Hasta La Gadget!

White space devices seem likely to play a major part in the FCC’s solution to the wireless spectrum crisis. Operating in the buffers between frequencies used by television broadcasts, these devices will be able to exploit TV’s airspace without interfering with the incumbent users’ traffic. The unlicensed utilization of white spaces has been approved going on for a year now, but really important government stuff has gotten in the way of making that vote a reality. It was only recently that Claudville, Virginia got the very first such network, and initial results show that it hasn’t disrupted any of the fine, fine programming percolating the local airwaves. The only issue we see is that your WSD will need to be capable of both identifying its own position by GPS and hooking up to the database to find out what bands it may use, but then it’s not like anyone sells smartphones without these capabilities nowadays, is it?

FCC starts up white spaces database, devices now inevitable originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feeling stressed out? The Japanese media are often featuring stories focused on Japanese being full of stress, but what can you really do about it? Houses are thinly constructed and apartments have paper-thin walls, so having a good scream is out of the question. This is what brought places like karaoke boxes to life in the first place, but sometimes you really just want to break something.

んだ〜バカヤロウ (nda~ bakayarou) is a new restaurant in Nagoya focused entirely on helping people relieve stress by acting stupid. It’s hard to translate the restaurant literally, so we’ll settle for “WTF?!”.

Both the Sakae Keizai Shinbun and the Asahi Shinbun did features on the place, featuring photos of customers getting doused with water and subjecting themselves to punishment in the name of fun.

Smashing plates in a controlled environment certainly has its merits, but Bakayarou removes the industrial atmosphere of the back of a truck or your ex’s kitchen, and let’s you go straight to the skull of your best friend. Of course, it’s not a real bottle, but that doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying.

In general, many Japanese third spaces are made exactly for stress relief, whether it’s about gaining private time to read, surf the web, or simply get some work done. In this case, getting crazy with some friends in a venue made just for that is pretty interesting, especially when it’s marketed for stress relief.

Price fixing is nothing new in the LCD panel business. Hell, collusion is pretty common across the entire consumer electronics industry though it’s difficult (and costly) to prove. Now Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, is suing a who’s who of Asian LCD manufacturers alleging a ploy to fix prices on handset LCDs. The November 25th filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco division, names Samsung Electronics, LG Display, Sharp, Hitachi, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes as co-conspirators. Nokia, of course, is seeking cash and injunctive relief to remedy damages incurred and has the dubious honor of following another high-profile move launched against Apple just last month. With Nokia’s high-margin smartphone sales waning against stiff competition, it’s easy to understand why its execs would be miffed if they paid artificially high prices for panels considering the sheer volume of lower-priced handsets Nokia sells at razor thin margins.

Update: Just dawned on us that this lawsuit (which we now know claims an 11 company cartel operating from “at least” January 1, 1996 until Dec 11, 2006) joins the AT&T action kicked off in October. Pile on! Nokia has also filed suit in the UK against both LCD and CRT makers.

Nokia sues LCD manufacturers for alleged price fixing (update: joins AT&T) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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During the Cold War, the CIA hired a master magician to teach them deceptive maneuvers. Here are a handful of tricks, recovered from a super secret manual the government thought it had destroyed over 30 years ago.

Our spooky spy friends Bob Wallace and Keith Melton—the guys behind the amazing spy-gadget bible Spycraft— uncovered one of the supposedly incinerated “magic” journals. Their new book, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, is in part a verbatim reproduction of that manual, but, thrillingly, it also shares the (declassified) history of CIA trickery from the beginning, including the formation of the double top-secret and sometimes sinister MKULTRA division. MKULTRA was supposed to have been erased from history in 1973, but—in true spy fashion—the few shreds of paperwork that remained ended up telling its whole story.

The discovered manual was penned by John Mulholland, the David Copperfield and/or Blaine of his day. Though Mulholland knew more than anybody since Houdini about pulling fast ones, his challenge was to teach people who were not necessarily pros to pull off tricks in front of an audience that didn’t know it was an audience. Perform a lousy trick, and you don’t get booed—you get beheaded.

Here Wallace and Melton have kindly shared some newly created illustrations of tricks from the book, CIA sleights you could employ to escape from a water-bottling plant, poison a friend, send messages with your shoelaces, steal single sheets of paper, look dumb, and of course, kill Castro. Not all of the tricks below come from Mulholland’s original manual, but they were all devised at Langley, and are all lovingly described in the book—a $16 thrill of a read for anyone with even a passing interest in spyology:

Thanks to Bob Wallace and Keith Melton for sharing their book’s illustrations with us. If you’d like to know more about the book, check out its sales page on Amazon (there’s a Kindle version too), or visit the authors’ new website, CIA Magic.

If you’ve been waiting for RED to release a product within reach of the prosumer class of shooters then this is it: the Scarlet 2/3. While the price is up from the original $3,750 lens and brain kit announced back in December 2008, an additional ASIC and four additional boards bring plenty of new features to help justify the price bump on this professional-grade camera. Scarlet starts with a 2/3-inch sensor in the $4,750 Scarlet 8X Fixed package (including “brain” and fixed 8x zoom lens, side CF module, REDmote, 2.8-inch touchscreen with “touch focus tracking,” REDVOLT battery, and travel charger) or $2,750 for the Scarlet Interchangeable which includes the brain-only with adapters available for electronic RED, Canon, and Nikon glass. The resulting cam shoots 3k REDCODE RAW video at 120fps (150fps burst mode) and scaled 720p or 1080p recording at 60fps. Expect both models to ship in May or June assuming nothing goes wrong with the ASIC or firmware. Until then you can check the gallery for plenty of shots includes a glimpse of RED’s mini primes and the 8x side-by-side with the 2/3 interchangeable.

RED Scarlet 2/3 priced, detailed, and wanted originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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