Six incredible real-life supervillain lairs

These are documented, real places. They weren't used for villainy, well, except for the one owned by a drug lord that killed the other people on the island, but it's still pretty cool. The bottom of the first page has a video tour of a Titan silo post-gutting and pre-refurb: talk about HUGE!

http://www.cracked.com/article_17278_6-incredible-real-world-supervillain-lairs.html


And here's a nice pictorial story in Wired about a converted missile base that's now a residence:

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2009/04/gallery_missile_base_1?currentPage=all

Doonesbury Say What

"I don't give a rat's ass if it helps. We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!"
-- Fox anchor Shepard Smith

Gee, if only you had voiced that opinion SEVEN YEARS AGO.

What does it cost to make a Kindle?

About 52% of the price that Amazon charges, with over 40% of that being the display.

I have no problem with Amazon making a decent profit on it, they have R&D costs to recover and to pay for developing the Kindle 3, etc. What I do have a problem with is the amount of money they are paying to Sprint to subsidize the cellular connection that it requires. I would be perfectly happy with a unit that required a WiFi or BlueTooth or USB connection (or memory card, for that matter) to transfer books to it if they would bring the price down to under $200. Unless I become a road warrior, there is no way I'd pay $360 for one of these puppies, regardless of how cool it is.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090421_430707.htm

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/1935202&art_pos=17

Two girls with lightsabers in a bar fight

This is fun!

Watch on YouTube

Did you hear about the Pirate Bay piracy trial in Sweden?

Pirate Bay is a torrent tracking network based in Sweden but it's distributed with servers around the world. They do not host illegal content (movies, MP3s, whatever) nor does stolen content pass through their servers, but they point to people that share it via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Sweden has fairly loose laws regarding piracy, and it was popularly believed that there wasn't much of a chance that they would be found guilty.

Well, they were convicted and face 1-2 years in jail each and some fairly whopping fines.

Guess what? Turns out that the judge is a member of two copyright lobbying organizations. So were the prosecuting lawyers.

Here, that's be an immediate mistrial. There? Dunno. I'm rather surprised that the defense attorneys did not discover this about the judge and force a mistrial and a change.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/1159216&art_pos=2