According to Plastic Pals:

The Korea Institute of Science & Technology (KIST) held an open house Technology Exhibit, where some of their latest research and development projects were showcased . . . Mahru III, a humanoid robot co-developed by KIST and Samsung, copies the movements of a human wearing a special suit which senses muscle movements.

via Plastic Pals

Be sure to follow the link for more pictures of this crazy thing. [ZuZu Top via Make]

In case you didn't notice, the motorboard glides over a GOD DAMN LOG. A LOG! And you can sit and carve on the thing like it was a little snowboard. I have no idea when this is coming out, if ever: these Aussies are trying to raise capital for their project. But I support the Powerboard in spirit, even if my wallet can't. [Scarpar via Engadget]

The results are spectacular, and really drive home the point that with this $2700 camera, anyone with an eye for shooting and a laptop can create a cinematographic masterpiece. There is a discernible and annoying shake in some shots, but nothing that couldn't be remedied with a little jury rigging.

Make sure to enable the HD and smoothing options in the embed, and check out the second half of the video for more evidence that the 5D's low-light capabilities are completely unreal. Another lesson learned from this video: even the most amazing shots can be ruined by unsettling facial hair. Deal with it, Monsieur Akihabara. [Akihabara News]

The rockets of the aeroshell—a protective armor that will protect the MSL and guide it through its descent—will fire to steer the capsule towards the desired angle. When this is achieved, a long parachute will open to slow down the Mars Science Laboratory as it enters zooms down the Martian atmosphere. As soon as the capsule slows down, the heat shield will eject leaving the rover exposed inside the aeroshell, attached to the floating crane mechanism.

That's when the whole landing process gets weird: The floating crane's rockets will fire up to further slow the descent. The top part of the aeroshell will then detach completely, leaving the sky crane alone holding the MSL rover, slowly descending towards the planet's surface. A few hundred meters above the terrain, the floating sky crane will start lowering the rover down using "a trio of bridles and one umbilical cord" until it touches down. At that time, the sky crane will detach from the rover and fly away, probably to fall over the home of some poor old Martian grandma.

I don't know about you, but the whole operation mesmerizes me to no end.

Dear Valued Lenovo Customer,

We are contacting you with regard to your recent Lenovo X200 order.

Please note that we recently experienced a web error which caused the price of the 128GB Solid State Drive to be erroneously listed at $0.
Unfortunately, we are unable to honor this pricing; in addition, the part is currently not available.

As a token of appreciation for your patience and understanding, we are pleased to offer you a substitute of either a 64GB Solid State Drive
or a 200GB Hard Disk Drive (7200rpm) free of charge in place of the 128GB Drive.

To accept this offer, please reply to this email and fill out the below fields by Monday August 11th with your selection.
*** If we do not receive a reply by that date, your order will be cancelled at that time.

[Lenovo - Thanks Alvin and Hex!]

What's the training like?
The program has yet to be announced, but we know it's a combination of real flight, simulated flight and centrifuge training.
What's the difference between your Virgin Galactic and Virgin America rides?
The different flight profile of each, but in some ways it flies like any jet...although some portions of the launch of SpaceShipTwo's reentry is glider-like. These planes also do +6Gs.
Is it like a Rollercoaster?
Well, a rollercoaster is more of an inverse G. [So, it's not similar]
What qualification did you need to become a Galactic pilot?
3,000 hours of flight time, and a variety of plane experience, since we also have to fly Gulfstreams to sometimes take customers to and from the spaceports.

Rich, you are a lucky bastard.
[Giz at Virgin Galactic Launch]

The exclusive tour is divided into three parts

While the storage areas are the most impressive part of the factory, I have to admit that nothing had prepared me for the scope and complexity that is required to make and pack 19 billion bricks every year. The scale of this factory, specially compared to the tiny bricks it produces, is absolutely breathtaking.

The warehouse and the mold room

We started in the main warehouse, which is half a kilometer long. Here they house the silos holding the raw plastic granulate. Through them, 60 tons of this material is processed every 24 hours. These towers are connected to the molding machines through a labyrinth of tubes that push the granulate mixtures in a permanent tin-pitched rumble.

It's the digestive system of the enormous factory, always feeding the molding lines through the tubes and moving big boxes full of pieces—using conveyor belts—into the storage area in an endless and precise dance which never ends: this factory works around the clock to fulfill the worldwide thirst for Lego.

The molding machines

Everything is recycled in the factory. The plastic granulate itself is a by-product from diesel, and whatever is discarded in the manufacturing process gets recycled. The leftover parts from the mold—the plastic that fills the channels that take the hot plastic into the piece negative—fall down the machine, gets ground up, and put back into the production cycle. Any other waste, like faulty pieces or the transparent plastic used to clean the inner tubes when they need to change the production color of a molding machine, are also ground up and sold to other companies for the production of other things, like pipes and even heating oil.

The machines produce more than two million pieces per hour, churning incessantly into color- and bar-coded boxes. I looked around and I couldn't see many people. A woman was in one of those endless aisles looking at a few molding machines with big "QT" signs on them. She was in charge of quality testing, making sure that the production was going perfectly.

At one point I was taking photos of a box of full of yellow bricks, and suddenly the machine stopped working. Fearing I had done something wrong, I saw a big wonky box coming from the distance, some kind of weird transport with strange sensors on the top, straight from a moisture farm on Tatooine or a spice mine in Dune. I stepped back, instantly realizing it was one of the many factory robots.

This transport bot was answering the call of the central mainframes, the brains of the Lego body that control every aspect of the process at all times. The mainframes had stopped the production of the machine, following the signal of the sensor next to the box and sending the signal to the robot, alerting it that it had to harvest the crop of bricks. The robots travel down the aisles autonomously, picking up boxes and leaving empty ones so production can be resumed.

The storage cathedrals, decoration and packaging

The robots then put the boxes in the conveyors, which move them into the storage cathedrals (click here to see a complete report on them, the following video only has a brief summary). There, the huge cranebots lift them to the heavens, placing them in endless towers of boxes. There are four of these cathedrals in the Lego factory, and no humans are inside. The mainframes know what it is inside at all times, and order the cranebots to retrieve boxes and send them to decoration and packaging, where Lego sets take their final form.

Here, the Lego pieces may take two ways. One is to go straight to the packaging lines. The other is to go into decoration. Decoration is the most expensive part of the Lego process. Here, the pieces are individually painted with absolute precision, like you can see in detail in this video.

In the packaging lines the pieces are distributed: they are dumped into the machine, which separates them one by one, then counts them using optical sensors, and placed in a generic small box. I watched in amazement, seeing how the pieces fell into these small boxes on a very small conveyor. At every step, one, two, three or whatever amount of pieces will fall into the box, according to the instructions of the set in production.

Along the way, high precision scales measure the weight of the box. The computers know exactly how much a box has to weigh at any stage, indicating that the correct number and kind of pieces are inside. If there's a variation of a few micro-grams, the alarm jumps and an operator grabs the box, sorts the pieces, and puts the box back into production.

Once the box is complete, the contents are dropped into the plastic wrapping machine, which makes a bag with the pieces inside. The box are then dropped inside another box, and passed into another production line, where more bags would be added until all the set pieces are in place, ready to be packaged and sent to shops all around the world.

As I watched the boxes going away, being wrapped for shipping, I couldn't help to have this feeling of absolute marvel. From plastic grains to full sets, everything controlled by computers and robots, in a scale that—given the size of most of these piece—stunned me. Next time you look at that Lego box full of bricks, or your collection of mini-figs, think about how complex and elegant the whole production process is. Your "toy" will have then a completely new dimension.

When they started to explain the capacity of these storage areas, designed to accomodate the 19-Billion-piece-per-year production, I realized the unbelievable scale of all this. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing.

Watch the video and multiple that vision by 32. Try to imagine a 65.6-square-mile area (170 square kilometers) distributed among thousands of shelves. Looking down one of the aisles—there are four per building—I realized I was looking at tens of thousands of boxes full of Lego bricks and pieces. All of them completely full: "There are approximately half a million boxes here," they told me. Later I found out that it was 162.240 boxes in each of the old cathedrals (which went up to 13 meters high) and 262.128 in the new ones (the 20 meter high ones).

Up in the distance I could see a robot working. I zoomed with my camera and saw how it took some boxes out, then put others in. "They are taking the boxes to packaging and decoration," Jan—one of the Lego PR guys in Billund—pointed out, "every time there's a production run, computers order the robots to retrieve whatever boxes are needed," according to the number of bricks necessary for a set. Everything is done on demand," he said with a big smile, proud of the efficiency of their system.

Then, without any warning, the robot started to move up there in Lego heaven, accelerating almost immediately as it descended from the top of the building to the bottom, at the end of one of the aisles. The speed was staggering for such a giant metal thing, and we all watched in silence as the gigantic crane moved the bot gracefully, like a male dancer would hold a ballerina in The Nutcracker.

We kept walking and one of them came towards us, stopping smoothly at the end of aisle. My first thought was about jumping into it and waiting for the next request from the production computers to feel the thrill of going up through that massive space, holding my breath and watching the multi-colored boxes blur in front of my eyes, like a Lego Silver Surfer on top of that yellow bot. Probably thinking the same, Jan turned to me: "you know, if you cross that line, the entire production process will stop. It's a security measure." Yeah, on second thought it was probably for the better. Later I learnt there were four robots per cathedral, one per aisle, moving at 2.5 meters per second in the new buildings, and 1.5 meters per second in the old ones. It doesn't seem a lot, but watching they zooming in every direction it didn't look very safe for humans.

But as we walked out of the storage, continuing with our visit to the factory, I just couldn't stop imagining myself flying on top of that bot in one of those long trenches, looking for the exhaust port on the Lego Death Star, probably with Jan and the Lego security chasing me like Darth Vader and his two TIE fighter wingmen. Lego Star Wars", I thought, at the end everything comes full circle. And then I said to myself: "Jesus, you are such a dork." I was. Albeit a very happy, smiling one. [Giz's Lego Trip]

And I can't be more grateful for that decision. I don't know about you, but the idea of having these strange (anti)heroes walking around a "real" 1985's New York, Ozymandias's massive Karnak, Mason's garage, Dr. Manhattan's nuclear lab, the Comedian's tacky bachelor's pad, and Rorschach's jail—all full of the retro gadgets, technology and the dirt of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comicbook masterpiece— has me excited.

If the movie is as good as his take on Frank Miller's 300, Snyder's Watchmen is going to be one for the books. [Watchmen via Superherohype]

Chris Dimino [via Treehugger]

Just pony up an Andrew Jackson (who's not very awesome) and you'll get one of these. We bet if if there were Native American ninjas back then, they would have taken out Jackson with a well timed kick to the groin. *Guitar RIIIFF* – Jason Chen

Product Page [Dannabananas via Nerd Approved]

In all seriousness, our own problems weren't with the fact that we thought it would work with the vehicle in motion (we didn't), it was with the placement (putting it on the steering wheel is bad) and the ergonomics (nobody wants to type with that angle) and the fact that it's a touch-screen keyboard (doesn't work well). – Jason Chen

Designer [via Yanko Design]

After Verizon double billed him, a guy who goes by the name "Poodleman" sued them for ruining his credit and won. When Verizon still wouldn't pay up, the court ordered a bench warrant for Verizon's arrest. Unfortunately, they finally paid up just before we got to the really good part: State Police trying to arrest all of Verizon Wireless. Maybe someday… –Adam Frucci

Warrant Issued For Verizon's Arrest [Consumerist]