Holy Military Secrets, Batman! Google Maps Revealed The Air Force's Hidden Weapon!

Thanks to Google Maps and an eagle-eyed Reddit user, we now know that the United States Air Force is hiding very special weapon on a military base in Okinawa, Japan. Oh yes, they're working with him.

Now can someone figure out where the Bat-Signal is hidden?

The PS3 Can Be Used As A Bed For Your Pe

SCORE! Finally! I've found a use for my PS3 Fat. Gut out its insides and turn it into a pseudo cage/pet bed for a ferret. Sounds like a plan. Now I'll need to get a ferret.

This gadget turned pet bed isn't as cute as the CRT Monitor Dog Bed but that's probably cause ferrets are rather ugly. I wonder if PETA or Sony approves of this.

The Newer, Smaller MacBook Air: The Storage Is the Secret?

An intriguing detail from AppleInsider about the new, 11.6-inch MacBook Air that's expectedto be revealed next week: It's not going to use a hard drive or an SSD for storage. It's going to use something else.

Instead, says AppleInsider's sources, it'll use "something described as an 'SSD Card'" for storage that's more like a stick of RAM than a traditional hard drive, a proprietary SSD alternative designed by Apple. It's almost like an SSD that's shed the bulk of a hard drive enclosure (since SSDs are basically just bundles of memory chips inside of a hard drive casing), but integrated, so it'll take up less room in the notebook.

It makes a lot sense, actually, to dump a hard drive enclosure's weight and bulk, particularly in a machine that's supposedly only 11.6 inches (and presumably even lighter than the original Air). It's a lot like when Apple ditched replaceable batteries in the MacBook Pros. Using only flash storage would also mean that the Air would be instant on, and more like an iPad in that regard.

Old Spice Guy Betrays Old Spice to Sell Windows Phone 7 in Australia?

Meme treachery! Viral video legend Isiah Mustafa appears in a new video, where he not-so-subtly alludes to the Windows Phone 7 launch, and an apparent ad campaign starring himself. I always thought advertising was a loyal business—how disillusioning.

While we will always be big fans of our pal Isiah for so kindly answering our tech query back in the Old Spice glory days, we wonder whether he'll be able to recapture the magic of his previous, heavily scented tenure. Is Windows Phone 7 sexy enough? Can he capture our hearts, and our libidos, with a tile-based interface? We have a feeling he'll find a way—and it will probably involve him ripping his shirt off a lot, and an ice cream cone filled with rubies or something.

Next Android Release To Be Named Ice Cream?

According to what ARM President Tudor Brown has been telling Forbes writer Elizabeth Woyke, the Android release following Honeycomb will be dubbedIce Cream. There's no confirmation from Google just yet, but the name would fit the pattern well enough.

But for fun, let's guess what other dessert names starting with the letter I Google might choose. Italian Cheesecake? Irish Cream Truffles?

Expensive, Yet Fast Describes Iomega's USB 3.0 SSD Flash Drives

USB 3.0 is fast. Faster than standard 7200 RPM disks can handle. So how do you make external storage faster to better fill up the transfer pipe? By putting an SSD inside.

As expected, these USB 3.0 SSDs are both costly and small, compared to your normal USB 3.0 disks. You're getting a 1.8-inch drive in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB sizes for $230, $400 and $850, respectively. Normal folks that only need external backup of their photos and music for traveling on the road will want to stick with non-SSD type drives, but pros and people who need fast drives to supplement their laptops will find these useful. And at 1.8 inches, they're about phone-sized and can fit nicely into pockets.

All three drives will be released in early November. Iomega tells me that these SSDs are about twice as fast as 7200RPM USB 3.0 drives, and 10 times as fast as USB 2.0 drives.

Korean Pizza Hut Commercial

If the video is not available in your country just search on Youtube—Korean Pizza Hut Commercial.

Put Your Camera on Canon's Prototype Dock and Watch it Magically Charge and Share

Well, it's inductive charging, not magic. But Canon's Cross Media dock looks like a particularly sweet implementation, letting you not only juice up to three cameras or camcorders sans wires, but suck down and share your pics and vids too.

As soon as your camera is placed on the prototype's surface—and don't expect it to be anything more than a prototype for at least a couple years—the box will pull over your content and send it to your TV via HDMI, where you can browse at your leisure. Sure beats having to mess with memory cards, no? Now just give us a universal version of this that works with any camera brand (and phones!).

Skype 5 Integrates Facebook Phonebooks, Makes Group Video Semi-Official

Windows: Skype is out with an official version 5, making the group video chat seen in previous sign-up betas an official option, and linking up with your Facebook account for status updating and quick calls to friends' Skype or landline numbers.

So this release, beyond the usual bug and performance fixes, mainly makes official the group video chat we found a bit wonky in a real-world test—although Skype still labels the group video function as "beta." The Facebook integration, at least from the contacts-with-Skype perspective, is pretty convenient. Now you just have to bug your friends to list their Skype names on Facebook.

New also to this version is an automatic call recovery feature, which you can set to automatically re-dial and reconnect calls whenever they drop out. It won't be a great idea for every situation, but very handy in the right circumstance.

Skype 5 is a free download for Windows users only. Presumably, Skype will push out the group video features to other clients, as it's a Windows-only feature at the moment.

This Bridge Looks Like It Can Fly to Space

The Paik Nam June Media Bridge project—in Seoul, Korea—is more than a kilometer long (0.67 miles). It has museums, libraries, and shopping malls, but what it really needs are anti-gravity engines so it could fly to orbit.

Those ramps are not engines of any kind, however. They just lead to gardens by the river and ship docks:

Each of the bridge's floors has horizontal gardens. The building uses solar panels for energy, as well as water from the river for climate regulation.

Japanese Scientists Teach World's Creepiest Robot to Sing

Meet HRP-4C, a singing "divabot" who mimics human singers' facial expressions and breath patterns. What a beautiful song she's singing! Can't wait to hear it again, in the nightmares we will have about her and her creepy corpse eyes.

Hoodies with Headphones Built Into the Strings

HoodieBuddies are a blend of fashion and technology that will save space in your pockets and prevent you from the dreaded tangled headphone cord situation. This normal looking hooded sweatshirts actually have headphone earbuds built right into the strings. The other end of the cord goes through the pocket, so you’d plug your iPod in via the pocket.

 Now you won’t have to carry around a pair of headphones to listen to music on the go. Sure you may seem a bit odd to look at dancing down the street with sweatshirt strings in your ears but people are probably looking at you funny anyway, you freak. They’re available soon for around $45.

Apple "Back to the Mac" Event Oct. 20: New OS X and MacBook Air?

Is that a Lion lurking in Apple's invite for a "Back to the Mac" event on October 20? It looks like a brand new version OS X. I hope they call it Simba. But what else?

The surprise could be a revamped MacBook Air. At least, that's what Daring Fireball thinks:

A "sneak preview of the next major version of Mac OS X", and, I'm just guessing here, the brand-new way-cooler MacBook Air.

The other update that is long overdue is iLife. However, it seems unlikely that they will introduce a new Mac OS X (which will take at least one hour to present), a new "way-cooler" computer, and iLife. We'll find out a week from today.

Grown Man Drives Girlfriend Off the Road For Taking His PlayStation Away

Darren Suchon even at 42 years old, he doesn't understand that it's wrong to drive your live-in girlfriend off the road just because she took your PlayStation away. Especially when you're using her Porsche to do it.

Suchon is, as one might guess, unemployed, and apparently spends most of his day playing video games. Understandably frustrated with the situation, Colleen Frable took Suchon's console with her to work last Friday. Which in turn prompted Suchon to follow Frable from their home to somewhere up Route 248, where he forced her car off the road and rear-ended her. Classy guy. And it gets better!

When he was initially confronted by the police after the chase, Suchon's response was that he "didn't know what the big deal was." According to reports:

He told police, "I just wanted the game, I would never hurt her. I just wanted the game."

He'll probably have to do a little better than that when his court date comes up; Suchon's been charged with simple assault, reckless endangerment, harassment, disorderly conduct, reckless driving and driving with a suspended or revoked license. So assuming he doesn't come up with the $25,000 in bail money any time soon, he's likely bleeped his last bloop for quite some time. No word on what PlayStation it was, but if it was a PSP they should seriously consider life without parole.

Virgin Atlantic Fantasy Flying vs Reality

Virgin Atlantic has a new ad out! And it makes flying look like something between attending the VMAs and a scene from 300. But let's keep it really real here, Virgin—you're cool, but flying is not like this.

The full ad—which, to its credit, is well done, as far as travel porn goes—can be viewed in its entirety below. Slow motion! Sultry flight attendants! Gourmet shrimp—in slow motion! It accomplishes something between making me want to run out and buy a ticket to anywhere right now, and making me feel a lot less cool about myself.

Mario's Creator is Embarrassed by How Super Mario Bros. Looks In HD

I'm sure you'll agree that half the charm of playing Super Mario Bros, nowadays is that it's so completely different to realistic games like Fallout 3. To its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto however, it's just plain ol' embarrassing.

Even though the Wii doesn't output at full-HD, Miyamoto feels that the resolution of the original Mario game doesn't quite hold up to today's standards. He told Earthbound's designer Shigesato Itoi that "When I see this [Super Mario Bros.] so clearly, it's a little embarrassing back then, with tube televisions, it was a little blurrier and the images weren't quite so sharp. The places where we tried to fudge it a bit really stand out!"

Doesn't his concern just make you love him even more? If Super Mario Bros. was made today, he would smooth out some of the mistakes kept in the game, he said, though he does admit that "those rough places are a part of the game and even well-received." Damn right they are, Shigsy!

Will It Blend? - Old Spice

Are Google's Driverless Cars Legal?

Google's project to design driverless vehicles raised several questions about the future of driving. But it also raised a more topical question: Are Google's heavily-modified driverless vehicle prototypes even legal? We found out.

Researchers have been working on driverless vehicles since the late 1970s; European governments spent nearly $1 billion in the 1980s and '90s on automated vehicles, including a Mercedes sedan that passed other vehicles on the German autobahn in 1995 at speeds of 110 mph without human input.

In revealing its project Sunday, Google said it had racked up nearly 140,000 miles in its vehicles on public roads, including the Pacific Coast Highway and famous spots such as San Francisco's twisty Lombard Street. The computing giant says it alerted local law enforcement officials whenever testing took place.

According to California officials, there are no laws that would bar Google from testing such models, as long as there's a human behind the wheel who would be responsible should something go wrong. Google says its test vehicles always have at least three passengers: a driver behind the wheel and two technicians to monitor the software and systems.

Google's software "would be just a big step up from cruise control," said Mike Marando, a spokesman for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. "If the vehicle goes too fast, or strays across the line, the human would be responsible for operating the car legally."

And sadly, modern vehicles have been replacing drivers with technology for years. Adaptive cruise control is standard on many luxury models; Ford and Lexus vehicles can parallel park on their own with only brake inputs from the driver, and more advanced systems engage braking controls automatically if they sense a crash is imminent.

For now, there's no legal limits keeping Google or other researchers from developing their cars on public roads as long as there's a human behind the wheel. Going beyond that will make the legal questions as challenging as the technical ones.

Dell Venue Pro Hands On: A Solid First WP7 Slider

Dell's WP7 phone may have gotten a name downgrade—Dell Venue Pro just doesn't have quite the cachet of Lightning—but after some hands on time, the slider at least looks and feels every bit as promising as we'd hoped.

The Venue Pro has a bit more heft than some of the other WP7 devices launching today, but it's not overly bulky. It just feels solid, durable. Likewise the portrait slider keyboard: good spacing on keys, a sliding mechanism that seemed capable of enduring an extended SMS barrage. The 4.1-inch multitouch AMOLED screen is bright, crisp, and responsive. I can't wait to see how pics from the 5MP camera look on it. One quibble: the phone's already so long that the added hight from sliding out the keyboard vertically makes it look and feel a little gawky and off-balance. But it otherwise seems, so far, like a warhorse.

It's a promising start for Microsoft, and a pretty clear indicator that their strict guidelines for hardware partners is paying off. It's also a fresh start for Dell, who between the Venue Pro and the rumored Thunder Android phone are going to quickly make Aero a distant memory.

LG Slips Early With Optimus 7 Windows Phone 7 Handset

Admittedly it's not like we didn't know LG was going to announce the Optimus 7, consideringthey've already shown it off several times themselves. However, their blog went live with the details today, showing off the panorama photo-shooting phone.

The screen is a 3.8-inch WVGA display, with the overall phone measuring 125 x 59.8 x 11.5mm. Inside, there's 16GB of storage, along with the usual Bluetooth 2.1, accelerometer, proximity sensor, GPS, digital compass and light sensor.

Clamped onto the back is a 5MP camera which can shoot video at 720p resolution, but also snap 360-degree panorama photos. That'll be a nice trick to furnish your Flickr accounts with.

While it's running Windows Phone 7, LG (like many other manufacturers, we're sure) has added some of their own apps to the tiled interface. We already knew of the DLNA streaming, but there's also voice-to-text for Facebook, Twitter and email; not to mention Scansearch which is their own take on the whole "take a picture of a barcode, see if you can find it cheaper elsewhere" shebang which we've used several times on other devices, only to grow bored and revert back to Amazon.