Tag: gadgets
Enertia, the electric motorcycle for commuters
The Enertia Electric Motorcycle won’t replace your Harley – but it might replace your car. Designed for commuters, the Enertia has a top speed of 80kph and a range of 70km per charge, and recharges in three hours, so you could likely even nip home for lunch if you liked. It’s a zero emissions vehicle, and while the batteries aren’t terrific right now, they’re modular enough that it’s possible to upgrade just that component to improve the overall function. Standard model is $12,000, and the limited edition carbon fiber model is $15,000. [GT]
Enertia Electric Motorcycle via Kneeslider
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US judges rule warrantless tracking of Internet use OK
This weekend, in a 3-0 ruling, California judges ruled that investigators may monitor URLs and email addresses visited by suspects without need for wiretap authorization. This does not entitle them to snoop the actual content of the pages or emails. Judges ruled that this was equivalent to “pen register” law already in place, which allowed investigators to monitor phone numbers called and addresses visited without actually being privy to the contents of any communication passed within. “[I]t does not find out the contents of the messages or the particular pages on the Web sites the person viewed,” said the ruling. The rationale was that since users already submit those addresses for use by their ISP, they have already forfeited expectation of privacy concerning them, same as if they’d written an address on an envelope and expected the Post Office to read it. [GT]
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Using noise to increase laser signal
While noise is usually a bad thing for your signal (hence the ‘signal to noise ratio’ concept) a group of researchers from Belgium, France and Spain have found that adding a tiny dose of noise to a an electrical current can make a smoothly controlled laser where before they had an uncontrolled one. The vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) would be extremely useful in boosting bandwidth if they were reliable (unlike now). They’re not sure why it works – noise ought to generally be a negative deal – but there’s another truism: whatever works, works. [GT]
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Hard drives with ultra-powerful zaps of LASER beams
New tests, from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, show pulses from ultra-powerful lasers outperform magnets by two orders of magnitude. By flipping polarity of the laser to either positive or negative, binary sequences of one or zero are indicated. Data in these tests transfered in intervals of 40 quadrillionths of a second, which is about a hundred times faster than we’ve got now, which means we could store a hundred times as many Lol cats pictures in the same amount of time. Oh, efficiency! [GT]
Lighting a Fire Under Hard Drives (via Crunchgear)
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USB virtual friends from Brando finally hit Europe
While it may be that you can pick your friends, with Brando’s USB virtual friends you can pick their very souls! (Maniacal laughter) With 100 preset catchphrases and a personality editor to allow you to fine tune exactly how your minions, er, friends, behave, they also have a little photo frame where their face should be, so you can paste in someone you love, or just want to dominate. We’ve been waiting eagerly since they were announced, and finally, they’re on sale! $17 each or $30 for the pair. [GT]
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Ultra Slim Bluetooth Dongle
Now here’s a USB device you’ve got room to slip in your loafer — since it’s barely bigger than a penny! The Ultra Slim Bluetooth Dongle is only 4.5mm thick and has a slide cover so there’s nothing, as it were, to lose. It imparts Bluetooth 1.2 connectivity with a 10m radius range. £20. [GT]
Ultra Slim Bluetooth Dongle (via Red Ferret Journal)
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Pocket Cyberman Etch-A-Sketch
Ever wonder what’s inside the head of a Cyberman? Get your own 10cm pocket type with the Cyberman Etch-A-Sketch and it can be whatever you can squiggle on there with the little silver knobs. The head flips up to show a tiny but entirely functional version of the gray plastic screen we all know and love. While it claims to be an “ages 4+” item I’m sure they’ll be showing up in the pockets of more than a few so-called adults. £8. [GT]
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Look for 'weird' extraterrestrial life on Titan, say scientists
Don’t just focus on Earth-style life forms when looking for extraterrestrial beings, says the U.S. National Research Council, in a statement of the breathtakingly (be it oxygen or methane) obvious. “Advances throughout the last decade in biology and biochemistry show that the basic requirements for life might not be as concrete as we thought,” said committee chair John Baross, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, Seattle. “The search so far has focused on Earth-like life because that’s all we know, but life that may have originated elsewhere could be unrecognizable compared with life here.” Goodness! One might think scientists were creatures of closed and narrow focus, in need of reminder that not everything that looks like a fork should go in your mouth! Developing (over the next thousand years). [GT]
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Sprint drops customers who call too much
I believe it was Basil Fawlty who said, “this would be a wonderful hotel, if it wasn’t for the customers.” Sprint Nextel seems to have taken the same attitude. On June 29, 2007, Sprint sent letters notifying some customers that their service would be canceled by the end of July due to excessive calls to customer service. “Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information,” the letter reads. “While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.” Sprint has long had a reputation for poor customer service (which I’ve personally experienced) and for the first quarter of 2007, it reported a loss of 220,000 post-paid monthly subscribers. It is clear that Sprint have dropped the high-maintenance customers as an attempt to conserve resources, but fail to see that this attitude is what cost them money in the first place. [GT]
Sprint breaks up with high-maintenance customers
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