Either Samsung weren’t very good at sweeping their dirt under the rug or they didn’t want to get in any further trouble once the looking glass focused in on ‘em, but apparently Samsung’s fessing up to a worldwide practice of price fixing DRAM memory between April of 1999 to June 2002. And they’ll be paying out the nose for what’s supposed to be the second-largest criminal antitrust fine in US history, too — something to the sum of, oh, say, three hundred mil? Being DRAM it doesn’t seem to directly relate to the South Korean FTC’s investigation of Samsung’s pricing practices for NAND flash memory, but Assistant US Attorney Niall Lynch did cite Apple, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM as beneficiaries of the Samsung’s, um, generosity.

[Thanks, Mike]

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Researchers from the European Information Society Technologies are developing an artificial hand that would be able to give patients active feeling via a sensory system and motor functions that can be controlled by the brain. This project involves researchers from all across Europe and it's already racking up a lot of achievements. A real-life Kung Fu grip—that is awesome.

The Cyberhand [Medgadget]

Congrats to zZz and his motorized robot with an iPod heart, your android is the proud owner of a new Apple iPod 30GB video player—send an e-mail to let me know whether he/she wants it in black or white (to match the spooky mask).

Don't let those shrines got to waste. Keep praying and ye shall receive... eventually.

Thanks again to Apple for sponsoring the contest.

I can't tell if this is too stupid for words or stupendously ingenious. Guess you'll have to make your own call. It's called the Beerbelly and it's actually a fake gut that you can fill up with beer (or your favorite alcoholic beverage) and hide under your clothes. Made up of a sling and a polyurethane "bladder" with a dispensing tube, the thing was created to let you slip booze into places where such substances may not be allowed. Like your kids dance recital, maybe? Or school? Oh, it looks like they were thinking more along the lines of the movies or a sporting event to avoid the $10 beer. And that's not all, folks—you can also fill it with hot beverages as well, and of course, silly things like water. The Beerbelly Deluxe Kit is $49.95 and that includes the Beerbelly Sling and Bladder, The Pleasure Extender, One Step Beerbelly Cleanser and three specially-made brushes. Run, don't walk!

The Beerbelly [Beerbelly]

I admit, it's not exactly high-tech, but this little media player was too cute to pass up. Yes, it's built to look like a VW Beetle (the new model, of course) but it's actually a CD/DVD player with FM radio under the hood. The DVD tray is in the front bumper and the connectors are all shoved in the trunk, as would be expected. Though just a mock-up now, expect the full-scale version to also sport a remote, lithium battery and AV cable. Goes for about $216.

Beetle disguised as DVD player [T3]

We’re not a 100% sure that it’s “the future of radio,” or that we find its “cash money!” affiliate program and already slashed-through price all that terribly reassuring, but if you like Internet radio — really like it — then peep the PenguinRadio WebRadio. PenguinRadio, which maintains such internet audio sites as penguinradio.com and podcastdirectory.com, has released their first hardware device meant for listening to the content that they distribute, which includes music, sports, and religious programming. Designed as a plug-and-play device that can hook directly to a WAN, LAN, or phone line, and targeting non-techies as its ideal audience, the WebRadio is available for purchase immediately for an introductory price of 239 bones.

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You’ll have to forgive us for missing the feature-packed ilo XM-ready MP3-CD car stereo, but rarely do our electonics shopping excursions include Wal-Mart as a featured destination. The ilo delivers a lot of bang for the $175 pricetag: XM-ready tuner (for displaying programming info), MP3-CD player, 2-inch color TFT-LCD, and perhaps sweetest of all, an SD slot that reads MP3s, JPEGs, and AVIs. Seems that next time we’re picketing Wal-Mart for their sexist glass ceiling and questionable labor practices, we may actually pop in and see what other goodies we’re missing out on.

[Thanks, Car Guy]

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We’re all still tapping our feet over here waiting for Cingular’s house brand launch of HTC’s Wizard and Tornado handsets, but we got word today the unit’s WiFi capabilities are distinctly missing from the filing documentation for their Tornado that appeared on the FCC site. Does that mean that Cingular’s release of the 2100 / 2125 won’t have WiFi? No, not necessarily — this could be for a specifically WiFi-free version of the handset — but it’s certainly not very encouraging if you ask us.

[Via PhoneArena]

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Haven't had the time to hit the slopes this year and fear you may not be at the top of your snowboarding game? Check out Hammacher Schlemmer's all-in-one snowboard simulator game, a nifty little package that includes a snowboard simulator with four games, all for $59.95. The games include time challenge, pipedream and Tokyo megaplex and you'll find a wide range of terrain and weird things to look at as you digitally board. Be on the lookout for half-pipes, forests, mountain ranges and of course, other snowboarders.

Snowboard Simulator for Your Living Room [i4u]

We've all been there. Trying desperately to spread a cold lump of butter on our beautiful bread, only to find it hard and unfeeling, leaving us with only gashes and holes. Heartbreaking, I know. But lo and behold, someone has felt our collective pain and decided to make it all better. A British company called ButterWizard has launched a temperature-controlled butter dish that will keep your butter (or butter-spread for that matter) at a beautiful 65 degrees for perfect spreading all the time. The dish has a built-in fan and a chip that can control the temperature for different textures of bread products. Yes, your muffin can be buttered differently than your baguette. Of course, you can also manually adjust the temperature if you feel the need, but whatever the case, we thank you, ButterWizard. The pleasure is all ours.

An end to hard butter misery? [Reuters]

Every Wednesday Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, an opinion column about consumer technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Dear Ross,

As a valued customer, we’d like to inform you of some changes that we’ll be making to our Black Friday program this year.

—Shopping site non-aggression: For the past few years, various Web sites have offered details of Black Friday products and pricing in some cases weeks before these products go on sale. We realize that all of our competitors are going to have pretty much the same stuff on sale. The brands may be different, but with a 70 percent discount, most people could care less. In any case, we’re not going to threaten to sue Web sites that publish these products and prices. All in all, it’s probably not a bad thing to be on good terms with people directing traffic to our store on Black Friday.

—Late openings: On Black Friday, our stores will open at 10 AM in recognition that many of our customers travel home from relatives in a tryptophan-induced stupor on Thanksgiving. Your dollars aren’t worth appreciably less five hours earlier, and we’d like to give plenty of time for all the shoppers coming from the three or four 5 AM openings all competing with each other to converge at our stores for the 10 AM openings.

—Calming the crowds. After the multimillion-dollar lawsuit judgment entered last year against one of our competitors following a customer injury in the mad rush for a $2.47 DVD recorder, we will distribute vouchers that guarantee customers one of the available products in stock. In addition, all customers who are present at the time of opening will receive a rain check for one Black Friday promotional product if they purchase at least $100 worth of other products. We believe in the value of creating excitement in our stores without reenacting the final battle scene from Braveheart.

—Preferred Priority program: Our stores will embrace the spirit of Thanksgiving by offering priority to Black Friday products to customers using our in-store and online customer loyalty program. Why make you wait in line for eight hours when you could be buying merchandise from us at home? In addition to cutting down on lines and frustration, this will help ensure that our best customers get our best prices in the way that’s best for them. If you’ve been one of our top online customers but live 80 miles away and can’t drive, we really don’t see the need to have you show your face one day out of the year by offering some deals only in stores.

Black Friday products are available for only a few hours, but the kind of respect for customers shown by sparing them a frigid sleepless night or favoring a random eBay power seller to them can build lifetime loyalty. From everyone at our company, have a safe and happy holiday season.

---

Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis at NPD Techworld, a division of market research and analysis provider The NPD Group. Views expressed in Switched On, however, are his own. Feedback is welcome at fliptheswitch@gmail.com.

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Want some serious protection for your discs? Try the oh-so-subtly named Scratchless Disc, being happily touted as "The World's Safest Optical Disc." Using 20 small bumps that are added to the bottom of the disc to raise it off the surface you so sloppily left it on, this crazy technology basically just keeps it from rubbing up against anything while it's lying around. Add to this a layer of polymer and Scratchless-Disc LLC thinks you'll be completely scratch-free. Almost. They hope. Comes in CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW and DVD-RW formats.

Scratchless Disc [Scratcless Disc]

We have nothing against butter — or Brits — but put the two of them together, and it’s a recipe for culinary (and arterial) chaos. Think about it; you go to a sandwich shop in the UK, and they put butter on everything. Ask them to skip it, and they look at you like you’ve got three heads. So, leave it to the Brits to come up with the ButterWizard, a £34.95 ($60) device that’s designed to keep butter at an “optimal spreadable temperature” of 65.3 degrees. The developer, David Alfille, of East Sussex-based Alfille Innovations, tells Reuters that the company was “trying to find out what people’s frustration with butter was,” and discovered that it’s “either too hard or too soft.” In fairness, the ButterWizard does let you set your own temperature, in case you want it runnier or firmer. But still, $60 for a heated butter dish? Then, again, maybe we shouldn’t talk. America, after all, is the home of the radio/toaster combo, which could be the perfect companion for this.

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More bad news for Research In Motion today as a US District Judge denied the company's request to stop the legal proceedings until the US Patent Office decides whether the patents it holds are valid. In addition, the judge denied the $450 million settlement RIM reached earlier in the year with battling company NTP, which actually fell apart in June. Although we've heard RIM's co-chief executive officer, Jim Balsillie, say the company will absolutely not shut down Blackberry service using what he called a "workaround," we still haven't gotten any info about this technology. The only other way to make sure service keeps on chugging is if RIM does find a way to prevail in court (or just pays NTP to license the patent they've been fighting over).

If the judge does grant a permanent injunction and RIM's technical workaround fails, the company would be forced to pay a hefty fee to keep its U.S. BlackBerry service operational. (It has about $1.2 billion in cash on hand.) Any injunction, however, would not cut off BlackBerry service to government officials--only individuals and businesses.

That's nice to know, huh?

Judge to RIM: We're not delaying this any longer [Cnet]

It appears that the Creative Zen Personal Media Center wasn’t really flying off the shelves with its hefty $500 price tag, so Creative is hoping to give it a little nudge by offering an enormous $200 rebate on it. This device was never really that bad, it has somewhat of a big design, but that accompanies the high-end specs that this PMP features. $300 for a device of this caliber isn’t too bad, and a hell of a lot more effective at video watching than the, ahem, iPod Video. Yeah, we talk down on iPod from time to time. Better bookmark this, it won't happen again for a while.

Zen PMC now $200 after Rebate [Digital Media Thoughts]

Oh how cute, a company decided to use a number in place of a phonetic sound. That's just dandy. This gadget tags commonly-lost items and then displays where they are on a radar screen, Metal Gear Solid style. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let me tag my sexuality—I guess I'll never find it.

Lost your Keys? Let Loc8tor find it [Tech Ticker]

The 2006 Honda Odyssey EX-L is well set up for long trips with kids, getting decent highway mileage for a minivan, offering good in-cabin entertainment options, and keeping the driver informed with navigation.

Here is the “TRANSGEAR HMP-100,” a portable audio player from a Japanese company called Nagase Industrial Corporation. It comes stocked with Gracenote’s “MusicID” database — a database of song, genre, artist, and other information for roughly 3.5 million songs. Users connect their audio source to the player via analog audio input, and the player compares 15 seconds of waveform data with its internal “FingerPrints” database, matching the song up with its corresponding information from MusicID. Pretty slick if you ask us. But the fun doesn’t stop; the player even interfaces with a mobile phone so it can connect directly to the entire Gracenote database of 40 million songs, and retrieve information that doesn’t appear in its internal database. The player supports direct MP3 encoding at up to 192kbps, has a 6GB hard drive, a 1.8” monochrome screen, and a rapid recharging battery that gets to 80% capacity in an hour and a half of charging. Nagase plans to license this technology to other companies, so don’t be surprised if you see it turn up in someone else’s player.

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Avid Pinnacle Studio Plus 10 deftly straddles the line between simple and complex video editors, though not without some serious performance issues.

At $330, the Tivoli Audio iSongBook may be one of the most expensive ways to integrate your iPod into a home entertainment system, but you do get great sound for that price. That’s the conclusion reached by Playlist, which reviewed the iSongBook, which also includes an AM/FM clock radio. The review found the iSongBook to produce “excellent” sound, accomplished in part by a detachable speaker, allowing a separation of up to six feet between the system’s two speakers. The review also cited the iSongBook’s solid AM/FM radio, good battery life, and a good (though “quirky”) remote. The reviewer also paid the iSongBook the ultimate compliment: he said that, despite the high price, it’s the speaker system he’ll buy for himself (glad to know he’s not accepting a freebie!).

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In a classic case of “if we don’t play my way I’m taking my toys and going home,” electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold has announced that it will no longer do business in North Carolina because the state refused to grant an exception that would let Diebold keep its source code secret. After more voting machine blunders in 2004 (little things, like how it was discovered that even monkeys can hack Diebold gear), North Carolina passed a law that requires e-voting vendors to place their source codes in escrow as a precaution against future irregularities, meaning that the state is not even asking Diebold to reveal its code publicly. Nonetheless, Diebold claims that because their machines contain some Microsoft software, they don’t have to right to release the code. Okay folks, which explanation sounds more reasonable: A. Diebold is willing to lose an entire state’s worth of business in order to protect Microsoft or themselves on the off-chance of a successful lawsuit or B. Diebold is petrified that their code is so full of security flaws and other problems (”liberal” Republican vote counting?) that should it ever be scrutinized, the company would most likely go out of business? Now before you answer, remember once again that this is Diebold we’re talking about here.

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Namco and Bandai showed off this project at IREX 2005 this year. It is a little too farfetched to be a real toy on the market, but nevertheless it's pretty cool. It is a scaled up PacMan map that features a robot PacMan along with Pinky, the pink ghost. The robot is controlled by you, as you play the actual video game on a television screen. Just when you thought Namco had managed to milk every single cent out of the PacMan franchise they pulled out something else that is pretty sweet.

Robot PacMan (IREX 2005) [Akihabara]

RIM just can’t catch a break. Following ruling after ruling against the Blackberry manufacturer, a federal judge has now decided that the disputed $450 million settlement with NTP that RIM was looking to have enforced is not in fact valid. District Judge James Spencer could next decide to reissue an injunction that would suspend Blackberry service in the US, which might effectively force RIM to cough up as much as $1 billion to avoid. All of this action comes while the validity of NTP’s original patents is still in question, but that is still an issue for the Patent Office and thus has no bearing on the current proceedings.

[Thanks, Jim L.]

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The Moto PEBL

By Brendan I. Koerner

The Pitch A serene-yet-serious man bearing a vague resemblance to a Siamese Dream-era James Iha holds a black PEBL in his outstretched hand. How he manages to look so calm is beyond me; if I were standing on a glacier clad in nothing but a fringed blanket, I'd be freezing my babymakers off. The copy in the upper left-hand corner, meanwhile, compares the PEBL to a "natural clam."

Rip-Off Of Many a high-end vodka ad extolling the virtues of pure Scandinavian (or Polish, or Russian) water. I'm also reminded of the Sandman graphic novel Season of Mists, in which several ancient gods gather to quibble over the key to Hell. Our PEBL loving friend here totally looks like he belongs in that plotline, perhaps as Loki's Gal Friday.

The Spin Motorola's trying to parlay the Razr's success into an unassailable brand image. Like Apple in the realm of MP3s, the company wants to be known as the go-to vendor for well-designed handsets—not in terms of features, but rather looks and usability. And a big part of that branding strategy is to take the Absolut approach to advertising: create images that wouldn't look out of place in a museum, rather than spec-ed out product shots that only geeks could love. The goal with the PEBL is to capture those same consumers who purchased the iPod Nano because, darnit, it just looks so friggin' amazing—never mind that you've already got a 40-gig iPod and a Mini on the desk already.

Counterspin Geeks like us know that the PEBL was delayed a full quarter due to problems with the hinges—prototypes were popping open unexpectedly, and often crashing to the floor as a result. Not that the ad doesn't illustrate how the handset's opening mechanism operates—for that, you have to visit hellomoto.com and check out the 360-degree tour. To be honest, I'm still not 100 percent sure how the PEBL's able to respond to slight hand twitches. But, hey, look! A quasi-androgynous model in a fringed blanket! And he's in, um Greenland? I'm sold.

Takeaway You have to give Motorola credit for reinventing its brand over the past few years; tough to believe that the same company that used to specialize in clunky radios has now surpassed Nokia et. al. as the king of cool handsets. Granted, there's not a lot of info in the ad, and your mileage may vary if you don't click with the strange dude palming the PEBL. But the ad sticks in the mind just enough that you want to learn more, and it deserves props for the fashion-mag photography.

Hype-O-Meter 8.5 (out of 10); if you vibed to the whole, Euro-style "Hello, Moto!" campaign, this is right up your alley. Also if you're an over-26 Smashing Pumpkins fan.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Hype Sheet column appears every other Wednesday on Gizmodo.

Read more Hype Sheet

This week at Lifehacker: Drive Firefox with your keyboard. Carry around secure data backups on your iPod. Optimize your Mac's broadband connection. Learn all the right gym moves using exercise videos on your iPod.

You call yourself a geek and you didn't know that Control/Command-K will snap your cursor up to the Firefox search engine box? And that Control/Command-Down and Up will switch up engines? Click thee to our guide to mouse-less Firefox and shun that rodent while you surf faster and more efficiently.

Some people have redundant arrays of disks backing up their pirated movies, porn, and Word documents of college papers. Others just use their iPod. Stick an encrypted disk image of your personal data in your pocket along with the 10,000 MP3's you never listen to. This way when your house burns down along with the multiple replicating file servers, you'll still have off-site iPod backup.

Enlarge the data pipe that connects your Mac to the 'net. Apple's free Broadband Tuner increases buffer sizes to take full advantage of broadband connections on OS X. Remember, when it comes to buffers, size does matter.

Are you the uncoordinated fool at the gym flailing about pulling leg muscles while trying to master the art of the crunch? Download free exercise videos to your iPod to get those moves right and give you something to look at other than the gaggle of hotties pointing and giggling in the corner.

Lifehacker's Power User column appears every Wednesday on Gizmodo.