Two MQ-9 Reapers retrofitted with the new $15 million wide-area aerial surveillance sensors, or WAAS, will fly test missions later this year, and the Air Force plans to have ten such planes in battle by next spring, in rotation on a 24/7 patrol. “It’s an incredible force enhancer,” said Colonel Eric Mathewson, Director of the service’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Task Force at the Pentagon. Sierra Nevada Corporation, makers of the WAAS, chose the name, a spooky reference to the cursed sisters from Greek mythology—Medusa being the Beyoncé of the trio—whose gaze turned men to stone.

Perhaps a better description from this Washington Post Article on the Gorgon drone:

This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.

It turns out Microsoft is doing something similar as was seen at TechCrunch TechFest last year. In this video called Qik Meets Photosynth they are combining different low res video streams into a much larger stream that is color corrected and aspect correct. Pretty darn cool. The video is below:

If we all streamed video from dash cams in our cars, we could have a real time traffic map of major roads combined. Things that make me go hmmmmm….

Recording and creating videos is still a real pain. Especially for newbies on Vista. In one experience last week Windows Movie Maker on Vista did a great job of letting a friend create a video. But you can’t yet post the (new?) wmv file format to youTube. So create? yes. Publish? no. Or maybe we just couldn’t figure it out.

From this post by Jon Udell in response to a question by Beth Kanter he uses the following tools:

1. Camtasia – like Windows Movie Maker but exports in various formats with less hassle. A must have.
2. Windows Media Encoder – free and few people know about it. Hard to use but it lets you screen capture on a local PC for integration into a video.

From our experience doing help videos for Tendenci, you pretty much have to go with Camtasia on a PC.

…lately YouTube has been making me look/feel so much smarter by smashing
really great political content into my ordinarily chuckle-induced
online video world.  This makes me really happy. (more)

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri

So the codes are out there and digg needs to stop deleting content that mention them. What IS funny is that the top story on digg as I write this has a simple link to an image. A pretty picture. The picture at the top left. It only makes sense (to a geek) by also referencing this image which provides the translation.

Take aways? First – don’t fight a mob with censorship when they are busy copying and pasting content. You ain’t gonna win that battle. Second – rethink the whole "security through obscurity" idea. It doesn’t work long term.

For more on this particular story, try this post on Digg fights user revolt over HD-DVD ban. And a definite shout out to dsilverman for the twitter heads up!