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Slick Keyport Keyfob Shipping Now, Still Way Too Expensive

The Keyport, that undeniably cool yet retardedly expensive keychain thing that holds a half dozen of your keys together without jingling, is now shipping. If you’ve got $295 sitting around and nothing better to do with it, now’s your chance to keep your keys from making noise or scratching your iPod in your pocket ever…

Death Is A Lonely Hang-Glider

What lies beyond death? A really cheesy acid trip, according to 1990’s Flatliners. In many ways, Flatliners is a percursor of much better films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (complete with the medical procedure, and the delving into the characters’ pasts.) There are two reasons to watch Flatliners: to see the young (and…

Justice Department Says $222,000 Damages Awarded to RIAA in File-Sharing Suit Not “Obviously Unreasonable”

The Department of Justice says that the $222,000 verdict—over $9,000 a song—Jammie Thomas got slapped with for file-sharing when she (somewhat feebly via her weak evidence) went up against the recording industry lawsuit machine is not unconstitutionally excessive. https://gizmodo.com/idiotic-jury-awards-riaa-222-000-for-24-pirated-songs-307357 As part of her appeal, she filed to have the damages ruled unconstitutional in their heft,…

Doctor Who Says Bigger Is Better

The BBC will be attempting to prove that bigger is better when the Doctor Who Christmas Special, also known cheerfully as “Voyage of the Damned” airs on Christmas Day this year. It’ll run longer than the previous Christmas episodes, and has an hour long documentary tacked onto the end of it. All in all, that’s…

Rumor Smashed: No IPTV on Xbox 360 in Fall Update

Although the Fall Xbox 360 Update brings a lot (most notably spectacular DivX and XviD support), what it doesn’t bring is IPTV. A few sites picked up the rumor that IPTV came with this update, but needs provider support to work. However, we contacted Microsoft and they told us in no uncertain terms that there…

London Mayor Is Eco-Pimp

You’d better have your carbon offsets, bitch, or Ken Livingston will slap you up. The London mayor’s shiny cyber-pimp coat is made out of household insulation. He wore it as part of a promo appearance at No. 1, Lower Carbon Drive, a new house on Trafalgar Square which showcases ways for Londoners to reduce their…

The Seasonal Affective Disorder Virtual Reality Film Festival

Bad weather has trapped you in the house, and it’s getting darker outside every day. You’re feeling depressed and crazy. What you need is a dose of dystopian cinema that’s all about how the dark world you inhabit is just the product of some AI’s fevered imagination. io9 always wants to make you feel worse,…

Sea Creatures Float in New Smartglass Aquatic Carousel

Nobody wants to ride merry-go-rounds anymore because horse-drawn carriages are so last century. That’s why Manhattan’s Battery Park is setting up the first aquatic carousel this summer. Instead of mounting a horsey inside a tacky gold-plated circus tent, visitors get to coast through a nautilus-shaped carousel on the back of a dolphin or a manatee…

Dealzmodo: Xbox 360 HD DVD Player $129

Toys “R” Us has the XBox 360 HD DVD player on sale for $129, quite a good deal when ou see that the normal price is $170ish on Google Products. It still comes with King Kong, like it did when the drive first came out, and still qualifies you for those five free movies with…

The A-Team Limousine: Chauffeurs of Fortune

Apparently being a soldier of fortune was no longer lucrative because it looks like the former team of crack commandos we all know and love has taken to chauffeuring around partygoers (and appearing in Warcraft ads) to pay the bills. If you have a prom (or other social event) and no one else can help,…

I Am Legend May End With More Zip

I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence confirmed that he reshot the film’s ending at the last moment. But he seemed a tad embarrassed by the topic, saying he “didn’t want to talk about it.” Rumor has it the new ending is a lot more upbeat than the novel’s original downer ending. [Sci Fi Wire] http://io9.com/scifi/i-am-legend/-323434.php

Microsoft Kills Santa

After Santa the IM bot’s supposed obscenities came to light, Microsoft tried very hard to fix the fat bastard so he wouldn’t curse up a storm at children. Programmers weren’t completely satisfied with what came out the other end, so they threw up their hands in defeat and said, “screw it” to the whole thing…

Class War Between Mars And Venus

A new web TV show could pick up where Firefly left off, telling gritty stories of class warfare on human colonies. Venus Rises is filming now in New Jersey. Four episodes will be available next year on national video-on-demand cable channel Illusion TV as well the show’s own site. One glance at the first episode’s…

T-Mobile Customer Service Killed By Flooding in the Northwest

Our busybody brother Consumerist is reporting that T-Mobile’s customer service is totally down and out for the time being thanks to some wrath-of-god flooding in the Pacific Northwest. Their soggy computers can’t pull up customer info, apparently. It’s been down since last night, though no word on when it’ll be back up. [Consumerist, Image via…

How To: Subscribe to the Best Gizmodo Stories on RSS

A couple of you have asked us how you can subscribe to a “best of” roundup of Gizmodo stories for the week, so we figured we’d share the answer with the rest of the class. There’s no weekly Giz round up yet, but you can point your RSS reader here and subscribe to our top…

“Golden Compass” Is Steampunk, Not Fantasy

The Golden Compass is sneaking science fiction into the holiday movie season, which is usually reserved for magical wonders and barely-funny revamps of the Santa Claus myth. The movie may be wrapped in fantasy trappings with its brave-but-cute kids and talking bears, but The Golden Compass will be more steampunk than Narnia. In fact, the…

Rocket Launcher vs. Bulletproof Glass in a Battle for the Ages

Here’s a question that I didn’t know I was curious about until I heard it asked, at which point I became insanely interested: can a rocket launcher break through bulletproof glass? My answer came in video form, and it’s a big fat sometimes. With thinner bulletproof glass, it gets punched through like paper, as seen…

Sci-fi author Jo Walton writes about the value, from her point of view, of science fiction: “SF lets you talk about the human condition more widely and from different angles by contrasting it with the alien condition and the AI condition and the android condition . . . In SF, you get books like Spin…

Cheap Time Travel is Easy With the Flux Capacitor

Scientists have been examining the possibilities of time travel for decades, but now you can stroll into any store and purchase a Flux Capacitor for a couple hundred bucks. People have been recreating the time-tripping DeLorean from Back to the Future for years, and now a high-end toymaker has done them one better. Diamond Select…

Xbox Live Video Marketplace Coming to Europe on December 11

European Xbox 360 owners don’t just get the Dashboard update with DivX and XviD playback, they’re finally getting Xbox Live Video Marketplace as well! They’ve been asking for it forever (seriously, they ask almost every time there’s Video Marketplace news), but come December 11, they’ll be able to pay 380 points for 720p HD video…