Finally! GM Announces Volt Pricing ($41,000 Before Rebates) – “After years of waiting, we finally know how much the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid will be sold for: The Volt’s MSRP will start at $41,000 ($33,500 net of the full federal tax credit, which ranges from $0-$7,500) including a destination freight charge of $720. GM will also be offering a lease option with monthly payments of about $350 for 36 months, with $2,500 down. Read on for more details…”

Web expert on his ‘catastrophe’ key for the internet – “A British computer expert has been entrusted with part of a digital key, to help restart the internet in the event of a major catastrophe…”

The Challenge: Eating For 31 Days on $31 – “When you think about spending less at the grocery store and trying to keep your costs down, it never really crosses our mind that a small amount of leg work could actually have us eating relatively healthy food for far less money. This is the true story of how one man lived on $31 for 31 days and did remarkably well!”

Gel that can help decayed teeth grow back could end fillings – “A gel that can help decayed teeth grow back in just weeks may mean an end to fillings. The gel, which is being developed by scientists in France, works by prompting cells in teeth to start multiplying. They then form healthy new tooth tissue that gradually replaces what has been lost to decay…”

Fact: Literally No One Would Pay To Use Twitter – “There may be plenty of ways for Twitter to make money, but it doesn’t look like charging membership fees will be one of them: a recent survey showed that zero percent of users would pay for the service. Zilch. None…”

Master Your Smartphone: The Best Android Tips and Tricks – “From its auspicious start as the brainchild of Internet giant Google, Android has matured into a well-rounded, extremely capable smartphone operating system. Advocating open source, Google released Android to the masses, opening the doors to application developers. There were a few growing pains, of course, such as weak Bluetooth support and a lack of multitouch support, but today Android is knocking on the door of the iPhone mansion, and it’s knocking hard…”

Helmet lets you kill at a glance – “Raytheon has unveiled its Scorpion helmet technology, which allows pilots to lock onto their target just by looking at them. Scorpion is planned for F-16 and A-10 combat jets, thanks to a $12.6 million U.S. Air Force contract…”

How Your Views Compare With the Court – “Answer six questions to see how your views align with those of the Roberts court and all Americans…”

Motorcycle

China considers big rocket power – “Chinese engineers are considering a new super-powerful engine for the next generation of space rockets, say officials…”

Banks Unveil New Fees On Customers – “You may have opened up a credit card statement lately and noticed a fee for card inactivity, a higher annual fee, perhaps, or maybe a new balance transfer fee. As banks grapple with fewer customers and new government regulation, they’re testing out new fees on customers to see how much they’ll tolerate. To find out what consumers can do, we called Ron Lieber. He’s personal finance columnist for The New York Times…”

Motorola Tablet with Android 3.0 Coming in November – “Motorola is getting into the slate business, and a Motorola rival to the iPad is expected in November 2010, which will have a 10-inch touchscreen display and running Google Android 3.0 Gingerbread OS…”

iPad Personality Clash: Elites vs. Geeks – “The iPad is one of the more controversial mainstream technology products in recent memory. Some love it, others think it’s pointless. Naturally, the debaters believe that their opinions are about the product. I actually think it’s more about them and their personal differences. Recent MyType survey data backs me up, indicating that behind the controversy is a personality clash between selfish elites and independent geeks…”

Chatroulette tries to ditch the flashers – “The website Chatroulette — which unites people all over the world for live, random video chats — has been plagued by awkward, and possibly illegal, nudity since it became wildly popular in February of this year. People who log onto the site with a webcam are thrown into a video conversation with a stranger, who, according to one analyst’s report, is likely to be a stranger without pants more than 10 percent of the time…”

A Joke iPhone Sticker Turns Into a Business – “After Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference last week, Szymon Weglarski and Jon Dorfman, two designers from Brooklyn, decided they would have a little fun with the iPhone 4’s antenna problem. They designed tiny bandages that fit perfectly around the edge of the iPhone, opened a store on the marketplace site Etsy, and named their new product Antenn-aid. Now the two partners are rushing to keep up with orders…”

The Search Engine Backlash Against ‘Content Mills’ – “Gabriel Weinberg, creator of upstart search engine Duck Duck Go (DDG), says that some time ago users requested that he remove from results from eHow.com. The site is owned by Demand Media, a $200 million a year “content farm” that produces 4,000 articles a day by playing freelance writers to churn out articles at bargain basement rates, based on what people are searching for and how much ads those search terms are worth….”

Did you hear the joke about the comedian and copyright law? – “Ponder the difference between the comedian and the musician. Both create and perform works to entertain audiences, but they go about protecting that work in different ways. The notoriously litigious music industry often resorts to the legal system to protect itself from pirates and samplers. But comedians don’t. So why hasn’t the joke well gone dry?”

Nonvisual interface may allow blind people to drive cars – “A newly developed driving interface may let blind people independently drive cars on the open road. Designed by engineers at Virginia Tech, the system incorporates various nonvisual cues into the driver’s seat of a dune buggy that could help the blind navigate roads without assistance…”

Chinese philanthropist donates it all – “Yu Pengnian’s journey from poor street hawker to Hong Kong real-estate magnate was already a remarkable one. Then the 88-year-old did something even rarer that shocked many in increasingly materialistic China: He gave it all away…”

Khronos Group releases OpenGL 4.1, claims to leapfrog Direct3D 11 – “Just four and a half months after releasing the OpenGL 4 specification, the Khronos Group has released the final version of the OpenGL 4.1 specification. OpenGL 4.0 brought feature parity with Direct3D 11′s new features—in particular, compute shaders and tessellation—and with 4.1, the Khronos Group claims that it is surpassing the functionality offered in Microsoft’s 3D API…”

Magic Trackpad – “Desktop users, your time has come. The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen. Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever. Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in place of a mouse or in conjunction with one on any Mac computer — even a notebook…”

Nvidia banned from using its own GPUs – “PATENT TROLL OUTFIT Rambus has managed to win a ruling that effectively means that graphics chip designer Nvidia is banned from importing the chips it uses in just about every one of its products…”

BP Oil Spill: Clean-Up Crews Can’t Find Crude in the Gulf – “For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there’s one problem — they’re having trouble finding it…”

Oil spewing from well near Louisiana marsh – ” Adding insult to the Gulf’s injury, an oil platform hit by a tugboat is now spewing oil and natural gas near a Louisiana marsh area, officials said Tuesday…”

Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are “fair use” – “This time, the Library went (comparatively) nuts, allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVDs, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be “fair use,” and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers…”

Quantum time machine ‘allows paradox-free time travel’ – “Quantum physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe it is possible to create a time machine which could affect the past without creating a “grandfather paradox”…”

New Tech: Life Microscope promises to track your every movement – “There are plenty of gadgets like the Fitbit that can track your movement and report on your general level of activity or laziness, but only Hitachi has what it’s dubbed a “Life Microscope…”"

Ford using Facebook to reveal the 2011 Explorer – “No auto company has embraced social media and modern web technology more than Ford. Their social media guru Scott Monty has brought Ford roaring into the modern age with his dedication to the tools that can deliver marketing messages to young and savvy auto buyers. Don’t get me wrong—some of others have followed suit—but Ford did it first (and best)…”

The Sad State of Open Source in Android tablets – “With the exception of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, a device that isn’t even really a tablet, I couldn’t find a single tablet manufacturer who was complying with the minimum of their legal open source requirements under GNU GPL. Let alone supporting community development…”

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