patriots

Smashing columns of enemy tanks with air power is the basic premise of Air Patriots, a free Android game. It's a variation on the familiar tower-defense game, but instead of stationary towers, you're behind the stick of a fighter plane on a ground attack mission. And what is the mission? We've already told you: destroying columns of tanks before they can cross the terrain you're defending, which can cause you to lose heart (and, thus, lose). You start out as a Rookie, but skill and audacity will see you promoted quickly, with better and faster aircraft … Read more

European data stored in the "cloud" could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe's strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

A research paper written by legal experts at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law and titled "Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act" supports previous reports that the antiterror Patriot Act could theoretically be used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union.

The Patriot Act, … Read more

Amazon has kicked off its first mobile game, and one that can be played on both Android and iOS devices.

Taking to the skies today, Air Patriots lets you command a squad of planes by moving your finger around the screen. Drawing paths on the screen manuevers the planes to the right spots to defend your territory and battle the enemy.

You can outfit your fleet with 13 different types of planes. The game offers 28 levels and 7 different maps (the first 3 maps are free). The more victories you score, the more gears you collect, which can unlock … Read more

Twitter reports that football fans sent roughly 10,000 tweets in the final 3 minutes of last night's game, but that wasn't enough to overthrow the all-time record for tweets per second.

Guess which film roped in 25,088 tweets per second last December? Hint: it wasn't made in America.… Read more

Super Bowl Sunday offers no respite from partisan bickering in this presidential election year.

A Silicon Valley startup found a strong overlap between how people feel about who will win today's big game and who they'd like to see win the presidential election in the fall.

Mountain View-based Saygent conducted a survey asking 205 people for their Super Bowl predictions and then did a bit of data crunching using its voice response and analysis platform. Saygent's algorithm looked at the way people talked about the teams and the game ("by analyzing the way people talk about the game we can infer who is actually knowledgeable and who is taking a stab in the dark," the company says).

Saygent then filtered out "people with very low trust or a strong bias" to come up with a prediction from its "trusted crowd" of 90. The result? the New England Patriots by three points.

That's almost identical to the official line, which had the Pats by 2.5 points at last check, and is--frankly--not that interesting.

But Saygent, in what it admits is not an exact science, also asked people in the same survey who they planned to vote for for president. When it took a look at those political preferences, it revealed quite a rift:… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The Super Bowl takes place in just over 72 hours, and Brian Grey and his lieutenants are trying to plan what is by far their most important day of the year.

Grey is the CEO of Bleacher Report, one of the largest sports Web sites in the U.S., and a place nearly 26 million people visited in January for the latest insights into their favorite teams.

Unlike many sports publications, Bleacher Report doesn't concentrate on breaking news with a team of paid writers. Instead, it relies on sports enthusiasts around the country and the world who are … Read more

Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, we're cutting the live stream to free up bandwidth. Our tenderest apologies to the daily live listeners, but be sure to follow @the404 on Twitter for an extremely truncated, livebloggish version of the episode.

If you're now wondering what to do from 12-1 p.m. every day, we recommend rewatching old episodes and pretending they're live. On today's show: sunbathing groundhogs, instant Facebook millionaire David Choe, a CBS pilot show about Groupon, and "Reading Rainbow" host LeVar Burton strikes back.… Read more

The Patriot Memory Pyro solid-state drive (SSD) is the "budget" version of the Patriot Wildfire that was reviewed a few months ago.

While costing some 90 cents per gigabyte less than the Wildfire, the Pyro is still one of the most expensive SATA 6Gbps SSDs on the market, with the 120GB version being priced at around $200 and the 240GB version at around $430.

The drive's data transfer speeds were relatively slow compared with those of other SSDs of the same standard, including the Wildfire.… Read more