In 2005, Jackson planned a series of shows in Las Vegas and planned, among other spectacles, a 50-foot mecha that would terrify people flying into McCarran airport as an advertisement for his show.

When he couldn't get enough money, he downscaled the idea to a Godzilla-sized robot that would stand at the entrance of a casino, with a moving face that shot lasers.

The money never materialized and Michael moved away, so it never got built. Oh, what a spectacular doom that would have been, drunken frat boys crushed by a giant moonwalking robot. [The Guardian]

Sprint, which owns a 51% stake in Clearwire, says it will offer 10Mbps download and 3-6Mbps upload speeds in those three cities, which is a pretty sweet deal for Sprint customers. Now come on, Clearwire: make good on your promise and blanket the country with sweet 4G action. [mocoNews]

Apparently, the sight wasn't enough to stop traffic. Here are the shots one more time in handy, animated gif form...like someone just flicked a switch and Vegas went black.
[Getty Images, inspired by The Big Picture]

The hotel, called the Harmon, was just essentially "kneecapped." What did they do, take an X-acto knife across the blueprints? You have to wonder what Foster thinks of all this. [LasVegasSun via BLDGBLOG]

The Hall of Fame features 141 pinball machines in working order, available to play for just a few quarters, and if you're a pinball fan it looks like a must-see. I'm loving the idea of two-player pinball: it seems like a cross between air hockey and a typical pinball machine, with the object being to score on your opponent rather than just rack up points. This is just the kind of brain-melting mix of excess, shiny things, and noise that you'd want from a trip to Las Vegas. [Joystiq]

T-Mobile USA, Inc. announced today the continued expansion of its next-generation wireless network with the launch of 3G service in Las Vegas. The company plans to expand its 3G network to at least 20 additional markets by the end of 2008.

T-Mobile has invested more than $37.5 million in infrastructure and spectrum to bring its 3G service to the Las Vegas market, according to Neville Ray, senior vice president, engineering operations, T-Mobile USA, “Customers in Las Vegas are already accustomed to reliable and robust service from T-Mobile, which gets even better with this additional network availability,” Ray said. “This investment in today’s 3G network also sets the foundation to help customers stay closer to their family and friends in new and exciting ways.”

T-Mobile’s 3G network in Las Vegas supports voice and data services consistent with available service and handset offerings. The company today offers multiple phones that are able to operate on the UMTS network. These phones are designed to automatically connect to the best available network (3G or GSM/GPRS/EDGE) to provide the great call quality and rich communication services customers expect from T-Mobile.

Customers using a 3G-capable handset from T-Mobile will also experience faster data speeds when accessing the Web, or downloading content from the T-Mobile t-zones content portal, for example. T-Mobile plans to soon offer its first HSDPA device, along with new and compelling data-centric, all-in-one devices that help make the most of T-Mobile’s high-speed data network. The launch of the 3G network in Las Vegas also enables T-Mobile to accommodate and serve more customers more efficiently through the use of its AWS spectrum.

As the 3G service rolls out in targeted major markets, T-Mobile will continue to build upon its T-Mobile® HotSpot Wi-Fi network — its wireless high-speed Internet offering that launched in 2003 — and its nationwide voice and data network, to empower customers to effortlessly stay connected using the best available network.

At 825 feet long, the unnamed fountain will be 25% larger than the Bellagio fountain. Powering the fountain will be pumps capable of shooting columns of water approximately 450 or so feet into the dry Middle Eastern air. A light and sound show produced by a network of 6,600 lights and 50 projectors will illuminate the burgeoning Dubai skyline at night. About 22,000 gallons of water are expected to cycle through the fountain at any given time when it is completed in 2009. Now, if you'll excuse me, nature calls. [Luxury Launches]

It has tasty-looking food sitting on top of the minibar, but that classy-looking tray is actually a scale. If you take something off, it'll know about it via scales and sensors, and you'll suddenly find $25 worth of mixed nuts charged to your room bill. Better hope you don't want to check out the nutritional info or anything. Don't worry, however: standing close and smelling the packages is still OK, as is staring from afar. At least for now; you never know what sensors they're working on. [Upgrade: Travel Better via Consumerist]

The $200 million project would be funded by the casinos (who else?), so the food would be going right to them rather than to, say, poor people who are hungry. It'll make food costs lower for them and their awesome, awesome buffets. It could potentially make $25 million a year in addition to $15 million a year of potential tourist revenue. If it gets built and is successful look for vertical farms to pop up in less sleazy towns with the food going to people who actually need it, rather than tracksuit-wearing, fannypack-accessorizing, overweight Midwestern tourists. [Nextenergynews via Slashfood]

Er, no, that's not right. E-Z Sex, is it? Or something like that. CES. Right. Yep. I knew that all along. We shed tears at the farewell ceremony. I fired a party popper and played my kazoo. Blam made a stirring speech all about fighting them in the booths, fighting them in the corridors, fighting them in the virtual theaters of war. The troops all had lumps in their throat—especially Wilson, who's been grappling with a nasty cold this week—and I could only stand and and marvel at their certain sacrifice all in the name of freedom and liberty consumer electronics.

Reader, it is a sacrifice. Barely have these young men recovered from Slut Machine's New Year's Eve Party, their reward for the earlier horrors of chatting up Great Aunt Ethel on Christmas afternoon in the Old Kuntz home, than it is time for them to brave the horrors of Homeland Security, remove their shoes, belts and electronic devices (trust me, Muscles, you don't want to be on the wrong end of a "You want me to put my iPhone in that tray? Seriously??" look from Blam) and get on a Vegas-bound plane that is Wi-Fi un-abled. I mean, you don't expect them all to have actual spoken conversations with each other, do you?

Having just fought my way through the new-gadget desert of December, I can understand why the powers that be want to hold CES in January. The beginning of the year is all about hope, it's a shiny and new time for everything—except people's livers and wallets. But do they have to go and hold it in Vegas? Sheesh, those guys have got a lot to learn about mankind. At least they should give everyone a couple of months to recover from cocktail and credit excess before dangling expensive, sexy bits of metal, plastic and silicon in front of their eyes.

Wilson, between sneezes and swigs of Robitussin, described CES as a "masochistic feat of machismo." I, sadly, will not be able to verify that, as I have been instructed to stay in the office, rather like Miss Moneypenny. Guarding the door, keeping everything ticking along, a little bit of co-ordinating here, some dusting there, checking out Jason's nekkid lay-dee collection that's on that secret hard drive he thinks I don't know about, reading Matt Buchanan's dear diary, that sort of stuff, waiting for the special red CES-emergency telephone to ring and Blam to tell me breathlessly that he put his foot through the paper-thin Pioneer 118-incher, and does Giz have insurance?

Then the doorbell will ring, and I'll open it, and standing there will be a stacked young man from the Geek Squad, wearing funny overalls with no shirt underneath. And suddenly all my clothes will fall off and excruciatingly cheap-sounding R 'n' B will start playing before the bloke says "Ja, Ja, Das Is Fantastiche, Grossen, Filthen Schlutten" and drops his pants.

Anyway enough about my fantasies—and the Adult Entertainment Expo. Salute the bravery of these guys. The crazy-assed figure of 250 posts a day was being bandied about our chatroom the other day. That is five times our daily post rate. Over 10 an hour. One every six minutes or so. And let's not forget the surprises, like one-on-ones with the innovators, the exceedingly rich and geeky, and of course all those booth babes.

Readers, they're doing it all for you—and without an in-suite hot-tub between them. I'm not going because I've got an unbreakable engagement in London, but I wish I could be there to do more than the dusting. Next year, I guess. Viva Las Vegas!

He was wrong. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis claimed him, a year short of his prediction, at the age of 69. Throughout the decades that mattered, however, he did seem immortal. The frailty of his equipment was the thing that failed him, time and time again. Attempting to pop a wheelie on an earth mover while working at the Anaconda Mine Company he hit a power line, depriving Butte of its power for eight hours, and him of his job.

It was the same at Caesar's Palace in 1967, when he attempted to jump the fountains (useless-fact fans will appreciate that Linda "Krystle Carrington" Evans worked the camera during the stunt) in front of the casino. As Knievel hit the ramp, he felt his bike, a Triumph 650 Bonneville, decelerate suddenly. The subsequent crash crushed Knievel's pelvis and femur, caused fractures to his hip, wrist and both ankles, and left him in a coma for 29 days.

Knievel shopped around for bikes, using Nortons, Triumphs and Harleys for his jumps, which earned him an estimated $30 million during his heyday (although he claims he spent more than he made on usual suspects such as yachts and Ferraris and, more improbably, snakeskin boots and fur coats). But perhaps his most famous ride was the X-2 Skycycle, on which he attempted to jump Snake River Canyon. (His earlier dream, of leaping the Grand Canyon astride a Norton Atlas Scrambler, fell through after he realized that the US would never allow a leather-clad superstar to commit suicide, however spectacular the stunt might be, in front of a large audience.)

The X-2 Skycycle was a steam rocket designed by former NASA engineer Robert Truax (whom Knievel later described as "an egotistical little bastard who burned up Gus Grissom on the launch pad.") Just three of the Truax-designed steam rockets were made, at a cost of $250,000 each. After two of them were totalled during testing, Evel, ever the risk-taker, decided that it was now or never and, selling the visual rights for an estimated $4 million, scheduled the jump for September 8, 1974.

Again, the equipment let him down. Three of the bolts that secured the cover of the Skycycle's parachute sheared off with the force of the blast, activating the 'chute. Although the rocket had made it across the canyon, the drag caused it to turn on its side and float down to the river beneath. Knievel, who walked away with minor injuries—for a change—cheated death when he avoided drowning by just a few feet.

"God never made a tougher son of a bitch than me,"he boasted last year, already laid low by lung disease. But he was right— jail, the IRS, bankruptcy, booze, not to mention his death-defying leaps— couldn't kill Evel Knievel off. His funeral takes place tomorrow in his hometown of Butte, Montana; I, for one, will be donning a cape and revving my Evel Knievel Stunt Bike in his memory.

By the way, this was the hotel where Elvis made his big Vegas debut back in '56. In the place of this pile of ashes, by 2011 a phoenix will rise in the form of the Plaza, an $8 billion luxo-palace complex on the Vegas strip that will specialize in fleecing those who don't understand the difference between possibility and probability. [Metacafe and LA Times]

The crazy, terrifying robot would be visible to airplanes landing in Vegas, which I'm sure will really hurt Vegas's tourism numbers. Talk about the last thing you want to see from an airplane window.

No word on whether there will be a 35-foot-tall little boy for him to molest as well. Hiyo! –Adam Frucci

Danger Room [via Yahoo]

Las Vegas Sands to unveil mobile gambling [Yahoo!]

It's hard to think of technology in Las Vegas beyond updating the neon lights and the surveillance cameras surveying every pit, but the truth is a lot of time and money goes into developing new products for use in casinos. Take the Table Master by Shuffle Master, at your left, for instance. It's a fully-automated casino: no cards, no dealer, runs 24/7 and can't be cheated. Doesn't sound like very much fun to us, as we're big fans of human interaction, but it might be just the perfect thing for some casinos, or maybe even places like airport lounges.

The Wynn Las Vegas isn't the kind of place to have Table Masters but all their poker chips are made by Shuffle Master and have RFID tags embedded within, so the resort can track their movement from cashier to table back to cashier. Chips aside, the Wynn might just be the most technologically up to date resort in the world right now. Every room has HDTV and a speaker wire so you can plug your own MP3 player in. They also have what they say is the largest VOIP installation in a hotel: 4,200 phones, each with an interactive display.

Click: Vegas gambles on a hi-tech future [BBC News]