Here in my rainy home of London, stories about "yoofs" and "hooligans" glassing each other with beer pints are pretty rife, which is why I'm hardly surprised the UK government is redesigning the pint glass to cut back on violence.

Supposedly 87,000 glassings occur each year in the UK, which says quite a bit about our culture here. Anyway, the government has weighed in and enlisted the help of the Design Council to create a safer glass, with a few different prototypes made so far. The first is coated in plastic to stop it from cracking, with the second design made from two layers of glass, bonded together with resin.

It kind of begs the question of whether pubs should just sell the amber liquid in plastic glasses, but you know those Brits—they may be hard-fisted purveyors of a good ol' glassing, but they still want to look classy while doing it. [BBC]

Image Credit: OwenBlacker

Here in my rainy home of London, stories about "yoofs" and "hooligans" glassing each other with beer pints are pretty rife, which is why I'm hardly surprised the UK government is redesigning the pint glass to cut back on violence.

Supposedly 87,000 glassings occur each year in the UK, which says quite a bit about our culture here. Anyway, the government has weighed in and enlisted the help of the Design Council to create a safer glass, with a few different prototypes made so far. The first is coated in plastic to stop it from cracking, with the second design made from two layers of glass, bonded together with resin.

It kind of begs the question of whether pubs should just sell the amber liquid in plastic glasses, but you know those Brits—they may be hard-fisted purveyors of a good ol' glassing, but they still want to look classy while doing it. [BBC]

Image Credit: OwenBlacker

Well, this is nice: a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card available on the cheap. It looks like you're not sacrificing much in performance, either: The $60 Radeon 5450 has full DX11 graphics and Eyefinity multi-display support.

The $60 version comes with a 512MB memory configuration, and you lose a little speed compared to the 5800 and 5600 lines. But the 5450 is also optimized for HTPCs, with HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

DX11 graphics, for those who forgot, can be pretty brain-melting:

For sixty bucks? Yes, please. [BusinessWire]

Did you know the Palm Pre Plus is a phone for ladies? Specifically, for moms? Well, it is, you sissy! If you were a real man, you'd buy a Droid! That's a phone for men!

Actually, that's far from the truth. Both phones are pretty damned gender neutral, unless you're the type of person who believes only men appreciate hard lines and ladies are drawn to curves. And apparently that's what Verizon believes, based on their advertising.

I mean, just look at these new Verizon Pre ads! Why are they showcasing this as a phone for moms? It's a quite capable phone that people of all genders and ages would enjoy. But I guess if they made the ads for the Droid so explodey and masculine they thought they had to make up for it with these.

Hey Verizon: they're both good phones. Feel free to just advertise them as such. [Engadget]

What do you do if you are a retired electronic and mechanical engineer with 41 years of experience, and a passion for ultra-high speed photography? Like Fotoopa, you make your own kick ass laser rig to take these cool photos:

That's Fotoopa—photograndpa in Dutch. His setup includes his own custom shutter—which can fire at five microseconds—made around an Arduino controller and custom aluminum parts, extra lenses to search for insects in focus, and a reflected laser light system that allows him to move around anywhere to shoot his photos. The rig can work in broad daylight or total darkness, and it doesn't need any setup except adjusting the sensitivity of the lasers depending on the ambient light. The whole thing is self-contained.

According to him, the focus range detector works from 1mm to 700mm from the camera, and the firing mechanism is capable of detecting flying objects two millimeters in diameter. Extremely impressive for a do-it-yourself machine. And the results are as good as the technology.

Fotoopa, we salute you, Sir. [Flickr via Makezine]

So, the HDDBOOST may be ridiculously brilliant. It's a hard drive bay that offers SATA connections to both a normal hard drive and a solid state drive. Ultimately, it promises the speeds of SSD with the storage capacity of HDD.

Here's how it works:

With no additional software, a 32GB SSD (recommended size, that you install) mirrors a chunk of data from your HDD, allowing it to act as a high speed data buffer, starting processes quickly while your computer only combs through your slower HDD-based files as necessary.

Of course, everything won't be SSD speed, but manufacturer SilverStone still promises a 150% speed increase across your entire computing experience. That number is a bit hard to swallow, given the fact that there's no intelligent optimization (that we've heard of, at least) guiding HDDBOOST to only copy over the most used, most beneficial files for speed increases. Then again, the idea certainly makes some level sense. And for $55 (available in Japan only at the moment), the HDDBOOST isn't a huge financial risk. [Hexus]

When the inevitable police report is filled out, expect all the old cliches. "She seemed so harmless," the neighbors will say. "We never thought so much evil could be hiding under such a cute little bow." But we knew better.

The provenance of this Hello Kitty chainsaw, complete with a splatter pattern of purple hearts on the blade, is unknown, and maybe it's better that way. The less we know, the less likely we are to be dragged in as material witnesses. [Hello Kitty Hell via Make]

Netflix signed a frightening deal with Warner Bros, delaying new release WB DVDs from going out to customers until 28 days of purgatory pass. Netflix minimized the decision, but what if every studio jumps on board? Here's an example:

TechCrunch dug through Netflix's top January rentals, and they yanked any title that's within 28 days of release. Over half (13 of 24) would be missing.

(Yes if available, no if not)

1) Julie & Julia: December 8 — No

2) District 9: December 22 —- No

3) 500 Days of Summer: December 22 —- No

4) Angels and Demons: November 24 -– Yes

5) The Proposal: October 13 —-Yes

6) The Hangover: December 15 —- No

7) Star Trek: November 17 -Yes

8) Up: November 10 —-Yes

9) The Taking Of Pelham 123: November 3 -– Yes

10) Night At The Museum 2: December 1 -– Yes

11) The Ugly Truth: November 10 —- Yes

12) Public Enemies: December 8 -– No

13) The Hurt Locker: January 12 —- No

14) Inglourious Basterds: December 15 —- No

15) Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs: January 5 — No

16) Funny People: November 24 — Yes

17) G.I. Joe: November 3 — Yes

18) Harry Potter 6: December 8 —- No

19) Terminator 4: December 1 - Yes

20) Gamer: January 19 — No

21) A Perfect Getaway: December 29 — No

22) Extract: December 22 — No

23) 9: December 29 —– No

24) Transformers 2: October 20 — Yes

25) Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past: September 22 — Yes

Netflix has positioned themselves well, especially as the service has evolved to the greatest streaming media portal (in the living room) in existence. But even scrolling through my digital media library, I can spot a decent number of titles, sure, but there's not all that much that I actually want to watch (Starz offers some of their most notable content, and even that's in jeopardy).

Netflix has developed an amazing rental infrastructure. But they need to become as media savvy as Apple if they want to make it worth a damn. [TechCrunch][Photo by Rob Lee]

When the SlingPlayer iPhone app launched last May, it was hamstrung by AT&T's insistence that it stream video only over Wi-Fi. It was an untenable position, given that MLB.com and others already stream over 3G. Today, finally, the carrier relented.

This has been in the works since mid-December, and both companies still need Apple's sign-off before the new 3G SlingPlayer app is available. And don't worry: if you'd previously purchased the $30 Wi-Fi only app, you'll get a free upgrade once the new version is available.

As for what it will do to AT&T's already clogged 3G network, only time and a few dozen dropped calls will tell. [NY Times]

Back in the 60s, astronauts had to compete with monkeys to make their way into space. Today, NASA and GM have developed a new trainable, expendable crew member. Its name is Robonaut2.

(The original Robonaut, developed a decade ago, never got off the ground.)

Ambidextrous and designed to use the same tools as humans, Robonaut2 can lift up to 20lbs (just check out that lead photo!) and operate in environments too dangerous or inconvenient for humans to work. From what we can tell given the past decade of Robonaut development, the system is loaded with technologies like head tracking, so Robonaut can autonomously watch a human's every move, but the limited AI seems to take the backseat as Robonaut is more of a VR controlled construction worker than a HAL on legs.

Well, that's as of today. The bottom line is that, in the not so distant future, we'll be able to build robots that need far less care than humans. Robots were the first to walk (OK, roll) on Mars. And it's hard to imagine that trend slowing down, ever. [Nasa via Engadget]