Macrumors says there are speed fixes, battery improvements, third party system pref panes, dock menu changes and expose for multiple monitor fixes.

We recently got a minor spec bump in the original line, making the Vaio P as fast as normal netbooks. No other details on what the new machines will have, however. [TechRadar]

Neither Hedy or her co-patenter made money from the invention because their patent expired before it was implemented in 1962, and wasn't really acknowledged until 1997 by the EFF. The core logic to the invention is still in use today in spread-spectrum communications like Wi-Fi and CDMA. You can read more about it here. [Divine Caroline]

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This week at Uncrate: We kick back with a tall glass of Glenfiddich 31 Year Scotch Whisky, wash it down with some crisp agua from the Charcoal Water Pitcher, and make sure we're good to drive home afterwards with DrinkTracker. We also take our weekend role play to new heights with the Peasants & Travelers Doctor Bag, take a break from our rigorous TV watching schedule to enjoy Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, and enhance our beer-drinking experience with the Samuel Adams Boston Lager Glass. Finally, we take a ride aboard the aptly-named Sachs MadAss 125, test our pretend jousting skills in the Cardboard Tube Fighting League, and roll a few rounds at the ever-so-classy Brooklyn Bowl.

• There's now a featured comments section. This is what you're going to see by default, and you can click to reveal all comments, like it is now.
• The featured comments section is going to be made up of starred commenters, plus any comments that are especially good from non-star commenters and are promoted inside that post
• Star commenters have the ability to promote other people's comments to the featured section by replying to that comment, or just clicking the promote button—reasoning being that if we think star commenters can make good comments, they know what a good comment looks like
• You'll be able to approve unapproved commenters (they have red boxes around their comments)

One of the things that the new system tries to change is to make the "best" comments show up on the front, rather than just the quickest. The fact that we have multiple pages of comments doesn't change, it's just the question of which ones are visible by default: the ones everyone agrees are intelligent, or the guys who just happened to comment after a post goes up.

Oh, and you can also edit your comment for 15 minutes after you make them.

And the cool stuff we can do?
• Live interviews and Q&A's inside the comment section
• Live chats
• Collaborative photo pools, like a photoshop contest except without the photoshop, and in real time

Plus more stuff you guys will think of once you get familiar with the changes. The site may be a little buggy today—we tested it, but there's no substitute for millions of readers piling on and hitting it with weird use cases. So send your bug reports to tips@gizmodo.com with the subject "Comment bugs", and we'll take a look.

Update: Yeah, as predicted, there are bugs. Just hold out while they're fixed by our tech team.

In theory, a standby PS3 uses about $250 a year when in the off standby position. An Xbox 360 uses a little bit less than that. Both those consoles use a little bit of power to maintain the wireless receiver (and USB charger, if you're charging a controller) while the main power is off. If the Tricklesaver shuts this off when the TV is off, you theoretically won't be able to charge your controllers or turn on your console wirelessly.

The solution is to just turn on your TV before you activate your console. But there's not much you can do about that controller charging. It's also $35, which is kind of steep for something that only has space for one TV and one console. [PR Web via Go nintendo via Oh Gizmo]

Update: Reader Jonathan notes that the PS3 uses only 2 watts in standby, and if you're to calculate that out, that's only about $5 a year. Not quite $250.

It's just an investigation now, and no promises of filings or accusations of wrongdoings may be made.

One issue lawyers agree on: The law is murky when it comes to corporate disclosures about a CEO's health. That may make the SEC reluctant to press a case, said Peter Henning, a former federal prosecutor and SEC lawyer who teaches at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. Regulators will probably focus on the two statements made by Jobs in January, he said.

[Bloomberg]

Head to Nikon Rumors for the full list, but the short of it is that the D3000 and the D300 with HD movie are coming in August, D700X in October, D4 and D400 in Q2 2010, and D4X in late 2010. Supposedly. [Nikon Rumors]

The Gazelle prototype is supposed to do stuff like protect webapps from each other, and isolate different browser tabs (like Google Chrome does now and Firefox is going to do). It's one of the many, many research projects Microsoft has incubating, but might be the one that they trot out next week to show that they're still in the loop in terms of keeping up with Google.

What it won't do is replace IE—at least not in the short term. [CNET - Thanks tipsters!]

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The Price: $434 on Amazon

The Verdict: Strong. I hate going running down the feature list in reviews, but the NS4600 has quite a big spec sheet.

• Hot-swappable 3GB/s SATA, 1.5TB per drive, up to 4 drives
• RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support
• Gigabit Ethernet
• USB HDD and printer support
• One-touch backup
• Built-in BitTorrent and eDonkey downloads
• SMB/CIFS/AFP/NFS Network Protocols Support; Shared Storage for Windows, Unix, Linux, MAC clients
• Time Machine support
• DLNA Streaming (PS3, Xbox, DLNA TVs)
• Cellphone video/music streaming (iPhone, Nokias, PSP, Windows Mobile)
• Internet management/access

And all these features work! Streaming to the iPhone was slick (just enter in the username and password) and fast, and streaming to the Xbox 360/PS3 worked as well as any other DLNA network device. This means that if you set up the correct port forwarding options on your router to punch through your NAT, you can have access to your library of music and videos on your cellphone no matter where you are.

What's also very useful is the RAID support, which you can check our Giz Explains to see why you'd want one. In short, you're going to have all your media and documents on here, and it pays to have some sort of redundancy when (not "in case") a drive fails.

There are editions of their SmartNAVI management client apps for Windows and Mac, which lets you manage shares, stream media, set up new users, set up BitTorrent and eDonkey downloads (very useful if you don't want to keep a separate PC on all the time) as well as set up a Time Machine backup. And yeah, the Time Machine backup works. The backup folder mounts as a drive on your machine, and you back up normally, via Time Machine.

The only downside of this beefy NAS is that it doesn't ship with drives. That means you're paying $434 for just a box, which you still have to populate with your own drives. If you want to max out the storage with four 1.5TB drives at $120 each, that's an extra $480. A 1TB RAID solution at $80 each would only cost you $320. But the fact remains that this is a BYOD solution.

Is this worth it? It depends. We're big fans of pre-built Windows Home Server machines here, and that already has a lot of backup and streaming and remote access apps built in. But it doesn't have RAID, and it doesn't have Time Machine support (except for HP's), and it doesn't have everything this unit has. So yes, even though the Promise SmartStor NS4600 is a little pricey because it runs almost five bills and you have to bring your own drives, it is quite a sturdy and capable NAS. [Promise]

Tons of features

Time Machine support

The SmartNAVI user interface is kind of clunky, but it does what it's supposed to

Expensive for something that doesn't ship with drives

What you do is set up Orb on a Windows machine to transcode, on the fly, your already downloaded Zune songs. This way you can listen to your music (your entire music library, not just 16GB or 32GB worth) wherever you have an internet connection. It works over 3G as well as Wi-Fi, but EDGE is a little too slow for full-quality music.

Head over to Gear Live for a walkthrough. [Gear Live]

The process is the same as the one used in the Lego factory, but instead of Lego, these guys make things you touch pretty much all throughout your day. [RGS]

Just hold up the symbol on the back of the bag to your webcam—webcam not included in Doritos bag—and visit doritoslatenight.com. You'll get the option of Choosing Blink182 or Big Boi, and they'll magically POP out of your bag, onscreen, and do a little dance for you.

Unless you're four years old or really, really love Doritos, this'll be interesting for about 10 minutes. But when it's done, you have a bag of Doritos that taste like Taco Bell tacos. Score.

If you're trying to decide between the bag of Doritos that doesn't let you do something with your webcam and the one that does, the choice is obvious. [Doritos Late Night]

Their method varies in accuracy from state to state, but the basics of it is that they use your birth date and the area you were born to come up with a likely match for the first few digits of your SSN.

Since the late 1980s, the government has promoted an initiative termed "Enumeration at Birth" that seeks to ensure that SSNs are assigned shortly after birth, which should limit the circumstances under which individuals apply for them later in life (and hence, make fraudulent applications easier to detect).

The last few digits are harder to guess correctly. If the algorithm narrows down your details to just the last few and attack it with a brute force method—say online, on a site that lets you try multiple times—this could mean that people could forge your identity by using details you have on Facebook, coupled with a botnet of a couple thousand machines. [Ars Technica]

Jobs, for all of his virtues, clings to the Great Man Theory of Leadership - a CEO-centric model of executive power that is outmoded, unsustainable, and, for most of us mere mortals, ineffective in a world of non-stop change. A Wired magazine cover story from last year made the point well. The article begins with a memorable anecdote - the CEO, in search of a space in the company's crowded parking lot, regularly leaves his Mercedes in a handicapped space, sometimes taking up two spaces. The pattern became so noticeable that employees, according to the article, put notes on his windshield that read, Park Different.

"Jobs' fabled attitude toward parking", writer Leander Kahney says, "reflects his approach to business: For him, the regular rules do not apply." That means shrouding his company in secrecy; treating his employees to tyrannical outbursts; and refusing basic accommodations that would make beautifully designed products more customer-friendly. (As one wise-guy blogger commented, in decidedly bad taste: "I can't believe Steve Jobs's liver is replaceable but the battery in my iPhone is not.")

So to all those execs that are looking to Steve Jobs to emulate? Cut it out. Emulate his good points, like the ability to get products out the door, but not his lousy points. [Harvard Business via PC World]

The Price: $300 for two cameras and four magnetic wall mounts

The Verdict: It works and it's easy. The three pieces are self-configuring, and all you need to set it up is to plug the main gateway into an Ethernet jack and the wireless cameras will all hook up seamlessly. Here's the video quality:

It's not bad, especially for a wireless video recording from such a small camera. It's on par with a mediocre webcam, and is definitely good enough for a "security" cam. It's nothing you want to use for actual webcamming, but it's great for seeing whether or not your kids are doing their homework.

There are a few other interesting features, like video sharing and video recording. Recording is obvious, but sharing works by inviting your friends to view either live streams or recorded clips. You and your friends interact with the system via the Vue website, which is accessible inside or outside your network. The batteries are supposed to last a year (they're not rechargeable), but you can buy replacement CR123 batteries. You turn on recording from the interface and there is scheduling.

So is this worth $300? Probably, depending on how much you need something like this. There are cheaper solutions like hooking up a webcam yourself to a computer and somehow routing that online so you can access it anywhere. This involves port forwarding and all kinds of more technical workarounds. So for ease of use, performance and convenience (it's wireless and reaches 300 feet), it's hard to beat the Vue. We only wish that, for $300, this would come with four wireless cameras instead of just two. Available later this summer. [VueZone]

OK...meaningful...here goes...

For that definition, it was probably an electronics learning kit I got for Christmas at about age 8 or 9. As I recall, it didn't teach electronics formulas or resistor codes, but was full of projects to hook up input devices like switches and output devices like buzzers and lights. It was like learning how to connect all the devices to your hi-fi, or connecting all your peripherals to a computer. It also gave me a good start toward understanding logic rules, like both switches have to be on for the light to shine, or if switch A is on, then switch B selects which light is on.

I call this one the most meaningful, because, pretty clearly to me, it preceded my other important gadgets and inspired me to like gadgets and to understand how to build some. It's like how the transistor led to the chip, which led to microprocessors, which led to personal computers. Everything goes back to the first invention, in that sense. This electronics kit gave me the understanding that made it easy to progress to large logic devices with multi-pole switches, and some relays, which then progressed to a large tic-tac-toe computer with transistors which progressed to a large adding/subtracting machine with transistors, etc.

The word 'meaningful' has the root 'meaning' which implies some emotion. In that sense, my first transistor radio, at about age 10, would fit the bill. It gave me portable music that I could listen to all night long as I slept, every night. 20 years later came the walkman, and 20 more years later came the iPod, but the real change in life, the one having the most 'meaning', was with the transistor radio.

I always wanted my own computer. With the Apple I, I now had a machine that I could program. I would never run out of things to do in my entire life. So it's a close runner up to the other two.

The gadget that has been the most attractive of attention ever is not my Segway. It's my nixie tube watch from CathodeCorner. It looks very large to other people and looks very strange. It's handmade in America too. The nixie tubes run on 140 volts on your wrist. Airport security guards who have seen every kind of watch ever made have a thrilling time with this watch.

I used to fly to Japan regularly to scour new gadgets, and always bought tons of things which were always surprising at the time, but looking back, few have special meaning. The first consumer digital camera, I think the Mavica technology, was meaningful. The first one for computers, not TV's, was the QuickTake from Apple. But in many ways, no digital camera to this day has been as good as the first Ricoh one.

The HP-35 calculator was also very meaningful in my life, as it led me to an incredible job designing for the follow-on models.

Much thanks to Woz for helping to kick off our series. Coming up soon: Phil Torrone, gadget maker and modder extraordinare.

Image credit: Sony Mav, HP Calculator

The fingerprint ID also, of course, can theoretically act as a security device so that only you can activate your phone. There's also haptic (physical) feedback when you're hitting things, as well as using the touchscreen as an RFID reader. None of the three are really mindblowing in themselves, on the surface, but if implemented intelligently might make for a big step forward in the iPhone product line. [Macrumors via Boy Genius]

In an interview for a Korean news agency, Ahn Seung-kwon says (besides the details above) that LG will make another luxury phone (unrelated to the Prada) that will be similar to Nokia's crazy overpriced Vertu. He also said that they aim to be the number two cellphone maker in the world by 2012. The current #2? Samsung. So it's like Predator vs. Aliens, except instead of Predator and Aliens, you have a bunch of Koreans. [Unwired View via Boy Genius]

...it was dunked in mud, put inside a 300 degree oven, and soaked in beer. What finally did it in is being crushed by a three ton forklift, which is pretty above and beyond the duty of any phone we'd normally use.

As for the specs, it has 1500 hours of battery (standby or talk, we're not sure) and a 2-megapixel camera. And, most notably, it has an "extra loud" ringtone so you can hear it under elephants. [Telegraph via Slashdot]

That's it. There's going to be a family pack for three users. Nobody knows what the pricing will be, but Apple's Leopard family pack pricing is $199 for five users, and Snow Leopard is $49. Only three (Mom, Dad and Junior) can use Windows 7, so theoretically it should be lower than $199. But when you look at the pricing for a standalone one-user copy of Home Premium, it's $120 for an upgrade and $200 for a full version. So somewhere between $120 and $199 for an upgrade Family Pack, and somewhere between $200 and infinity for a retail Family Pack. [Kristian Kenney via ZDNet]

It's supposedly going to be battery-powered upon release, letting you take it outdoors for a quick bean injection no matter where you are. And having a microwave on your desk? That's living, my friends. [TechEBlog]

The Sears Tower Skydeck is four separate glass retractable "protrusions" that can each hold up to five tons, and is probably the best laxative to be found on the 103rd floor. What's holding you up is three layers of half-inch thick glass (plus whatever joints and connectors they have to connect the glass). The visit is included in the $15 admission. [Sun Times]

We can see how they approved the app, since it's innocent by itself (a photo sharing and uploading app). But when 15 year old girls start uploading topless photos of themselves, like the previously approved and then denied Hottest Girls app, that's when someone needs to take the app off the market. [Krapps via Wired]

Very useful for keeping fatties off the 2nd floor, as well as making sure your children NEVER RUN UP THE STAIRS. That is, if you're still viable to have children after all those accidents. [Costel21d via Treehugger]

The pack is waterproof, comes with a built-in metal bottle opener on the strap and is fully insulated to keep coldness in. And when you're done drinking, it's a perfect portable container for vomiting into. [Timbuk2 via Boing Boing Gadgets]

According to our poll, a full 52% of you made the switch to Blu-ray for some reason or another. What's surprising is that 40% of you still haven't switched to the HD format even though prices are pretty damn reasonable now (sub $200).

Is it because $200 is still $100 more than you want to pay? Is it because you don't have an HDTV? Is it because you've got a guest room full of DVDs you already invested thousands of dollars into? Tell us.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
[Thriller Headphones via Josh Spear]

This DSLR battery clip charges via a special USB source (like Energizer's own portable battery pack, which has a higher voltage than standard USB) and clamps on to "any" digital camera or camcorder battery. The compatibility list is probably high, but we're unsure if any actually means any, so check out the site before buying. The entire Energi To Go line will be available next month. [Gearlog via Oh Gizmo]

There are only ten available, and with each one costing $6000, you're probably not going to be one of the ten. So soak up the images and pretend that you can reasonably justify paying more than twice as much for a laptop just for it not to be so shiny and grey. [Colorware]