Matt's Favorites: 2018 Trip To Mars, Ford C-Max Energi review, NBC Gets Infected, And On Star Trek, The Gold Shirts Are Deadly Too
And what's the latest from the wide wild world of high technology? Here you go, campers...
* Maybe they're nuts, hopefully they're serious, but a gazillionaire who was the first person to pay for a ticket to the International Space Station plans a manned mission to Mars in 2018. Here's the CBS News story, and here's the Scientific American version.
* And just in case they need the info for their trip, here's how to make a peanut butter sandwich in space.
* And NASA, meanwhile, launches a new space tech and exploration division.
* And in this amazing video, you can watch superheated plasma fall on the sun like rain.
* Here's a CNet review of the 2013 Ford C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid. (Full disclosure dept.: I just leased a 2013 Ford C-Max Hybrid and loooooove it.)
* Facebook blocks NBC's Web site after it reportedly became infected with malware.
* And attention, Trekkies -- it turns out the gold shirts are statistically more hazardous to your health than the red shirts.
* And just in case you're worried about it here's the latest from Al-Qaida on avoiding being the victim of a drone strike. No, seriously -- their manual for doing just that was discovered in Mali.
* Google is adding a new touch to its line of Chrome laptops in an attempt to outshine personal computers running on software made by rivals Microsoft and Apple.
* This Apple patent application certainly hints at an iWatch.
* Taiwanese animators Next Media Animation is taking the Sony PlayStation 4 event to task.
* The company that measures television viewership said Thursday it will soon begin counting people who watch programming through broadband in addition to the traditional broadcast or cable hook-up.
* Apple Inc's manufacturing partner Foxconn Technology Group has frozen hiring at a Shenzhen, China plant that makes gadgets including the iPhone 5 and put the brakes on recruiting for other factories across China, but said the move was not linked to any single client.
* Microsoft Azure's cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests conducted by Nasuni, a storage vendor that annually benchmarks cloud service providers.
* If you have one of those cell phone reception boosters in your house, the FCC says you have to turn it off and register it. Yikes.
* A social media aggregator, Memolane, is shutting down.
