McGruber writes "The Federal Times is reporting that Northrup Grumman has filed suit against the US Postal Service, accusing the USPS of violating the terms of the 2007 fixed-price ($875 million) contract to produce 100 massive automatic sorting systems, each capable of handling millions of magazines, catalogs and other pieces of flat mail. The Postal Service embarked on the project just as mail volume was beginning to nosedive, cutting into anticipated efficiency gains. The sorting machines' performance has been uneven, according to a series of reports by the Postal Service's inspector general."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Smith is just about the best. When, on the Graham Norton Show, special guest Gary Barlow broke out a keyboard to play the infamous The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air introductory song, Mr. Smith immediately dropped into the verses as soon as the audience began to sing. Now, granted, it seems like there’s probably a prompt for the studio to see the words, but it’s clear that Smith didn’t have such a gadget at his disposal. The man just knows his song and how awesome it is to really connect with people on a positive level.

(via Viral Viral Videos)

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Handing someone a well-designed business card that's clever, even humorous, is a great way to promote yourself. But handing someone a giant poster and asking them to slice it up into 100 cards to create a flip-book animation? That all but guarantees you a spot on the unemployment line. More »

colinneagle writes with an excerpt from Network World: "Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London began trials of a Kinect-driven camera last week that would sense body position, and by waving his or her hands, the surgeon can sift through medical images, such as CT scans or real-time X-rays, while in the middle of an operation. During surgery, a surgeon will stop and consult medical images anywhere from once an hour to every few minutes. So the surgeon doesn't have to leave the table, the doctor will work with assistants, but sometimes, if you want things done to your satisfaction, you have to do it yourself. Dr. Tom Carrell, a consultant vascular surgeon at Guy's and St Thomas', described an operation on a patient's aorta earlier this month to New Scientist. 'Up until now, I'd been calling out across the room to one of our technical assistants, asking them to manipulate the image, rotate one way, rotate the other, pan up, pan down, zoom in, zoom out.' With the Kinect, he says, 'I had very intuitive control.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guy makes a skull from typewriters (Boing Boing)

6 Japanese Video Games That Will Make Your Head Explode (Cracked)

How To Recognize A Potential IRL Friend On Twitter (Bit Rebels)

Swedish telcom Teliasonera complicit in mass surveillance operations (Boing Boing)

Animal statues made from woodchips are boss (BuzzFeed)

20 most ridiculous zoo signs on Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

Organic food makes you into a jerk (Neatorama)

(title pic via Reddit)

 

When he's not finding ways to get you drunk in mere seconds, Philippe Starck spends his time designing some of the most beautiful everyday objects we've ever seen. From juicers, to hard drives, to now a set of stunning fitness gear including free weights and jump ropes. More »

The final significant roadblock to Google's buyout of Motorola has been cleared, as Chinese regulators have just given their rubber stamp. Their approval follows a few months after the simultaneous American and European clearances, and virtually all that's left now is to formally close the deal and start integrating the two mobile giants. It might still come too late for the combined entity to present a united front at Google I/O, but at least they won't have any awkward glances at each other across the room. We're just trying to decide on whether or not Googorola is the best pet name for the loving, $12.5 billion-dollar Android union. Update: Google has since told the AP that the deal will likely wrap up early next week, so Motorola should be part of the family well in advance of Google I/O.

China clears Google acquisition of Motorola, eliminates last barrier to Googorola bliss originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 May 2012 14:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At some point in your life you're going to have to give up the dream of sleeping in an awesome car bed. We still totally support you, but the rest of society won't be as accepting. So as an alternative, you might want to consider a car-shaped couch instead. More »

Looking through Engadget's annals of robotic achievements, we see droids juggling, dabbling in competitive sailing and even manning prisons. Cool as they are, those functions aren't going to mean a thing when Mr. Automaton is lost in the wilderness, damaged and without a helping human hand in sight. Researchers at ETH Zurich are working to change that scenario, as they're currently developing a "self-reconfigurable" device that packs a glue gun for creating the tools it needs on the fly. It might not be the quickest method -- as you'll see in the video below, making a glue cup takes a good hour -- but it's effective enough for transporting and pouring water. That's not to say that the prototype is ready to fend for itself; it built the cup, but only under human direction. The researchers' next step is adding in autonomous capabilities so the bots can repair things -- and even build other robots -- without being told to do so. A sea of self-regenerating droids? Sounds harmless to us.

Continue reading Robot uses glue gun to make tools, hopes to ace Survival Skills 101

Robot uses glue gun to make tools, hopes to ace Survival Skills 101 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 May 2012 14:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lasrick writes "Benjamin Loehrke describes the rather odd definitions of what is a 'tactical' nuclear weapon and what isn't. 'There is enough ambiguity surrounding the capabilities of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to render the term "tactical" all but useless for arms control purposes. As the United States and Russia pursue new arms control treaties, they should drop the tactical distinction and limit the total number of all nuclear weapons — strategic, tactical, or other.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Getting ripened fruit to your local supermarket is actually a pretty complicated process. Many fruits ripen when ethylene binds to a particular receptor. That means that if the fruit is exposed to too much ethylene, they’ll be overripe when they hit the stands. If not enough, they’ll be sitting there looking just shy of ripe and therefore less likely to get purchased. Thank goodness for Timothy M. Swager and the folks on his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They’ve developed a carbon nanotube-based sensor that should eliminate our fruit ripening woes.

It’s not that there haven’t been ways to detect ethylene before, they’ve just been incredibly expensive or otherwise ineffective for fruit ripeness determination. Ethylene is particularly difficult to detect due to being a small, nonpolar molecule so the previous inventions haven’t really been viable to take to, say, an orchard. Luckily for us, Mr. Swager and his colleagues have made an inexpensive and portable sensor to do the same job — and better. Phys.org describes the device like so:

The sensory element consists of a small glass plate with two gold electrodes. A mixture of single-walled carbon nanotubes and a special copper complex is deposited between the electrodes. The copper complexes bind tightly to the carbon nanotubes. When the sensor comes into contact with ethylene, the ethylene binds to the copper complex, weakening the bond between the copper complex and the carbon nanotube. The electronic properties of carbon nanotubes are very sensitive to the strength of their interaction with the copper complexes. Their electrical resistance changes in relation to the ethylene concentration.

The team at MIT then experimented by placing the sensor and different fruits in an airtight chamber before allowing nitrogen into the environment. They then compared the ethylene emissions of the various fruits and determined the highs and lows of their cycle. The ones that ripen after harvest, like bananas and avocados, showed a clear peak while those that do not, such as oranges, released a consistently low amount of ethylene. If this means no more crunchy bananas, I’m all for it to become a widespread practice.

(via Phys.org, image credit via Doug88888)

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This week was a busy week! We gave you the inside scoop on how Yahoo ruined the best photo sharing site on the web, All the excitement and drama surrounding the Facebook IPO, the death of unilmited data on Verizon, and a TV news mystery we can't quite wrap our heads around. Here are our top stories of the week. More »

PhunkySchtuff writes "I'm seeking the collective's recommendations on a laptop with a numeric keypad that doesn't suck. For practicality reasons, an external USB keypad is less convenient than a built-in one. A keypad is required for entry of lots of numbers, and using the alpha keys with the Fn key to turn them into a keypad is not acceptable. Looking at the larger manufacturers, it seems that none of their business grade laptops (e.g. Lenovo's T-Series or similar quality levels) have numeric keypads. Looking at their laptops that do have keypads, invariably they are cheap, plastic and flimsy. Looking at Lenovo's offering with a Keypad, whilst it's a 15" screen, the vertical resolution is just 768 pixels, and the build quality of it leaves a lot to be desired. I need to find something that is built to the quality of a 'real' ThinkPad, or even a MacBook Pro, but has a full-sized keyboard with a numeric keypad and there doesn't seem to be anything like that on the market at the moment. This is a mystery to me as to why it would be the case as I'd imagine it's business users who need to use a keypad more than the average user, yet it is the consumer grade laptops that have keypads."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the first things that I do after installing Vista or Windows 7 on a new computer is to change some of the default visual effects the operating system ships with. On Windows 7, I immediately switch from the Windows 7 (Aero) theme to Windows 7 Basic which does away with lots of the eye candy that I’d otherwise be annoyed at. This includes first and foremost Aero Glass with its transparent window chrome, but also other visual effects that I find more distracting than helpful.

You may see this different, and there are certainly users who appreciate the Aero interface with its transparent chrome and visual effects. Microsoft however did reveal that it will change the Windows 8 desktop in this regard.

We applied the principles of “clean and crisp” when updating window and taskbar chrome. Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look. The taskbar continues to blend into the desktop wallpaper, but appears less complicated overall.

To complete the story, we updated the appearance of most common controls, such as buttons, check boxes, sliders, and the Ribbon. We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

This basically confirms that Microsoft intends to drop Aero Glass, and several other Aero effects that the majority of Windows users have come in contact with in recent years. For me personally it is a welcome change, as I would have turned off those effects anyway on computer’s running Windows 8.

Some visual changes will be included in the soon to be released Release Preview of Windows 8. The majority of them are however only included in the final release, and not the release preview. This is kinda interesting, as I had assumed that the Release Preview would be the operating system’s release candidate, which usually marks the end of development.  It is possible that Microsoft has included the features but disabled them in the release.

I personally like the design that you see on the screenshot above. What about you? Do you think Microsoft is heading into the right direction with these design changes? (via The Verge)

It’s all but confirmed that Verizon is looking to raise their FiOS broadband service plan rates. Due to their prevalence in markets where it’s available — and the fact that it’s simply one of the fastest services out there — it shouldn’t come as any surprise that they’re looking to improve on their revenue by charging more for what they consider to be a superior product. What isn’t quite as solid is whether Verizon will soon be improving their FiOS service plans as well.

Speaking at the 40th Annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Fran Shammo basically said as much in regards to the price increases. Specifically, he said that they need “to do a better job in discipline of price increases” which roughly translates to “yeah, there is going to be some price hikes here shortly” for everyone. And he should know, considering Mr. Shammo is the Verizon CFO and Executive Vice President.

The reasoning here is that, due to the nature of premium services, folks are more likely to be willing to pay more. Supply and demand, after all, is the way of such things. But never fear, Verizon FiOS subscribers, there may very well be some silver lining to this cloud. Along with the increased rate, there are rumors that two of the tiers will have their speeds increased too. You’re welcome.

According to DSLReports, Verizon’s current 35mb tier will soon see a pretty staggering increase to 75mb downstream and 35mb upstream. In addition, the 25mb tier will become 50mb downstream with 25mb upstream. If this happens, awesome. If you’re in the right market for it. And you have Verizon. And you don’t mind the price increase. And you like the internet.

(Verizon at JPMorgan TMT Conference via DSLReports, image credit via Night-thing)

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Last week's cupcake-filled sausages put a damper on our appreciation of all things meat. But our mood has been considerably improved now that we've discovered these fantastic hand-made balloons that look exactly like cuts of meat. They've even redeemed sausages for us. More »

My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows — turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy.

As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It’s a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on.

Perhaps the niftiest thing about the CordLite is how you actually fire up those lights — the dock connector’s aluminum body is entirely touch-sensitive, so the lights engage whenever someone goes to plug in the cable. Meanwhile, a pair of indicator lights run along the top of the dock connector so there’s never any confusion as to which side is up.

Pledging $25 locks you in for one of the first CordLites to roll off of the assembly line, so you’d best shell out the dough if you’re interested — after the Kickstarter campaign ends, the price will jump up to $35. Not a bad deal for night owls, especially considering that Apple’s own dock connector cable is nearly $20 without a single frill to go with it.

Though the CordLite is Apple-only for now, Android users shouldn’t feel too left out. The team also has a light-up micro-USB cable in the works, though I suspect we won’t be seeing those out in the wild for a little while yet.

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line.

On average, North American consumers will spend a lifetime total of five days on failed attempts to pair their dock connector cable with an iPad or iPhone. Yeah, that's not true, but we can certainly sympathize with frustrated device owners -- fitting a tiny connector to any gadget can be a chore, especially in the dark. Scrap Pile Labs' CordLite sets out to point the way to a successful connection with its built-in LEDs. The illuminated cable is quite simple to use -- with no buttons or switches to fuss with, the connector lights up when you touch the aluminum plates, and powers off the moment it's secured to your device. There's really not much else to it -- CordLite functions identically to an Apple-manufactured cable, though the dock connector itself is significant larger than the OEM variety, at least in its current prototype form.

The design team has turned to Kickstarter to get their project funded, with a $70,000 goal. If all goes to plan, they expect to ship black or white CordLites beginning in September at $35 a pop, but as always, getting in during the "pre-order" phase will net you a hefty discount. The first 200 backers can get an early-bird cord in the color of their choice with a $25 pledge, with the required amount jumping up to $30 from there. A $45 pledge gets you an exclusive laser-etched model, while $50 will be met with a pair of early-bird cords. As you may have gathered from the picture above, the first version will only function with Apple devices, though a microUSB cord is also said to be in the works. See it in action in the video demo just past the break.

Continue reading Insert Coin: CordLite illuminated iPhone cable (video)

Insert Coin: CordLite illuminated iPhone cable (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 May 2012 12:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  CordLite (Kickstarter)  | Email this | Comments

theodp writes "Q. What do you get when you surround the image of Men in Black star Will Smith trying on sunglasses with a pitch for 'MIB Bill Smith Dark Shades'? A. U.S. Patent No. 8,180,688. 'Many people consume broadcast media such as television shows and movies for many hours a week,' Amazon explained to the USPTO in its patent application for a Computer-Readable Medium, System, and Method for Item Recommendations Based on Media Consumption. 'The consumed broadcast media may depict a variety of items during the course of the transmission, such as clothing, books, movies, accessories, electronics, and/or any other type of item.' So, does Amazon's spin on As Seen on TV advertising deserve a patent?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It certainly seems that Google is of the mindset that more data is always better. If only they had more data, they could really data their data. And now, thanks to a combination of satellite imaging and the Maritime Automatic Identification System — or AIS — that all ships have to prevent collisions, they’ll be able to gather  the location of every vessel on the open water. That includes military ships.

Typically, AIS signals are designed to only be detectable for up to 20 nautical miles. But researchers at Greece’s University of the Aegean developed bigger and better antennas built on land that could pick up the signal even further away. Even so, this still only provided for those ships close to shore and not for those far out to sea. Enter satellites. Being overhead they can, with the right technological advances, find the signal at even greater distances.

Michael Jones, Chief Technology Advocate at Google Ventures, let it be known at the annual Joint Warfighting Conference that the technology required for the endeavor cost a cool three million dollars. That’s three million dollars to know the location of every single ship out there — with one major flaw. For someone to go dark on the map, all one need do is turn off the AIS.

One big positive from this initiative is that patterns will emerge from the sheer amount of data being mined on completely legal ships. Researchers will have access to thousands upon thousands of routes over time. This could potentially lead to the discovery of improvements for shipping lanes or, if nothing else, it should be really cool to look at.

(via AOL Defense, image credit via asmythie)

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