He’s now planning on a Hummer Hybrid where a jet engine spins up the juice. He reckons he can make it go from 300 to 600 hp and get 60 miles per gallon.
Daily Kos: Doing what Detroit says is impossible
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Legalise it – and no one wants it
Smoking police come after pub for smell of smoke in garden
Canon Snap concept design offers peek into the digital camera future
Although Canon still rules the day when it comes to digital cameras the company shouldn’t rest on its laurels. New from the concept lab of independent designer David Munscher comes the Canon Snap camera. Able to fit snugly on your finger the idea is to merge the high-powered functionality of Canon’s larger product line with a sleek and tiny form factor. Hopefully, the suits at Canon are listening. — Adario Strange
iShoes motorized skates: cruise at 15 mph without moving your legs
While iShoes certainly will push you along at a leisurely 15 miles per hour, you might look a little silly wearing them. iShoes are an invention designed by brothers Ilya and Boris Kaganovich from Minnesota, and work a lot like roller skates, except they are motorized and controlled with a hand unit. Weighing eight pounds each, the skates are powered by electric motors that are good for five to seven miles per charge.
Useful for a short range journey, but you might not be getting back. Right now the iShoes are just a prototype, so no pricing or availability — though we do have a video for you after the jump. — Kevin
Bling Bling Laptop
f you are a true fanboy of everything Mac, and you are super-excited about the launch of Leopard (the latest operating system from Apple), then celebrate by purchasing a gold-plated MacBook Pro. Computer Choppers has upped the bling quotient with a gold and diamond-encrusted laptop for those with more money than sense. The computer itself is nothing special with a 2.2 or 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 802.11n Wi-Fi, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB internal drive, but it’s the gold plating that makes you sit up and drool.
Two versions are available; a 24-karat gold-and-diamond version, with the diamonds filling the Apple logo, or the plain gold version sans shiny rocks. They’ll set you back $9,000 and $6,000 respectively — it’s just unfortunate it only comes in the 15-inch version instead of the more useful 17-inch line. I understand gold plating your tech is all the rage these days, but a big gold brick sitting on your desk is going to get stolen as soon as you turn your back. — Stephen Schleicher
Take the jump for another shot of this highly expensive, high-tech laptop.
NEC SX-9 supercomputer is world’s fastest at 839 TFLOPS
NEC has a new supercomputer it’s touting as the world’s fastest. The SX-9 is capable of processing a peak 839 teraFLOPS, and a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS per individual core. Well hey, that’s a lot of FLOPS. The picture above might be a little misleading, but each SX-9 is actually a little taller than your average person. Like the computers of old that were as big as a room, you don’t want one of these sitting on your desk. Yet.
Supercomputers are incredibly useful in fields where there’s an enormous amount of information which must be handled regularly, like weather forecasting or fields that rely on advanced mathematics. Progress has been fast: at the beginning of 2007, IBM and Cray had supercomputers capable of processing 280.6 TFLOPS and 318 TFLOPS, respectively. Deep Blue, probably the most famous supercomputer for taking on chess champion Garry Kasparov, was capable of processing 11.38 GFLOPS. — Kevin Hall
Senjo No Kizuna: a glorious panoramic Gundam simulator
Giant robot lovers, rejoice! And then buy plane tickets to Japan.
Japanese game purveyors Banpresto and Bandai joined forces to release Senjo No Kizuna, which features mechs from the ultra-popular Gundam universe blowing each other up. Sitting inside a simulator, the player controls her mech with both dual joysticks and foot pedals. Each pod is a single-seater, closed environment, has a panoramic display and is networked so players will face combatants from adjoining pods and from units in other arcades in matches of five versus five. Senjo No Kizuna also issues players a Pilot Card that stores all of their combat data and allows them to build upon their record with consecutive plays.
Click through to see a video of the game in action. — Kevin Hall
D-Box GP-200 chair adds motion to your games
Hey racing buffs, do you find it’s just not as satisfying to pull off hair-raising turns with your average controller? If you’re looking for the off-screen action to match your gameplay, the D-Box GP-200 gaming chair might do nicely.
Picture a padded bucket seat propped up on three hydraulic legs and fitted with five speakers. Now imagine said hydraulic chair wiggling all over the place, turn-for-turn with your virtual race car, meanwhile your ears throb from the roar of the engine. It’s the kind of fun you could normally only enjoy while playing an arcade simulator, though at several times the price: $16,425.
Yowza! If you’re still with me, the D-Box GP-200 works with a handful of racing games, as well as other simulators such as Flight Simulator X. — Kevin Hall
Aviation enthusiast replaces his bedroom with $30,000 simulator
Love planes? So do we, but it’s probably a safe bet that John Davis loves them more. Rather than go for a bedroom built into a plane, he turned his own into a fully functional, professional-grade simulator.
Now 47 years old, it took Davis eight years and over $30,000 to complete his working replica of a Boeing 747 cockpit. His rig has a center screen measuring 12 by nine feet flanked by two 19 inch flatscreens, and uses Microsoft Flight Simulator and Aerowinx PS1 for the visuals. All the attention to detail has really paid off — Davis shelved his graphic design job and now rents out time on the simulator to pilot trainees looking to get their wings.
Our favorite line from Gizmodo’s interview with Davis: “There’s no room for anything else — that’s why my wife had to go!” — Kevin Hall
USB Disk Dock lets you plug in hard drives
Now you can hook up a dirt-cheap SATA disk drive to your PC or Mac by simply plugging it into this USB desktop adapter that works just like an iPod dock. Until now, if you wanted to add a bare hard drive to your computer, you either had to put it in some sort of enclosure, or open up the hood of your PC and install it next to the other drive in there. That’s not easy for the uninitiated.
This disk dock couldn’t be simpler, accommodating 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch disks that you simply plug into its top. It’s a cinch to connect it to your PC or Mac, too, because all you need to do is hook up a USB cable between this dock and your computer, just like you do with your digital camera. Then that naked hard drive acts just like any more-expensive external drive. All this convenience is relatively cheap, costing you just $46.79. — Charlie White
Force feedback vest takes gaming a step too far
f gaming wasn’t already on the hot seat, now those violent games your parents and senators hate so much can now simulate gun shot and other torso wounds. The TN Game’s Third Space Vest is the work of physician Mark Ombrellaro who got the idea from a type of vest used in a real medical circumstances to simulate and investigate types of injuries.
The vest is designed with the shooter game in mind (even though it could be used for other types of games). It includes eight different zones that can apply a wide range of feedback — anywhere from a simple tap, to a full blown explosion-type of force.
This vest will be available in November for $189 and come bundled with a space game and Call of Duty II. A software development kit will be available shortly and expect patches to come for other big name shooters like the Quake, Doom and Unreal Tournament series. — Travis Hudson
Ferrari Segway parts fool and money
M61 “Counter-Rocket” gatling gun-on-a-truck shoots down mortars like skeet
Mortars pose a significant threat to infantry as even if they aren’t always lethal, they drop out of the sky and can effectively pin a squad down. Well, some crazy military engineers decided to take the Phalanx M61 (pictured above) that protects naval vessels from anti-ship missiles and toss it on the back of a truck to counter mortars before they can land.
That big white lump on the top of the M61 is a radar. Once an incoming mortar is detected, the M61 spews out several hundred shells from its six 20 mm barrels until said mortar explodes. The Phalanx M61 “Counter-Rocket” is a closed-in weapon system (or CIWS) — meaning it takes care of itself for the most part — and it can fire 4500-7000 rounds per minute.
Click on through to see the M61 play target practice with a few mortars. — Kevin Hall
Samsung to show 10mm-thick HDTVs, thin LCD race intensifies
We were surprised at Hitachi’s 32-inch HDTV whose thickness was just 0.74 inches. Now it looks like Samsung has topped that, creating a flat-panel HDTV that’s half that thick. Imagine a TV that’s just 10mm thin — just over a third of an inch. That’s the depth of this 40-inch 1080p LCD TV (pictured at right) from Samsung that will be unveiled at the FPD International 2007 convention in Yokohama, Japan later this month. When a panel is that thin, the design looks more like a pane of glass than an LCD.
To accomplish this feat, Samsung uses miniaturization techniques it learned from manufacturing desktop monitors, and upscales them into TV size. That 46-inch screen pictured at left is just as thin, but the screen’s bezel has been shrunk as well, to just 10mm wide (as opposed to 30mm). Samsung’s not talking about when such paper-thin TVs will ship, but you can be sure the company aims to beat that Hitachi set’s announced release date of 2009. — Charlie White
Suzuki Biplane is a motorcycle, but looks like it could fly
Let’s hope the Biplane didn’t get its name from something that happened during test runs — motorcycles tend to be at their best with at least one wheel on the ground.
The Biplane is a concept motorcycle design that Suzuki is showing off at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show. Details are scarce, but it looks damn fast and the sleek, yellow shell looks like something straight out of an anime. Click through the gallery for a few other angles of the Biplane. — Kevin Hall
Jalponik, via BoingBoing Gadgets
NSA To Recruit Children, Furries
ey, kids! Have you ever wanted to listen in on the conversations of other people without them knowing it? Create codes that allow spies in the field to get information about enhanced interrogation techniques without those killjoys at Amnesty International finding out? Dress up as a totally extreme rapping turtle and get a blow job from a sexy lady squirrel? Well now you can, thanks to the Cryptokids— the NSA’s new program for young people and furfans. The Web site, with detailed biographies of its cadre of rad furry spies, has had so much more effort put into it than we’re comfortable thinking about. But it’s important to recruit children into the spy apparatus, as it’s the best way to get info on the parents. We call them “nature’s hidden listening devices”! As for the furries, well: do you want that fat sweaty guy in the raccoon suit working for us … or for the terrorists?
Scribd – youtube for documents
CCTV Camera’s don’t solve crime
What society is watching
PHP development odds and ends
PHC-WIN itself is written in PHP and utilizes wbObjects, my object oriented layer for WinBinder to create windows controls.
Incredible bathroom design
Yup, we should be dead
Thought this might strike a chord or two!!
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE:-
1940’s, 50’s,60’s and 70’s !!
First,
we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They
took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then
after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints
We had no
childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode
our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking .
As
children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding
in the back of a van – loose – was always great fun.
We
drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle.
We
shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We
ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because……
WE
WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We
would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back
when the streetlights came on.
No
one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We
would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem
.
We did not have
Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or
Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of
trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents
.
We played
with worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
Made up games
with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we
did not poke out any eyes.
We
rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang
the bell, or just yelled for them!
Local teams
had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn
to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a
parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation
has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors
ever !
The past 50
years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We
had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we
learned
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!
You
might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our
own good.
and
while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
Kind of makes
you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!
PS -The BIG
type is because your eyes are shot at your age
Best Wishes Willie
Kids ‘should set tests’ – Education – News – Manchester Evening News
Not only that, they should mark each others’ tests as well.
No, seriously. This is what the UK National Curriculum advice is for this year.
First the UK has managed to scare the people into doing whatever it wants in the name of security, then it created a nanny state, and now it’s dumbing the people down – apparently people are still complaining too much about having their DNA on file for no particular reason.