firehose

Earlier this week, NASA announced that two commercial space companies have placed bids on one of the mobile launch platforms at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The platform is one of three structures originally designed and built for Project Apollo back in the 1960s; the hardware was redesigned and refitted for use with the Space Shuttle in the late 1970s and was in use continually until the Shuttle program's end in 2010.

One of the three mobile launch platforms, situated atop a crawler-transporter.

AFP Photo / Matt Stroshane

The two companies bidding on the launch platforms are Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Both companies would use the platforms as part of their own rocket launch efforts, and both companies have their eyes set on far larger NASA assets: Launch Complex 39A.

Launch Complex 39, with its two pads (LC39A and LC39B), is NASA's largest and most sophisticated space launch facility. Like most of NASA's crown jewels, the site was constructed to support Project Apollo and repurposed into the Shuttle era. Pad 39A is the southern of the two and hosted 12 Saturn V launches and 80 shuttle launches; pad 39B was used for one Saturn V flight, 4 Saturn 1B flights, 53 shuttle launches, and the single Ares flight.

Creative Heroes

A security researcher has developed a technique that could significantly improve the secrecy of text messages sent in near real time on iPhones. The technique, which will debut in September in an iOS app called TextSecure, will also be folded into a currently available Android app by the same name.

The cryptographic property known as perfect forward secrecy has always been considered important by privacy advocates, but it has taken on new urgency following the recent revelations of widespread surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency. Rather than use the same key to encrypt multiple messages—the way, say PGP- and S/MIME-protected e-mail programs do—applications that offer perfect forward secrecy generate ephemeral keys on the fly. In the case of some apps, including the OTR protocol for encrypting instant messages, each individual message within a session is encrypted with a different key.

The use of multiple keys makes eavesdropping much harder. Even if the snoop manages to collect years worth of someone's encrypted messages, he would have to crack hundreds or possibly hundreds of thousands of keys to transform the data into the "plaintext" that a human could make sense of. What's more, even if the attacker obtains or otherwise compromises the computer that his target used to send the encrypted messages, it won't be of much help if the target has deleted the messages. Since the keys used in perfect forward secrecy are ephemeral, they aren't stored on the device.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Bunnyfood)

Daedalic Entertainment's role-playing game Blackguards is more than 40 hours long because the developer feels that's what its audience wants, according to PR director Claas Wolter.

Blackguards, set to launch this fall, will be Daedalic's first foray into role-playing games. The game incorporates the genre's more classic elements — having a gang of unique characters armed to the teeth with weapons and spells — with turn-based strategy elements. During combat, players move on a grid, clicking on the space they want to move to, then choose an attack to take down the enemy in front of them. Conversations occur in dialogue boxes that show the characters' face along with a chunk of text.

"There are still many old-school gamers, like us"

The title will launch with 190 battle maps — or combat scenarios — along with a lengthy main campaign and a slew of side missions, all totaling more than 40 hours of gameplay. Wolter said there is a still a market for old-school, long RPGs and Daedalic's community of fans, drawn to the company and its long-standing tradition of making adventure games, are used to the lengthy content.

"There are still many old-school gamers, like us, who are really into these games that have a lot of content," said Wolter. "Blackguards is very story-focused, and you never know what is really up — there's a lot to dig into."

"We wanted the best way to tell the story, and while adventure games are our passion, we're not limited to that"In Blackguards, players step into the shoes of a young man who witnesses a princess' death at the hands of a wolf, then is blamed and jailed for it. He escapes prison with the help of a snarky dwarf, and along his journey — the details of which Daedalic is not sharing just yet — he assembles a ragtag band of criminals to assist him along the way. Wolter said the game includes multiple plot twists, which trigger a handful of alternate endings depending on the route players take.

"You complete quests and new things open up," he said of the game's progression. "There's lots to unravel, lots of raw information to take in."

Wolter added that making an RPG is an extension of making an adventure game: both need a strong plot and characters in order to work. Blackguards is technically still a point-and-click game — like the company's Deponia action-adventure games — but it required a different application of the development team's skill set.

"A role-playing game is the logical evolution [from] an adventure game," Wolter said. "We wanted the best way to tell the story, and while adventure games are our passion, we're not limited to that. The team's experience applied well to making an RPG."

Tweet exchange (used with permission of the initial poster)

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Q: How much better is the original Teen Titans series than the New Teen Titans? — @boxofmilipedes

A: You know, Millie, it’s funny. New Teen Titans is a book that hits every single checkmark of something I should like. I love teenage superheroes, I’m a sucker for weird team-ups involving goofy combinations like half-demons, half-robots and full-on alien princesses, and Robin and Wally West are two of my all-time favorite characters. Throw those things together in a book by the dude who wrote Tomb of Dracula and the artist who would go on to draw my favorite run of Avengers? That oughtta be a slam dunk, but every single time I read it, it feels like homework.

Folks, it’s been thirty years. Maybe it’s time we all come together and just admit that New Teen Titans was not that great.

Okay, before anybody starts passing out pitchforks and torches, I should probably go ahead and say that I realize this is an unpopular opinion and that it’s purely based on personal taste, but it’s true. For me, New Teen Titans just doesn’t hold up, especially when you compare it to the book it was designed to compete against. There’s no getting around the fact that NTT was DC’s attempt to capture some of the success that Marvel was having with X-Men, to the point where they used the exact same formula to create both books. They each took a team created in the sixties that nobody really cared about anymore, kept a few of the original members (Robin and Kid Flash / Cyclops and Jean), added in a few new characters to freshen things up (Raven, Starfire and Cyborg / Nightcrawler, Colossus and Storm), and threw in a character who had originally appeared in another series who had an interesting hook and was positioned to become a breakout star (Beast Boy / Wolverine).

They’re even structured in similar ways, with the high action of superheroics balanced out by a focus on the relationships between the characters. There’s romance, unrequited love, the feeling of not belonging in the world, angst by the bucketful, and all the other stuff that’s scientifically designed to make a comic that’ll appeal to teenagers. Even the covers are alike — compare NTT #1 to Giant Size X-Men. The only real difference is that they swapped out the logo.

And to their credit, it worked. New Teen Titans was a massive hit for DC, to the point where they ended up handing Marv Wolfman and George Perez the job of destroying and restructuring the entire DC Universe in Crisis — which, incidentally, is also a ridiculous mess, but that’s a subject for another time. It’s the book that hooked a ton of readers, fleshed out characters like Donna Troy and Beast Boy that had been around for decades but had never really had much depth, added interesting new elements and characters to the DC Universe, and gave long-time stalwarts like Wally West and Dick Grayson an entirely new chance to shine. Historically speaking, it’s an incredibly important book for DC, and considering the amount of impact it led to, for superhero comics in general.

Thing is, it’s nowhere near as good as X-Men was.

Say what you will about what they did later in their careers, but there were years when Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Dave Cockrum were knocking out classic after classic on a monthly basis. Sure, the dialogue is occasionally a little clunky — okay, and by “occasionally” I mean “in every single caption,” but those stories hold up amazingly well. That issue where the Hellfire Club beats the living hell out of the X-Men and Wolverine gets dropped through four floors to the sewer, then comes back at the end ready to literally murder everyone he sees? #132? That comic still feels like a product of the Modern Age, and it’s part of a run that set the standard, influencing almost every title that came after — including New Teen Titans.

This isn’t really a knock on Wolfman and Perez — like I said, I’ve loved the work they’ve done in other books — but if you put NTT next to X-Men, I’ll pick the latter every time. As much success as they had by tweaking a similar formula, Titans has always read like it was imitating X-Men and never quite managing to break out of its shadow. Why listen to the cover band when you’ve got the original right there?

Plus, it introduced the world to this dipstick:

F**k you, Terry Long. With the exception of Lucy Lane, you are the worst thing that has ever happened.

So yeah, New Teen Titans isn’t for me, which is a shame since I actually really like the original Teen Titans series. I’m sure that this doesn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone given my reputation as someone who’s obsessed with comics that came out twenty years before I was born, but there’s a lot of fun in those issues, and there’s a good reason why the Teen Titans cartoon took Wolfman and Perez’s characters and often dropped them into a world that seemed built by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy.

Bob Haney is one of the best comic book writers who ever lived. This isn’t even up for debate, it’s just a stone-cold fact. His run on Brave and the Bold with Jim Aparo is almost always incredible, and Metamorpho, co-created with Ramona Fradon, is probably the sharpest, wittiest and weirdest DC book of the Silver Age. So when he and Cardy teamed up to do a book about a bunch of sidekicks hanging out together and dealing with Teen Problems — or, you know, what passed for Teen Problems in DC comics in the ’60s, like adolescent cavemen and sinister hot rod mechanics — the end result is pretty great.

It might not be quite the high point of Haney’s career, but he brought the same thing to Teen Titans that he brought to a lot of his books: this overpowering sense of fun. He and Cardy were well aware that they were making a book about kids designed to appeal to kids, and again I can’t imagine that it wasn’t at least partially a response to the success that Marvel was having with their teen super-hero, Spider-Man. This was, after all, 1966, when John Romita was drawing Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane go-go dancing at the coffee shop and Stan Lee was trying to capture the hip slang that the kids were using. He was an unexpected success right from the start, and while DC certainly wasn’t ready to break their formula on the main books like Superman, Teen Titans was exactly the sort of book where they could play around with the idea of appealing to the kids in a slightly different way. And if you want hip slang, then cousin, nobody does hip slang like Bob Haney.

Even if he occasionally slipped into what Ryan North called “old-man-itis.”

Oh, those crazy “rock-and-roll” records!

Really, though, that’s where the similarities end. Rather than taking a Marvel style approach and filling the book up with operatic drama, Haney just did… well, a Bob Haney book, full of goofy problems that were vaguely tied into what kids would be interested in. There’s an issue where Aqualad is bonked in the head by a weaponized station wagon that shoots surfboards, for instance, and there’s no way you’re going to convince me that this is not an amazing idea. Eventually, Teen Titans did start edging towards more dramatic stories, but to be honest, that’s where my interest in the book fades. I love Amazing Spider-Man and I’ll defend those first 200 issues as maybe the best run of its length in comics history, but, much like my feelings about New Teen Titans, I don’t really need to read a knockoff.

So is Teen Titans better than New Teen Titans? For me it is, but that probably has a lot to do with reading X-Men as a kid and not getting around to The Judas Contract until I was in my 20s. For you, maybe New Teen Titans took the formula from X-Men and refined it into something better, and maybe Teen Titans is just a second-rate Silver Age book that broke continuity by introducing Wonder Girl and eventually led to Wolfman and Perez having to fix it on three separate occasions. Stuff like this is all down to what you like, so there’s no real way to be right or wrong about it.

Unless you’re me, I mean. I’m right. As usual.

Ask Chris art by Erica Henderson. If you’ve got a question you’d like to see Chris tackle in a future column, just send it to @theisb on Twitter with the hashtag #AskChris.

If your money was on Marvel turning Alpha Flight into the Northern Avengers before DC could introduce a Canadian version of the Justice League, pay up.

DC Comics will announce the launch of Justice League Canada at Toronto’s Fan Expo today, though it’s less of a launch than a renaming. Next spring, writer Jeff Lemire (who grew up in Essex County, Canada, and who lives in Toronto) will take over Justice League of America and transport it to his home country, the Toronto Star reports.

Lemire said he wants to create “a cool, rural Northern Ontario headquarters for Justice League Canada,” though he can’t say what it is just yet. He confirmed it isn’t a hockey rink, though he considered it.

And the writer is quick to say that this series will not be Alpha Flight:

“It’s not really like Alpha Flight, as we’re not creating a bunch of very Canadian characters. Like, those characters are all almost clichéd Canadian archetypes. This is still very much set in the regular Justice League universe and the team will still have some of the bigger-named superheroes, but they will actually be located in Canada now, and there will be a couple of new members who are Canadian.

By Dan Rubenstein on August 23, 2013 at 1:02p

Madden NFL 25 is a celebration and, in a weird way, a culmination of the most long-running annual franchise in gaming history.

Wrap Up:

Madden 25 caters to feature junkies and casual fans alike

Madden NFL 25 is as fun to play and enjoyable as any ultramodern sports game could hope to be while still toeing the advanced feature line. The NFL itself breeds diehards who need every tiny option at their disposal and casual fans happy to enjoy some healthy competition. While Madden NFL 25 does an admirable job of catering to those with little use for, say, the ability make 14 changes before each snap, it stays true to its ethos to give you as much control as you could possibly want. Asses and all.

Madden NFL 25 was reviewed using a retail Xbox 360 copy provided by Electronic Arts. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.

title - Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon

(Sculptured Software - SNES - 1994)