Hasta La Gadget!

Nothing to be done.

Taco Bell has responded to charges that its taco filling is something other than beef with a simple message: “Thank You for Suing Us.” That was the headline of a full-page print ad taken out in a number of prominent papers today, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.

In smaller text, the ad, a letter from the company’s president, Greg Creed, promised to “set the record straight.” The ad carries a “Real Beef – Quality Guaranteed” logo. It continues,

The claims made against Taco Bell and our seasoned beef are absolutely false. Our beef is 100 percent USDA inspected, just like the quality beef you buy in a supermarket and prepare in your home.

Creed goes a step further, breaking down the contents of the meat, which is made up of 88 percent beef and 12 percent other stuff,

We start with USDA-inspected quality beef (88 percent). Then add water to keep it juicy and moist (three percent). Mix in Mexican spices and flavors, including salt, chili pepper, onion powder, tomato powder, sugar, garlic powder, and cocoa powder (four percent). Combine a little oats, caramelized sugar, yeast, citric acid, and other ingredients that contribute to the flavor.

After that quick recipe, the letter takes a slightly harsher turn, with Creed promising to “take legal action against those who have made false claims against our seasoned beef.” If there’s a real takeaway here, it’s to never mess with a man’s seasoned beef.

A Staten Island Facebook user is suing the social network after it cut off his account with apparently no warning. Thirty-nine-year-old Mustafa Fteja lost contact with his roughly 340 Facebook friends, losing a valuable connection to the world, his suit claims. And now the site won’t respond.

“You call, they don’t answer the phone,” said Fteja. “You write, they don’t reply.” The man also noted that he was Muslim in the $500,000 lawsuit, stating that religious discrimination may have played a role in the company’s decision. “I’m not doing this for money,” Fteja told reporters. “I’m doing this for justice. I believe there should be some, somewhere.”

Fteja’s account was cut off on September 24th. When he reached out to the site, he received a form letter stating that he had violated Facebook’s terms of service. “I know one thing,” says Fteja. ” I didn’t do anything. I didn’t violate anything.”

Military scientists have had no shortage of inspiration. Whenever they’ve run out of options in the labs, they’ve done best to take a look at the world around them. The latest key to unlocking a tough to crack secret may, in fact, come from under the sea.

Researchers employed by the US Navy are looking to the humble squid for helping in discovering the key to the holy grail of invisibility. The Navy has plunked down $5 million for scientists at Duke University to study the color shifting properties of the mollusk.

Here’s a bit from one of the team’s studies,

The systems evolved by marine animals in order to hunt, hide and mate over hundreds of million years surpass our contemporary engineering designs for underwater vehicles. The impact will hopefully affect all branches of the armed forces that have aquatic missions. This includes Special Forces, mine hunting vehicles, the submarine community and a newest generation of underwater vehicles that could all benefit from the option of ‘stealth.’

“They make color sort of the way soap bubbles do … but the neat thing about it is they can actively control it,” Duke associate professor Sonke Johnsen told AOL, adding that squid could “probably play a television show on their backs, if their brains were big enough.”

This is Only Won, the the self-proclaimed “world’s first Asian-American hip-hop artist.” I don’t know all that much about the guy, though, judging from his Website, he seems to be doing pretty well, these days. But alas, even the most successful amongst us must go through life with some dreams unfulfilled. You see, Only Won (born Baldwin Chiu), just wants to be an engineer “so freakin’ bad,” as he puts it.