Nathan

The XM8 Rifle

The M16 has been the primary rifle in  service of the army for a very long time now. Naturally, the army has begun looking for more high-tech replacements. Although all the competitions hosted by the army have yielded no economical replacements for the M16, some very interesting designs have been created.

Among my favorites is the XM8 Rifle, a modular rifle system that comes in four primary variants: The carbine, the basic version of the rifle that can be modified into the other versions, the sharpshooter  variant, a type with a longer barrel that fires slower but is more accurate, the compact carbine, made with the stock folded in and a very small barrel, and the fully automatic rifle, which uses a carbon-composite 20" barrel, folding stock, and a 100-round drum clip.

The XM8 was originally scheduled for mass production in 2004, but was canceled in 2005 due to it not being very cost-effective, as well as for some flaws that began to show themselves after several years of testing. Nonetheless, it is a very powerful, efficient gun, and has been featured in many video games about warfare in the next century.

(Please click on the image below.)

The Cosmic Bounce-House

Instead of making even more complex and fragile pods for space stations, NASA has been looking into inflatable space units lately. Inflatable units can be made to be simple, large, and open, a stark contrast to the current parts of the International Space Station. NASA even plans to build a permanent base on the moon using a large number of linked inflatable pods.

The main contractor that NASA is currently using is Robert Bigelow, who has been researching possibilities of making a his own space station up in the sky. Mr. Bigelow's main product is called  the inflatable "POOF", a pod completely sealed, yet easy to collapse and inflate, and all the while very economical. As part of Project Constellation, a single, 12-foot diameter POOF will be deployed on the moon, where astronauts will live for increasingly long lengths of time. This will both pave way for a moon base, and, because the moon's temperatures can vary from both hotter than and colder than Mars' temperatures, a manned Mars expedition.

Currently, only the earliest tests have begun, and anything that might happen won't likely come to light until after 2010. The first mission isn't planned until 2020--we may even see the Bigelow Station sent into space before NASA employs the pods.

Read more on NASA's website.

The Big Digg

After working for several months now decoding the hexadecimal code, hackers on Digg have finally finished their massive project. They cracked the copyright protection on HD-DVDs.

All HD-DVDs have a program that prevents you (and your computer) from entering into the code of the DVD, which makes it so that you can't copy them, or meddle with them in any way. This program can be overridden with a hexadecimal code. Hexadecimal numebrs work in a base 1297 system, and are portrayed in writing as a pair of letters and numbers, ranging from (00), to (0z), to (z0), and maxing out at (zz). When you consider that there are 16 seperate hexadecimals in the override code, that means that there are an immense number of possibilities.

Hackers cracked this code, though, and posted the code several times on Digg. The communinty instantly exploded, creating a war between the moderators, who desperately deleted the posts, and other people on Digg, who reposted the code combonation. Once anything like this gets released on to the internet, it's gone. It's not coming back. Nonetheless, a group called the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator sent angry letters out to Digg, other sites carrying the code, and even Google for having the number in search results.

After Digg's lawyers deemed Digg safe from prosecution, though, Digg gave up, let the code freely flow, and even posted it on the official Digg blog. Digg's community had spoken, and there was not much that could be done.

Do you want the code? Look in the title of this post!