, she said. A lot of them eat their old shell to get the calcium necessary to regrow a new one. “We definitely have to keep them separated until they harden enough to be exhibit-worthy again.”

Hayden-Roderiques added there’s no guarantee that Lola will regrow her unique claw after the molting process.

An Oddity Among Oddities

Though a six-clawed lobster is an oddity, Lola will be among her own kind there.

That’s because Maine State Aquarium seems to be the place for unique lobsters. The aquarium houses lobsters with a variety of color variations like orange, blue, and calico, as well as a 20-pounder (we assume that one gets lots of dinner invites) and several other lobsters with unique claw mutations.

But Lola is a catch. Even the aquarium’s seasoned marine scientist, David Libby from the Maine Department of Marine Resources, was so impressed by the six claws that he told the Bangor Daily News that his 40 years of experience with ocean creatures was “apparently not enough.”

What’s more, Lola has to be the friendliest lobster in world… Well, at least she always looks like she’s waving.

[CanuckSARTech]

That Bugatti....

While it's definitely a beautiful car, and richness has its indulgences, this just kind of "jumps the shark", IMO.

The whole car is done in carbon fiber - for lightness and strength, yes? But then, LOL, they do the grill surround....in platinum...just about the heaviest metal around. My wife and I have platinum wedding bands (I made the mistake of getting her platinum for the engagement ring, and then she wanted it all "to match", LOL). It's super heavy....and super expensive.

I'd laugh to know the weight totals, but I'm sure that the platinum that's in that grill surround probably quite heftily undoes a bunch of the weight savings that's in the carbon fibre body. LOL.

[MIKA27]

Sony's New Walkman: MP3 Player, Headphones, And Speakers In One

In its quest to keep the legendary Walkman brand relevant in the post-iPod world, Sony has taken to creating some odd and neat, if niche gadgets, like the one-piece waterproof Walkman (Seen below).

Now, here’s another stab at the same concept retooled for the hip commuter crowd.

Like the exercise versions before them, the NWZ-WH505 and NWZ-WH303 are 16 GB/ 4 GB music player built-into headphones. This time the headphones are the big over-ear variety: The 505s have bass-friendly 40mm drivers whereas the 303s have 30mm drivers. Both of the Walkmans can also switch to a speaker mode so that they’ll play outloud hanging from your neck. No word on pricing or availability, but don’t be surprised if they’re cheaper than you’d think. The waterproof ones only cost $US100, and Sony headphone hardware tends to the affordable side of the spectrum.

Now, the headphones, which morph into speakers idea has been tried before to some pretty disappointing results, so this product might be a bust. Nevermind, that it’s not clear you need built-in storage in your headphones — if you don’t want wires, Bluetooth is available. But it’s still interesting to see how Sony evolves the Walkman to fit with the times. These days, it’s not the personal audio player that has cachet, but the headphones. And Sony,has quite a history with headphones. Here’s a Walkman for our times. Will anybody listen?

[MIKA27]

Watch People Get Pranked Into Thinking Star Trek Teleportation Is Real

Teleportation is perhaps the dreamiest sci-fi invention ever imagined so it’s no surprise that when a Star Trek-style Transporter pops up in a middle of a mall and promises real life teleportation, a crowd forms to ooh and ahh and secretly hope that it’s real (no matter how unreal it is). Illusionist Scott Penrose created this teleportation prank that had people believing in all things Trekkie.

The prank is an ad for Star Trek Into Darkness being available for streaming on blinkbox but it’s a good one.

[MIKA27]

Boeing Designed And Built This Slick VTOL Drone In Just 27 Days

DARPA’s always working on a bunch of crazy projects, whether it’s to find the next insane robot hero, or just Star Wars robot arms.

On their long list of wants is an unmanned “X-Plane” that can do vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) like the dope-arse F-35B. Boeing whipped up this slick contest entry in 27 days.

The Phantom Swift is a bit more Osprey than F-35B but it looks like it found its VTOL legs pretty fast. And apparently it wasn’t even that rough to design either; the Phantom Works team banged it out in just three days. And the, with the help of rapid prototyping, the sucker was flying in under a month.

It’s only a prototype, so the real thing — if it ever exists — would be a lot larger. This is only a 17 per cent-sized scale model to prove the design works. Unfortunately, Boeing didn’t see fit to show off the Phantom Swift cruising around in full-on plane mode; maybe they’re still working out some of the kinks. But hey, for a month’s work this ain’t bad.

[MIKA27]

Shield Your Eyes: Stallone And De Niro Brawl In Video Game Mo-Cap Suits

I've seen De Niro beat up meat-heads in all kinds of suits, most of them tailored, some of them even pressed. His newest combat garb is… less flattering.

As older actors are wont to do, Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro are teaming up to make a movie about keeping in the fight despite their age. In Grudge Match, the ringside action starts where you’d least expect it, in an outfit I never thought Stallone would don. That’s right, these two has-been boxers throw down in a video game mo-cap session in full green-man tights and sensor balls, a melee which launches them into a media frenzy that culminates in an actual (dun, dun, dun) grudge match.

I know, try to contain your excitement. Check out the full trailer below for more skin-flapping action.

[Habana Mike]

How Did Odd Lobster Get Six Claws?

I dare you to high five this lobster.

Amazingly, you could. Lola, a 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) lobster with five claws on her left side, was caught off Hyannis, Massachusetts, last week by the F/V Rachel Leah (from the TV show Lobster Wars) and donated to Maine State Aquarium in Boothbay Harbor.

Claw abnormalities occur when a set of regulatory genes that dictate growth give the wrong signal. They also sometimes occur when a lobster regenerates a claw after losing one, experts say.

The multiclawed crustacean got to meet the public briefly before being pulled off display due to health concerns, aquarium manager Aimee Hayden-Roderiques told National Geographic.

Aquarium staff believe that Lola was in the molting process at the time she was caught and was acclimating to the aquarium system, she said.

“It’s standard protocol for us to pull any potentially molting lobster off exhibit for their protection.”

After they shed their exoskeleton, lobsters “become this soft, water balloon-version of a lobster,” and then hide until they regrow their shell, she said. A lot of them eat their old shell to get the calcium necessary to regrow a new one. “We definitely have to keep them separated until they harden enough to be exhibit-worthy again.”

Hayden-Roderiques added there’s no guarantee that Lola will regrow her unique claw after the molting process.

An Oddity Among Oddities

Though a six-clawed lobster is an oddity, Lola will be among her own kind there.

That’s because Maine State Aquarium seems to be the place for unique lobsters. The aquarium houses lobsters with a variety of color variations like orange, blue, and calico, as well as a 20-pounder (we assume that one gets lots of dinner invites) and several other lobsters with unique claw mutations.

But Lola is a catch. Even the aquarium’s seasoned marine scientist, David Libby from the Maine Department of Marine Resources, was so impressed by the six claws that he told the Bangor Daily News that his 40 years of experience with ocean creatures was “apparently not enough.”

What’s more, Lola has to be the friendliest lobster in world… Well, at least she always looks like she’s waving.

Does Lola have an opposable thumb? Lobsters evolving freakishly!

[polarbear]

Shield Your Eyes: Stallone And De Niro Brawl In Video Game Mo-Cap Suits

I've seen De Niro beat up meat-heads in all kinds of suits, most of them tailored, some of them even pressed. His newest combat garb is… less flattering.

As older actors are wont to do, Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro are teaming up to make a movie about keeping in the fight despite their age. In Grudge Match, the ringside action starts where you’d least expect it, in an outfit I never thought Stallone would don. That’s right, these two has-been boxers throw down in a video game mo-cap session in full green-man tights and sensor balls, a melee which launches them into a media frenzy that culminates in an actual (dun, dun, dun) grudge match.

I know, try to contain your excitement. Check out the full trailer below for more skin-flapping action.

Looks a lot like a comedic version of Rock 5 to me...

[MIKA27]

The First Colour Screen GPS Watch Can Predict Your Race Times

Garmin has long been working to design GPS-equipped watches that don’t look like a monstrosity strapped to your wrist. And the company’s new Forerunner 220 and 620 manage a svelte form factor that also squeezes in wireless connectivity, touchscreen functionality, colour displays, and enough stat tracking to predict how far a run you can muster.

Both watches feature Garmin’s one-inch Chroma display and Bluetooth connectivity, but the 620 adds the option to connect to a Wi-Fi network for tracking your stats on an accompanying app, as well as a touchscreen that works even while wearing gloves.

Both use a built-in accelerometer to track your steps and strides, and combining that with GPS data they’re able to keep tabs on your pace and performance compared to past runs — but the 620 goes one step further. When used with an optional heart rate monitor it can even calculate an athlete’s V02 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen a runner can consumer per minute.

This allows the watch to then predict what their race times will be for a given distance, displaying their performance potential via a graph on the watch’s display.

So it’s not surprising that the 620 will set you back around $400 later this year, while the 220 is slightly more affordable at around $250. And if you want to take advantage of all the features both watches offer, you’ll need to cough up extra for bundles that include a heart rate monitor. But look on the bright side: they’re still cheaper/less annoying than a personal running coach.

[MIKA27]

Flies See The World In Matrix-Style Slow Motion

If you’ve ever sat puzzling over a fly’s ability to outmanoeuvre your swift slap of death almost every. single. time — puzzle no more.

According to science, you’re just measly Agent Smith to the bug’s Neo; new research shows that a creature’s perception of time is directly related to its size, meaning flies live in a world where time passes as if in slow motion.

But how can we possibly know what’s going on in that fly’s itty bitty brain? It’s all more or less thanks to something called “critical flicker fusion frequency”, which is basically an animal’s ability to detect distinct flashes of flickering light before they appear to merge together. And that point at which the lights fuse together offers insight into that subject’s perception of time. As Dr Andrew Jackson (his real name) from Trinity College Dublin in the Republic of Ireland told The Guardian:

Interestingly, there’s a large difference between big and small species. Animals smaller than us see the world in slo-mo. It seems to be almost a fact of life. Our focus was on vertebrates, but if you look at flies, they can perceive light flickering up to four times faster than we can. You can imagine a fly literally seeing everything in slow motion.

The study, which was published in Animal Behaviour, looked at 30 different species in total, including rodents, eels, lizards, chickens, pigeons, dogs, cats and leatherback turtles. But more than just offering interspecies insight, this news also provides an explanation for why children always seem to be speeding around to adults (who often complain of time seeming to speed up with age). Jackson added:

It’s tempting to think that for children time moves more slowly than it does for grownups, and there is some evidence that it might. People have shown in humans that flicker fusion frequency is related to a person’s subjective perception of time, and it changes with age. It’s certainly faster in children.

And just as that might suggest, the study supports the notion that the various perceptions of time in different animals is directly linked to the “difference between life and death”. Not only in terms of ageing but also how certain animals manage to avoid predators. For instance, fireflies use flashing lights as signals that larger animals might not even be able to see due to their quicker perception of time — like a secret code for the perennially quick.

And while it might seem like a pretty weak perk for getting a shorter lifespan, remember: to the fly, it’s been a full happy life — that is, assuming you can’t catch him. Plus, this could finally explain why an elephant never forgets. Because if you’re an elephant, everything just happened.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: You Won't Believe What It Will Take To Free The Costa Concordia

The 104,000-tonne Costa Concordia luxury liner has been rotting on an Italian reef since last January, after a collision that killed 32 of the 4229 passengers and crew on board and has left the ship stranded for nearly 24 months. This morning, a crew of more than 500 engineers is attempting to finally right the Costa Concordia in the single largest maritime salvage operation of all time. Here’s how they’re getting it done.

The Costa Concordia has spent the last year and a half resting in about 20m of water, atop a pair of underwater granite peaks a few yards offshore, tilting 70 degrees to starboard. While roughly half of the ship remained above water, the entire wreck is dangerously close to the edge of the reef that sank it, which sits above a 70m deep trough that could submerge it entirely.

Today, crews are attempting the first of five phases needed to right the vessel so that it can be towed to a scrap yard and dismantled. A series of cement sacks and a steel platform have already been installed on the reef to stabilise the wreck, and a floating boom has been deployed to capture any remaining fuel, oil or other hazardous liquids that might spill out as the ship is righted. Nearly 350,000 litres of diesel, fuel and other lubricants have already been offloaded to prevent an ecological catastrophe should something go wrong.

“The size of the ship and its location make this the most challenging operation I’ve ever been involved in,” Nick Sloane, chief salvage operator, told the Daily Mail. In fact, this is the largest recovery op ever attempted on a passenger ship.

The actual raising involves a complex series of ropes, pulleys and hydraulic jacks. In addition, a series of 11 mammoth steel boxes, dubbed sponsons, some of which are 11 storeys tall, have been welded to the port side (as you can see above). These boxes are being flooded with seawater to help entice the ship onto a more even keel. Crews hope this will occur without tearing the ship in two, which is a very real possibility. Engineers estimate that it will result in only slightly buckling the superstructure, however, nobody knows how firmly the ship is wedged into its perch or how much force will really be required to free it.

“Once you start lifting her off the reef you have already gone beyond the point of no return,” Sloane, told the Telegraph last Friday. If successful, the Costa Concordia will roll off its granite peaks — its weakened bow braced by a pair of steel “blister tanks” — and onto an artificial reef constructed of six steel-cement platforms before being towed away and scrapped next spring.

In all, the project is expected to use more than 27,000 tonnes of steel in the construction of these platforms as well as the rest of the equipment that will be employed during today’s 12-hour operation. It will be raised slowly in order to minimise structural shock and, with any luck, right the ship in one piece, as well as allow ROVs to explore previously inaccessible areas for the two remaining missing victims.

This 14-month recovery project has already passed the €600 million ($800 million) mark with a final price tag estimated to be as much as $1.1 billion. The project is being paid for through Costa Crociere’s insurance.

The parkbuckling project has been underway for roughly three hours now as an overnight storm delayed the operation slightly.

Crews are currently performing the most delicate steps of the salvage, employing hydraulic jacks and pulleys to slowly pry the giant ship from its perch.

[MIKA27]

Raytheon's New Real-Life Minesweeper Will Make Seas Safer For Sailors

Even though Iran has backed away from from its threats to lace the Strait of Hormuz with mines, militaries around the world (the US included) continue to employ the devices in large numbers — as much as 200 times as often as any other kind of maritime weapon.

So, to augment the DoD’s ageing fleet of Avenger-class vessels and empower the new fleet of Littoral Combat Ships, Raytheon has developed the helicopter-launched Airborne Mine Neutralization System.

Given how easy it is to install an undersea mine (they can either be moored or simply sit on the seabed) and their destructive capabilities, they’re highly effective naval deterrents capable of holding back full armadas from sensitive coastal areas, waterways, and strategic choke points. Raytheon’s Airborne Mine Neutralization System (AMNS) is designed specifically to counter this threat by finding and destroying the mines before the rest of the carrier strike group floats into them.

The AMNS consists of two major subsystems. The Remote Mine Hunting System which pairs Raytheon’s AQS-20 mine-detection sonar with Lockheed’s autonomous Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle. The RMMV is first launched from from an LCS and sets about scanning the area in question with high frequency sonar. Any present mines generate a ping and are recorded for higher-frequency investigation. As Greg Black, Director of Underseas Systems at Raytheon, explained to Gizmodo, “The higher frequency sonar, has a broadband component to it, so it’s a range of high frequencies. The wavelength of the frequency is smaller, the physical wavelength is smaller with the higher frequency, and it’s therefore able to resolve more details of the object.”

Once the RMMV’s operators are confident they’ve found a mine, the second major subsystem comes into play: the MH-60-launched ASQ-235 Airborne Mine Neutralization System. “this is a helicopter-based system,” Black continued, “that will use information from the AQS-20 mine hunting system to go back out to the location of the mine with the helicopter, re-acquire the mine and ultimately neutralize it.”

The ASQ-235 itself is composed of the Launch and Handling Carrier — a hoist-deployable launch platform that the MH-60 crew lowers in the water and from which the Neutralizer ROV launches. The LHC also provides a communications link back to the operator via a fibre-optic data link that provides sonar and video feeds. Once the operator relocates the mine, he commands the Neutralizer, in this case, Britain’s Archerfish to detonate its shaped charge against the threat, destroying them both.

This two-prong approach to undersea demining may seem convoluted but its certainly better than sending sailors out in wooden-hulled ships to shoot at mines with .50 cal machine guns.

[MIKA27]

Japan's Rocket Launch Was Totally On The Cheap

Over the weekend, the Japanese space agency Jaxa successfully launched the Epsilon rocket, which is carrying a telescope, Sprint-A, for planetary observation. Jaxa was able to complete the launch for about $US37 million, half the cost of previous Jaxa rockets and cheap compared to an average $US450 million NASA launch.

To scrimp and save, Jaxa built Epsilon smaller than past Japanese rockets and added onboard AI so the rocket could perform its own safety checks. This also reduced the need for staff at the launch from 150 people to eight people. And the whole launch was coordinated on two standard PC laptops.

Epsilon successfully released Sprint-A 620 miles above the surface of the Earth. Jaxa says that the telescope will be able to image Venus, Mars and Jupiter. It’s pretty crazy to think that your laptop has enough computing power to send rockets into space.

And then you remember that the Apollo guidance computer was literally made out of rope.

[MIKA27]

Grand Theft Auto V:

Rockstar Games has scaled a mountain with Grand Theft Auto V, creating the best-looking, best-sounding and, most importantly, best-playing version of gaming’s most notorious franchise. Scaling one peak, however, reveals another — their cloud-piercing ambition to create a great ensemble video game drama, an epic of intersecting, interactive lives. Rockstar doesn’t summit that new peak as impressively with GTA V, but in its first attempt at such an audacious feat, makes a good go of it.

This is a game that feels like both the best of what anyone might expect from a GTA and the exciting, somewhat raw, uneven first try at a more interesting future for these kinds of massive open-world adventures.

This is a game that works both as apotheosis and rough draft.

But perhaps you’d simply like to know how it compares to GTA IV, the previous Grand Theft Auto released way back in the spring of 2008. Fine. This new one is far better-looking on console even though it is running on the same hardware, has a more interesting and varied world, has better average mission quality, is longer (possibly the same length if GTA IV‘s two episodic expansions are counted), is better-engineered, is less serious, but lacks a lead character as compelling as Niko Bellic. Also, V has planes. And tanks.

The Change

Like six of the previous seven Grand Theft Autos from Rockstar Games, GTA V is a third-person action game set in a massive three-dimensional world. This game’s world is a detailed, fictionalised recreation of Los Angeles and of archetypal nearby deserts, forests, mountains, lakes and small towns.

The game’s Los Santos is not real LA but a parody version, complete with parody radio stations, parody celebrities, and a parody Internet. A lot of it spoofs American politics and pop culture. Remember, this is the game series that has patriotic gun shops called Ammu-Nation. This is a GTA world stuffed with people who are mostly ridiculous. Almost everyone is a jerk and/or a joke. Almost everyone is a trope: dudebro financial guy, corrupt government agent, brainless starlet, mouth-breathing gamer, hardass lawyer.

The game world is huge, varied, full of this kind of ridiculousness. It’s there to entertain you.

The most notable change to the series’ formula is that there are now three protagonists for the player to control. Instead of one ambitious Tommy Vercetti or one reluctant Niko Bellic, players of GTA V can switch back and forth to steer a trio of men through the congested Los Santos and the vast Blaine County to the north. They each have their own parts to play in their interwoven narrative.

The leads in the new game are all criminals but have very different lives. There’s Franklin Clinton, a black South Central native who has a crappy job at a car dealership and who dreams of pulling off some grand crimes. There’s Michael De Santa, a white supposedly-retired bank-robber living in the posh GTA version of Beverly Hills. He shares a home with a wife who is sleeping with the tennis instructor (and the yoga teacher), an annoying, talentless daughter who is trying to get on a TV talent show, and a lazy son who spends his days trashtalking his way through violent online video games and trolling celebrities on GTA V‘s version of Twitter. The third lead is Michael’s former bank heist partner, the balding white trash Trevor Phillips, now a meth dealer who lives up north in a trailer and who has a perforated line and the words “cut here” tattooed across his neck. The man is almost constantly screaming. He’s a psycho. Franklin, Michael and Trevor are drawn together and, soon enough, begin planning heists while also pursuing their own criminal ventures.

In the older Grand Theft Autos and in many of the games that copied Rockstar’s open-world formula, a player got around by running around or by making their character run up to any car or truck idling in traffic or parked on the side of the road and jack it.

In the new game, there’s a third option. The player can hop across the map by changing characters and dropping into one of the other guys’ lives.

Once the game allows access to all three lead characters — and for much but not all of the rest of the game — the player can press a button on their controller to produce a circle that shows portraits of the game’s three leads. After one more input by the player to switch characters, the game’s camera will suddenly be reeled up into the sky, shift to another point above the GTA V‘s huge world and then push down onto the new character the player chose to control. These switches vary in length of time, but typically take fewer than 30 seconds. Michael, Franklin and Trevor don’t sit idle waiting to be controller. Whoever the player has switched to will appear to have been going about his day. A short scene will play out before the player has control. Judging by these transitional scenes, Trevor’s days seem to involve getting thrown out of places, tying men to the bottoms of piers, or stumbling around drunkenly while wearing only boots, socks and underwear. Michael’s and Franklin’s days are more like yours or mine (hopefully!).

Players have no say as to where the character they’re switching to is hanging out in the world. The destination of the character switch is a surprise, which adds a welcome new variable to the GTA formula. Character-switching winds up being similar to flipping between three TV channels. You’ll know, in general, what you’re going to be tuning into, but you won’t know where they’re at in the show until you flip.

As before in GTA games, missions are sprinkled throughout the game world, Major missions — some 75 of them, despite what the in-game mission counter says — are represented by capital letters that are colour-coded to indicate which of the three main characters can initiate them. The new game’s pile of major sidequests — of which there are a few dozen — are also colour-coded.

Some quest-givers have different missions for different characters and will weave in and out of each of the three leads’ threaded narratives. All of that enables GTA V to feel like the least linear game in the series, because even though it flows to certain bottleneck moments, it affords the player great liberty in choosing where to go, who to meet, what missions to go on — all with the randomised surprise of where on the map the player will be when they switch characters — to shake things up.

Once missions are triggered, the game narrows the player’s options by funnelling them into a carefully-planned sequence of cutscenes and tasks, similar to how other Grand Theft Autos have done it. But in this game, some missions will involve two or even three playable characters. Those missions will allow players to switch characters on the fly. In-mission the character switches are as quick as a finger-snap.

Some in-mission switches will be minor, involving, say, switching from Michael taking cover behind a car in a shootout with the cops to Trevor who is holding a sniper rifle while standing on a roof overlooking the firefight.

Other switches are spectacular, flipping, in one instance, from a character on a train that’s about to cross a bridge high above a river to a partner in crime in a boat on the river far below. The latter changes are often triggered automatically, but they nonetheless help the make missions feel more varied, less like a sequence of events and more like a juggle of multiple, simultaneous chaotic moments.

Regardless of all of that, players who plumb Grand Theft Auto‘s deep trove of missions, side missions, hobbies, mini-games, diversions, and random events will spend much of their time playing solo as whichever character they prefer. They’ll be doing what GTA players have long done: stealing a convertible, flipping radio stations, peeling down the highway, racing away from some pissed off cops and heading toward… a game of darts? A rampage? The military base where, this time, they’re going to steal a fighter jet?

The Numbers

Some GTA players ignore all the story missions and just play in the games’ chaotic sandbox. Others rush through the storyline. When I play open world games, I’m a wanderer and a checklist checker-offer. In advance of my review, I played Grand Theft Auto V for the better part of a week, taking my time to explore Los Santos and Blaine County instead of just driving from mission to mission. I’m a sucker for great scenery and interesting sidequests. The game is full of both.

A peer who mainlined the story and did few sidequests cleared the game in about 30 hours.

Another who was racing just from story mission to story mission was moving at faster than that rate.

I moseyed and didn’t even do the game’s first major heist until 11 hours into the game, didn’t unlock the third main character until after that and saw the credits roll, with 69 main quests done and 33 sidequests done in 42 hours. Fascinatingly, the time I spent as each of the three main characters was nearly identical:

Playing the game this way let me take the story slowly and allowed me to poke around in sidequest after sidequest. The side missions opened more of the game up, triggering new special mission types like, say, base-jumping, while improving my understanding of the characters and enhancing the richness of the game’s world. Refrain from doing the sidequests and the game won’t just fail to send you parachuting, but it won’t take you to the peak of its highest mountain. Don’t do the sidequests and you won’t go jogging with a woman on the beach, you won’t be trying to steal celebrities’ belongings for an elderly demented British couple, you won’t see how Trevor deals with immigration issues, and you won’t see how, in a succession of three optional missions sprinkled throughout the game, each of the GTA V’s lead characters reacts to a man who is trying to legalise marijuana.

Even with the major side missions done, the game will only take you to Blaine County’s sprawling wind farm once, will never take you to its prison and will ignore the game’s stadiums and speedway. This is not a negative. Rather, it’s a testament to how immense and full of attractions GTA V‘s world is. Fly over the game’s spaghetti of roads and bridges and you’ll see that Rockstar has, graphically, ceased to operate in visual metaphor and instead has drawn with detailed realism a metropolis and its surroundings that are full of every kind of landmark and incidental element of real world terrain that you can think of: from fictionalised versions of the Hollywood sign, the Getty Center, the Rose Bowl, LAX airport and LA’s famous urban drainage canals, to trailer parks, ranches, quarries, shipping docks, diners, and some place where people paint rocks in the hopes of signalling aliens. Some of GTA V’s magnificent landscape may be there just for virtual sightseeing. Some of it may be used as a playground in the October-scheduled Grand Theft Auto Online, which, for starters, will use GTA V’s map (and is free for anyone who buys GTA V) .

GTA V‘s lands and bodies of water also likely hold at least hundred secrets-specifically hidden collectibles of which I only found three in my 42 hours of playing. There is just so much in the game to explore, much of it trading off the appeal of real world geography. If the magnificence of a massive lake, the eeriness of an abandoned barn or the allure of biking up a big mountain does nothing for you, look for more fantastical game worlds to play.

The Four Games In a GTA

Vast as the game is, it can be boiled down into four elements. Every GTA, after all, is essentially four games happening at once. In no particular order, they are:

1) The Menu of Mini-Games: In a way, the cities of Grand Theft Auto games are glorified menus that grant access to smaller, more focused games. Want to play a game of darts? Or a video game version of yoga? Or tennis? Or golf? Or fly planes through targets?

Or use said planes to drop things on targets? Or race cars? Race boats? Do a triathalon? Drive to the correct spot in GTA V and you can do that stuff. Versions of some of these activities have appeared in GTA games before; others are new. Games such as tennis are complex enough to stand as small games of their own.

For better or worse, though, these mini-games remain, for me, the least appealing part of the series. They are presented, more or less, dispassionately, without the snark and satire of the rest of the game’s world. They are, generally, exactly what you’d expect them to be. The darts game is just that, a darts game. There’s no flair, no imaginative gameplay twist, no buzz of that something special that makes a game or a game-within-a-game fun.

GTA V may have more mini-games than ever before, but these activities remain one-time tries for anyone but completionists, straight-faced diversions in a game world that otherwise seems to go out of its way to get a reaction out of you.

2) The Chemistry Set: GTA’s best element has always been its mad mutation of Pac-Man, its chase-or-be-chased action, set across what used to be a mostly-urban grid. The genius of 2001′s GTA III and its successors was their ability to give players an ever-flowing street-level version of this action and to give players an ever-increasing amount of freedom as to how they’d play it out. If you steal a car or shoot someone in these games, the police may well come after you. Whether you flee or fight back, you’ll deal with an intensifying response. The cops start driving toward you. If you’re on foot, you’re in for a gunfight. If you’re in a car, you’re in for a crazy chase. You’ll either get your character killed or manage to escape, but, usually, there will be a lot of chaos along the way.

In GTA V, there are up to five “star” levels of notoriety, though when you’re down to zero there are actually relatively few cops around. Get to three or four stars and the police will send helicopters after you.

The big change to how GTA‘s central cops-and-robbers system flows involves how the cops chase you. If the police see you, the mini-map in the lower lefthand corner of the screen will flash blue and red, and the cops will be all over you. Give the cops the slip, and the mini-map reverts to black and grey, but little flashing dots representing the police will buzz through the mini-map, projecting a cone that represents each cop’s line of sight. What’s happening there is that the cops are hunting you down. You can’t stay stationary and hide. You have to move. You have to keep veering out of the line of sight until the police lose interest.

The police have always been the most interesting part of GTA‘s chemistry set, but there have been other elements mixed in, usually tied to specific vehicles. In the past, for example, stealing a taxi allowed players to start finding passengers and taking them to their requested destinations. That returns in V. In the past, other missions might spawn after stealing a tractor trailer or police car or delivery van or fire truck. Much of that appears to have been removed for V, though the wide range of vehicles to steal remains. If you’re stealing, say, a helicopter in this game, you’re largely just doing it for the fun of it.

GTA IV had added a cell phone to the mix and gave the player a lot of in-game friends who would call and ask to hang out. These friends were annoying. These people seemed to always want to go to bars or play pool or do any other of GTA IV‘s less fun activities. Each of the lead characters in GTA V has a cell phone and friends and family who call (or text or email), but they rarely ask you to do anything with them. You can go to the bar with them if you’d like, but only at your prompting.

So it’s not vehicles or friends that play a big role in tweaking the GTA chemistry set this time around. Instead, it’s money. The game runs on a much more complex economy than its predecessors and builds greatly on some property-ownership ideas introduced in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In V, you can buy properties, take in weekly piles of money from those properties and even go on missions to keep that take high. Some of your property income will be affected by actions in the world. For example, the scrap yard yields a certain amount of money each week based on how many cars you’ve smashed in the game.

More interestingly, you can play the stock market. The game runs two stock markets, one controlled locally within the game and the other whose company stock prices are, according to Rockstar, determined by how the mass of GTA V players is all playing the game. Should, for example, one type of car get stolen a lot then the stock price of the auto-maker behind it will be affected. Stocks also change prices based on missions players are going on, so it behooves players to listen to their mission-givers and, perhaps, buy a ton of stock in the company whose rival CEO you’ve just been asked to assassinate.

GTA V‘s chemistry set is well-tuned for players to mess with. It’s tempting as ever to nudge an element here or there in it and see what happens as a result. You know, like… well, what would happen if I drove through the airport gate and tried to steal a private jet? What if I put all my money in Burger Shot stocks? What if I steal that fire truck? Go ahead and see what happens…

3) The Search For Stuff: It might be apostasy to purists of video game theory, but one of the most enjoyable things to do in GTA games, including this new one, is to find the next bit of non-interactive or barely-interactive content. GTA V is, in a sense, a massive treasure hunt. Like the franchise entries before it, it’s got a massive world that has all kinds of things in it that the developers would like you to find but aren’t going to make it easy for you to find. Well, not all of it’s easy to find. Some of what’s in the game is what series veterans would expect. You’ve got new in-game TV shows to watch. There are more than a dozen of radio stations to listen to, all with funny, satirical commercials. You can spend a few minutes in the game watching Rockstar’s send-up to nearly-incoherent foreign films.

The game’s fake Internet is bursting with websites that spoof major clothing brands, online dating services, self-help movements and more. None of this makes GTA V more interactive, but it helps make its world more interesting. It also makes the game a time capsule as the targets of its mockery — everyone from predatory lenders to people who camp out for iPhones, everything from skinny jeans to Google Maps — may not be around or be recognisable or may simply not be annoying in the same way by the time Rockstar makes another GTA.

A note about all this satire: it can be hard to take Rockstar’s skewering of modern (mostly American) culture all that seriously in a game that also offers interactive first-person lapdances as well as easy knocks at idiotic things like reality shows. Some might see the old Shakespearean gesture to both the highbrow and the lowbrow in GTA V‘s satirical abuse of tax-and-spend liberals and its jokey presentation of pot use. But GTAhas done this stuff before, and its satirical newscasts — “Weazel News: Confirming Your Prejudices” — just don’t sting as much since they stung so many times before. GTA V finds its mark and makes a piercing point when it presents some of its satire in the game’s playable missions. Without spoiling it, one mission makes its point quite clearly about America’s post 9/11 treatment of people who look a certain way. By being interactive, it makes the player fascinatingly complicit in what it appears to criticise.

Most of GTA V‘s content hunt is actually not that heady. It’s also rarely dull. At turn after turn, there’s a new character to find or new place to visit, new thing to watch or listen to. For those who like to hunt and peck and peer at all corners of a game world, there’s much here to like.

4) The Story. There’s a scripted adventure to be had in these games, one with a beginning middle and end.GTA V‘s got that, too. That’s where the ensemble comes in and that’s where the game ceases to be a perfecting of what has come before it in the franchise and more of an attempt, imperfectly, to do something new.

At its most basic, GTA V is a story about three men who come together to commit new crimes. Because they can’t be together at all times, the game’s writers and mission scripters needed to repeatedly find reasons to bring Michael, Trevor and Franklin together and then to split them up. While doing that, they needed to keep all three men interesting. Here, their success was mixed.

Separately, Trevor outshines Michael and Franklin. A complete nutjob who enters the game in a way that made him immediately incorrigible and fascinating, Trevor is the right kind of crazy for a GTA. His character fits his action, overcoming a flaw in previous GTAs that made the character that players controlled in the cutscenes (generally calm, bemused, and often reluctant men of action) feel wildly inconsistent with the one they controlled in gameplay (generally mass murderers willing to blow up dams, drive over pedestrians and machine-gun dozens of cops). Trevor is nuts in his gameplay. He’s nuts in his cutscenes. He also has weird relationships with his friends, is haunted by things that happened in his and Michael’s past and, overall, is someone who is interesting to control and find out more about.

Michael is, perhaps, half as interesting. His family dramas brim with potential but never achieve anything more than sitcom complexity. He’s in therapy, but that is played mostly for satire. Any epiphanies the character has feel unearned. He has his own issues with his past and he has potential as a mentor to Franklin, but aside from a dalliance with a possible career change at one point in the game, he feels paint-by-numbers and lacking in surprise or meaningful development.

Franklin is enriched by his friendship with Lamar, a hotheaded friend from South Central who steals scenes early and late in the game. Otherwise, though, Franklin is largely a blank, coming to life a little when exchanging emails with his ex-girlfriend but otherwise failing to distinguish himself as anything other than a mostly reasonable aspiring crook.

Many of Grand Theft Auto‘s previous protagonists were as blank or even more bereft of a memorable personality than Franklin, so it may seem unfair to knock two thirds of the leading cast. But the ensemble approach invites comparisons across that cast, and Michael and Franklin pay the price of the excellence of Trevor. Good supporting casts for all three leads at least help even things out. It’s one of GTA V‘s best touches that switching from one character to the next also feels like changing social circles. The problem is that Michael and Franklin, when sharing a scene with Trevor, lose out. He’s the one to keep your eyes on. And he’s the spark of most of the interesting exchanges between the characters. Trevor also follows Cole Phelps and John Marston, two exceptionally well-written, deep, interesting leads in Rockstar games. He ranks up there with them. His two buddies do not.

There are hints in the game of the storytelling power of having the player know more about what’s happening with all three characters than Michael, Trevor and Franklin do. Rare as that kind of thing is in games, Rockstar at least had previously played with the gulf between character knowledge and player knowledge to great success in its and Team Bondi’s 2011 L.A. Noire. For a stretch of the game, two characters have a very different understanding of something that happened in the past. The player knows the truth even as they control one of the characters who still believes a lie. There are few other examples like that in the game. But those parts of the story don’t quite feel fully realised; they’re glimpses of a fascinating new way to tell interactive stories, but their potential never feels sufficiently tapped.

There’s something undeniably potent about experiencing a story as a variety of members of an ensemble cast. For all the multi-character role-playing games out there, the concept feels largely untapped. In the writing and the mechanics of giving GTA V‘s lead trio missions together, Rockstar’s new game feels like it is making progress, but not quite getting it, not quite justifying narratively why these guys would stick together, not quite getting the most out of what a player’s relationship to three different characters would be and, simply, not quite presenting as evenly excellent a lead cast of characters as it probably would have liked to.

Players may find themselves occasionally yearning for the simple, single arc of GTA IV‘s Niko Bellic, forgetting the dull parts in a narrative that was stretched too thin. Michael, Trevor and Franklin benefit from shorter tales but would have benefitted even more from more interesting arcs and intersections.

The Heists

Michael, Franklin and Trevor are brought together in GTA V to go on heists. While promoting the game, Rockstar officials described a handful of malleable heist missions that would see the lead characters coming together. These missions would give the player the opportunity to tweak some variables and play the heist differently from other gamers. These capital-H Heist missions do present some of the most exciting big-action moments of the game’s main storyline, but they’re, surprisingly, not the game’s best missions.

They’re not even all of the game’s biggest missions.

Something is off about the Heists. They may branch. They may be playable different, fun ways. But some of the choices and systems associated with them feel half-baked. The Heists present options, for example, about which henchmen to bring along. Some of these henchmen are found in the game world. They can serve roles as drivers or gunmen. The henchmen have varying skill levels and demand a different percentage of a heist’s haul. Really bad henchmen will screw up part of a heist. Good ones gain stat bonuses after finishing a heist. The problem is that nearly none of that seems to matter. The consequences of using these henchmen or of repeatedly using one in order to raise their stats are nearly invisible. It seems to matter little what their take is, because players make a decent amount of money in this game no matter what.

Perhaps these core specially-designated Heist missions should be seen as great bonding moments for Michael, Trevor and Franklin. Sometimes, they are. But non-heist missions provide good moments for these characters — and some excellent interactive robberies — of their own.

What It Feels Like

GTA V‘s credits roll for 36 minutes. For however many hours they play the game, players will feel that they are playing a game made by the amount of people it takes to keep a crawl rolling that long. The attention to detail in GTA V is likely unparalleled in any other video game.

Park a car and you’ll hear a few rattles as the engine cools.

Finish a mission as a man is ranting behind you and stick around… that rant just might go on for a while.

In comparing my experiences in some of GTA V‘s missions with others who’ve played them, we’ve discovered that one of us has heard lengthy in-game conversations that the other missed. It’s likely that players’ memories of the GTA V and understanding of the game’s events will vary because of this.

Thanks to the army of people who made the game, there is a generous amount of polish in the game and a lot of fixes that correct old GTA aggravations. A series once known in part for bad controls and unforgiving un-checkpointed missions now sports tight shooting, decent stealth and refined driving controls. Missions now checkpoint so much that players may start complaining the other way: that the game holds players’ hands too much. (Rockstar should be able to deflect that criticism, since each mission includes several gold-medal completion requirements that reward uncheckpointed, elite play.)

Another nice touch: each of the game’s three lead characters has stats associated with driving, shooting and other basic abilities that all improve with use. This helps makes controlling the game easier the more you play it. Early in the game, I kept retrying a race that was giving me fits. Each attempt didn’t just help me learn the game’s car physics; it made my driver, Franklin in this case, better at turning corners. Each character also has a metered special ability. Franklin’s ability, which slows down time while driving, makes hairpin turns during car chases a cinch and makes evading the cops more fun and less frustrating.

All of this makes GTA V feel more player-friendly than previous GTAs. This one wastes less of your time and forgives more of your small errors than any before it. It also just makes the experience of playing it more pleasant. Here’s a game that is well-resourced enough to dole out long conversations between your character and his passenger while driving, changes those conversations slightly (as IV did) if you’re repeating the mission, interrupts those conversations with some cursing from your passenger if you bump into traffic mid-conversation, and then picks up from that interruption to continue the scripted conversation without missing a beat. Incredible.

As Rockstar has made its GTA games the studio has gradually improved things like controls and checkpoints to get to where V is, but those improvements had seemed to come paired with a taming of GTA‘s possibilities. Older GTA games’ open-ended missions let players find creative solutions to accomplish various driving or assassination tasks. That approach gave way to missions in the likes of GTA IV that had fewer and, often, only one way to complete them. GTA V, thankfully, begins to turn against that. Some missions explicitly ask the player to plan an attack, supposedly any way the player would like to. Others simply offer an objective and leave it to the player to creatively figure out how to accomplish it. In a game so filled with scripted content, this is a welcome return to an earlier form.

It’s also impressive that GTA V seems to continuously find new ways to surprise its players by populating its world with small interactive events. The idea for the game’s semi-random encounters comes from the pedestrian missions in GTA IV that were expanded in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption. In both games, players would happen upon characters who had a few lines of speech and maybe a request to be transported somewhere or to have someone hunted down. GTA V is bursting with these kinds of things. Some, like the guy who is standing on his driveway looking at the clothes his enraged wife has thrown out of a window and who needs a ride out of there, seem tied to certain places on the map. Others, like the game’s numerous sidewalk robberies, seemingly happen anywhere. These small incidents are generally welcome — except the robberies, which are V‘s worst annoyance — and can lead to good things. A man needing a ride to the airport, for example, gave Franklin a great stock tip. Who knows what else is hiding in Los Santos.

By the end of GTA V, such as there is an end to GTA V, the player will have stories to tell. One is the story of Michael, Franklin and Trevor and follows the main plotline. That one’s ok. The better story to tell will be the one about all the things that happened at the margins… in the streets and alleys, off the airfields and down in the valleys. Much of that was written by Rockstar, too, and some of it was simply enabled by the marvellous chemistry-set of their game world.

Beyond all of this, however, is one consistent fact about so many of the best video games: they create great places in which to play.

Underpinning everything else, in GTA V, Rockstar has created one of gaming’s most impressive worlds. They’ve built on geography that anyone who has visited LA or hiked a trail will recognise and appreciate.

Occasionally Grand Theft Auto V‘s main missions will push players up the map and out of the city, into the big-sky northern half of the game. In one such moment the player is controlling Trevor. He’s on a motorbike. He’s chasing a plane that is also heading north.

Blaine County stretches as far as the eye can see, a world of possibilities. You can go to all those places you can see. You can do stuff there, probably cause some mayhem or go on a mission or just explore. It’ll look good when you get there, too. Mount Chiliad looms in the distance.

That’s GTA V at its best — excelling at what you thought GTAs were supposed to do, while heading for the next impossibly high peak.

[MIKA27]

CDC Threat Report: ‘We Will Soon Be in a Post-Antibiotic Era’

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just published a first-of-its-kind assessment of the threat the country faces from antibiotic-resistant organisms, ranking them by the number of illnesses and deaths they cause each year and outlining urgent steps that need to be taken to roll back the trend.

The agency’s overall — and, it stressed, conservative — assessment of the problem:

• Each year, in the U.S., 2,049,442 illnesses caused by bacteria and fungi that are resistant to at least some classes of antibiotics;
  
• Each year, out of those illnesses, 23,000 deaths;
  
• Because of those illnesses and deaths, $20 billion each year in additional healthcare spending;
  
• And beyond the direct healthcare costs, an additional $35 billion lost to society in foregone productivity.
  

“If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era,” Dr. Tom Frieden, the CDC’s director, said in a media briefing. “And for some patients and for some microbes, we are already there.”

The report marks the first time the agency has provided hard numbers for the incidence, deaths and cost of all the major resistant organisms. (It had previously estimated illnesses and deaths from some families of organisms or types of drug resistance, but those numbers were never gathered in one place.) It also represents the first time the CDC has ranked resistant organisms by how much and how imminent a threat they pose, using seven criteria: health impact, economic impact, how common the infection is, how easily it spreads, how much further it might spread in the next 10 years, whether there are antibiotics that still work against it, and whether things other than administering antibiotics can be done to curb its spread.

Out of that matrix, their top three “urgent” threats:

• Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae or CRE, a set of ICU germs that are resistant to almost all antibiotics: 9,000 infections per year, 600 deaths
  
• Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which currently responds to only one drug: 246,000 infections per year
  
• Clostridium difficile, which is growing in resistance to one class of drugs, but more important, serves as a marker for the use of other antibiotics: 250,000 illnesses, 14,000 deaths.
  

There are 12 resistant bacteria and fungal infections in a second category, which the agency dubs “serious” (requiring “prompt and sustained action”); they include the hospital infections Acinetobacter,Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and VRE; the foodborne organisms Campylobacter, Salmonella andShigella; MRSA; Candida, a fungal infection; and TB, among others. The last category, “concerning” (requiring “careful monitoring and prevention”) includes rare but potent vancomycin-resistant staph, VRSA, as well as strains of strep resistant to two different categories of drugs.

For each organism, the report explains why it is a public health threat, where the trends are headed, what actions the CDC is taking, and what it is important for health care institutions, patients and their families, and states and local authorities to do to help. It also makes explicit where the trend of increasing and more common resistance is taking the country, outlining the risks to people taking chemotherapy for cancer, undergoing surgery, taking dialysis, receiving transplants, and undergoing treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.

(The report also — and this is so important that I’ll take it up in a separate post tomorrow — tackles the issue of how agriculture, as well as healthcare, contributes to the increase in resistant organisms nationwide.)

The report lists some serious concerns the CDC has regarding how well resistance is monitored: in “gaps in knowledge,” it specifically names limited national and international surveillance, as well as the lack of data on agricultural use of antibiotics. And it calls for action in four areas: gathering better data; preventing infections, through vaccination, better protective behavior in hospitals, and better food handling; improving the way in which antibiotics are used, by not using them inappropriately in health care or agriculture; and developing not just new categories of antibiotics but better diagnostic tests so that resistant organisms can be identified and dealt with sooner, before they spread.

In an interview before the report became public, Frieden said that some of these actions are already happening. “My biggest frustration is the pace of change,” he told me. “Hospitals are making progress, but it’s single digits in terms of the number of hospitals that are being very proactive. The challenge is scaling up what we know works, and doing that fast enough so that we can close the door on drug resistance before it’s too late.”

I talked about the report’s calls for action to Dr. Ed Septimus, who is a professor of internal medicine at Texas A&M Health Sciences Center in Houston and a frequent spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the professional group for the physicians who usually treat resistant infections.

“We have gotten some action in Congress,” he said, mentioning the GAIN Act, which passed and offers incentives for drug development, and the STAAR Act, which aimed to improve surveillance and antibiotic conservation, but did not pass. “The FDA is considering regulations that would allow a special designation for drugs for unmet needs, and resistance would qualify; and the NIH has prioritized research on resistance higher than it did 10 years ago. So there is movement — but in terms of funding, it is a slow difficult process.

“Still, there are things we can do without funding,” he said: hospitals could create their own stewardship programs, and could work with nursing homes, whose patients bring some of the most resistant organisms into hospitals but who usually lack the budget for infection prevention.

“It’s up to us to make the recommendations in this report happen,” Septimus said. “If we do nothing but say, ‘Here’s the problem,’ then the problem will continue to grow.”

[MIKA27]

New Walking Dead Spinoff Coming to AMC in 2015

2015 continues to be a big year for genre fans. Not only will it bring a new Star Wars movie, a secondAvengers film and the much-discussed debut of Ben Affleck as Batman in the still-unnamed sequel toMan of Steel, but this morning AMC announced that it’ll also be the year when The Walking Dead spins off a brand-new television series set in the same post-apocalyptic world.

The cable channel revealed today that it is in “the initial stages of developing a companion series” to its hyper-successful adaptation of the long-running Image Comics series co-created and written by Robert Kirkman about a group of human survivors in a world filled with the undead. Kirkman is part of the group developing the spinoff, acting as executive producer on the project alongside Walking Deadexecs Gail Anne Hurd and David Alpert.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled about getting the chance to create a new corner of The Walking Deaduniverse,” said Kirkman in a statement included the network’s announcement, adding that “the opportunity to make a show that isn’t tethered by the events of the comic book, and is truly a blank page, has set my creativity racing.” AMC president Charlie Collier promised that the show would feature “an entirely new story and cast of characters,” while offering “another unforgettable view of the zombie apocalypse.”

Today’s news is another example of AMC strengthening its core offerings; last week, the channel announced Better Call Saul, a prequel spinoff from Breaking Bad focusing on popular character Saul Goodman as the original series winds down to its finale.

Given the 2015 premiere date for the Walking Dead spinoff, it’s possible that the network is planning for this second zombie series to ultimately replace Dead in the same way that Saul will replace Breaking Bad, which ends in two weeks.

The Walking Dead returns for its fourth season on October 13.

[MIKA27]

Stricken Costa Concordia ship set upright

UPDATE:

Engineers in Italy have succeeded in setting the cruise ship Costa Concordia upright, 20 months after it ran aground off the island of Giglio.

They said that the unprecedented salvage effort "reached degree zero (vertical), which was our target".

In the operation that took all of Monday and most of the night, they used cables and metal boxes filled with water to roll the ship onto a platform.

The Costa Concordia capsized in January 2012, killing 32 people.

The bodies of two of the victims of the disaster, by the island of Giglio, have never been found. There are hopes that they may be located during the operation.

'Double Titanic'

The ship was declared completely upright shortly after 04:00 local time (02:00) on Tuesday.

Franco Gabrielli, the head of Italy's Civil Protection Authority, said the vessel was now sitting on a platform built on the sea bed.

"A perfect operation, I must say," said Franco Porcellacchia, a project manager for the Concordia's owner, Costa Crociere SpA.

He added that no environmental spill was detected so far.

Booms and nets were put in place before the operation started - to combat any pollution threat in what is a marine national park.

The 114,000-gross tonnage ship - twice as heavy as the Titanic - was on Monday raised from rocks on which it had been lying and roll up onto her keel.

More than 50 enormous chains and winches were used to break the ship away from the reef - the process known as parbuckling.

During the marathon operation, the ship could be seen slowly emerging from the water, and the clearly visible watermark on the part that had been submerged.

The engineers had originally planned to complete the operation by Monday evening, but it had to be delayed by three hours because of a storm.

This procedure was carried out very slowly to prevent further damage to the hull, which spent months partially submerged in 15m (50ft) of water and fully exposed to the elements.

Officials now plan to fully inspect the vessel and begin to prepare the next stage - the effort to repair and refloat it and eventually tow it away to be destroyed.

Engineers have never tried to lift such a huge ship - over 951 feet long (290m) - before.

Huge cost

Five people have been convicted of manslaughter over the disaster, and the captain, Francesco Schettino, is currently on trial accused of manslaughter and abandoning ship.

Giglio mayor Sergio Ortelli earlier said that the removal of the Costa Concordia would bring an end to "a huge problem that we have in our port and that we want to solve as soon as we can".

"Islanders can't wait to see the back of it," he said.

On Sunday, prayers for the operation were said during Sunday Mass on the island.

The small island's economy depends hugely on tourism and the presence of the wreck has discouraged visitors.

The salvage project has so far cost more than 600m euros ($800m; £500m) and is expected to cost much more before the operation is complete.

Concordia's dead and missing

• Dead: 12 Germans; six Italians (including Dayana Arlotti, 5, and father William Arlotti); six French people; two Peruvians; two Americans (Barbara and Gerald Heil, passengers); one Hungarian (Sandor Feher, crew); one Spaniard (Guillermo Gual, passenger)
  
• Missing: one Italian (Maria Grazia Trecarichi, passenger); one Indian (Russel Rebello, crew)
  

[MIKA27]

Washington Navy Yard shooting: Gunman brings terror to US base

Thirteen people have been shot dead and several others injured in Washington DC after at least one gunman went on the rampage at a US Naval installation less than three miles from the White House.

The shootings at the US Navy Yard, a sprawling 65-acre facility on the banks of the Anacostia river, began at 8.20am local time, causing chaos in the US capital as thousands of police and military personnel were sent to the site, a major command centre for the US Navy.

A police and FBI investigation is under way as it was confirmed that at least one gunman was among the 13 dead. However, five hours after the incident began, police were still tracking reports of another “potential” gunman at the site, which has hundreds of rooms and several miles of corridors.

Although the motive remained unclear and terrorism had not been ruled out, officials said the dead gunman had been preliminarily identified as a US Navy employee whose work status had been changed earlier this year, the Associated Press reported. Several reports named the employee as 34-year-old Aaron Alexis, from Fort Worth, Texas, who had recently worked as a civilian contractor at the base.

Barack Obama, the US President, speaking earlier at the White House, described the shooting as “cowardly” but did not indicate any information to suggest the attack was a terrorist incident.

“We are confronting yet another mass shooting. And today it happened on a military installation in our nation’s capital. It’s a shooting that targeted our military and civilian personnel,” he said, promising to do “everything in our power” to hold those responsible to account.

At the height of the attack, workers in Washington were advised to stay indoors and the US Senate, which is less than two miles from the Navy Yard, announced it would be locked down “out of an abundance of caution” for the safety of staff and legislators.

The Special Response Team that helped track Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the marathon bomb suspect, in Boston in April, was among the 20 special agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives dispatched to the scene.

The Special Response Team, which is based in Washington, consists of officers who are trained for “high-risk operations” including manhunts, hostage rescue and “dynamic entry techniques”.

The shooting came nine months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which 20 children and six members of staff were killed, and four years after the Fort Hood shooting in which 13 US Army personnel were killed by a military psychiatrist.

Reagan National Airport, one of Washington’s two airports, had a temporary no-fly order imposed during the incident.

The building targeted was the military’s headquarters for Naval Sea Systems Command, which buys, builds and maintains ships, submarines and combat systems. Approximately 3,000 people work at the headquarters, many of them civilians.

At least one police officer who confronted the gunman was confirmed dead, with another listed as being in a “critical condition” among those who were removed by helicopter from the rooftops.

Cathy Lanier, the police chief for the District of Columbia, said the response of police officers had been “nothing short of heroic”.

“With at least 12 confirmed dead at this point, I think the actions by the police officers without question helped to reduce the number of lives lost.

“So our hearts go out to the families, certainly of all the victims here, but our gratitude to the front-line officers who ran into danger this morning,” she said.

Witnesses told The Telegraph that they had fled to safety as bullets struck the ceiling and the walls around them.

“There was a tall black guy who stepped around the corner maybe 20 yards from us with a gun in his hand. He pointed the gun our way and started shooting,” said Todd Brundidge, an executive assistant at Navy Sea Systems Command.

“I feel really lucky because if it had been two or three seconds later he could have been right up on us. I’m just lucky to be here.”

Another witness, Rick Mason, told the Associated Press news agency that he saw a gunman shooting from a fourth-floor balcony in the hallway outside his office, aiming at people in the building’s cafeteria.

Patricia Ward, who was in the cafeteria said: “It was three gunshots straight in a row — pop, pop, pop. Three seconds later, it was pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, so it was like about a total of seven gunshots, and we just started running.”

[MIKA27]

ECOCAMP PATAGONIA | CHILE

Enjoy the Patagonian wilderness in a cozy, igloo-style dome. EcoCamp is tucked away in the very heart of Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia, Chile. Offering fully sustainable accommodation, complete with green technology, you can stay at one of the eco-friendly domes that range from standard to superior to plush suites. By day you can enjoy guided treks and wildlife excursions through the beautiful Patagonian landscapes, at night you can relax and dine at one of the community domes, before falling asleep gazing at the spectacular starry sky through your dome ceiling.

[MIKA27]

Camerons Stove-top smoker:

Get delicious smoky flavor in your meat and fish without the hassle using the Camerons Stovetop Smoker ($33). Made to work over just about any heat source, it works great on your gas or electric indoor range — so you won't have to do your smoking outdoors once the cold weather sets in. Its seamless stainless steel construction holds in the smoke, while cleaning up easily in the dishwasher. At seven by 11 inches, it's plenty big to hold a large piece of meat, or a filet of fish, but still small enough to fit on your stove. It includes a supply of wood chips, a recipe booklet, and a non-stick rack, so you'll be all set to get started.