While I find the implicit message of "toss this when you're done" here, I have to admit: a pre-paid phone co-branded with BIC, makers of world famous cheap pens and razors, is sort of brilliant.

The BIC Phone will be available in France as a pre-paid unit from Orange. It does appear you can buy top-up cards. Please do, France!

Press Release [Orange.com via Red Ferret]

For $10, Best Buy will reattach your Bluetooths. How much to insert flash cards?

Best Buy's $10 headset pairing service includes testing, finger pointing [Engadget]

As PlayStation 3 sales pick up, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer told Bloomberg his opinion of Nintendo's Wii: too pricey and strange!

"I've played a Nintendo Wii," Stringer said last week at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. "I don't see it as a competitor. It's more of an expensive niche game device."

His thoughts regarding Nintendo's $250 console comes after Microsoft announced a $50 cut to its XBox360, which is now $300. The PlayStation 3 is $400. Sony has no plans to reduce its price.

While there's an obvious amusement to be derived from the idea that the cheapest is actually the most expensive, we can at least see what Sir Howard's getting at: a Wii just does games, but a PS3 does everything. The real insanity in this story is an entirely different claim, from Sony's Peter Dille. Dille believes that the PS3 was initially a flop because "consumers were unable to find machines in stores" and that Sony was unable to meet "demand."

"That's not a formula for success,'' Sony's Peter Dille said. "Once you create the demand and aren't able to deliver, you create a situation where it stalls.''

This sort of soft-headed fantasy is why people make fun of Sony.

Sony's PlayStation 3 Gaining Ground on Xbox With Games, Blu-Ray [Bloomberg]

Joel has sworn up and down that he's not going to buy an iPhone 3G today. "It can wait. The real hotness is 2.0" and "I'm busy moving this week. Don't have time." A little more than a year ago, he made the same claim about the original iPhone: "I'm pretty happy with my current phone" and "I'm going to wait for 3G."

How long did Joel's reserve of willpower last? All it took was a single instant message from one Ms. Xeni Jardin proclaiming the iPhone "rad" to send him sprinting his flabby blogger's frame down the block as he wildly tried to flag down a taxi, destination: "habbadegeebideeIPHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!"

Frankly, it was an embarrassment, and Joel should feel shame. Now it's a year later. Joel's considerably svelter, more confident. He has come up in the world. He's a bettter, more dynamic man. Surely his resolve won't wane so quickly this time. But in BBG's private channel, we can already see him sliding down that path again. Yesterday, Rob and I spent all day listening to him "review" iPhone 2.0 apps. There wasn't a single one he didn't refer to as "innovative" "amazing" or "game-changing." This included such programs as tip calculators, die-rolling simulations and a virtual abacus.

So how long until Joel's internal thought process goes something like this: "Man, that virtual abacus really is pretty dude. But imagine how much more wanktastic it would be with the power of 3G?"

My guess? If he gets to Saturday without one, he's going to start seeing dead babies crawling on the ceiling.

We're now taking all bets, measured in hours and minutes from the time the iPhone goes on sale this morning in Brooklyn. Soothsay in the comments! No fair guessing, Xeni.

Image: Bizarre first hit for 'Joel Johnson' in Flickr, courtesy of the great spaghetti communist, Camillo Miller

Update: Joel is emphatically denying he ever called either the virtual abacus or iPhone tipping calculator "innovative." Needless to say, if true, this new information might add hours to the time it takes for Joel to crumple into a mess of primal, unthinking consumerist impulses. You should adjust your bets accordingly.

A few days ago, Cult of Mac's Leigh McMullen claimed that the MacBook Pro should not be redesigned, as it's started to attain a valuable kind of mindshare: its current appearance is becoming entwined with the general public's idea of what a high-end notebook should look like. As a result, marketers put it in ads for stuff, free of charge to Apple, because of its aspirational connotations.

If you want a real life example, Leigh, check this out: Grocery chain Giant Eagle using it to sell vegetables and pasta

blip.tv got a chance to go to the Asahi Beer Brewery and check out their eponymous robotic barman, Mr. Asahi. He only serves Asahi, unfortunately, and there's a great deal of chest thumping about how his hyper-complex robotic innards took "eight engineers two hundred man hours to put together" (in other words, a Bank Holiday work week), but I look forward to a future in which I am drafted Heffeweiszens with micron perfect heads by robotic bartenders. The first time one goes into kill mode on me for drunkenly forgetting to pay my tab? Well, not so much.

What is a crapvendor? Joel has used the phrase a couple of times to a degree of bafflement, not least from crapvendors themselves. Please update your dictionaries:

David Galbraith, curator over at Oobject, writes about his latest gallery showing the insides of Chinese factories:

Although a couple of these are from a photo essay, I've tried to pull as many as poss from publicity material. A weird thing emerged - most Chinese factories seem to have the same bland pastel colored thing going on.

chinese factories [Oobject]

Ping Mag has a great write-up on the hallucinogenic consumerist scope of Japanese vending machines:

To go back a bit, the first known vending machine was a pneumatically driven holy water vending machine in an Egyptian temple in Alexandria in 215 B.C. The first Japanese machine made its dedebut over 2 millenniums later in 1890 and the oldest existing stamp vending machine from 1904 can still be seen at the Museum Meiji-Mura. Since then, the number of machines has risen to an astonishing 5,405,300, making Japan the country with the highest concentration in the world (one for every 23 people!) While half of these are standard soft drink vending machines, a surprising number of contraptions sell more unusual fare. There are 118,000 machines selling razors and socks and an impressive 5,500 issuing cans of noodles.

The much-fabled-but-never-seen used panty vending machines — which Internet legend would have us believe are ubiquitous fixtures in every Tokyo subway men's room, but which I once spent half-a-day fruitlessly hunting for — do not make an appearance, because they are imaginary vendomatic leprechauns. Sorry, huffers.

Vending Machine Extravaganza [Ping Mag]

According to this vintage Flash Gordon strip by Alex Raymond, Union Carbide's chemical and plastic empire had already spread its sticky polymer tentacles as far as the planet Mongo by 1936. "We sure could use some rocket carloads of BAKELITE polyethylene in Frigia, Flash," Ronal casually remarks to the shirtless beefcake during an exciting escape from a patrol of murderous alien giants. An ironic wish, considering the fact that Union Carbide was eventually to be forced off of Mongo after what is commonly referred to as the Frigian Catastrophe, a thermonuclear explosion of BAKELITE brand rocket car fuel that was, in itself, a dire foreshadowing of Earth's own 1984 Bhopal Disaster.

Product Placement, Flash Style [Core77, strip via io9]

Adam Lisagor on the significance of Apple's new "MobileMe" branding:

I offer evidence only in my strictly unacademic impressions of the differences between ‘I’ and ‘me’.  For instance, ‘I’ implies activity, a doing and a being of something.  Ideologically, this meshes well with Apple’s provenance as the tool of the artist and its aim to imbue the user with the identity of Unique Creator of Digital Artifact, of curator and distributor and master of his or her digital hub.  In this model, I am the center of my digital lifestyle, from which springs endless evidence of my unique and lovable existence and expendable income.

...

Signs do, however, point clearly to Apple steering away from consumer as creator of data and toward consumer as data itself.  I no longer create the data I sync, the data is me and it syncs on its own.

I can only hope this presages a new piratical prefix, provoking endless giggling exclamations of "Arr, me'Phone!"

For those who might have wondered, the brand "iMobile" is already taken by a company that makes in-dash PCs for cars.

Why me? [LonelySandwich.com]

The people who sell super-expensive cables are on the march from Audiophileland to Nerdasia. Are we ready for the onslaught? First up: $500 ethernet cables from Denon!

IP is what we usually send over these cables, error-corrected from end-to-end. This means, generally, that throughput, rather than quality, is what drops with interference or long runs—the networking cards perform integrity checks on incoming packets and ask for re-sends if they're imperfect.

From a standard computing perspective, then, this cable is outright robbery if what you use it for involves ethernet networking, with routers and computers and what-have-you.

This is not, however, what Denon is pitching this for. Denon uses ethernet cable for its Denon Link system, and this means that it tangles up with protocols and streams which are not error-corrected. And it's true that digital isn't the "it works or fails outright" surety that some think it is: you can scramble ones and zeroes just like anything else, if nothing's acting as a gatekeeper at the far end.

Standard Cat6's characteristics, however, allow it hundreds of megabits per second of throughput (they're rated for a full Gigabit), over runs longer than almost any sound system could need. Are we seriously to believe that audio data such as 24-bit PCM and DVD-Audio, will be improved by spending $500 for fancy ones? Over runs of only 6 feet?

Product Page [Denon via Consumerist]

Valleywag collates a gallery tracking Steve Jobs' shrinking girth over the last decade, from bearded plumper to lithe ariel of the keynote.

The incredible shrinking Apple CEO [Valleywag]

Bigshredder is the YouTube account of SSI, which makes gigantic industrial-capacity shredders. Asteroids is turned into a muesli of woodchips and silicon in about 20 seconds.

A dumpsterful of computers practically bubbles atop the whirling crushers:

via DVICE

We can't figure out if this packaging for the Sennhesier CX 300 headphones — made entirely of cardboard — is real or just a design prototype. Clearly previous CX 300 were packaged in the typical hard plastic shell, but perhaps Sennheiser has adopted this easy-to-recycle packaging.

But if they have, John brought up a very good point: what retailer is going to accept something so easily slashed and swiped? Those horrible blister packs that are impossible to open are impossible to open on purpose: they're designed to make shoplifting more difficult.

Anyway, has anyone seen this in the wild? I'd like to thing it's real. And if it's just a prototype, well, good job!

Eco Friendly Packaging [Design Muse via The Dieline]

From the New York Times:

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- Federal officials unsealed one indictment Thursday alleging co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III of chip maker Broadcom Corp. spiked the drinks of technology executives and customer representatives with ecstasy and maintained a warehouse for ecstasy, cocaine and methamphetamine.

Why didn't we know this guy? He sounds fantastic. Except for the drink-spiking, of course. And the conspiracy, securities fraud, and stock backdating. I guess it's pretty much just the warehouse that I like.

There's a lot of purportedness in this photoset: is this pile of Canon cameras really worth half-a-million dollars? Were they really damaged during shipping, forcing the company to destroy them all before they hit the grey market? Was there really not a better solution for these than destroying them?

It's easy to understand why Canon wouldn't want these cameras to go on to the market: they don't want to damage their reputation, nor be responsible for supporting cameras that may already be wonky. But it's all so wasteful. The serial numbers were known, surely; that would take care of the warranty problem. Couldn't they have scraped all the branding off the units and donated them to schools or something? Argh.

Mass destruction of the Canon cameras [Paradoxoff.com] (Thanks, Matt!)

Online bookie Bodog is taking wagers on Apple announcements for Monday's WWDC. Think you've got the prognostication skills of a certified technology pundit? Put your money where your blog is.

• Will Apple announce a 32GB iPhone? With "Yes" paying -300 and "No" paying +200.
• Will Apple announce a "thin" iPhone? With "Yes" paying -200 and "No" paying +150.
• Will Apple announce a 3G iPhone? With "Yes" paying -500 and "No" paying +300.
• Will Apple announce a 32GB, 3G, "thin" iPhon? With "Yes" paying -130 and "No" paying -120.
• Will Apple's stock (APPL) close higher or lower than its opening value on June 9? "Higher" pays -200 and "Lower" pays +150.

Matt Haughey's Keynote Index Fund chart will at least help you on the last one.

Prop Bets on Apple iPhone Announcement [Beat.BodogLife.com]

Paris is to get its first Apple store, in the Louvre's attached shopping mall. It'll be 715 square meters, replacing two other stores, Résonnance and Lalique.

Machine Trans [Nanoblog via Textually]

This microwave case mod may not be ingenious — the PC guts are crammed inside, a small LCD is bolted to the inside of the door — but it's a fine medium of display for the endless looping of any "mewling baby on high" vid that might be found in the archives of the Stile Project.

Crazy PC Case Mods [Hacked Gadgets]

Image: linkinn

Ninety-five percent of electronics returned by consumers are not broken, according to Accenture.

The research consultancy claims that 68 percent of returns either didn't perform as expected, or the buyer can't figure the damn thing out. Twenty-seven percent of returns are buyer's remorse. The remaining 5 percent are lemons.

It's easy to pound the "RTFA" angle, but think of it this way: Accenture says up to 20 percent of all sales get returned, which means that fully 1 percent of some varieties of consumer electronics are broken in the box.

Nearly all returned gadgets still work [The Inquirer]

Time Warner's plans to meter its cable internet are taking shape. The short of it: $1 for every gigabyte over the plan's standard allowance, which will be 5 GB for a $30 plan and 40GB for a $60 plan. This compares to Comcast, which has secret limits somewhere north of 250GB, and Bend Cable, which has a 100GB cap.

Of those two plans, only the latter is of any use to anyone who does more than check email and IM: 5GB is what you get with cellphone data plans right now. Even 40GB is crummy: compare to Comcast, derided by geeks for its secret caps, with its 250GB-ish allowance. If you used that much bandwidth in one of Time Warner's test markets, you'd be getting a $270 internet bill.

$1 per GB is nearly $5 for a single DVD's worth of data—after a cap you could reach by downloading only eight linux distributions, video games or movies (assuming each occupied a single DVD). Amazon's file storage service charges about a quarter per Terabyte of bandwidth.

I thought metered bandwidth was a way of heading off regulatory action over that "unlimited" silliness. This convinces me that it's a way to get us used to paying for it by the byte now, before bandwidth becomes so cheap they'd never get away with it.

The good side of metering is getting rid of secret limits and the deceptive marketing of "unlimited" plans. The bad side is, well, $1 a GB.

One images a cheap router slung from the pole at the end of your street, its routing table exploding with torrent-related garbage. Your fault, or the cable company's?

Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use [AP via Slashdot]

Valleywag (I know) is reporting a rumor (I know, I know) that Apple's (It's interesting, okay?) advertising agency commissioned the building of a fake Apple store on the Warner Bros. lot so they could film a secret commercial, inevitably something that will be announced next Monday. It's worth noting, as did Valleywag, Apple's willingness to keep their announcements a secret.

I wonder if Steve always knew the power secrecy would hold for product announcements or if it was something he picked up along the way as an unforeseen byproduct of his need to control product cycles? (I'm a post-iPod Apple watcher, so the '80s and most of the '90s in Apple history are hazy recollections of only slightly less hazy Slashdot discussions.)

Apple created temporary store on Warner Bros. lot [Valleywag]

There's a lot of fuss today about proposals in Britain to abolish "drawings" of child abuse. Naturally, this kicks the Internet's predilection for age-ambiguous Japanese cartoon smut, right in the balls. Or does it? Reading the original BBC article provides something of an RTFA moment:

Ms Eagle said the plans were "not about criminalising art or pornographic cartoons more generally, but about targeting obscene, and often very realistic, images of child sexual abuse which have no place in our society".

There's always that slippery slope argument about free expression—especially in increasingly creepy Britain—and about the "thought police" nature of punishing crimes without victims. But the ambiguities and gotchas recounted by critics today, such as "how would one provide records to prove the the age of a drawn character?" fall immediately foul of Eagle's explicit claim to not be targeting erotic artwork in general. In fact, by "drawings" it may refer to a section in Britain's new Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which details images "derived" from real photographs.

The idea of photoshop-filtering photos to appear superficially like genuine artwork isn't exactly novel. Conclusion: 4chan not banned quite yet.

UK Proposes Banning Computer Generated Abuse [/.]
Computer generated abuse 'banned' [BBC]

It's a scene any Best Buy patron has seen a million times before: three sassy soul sisters shaking their booties in an impromptu display of dancing prowess before the stereo speaker display, while a dorky, heavy set employee looks on, pathetically trying to look "hep." But god bless the dorky, heavy set employee in this video, because after 40 seconds of indecision and lame bobbing, he just gets down, becoming one with the groove, and triumphantly wins high fives from all.

It's an awesome sight, but as an ex Best Buy supervisor, I can't help but furrow my brow in disapproval: this does not look like a man properly upselling an extended warranty. Leave the dancing to the customers on-the-clock, chuckles.

Best Buy Dance [YouTube]

The Times reports on a gigantic new LED advertising billboard to be installed in Times Square by Walgreens — the largest so far.

The sign will have 12 million light-emitting diodes, known as L.E.D.’s — 17,000 square feet of them, “which is more than a third of an acre,” said Arthur Gilmore, president of the Gilmore Group, a Manhattan design and branding consulting firm, which created the sign. “Including its digital and vinyl decorative components, it will be 43,720 square feet in area.” ... And so, the sign components of the east and west facades of the building, which are 341 feet tall and 143 feet wide, will be programmed “in a synchronized way, as a single animation,” said Meric Adriansen ... The sign will marshal enough candlepower to withstand the sun at high noon. Its images will be projected by 12 million red, green and blue L.E.D.’s programmed to glow in different configurations so that the brains of human observers interpret them as images. A trillion colors are programmable.

Image: Dinosaurs and Robots

How to Stand Out in Times Square? Build a Bigger and Brighter Billboard [NYTimes.com via Racked]

Sexing up power strips is a little industry all to itself: the sexiest being the Power Squid. The latest design rests on the waves, not beneath them: it's modeled on the container tankers that deliver to our shores the very gadgets it powers.

Designed to accommodate the many power adapters cluttering our living space, this ship powers our electronic devices with their cords in its wake. It also makes apparent the infrastructure behind all those power cords.

Most electronic devices in use everyday are manufactured in one province in China and are delivered to us by containership. What people often do not realize is the extreme scale of the infrastructure needed when a single geographic area becomes a primary manufacturing source; even for things that most people see as insignificant. The largest of these ships hold up to 9,000 40ft containers and are too massive for the Panama Canal. They frequently return to China empty. There is nothing to bring back.

The Containership Powersupply (Prototype shown) measures 20"x3.5"x5" and is made from a cast rubber body over a metal chassis. Prototyping by ModelSource, Avon, CT

Product Page (Click the "I" in the top row) [Giffintermeer VIA SlipperyBrick and Oh Gizmo!]

ExtremeTech asks today if Comcast — rumored to be about to start metering bandwidth — is "preparing to screw its customers."

While it's true that Comcast screws its customers, metering bandwidth strikes me as a fairer modus buggerandi than what it does now: lying to us by offering "unlimited" plans with secret limits, with a Kafka-esque policy of not communicating with people who get close to it.

Here's the rumored plan:

"Comcast is considering a rate hike for broadband customers who consume more than 250 gigabytes of data each month, though there are no immediate plans for implementation. "Comcast is currently evaluating this service and pricing model to ensure we deliver a great online experience to our customers," the company said in a statement. "We have not made any changes to our current service offerings and have no new announcement to make at this time."

It all comes down to cost. If Comcast stopped offering unlimited bandwidth, would you still feel entitled to it? It would be beastly indeed if Comcast smacked 250GB transgressors for huge penalties, but at least then it wouldn't be defrauding its customers any more. Or is it all just part of a strategy to get you used to paying by the unit for a commodity — bandwidth — that is or will soon be effectively free of charge to it, the utility provider?

CBS has noticed the Internet. It is to pay $11.50 a share for CNET, which adds up to nearly $1.8bn, instantly turning it a big player in the tubes. Fortune says that's a 44 percent premium over Wednesday's closing price, which is basically them saying "Damn, this company is run terribly. Grab it!"

Here's CEO Les Moonves.

“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNet Networks. CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNet Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience.”

CBS shares down, CNET shares up 34 percent in early trading. In the distance, a dog barks.

CBS agrees to buy CNET [AP]