Meanwhile, pour out a little bit of Earl Grey for Regretsy, as the craft-snark blog is shuttering. Wrote founder April Winchell in a blog post: "After three and a half years, I've said everything I have to say about it, and now we're just Bedazzling a dead horse." [The Daily Dot]

The nice thing about a Yahoo earnings call, if you're Kara Swisher, is that you don't have to hide in the vents to hear what Marissa Mayer is saying. The good news: Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates. The bad: Revenue was flat, and oh, can someone do something about that pre-call elevator music? [AllThingsD]

That was a short-lived experiment: Months after Tumblr gave users the option of paying $5 to pin content to the top of followers' dashboards, the pay-to-pin feature has been abandoned. [The Daily Dot]

This hardware will self-destruct: the Pentagon is interested in military hardware "capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner"—the better to keep enemies from collecting and reverse-engineering the detritus of war. [Wired]

Less than a week after Twitter launched Vine, the video-sharing app it acquired last year, the company went back to the acquisition well, announcing a deal for Crashlytics, which tracks bad code when apps fail. [Business Insider]

Artist's rendering.

Looks like DARPA is still hard at work combing through that office video library for new ideas. Wired reports that the Pentagon's resident mad scientists have just released an update on their Phoenix project, an attempt to make satellites less earth-shatteringly expensive. And what have the brains in the basement (we assume their office is in a basement and also looks like the set of the IT Crowd) dreamed up? 

Basically, it's Wall-E in space.

As Wired explains, the plan is to "have space robots pluck functional antennas off of dead satellites floating above geosynchronous orbit, and combine them with small, modular 'satlets' into new, longer lasting communications satellites." So it's recycling, but via robots and in outer space.

Finally, a use for all that space junk zipping around the heavens! The trick is going to bringing the costs down far enough that it's cheaper than just launching a whole new satellite.

Here's a video illustrating the concept, with an appropriately synth-heavy planetarium-style soundtrack:

"GUYS, I've got a GREAT idea."

The U.S. Navy has a big job, monitoring all seven of the seas. (There are seven, right?) In fact, short of a clone army of incredible Mr. Limpets, there's no easy way to distribute resources so they can respond quickly to possible regional flare-ups. And so DARPA's latest, greatest idea for the waterborne branch of the armed forces, Popular Science reports, is the "Upward Falling Payloads" program, which:

seeks to create technologies that would allow the Navy to leave unmanned systems and other distributed technologies hidden in the ocean depths for years on end and deploy them remotely at the push of a button when the need arises.  

That sounds pretty futuristic, but it also faintly rings a bell. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, right: It's basically War of the Worlds: Ocean Edition. Here's how Steven Spielberg's 2005 version of the story opened:

Ray reaches the place where multiple lighting bolts struck the ground and witnesses the ground heaving up as a massive machine with three long legs climbs out. The Tripod gives off a loud blaring sound before opening fire with heat-rays, vaporizing bystanders and destroying everything in its path.

You might also recognize the theme of "robots chilling out under the sea" from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

However, before anyone gets too creeped out, DARPA doesn't want weapon systems, which you can't just leave lying around unattended on the ocean floor in potential war zones, because other countries will just snatch them up. They're thinking more along the lines of surveillance.

We wonder what percentage of DARPA's annual "research" budget goes to purchase new titles for the office video library.