The D-Link DSM-750's journey to stores is something of an epic.

#boingboing regular Dean "Mustard Hamsters" Putney has built a robotic rig that frames his school's chalk board, invited his mates to come draw on it, and will now attempt to stitch together the world's largest image, projected at 40 gigapixels.

He's streaming the attempt live from his site, which will now break. Go Hamsters!

I chatted with him about it in IRC:

[joelev] what's the one line description?
[joelev] You're going to tak ea series of images?
[joelev] and then stitch them together?
[mustardhamsters] how about Largest Digital Image Process Video Stream
[mustardhamsters] yep
[mustardhamsters] i built a robot to do it
[joelev] how do you know it's the record image?
[mustardhamsters] current is 16 gigs
[mustardhamsters] ours is a projected 40
[mustardhamsters] gigapixels
[mustardhamsters] we're doubling it
[joelev] you have a machine with enough ram to do that? :)
[mustardhamsters] i'm buying a solaris sparc server
[mustardhamsters] 10 processors
[mustardhamsters] 20 gigs of ram
[mustardhamsters] two raid cases each with a dozen 18 gig scsis
[joelev] bitchun
[joelev] I have to leave soon
[mustardhamsters] i can tell you about the whole process in a minute or two, i'm setting up the camera now
[joelev] but I will make a post
[mustardhamsters] best part about it: $500
[joelev] Godspeed!

I've got to pop out for the evening, but you can join him in #boingboing on freenode.net if you want to chat back.

Giant Photo: Second Attempt [MustardHamsters.com]

Despite having nothing to do with Cheap Trick at all — except for the cheap trick we all play on ourselves believing there is anything unique or selfish about the need to love and to be loved — "I Want You to Want Me" is an interactive art project built from data mined from various dating sites, organizing into a heart-achingly beautiful touchscreen presentation where each person is represented as a balloon.

It was one of the pieces at MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" show, which is apparently no longer on display. I'm kicking myself for missing it.

[via Cool Hunting]

Aussie designer Craig Arnold makes these "Re:vision" cuff bracelets out of parts from old camera lenses, perfect for the fashionable photographer. (Or pretenders to both, like myself.)

They're AU $190 and up, which ain't cheap, but they look well made. Or if you're handy with a saw and grinder, you've got a fun new DIY idea.

Catalog Page [Oye Modern via Cool Hunting]

In 60 minutes, we'll be hosting the second weekly game on Boing Boing's official IRC channel, #boingboing on FreeNode IRC. This week's game? Rule 34 Challenge. The game starts at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 8pm GMT / 9pm BST.

Rules Rule 34, as all men know, is the cosmic rule that demands that porn can be found on the Internet to fit any concept. The rules are simple: numerous times over the course of one hour, I will shout out the Rule 34 Challenge. Contestants will then scramble to Google to find an image or link that puts that person, character or concept in pornographic light. The first three people to present an appropriate link in channel will get points. At the end of the hour, we will add up the points and have our Rule 34 Champions! And we'll knock up the chat log so everyone can bask in our depravity firsthand.

Needless to say, this game will be NSFW.

So, How To Play?: Use an IRC client (or follow this handy-dandy link to a Java client that will run in your browser) to join #boingboing on Freenode. (chat.freenode.net)

Since you will need to be able to private message people in game, register your nick by typing "/msg NickServ register [choose a password]"

Once you've done that, message me that you want to play ("/msg Brownlee I want to play!"). I'll send you a message back, confirming that you're in.

This game won't have any player limits, but you'll still have to message me to play.

See you there!

The story has been developing all week, but once Wal-Mart decided to stop carrying bottles that use Bisphenol A — a chemical which may or may not induce hormonal changes, especially in children — bottle-maker Nalgene has announced they'll ditch the chemical in their manufacturing process.

Reports the Times:

Nalgene’s decision to drop the plastic that transformed it from an obscure maker of laboratory equipment into a consumer brand does not mean the company is leaving the drinking bottle business. It has long made bottles from other plastics that lack the glasslike transparency and rigidity that made polycarbonate popular.

Last month, Nalgene introduced a line of bottles made from a relatively new plastic from the Eastman Chemical Company, Tritan copolyester, that shares most of polycarbonate’s properties, including shatter-resistance, but is made without the chemical

Bottle Maker to Stop Using Plastic Linked to Health Concerns [NYTimes via Treehugger]

The Pirate Bay, a popular MMORPG which pits players against the obsolete middlemen standing between artists and consumers, claims that a cop who led a raid on its servers is in the employ of Warner Brothers.

In a statement issued today, TPB says that the officer, Jim Keyzer, is not only a key witness against them in court, but canceled a counter-investigation that arose when The Pirate Bay's accused its enemies of "data trespassing," whatever the hell that is.

"The 39-year old investigator isn't the objective professional a police investigator should be. Since March 16 this year, he is employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the prosecution against The Pirate Bay. Keyzer himself confirmed the information but refused to reveal what his position within the company is."

Peter Athlin, lawyer to TPB's Peter Sunde, describes this conflict of interests between police and plaintiff as a "legal outrage."

Analysis? It's hardly a legal outrage for him to take the job—after all, the record industry has every reason to love him and want to offer him a place under its leathery wing. But he can't now testify on its behalf without looking like a big corrupt penis, and the whole situation reminds us how slimy and weird the RIAA and its member companies are.

Assuming it's actually true, of course!

Samsung has announced that they have developed a new kind of cell phone battery powered by water and a hydrogen cartridge. Crave explains:

Here's how it works: When the handset is switched on, reaction between metal and water in the phone produce hydrogen gas. This is then channeled to the fuel cell, where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power.

Samsung says the new battery could last for up to 10 hours. Based on four hours of use daily on average, the hydrogen cartridge would have to be replaced about every five days.

Sounds good, but wake me up when I can simply pull out the little plastic tab and recharge my cell phone by putting it under the faucet, like a cheap squirt gun.

Samsung: Water-powered cell phones by 2010 [Crave]

This hovering space-wagon is a fantastic space age concept car designed by Syd Mead for US Steel in 1961. Knowing full well that the future would all be about electronic rave picnics on the surface of extra-solar alien worlds, Mead saw fit to install a fairly bitching DJ mixer in the back of the vehicle. The gentleman in the mustard slacks at the forefront of the image appears to be some sort of Venusian: notice that his scrawny, horrible legs appear to be twice the length of his torso. Thanks for uploading it to the In The Year 2000 pool, Grain_Edit!

In the other pools: despite highlighting it on Monday, this week's Electro-Selectro entries were pretty dry. However, props go to J_bary for uploading this image of an electronic nose from the 1950s that sniffed out power-line leaks. Sometimes the most boring things are fascinating: who knew that electrical maintenance men used to use soap bubbles to detect power line leaks before this high-falutin' electronic nose gadgetry revolutionized the industry? Thanks, J!

There's a fascinating article over at Computer World about the difficulty the blind have using the Internet as web site design becomes increasingly sophisticated and image based. This is certainly enough to make me feel guilty about never bothering to fill in my ALT tags:

"It can take a while to wade through a strange site -- it can be maddening," complained Jay Leventhal, who is blind and serves as editor of AccessWorld Magazine, produced by the American Foundation for the Blind in New York. "Sometimes you find what you want to buy, but then you can't find the submit button. It seems to literally not be there. A skilled [blind] user can navigate a majority of the sites on the Web these days, but you have to master certain tricks, like jumping from header to header in order to skip over a lot of junk, and use the search function to get the information you want. An average user can struggle for a long time looking for something and will even struggle on a familiar site."

Staying offline is just as bad, with most blind computer users looking wistfully back to the days of DOS, when information was presented more simply: more textual than symbolic.

Blind users still struggle with 'maddening' computing obstacles [Computer World]

There's not much to recommend the SunView PMP Projector (PMPP), a pedestrian and chunky media player that runs Windows CE, except...a built-in "pico-projector" that will shoot a 53-inch VGA image onto any available flat surface. Now it's not a very bright image at that size — just 9 lux, just shy of one footcandle (to use a modern measurement) — which means you'll only be using this in a darkened environment. But it's the notion that counts. While these tiny LED-based projectors won't be replacing LCD screens in our gadgets any time soon, it's reasonable to think that in the next few years they could become as ubiquitous as the tiny, crappy cameras we now expect to see in almost every device we own.

The PMP Projector is available now through your preferred outlet for obscure Chinese equipments.

World’s First Commercial Portable Product with Integrated Pico-Projector Unveiled in Hong Kong [Display Daily via Gearlog]

The Push-Kun is a robotic quadruped trashcan that tells jokes, plays drum rolls on its tin belly and waddles around your house being irritating until you order it to actually try eating some garbage, at which point, it spectacularly fails. There's also a passing resemblance to Homestar Runner. Created by Osaka-based Robot Force, the Push-Kun was an official entrant in the Baka RoboCup, which is basically Japan's Robot Special Olympics. I can't believe it didn't take home the Gold.

Push-Kun the Robot Trashcan [YouTube via Pink Tentacle]

Most digicams in the last couple of years came in a fixed form factor: just under an inch thick, about three and a half wide, and about 2 inches tall. Canon's satisfyingly blocky Elphs are the exemplar of it; others may have a swooping curve here or a sliding lens cover there, but that's the status quo. Casio, whose original Exilims were among the earliest decent concealed-carry digicams, finally bored of this clone army and issued the Z200, which is super-thin, and the EX-Z80, which keeps the thickness but trims the other dimensions.

The Ex-Z80 is teeny indeed—and, at about $200, cheap—so I picked one up to replace my dying SD1000. It's a decent 8.1-megapixel shooter with 3x optical zoom and some nice extras, but it isn't without shortcomings.

First, the good. God damn is this thing pretty. It has a vaguely retro air about it, at least in sensible colors, as if stolen from some over-funded 1970s Soviet espionage porn lab.

Its chassis is stylish and offered in black, pale shades of silver, red, blue or green, or hot pink. A bountiful 2.6" LCD panel is wedded to a simple, no-nonsense user interface, and there's a separate shoot button for videos to make quick-on-the-draw captures nice and easy. It can record 848x480 H.264 video at 30fps, or ready-to-upload YouTubes. In good light, the shots are great.

Unlike many small models, it has manual focus, and the myriad of shooting modes will be fun to mess around with for those who don't care for post-processing: there are practically dozens of them, from cheesy cartoonifiers to sepia toning and eBay-friendly fast-shutter snapshots.

The Z80's flaws, however, are hard to miss. Image quality heads well under par as the ISO setting goes up. The "auto-shutter" mode, which is supposed to wait until the scene is steady before shooting, seems to be complete garbage. The voice recording mode is also no good.

You can't manually set shutter speed, and it tends to opt for longer settings than I'm used to: steady hands are mandatory for flash-off indoor shots. The Exilim also uses micro-USB instead of mini-USB for its data jack.

Nonetheless, it takes good pictures, is smaller than everything else on the shelf that is not itself another Exilim, and costs less than $200. It's the perfect concealed carry for people who can't stand cellphone pictures, still want the bare minimum of weight and size, but want acceptable print quality and image control.

Product Page [Casio]

CNET is reporting that my favorite online shoe vendor, Zappos.com, will be launching a new interface design that will highlight their entry into a new market: consumer electronics.

Amazon is clearly their main competitor. I'm torn. I buy most of my electronics from Amazon (with a little Newegg here and there), not just because they tend to have the lowest prices, but because the Amazon Prime shipping gets almost everything to my door in two days or less. But that's the same reason I order from Zappos: they have great prices and quick turnaround, plus great customer service. Here's hoping a little competition keeps both companies on their toes.

The new Zappos: Shoes--and gadgets to boot [News.com]

To have a moustache. To join the echelon of hirsute-lipped Olympians like Erroll Flynn and Burt Lancaster. To make women sneeze when you kiss them. To be able to call out, liltingly, at any occasion, "Who wants a moustache ride?" and see a dozen quavering arms raised with passionate, trembling eagerness. To always be able to run your tongue through the follicles of your upper lip when you're hungry, looking for a piece of potato or scrambled egg that you missed. Yes, it's true. The man who has a moustache is a god.

But a moustache requires constant love and attention. This sterling silver moustache comb by Makool hangs from a man-chain around your neck, allowing you to casually call attention to your moustache while simultaneously maintaining it's lustrous sheen. God knows why it says "Morning Cup" on the side, though. And for 120 bucks, you'd probably be better off just paying someone attractive to lick it clean for you.

Moustache Comb Necklace [Makool via Brandish]

Sanyo has announced another low-end Xacti, the DMX-CA8, a companion to the new CG9. It's still a VGA camera, something for which many people are dinging it, but it does manage to at least do 60FPS. And as my experience with my CG6 has shown, for quick turnarounds to the web, VGA is still just fine.

But what makes the DMX-CA8 noteworthy isn't its video quality, but its ability to be used underwater up to 10 feet for up to an hour. (Don't let the time restriction trip you up; most underwater gear has the same sort of caveats from the manufacturers who like to play it safe.) Sanyo's current underwater model, the Xacti VPC-E1, is rated for depths of just five feet for 30 minutes.

Now most of the reason I love my Xacti CG6 was that it was cheap — I paid $200 — and that it is small enough to be pocketable and, god forbid, disposable. Yet it still has a proper optical zoom and all the other things that a camcorder should have. I get under the water a few times a year, though, and would have loved to have gotten the VPC-E1 instead, but it wasn't worth paying twice as much. And unfortunately, the DMX-CA8 is set to be priced in the same ballpark at around $500.

My friend Jason just bought a Flip Video Ultra for $170 and added the $40 underwater housing. That's about the same price as my CG6. For my purposes the CG6 is still the better choice, but it's impossible not to get a little jealous when I see epic videos he's shot like the one below. Especially since the underwater housing for the Ultra is rated to 30 feet (and will probably go deeper as long as you don't try to get the buttons to work).

Akihabara News got a hands-on with the DMX-CA8, although like the CG9 there's not a whole lot to it. If nothing else, perhaps the mid-year launch of the DMX-CA8 will force the price of the VPC-E1 down into a range where buying one — and then watching it sink into the abyss — won't be so painful.

The All New Sanyo DMX-CA8 Waterproof [AkihabaraNews.com via Gizmodo]

Artist Martin Belger builds remarkable pin-hole cameras, their design meant to evoke the spirit of the object he is photographing. Pictured, his HIV Camera, which contains actual HIV infected blood. Rusty gears, tanned skins and broken antlers are some of the other materials he uses. According to his wacky artist's statement:

I create the cameras from Aluminum, Titanium, Copper, Brass, Bronze, Steel, Silver, Gold, Wood, Acrylic, Glass, Horn, Ivory, Bone, Human Bone, Human Skulls, Human Organs, Formaldehyde, HIV+ Blood and relics all designed to be the sacred bridge of a communion offering between myself and the subject. All to witness and be a tool of the horrors of creation and the beauty of decay presented by the author light and time.

O, ye mortals, be witness and be tool to the UNFATHOMABLE HORRORS OF CREATION! The beauty of decay presented by ME, the Unholy God, The Alpha and Omega, LIGHT AND TIME! Behold my works, ye digital photographers, and DESPAIR!

Sheesh! But awesome cameras. Just don't drop the HIV model.

The Art of Wayne Martin Belger [Official Site via Core 77]

We already knew the Dell Crystal Monitor was going to sell only to those more concerned with how their computer looked than how it performed — $1,200 for a 22-inch monitor with a sheet of glass over it is madness, no matter how attractive it might be — but what we didn't know was how bad it would look turned on. Maximum PC got their greasy hands on the Dell Crystal and found its slab of glass to greatly diminish the picture quality of what is otherwise an okay monitor.

The monitor’s artful exterior looks great on our desktop. If only the picture followed suit. Even after cranking the Crystal’s brightness to the extremes, the 1680x1050-native picture was unable to produce acceptable differences on its dark grayscales during our DisplayMate testing. This translated to a noticeable loss of quality and increased darkness levels in every real-world test we could conjure up: details escaped our pictures and movies; subtle lighting effects smudged together on our games.

This is the fuel behind the Crystal’s fiery glare issue. The display’s tempered glass lends the entire unit a mirror-like quality, more so than any glossy-panel monitor we’ve reviewed. We didn’t notice ourselves when we were working with a brighter scene, but seeing our blatant reflection during darker images, like Sweeney Todd, was more than a mere distraction. It destroyed the picture.

They gave it a five out of ten, which I'm happy to translate into human speech: avoid.

Dell Crystal [MaximumPC.com]

Previously • Dell Crystal LCD Monitor [BBG]

Although certainly environmentally friendly, there are reasons not to encase your gadgets in the raw, seeping musculature of a freshly-slain bovine, no matter how many times you've seen Videodrome. Yes, it's delicious for a spell. Yes, it's a conversation starter. Yes, it will give you an in with that one goth chick who really has a hard-on for Hellraiser. Yes, it will ward off the smelliest of vegan hippies. But within a couple of weeks, all of these advantages are superseded by the drawbacks: a feeling of constant exhaustion that prevents you from brushing away the flies that keep landing on your eyeballs, the putrid kiwi-sized lumps glistening in your morning evacuations and, of course, the high cost of "freshening" up your protective iPod case every few weeks.

Enter the Mosquito Ruby Pod Rare, an iPod case that looks like you've slathered your MP3 player in glistening, marbleized flesh, but without the stench, the salmonella or the writhing of maggots. Unfortunately, the Mosquito Ruby is about as expensive as it gets for a rubber iPod case: $68 will buy you a lot of prosciutto. Perhaps it's time for the industry to start seriously examining the jerking process as a way to extend the life cycle of our gadgets' protective sheaths of flesh.

Mosquito Ruby Rod Rare [Rakuten via Dvice]

I bought LG's GSA-E50l external DVD drive. It was inoperable out of the box: a circumstance so baffling I briefly wondered if it required drivers or some such, heralding a new era of basic in-out hardware that doesn't work until after an OS is loaded. Ah, but no! It's just a lemon.

I tried it on four computers, including a desktop, a laptop, a Zonbox and an iMac. Not one machine could see it. The power light came on, but the disk tray wouldn't eject and it is not detected as a USB device.

Staring at the little 5"-square slab on the desk, I realized that I was in a pickle. I wanted a slimline bus-powered optical drive, and this was the only one that the local brick 'n' mortars carried. Suspicion was strong from the beginning: whereas most such things are plain, sleek rectangles, LG's GSA-E50L is overdesigned, resembling a giant squashed suppository. It is what Charlie Sorrel at Gadget Lab would describe as "plastic tat."

Alas, it is therefore unrated and unreviewed, but can hardly be recommended. I shall endeavor to find out if this is a common problem with bus-powered optical drives: most such models require external power, even with dual-USB Y cords.

• HD Camcorder – Canon Vixia HD30 1080p miniDV camera for $650 plus $12ish shipping. I paid like $800 for my HV20 just a few months ago, so this is an awesome deal. (And really irritating!) [Slickdeals]

• GPS Navigation – TomTom ONE 3rd Edition for $100 after $20 mail-in rebate. It's a refurb. But that's about $70 off. [Dealhack]

• Internet Tablet – Nokia N800 for $200, about $30 off. [Dealnews]

• Vacuum Broom – Dirt Devil rechargeable broom vacuum for $30, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Swing Chair – Ultimate Air Chair for $30, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Watch – Today's Woot! is the Invicta Stainless Steel Racing Chronograph for $95, shipped.

The future of video rentals is pretty clearly in on-demand streaming of video over the Internet, but until then, DVD companies need to strengthen the legs of their business model somehow. Now, a German company named Einmal has announced that they have come up with a self-destructing DVD technology. Coated in a special chemical, the DVDs will begin to break down and corrosively melt after 48 hours, rendering them unplayable.

The idea is to allow people to "rent" DVDs (or, really, buy the DVDs while renting the intellectual property stored on the disc) anywhere: gas stations, grocery stores, 7-11s and the like. The whole concept eschews the troublesome "returning the disc" aspect of DVD rentals.

Of course, this isn't new: Flexplay has offered disposable DVDs in America for the last five years. I actually saw some of these at a Mass Pike Gas 'N' Gulp in January, and I remember being flabbergasted by the utter wastefulness of such a scheme... along with the way in which each and every item I purchased was placed in its own individual plastic bag, then double bagged for good measure.

That's what really bothers me about it. The wastefulness. I'm actually not particularly green conscious, subscribing to the Monty Burns School of Environmentalism. But the utterly stupid wastefulness of tossing out millions of DVDs a year — as if an optical disc were as befouled by a single viewing as a prophylactic is by a single syphilitic hump-and-squirt — just stupefies me.

What's even more bizarre is the EU is far more green-friendly than the United States. I live in a country (Germany) where all of my garbage must be sorted into eight color-coded bins every trash day; where I am expected to pay 20 cents per plastic bag when I go shopping; where an empty beer bottle will get you a 25 cent deposit back. How can Europeans, of all people, be embracing such a wasteful, decidedly un-eco-friendly scheme, even as Americans have rejected it?

And I think that's the rub: while Europe has high bandwidth penetration and people actually would like to stream video on-demand, it's a second class citizen (but with a 40% higher currency value). We're largely excluded from buying video off of iTunes. Most of the American corporate video streaming sites exclude us. There is no real European equivalent to Netflix or Blockbuster online. There's money to be made, but no one's paying attention.

Until the film and television industry starts reaching out to Europe in the same way it's reached out to Americans, melting DVDs are about as good as it's going to get.

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours [The Register]

(Thanks, Instantenemy!)

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This video of an extremely patient Japanese Chinese RC car enthusiast playing the Super Mario Brothers theme song on a long line of half-filled bottles snaking through an underground parking complex has been going around a lot lately, but that's no reason not to share it here... if only to commemorate the sort of hero who can drink one thousand beers then drive a remote-controlled vehicle between the empties in a perfectly straight line.

Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles [YouTube]

According to an in-depth report from Reuters, people are still throwing far too many of their gadgets in the trash:

But while the percentage of old electronics thrown in the trash can dropped to 19 percent in 2007 from 21 percent in 2005, according to the association, U.S. consumers still ditch millions of device such as TVs and computers with their coffee grinds and candy wrappers.

Perhaps if there were a set day for electronics pick-ups, like is currently done in many municipalities for recycling? (Some towns have this already.) Driving to a central location or having individual pick-up for each gadget seems wasteful, too.

Oh when will the Mega-Sort Reclamation Company spring into existence and disassemble and index every last bit of our garbage into its base parts?

U.S. consumers still slow to recycle gadgets [Reuters]

Dixon Tape & Rule Co. make a variety of tape measures set in lovely wooden cases, including models with inlaid patterns and hand-painted birds. For some reason, however, they don't include the little brake that will lock an extended metal tape measure in place, making them far less practical than the standard tape measure on the belts of nearly every contractor walking the planks today. Of course, they only extend to six feet, so the brake is perhaps not that essential.

Prices range from about $35 to $70, depending on materials and fanciness.

Product Page [DixonRules.com via Toolmonger]

Today on Modern Mechanix we learn about a 1938 time capsule designed so that people of the distant future can learn about us and restore their shattered world to our glorious standards. This 1929 Modern Mechanics article chronicles inaugural flight of the Transcontinental Air Transport Corporation, piloted by Charles Lindberg. The T.A.T could take someone from Los Angeles to New York in under 48 hours via a combination of airplanes and sleeper trains. We also looked at an elevator that works without cables, an 80mph baby cycle car, a weird 1970 ad for rice, and a rather rotund long distance swimmer who demonstrates how to eat lunch in the water.

We have a name for the 21st century where I come from: the suppurating asshole of space time. For reference, imagine flipping through an American History textbook, just lazily skimming around, then... WHAM! Goatse.cx. You now have a good idea of what the history books of the 31st century look like: an engorged, inside-out historical sphincter stretching between the knuckles of 1983's break-dancing revolution and the emergence of robo-break-dancing in 2176.

Now imagine being sucked into that pulsating Goatse vortex and you've got a pretty good idea of what it felt like when I woke up naked in an Oklahoma field surrounded only by belching cows and clouds of dissipating purple chronatons. Yes, it's an ugly analogy, and I'm sorry to labor it, but short of cramming the monolith from 2001 down your throats, it's the only way I can make you monkeys understand what it's like to be trapped here.

The name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Battelle. I'm Boing Boing Gadgets' "band manager," whatever that is. And I am from the future.

Nebbish and sunken-chested, a spindly and asthmatic ectomorph, I've long looked forward to exoskeleton technology. I'm sick of having sand kicked into my face by bullies at the beach as I pursue a dim chance at the reproductive act; an exo-skeleton will even the score by allowing me to confront all of the mesomorphic jerks who torment my life on their own brawny terms and, thus confronting them, hit them so hard they ejaculate their central nervous systems. In the 1940s, we had Charles Atlas; in the double oughts of the new Millennium, we have robot suits made out of titanium.

Until now, though, exoskeletons were far too expensive to bother with. Cyberdyne's HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) Exoskeleton, though, looks well within reach. The suit itself is able to enhance the average user's strength ten-fold. Better yet, Cyberdyne is saying that they will have 40--500 suits available for rent by the end of the year... for the scant price of $1,000 per month. If that's really the price, we're totally getting one...

Cyberdyne [Official Site via Bot Junkie]

Superblogger and RSS pioneer Dave Winer got his internet cut off by Comcast. Why? Because he uses too much of his unlimited service. The story is good and deserves to be read, so there's no reason to abridge it here. A few points, however, demand a short-form recap:

• Comcast's robot menu choices at its legal department make you agree that you're at fault before you can continue the call.

• Comcast refuse