The Pirates of the Caribbean director gets set to train his lens on a much creepier underwater world.

Olympus' E-420 is the lightest and smallest DSLR on the market. It also happens to take some damn fine pictures, thanks to top-notch optics and easy usability.

Why did the U.S. Army pull its web page on a "nonlethal weapon" that sends "microwave transmission[s] of sound into the skull[s] of persons or animals?"

Microsoft has released potential directors in a hostile takeover of Yahoo, in what the Wall Street Journal calls a "clear sign" the Redmond giant is really, truly walking away. Will this defining moment end once and for all the speculation which has helped Yahoo shares to remain comfortably above pre-takeover-talk levels? Of course not.

Microsoft isn't saying much -- though Bill Gates does keep saying they are going to go it alone now. But having attempted to independently create a search that would rival Google, and then to try to buy into the game by taking over Yahoo, what exactly is "Plan C?"

Facebook agrees to deploy 40 new safeguards it says will protect users from sexual predators and cyberbullies. The move is endorsed by 49 states and Washington DC, which have been negotiating with the number-two social network on the measures for months. The holdout state? Texas -- which says they do not go far enough.

Google still hopes to link up with Yahoo on advertising, a deal that would almost certainly be lucrative to both companies and make Yahoo a tougher takeover target for, say, a certain Redmond software concern. Google co-founder Sergei Brin says there was a two-week test last month but doesn't say how far along the talks are.

From way over in Indonesia, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates let it be known that Microsoft never needed to buy Yahoo to make headway in search and advertising. It just kind of wanted to.

"We have always felt we could do very well on our own and now that's the path we are focused on," Gates told AP in Jakarta on Friday. "The standard strategy for us is to just hire great engineers and surprise people at how well we can compete, even with a company that's got a strong lead."

Actually, that may be the first bit of sense out of Microsoft since the Yahoo thing first emerged. That is exactly what Microsoft is good at: identifying market leaders in interesting new tech markets, then systematically destroying them. In fact, Microsoft is probably better at it than maybe any company in history. Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, Real Networks ... there's a long list of companies that invented something that Microsoft then copied and took down. And Windows, of course, was a copy of what Apple and Xerox were doing. Now Microsoft's Zune is taking aim at the iPod.

Microsoft is at its best when it does this. It spends billions of dollars a year on Microsoft Research, but has yet to invent an entirely new business. (Microsoft did once get out in front of a tech development, creating travel site Expedia early on. So surprised was Microsoft that it did this, the company soon thereafter spun out Expedia -- perhaps so Expedia would not contaminate the Microsoft culture with actual market innovation.)

The thing is, though -- search so far is looking like Microsoft's Waterloo. Yeah, it's won every big battle so far, but Microsoft has spent vast amounts of time and money trying to crack search -- and so far has failed. Can it beat Google at Google's own game? That seems unlikely. Can it outwit Google and create an innovative new version of search that Google never thought of? That would be very un-Microsoftian.

So ... now what?

No matter how beautiful the sex animations are in your favorite virtual playground, they can't compete with the movement of your own body.

How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think.

Kevin Alderman, who's already infamous for the sex animations his company Strokerz Toyz creates for Second Life, is developing a wireless, consumer-level motion-capture suit that's expected to hit shelves in 2009.

"Right now only a dozen or so sites on the web offer downloadable mocap files," Alderman says. "You have to wait until some studio becomes benevolent enough to make the animations you want, or you have to engage them for your specific needs."

Personal motion-capture suits will enable residents to contribute sex animations to the world of their choice -- and to develop scenarios tailored to their own deepest desires, especially if they team up with others who also have the suits. It's the bridge between today's expensive studio mocap and the real-time avatar control of tomorrow.

Meanwhile, technologists Mitch Kapor and Philippe Bossut have developed a less exotic, yet more familiar, prototype for hands-free interaction in virtual worlds: They're using a 3-D camera to track body movements, which are in turn translated and used to control avatars in Second Life.

These new technologies won't instantly set off the "ZOMG it's sex!" media alarms the way Bluetooth-to-sex-toy interfaces do. These developers can position themselves as facilitators of dancing and flying and walking around, creators of new input devices rather than instigators of a whole new level of cybersex.

But you can be sure we'll adapt whatever they come up with to our own erotic purposes. I would gladly put up with a few technical glitches for the chance to play with home mocap systems and virtual worlds.

Traditionally, home motion-capture animation has been financially out of reach for most geeks, costing about a half-million dollars for a studio setup -- a big room, multiple cameras to capture all the angles, the spandex suit with the white pingpong balls, the software that calculates the movement of those points through space and maps it to a digital figure.

However, Rick Hall, production director at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, sees "a trend to move away from big external optical systems" like the mocap setups used for movies and game development. Hall suggests that MMORGs will most likely provide the first venues for real-time mocap.

"Picture the more sedate scenes like in a bar, or dance clubs," he says. "That could be an interesting application, putting on a little virtual-reality mocap suit and dancing."

Ask hard-core game developers about the limitations of using real-time motion capture devices to control your avatar and they'll remind you that your living room is a finite space. Even if you could strap on the motion sensors and use your body to maneuver your digital alter ego, you can't do much flying, climbing or fighting without hitting a wall.

"You can swing a baseball bat or kick a football, but you can't go dive, can't run, can't explore a cave," Hall says. "We're always going to have this problem. Duplicating the Holodeck on the Enterprise sounds nice, but when they turn the screen off, it's just a big room.... It's not limited by (mocap) technology but by the walls in your house."

With virtual sex, that's not such a problem. Sometimes what you want to do in a virtual world takes up no more physical space than a sleeping bag. And sometimes you actually need a wall. Where else would you secure the tie-downs?

"I'm not sure I want to go there," Hall says. (That's OK. Everybody has a day job.)

Strokerz Toyz's Alderman wants to go all the way there. While the world waits for his $10,000 home mocap suit, he's launching a mocap studio, StroCap, that focuses on mature content.

"We are soliciting (Second Life) residents to tell us what they want to see in adult motion capture," Alderman says. "More realistic caresses? More erotic dances? More action?"

With StroCap's offerings and the inevitable use of home mocap suits and 3-D cams to control avatars, people who want to express themselves sexually in a virtual world -- but can't draw or animate -- will still be able to translate their own desires and preferences into in-world animations.

Gradually, our avatars will begin to mirror the way our bodies actually move, which could have an interesting effect on the gender play virtual worlds are so keen on. If we get it right, we'll become at least 50 percent more attractive to other residents, according to a collaborative study conducted last year at Texas A&M University and New York University.

People are more than ready to replace keyboards and controllers with more holistic interfaces. Look at the demand for Wii Fit, even though nothing prevents us from popping in an exercise video or walking the dog.

As for the lag that can still be a problem in virtual worlds, well, you wouldn't have expected people to use webcams night after night over their 14,400-baud modems, and yet we did, somehow.

My first real-time mocap action will be to kiss whoever develops the system I use.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

- - -

Regina Lynn invites you to move her at reginalynn.com.

1941: British destroyers capture a German submarine, U-110, south of Iceland. The British remove a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known to the Allies as Enigma, and then they let the boat sink -- to keep the fact of their boarding secret.

The Enigma machine, used by the Kriegsmarine to encode and decode messages passing between shore command and ships at sea, was taken to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers including computer pioneer Alan Turing succeeded in breaking the naval code. The Germans, assuming U-110 had foundered with her secrets intact, failed to realize that their code was broken. The subsequent information passing before British eyes helped the Allies enormously in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Several versions of the Enigma machine existed, but the working principle -- a rotor system activated using a keyboard -- was the same. The machine itself had been around since the early 1920s and was used by other nations, too, although it is most closely associated with Nazi Germany.

The Enigma used by the German army was decrypted as early as 1932 by Polish cryptographers, who later passed their methodology along to the British and French. In light of subsequent events (the Germans drove a Franco-British expeditionary force out of Norway and then crushed the French in a six-week campaign in 1940), the military value of this early intelligence is debatable.

But breaking the German naval code, made possible in large part by the recovery of U-110's machine, provided the British with a leg up at a time when the war at sea was very much in doubt.

The capture of a U-boat on the high seas was a rare and considerable achievement, since submarine crews scuttled their boats rather than let them fall into enemy hands. In this case, the U-boat’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Fritz Julius Lemp, thinking he was going to be rammed by an oncoming destroyer, ordered his crew to abandon ship. (His precise order, according to one survivor, was "Last stop. Everybody off.") Seeing the Germans leaving the boat, the British commander managed to veer away and avoid a collision.

Lemp, already in the water when he realized his boat wasn't going to be rammed, was swimming back to U-110 to scuttle her when he was either shot by the British (according to the Germans) or simply disappeared (according to the British).

Three other U-boats were captured at sea during the war, most notably the U-505, surprised by an American task force off the African coast in June 1944. That boat is on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Pop culture footnote: The thoroughly mediocre movie, U-571, was loosely based -- very loosely based -- on the capture of U-110. It was also shot through with historical inaccuracies, but that's a subject for another time and place.

(Source: Uboat.net, Wikipedia)