Sprint may have lost 360,000 customers over the last quarter, but it’s looking to stem that tide with the introduction of Sprint Spark, an enhanced LTE service it says will deliver “unprecedented speeds” to its cellphone users. The company demoed the service running at 1Gbps this morning, however, …
All the unlimited lives, ammo, and health in the world won’t make it easier to deal with your boss at that meeting you’ve got later today. But you know what will? Some straight-up liquid courage. And that’s why this Gamebooze is infinitely more useful to a gainfully employed adult than a Game Boy. For just $20 it promises to make everything more enjoyable: from your daily subway commute, to waiting in line at the bank, to your kid’s piano recital. Just don’t forget to ‘charge’ it every night if you know what we mean. [ThinkGeek]
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(Credit: Dezeen)
We’re not quite at the level of complex navigation using only neuronal activity, but electroencephalography (EEG) headsets have enabled people to do some pretty cool things, including piloting a quadcopter, and painting, just by thinking.
Alejo Bernal, a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, has brought a similar project to the ground. He created a toy car that can be piloted forward by thinking while the user wears a commercially available NeuroSky EEG headset.
The project isn’t just about performing cool maneuvers, but about improving concentration skills, specifically for those with attention deficit disorders. As the wearer starts to focus on moving the car, light levels in the toy vehicle visualize neuronal activity, seen through its semi-transparent acrylic body.
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The public expects Apple to churn out innovative products each year, or at least updated versions of their existing productions with a few innovations here and there. Surely this can not be achieved without substantial investment being made into research and development. It has been discovered through Apple’s annual Form 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company’s R&D expenses were up 32 percent this year. Apple has spent $4.5 billion on research and development alone this year, that almost the amount for which BlackBerry, an entire company, is likely to be sold.
Last year, Apple’s R&D expenditures stood at $3.4 billion, a 39 percent increase in itself from $2.4 billion spent on R&D in 2011. Apple accounts the increase in expenditure to increase in personnel, also to increased expenditures it had to make to support expanded activities. Apple believes that “focused investments” in R&D are crucial to its future growth, the filing states, and that it expects to make further investments in this sector down the line. $4.5 billion is merely a fraction of the huge pile of cash Apple is sitting on, at the end of its previous quarter, the company had nearly $150 billion in cash reserves. The filing also mentions Apple’s plans to spend $11 billion on capital expenditures next year, earmarking $550 million just for retail store facilities. 30 new stores are expected to be opened around the globe next year, with 20 existing stores likely to be remodeled.
Apple Spent $4.5 Billion This Year On R&D original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Engineers at NVIDIA have taken the time this week to reveal a collection of new abilities for their SHIELD device, perhaps the most symbolic of these being a new “Console Mode”. This mode for the device allows the user to close the top on the handheld device and run its display through a mini-HDMI port […]
Tesla’s West Coast Supercharger Corridor opened today, making it possible for owners of the Model S to travel free between San Diego and Vancouver, using Highway 101 and Interstate 5. This makes a Supercharger reachable within 200 miles to over 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of those in Oregon and Washington.
A lot of attention has been paid to Tesla’s efforts to make a coast-to-coast trip in one of its vehicles a reality, via Superchargers and other charging stations, but blanketing the West Coast means that Tesla S owners can now travel from essentially the Mexican border to within the Canadian one without paying any money to fill their cars, and with a minimal amount of charging time required. Superchargers can charge a Tesla S to a capacity worth around 200 miles of driving distance in just 30 minutes, and the stations are positioned near restaurants and shopping centers to give you something to do while your car powers up.
To promote the new corridor, Tesla is having two Model S vehicles make the trip from San Diego to Vancouver, and they’ll be pushing updates to their various social media properties along the way. Spoiler alert: those cars are definitely going to make it without incident.
Supercharger rollout continues globally, with Tesla announcing plans in September to cover 100 percent of the population of Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg, and 90 percent of the population in England, Wales, and Sweden with a station within 320 kms by the end of 2014. Getting past that basic excuse of “I can’t buy one, there’s nowhere to charge” is clearly a huge part of the company’s global rollout strategy, which is why each of these Supercharger network expansions is a big win for Tesla and for founder Elon Musk.
The Washington Post reports that, according to new documents leaked by PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has been secretly tapping
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It’s a top secret plan with a fittingly supervillain-esque codename: MUSCULAR. That tool, part of a partnership between the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ, has been used to infiltrate Google and Yahoo data centers across the world, according to documents revealed by Edward Snowden and confirmed by sources at …
Its not unusual for Hollywood stars to lend their voices in video games, particularly insanely popular video games such as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series. Stars such as Ray Liotta and Samuel L. Jackson have voiced characters in the game before, and apparently Alec Baldwin was given the chance to join that distinguished list a few years ago, but he turned the offer down. Baldwin, of 30 Rock fame, made the revelation while talking with Indiewire.
Baldwin revealed that many years ago, he was approached by “the makers of Grand Theft Auto” to lend his voice to a mobster in the game, presumably for Grand Theft Auto 2. He says that he was offered an “incomprehensible amount of money” just for a day or two’s work. Seems like he really was offered a lot of money, because Baldwin regards the offer multiple times as “pile of money” and “ridiculous amount of money.” However, he chose not to do it because the mobster character was a cop killer, and he had issues with that. Baldwin says that he refused to do the job because of his reputation, adding that he already has “enough problems with the press as it is.” Sucks for Baldwin fans though, doesn’t it? They probably would have loved to see him channel Jack Donaghy as a mobster.
Alec Baldwin Refused To Lend His Voice In Grand Theft Auto original content from Ubergizmo. 
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