Here’s a good, yet creepy, mini-movie (2 min) revolving around the Google Maps application. Two young men take a turn down the wrong street view.

I’m hoping one of our military folks that reads Geeknews, specifically Rizzo, can comment on this whole affair.

The Seattle-Times is reporting that Boeing’s opponents and critics are calling their latest design proposal for the military’s new air tanker a clumsily stitched together horror of parts assembled from different models of the 767. Visit the news page to see the bigger pic of the caricature, you can see a Frankenstein bolt sticking out of it’s ‘neck’ right behind the cockpit.

Boeing is competing for the contract against the bids by Northrop-Grumman and Airbus who are combining their efforts. If you haven’t been following this tale there’s been some very interesting twists and scenarios in this hotly contested contract, not the least of which is that Airbus may become Americans since they’d end up moving some of their manufacturing plants to the United States if they win the contract! Imagine that.

The Airbus/Northrop proposal is based on the A330 MRTT, Boeing’s proposal is called the KC-767.

Hey Rizzo - you work on the KC-135 Stratotanker that is to be replaced by the winning design, do you or your team ever talk about the next big thing in air refueling like these bad boys? Do you have any preference or comments?

We all know how the guillotine works. I probably first learned about the device in history class as a child when studying 18th century France when Marie Antoinette and other government officials met their fate with the swift justice of a guillotine blade.

But that’s not what’s interesting. The interesting thing about guillotines are the version of this apparatus used by illusionists to entertain and scare us. We’re led to believe that they are surely going to wind up headless after showing us a watermelon split in half.

If you’ve wondered how they do that trick then wonder no more. Here’s a patent on a modern illusionist’s guillotine with full description of how the contraption works and fools the crowd.

Area 51 is apparently now being called out on charts as Homey Airport. No word on whether the function of the base will continue to focus primarily on reverse engineering flying saucers and housing alien bodies in their vast underground base.

Link to the Air Force Times.

Can you say ‘OOPS’ ?

Messages and other content were irreversibly deleted from in-boxes and archive folders of 14,000 accounts the other day during routine cleanup tasks by the Admins of Charter Communications.

It appears that part of their cleanup work is to simply delete any e-mail from accounts that haven’t been used in 3 months, all this with no warning. They immediately realized they made a mistake of not archiving it off first but it was too late, the information was irretrievably lost.

In place of the lost data, Charter is applying a $50 credit to accounts suffering from their gaffe.

Well, $50 is a lot of money but let’s hope that a job offer wasn’t in that in-box or perhaps some other vital document or family photos.

The lesson learned here is to periodically log into the account, or generate some other activity. I do this for a variety of Yahoo and Hotmail accounts that I rarely used, when I forget I’ll realize my mistake when I learn that the account needs to be reactivated.

In fact, one highly desirable Hotmail account I have today was obtained by trying to create a new account every week and when asked for the name I wanted to use I entered this same name, every time, hoping. Of course since the account was in-use, the registration wizard would prompt me to use a variant and I’d quit until the next week. That is until after about 6 months later after many dozens of tries, one day it worked!

Apparently the previous owner of the account lapsed in their requirements to periodically use the thing, so Hotmail deactivated it and put it back in the pool of available names. Hooray for obsessive compulsive disorder!