Friday, December 18, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 05:31 AM PST

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Yesterday, news broke that insurgents used a $25 application available online to hack into US military drone video feeds, and view, copy, and potentially distribute their contents. Hmmmm... Unauthorized copying of audio and video material? Some on Twitter have suggested that we might just send the MPAA or RIAA after them -- then, for sure we'll at last find Bin Laden. But Wired Danger Room's Noah Shachtman says,

Tapping into drones' video feeds was just the start. The U.S. military's primary system for bringing overhead surveillance down to soldiers and Marines on the ground is also vulnerable to electronic interception, multiple military sources tell Danger Room. That means militants have the ability to see through the eyes of all kinds of combat aircraft -- from traditional fighters and bombers to unmanned spy planes. The problem is in the process of being addressed. But for now, an enormous security breach is even larger than previously thought.
Here's the Danger Room article.

Dark Horse Conan comics collections

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:33 AM PST


After my review last November of John Clute's outstanding collection of Robert E Howard's short fiction, Dark Horse was kind enough to send me all seven collected volumes of their superb Conan graphic novel series.

The series ran from 2004-2008, cycling through an assortment of writers and artists who've taken Howard's work and paid it great justice indeed. Cary Nord, who illustrated the first three books, set a high standard for the art, devoting himself to a Frazetta-esque attention to anatomy, blood, and action. The writers, meanwhile blended Howard's own storylines with original material that serve to connect one adventure to the next (there wasn't much continuity in Howard's original Conan saga, which ran more like a series of discrete adventures, each intended to stand alone).

As I've noted before, I have enormous affection for Conan; these stories are the origin node of the modern network of heroic fantasy, the original strong brew that has been diluted for a million mighty-come-lately adventures. Howard's muscular prose, his romanticization of "uncivilized" life ruled by passion and honor, and his faultless pacing (when in doubt, insert an epic battle with an army of the undead, a pack of thieves, a gang of ice-giants, or, if necessary, a dalliance with a hot-blooded swordswoman that ends with the two fighting back to back against a pack of lions or similar) make each Conan adventure a perfect, blood-pounding escape.

The comics form is especially kind to Conan. The artists are able to do the heavy lifting of setting the scene and depicting the action, whittling away Howard's prose to the unselfconsciously heroic dialog: blood oaths, curses, seductive grunts, defiant yells.

I devoured all seven volumes in three days, reading one at the office and one before bed every night, waking up my wife to show her particularly gore-spattered panels (she's the illustrator in the family and enjoys this stuff as much as I do). It was just wonderful returning to Conan's world, to the heroic lands I'd lived in in my imagination as a boy.























Australian fliers will get their cutlery and knitting needles back

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 04:19 AM PST

Australia's aviation authority has announced a return to sanity, allowing nail files, umbrellas and metal cutlery on its planes, saying that it will focus instead on "real risks."
The changes will see passengers again allowed to carry some sharp implements, such as nail files and clippers, umbrellas, crochet and knitting needles on board aircraft from July next year.

Metal cutlery will return to return to cabin meals and airport restaurants following Government recognition that security arrangements must be targeted at 'real risks'.

The best secondary customs screening I ever had was in Brisbane. We got off the plane and were directed to secondary. I told the customs guard that Alice was pregnant and he practically ran to get her a chair and a glass of water while we waited. Shortly thereafter, two customs agents came over and asked us a few simple questions ("where are you staying, why are you here?") in a friendly tone and then told us we were done. I thought they were just passing the time of day before the screening -- they were so incredibly nice, the way Canadians are meant to be (except when you cross a border, where they turn into total bastards in the name of ensuring that you don't cheat the government out of its national sales tax).

Carry-on restrictions to be relaxed (via Schneier)

(Image: TSA Screener with Checkpoint Friendly Laptop Case, a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike image from Mobile Edge Laptop Cases' photostream)



Spite Houses, built to piss off the neighbors

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:24 PM PST


Ape Lad sez, "I somehow ended up reading about spite houses (homes built specifically to piss off a neighbor) this evening, which I had never heard of before. Flickr has several when you search the tags, including the sad story behind this house in Connecticut."

Spite house (Thanks, Ape Lad)

(Image: File:AlamedaSpiteHouse.jpg, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, Wikimedia Commons)



Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:50 PM PST

Male bedbugs will schtup anything, and when they do, their stabby little penises can do great damage to one another. Female bedbugs have some "down there" armor that absorbs the punishing blows of the bedbug's love-spear, but males lack this protection. A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging:
According to lead researcher Camilla Ryne, bedbugs are notoriously undiscerning about who they mount, and are accustomed to stab their penis straight into another male's abdomen...

Males with blocked glands were mounted as often as other males, but for longer and suffered more wounds.

"This is the first time I've seen an alarm pheromone used as a sexual one," New Scientist quoted Ryne as saying.

New discovery may help deal with bedbug infestation (Thanks, Steve)

(Image: 98221_hires.jpg, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from liz.novack's photostream)



Installing Windows considered as a literary genre

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:43 PM PST

During a discussion of Charlie Stross's epic tale of Windows installation, a Making Light reader called Ajay worked up this killer formal structure of "the well-established genre, the tale of godawful Windows-installation woes":
I. Exordium. The narrator introduces himself, establishes his experience in computing (ethos) and exhorts the listeners to gather round.

II. Prolegomenon. Customarily, the hardware spec of the machine is outlined here.

III. Praeinstallatio. The narrator describes his initial attempt to install Windows.

IV. Contrainstallatio. The installation goes wrong.

V. Descendo. The narrator describes his increasingly desperate attempts to get things to go right.

VI. Depilatio. The narrator is reduced to despair and frustration.

VII. Inertio. The narrator sinks into a horrified stupor as his machine gurgles and clunks to itself for anything up to three days.

VIII. Peroratio. The narrator rises into fury as he describes how long and painful an experience the install was;

which may be followed by

IX. Aptenodytes forsteri, the narrator switches to Linux.

Chkdsk red in tooth and claw

(Image: Frustration!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from basykes' photostream)



Montage of magic "photo enhancement" in cop shows and movies

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 10:02 PM PST

Darren sez, "A terrific montage of those 'can you clean that up a little' moments in film and TV. You know the trope: when back at the lab, some nerdy technician spouts technical gobbledygook and uses some fancy version of Photoshop to improbably improve the quality of some grainy security footage."

My favorite one of these -- I think it was in Enemy of the State? -- was two supercops looking at a satellite image of a terrorist standing on the roof of a building, and one says to the other, "can you rotate the picture so we can see his face?" I was waiting for the other guy to say something like, "sure, I'll just rewrite the fundamental laws of the universe so that cameras from overhead satellites can see around corners," but no, he did it. As the lady said of Meg Ryan, "I'll have what he's having."

Let's Enhance



Association for Computing Machinery tries to undermine open access

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:32 PM PST

Naty sez, "As a longtime member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), I've often had cause to be annoyed by their approach to copyright (the ACM exists to support the computing community, not to make money, and they seem to have forgotten that). I've just written a blog post about their latest bit of asshattery - they are trying to convince the US government not to expand the successful NIH open access requirement to other government funding bodies, all in the name of protecting the revenue from their digital library."
The ACM has no legitimate needs or interests other than those of its members! How would U.S. voters react to a Senator claiming that a given piece of legislation (say, one reducing restrictions on campaign financing) "strikes a fundamental balance between the needs of the Senate and those of the United States of America"? ACM has lost its way, profoundly and tragically.

As much as Mr. Rous would like to think otherwise, ACM's publishing program is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. ACM arguing that an open repository of papers would be harmful because it "undermines the unique value" of ACM's closed repository is like the Salvation Army arguing that a food stamp program is harmful because it "undermines the unique value" of their soup kitchens.

One data-point: I wrote a short story for Communications of the ACM that they were supposed to put on their website for free more than a year ago, and they still haven't figured out how to do this; they say that their website back-end makes it impossible to flag articles as open access.

US Gov Requests Feedback on Open Access - ACM Gets it Wrong (Again)



Remixed Danish tourist poster reflects the brutal new Copenhagen police-state

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:26 PM PST


Carsten sez, "My friend, artist Camilla Brodersen created a wonderful, freely-redistributable rehash of an old Danish tourist poster, highlighting the new situation after the new police powers, as demonstrated in the heavy-handed clampdown on protesters at the recent climate change summit in Copenhagen. My friend Amila juxtaposed the mashup with the original poster on her English-language blog, creating a chilling and all too realistic contrast."

Copenhagen before and after (Thanks, Carsten)



How would you win this game show?

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:20 PM PST

Here's a nice little game-theory exercise:
You are in a game show with nineteen other players. You don't know the other players, you can't see them, and you can't communicate with them. The game you are in is called 'Greed!', and is straightforward to explain. You are asked to write down a whole dollar amount in the range $1 - $1,000,000 on a piece of paper. You will be paid the amount you asked for if it is deemed to be 'non-greedy'. Whether your request is indeed 'non-greedy' will be decided once all twenty request have been received by the host of the show. Your requested amount will be labeled 'non-greedy' if no other player has asked for less, and at least one player has asked for more.

How do you play?

Game Theory - The Art Of Acting Rational (Thanks, Dad!)

(Image: Money!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from yomanimus' photostream)



The Simpsons turns 20 today

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 08:44 PM PST

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Twenty years ago today, the first full-length episode of The Simpsons -- known as The "Christmas Special" -- aired on television. This episode was originally intended to be show number 8, but ended up being first after a series of production glitches and switches. You can find streamable copies around the internets.

I've been traveling in rural, indigenous communities in Central America this week. I was reminded of the awesome happy-power and transcultural reach of the Simpsons in a conversation last night with an 8-year-old K'iche Maya kid. He lives in a highland village. His family is too poor to own a TV, but we got to talking, and he volunteered out of the blue his love for the show. He knows exactly who his favorite character is, too: "Omero" (Homer). He's a shy, quiet, serious boy, but lights right up when he's talking about the Simpsons. Pretty cool to think that a show could delight so many around the world, for so many years.

A special holiday shout-out to David Silverman, a personal friend who also happens to have been the director of that very first episode (and, of course, many others, and that movie). David, I hope you're having a more relaxed December than you did in 1989.



Update on the Frazetta heist: Notary says artist gave son permission to take paintings

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 06:27 PM PST


Here's an update on the arrest of Frank Frazetta's son, who was charged with swiping at least $20 million of his father's paintings last week. The story has a few twists and turns, as you might imagine in a case in which an adult child has been accused of ripping off his own parent.

The details are fuzzy, but it sounds like Frazetta's adult children are fighting over the art created by their father, who is 81 years old and has dementia. Three of his children apparently want to sell the paintings (one painting recently went for $1 million, and it wasn't even one of Frazetta's most famous works) while Frank Jr. apparently doesn't want to sell them off, and that's why he broke into the family museum to take the paintings.

Heidi MacDonald of The Beat adds this important bit:

The REAL bombshell, however, comes from a notary who says that Frank Frazetta Sr. came to her nine days before the aborted heist and asked her to notarize a power of attorney removing control of the art from Bill, Heidi and Holly and giving it to Frank Jr! "He was in the right frame of mind," said the notary.
Frazetta Heist update: Notary drops bombshell



See-through "never clog" sink drain

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:56 PM PST

Never-Clog-Drain

The $20 PermaFLOW Never-Clog Drain seems like a good idea!

With its innovative, self-cleaning design and integrated wiper that removes blockage, PermaFLOW eliminates the need for chemical drain cleaners, plungers, and expensive pipe repairs. This smart alternative to traditional P-traps installs in a snap and even allows for easy retrieval of accidentally lost jewelry and other items.
Amazon has videos of it in action.

Chicago MD better at hide-and-seek than Evan Ratliff

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:41 PM PST

In 2004, doctor Mark Weinberger vanished from a private yacht in the Aegean. In debt to the tune of $5.7 million, and facing a class-action suit from patients who believed he performed unnecessary surgery on them, he was featured on America's Most Wanted more than once. This week, he was caught, 6,000 feet up an Italian mountain, living in a tent. (Thanks, Steve Silberman!)



Vintage Frazetta anti-smoking ad

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:41 PM PST

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Many thanks to copyranter for reminding me about the world's greatest anti-smoking ad, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, and co-starring the world's only selectively-blind teenage surfers. (Click image for a closer look.)



LED traffic lights don't melt snow

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:22 PM PST

Cities that installed LED traffic lights to save money are learning that the incandescent lights they got rid of had a useful purpose: their waste heat melted the snow that covered them in winter storms.

200912171217Municipalities around the country are taking different steps to keep their signals shining brightly in the face of Mother Nature. Crews in St. Paul, Minnesota, use compressed air to keep their lights clean. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, city workers brush the snow off by hand in a labor-intensive process.

Unintended Consequence of Technology: New LED traffic lights can't melt snow

Blondie - We Three Kings Music Video (2009)

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:46 AM PST


The band has a new album coming out in 2010, too.

Electric Sheep artificial life screensaver goes super hi-rez

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:27 AM PST

Scott Draves sez, "The Electric Sheep makes art collaboratively with 60,000 computers and people all over the internet. It's based on a free screensaver that anyone can download and run. As it runs you may vote on designs you like, and the favorites survive to reproduce with a family resemblance, hence the flock evolves to please its human audience. It also supports Intelligent Design: you can use a genetic editor to create your own sheep and upload them into the gene-pool. All the sheep are CC licensed and may be remixed or remade into your own work.

I use the free screensaver as a design laboratory and supercomputer to realize higher quality works such as all-over print t-shirts, limited edition c-prints, and high-resolution videos (like the one recently commissioned for the new Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the sample from our Blu Ray). Our objective is to make this artificial life-form self-sustaining, so the revenue generated by these pieces funds the operation of and improvements to the open source screensaver.

For example, In the past 6 months the Electric Sheep have been totally remade. We have a new server (including support from archive.org) and the client has been rewritten. The whole setup is 10x better than it used to be: the visual/genetic language is more expressive, the sheep have double the resolution and a better codec (x264), display is totally smooth, and download works for everyone.

More information can be found on the Wikipedia and in my bio. High Fidelity Demo Excerpt (2009) (Thanks, Scott!)



"A higher bandwidth than any internet connection that ever existed"

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST

How much data--in terms of genetic information--does a human sperm carry and what is the rate of transfer? Can you properly compare a penis to an ethernet connection? The good citizens of Reddit attempt to convert "bits" to bits. Hilarity ensues. (Thanks, Marc Abrahams!)



Gibberish rock song written by Italian composer to sound like English

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:30 PM PST

In this remarkable and fully rockin' video, an Italian singer performs a rock piece whose lyrics are gibberish intended to sound like English. Entitled "What English Sounds Like to Foreigners," the video is meant to illustrate which English phonemes and syllables carry into the foreign ear, but I tell you what, it sounded like English to me, too, though like English as sung in such a way as to make it hard to decipher.

What English Sounds Like to Foreigners (via Making Light)

Update Thanks to commenter LukeWhite for this intelligence: "It's actually titled Prisencolinensinainciusol, written by Adriano Celentano wrote it in 1972."

All you need to know about the Motorola Droid

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:08 PM PST

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I liked it, but I wouldn't buy it.

Product Page

Proof that goats cannot be trusted

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:09 AM PST

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Professor Eustace P. Toffeynuts III, Ph.D., D.D.T., L.S.D., has produced a very important treatise on the freaky nature of goat eyes, their relationship to the freaky nature of octopus eyes and why both animals are clearly in league with Satan.

Goat Eye Syndrome is characterized by eyes afflicted with horrific horizontal pupils similar to those of cephalopods such as octopi, squid, or cuttlefish. The pupils of these beasts are approximately the shape of a kidney bean, but instead of dividing the eye vertically, in the manner of noble, trustworthy beasts such as tigers, bobcats, and snakes, the GES pupils transfix the eye horizontally. This is disgusting. The only other type of animal to display such disgusting, vomit-inducing eyes are the previously mentioned cephalopods (which have a long association with death from the murky depths and Cthulhu) and Kermit the Frog, who is a felt puppet created by Jim Henson, and should not be considered an example of an accurate representation of frog physiology.

Ignore this research at your own peril.

Professor Eustace P. Toffeynuts III, Ph.D., D.D.T., L.S.D.: Goat Eyes: Satanic ploy, or merely horrific crime against nature? A serial treatise on the unnatural pupils of those beasts of the genus capra (2006)

(Thanks, Ed Yong!)

Image courtesy Flickr user BitBoy, via CC



What a luxury ski resort is doing to solve climate change

Posted: 16 Dec 2009 03:49 PM PST

3878659561_5c01d7d51b_b.jpg I'm sitting in the lobby of the Little Nell with Auden Schendler. This is a fancy pants, 92-room spa and resort in Aspen that routinely hosts world leaders and celebrities in rooms that cost upwards of $760 a night. The Nell is a major energy spender — in 2008, it used 25,556 MMBTU of natural gas and 3,269,967kWh of electricity, generating 4,245 tons of CO2 emissions (the average house generates about 17,000 lbs). Aspen is an entire town full of buildings like the Nell; in addition to the hotels and shops, the luxury ski town hosts four mountains full of energy-sucking ski lifts, snowmaking machines, snowcats, and heated buses on constant rotation that take people from one part of town to another. Add to that the transportation costs to and from the resort of the 1.36 million skiers and 34,000 employees that come here every ski season, and you've got what seems like a major environment killer.

But if you ask Schendler, he'll tell you that the Little Nell is a prime hub for fighting climate change.

Schendler — a tall, mountain-man type wearing big boots and a puffy jacket — is the Sustainability Director of the Aspen Skiing Company. What this means is that he has the seemingly absurd task of transforming the entire energy-sucking, luxury-soaked resort into a tool to fight climate change. Earlier this year, Schendler authored a book called Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution — a fun-to-read motivator that very clearly outlines how big, influential corporations can leverage their power to lead the fight against climate change. Schendler used to be a regular grassroots "enviro guy"; but now that he's a bigwig exec at a big corporation, he's even more hell bent on solving the climate problem. We chatted for about an hour at the Nell's restaurant last week, and here's what he said:

The question: "How do you even justify what you're doing?" comes up all the time. I'm sorry, you're the sustainability guy at the ski resort? You care about climate change? Why don't you shut down the resort? Aspen flies people in from all over the world. If you look at carbon footprint, that's 27,000 tons of CO2 a year. For your day of skiing, it's about 30-40 lbs of CO2 for one day. Per skiier! Snowmaking uses huge energy. Shut down!

The problem with that logic is, it's very hard to draw the line. Ok, no skiing. No flying? Ok, no flying because it's worse than skiing. No vehicles. Can't ride the bus. Can you stay in a hotel? Not a five star hotel. Can you stay in a motel 6? Pretty lavish compared to say, Bangladesh. It becomes impossible to say what's okay that's not.

It's wasteful, I see it. But The Nell is a five star hotel. The whole concept is wasteful. And unless we say we're gonna change the whole product, we're stuck. Skiing is absurd on its face. But we have to assume that the business itself is acceptable because presumably, no matter how radical we are as environmentalists, the community needs a base of business. There's value to an economy and people having meaningful jobs that pay well. Otherwise to solve climate you'd have to shut the world down and go back to medieval times.

We've done huge energy retrofits in this hotel. Solar panels on the roof, LED lights in all the rooms, the garage... all this cool stuff. If you look at the menu here, it's all local food, farmed locally. We certify the buildings to LEED standards. Every guest who stays at the Nell has $2 deducted from their bill and that goes to open space preservation. Some of the lifts have maps on them — it's cool, it keeps people from littering, and we don't have to print as many. Those are environmental solutions in the old way, but they also reach a captive audience with climate messages.

But if you look at the impact of those emissions reductions in the scope of the world, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I make the decision not to fly. That's not gonna stop the plane. The plane's still flying. Even if the ski industry eliminated all our emissions, we're still out of business by 2050 or 2100 because of the climate.

So what do you do? You gotta fix the whole system. You have to fix the economy and the energy economy so that the carbon footprint is much less. We have to fix the problem of transportation. The best thing to do would be to have a carbon tax. You can't just say, okay no pool. What you can do is create the conditions where it doesn't make sense to have that pool or to fly. A carbon tax taxes energy, so all the energy used is more expensive. you just have to decide whether to pay more or not. Right now it costs $2000 a year to heat that pool. Maybe if it cost $20,000, things would start to change.

I always get in the same arguments with the hard core enviro community. They want me to do rinky dink stuff like bamboo foors and recycling, and I tell them it doesn't matter, that their personal actions don't matter because the problem's too big. That pisses people off — they get mad at me and say every little bit helps. But every little bit doesn't help because the problem's too big. If everyone who was so inclined did every little thing from the Prius to the bulb, we still wouldn't solve this problem. It's gotta be a global mandate, not a voluntary thing. My day is full of people getting furious at me. Last week I had to send the FBI some death threats I was getting about calling the governor of Utah willfully ignorant on climate. This is war. This is a combat situation. and it's gonna hurt people the way wars hurt people. I like to say, we're gonna have to break things and hurt people to make this happen. Just being straightorward and truthful about these things instead of glossing and deluding people is incredibly valuable.

If Aspen can be anything, it can be a shining city on a hill. There's a lot of energy being wasted at the Nell, but it's also a power center. The people at this hotel are the people who can save the world. Jeffrey Sachs said, if the top 5% of the wealthiest people in the world gave 4% of their income every year, you'd end global poverty. Those people are right here! They're in this hotel! I'm exactly where I need to be. In the past two months, our CEO has been to DC twice to lobby on climate change. We have the tax resources and the corporate resources — if we can't demonstrate that this problem is solvable, then no one can do it. We're a lab for addressing climate change; we can try stuff and fail and be public about those failures and successes in a way that has a ripple effect.

What if I said, you know what, I can't justify being here at this five star hotel. I'm gonna go to the peace corps and work on putting photovoltaic installations in Samoa. What have I done? I've essentially made myself powerless. I've changed this from being about climate to being about me personally. The second this becomes about you or me, we reach a point where we're fully incapable of solving a problem. It's naive to just say, our impact is terrible, we're gonna shut down. A ski resort operated appropriately is one of the sustianable conrnerstones of this community. Are we there yet? No, but we'll get there.

Images: Jeremy Swanson (top), Paul Morrison (thumbnail), courtesy of the Aspen Skiing Company



Hacking the Predator drone: Cheaper than dinner and a movie

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 05:59 AM PST

1 Predator drone: $4.5 million

Intercepting video from the Predator drone's unprotected communications link: $25.95

Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren't readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

Fixing the security gap would have caused delays, according to current and former military officials. It would have added to the Predator's price. Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies.

Today, the Air Force is buying hundreds of Reaper drones, a newer model, whose video feeds could be intercepted in much the same way as with the Predators, according to people familiar with the matter. A Reaper costs between $10 million and $12 million each and is faster and better armed than the Predator. General Atomics expects the Air Force to buy as many as 375 Reapers.

Wall Street Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones



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