Filed under: Robots

var digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/design/Blaser_Tournament_Japanese_robots_battle_with_laser_beams’; Look Japan, we know you love your robots but is it really prudent to equip them with frigging laser beams? Why not just hand them maps to our vital organs and special hoses to juice our babies? You’re looking at an actual photo from the Blazer tournament held this week in Fukuoka City, Japan. The competition fitted Kondo’s KHR-1HV with lasers and sensors and then let the teams battle it out in a mock-up city. We truly are the makers of our own doom.

Update: Video added after the break, pew pew… pew-pew, pew.

[Thanks, HolyMary]

Continue reading Video: Blaser tournament unwisely fits Japanese robots with lasers — PEW PEW

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

The last we heard of DHS’s “Project 28″ plan to build a 28-mile stretch of virtual fencing along the US / Mexico border in Arizona, it had been postponed until at least 2011 because the towers didn’t quite work. Well, it appears that on further review, the system is even more of a total failure, and it’s being scrapped entirely: according to Kelly Good, deputy director of the administration’s Secure Border Initiative program, Project 28 “hasn’t come close” to meeting Border Patrol’s goals. Tests of the virtual fence didn’t lead to nearly as many arrests as designers had hoped, and the lag from sensor detection to transmission of an image to border agents was apparently a big part of the problem. Boeing, which won the $860M contract to build the system, is now being told to replace it all with upgraded towers, but there’s no word on when that’s happening or what it’ll cost taxpayers on top of the $20M already paid out. We’re expecting trillion-dollar chain-link bids to come rolling in any day now.

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Show Name: The Daily Show; Show Title: n/a; Episode Date: 2008-04-23

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Show Name: Lewis Blacks Root of All Evil; Show Title: n/a; Season: 1; Episode: 7

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The Nokia N95 8-GB cellphone was just introduced in North America. But instead of writing about it, we’re going to talk about it in the first live video review in Gadget Lab history at 11 a.m. PDT.

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Show Name: The Colbert Report; Show Title: n/a; Episode Date: 2008-04-23

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Georgia’s claim that a Russian MiG shot down one of its drones brings condemnation from the United States, denials from Russia and a nice little video clip from Russia Today.

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Filed under: Laptops

Curious enough about the MSI Wind to sit through a video of a couple of nerds talking about it endlessly in Turkish? Check it out after the break — and we don’t want to hear a word about how you want those three and a half minutes of your life back.

[Via Mike Cane 2008]

Continue reading MSI Wind gets Turkish video hands-on

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Show Name: South Park; Show Title: n/a; Season: 12; Episode: 7

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Show Name: Men in Trees; Show Title: n/a; Season: 2; Episode: 16

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