I only see one problem to this huge retrofitted 1/350 scale model: How the hell do you make pew-pew sounds under water? [Hobby Media via Makezine]

I think I now want a ticket aboard Enterprise even more than I did before.

They're performing just one song, rumored to be either Gold, True or I'll Fly For You (surprising news to anyone who thought they had just two songs) if Spandau Ballet guitarist/saxophonist Steve Norman is to be believed. With only six passengers and two pilots allowed on that first Enterprise flight, the five Spandau Balleters will make up almost half the human weight. Although judging by the looks of Tony Hadley these days, maybe it'd be more like 50/50. [The List]

During the Drill Machine sequence as the Enterprise comes out of its barrel role amidst destruction of the other Federation ships above Vulcan, we cut to an interior Enterprise bridge over the shoulder of Kirk that is looking out through the front viewscreen. In space, R2-D2 is floating in the debris from about the top middle of the screen to the bottom right.

Poor R2. [Oh No They Didn't]

Update: The scene is that but that is not R2-D2 according to one ILM Star Trek effects supervisor. Unfortunately, he and Paramount can't show the scene yet.

Click on this image to see the full picture.

When JJ Abrams said that he wanted to put some Star Wars into Star Trek, apparently it also applied to the scale of spaceships (and matching viewscreens.) And while the new Enterprise doesn't even reach half of the 1,600 meters—that's a mile long—of an Imperial Star Destroyer, it's still amazingly big compared to the 288 meters of the old Enterprise. Maybe now you would be able to take down an Star Destroyer with a couple of these.

The battle I would really want to see now, however, is not the old Star Trek vs Star Wars (we already know who would win that one.) No, you know what I want to see.

Yes, Starbuck vs Uhura. In a chocolate pudding pit.

Maybe Galactica vs Enterprise too, but that's a distant second. [Thanks to David B. from Bad Robot Productions]

UPDATE: Since we did the original ISS comparison, the specifications for the new Battlestar Galactica have changed. After the end of the series, one of the visual effects guy shared information about the actual size of Adama's new ship. It measures 1,438.64 meters. Almost a mile, so it's bigger than the new Enterprise and less than 200 meters shy of an Imperial Star Destroyer. I changed the graphic to display the old Galactica, which has the correct size. [Thanks to the readers who pointed this out]

Too bad the video gets ruined by the crappy explosion at the end. I'm sure JJ Abrams would approve, though.

A couple of months ago Brian asked me: "Do you want to do something cool?"

This is something that Brian asks sometimes. It usually involves latex, handcuffs, and chocolate pudding. Fortunately, this wasn't the case.

"It's not what you think," he added. (see?)

"Hmmm..."—I replied—"does it involve getting in scuba gear, jump on a supersonic plane, skydive into the Pacific Ocean, search for the remains of a Spanish galleon, find a gazillion gold doubloons, buy an island, and hire five former Playboy playmates to play rock paper scissors all day long?"

"No, but it's pretty cool"—he said—"what about doing a custom Enterprise for JJ Abrams."

Which, mind you, is not as cool as my first idea, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. And I did. They sent me the Enterprise, one of 30 models. The other 29 were sent to other people: artists, movie directors like Robert Rodriguez, and designers around the country.

Not all of them have arrived, but they are being distributed across cinemas in the US as I write these lines. Mine—Enterprise 10—is located at the The Bridge Cinema de Lux in Los Angeles, California. And my favorite so far—Enterprise 15, or Oreo Enterprise—is located at Rave Town Square Theater in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Check the rest in this link. [Star Trek Enterprise Gallery]

Developed by Research in Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry Enterprise Server works on a secure network that encrypts data. It was designed with the intention of keeping the security legitimate business communications intact. Faced against such a highly secure means of transmitting of information, however, it's near impossible for law enforcement to listen in on and nab suspected criminals. The roadblocks have undoubtedly lead to the upward trend in gangs and other malefactors choosing the BlackBerry over other devices, where conversations can be more easily intercepted.

While some Canadian legislators support major de-encryption efforts, this will inadvertently compromise the security of business communications as well. [Mobile Syrup]

Seriously. By then you think they should have realized how the frak to get this whole video communication thing to work right. I'm not even asking for 4096p high definition holographic projections with Smell-o-rama™. Heck, even the holograms look like crap in Star Wars. But this is just wrong.

On one side you have the Federation, with technology capable of warp speed and tele-transportation and frikking photon torpedoes and phasers and generators that can create cheese-and-bacon burgers and fries and Guinness out of thin air. On the other, the Romulan Empire, which can do the same but wearing funky pants and eating tempura tofu instead of greasy burgers. And yet, the useless sons-of-Klingon-bitches can't get their communications to look half-way decent.

I mean, check this newly-released image from the film. Even my iChat AV works better—and that's crap on its own. Unless... unless they are telling me the Enterprise's screen is 3D and the image requires green-and-red eyeglasses, that is.

That's what this thing is going to give us: A natural way to plug into the vast pool of information of the internet and ask questions like Kirk does in Star Trek. At least according to Stephen Wolfram—who changed the world of mathematical research with his Mathematica software and, as geniuses go, he's up there with the best—and other scientists who have tried it. The new engine will be able to truly interpret your questions and give you a real, precise answer to them.

It won't use a database of preset questions, however. The engine is designed using extremely advanced algorithms so it truly has the ability to actually understand what you are asking for. So if you type "How many protons are in a lasagna for six people?", the system will be able to recognize, interpret, connect the pieces of available information and give you the answer to the question—provided the question has an answer, of course.

I find this fascinating. An engine that could actually interpret your questions and the information available to give you specific answers is the Holy Grail of information technology. Wolfram doesn't claim Wolfram Alpha will fully achieve this, but he and other scientists are claiming this is a huge step towards that goal. We will have to wait and see how well it works—before Google buys it.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite short stories by Isaac Asimov. In his robot tales, he wrote about humanity inventing a computer to answer questions. The computer will give a lot of answers, but it will never be able to answer the biggest questions of them all: What is the origin of it all?

As it evolved and expanded through the universe, humanity's consciousness became part of the megacomputer. Periodically, first individual people, then a stream of consciousness, will ask that question: What's the origin of it all? No answer will be given after ages computing it except: "Not enough information."

At the end of the tale, the universe is completely dead and dark. By then, the megacomputerhumanity was already in a separate dimension, a huge stream of energy, just thinking about the answer to that question. At the end, the computer finds the answer and says:

'Let there be light.'

And there was light.

In the meantime, we can only hope that nobody asks "what was first, the chicken or the egg?" or we will all go to hell. [Wolfram via Daily Mail]

You have heard her voice many times: She was the voice of the Enterprise's computer. She died yesterday age 76.

The First Lady of Star Trek, as she was known, married Roddenberry in Japan in August 1969, after the end of the original Star Trek TV series. She also worked in other TV shows, like Bonanza, The Untouchables, and The Lucy Show, with Lucille Ball. She also was the voice of the USS Enterprise in every single movie and TV episode of Star Trek.

She then returned in The Next Generation, trying to take the underpants off Jean Luc Picard as Ambassador Lwaxana Troi, and returned to the screen in Deep Space Nine, where she was actually able to take off the underpants of Constable Odo.

Her last work in the Star Trek universe was was two weeks ago, reprising her role as the voice of the mighty Federation ship for the new Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams. [Mercury News and Wikipedia via Boing Boing Gadgets]

To put it into perspective, that's nearly 2x the read speed of Intel's already fast SSDs, and roughly 5x the write speed. The ioDrive uses the same NAND flash memory of an SSD, but since it plugs in to a PCI Express bus rather than SATA and only works with 64-bit systems, it can achieve speeds nothing else can touch. And yes, here we are talking megaBYTEs, not megaBITs—a lower metric often used for data transmission speeds.

For now it's for enterprise stuff exlusively—an 80GB version will set you back $3,000, on up to $14,400 for 320GB. If you are interested in this kind of thing, the boys at Tweaktown have written a ten pager on it. [Tweaktown via BBG]

* Disclaimer: I like Star Trek as much as I like Star Wars. I just like to piss off Chen and Lam.

We are so used to the International Space Station that we don't give its massive scale a second thought. I, for one, took it for granted until a newly-released NASA photograph reminded me that this thing is huge. So huge that I fired up Photoshop and did an illustration comparing it to a Colonial Viper Mk1, a Corellian corvette, the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A, and the new Battlestar Galactica. Check both the high resolution sizemodo and the amazing NASA photo after the jump.

<<< Click on the sizemodo to see the high definition image*

Here's the NASA photography, showing the scale of an astronaut against a small section of the International Space Station.

I don't know about you, but this one really make me go oh-ah. Maybe it's all a fake and that guy is a Lego Minifig.

ISS Size:

Mass: 300,214 kg (661,857 lb) (June 18, 2008)
Length: 58.2 m (191 ft) along truss (February 22, 2007)
Width: 44.5 m (146 ft) from Destiny to Zvezda
Height: 27.4 m (90 ft) (February 22, 2007)

Solar arrays span: 73.15 m (240 ft) (February 22, 2007)

* The sizemodo shows the final completed ISS. The scale is 1 pixel = 0.5 meters. Scaled and measured with Photoshop's measurement tool.

No. The bottleneck in a setup like this is the centralized wireless controller chipset architecture that routes all of the data coming in and out. Proxim's solution, instead, uses a new distributed wireless architecture for which enables it to smartly share the burden over the two radios. It uses two standard Atheros 802.11n radio chips and a controller processor from Freescale. This is also different from the many dual-band routers out there that use two radios, but only for each band individually—not combined into a single bandwidth pipe.

Of course, your computer only has one radio, so you won't see double the speeds on your local machine. This just helps cram more data onto a huge enterprise network without bringing it down, but an interesting strategy that could, theoretically, find its way into more consumer-type gear. The dual-radio AP-8000 costs $1,099, and also looks like a Dungeness crab after I've eaten four delicious legs already. Sold! [Product Page via GigaOM]

You charge the RC Enterprise with a=the tricorder-shaped charger seen above (sorry, no space dock just yet). After a 15-minute charge, the Enterprise is ready to fly again. [Entertainment Earth via Geek Alerts]