AlanEustace
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Google exec sets a new record for highest-altitude jump (video)
Move over Felix Baumgartner -- just two years after the daredevil's record setting 128,000 foot Red Bull Stratos space jump, Google VP Alan Eustace has topped it. The New York Times reports Eustace rode a balloon 135,908 feet above New Mexico and dove back to Earth, opting for just a specially designed spacesuit / life support system instead of Baumgartner's capsule + suit combo. It took two hours for the ride up, and another 15 minutes for the trip down, which peaked at speeds of up to 800 mph -- enough to break the sound barrier and create a sonic boom, making him the second person to do so outside of an airplane -- before the parachute system kicked in, and he glided back down to a landing site 70 miles away from where he started. He's apparently been working on the project since 2011, and declined assistance from Google to go it alone, working with Paragon Space Development Corporation on the project, dubbed "StratEx." He recorded the whole thing on GoPro cameras (of course) and you can watch video highlights from the feat embedded after the break. [Image credit: J. Martin Harris Photography / Paragon Space Development Corporation]
Google to flag 'censored' searches for Chinese users (video)
Google is announcing that it's going to place a flag on contentious search terms for users in mainland China. Mountain View's Alan Eustace euphemistically described how some searches break a connection to the service, leading to users being frozen out for around a minute each time. He theatrically added that the company has checked its servers several times and found no error, so whatever issue causes these outages must be external. Whenever a term is typed that is likely to cause an "outage," the error message in the picture above will appear, with a suggestion to search for something else, or use Pinyin to search for a term where contentious keywords appear inside otherwise natural searches.
