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I always found David Bowie to be a tad creepy—thanks a lot, Labyrinth—but I’ve always loved Space Oddity as one of his greatest songs. That and Fame… It’s already something of a spaced-out nursery rhyme, so a children’s book is a perfect medium shift. Andrew Kolb created this Bowie-inspired picture book that follows Major Tom…
Intel’s ultrabook spec is one of the best things the PC market has going for it right now. Asus, excited by this, plans to release five to seven new models of the slim, powerful PCs in the next year. Overkill? https://gizmodo.com/intel-insists-macbook-air-thin-ultrabooks-will-be-under-5827999 Though range of models will range in price between $800 and $2000, they’ll all…
Last week I was thrown into an anti-Verizon rage when I heard that Verizon wouldn’t be picking up the Samsung Galaxy S II like the rest of the networks. But BGR claims they’re getting something better: The Nexus Prime. https://gizmodo.com/if-verizon-passes-on-the-galaxy-s-ii-ill-be-mad-pissed-5834764 “Verizon doesn’t think the Samsung GALAXY S II will be competitive with the iPhone 5…
29-year-old Christopher Lowcock was put under a court-ordered curfew for driving, drug charges, and carrying a weapon. They even tagged his leg to keep him under surveillance. That didn’t stop him, of course. All he had to do was take the thing off and away he went. Two British security staff got fired for Lowcock’s…
At $1495, the Taga Bike may seem like an expensive proposition, but given the prices of bikes and baby trolleys, I would get one. Also, this thing is bloody awesome: it transforms from bike to trolley in 20 seconds! It’s made with aluminum, with a Shimano Nexus Inter-3 internal gear hub, disk brakes on both…
The only thing more embarrassing than discovering an atomic traitor high up on your government? Revealing the news by accident via a mysteriously leaked internet video. China’s newest (accused) spy is in radioactively hot water. Nobody knows how the leaked video—apparently from an internal government briefing—made its way onto YouTube. But the damage is done:…
120 petabytes, 120 million gigabytes, 24 billion MP3s, 1 trillion files. That’s how much IBM’s new storage array holds—nearly an order of magnitude more data than the largest current system, making it the biggest hard drive array ever built. The array is composed of 200,000 traditional hard drives working together. To avoid bottle-necks when reading…
At long last! After much suffering and delays, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been certified to fly by the Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Agency. Now Boeing can start delivering the planes to their clients. https://gizmodo.com/when-big-toys-break-boeings-dreamliner-delay-explained-5302447 The first delivery will be on September 26 to the Japanese ANA. Godspeed, Dreamliner! [Boeing]
“Let’s say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here’s how you do it,” says financial columnist Al Lewis. What follows is a list of everything HP’s done in a year. The truth hurts. A lot. [WSJ]
BlackBerry Messenger, GroupMe, iMessage, Facebook, Google Voice, and now Samsung’s ChatON. These message apps (and many others) promise to deliver us from the tyranny of SMS messaging. Let’s talk about why this, too, will suck. https://gizmodo.com/at-ts-new-text-plan-overcharges-you-by-10-000-000-perce-5832245 How are these mobile messaging services supposed to save us from SMS when there are so many of them…
This video of life in the space shuttle was recorded in the 1980s. I don’t know what kind of dehydrated space mushrooms these space goofballs ate or what kind of astroturf they smoked, but I love it. [NPR—Thanks John!]
The sick bastards at Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab thought it’d be a hoot to force two chatbot AI programs to talk to one another. The result is deranged, extremely uncomfortable, a fraught with hostility. Much like real human interaction! The little experiment used Cornell’s Cleverbot AI, allowing two programs—a grey-headed guy who looks like he…
The Samsung Epic 4G Touch, which is the Samsung Galaxy S II for Sprint, was supposed to launch tomorrow but has now been pushed back because of Hurricane Irene. It should still come out by next week, though. The delay sorta sucks because Europe’s been having all the fun with Pocket Now] https://gizmodo.com/samsung-galaxy-s-ii-a-first-draft-of-your-next-android-5818202
Your wet dreams are set to suffer another setback as Sarah Palin, Barack Obama and Beyonce have been excluded from the porny .xxx domain by the registry manager, ICM Registry. The list of VIPs is long, perhaps in the thousands. In fact, ICM claims they have locked 15,000 .xxx domains. They are not only celebrities,…
No, you’re not looking at Igor, The Hunchbacked Waterlad. This is Shane Dorian, one of the best (if not the very best) big wave surfers in the world, and he’s wearing the world’s first inflatable wetsuit. In 2010, while attacking monstrous waves at Mavericks—a notoriously dangerous surf spot in California—Dorian suffered the worst wipeout of…
Molecular astrophysicist Markus Hammonds gives us this perspective on how the size of a dwarf star like Sirius B looks compared to Earth. Those dwarfs are really tiny. And pretty. [Luminous Red Nova]
Anonymous would have you believe that they’re about the little guy, going after oppressive governments and major corporations both online and IRL. But who quietly benefits when they mount a protest like their recent one against BART? Time Warner. Wow. It’s not intentional. It’s all in the details. You know those Guy Fawkes masks that…
Fret not—Hurricane Irene didn’t blow all the stupid out of the world. The TomTom Go Live 1535 M packs apps! The coolest one? A neutered Twitter program that only lets you broadcast your location to the internet. Vroom! Yep, the Twitter app can’t actually read or write tweets. But if you want your followers (and…
A friend sent me this yesterday. She was as terrified as I was when she saw it. The horror, my friends. Pure, intense, break-your-spine horror.
Did we learn nothing from Independence Day? Nuking things for nuking’s sake just doesn’t work like we think it might. Take a hurricane, for example. It’d be relatively immune to whatever ordinance Bill Pullman—sorry, humanity—might throw at it. First of all there’d be the obvious nuclear fallout. Because hurricanes are coziest in the tradewinds, NOAA…
