Might not be as difficult as you think. Circuit boards have been flexible for more than a decade and you can easily overmold rigid plastic with flexible stuff (think toothbrush handles). It would be pretty easy to make an ebook reader in the same form factor as a paper book. Open to turn on and read, fold in half to…

A dual mode screen (eink or LCD) would make ebooks much easier to read and allow the current battery to last weeks if it were used only in eink mode. The Notion Ink Adam has this already, but I'm surprised it hasn't spread further.

As a diabetic who injects himself 5+ times per day, this would be useless to me. The needles used for insulin are so thin they are already virtually painless. I don't mean that they only hurt a little- I mean if I didn't know there was a needle there I wouldn't have been able to tell. What really hurts are those damn…

Huh? You agreed with me in your first paragraph, then disagreed with me in the last one. I agree that someone could use the lack of evidence that bigfoot exists to argue that bigfoot doesn't exist, but that would be incorrect. I am saying that the more times you look for something and do not find it, the less likely…

Absence of proof does not constitute proof of absence, but absence of proof is *evidence* of absence. Without this point, people use this statement to support all kinds of things that are almost certainly false. Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. If you look for something thousands of times and never find it, you haven't…

True, but you could chuck the StarTac before it at a wall a hundred times and it would still work. Motorola and Nokia phones from that time could survive damn near anything.

Me three. I also miss being able to drop a phone without it shattering.

Ah, the old Talking Moose. Fun times. I also messed around with a later voice recognition thingie on my Mac around. It worked pretty well and I messed around with it until a friend of mine walking by my room said "computer shut down". It did, and I lost everything I was working on. Never used it or any other voice…

Adding pepper spray to the smoke would've made this video so much more entertaining.

I can actually help with why people talk so loud on their phones without realizing it. On a landline phone your own voice is fed back into the earpiece, which gives you feedback on your volume and people end up talking more reasonably. As far as I know, this does not happen on cellphones, which leads people to talk…

It probably twists and flexes so much because it's going so damn fast. If they slowed it down to the speed of the fishertechnik one and used stock technics components it would have no problem. For example, here's one made from stock lego mindstorms parts solving a cube. Much slower, but probably still faster than the…

Leaves Lego in the dust by solving Rubik's Cube? I don't think so- check out CubeStormer II, which can beat the human world record for solving a Rubik's cube (<5.4s).

Uh, that's exactly what DVRs and VCRs do and it's perfectly legal. Way back in '84 the Supreme Court (Sony v. Universal City Studios) ruled that home use of VCRs did not infringe on copyright as long as the copied material was not used for profit.

Dragon Skin is simple round overlapping ceramic disks. If this is the same idea as a presentation I saw at a conference recently (Christine Ortiz from MIT), they're planning to design interlocking armor plates (no fabric required to hold them in place) where the plates themselves are optimized to prevent penetration.…

Wanna be scared even more? This version can follow you. Check out at 0:25 when a guy walks past. Look at the "head" area- it's got a sensor suite and algorithms to follow people through rough terrain.

[www.jcpenney.com]

Or you could just use two headphones designed to let you hear your surroundings as well as the music ([www.airdrives.com]). I use these for running and they work great, aside from having to turn the volume up higher than with my other headphones.

Nice stuff- thanks for the link.

Considering all of the sensors in these phones now, I think it's only a matter of time before you'll be able to unlock your phone by "swiping" it around your face. Linking the motion sensors to the camera like this would create a 3D surface map that might actually be a pretty secure bimetric. Until you get a black…

I think that one could just as easily go to laziness instead of idiot proofing. It's also not as bad as it used to be, with modern automatics getting close in MPG to manuals. But it's now damn hard to find a new car with a manual. If they even make them you generally have to pay more for the manual now because you…