Beautiful beaches probably aren’t the first thing that come to mind when thinking of jolly olde England, but seaside resorts have been popular getaways for city-dwellin’ Brits for nearly two centuries. People do still go visit, but the Victorian-era piers that dot the coast have seen some better days.
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The UK government announced last December that it was building a “Cyber Reserve” to protect itself, and now it has a few more details to divulge. Crucially, rather than merely focusing on defending the country from attacks, it’ll also have an “offensive capability” to help it act as a deterrent. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said Britain needs to be able to “strike back in cyber space against enemies who attack us, putting cyber alongside land, sea, air and space as a mainstream military activity.”
Although it’s a fair guess to suspect that other countries are honing offensive cyber skills too, the Financial Times reckons that the UK is the first nation to admit it’s doing so. According to Hammond, the strikes could be used to disable enemy chemical weapons, communications, planes, ships and hardware. As for the forces carrying them out, they could be given a budget of up to £500 million ($800 million). Work on the Joint Cyber Reserve is already underway, with reservist recruitment scheduled to start next month. If the required physical military test intimidates you, there’s nothing to worry about: a less rigorous version will be used to let those of us with desk-bound physiques protect (and fight for) the Queen.
Filed under: Misc
Via: Financial Times
Source: Daily Mail
Spitbank Fort is one of those spots you read about in an Alexander Dumas novel. It’s a gritty, grey, Victorian-era fortress with a dark past and nothing but miles of water on all sides. And it’s the perfect place for a romantic weekend the next time you’re on the coast of England.
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Jaguars look great and it’s nice to know that they can go very fast as well. This new XKR was made to celebrate Jaguar’s ‘R’ division 25th anniversary. The resulting car is track-focused, but street-legal. It will not only blow your socks off, but your face as well.
The Jaguar XKR-S GT‘s maximum speed is limited to 186 mph. It will go from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds. It comes with carbon-ceramic brakes, a six-speed automatic gearbox, with electronically-controlled slip active differential. The engine is a supercharged 542 hp 5.0 liter V8.
Ahhh. Just listen to that sound. Only 30 Jaguar XKR-S GTs will be made available in North America, and you’ll have to fork over $174,000(USD) to get yours. Jaguar has said that if there’s enough demand, production could be ramped up to 50.
[via Autocar]
This is what it would look like if dragons actually existed and we uncovered their bones. This 40 foot dragon skull is amazing and scary. I would hate to run into this thing on the beach. As if by magic, this massive dragon skull appeared on Charmouth Beach in Dorset, England.
It’s part of a promotion for HBO’s Game of Thrones, since Blinkbox now has Season Three of the series available for streaming. This was a great way to announce it as well as scare beachgoers.
It took a team of three people two months to sculpt this thing. How they got it into place is a mystery. Hopefully they leave it there for brave kids to play with it in perpetuity.
[via Geekologie]
You know what Doctor Who needs? More corn! A cornocupia of corn. It’s timey-wimey, corny, worny. Forget the Brigadier. We need the Kernel! Ugh! Terrible. That’s it for my corny jokes.
So what’s the deal with this huge Doctor Who crop formation? It’s to celebrate 50 time-traveling years of Doctor Who. The 300+ meter-long maze was made by York Maze and and you may have noticed, it depicts a giant Dalek, along with the first and latest Doctor.
It looks pretty awesome, but I would hate to get lost in this maze of maize – especially if I bumped into these guys…
At least we know that aliens didn’t create this one.
[via BuzzFeed and Obvious Winner]
How many people do you know in your city? Hello Lamp Post won’t exactly let you meet or talk with anyone specific, but it will allow you to listen to the thoughts, comments, and other random ramblings of others who live in the city.
First things first, what is Hello Lamp Post? It’s a city-wide experiment that involves turning objects throughout the city (like the mailbox shown above, or lamp posts, for example) into interactive objects. These objects have been assigned with a unique reference code. Whenever someone wants to “wake” them up, all they have to do is text “Hello [object] #reference code” to 0117-325-9898.
The object will respond with a question for you to answer. If someone has “woken” them up before, then you’ll receive their answer instead, followed by the option to add your own message so you can join in the conversation.
The concept launches today, July 15th in Bristol, UK. It’s a fun way to get to know your city and its other inhabitants in the most unconventional way possible.
Check out what sort of street objects are having the most conversations here.
[via Dvice]
It’s about time somebody started painting UK phone boxes in TARDIS blue. My only question is, what took so long? This is now happening in the city of Leeds. They are repainting their red phone boxes in a shade of TARDIS blue. The boxes will also be outfitted with Wi-Fi and touchscreens so they can serve as Wi-Fi hubs.
Image: Yorkshire Evening Post
But that’s not all. The phone boxes are also getting recording devices so that visitors and residents can record their thoughts about Leeds for other people to watch. It will be full of stuff like “Great city, but this TARDIS isn’t even bigger on the inside? Bollocks!”
A company called aql is handling it all. Unfortunately, the boxes won’t be all over the U.K. – just in Leeds. They have to rig them to make the TARDIS sounds though. How could you not add that?
[via Engadget via TechRadar via The Mary Sue]
So it’s official: Prince William and Kate are having a baby. To some, it’s great news. To the curious, it’s information worth knowing. To the vast population, it’s merely news that doesn’t have anything to do with them. But among this latter group exists a smaller group who make it their business to talk about it anyway: Twitter parody accounts.
If you’re active on Twitter, then chances are you’ve seen a couple of these accounts and might even be following some of them.
They’re mostly there for comic relief when you need it. With the lack of mockable news lately, it’s only to be expected that most of them will leech onto news of Kate’s pregnancy:
Laugh a little. If you like what you see, then follow them for more.
[via BuzzFeed]
Sure, you can always play catch with the dog, but what kind of game can you play with a caged rodent? Well, “find the poster,” apparently. A team of researchers from Universities in Spain, Germany, Austria, England and the US have put together a virtual reality system designed to let humans interact with rats at the rodent’s scale, challenging human participants to find and lead the rodent to a unmarked goal. According to a paper published in PLoS One participants were “beamed” into the rat’s environment by linking a head-mounted display and joystick to a rat-sized telepresence robot. Human players were then treated to a proportionally accurate representation of the game arena. The rat was there too, tracked with an overhead camera and represented by a human avatar.
Participants were tasked with coaxing their opponent in front one of three posters in attempt to sleuth out which one represents the “winning” position. When both players are in front of the correct mystery poster, a bell sounds and the game ends. The game was primarily created to test a scaled immersive virtual reality teleoperator system, but researchers are optimistic the technology could be used to observe animal behavior from a new perspective. Check out the setup in action after the break, or read on through to the source link below for a detailed description of how mankind and some of nature’s smaller creatures can get along in a virtual space.
Proportional VR experiment shrinks man down to rat size, lets us play games with rodents originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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