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Rusty Wallace Racing (RWR) had a busy weekend, not only confirming Brendan Gaughan as the team’s No. 62 Toyota Camry driver for the 2010 season, but also naming Scott McDougall crew chief for the No. 66 driven by Steve Wallace.

"Rusty has built a great organization and everyone is working extremely hard to get our Toyota Camrys in Victory Lane this season," Brendan Gaughan said according to NASCAR. "With a full year of Nationwide Series experience under my belt no… (read more)

How do you take a great idea like Xbox Live games coming to cellphones and ruin it? By only bringing those games to Windows Mobile phones, which may be what Microsoft has planned.

As you can see by the image above, taken from some internal Microsoft marketing material from last month, Xbox Live is spread across the Xbox 360, Windows and…Windows Phone. Now, this could just be a stand-in for many phones, or a new branding for game content to be available on many platforms. But it also could mean the games are just heading to Windows Mobile phones, which would pretty much kill the entire initiative right off the bat.

Also conspicuously absent from these plans: the Zune. No love for the Zune, Microsoft? [Kotaku]

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this morning in a case that could challenge last term’s groundbreaking decision granting criminal defendants the right to call forensic analysts as witnesses.

Seven months ago, the court ruled, in a 5-4 decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, that under the Confrontation Clause of the constitution, prosecutors can’t simply enter lab reports as evidence without giving defendants a right to cross-examine the analyst who conducted the tests. Since the decision came down, prosecutors have complained that the new rule puts an unmanageable burden on them — and 26 states join Virginia is today’s case, asking for a reversal of the decision in Melendez-Diaz.

Today’s case, Briscoe  et. al. v. Virginia, could provide a window for a slim majority of the court to limit last term’s decision. The makeup of the court has changed — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a former prosecutor, has replaced David Souter, a member of the majority in Melendez-Diaz.

Melendez-Diaz protected a critical right for defendants in criminal cases, and it should be upheld. The case has had most its most immediate impact in drug cases, but it also ramifications in violent crimes. More than half of the wrongful convictions overturned through DNA testing to date were caused in part by faulty forensics. Without the right to challenge a forensic analyst, defendants are at a disadvantage when prosecutors throw flashy — but questionable — CSI antics into a trial.

(more…)

Google’s Nexus One support forums have been flooded with anecdotes about the phone’s poor 3G connectivity, so one user decided to follow up with some reasonably scientific tests. The conclusion? The Nexus One is kind of terrible at basic cellphonery!

The test was simple and limited, consisting of one dude, user WV, wandering in and out of his house, recording signal strength as measured in dBm and ASU with Android’s built-in metering app. Assuming the Nexus One is supposed to work like a normal cellphones—that is, it connects to 3G networks when they’re available and EDGE only when they’re not—something’s wrong.

Since the phone is obviously finding and receiving the cellular signals just fine, but not handling them as you’d expect, randomly flipping between the two—and evidently preferring EDGE most of the time—no matter how strong its signal is. This points to a software issue, not a hardware issue. That, and this:

OK. I found “Phone Info” screen through “Any Cut”. This looks like a screen not intended for average users. It clearly has settings that should not be messed with. However, it does have a pull down menu that was set to “WCDMA Preferred”. I changed this to “WCDMA Only”. The phone reset, and never again saw the f’ing “E” on the signal indicator- ALL 3G. After about 1/2 hour of speed tests (150k – 800kbps) and google satellite map downloads (all definitely faster), I switched back to “WCDMA Preferred”. Guess what? After a few minutes, I was back on EDGE, even with a good signal. Switched back to “WCDMA Only”, and 3G it remains.

This doesn’t fully solve the problem, because as WV notes, if you fall out of T-Mobile’s 3G coverage area with EDGE disabled, you’re basically boned. But anyway, yes, this appears to be a software bug. Or, if you’re feeling conspiratorial today, like WV, a software feature:

My concern is whether T-mobile is being sneaky about this and purposefully dumbing down the 3G to Edge to reduce cell frequency congestion and/or their back-end network congestion.

I’m not sure I want to draw that nexus (haw?) quite yet, since the issue was first brought to light by comparing the Nexus One’s 3G/EDGE handling to other T-Mobile 3G Android handsets, and those, despite having the same data-sucking potential as the Google Phone, haven’t been throttled in any way. While Google and T-Mobile say they’re “investigating,” the evidence keeps mounting and the question looms larger: what’s really wrong with the Nexus One’s 3G? [Google Nexus One Support Forums]

Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Truck, Etc., Dodge

Entering the Chrysler display promised to yield few surprises here at the Detroit Auto Show. The automaker doesn’t even have a press conference scheduled – mostly because there isn’t a lot happening new product-wise. But that doesn’t mean The Pentastar doesn’t have anything to be proud of, including the latest iteration of the Dodge Ram Heavy Duty, which was recently named the Motor Trend Truck of the Year.

Ostensibly to celebrate that award, but probably more likely to add a little excitement to its booth area here in Detroit, Chrysler has somehow managed to attach a brand-new 2010 Dodge Ram Heavy Duty to the ceiling of its display. So, if you plan on visiting Detroit this week to see all that the world’s finest automakers have to offer, make your way to the Chrysler booth… and keep your eyes skyward.

Oh, one more thing. How many people were thinking Toyota when they read the headline for this post? What a feeling!

Follow our coverage of the 2010 Detroit Auto Show live all day on Twitter at http://twitter.com/therealautoblog

Detroit 2010: What a Feeling! Dodge Ram is Dancing on the Ceiling originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Proving once again that Apple’s iTunes approval process is absurd and futile, an app developer got his porn browser approved in under 12 hours, even with all the latest rules in place. The funny thing: Apple doesn’t know about it.

Until now, that is. Here’s what the developer told us:

I developed an app that is currently available in the app store. It’s called forChan and it is technically the first app with nudity that meets all of Apples requirements (hey, it was approved in under 12 hours believe it or not!).

It is a web browser/photo app. You have to enter URLs to browse different imageboards which do/don’t contain nudity. You can switch between categories to decide which uncensored content gets delivered to the
previous URL (blondes, brunettes, etc, etc).

There is currently over 100,000 pics spread between 15 categories with much much more coming soon.

It’s pretty simple. When you get the app, you can only browse a gallery of dogs. They are naked, but they are dogs, so unless you are into furry butts and lipsticks, all is fine.

But after pasting the image board URL, forChan allows you to browse through your favorite smut with ease, including full frontal nudity. While I haven’t seen any gallery with actual sexual intercourse yet, you can basically set this $1 iPhone/iPod touch software to browse whatever material you want. The app is 17+ and its description mentions nudity and sex, so Apple must know about it. However, no other 17+ iTunes Store app shows all the juicy bits.

Would Apple remove this app, like they did with BeautyMeter? That was a interactive application for teens, created to exchange photos and rate them. Porn was bound to happen. This one, however, is just a web browser for images. If they ban it, however, they will be consistent with previous cases: Any app that can be used to browse porn is automatically removed from the store.

But unlike previous cases, the software itself is truly innocuous until you enter a web address in the URL field (one could have argued the same about BeautyMeter, which was innocuous until you uploaded your bust or penis to ie). So, if they remove forChan, they will set yet another dangerous precedent.

I can think about another app in the iPhone that does exactly what forChan does. It comes from the factory.

Its name is Safari. [iTunes App Store]

What happened to your iPhone? It broke?! How?!! Just stopped working?! Really?! You didn’t drop it in the toilet? You dropped it in the toilet, didn’t you? Ah, the truth comes out. You dropped it in the toilet.

We’ve all dropped phones in the toilet before, except today’s complicated smartphones don’t work after being dropped in the toilet — unlike those old Nokia phones from the late 90’s. If you’re looking to replace your toilet phone, you can get an unlocked, refurbished iPhone 3G from sellout.woot.com for $380, today only.

That’s not a terrible deal considering that a new, no-contract iPhone 3G can set you back well over $500. This one carries a 90-day warranty.

Apple 8GB iPhone 3G [sellout.woot.com]

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We saw Fujitsu’s “service robot” ENON back in October 2008 during the CEATEC exhibition in Chiba/Japan (see video below), and it seems the friendly guy has been selling well in the meantime. The robot can be used as an information terminal, for entertainment purposes, patrolling, assistance etc. And last weekend, ENON could be seen in the wild, namely in a shopping mall in Osaka.

That specific ENON spent the entire Saturday interacting with customers. Equipped with a camera and face recognition software, the robot is capable of detecting a human’s gender and age. Combine this with ENON’s ability to “speak” and move around, and you get a store clerk of a very different kind.

During the test in Osaka, ENON was able to sweet-talk different customers into going to different stores, depending on the age and gender of the people he interacted with. Reportedly, the robot recommended a bar to a woman in her 30s by telling her the style of the bar would fit her beauty. ENON can switch between a female and a male voice, too.

Here’s the robot recommending a seafood restaurant:

Here’s ENON trying to talk people into going to a bar:

And finally, here’s the ENON video I made over one year ago at the CEATEC show:

Via Plastic Pals via Sankei News [JP] via Robonable [JP]

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Contrary to what one might expect in this economy, commuters in California are bailing on San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system and getting back into their cars, thanks to lower gas prices and higher transit fares, MercuryNews.com reports.

Some have even decided to work from home as a result of the recession-induced fare hikes.

Despite the increases in fares, BART is far from being a self-sufficient system, requiring $318 million in local, state and federal tax support in 2009, according to Reason.com.

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh has more on this devastating trend:

The desertion of the riders is also taking place outside the Bay Area. Los Angeles’ Metropolitican Transit Authority reports ridership down over the last two years for all its lines except that great Valley Zephyr, the Orange Line [pdf], a bus route which runs from Warner Center to North Hollywood and, in a rare reversal of transit policy, was actually developed to service proven demand. L.A. rail boardings are way down.

Ridership is also falling sharply in Sacramento [pdf] and Orange County. I am unable to decipher this report from San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System, which is confusingly titled “MTS Third Quarter Ridership Sees Increases in 2009” but is dated April 27, 2009. This North County Times story has San Diego MTS ridership down 15 percent from 2008 to 2009.

Declining service is frequently named to explain why nobody takes mass transit — obviously because this helps make the case that the government needs to invest more. Yet several of the transit systems mentioned above are reporting improvements in on-time-performance in 2009. I take L.A. mass transit frequently and have never had a complaint — though as always, the key to transit happiness rests in taking buses and avoiding trains.

Read the rest at Reason — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Transit Funding Is Broken
• NYC Public Transit Is On The "Brink Of Catastrophe"
• Foreign Firms Set To Get A Big Slice Of The High-Speed Rail Pie

Wireless appliances, a splash-resistant recipe reader, and an interactive oven were among the intriguing new home kitchen products we spotted at CES – the International Consumer Electronics Show – last week. Read on to find out which products are available now, and for a sneak peek at the technologies we’ll be seeing in the new decade.

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We’ve been hearing grumblings on the intertubes about the newly minted Nexus One having 3G connectivity problems with T-Mobile’s network. Users have been reporting that the Nexus is constantly bouncing between 3G and EDGE, even in a 3G saturated area, or, in some of the more severe cases, not connecting to the 3G network even when it is available. A moderator on T-Mobile’s forums states, “Google and T-Mobile are investigating this issue and hope to have more information for you soon. We understand your concern and appreciate your patience.” Let’s hope this is a minor coding snafu and can be resolved quickly by a software patch. Any early adopters of the “Sexy Nexy” seeing 3G issues?

[Via TmoNews]

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Desenvolvido sobre a plataforma do Volkswagen Golf VI e que dará origem a um novo cupê que ocupará a lacuna entre o Scirocco e o Passat CC, além também da nova geração do sedan VW Jetta, o NCC ou New Coupe Concept está sendo apresentado pela VW no Salão de Detroit. Conforme antecipado aqui no Carangoblog o modelo confirma o desenho que acabou vazando na rede e mostra que o modelo terá a frente igual ao do VW Golf.

O conceito apresentado é um hibrido, debaixo do capô ele carrega dois propulsores, um TFSI 1.4 turbo de 150cv e um elétrico de 20 kw ou 27cv abastecido por baterias de íon-litio, somados a potência total do modelo é de 177cv. A VW informa que o NCC pode atingir 227 km/h de máxima e acelerar de 0 a 100 km/h em 8.1 segundos. Nada mal para um carro desse tamanho.

O modelo tem tração nas rodas dianteiras e ainda é equipado com uma transmissão automática de sete velocidades DSG e dupla embreagem. A estréia da versão definitiva só deverá acontecer em 2012 enquanto a versão sedan deve ser antecipada para 2011 tomando o lugar do Passat no mercado norte-americano.

Fonte: Autoblog.it

With $1.36 billion in worldwide receipts after last weekend, Avatar topped LOTR: Return of the King and is now the second highest grossing film of all time. Next up? Titanic. Its record is just $500 million away. [BusinessWeek]

“Those things that hurt, instruct.” -Ben Franklin

MotoGP World Champion and Yamaha rider Valentino Rossi made a guest star appearance at the Auto Expo in New Delhi the past weekend, marking the Italian’s first visit to India. During the first day, Rossi met India Yamaha Motor’s senior management, signed autographs and also inspected the latest India Yamaha models.

During his second day of visit in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Rossi also met John Abraham, one of the biggest Indian film stars and also an ambassador for Yamaha … (read more)

As regular Intersection readers know, I’ve long been interested in energy. Today I’m flying to Texas to join Michael Webber’s three day energy technology and policy course at UTAustin. Here is the description:

Dr. Michael Webber, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Associate Director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, will share his insights and candid views about the best and worst of US energy practice. His fast-paced and information-packed lectures will include real-world examples, entertaining anecdotes, engineering fundamentals, historical perspectives, and an outlook for the future of energy. This crash course is perfect for people who want an energy credential or a graduate class in energy, but only have a few days to spare.

With lectures covering transportation, biofuels, climate, security, and food, I can’t wait. So expect some energy related posts this week as I have time to blog.