I don't know what's funnier, that Apple has the balls to erect a billboard so large it's illegal, or that Apple has such pull—financial and political—that they can get away with it. Since 2007 the 13,750-square-foot billboard has been up in a Boston-based storage facility, and the state has argued that it should come down. Protected in part by Boston hizzoner Thomas M. Menino and others, the ad remains, but after a temporary permit ran out, its owners had to pay a $110,000 "settlement." Sounds like a fine to me. Either way, the mofo is still standing. [AppleInsider]

On what looks like the Japanese equivalent of Regis and Kelly, a TV presenter showing off a Sony Vaio L touchscreen Win 7 PC can't quite get it to work. It's not fully frozen—it's the IR touch interface that seems to be the problem. Whatever the case, you can see this poor bastard visibly mourning his own rapidly decreasing family honor. And as for Reeg-san and JKelly, I don't know what they're saying, but I am pretty sure I've heard it all before. [MacDailyNews via CrunchGear]

Wal-Mart is sticking it to Best Buy with their own army of overpriced teenage-son replacements. You pay anywhere from $99 to $339 for, as Reuters puts it, "basic television installation on the low end to setting up a home theater, wireless router network or a home office computer network" on the high end. So let me get this straight, somebody paying $600 for a 40" LCD TV is going to pay $100 for it to be setup? Better yet, someone paying $30 for a wireless router will pay 10 times that for some dude to come install it? I mean, I know we're a service economy, but this is ridiculous. [Reuters]

My favorite Canadian co-CEO, RIM's Mike Lazaridis, did a kind of evasion/denial response to questions about the gloriously hideous Bluetooth BlackBerry smartwatch, a kind of wristborne Foleo, if you will. He kinda just giggled and said that the accessories they release are generally accessories that keep the BlackBerry handset at the center. Clearly this would be different—and CrackBerry maintains that it still may come out, designed and built for BlackBerrys by a firm unaffiliated with RIM. Sounds like a recipe for awesome to me. [TechDigest]

The piece, titled "Hand from Above," is best explained in video, but in any case it's fairly simple: a live camera feed from in front of the billboard is overlaid with a giant finger, which has its way, such as it does, with rapt viewers. The tickling and teasing soon gets more severe, and before you know it, said finger is throwing you off of the pavement, or shrinking you into nothingness.

The effect is playful and charming for adults, though it may cause minor metaphysical crises in small children and pets. For art! [Interactive Architecture via Make]

So it's not exactly "real time," but it's fairly close, according to BusinessGreen. The amount of greenhouse gases, now thrown in our faces by this giant glowing billboard, is rising by about 800 tonnes per second, which doesn't mean much to me but certainly sounds like a large number. You can also download a widget in case you don't walk by the billboard itself too often but still want to see a big number slowly increasing. [Treehugger]

Designed as a promotional tool for Tryvann Winter Park, a ski resort just 15 minutes outside of Oslo, these snowing billboards alert commuters that conditions are optimal for hitting the slopes. Whenever it begins snowing on the mountain, an SMS message is sent to the billboards instructing them to start their thing. A second message is sent when the snow stops. Needless to say, the temptation to ditch work would be unbearable. [Toxel]

The display, which wraps around the three most visible sides of 1 Times Square, is capable of playing contiguous video using all of its surfaces at once. Made up of a mix of 13 60in plasma TVs and over 12 million individual LEDs arranged in diagonal panels, the screen is purported to display a resolution of "20 times the resolution of standard HDTV," though it's not completely clear what that's supposed to mean. As far as the back-end goes, to play just 30 seconds of video calls for 150GB of data sent from 30 computers, all of which, I hope, one day conspire to make the greatest BSOD of all time. The sign was flipped on officially last night, though the trial run, featuring the awesome test pattern picture in this article, took place on Wednesday. Check out the local news report below for some more background and neat little renderings to put the whole thing into perspective. [NYT, image from Gothamist]

[Branislav Kropilak via Designboom]

The display itself will consist of hundreds of rows of LEDs spaced 6 inches apart. Apparently, this will allow residents to see out of the floor-to-ceiling windows, but at a distance it will appear to be a complete image. Whether or not this over-the-top advertising will be as tacky and annoying as it sounds remains to be seen. In order for Astani's pilfered vision to come true, it still has to be approved by city officials. Let's hope they have some sense. [io9 via Wired]

The owners themselves specify whatever information (irreverent or otherwise) they want to be shown on the billboards, and when it's transmitted to the billboards, that phrase is displayed up in lights for all to see.

Seems like a pretty good idea until you realize that you're carrying around a tracking device just to have some fun with a billboard or two. Weird. – Charlie White

Mini Motorby Billboard Cool Hunting, via CrunchGear]