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25th Anniversary Red Wii Spotted, May Not Be Coming To The US

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 06:45 PM PDT

This special edition Red Wii was spotted on the Nintendo Japan site, it’s in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the original Super Mario Brothers game.

Details are sketchy of course, but if you read Japanese there may be some more information here for you. What we do know is that it will have a Wii MotionPlus controller, Donkey Kong, and the original Super Mario Brothers. Since I don’t read Japanese, it’s tough to tell, but it looks like the Wii will be coming out on November 11th. It’d be great to see this in the US, but probably unlikely.

[via GoNintendo]

Now’s Your Chance To Buy A Faster-Than-Sound Land Vehicle

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 05:00 PM PDT


We may not have the Concorde any more (I speak as if I ever rode in one), but don’t let that stop you from breaking the sound barrier at whim. A “car” made to go more than 800MPH in a bid to break the land speed record is now for sale for just $3 million.

The car belonged to Steve Fossett, all-around awesome guy and record breaker. Early tests were promising, but Fossett died before an attempt at 800MPH (or 900 for that matter) could be attempted. Now’s your chance, assuming you’ve got the cash; there’s lots more information on the history and tech behind this beast in the brochure(PDF).

These land-speed record vehicles have always struck me as rather strange; they’re essentially planes being flown right next to the ground. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re land vehicles, but I just think the earlier records were more impressive, as insane as those of the last couple decades have been. At any rate, it’s yours for three mil. Keep it in your backyard if you like.

[via Autopia]

F-Stop Watch Tells The Time With Aperture

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 04:13 PM PDT

This is a pretty sweet little wristwatch. I’m sure our watch aficionados will sniff at its crude mechanisms and lack of dials, but there ain’t nothing wrong with having a few concept watches around for special occasions. I’ve got a double-eagle one for when I attend the Eastern European mob meetings down on Pine.

This one is for the photographer who’s too good for regular numbers. Instead, you get a set of common f-numbers indicating the hour, or approximating it, anyway. This might actually be more difficult to read than watches with no numbers at all.

Eh! At $36 it’s not much of an investment, and might make a fun stocking stuffer for the photographer in your life.

[via CNET and Gizmodo]

Facebook Complies Imperfectly With DMCA, Suffocates Fan Group

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 03:00 PM PDT


As Facebook expands its territory and allows for more and richer content, its responsibilities towards that content (and their users, and the law, etc.) become deeper and more complicated. While the structure of Facebook isn’t nearly as permissive as, say, a private message board or tracker site, the sheer amount of activity produced by hundreds of millions of users demands a level of vigilance matchable only perhaps by that exerted by YouTube administrators.

But like YouTube, they must also work within the law, and while this conflict surrounding the right to make a fan page for someone else’s work isn’t the most critical example of free speech, it serves for a quick lesson in DMCA compliance.

In early September, Overture Films, which is producing the US remake (Let Me In) of acclaimed Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In, issued a DMCA takedown notice to Facebook regarding a fan group for their upcoming film. Overture (their advertiser specifically, Mammoth) had created an official page, but was bothered by the unofficial page, and demanded all their “infringing” content (links to trailers, fan art, and so on) be taken down.

As TechDirt noted at the time (and recently followed up on in this post, which prompted my own), this was pretty clearly an inappropriate application of DMCA restrictions. And of course, because the DMCA prioritizes copyright holders (right in theory, wrong in execution), the material was taken down more or less instantly.

Apparently savvy in this kind of conflict, the group administrator filed a counternotice on September 10th. The law states that if the copyright holder does not file a lawsuit within two weeks of the counternotice being submitted, then the material may be replaced (though whether Facebook would be required to is disputable). No such lawsuit has been filed (or if it has, it is being kept secret by all parties), and it is now October 8th: the material should have reappeared by now — should have reappeared around the end of September, in fact. Obviously, it has not, and around the time the material taken down should have been put back up, the administrator of the group closed it, saying “I am suffocated.” The disputed material is not back as of this writing.

A convenient ending for the copyright holder, don’t you think? While this particular instance is just more fuel for the fire in the ongoing anti-DMCA efforts, the culpa proxima (I made that term up) belongs to Facebook. Providing the means to organize a community implies some responsibility on their part to protect that community from harassment, and they have failed in that responsibility. No doubt they have bigger fish to fry, they’re launching the new features, and so on — but failure to serve a user in an issue like this is a failure in practice and principle. If Facebook can’t be trusted to serve their users’ best interests in a situation like this, they’ll find power users (who organize and drive many groups, fan pages, etc.) migrating elsewhere.

The DMCA claimant had their reasons for action — wrong though they were to do so, under the law they have the right to issue this takedown notice. The group admin was diligent in complying with both the law and Facebook policy, and rightly waited for the content to be restored instead of uploading it continuing as if he wasn’t under threat of legal action. The ball was in Facebook’s court, and they dropped it. Whether it was a missed email, an overworked legal response department, or deliberate inattention, Facebook was at fault here.

I suspect we will only see more of this kind of negligence as Facebook and its applications grow, which is why I am making a mountain out of this particular molehill. I encourage our readers (as with any other company or service) to air this sort of trouble as publicly as possible; lapses like these (Google’s recent MP3 fiasco, for example) must not be allowed to languish in obscurity.

The new Pogo Stylus for iPhone has a little trick up its sleeve

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 02:40 PM PDT

As the touchscreen era rages on with no end in sight, there’s at least one group out there that tends to go unnoticed: the big-handed. Some call’em Meat Sticks; some call’em Sausage Fingers. Whatever you call big ol’ digits, one things for sure: they make touchscreens painful.

For the past few years, Ten One has offered up the Pogo Stylus as a means of touchscreen frustration salvation for mega-thumbed individuals. Today they’re pushing an updated version built for iPhone 4, and it’s got a bonus feature…

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Homemade Astrophotography Rig For Planet-Lovers

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 01:15 PM PDT


Wisconsonian Craig Smith wrote in to Make to show off his homemade photo setup for taking pictures of planets and such. This really isn’t something you could do without a lot of astronomical and mechanical know-how, but it’s worth admiring.

The challenge is that at magnification and light levels provided by something like a home telescope don’t produce enough light to take an effective exposure at normal shutter speeds. A four-second exposure is necessary, and at that speed you need to take into account the rotation of the Earth if you want a clear image.

A lot of you might be asking “Why take these random, rather blurry shots when you can get tons from the Hubble and NASA galleries, among others?” Because taking pictures of planets is unbelievably awesome, that’s why. Planets, people, hundreds of millions of miles away.

Sony Ericsson’s itty-bitty secondary display for Android phones to cost 69 euros?

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:40 PM PDT

At the tail-end of September, Sony Ericsson announced a rather peculiar accessory: the LiveView, an itty-bitty (1.3″), new-iPod-Nano-esque secondary display for their Android phones that could be worn as a watch or clipped onto clothes. While Sony Ericsson was happy to show the thing off and share some of the basic spec details, they kept hush on information like the launch date and pricing.

Things like that tend to make their way out one way or another though — and today, it seems they have.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Video: Windows Phone 7 hacked onto the HTC HD2

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:32 PM PDT

Immediately after Windows Phone 7 was announced , a little uproar began amongst those who had just recently bought the Windows Mobile 6.5-powered HTC HD2. From a technical standpoint, the HD2 looked like it could handle Windows Phone 7 no problem — but Microsoft said it wasn’t going to happen.

And with that, the hacking efforts began. Some chose to fake their efforts; other, arguably less fake, efforts never came to fruition. Well, there’s some semi-hopeful news for those still hanging on to their HD2s: it looks like someone has legitimately pulled it off.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

How Many Movies Has Technology Ruined?

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:15 AM PDT

A simple question: how many examples can you name where technology can be argued to have ruined a movie or TV show or book? I ask this because The Blair Witch Project was released on Blu-ray on Tuesday (well, widely released—it had exclusively been in Best Buy for a few weeks now), and having recently seen the movie (sometime in the summer) I can say this: in today’s world of GPS’d smartphones, like your iPhone or Android-based phone, the movie patently doesn’t work.

The main conflict in the movie—and yeah, these are spoilers, but come on, the movie’s more than 10 years old; there’s a statute of limitations when it comes to breaking out the spoiler tags—revolves around the loss of a map.

The three college students, wasting their parents’ money trying to create a documentary on the Blair Witch, hoof about the backwoods of Maryland in search of the witch and other such content. They’re basically in the middle of nowhere—and then they lose the map! (Which wasn’t very helpful to begin with, but whatever.)

Without the map, the kids are doomed to circle around the woods forever, breaking psychologically along the way.

Fun!

That’s all well and good in 1999, when desktop computers were less powerful than today’s smartphones (is that even true? I don’t know, but it sounds reasonable enough), and nobody had access to handheld GPS, but today? Go ahead and try to promote a movie where a bunch of dumb college kids get lost in the woods ofMaryland . I give it five seconds before someone in the audience shouts—hilariously—hey man just use your iPhone!

Then the audience laughs, and leaves.

In conclusion, Blair Witch Project would never work in 2010. Real talk.

Now the question becomes, what other movies (or TV shows or books or whatever) can you think of that have been ruined by technology? I know a number of Seinfeld episodes really show their age when a simple cellphone call would solve Jerry’s (or whoever’s) problem.

Hopefully we can think of a few examples. If not I’d have wasted a good three minutes of your life, and for that I apologize.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Wants To Outright Ban Phones From Cars

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 09:45 AM PDT

We all know that texting and driving at the same time is both incredibly dangerously and incredibly stupid. If you don’t agree, you’re wrong. But what the U.S. Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, wants borders on the ridiculous. If he gets his way, a federal law would be passed that would outright ban the presence of phones inside cars. Land of the free, etc.

LaHood told Bloomberg (the news organization, not the 85-time mayor of New York City) that hands-free cellphone conversations, hitherto seen as a common sense compromise between cellphone use and staying safe on the road, are tantamount to a "cognitive distraction."

In other words, since hands-free conversations take your mind off the road, they ought to be banned outright.

And if we’re going that far, perhaps we should consider banning in-car radios and GPS navigation systems?

In fact, let’s ban passengers, too. What could be more of a "cognitive distraction" than having your girlfriend in the passenger seat go on and on about how much she doesn’t like Katy Perry’s new album, or how so-and-so was robbed on Dancing With The Stars last night. I’m driving here, please no more "cognitive distractions"!

Will any such ban come into place? Well, it’s not like LaHood can wave a magic wand and change the relevant laws; they’re a states’ issue, you see.

The obvious to solution to distracted driving is to ban driving altogether. Clearly people are incapable of handling the responsibility of moving about a couple of tons of metal at 50 miles per hour.

Or, a little more seriously, perhaps we simply need better driver education in the U.S.? I could have sworn former (and future?) Formula One driver Kimi Raikonnen had said something to the effect that to obtain even a basic driver’s license in Finland you basically have to demonstrate a driving ability that would just about qualify you to drive for Ferrari or Red Bull. Here in the U.S. (at least in New York) it’s more like, "Are you 16? Do you have eyes and hands and feet? Then here’s your license, have fun out there!"

Comic Book Movie Rumor Round-up: Killer Croc in Batman 3, Spielberg To Direct Halo?

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:30 AM PDT

Comic-con starts today (I’ll be there tomorrow~!), so that means we’ll be seeing a bunch of comic book-related movie news coming at us in the next few hours. There’s already a few tasty bits of information out there. Like, will Killer Croc be the primary antagonist in the upcoming Batman movie? (The movie is set to be filmed in and around New Orleans.) Incidentally, Cros was probably my favorite villain in the old Batman cartoon.

What evidence is there to support Killer Croc? Well, beyond the merely superficial—the movie is in New Orleans, and they have gators down there! (Crocodiles aren’t really found around New Orleans)—comic book writer Mark Miller said that the villain is "from [his] favorite childhood runs on the character," before adding "again, very unexpected."

Signed, sealed, and delivered: Killer Croc is your new villain.

Moving on from Batman, let’s pay Halo a visit.

Now how’s this for a rumor: apparently Stephen Spielberg (the real Spielberg, and not Señor Spielbergo!) is interested in directing it. Whoa!

Word on the street is that Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio is trying to acquire the movie rights, with both the games and the various novels serving as source material.

It must take a special kind of Halo fan to have read the novels. I mean, I tried to read one of the Mass Effect ones, but I was like, "Man, I could be reading about actual space stuff, let me put this down…"

And there’s one more movie rumor for you this crisp autumn morning, and it involves Wolverine.

Darren Aronofsky, who directed The Wrestler and The Fountain (which I thought was quite good), has apparently been offered Wolverine 2. That is, the studio wants him to direct it. What could be holding that up is that Aronofsky is interested in directing a movie called Gangster Squad.

You can’t direct two movies at the same time, now can you?

Parrot AR.Drone Finally For Sale Now For $300

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:22 AM PDT


How much does it cost to feel like a villian from a Bond film? Try $300. The Parrot AR.Drone, complete with dual cameras and four fans, now costs $300 and is available from Amazon, Brookstone, and Parrot’s own website.

Sadly, these haven’t been armed… yet.

via Phonearena


Alan Mulally To Keynote CES 2011

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 07:46 AM PDT


Hopefully Audi’s Chairman Rupert Stadler is good at sharing. He’s not the only auto maker bigwig headlining CES 2011 anymore. Nope, Ford’s chief, Alan Mulally, is returning to the Consumer Electronic Show for the third time in as many years. He’s taking the podium on Friday, January 7th at 11 am and will no doubt talk up Ford’s impressive list of in-vehicle advancements.

He has quite a few talking points, too. There’s the Ford Sync system that among other things, now supports smartphone apps. Then there’s the forward-thinking MyFord Touch system that debuted at last year’s show but is now making its way into production vehicles.

There should be no doubt in your mind that the auto industry is has shifted gears. No longer are vehicles just a series of mechanical workings. No, the electronic creature comforts are now just as important as the powertrain. Cars these days don’t sell unless they have a whole array of gadgets. Expect more vehicle demos than ever at CES 2011 as the auto makers showcase their latest advancements.


CEATEC 2010: Eyes-on With Mitsubishi’s Monster Diamond Vision OLED Display

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 07:02 AM PDT

3D TVs that don’t require without glasses, short-focus projectors that work with touch screens and dual touchscreen phones: all these gadgets are currently being showcased at CEATEC 2010 in Japan, and all of these might be cool, but nothing can beat big sized screens. What you see on the picture (and in the video embedded below) is Mitsubishi’s so-called Diamond Vision OLED display.

This monster, which actually went on sale world-wide [PDF] last month, is actually “just” a modular display that’s made up of smaller screens. Each of these modules is 384mm high and wide (thickness: 99m) and weighs 8kg. The upside is that buyers can order it in any size they want. The display has a viewing angle of 80 degrees (horizontal and vertical) and produces images with 1,200 cd/m2.

A 155-inch model will apparently set you back $400,000, but you wouldn’t want to watch TV or movies with it. The picture quality is OK (8.5dpi pixel density), but you can’t expect the same awesome images Sony’s XEL-1 is producing, for instance. The Mitsubishi display is primarily designed to be used for digital signage anyway.

I forgot to ask the Mitsubishi staff at the booth how big the display currently showcased is, but I didn’t forget to take a video:

Days Before Medal Of Honor Release, Modern Warfare 2 & Map Packs On Sale On Steam

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 07:00 AM PDT

A certain video game that once upon a time featured the Taliban has leaked. I only bring this up because this prompted me to check Steam to see how much they want for the game: oh, right, $59.99. But then I also noticed this: last year’s FPS—that’s first-person sensation—Modern Warfare 2 is on sale right now on Steam.

Yes, the game is available for 33 percent off the regular price. That is, $40.19.

The additional map packs are also available at a discount: they’re going for $7.49 each.

If I recall correctly, the campaign in Modern Warfare 2 takes less than 10 hours to complete. You could beat it in a weekend, easily.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Hitting Sprint On November 14th for $399 On Contract?

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 06:31 AM PDT


The Samsung Galaxy Tab has been official for thereabouts 37 years but yet Samsung still hasn’t mentioned a price or release date. It’s getting a little crazy now. Out with it already. Well, it seems Sprint’s pricing might have leaked, which places the tablet at $399 with a 2-year contract and at $599 without. Alright, but how about the other carriers?

Samsung surprised nearly everyone when they announced that the Galaxy Tab was hitting the US’s four major wireless carriers. That’s a major coup for the tablet as it will be available on nearly everyone’s wireless carrier. However none of the carriers have announced any sort of pricing for the Galaxy Tab yet, which makes us wonder how the pricing will go down.

Chances are the Galaxy Tab will be $399/$599 at each carrier. That seems like a solid price point and Samsung probably required the product pricing to be the same across the board to keep things fair. The real difference will probably be in the data plans. There will be no doubt specials and incentives to keep say a Verizon sub from crossing over to Sprint just for their cheaper data. Some sort of add-on plan is likely.

The Samsung Galaxy line is great example of keeping things simple for, you know, us stupid people. The Galaxy cell phone is selling very well and the Tab might have a proportionality similar success. Instead of flooding the market with dozens of variations, the company outed one phone customized for each carrier and ran with it. This keeps manufacturing costs down while maximizing marketing dollars. It’s smart for the company’s bottom line and very consumer friendly. The world doesn’t need 5,000 slightly different Android phones in the same way it doesn’t need 500 Android tablets.

FBI Takes Back Their GPS Tracker

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 05:53 AM PDT

"We have all the information we needed," they told him. "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring. "

Ah, the banality of evil. Yasir Afifi is a student from California who, because of his father’s apparent ties to something Middle Eastern, was being tracked on a thirty day warrant by the FBI. After he found the tracking device in his car – apparently an older model that allowed detection – a buddy of his posted it to Reddit and the meme spread around the world. This week the FBI came around to ask for its toy back.

Afifi considered selling the device on Craigslist before the FBI showed up. He was in his apartment Tuesday afternoon when a roommate told him "two sneaky-looking people" were near his car. Afifi, already heading out for an appointment, encountered a man and woman looking his vehicle outside. The man asked if Afifi knew his registration tag was expired. When Afifi asked if it bothered him, the man just smiled. Afifi got into his car and headed for the parking lot exit when two SUVs pulled up with flashing lights carrying four police officers in bullet-proof vests.

The agent who initially spoke with Afifi identified himself then as Vincent and told Afifi, "We're here to recover the device you found on your vehicle. It's federal property. It's an expensive piece, and we need it right now."

I’m all for law and order, friends. Track away, FBI! Follow human traffickers and murders to the ends of the earth. However, to track a 20-year-old citizen with no ties to anything remotely dangerous and then treat the activity like a joke (“Don’t worry, you’re boring” is probably the most sinister line I’ve heard in years) is an affront to the laws they are sworn to uphold. Maybe the FBI agents had egg on their face. After all, kids aren’t supposed to find your tracking device. Or maybe the FBI really didn’t care and attached the tracker on a lark, just a fishing expedition because they had little else to do that month.

Either way, the fact that an American citizen with dubious ties to anything dangerous or remotely controversial deserves this sort of treatment is disgusting.


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