Running on what looks to be a Microsoft Surface the Reactable, Infractor is a piece of software that represents all of the NYTimes as a streaming beam of light, with individual stories floating through the stream like fireflies. Placing an interactive prism on the table splits this beam, allowing you to assign filters like "Obama" to make the stream more relevant. (A jog wheel, placed next to the prism, can alter the prism's specific sensitivity.)

Eventually, you'll tailor the beam to only hold topics you're interested in. Well, that, or you'll remember why the printing press doesn't use prisms to convey information. [Infractor via notcot]

We really didn't need postings on Microsoft's Careers page to tell us that a successor to Windows 7 is in the works. The only information in those job ads is that there could be some focus on Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows Live Mail integration. Other than that Microsoft just plain appears to be setting everything up for testing future development builds. Please page me when there's a leaked version of the builds, until then these are just job postings. [Ars Technica]

Like most concepts designs, this Carpool LED sign is great in theory. You're supposed to stick it on the top of a car (or even a cab) to show that you're willing to carpool and how many seats remain open. That's fantastic except it doesn't take into account that some of us don't want to pick up creepy, smelly strangers in the same fashion we would hitchhikers. The Halloween movies I've watched today even further prove this as a bad idea. [Yanko Design via Uber Gizmo]

A company called Cereplast decided that making plastic junk out of tapioca, corn, wheat and potatoes isn't gross enough. So now they're making flimsy cutlery out of that green gunk that builds on on water. Frankly, I don't care how much petroleum is saved in comparison to traditional plastic, I just plain don't want to shove something made of algae into my mouth. [Pop Sci]

Ideum has made yet another ultra-wide touchscreen surface and this one's designed to be capable of recognizing up to 50 different simultaneous touch points. I guess it could be fun if I had a few extra fingers or if a bunch of people crowded around and used all their toes. Geez. Can we just plain skip overdoing it with the touch points and work on getting one of these into my office? [Slashgear]

Since publishing the first leak, several more people have come forward with details on the Courier project.

This video is produced by the same firm that collaborated with Microsoft's Pioneer Studios on the previous clip, and it walks through a slightly different (and more conservative/realistic) iteration of the Courier interface. While the first video showed a handful of use cases, this one actually provides an overview of the interface and Courier's features, and more of how you would actually use it if you are not a designer.

The heart of Courier appears to what's called the "infinite journal," which is what it sounds like: A journal/scrapbook that is endless, bound only by storage constraints (presumably). Hopefully they will call it something less awkward. The journal can actually be published online, and it's shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There's also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.

This interface does share a few things in common with the other one: In particular, the hinge between the screens is still used as a pocket to "tuck" items you want to move from one page to another. It also still revolves almost exclusively around using the pen for input: In 4 minutes of video, there's not a virtual keyboard in sight. Fingers are still used just to navigate, through flicks, swipes and pinches.

The interface has a few more traditional elements than the first video, with more of a Microsoft feel (fonts and titles bars) and less of the entirely handwritten journal aesthetic: a smart agenda, more defined folder system, universal search and multi-page web browsing. It feels more evolved and fined, and less convoluted, suggesting it's more recent.

It also begins to bring into focus Courier's priorities, and possible limitations: Other than the brief glimpse at the library and the web browser, there is basically nothing about viewing content, like watching movies, reading books, or listening to music. Courier, in this iteration, appears to be all about creating and writing with a pen, which is vastly different from what everybody expects out of the Apple tablet.

We expect to have more a in-depth breakdown of the Courier interface in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that's a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple's tiger style. It's complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a "pocket" to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Over the next couple days we'll be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.

The awkwardly-acronymed CRISTAL, which stands for ""Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces," uses a camera to take an overhead shot of your living room setup, and you designate the compatible parts: TV, speakers, digital photo frame, HTPC, Roomba. Then you simply touch, swipe, drag and drop to control the room. Your digital media collection shows up as almost a Cover Flow-type design, and can be dragged either to the speakers or TV, or just examined more closely on the Surface-type screen itself. I love that you can watch a preview right there on the table, or quickly toss it to the TV to output it.

The system, right now, would cost a prohibitive $10,000-15,000, but the team says costs could definitely be lowered. Presumably they're not using an actual Surface, which costs about that much by itself. Still, it looks awfully responsive and just a blast to play with, so we hope they can figure out a way to get those costs down enough that, say, I can get one. [Wired]

You may remember, Bill Gates was a loyal tablet user for years (and he still uses one). He was such a fan, in fact, that back in 2001 Gates told CNN, "The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it...It's a PC that is virtually without limits — and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."

Obviously, Gates was wrong—at least about the timeline. It's seven years later and tablets are all but dead while netbooks and touchscreen smartphones thrive. Keep in mind that multitouch wasn't around yet, though the idea of smudging up your computer's screen probably didn't make much sense given that a stylus was the ideal means for navigation.

Microsoft has since dialed back their enthusiasm on the tablet form factor, but you can see its spirit live on in products like the Surface and Windows 7's multitouch support.

To me, the question is not so much whether or not tablets are capable of succeeding in the marketplace but how they've captured the imaginations of Bill Gates, Apple fanboys and Star Trek alike yet still managed to elude mainstream popularity. [CNN and Image]

After Mariner 3 failed to take images because of a hardware problem, Mariner 4 became NASA's next big hope to get images of the Red Planet. There were going to be ten Mariner missions, but they wanted these badly.

The spacecraft did its first flyby on July 15, 1965, at 00:18:36 UT. It took 21 pictures alternating green and red filters, which were saved to tape. Then, the probe went behind the planet and the signal was lost. Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, waited impatiently, listening to static as Mariner 4 travelled fearless across the dark side of Mars.

At 03:13:04 UT signal was reacquired. All systems were nominal, cruise mode was re-established, and transmission of the images started 8.5 hours later. It lasted until August 3.

The people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn't wait for them to be processed by the lab's imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and color them with pastel crayons.

I don't know about you, but I like the crayon version better than the actual image. [Images from the Data+Art exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, co-curated by Dan Goods]

Keep in mind, these two concept videos are not necessarily grounded in actual technologies that we have today, but were produced to "explore in a poetic narrative way how certain developing technologies could begin to blend and augment our daily lives".

The first clip is my personal favorite, as I love the idea of ordering a piano on my computer and watching it drop from my ceiling. But the second clip chooses a bit too much style over function for my taste. Do I really want information I'm looking for spilled across my desk like a spilled deck of cards?

*Keep in mind that both clips are available in YouTube HD, so you might not want to watch the embeds as they are. [i started something via SlashGear]

Gordon recounts the entire painful process in excruciating detail. Like, I got a headache reading it. It took 30 minutes to figure out where it plugged in—the most basic of all setup maneuvers—which required reading three manuals and calling tech support, who didn't know where to plug it in either.

Okay, it's up and running. Time to configure it. Logically, you can set everything up on the touch screen, right? I mean, it's a touch computer. After five minutes of fruitless poking, Gordon's crew realized maybe the mouse and keyboard were included for a reason—you need them to do the initial Surface set up. And after getting it to the point they could interact with it, another hour still was needed to finish setup.

At last, they finally got to the "truly dynamic and stunning user experience on the Surface." Philosophical question: Is an incredibly usable and fantastic product really those things if the process of getting it to that point is a nightmare? Sub-question: Is setting up a Surface really that hard? Or were Gordon and his people just horribly deficient human beings? [Kinesis Momentum]

Utilizing an array of infrared LEDs around the table, the guts of a PS3 Eye camera, a projector and some acrylic for the multitouch setup—along with a homemade wood cabinet and an old PC they had lying around (Core 2 Duo, 2 gigabytes RAM)—they fashioned together a multitouch beast for $350 that more or less mimics the surface experience.

The video runs through some of the demos available, which includes an ambient light/finger paint type program that can track all 10 fingers, a Pong-like game, and the usual photo shuffling, it's evident this was no half-baked project.

The project took a total of two weeks, and utilizes all open source software (Touchlib, AMCap, FlashOSC) to power the machine. For the entire lowdown (and tons more pics) on how this was constructed, definitely check out the post over on [Maximum PC].

As you can, see from the photo above, the computer is tracking hand gestures using a basic gesture language: pinching to grab, pulling hands apart to zoom, moving hands together to pan and rotate. In this demo, the content spewed from the omnidirectional projector is the WorldWide Telescope (the thing that made Scoble or somebody cry). It's pretty cool, especially when you see him pan all the way back to reveal the Big Bang, and then zoom in again to see that glowing dot that turns out to be the flippin' Milky Way.

And yes, it does remind me of the Total Perspective Vortex from Hitchhiker's Guide, even if it's not powered by a single piece of cake. (Trust me, I looked.)

Microsoft's TechFest is an annual jamboree of innovation and gadgetry from Microsoft Research, which means that while none of it is coming out as is in products in the near future, it's essentially what product development people use to add cool stuff to their actual releases. I'm here all day.

Surface is used in the way you'd think it would be used—to zoom in and out and scale things to people can view a map from the sky. There's voice communication and real-time tracking as well as instant messaging. [Microsoft]

Just looking at the “Image forming device, having an ejection tray, and a display is mounted to a cover” pretty much explains the premise. You place the camera on the screen and your photos are downloaded a la Microsoft Surface. Once downloaded to the printer's internal memory, you can browse the photos through the touchscreen and select those you'd like to actually print.

The printer would be pricey for certain, but illustrations do show that the screen tilts vertically. If it could double as a nice digital photo frame, I could definitely see the appeal. Make it happen, Sony! [US Patent Office via Electronic Pulp and Engadget]

It's not a system-wide fail, and we still like the Surface, but who doesn't love an error during promotion? Microsoft "goons" apparently hustled Yves immediately out after he snapped this shot, before he could do any more damage. Keep stickin' it to the man, readers! [Thanks, Yves!]

Correction: The Windows 7 touch UI above was not developed by the surface team, and so this general error message has nothing to do with them, and concerns only the separately developed UI.

Sadly, there's no stat as to its weight or tensile strength, but at 3 meters long (that's almost 9 feet), I can't imagine you could stand on it, shouting "I have a carbon fiber table, so I rule this house at last!" I mean, you probably could, but it might snap beneath your noble mass, once again returning the control of the house to your stowaway cousin who owns last year's 3mm carbon fiber table. Rats! [StylePark via bbGadgets]

As you can see in the video, there's nothing ground-breaking here, save for some fancy cars and interactive swatches for interior and exterior colors (the software was developed by Vectorform for BMW, btw). If you're up for a stiff German guy reading off a cue card, though, then by all means clicky clicky. [BMW Blog, Thanks Haratiu!]

To start with, real multitouch makes a stellar appearance with a giant Microsoft-Surface-style table which Judi Dench—the head of MI6—and other agents use with ease, simultaneously. In fact, the user interface on the table—albeit adorned for the required Hollywood eye candy—actually makes sense and is extremely attractive, gestures included. Everything on it is doable with current technology, even the part in which they place a dollar bill and it gets automatically scanned and identified.

There's also the huge video wall at M's office. Unlike the multitouch surface, this is a CGI effect. However, with enough money and the use of transparent OLED technology and gesture recognition, the video wall is also perfectly doable. In fact, I saw something similar in my visit to Philips Labs last August, although that transparent video wall—a simulation of a glass storefront—used projection rather than OLEDs.

Only a couple of technologies were exaggerated. One was Bond's cellphone camera capabilities—with 007 taking pictures of faces with 3D depth of field information from a very long distance. The other was the speed of data transmission between the cellphone and MI6's headquarters. However, you can perfectly imagine that all that may be real in the military world and just not available to consumers, specially looking at some of the latest camera and communications research.

But what really makes this movie is not the technology. Yes, it plays an important role: Bond gets geolocation information on the baddies, and he uses his camera to get some of their pics, which then are analyzed and cross-referenced by MI6 databases. But none of it is a gimmick. There is no magic zippo lighter capable of launching kinetic rocket fire balls and save the day at the end of the movie. The technology in Quantum of Solace is realistic and it integrates naturally into the film, it flows with the plot.

What makes it the best Bond movie ever is what makes an action movie good. The script to start with. Serious, but also witty, and with the right amount of reality stretching. It even has an underlying social theme, which is interesting and relates to the current world's political climate. Marc Forster's direction makes you wish he directed Indiana Jones IV. His movie runs like clockwork, with the action scenes being masterfully choreographed and filmed, and painting a deeper, much more complex portrait of not only Bond, but also M, who gets a lot more presence in this one (and is Judy bloody Dench. I rest my case).

And then there is Bond himself. Daniel Craig really makes the movie work with his presence alone. He's a badass, but feels absolutely human. He has flair and a taste for luxury—wait until he arrives to Bolivia to see what I mean—but he gets gritty and dirty all the time. He could be a psychopath, but you can see that he has heart. He can seduce a women into bed like the best Connery would do, but you can actually see that he cares about her. You can feel that he is a hopeless romantic below the cold surface. A guy consumed by the need of vengeance and the contradiction of being betrayed by the love of his life. Yet, at the same time, he still loves her to the point of risking everything, even while she is dead.

And he likes cocktails.

Yes. Go. See it. Now.