Found on Reddit.

x-posted to useless_facts.





At over three times the size of the Knock Nevis supertanker, the proposed world's biggest ship wasn't to be a ship as such, but rather a floating city of over 100,000 residents with its own offices, economy, hospitals, subways, traffic, malls, docks and a full airport on top designed to support take offs and landings of the largest commercial aircraft.

Construction on what easily would have been the biggest ship in the world was slated to begin around 2001, but nothing ever happened. The official website hasn't been updated since 2005.

Sauces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_ship
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/1289186.html?page=1
http://science.howstuffworks.com/floating-city1.htm

A partial history of computer storage depicted in pictures. Pictured: an hard drive made by IBM being unloaded off a plane in 1956. Capacity? 5 MB.


The world's most absolutely extreme cameras and photography equipment. Pictured: The Sigma APO 200-500 F/2.8. (That tiny little thing on the smaller end of it is a normal camera.)


Samsung unveils a 22 inch monitor that has another little 7 inch monitor perched on top of it, for no god-damn reason anyone can possibly come up with. It costs twice as much as a normal 22 inch monitor.


15 of the world's fatteest cats.


NYT: With rampant fears of the imminent recession and a new great depression, survivalism has made a comeback in a big way.

Shark causes traffic jam.

You'd think nobody would be stupid enough to hire a hitman and then not pay the entire bill, but you'd be wrong.

Sources: Knuttz.net and Neatorama, Fark.

"Motorola's current CEO, Greg Brown, is so technologically out of touch he refuses to use a computer for communications, and has all his email correspondences printed by his secretary and replied to by dictation."

Engadget: Motorola insider speaks out about the fall of a technology icon.

A few excerpts:

Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America's greatest technology companies, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey; I've always considered it Motorola's dirty little secret that the strategy for their entire profit machine was run by the company's CMO -- not the rest of the company's executives, who are as inept now as they have ever been.

Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands. [That was certainly the buzz around the industry at the time. -Ed.] I took his untimely death in 2005 very hard, and knew that the company would head downhill in the aftermath. On a personal note, Lynne, his wife blamed the company for his passing. She committed suicide soon after.

Meanwhile, Ed Zander continued to reap the dividends of Geoffrey's work as the company made billions in profit from overselling the RAZR for years. Instead of channeling that money into the obvious -- further development of groundbreaking consumer devices -- Zander purchased enterprise companies such as Symbol ($3.9b), and engineered billions of dollars in stock buybacks....

That's just a taste. This letter is a must-read for reasons I can't begin to count.

In testament to old world craftsmanship, Japan Steel Works is both a samurai sword maker and the only company in the world that's good enough with steel to produce the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in one piece, an engineering necessity in order to reduce the risk of radioactive leaks. The company spends so much time and resources on each containment vessel that they can only produce four per year, flaunting a price tag starting with a $100 million down payment.

Via Gizmodo.