TSA Uses Decoy Luggage To Bust Airline Laptop Thieves [Crime]

By Sean Fallon on Tsa

This is why you don’t check valuables people. A TSA officer and baggage handler working at JFK airport were recently busted stealing a MacBook Air and a T-Mobile Sidekick out of decoy luggage.

Both suspects were filmed by authorities rummaging through luggage bound for Miami on July 7th. They also switched luggage tags in a futile attempt to hide their crimes. The pair faces up to 4 years in prison if convicted—giving them plenty of time to swap stories with this guy. [Daily News via Gothamist via The Consumerist / Image via Flickr]

Technorati Tags: airlines, TSA, thieves, airport, baggage check

Billy Mays In Cubic Paper Form Still Looks Enthusiastic [Papercraft]

By Dan Nosowitz on rip

DeviantArt user Liz Lukens posted this papercraft cubic Billy Mays template so you can fold him up and bring him everywhere. Highly visible arm hair is thoughtfully included. [DeviantArt]

Technorati Tags: Billy Mays

Virtusphere Combines Virtual Reality With the Hamster Ball, Adds Broken English [The Future]

By Dan Nosowitz on Virtusphere

I think I and quite a few others have had this idea before, but some crazy Russians have actually built a 10-foot, stationary hamster ball for humans that translates movement to on-screen action.

Given the oft-hilarious Russian inventors, their equally staid and awkward American partner and the fact that this is on Vice Magazine’s video site, a part of me thinks this might be a joke, but it actually looks like they’ve gotten the thing to work. It’s essentially one of those giant American Gladiator balls, but placed on a stand equipped with wheels, so whoever’s inside can run in any direction. The users are equipped with goggles and what looks like a plastic laser gun for the first-person shooter demo, and the game picks up movement pretty nicely. We imagine it’d be tougher than they think to change direction on a dime, and of course not that many people have room for a 10-foot metal ball in their family room, but it’s worth a look. Best line: “It really is a locomotion simulator. And just to define locomotion, it doesn’t have anything to do with trains [dude does his best to hold back a vigorous guffaw at this pun] but with the movement of people.” [VBS.tv]

Technorati Tags: virtual reality, computer, fun, hamster ball

Donald Melanson

There’s not much in the way of official statements on this one just yet, but itp.net is reporting that a recently pushed out update for all BlackBerry users on the UAE-based carrier Etisalat is not a “performance enhancement patch” as advertised, but rather some spyware that could potentially give Etisalat the ability to keep an eye on its customers’ messages. The first suspicions about the update apparently arose when users noticed dramatically reduced battery life and slower than usual performance from their phones, which led to a bit of detective work from programmer Nigel Gourlay, who pegged the software down as coming from electronic surveillance company SS8. While it’s not switched on by default, the software can reportedly let Etisalat flip the switch on phones one by one and monitor their emails and text messages — or it could if it hadn’t completely bogged down the network. Apparently, the software wasn’t designed for such a large scale deployment, which resulted in the slowdown and battery drain as some 100,000 BlackBerrys constantly tried and failed to sign in to the one registration server for the software.

[Via The Register]

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Massive stars collapsing 11 billion years ago could shed light on the early universe

By John Matson

BLAST FROM THE PAST: Type IIn supernovae are believed to represent the collapse of massive stars surrounded by dense shrouds. Eta Carinae in the Milky Way is shown for illustration; it is a massive star (or pair of stars) surrounded by a nebula of material it cast off in the past.
Jon Morse/NASA

Type IIn supernovae are believed to represent the collapse of massive stars surrounded by dense shrouds. Eta Carinae in the Milky Way is shown for illustration; it is a massive star (or pair of stars) surrounded by a nebula of material it cast off in the past.

A team of astronomers has found what may prove to be the oldest supernovae identified to date, and they estimate that tens of thousands from the same vintage will be detectable in the coming years.

Jeff Cooke, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cosmology at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues found two supernovae, or stellar explosions, that are believed to result from the collapse of massive stars some 11 billion years ago, predating the previous record holder by roughly a billion years. (The universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old.)

via Archival Telescope Data May Show Most Distant Supernovae Yet: Scientific American.

via Let’s be rational.