Hasta La Gadget!

You heard right, folks. There’s absolutely no need to wait until 2011 in order to buy yourself a personal Surface. Instead, you can grab one of Microsoft’s multitouch phenomenons this June, but there’s just one tiny catch: it comes attached at the waist with a multi-million dollar yacht. Down at the Miami Yacht & Brokerage Show this month, Lazzara Yachts showcased its soon-to-be-released LMC 76, which — coincidentally enough — comes loaded with a Surface along with software from Infusion Development. The boat (and by extension, the Surface) should be ready to take on the open seas in just a few months, but there’s no indication yet on exactly how many New York banks you’ll have to rob in order to make it happen. If you need some encouragement on turning to the dark side, a hands-on demo video is just past the break.

[Via Beyond | IT, thanks Roy]

Read – Details from Lazzara
Read – Hands-on experience

Continue reading Microsoft Surface on sale this June… on board a Lazzara yacht

Filed under: Displays, Transportation

Microsoft Surface on sale this June… on board a Lazzara yacht originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve lost count on the number of times we’ve heard from a friend of a coworker of a cousin whose girlfriend’s stepfather happens to work at Sony and they’re all but ready to launch a UMD-less PSP in 17 different color options bundled with a portable version of Street Fighter IV. Typically, we remain skeptical, but when it’s veteran developer David “I made MDK and Earthworm Jim” Perry, we’ll give him the floor to speak. Earlier this week, his Twitter account updated to say he’s heard the PSP 2 is done and minus that disc drive. He later reaffirmed that comment to GameDaily, saying he can’t reveal his source (naturally), but he feels certain UMD is gone. Is his source bunk? He’s certainly a guy who’d know a guy, but we’ve heard this story far too many times to take a leap of faith now.

[Via Joystiq]

Read – David Perry’s Twitter
Read – GameDaily

Filed under: Gaming

PSP 2 is ready and UMD-less, claims Earthworm Jim developer originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is the world’s shortest escalator according to the Guinness Book of Records. Or at least it was back in 1989 — somebody could easily have built a smaller and even more useless automatic staircase in the intervening 20 years.

This escalator is pointless in so many ways. First, it’s just five steps (834mm) high, a mere leap to anyone with a healthy pair of legs. And lest you play the disability card on me in the comments, the escalator is followed immediately by a set of regular, manual stairs.

Also, these stairs go down, not up, pushing them even further into the realms of pointlessness. We’ll probably never find out why the folks at the Kawasaki More’s department store in Japan installed this diminutive staircase — perhaps they had some steps left over from a proper escalator. Still, for straight-up surreality, we love it.

World’s Shortest Escalator – certified by the Guinness Book of Records [YouTube via Buzz Newsroom]

Verizon Wireless is the target of a new class action lawsuit that alleges the carrier misrepresented a “metropolitan commuter transportation district” tax charged to New York consumers, according to RCR Wireless News.

“[The] defendant stated in its monthly bills to consumers, as well as in other places, that this charge was a tax that defendant is ‘required by law to bill customers,'” the suit claims. “In truth, [the] defendant was under no legal obligation to bill customers for this amount, since that charge is one that is imposed on wireless providers, not on consumers.” Included in the suit was a copy of a recent bill that showed the 44-cent tax, along with various other 911 and tax-related surcharges.

The suit went on to point out that Sprint never charged this tax to customers in the same area. A Verizon Wireless spokesperson dismissed the lawsuit, saying “This is just silly. It’s a tax on wireless customers, and we’re billing it correctly.”

The truth is that many of the extra taxes on our wireless bills are purposely misleading. With a few exceptions, none are required—despite what the carriers want you to think. For more details, check out our comprehensive guide to cell phone surcharges on Smart Device Central.

The odds are high that we’re not alone in the universe. In fact, there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, a Carnegie Institution astronomer and author of “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” in a new CNN report.

Based on the number of “super-Earths,” or planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter, that have been discovered already among the 330 exoplanets we know of outside the solar system, Boss predicts that any of them that have liquid water could also have life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said in the article. “But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

Soon, NASA will launch the Kepler Mission, which contains a telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years, the report said, in an aim to detect small dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the presence of orbiting planets. The mission is scheduled for launch March 5.