Hasta La Gadget!

Jamin “Sudsy” Barton is a bartender at the San Francisco Mission District 500 Club. On a Tuesday night, while closing, he discovered a lost cell phone, one of many that are discovered throughout the week. After the phone went unclaimed, he gave it a bit more attention, and realized that it differed from other smartphones, bearing a “not for sale” sticker and Google logo on the back. He showed the smartphone to a bar regular named Dave, who identified it as the soon-to-be-announced Nexus 4. Dave agreed to contact Google, and that’s when their problems started.

According to Wired, Barton heard back from a frazzled Dave the next day. “Dave sort of freaked out. ‘Google lost a phone,’ he told me. ‘You just got a guy fired. The Google police are coming.’” According to Barton, “Google had him pretty worked up” over the issue, telling him he could be an accessory.

To get the phone back, Google sent out Brian Katz, a global investigations and intelligence manager. Katz insisted on a meeting at the 500 Club immediately. Barton refused and left work early, heading to a different bar. Katz ended up meeting one of Barton’s coworkers, Don Hodge, who sent the Google “cop” on a wild goose chase, claiming that Barton was at the police station reporting the phone. According to Hodge, “[Katz] was little but really pushy, like military.”

Katz then left the 500 Club to intercept Barton and ended up caught in a scuffle at the police station, where local residents were rioting due to a police shooting earlier in the day. A lawyer friend of Barton’s, Ragi Dindial, then met Katz at the police station. Dindial retrieved the phone from Barton and passed it on to Katz, thus ending the saga of Google’s lost Nexus 4. Wired paid Barton in exchange for several snapshots of the phone; it also has a brief video of the device on its website.

Google is to announce the Nexus 4 on October 29. The smartphone features a 4.7-inch display with a resolution of 1,280 x 768. Inside you’ll find a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, and around back there’s an 8-megapixel camera. The device runs Android 4.2.

[via Wired]

Google’s Nexus 4 smartphone found in bar is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Dospara hits back with a new gaming PC, the Galleria HX ‘Counter Strike Online’. This Counter Strike Online certified gaming PC is packed with a 3.40GHz Intel Core i7-3770 quad-core processor, an Intel H77 Express Chipset, a GeForce GTX 660 2GB graphics card, an 8GB DDR3 RAM, a 1TB hard drive, a DVD Super Multi Drive, a 550W 80PLUS BRONZE power supply and runs on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS. The Galleria HX ‘Counter Strike Online is available now for 89,980 Yen (about $1,127). [Product Page]

If you’re wondering if the iPad Mini had an effect on its competitors, it did. Just not the one you were thinking. The Kindle Fire HD actually had its biggest day of sales since its launch, the day after the iPad Mini was announced. More »

Jeff Wyly, campaign manager for GOP Rep. Dan Lungren’s re-election in the Sacramento region of California, sent an email to supporters Friday with what he described as “very troubling news.” According to Wyly, an “extreme left-wing group” has been busing people from the liberal enclaves of San Francisco and Oakland to “spread their lies to voters in our district.”

The left-wing group in question is CREDO, an organization that has supported high-profile causes that some might hesitate to describe as extreme, including ending the war in Iraq and ensuring that low-income women have access to breast cancer screenings. This year, CREDO adopted a strategy from the right-wing 2010 playbook by establishing a super PAC dedicated to unseating right wing Tea Party legislators like Lungren.

The ploy that Wyly referred to -– bringing volunteers from San Francisco to Sacramento to canvass for votes — is part of that effort, and CREDO made no attempt to hide it. As Wily noted in his email, CREDO provided travel information on its website. “See it for yourself,” he wrote, linking to the page in question.

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It’s like something out a strange science fiction movie: a giant asteroid careening towards earth is diverted using a massive blast of paintballs fired into space, saving mankind and forever giving paintball-lovers bragging rights over airsoft fans. As odd as it sounds, this very proposal earned Sung Wook Paek, Department of Aeronautics and Astronauts at MIT, the 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition. And yes, there’s a video.

The competition was sponsored by the United Nations’ Space Generation Advisory Council. Paek presented his strategy at the International Astronautical Congress in Italy, where he detailed how firing a mass quantity of paintballs into an asteroid could prevent what would otherwise be an unfortunate collision with our fragile planet. It’s as simple sounding as it is seemingly ingenious; the light-colored paintballs, upon impact, would cause a slight diversion in the asteroid’s course. At this point, the chunk of space rock would then be coated in a reflective substance. The sunlight bouncing off the reflective surface would increase solar radiation pressure and further alter the asteroid’s course, redirecting it out of the danger zone.

This method was detailed in a video using the 900-foot-wide asteroid Apophis as the virtual test subject due to its potential impact with earth in the future. Just how many paintballs would it take to potentially knock the massive asteroid off course? Five tons’ worth. And sadly, while it’s fun to imagine the asteroid careening off-course immediately after a blast of pellets, it would take about two decades for the solar radiation pressure to shove the rock out of its dangerous trajectory. You can check out a video of this in action here.

According to Paek, additional things could be launched into space in addition to the paint pellets, such as pellets with aerosols that would “impart air drag on the incoming asteroid to slow it down. Or, you could just paint the asteroid so you can track it more easily with telescopes on Earth. So there are other uses for this method.” Last year’s winning strategy revolved around the idea of diverting an asteroid via a blast of solid pellets.

[via Space]

Fighting asteroids with paintballs: an MIT graduate student’s winning strategy is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.