I know, I know static electricity can harm your computer, but the quickest way to deal with static build up is to discharge yourself on an earthed object. Do that and you won’t have any static to zap your PC with. Just touch the metal part on a screen door. I think this Static Electricity Eliminator has more of a market for people that get scared to touch their car door on dry winter days. A little zap now and then won’t hurt you, it will only make you stronger.

Price: $10

Think Geek

The most over-packaged device that I bought recently was a pair of Razer HD-1 5.1 channel headphones. In my haste to extract my hard earned gaming booty, I lacerated my finger in a fairly nasty but minor way. It hurt as it did the time before and the time before that. Open It is a purpose built tool for preventing exactly the kind of mishaps that I just mentioned. It features some powerful looking steel jaws, a retractable utility blade and a screwdriver. That should be everything you need for tearing into every type of package known to man.

Price: $12 from Amazon

Pop Gadget

The revolutionary twistir blending beaker.

The revolutionary twistir blending beaker.

Perfect for mixing liquids in a safe, fast, easy and clean way. Oh! Let`s not forget fun, `cause children and adults alike love watching the `twistir in a glass`. You`ll wonder how you could have been without one all this time. Kiss spills and splashes goodbye. For good! Cleaning is a snap, as all you have to do is add some soap in the tumble and rinse it. Or place in the top rack of your dishwasher. AND, it comes with a lid, meaning you can maintain freshness of your treats in the refrigerator.

A handy helper to handle all those smoothies, Gourmet coffee drinks, baby formulas (perfect for any powdered drink or solution, even thick eggs and batters) milkshakes, puddings, graves, what have you.

Be prepared for Christmas with this incredible deal. We will ship to you 6 twistirs and you can give 5 away as a gift! Your friends will love you for it.

Thing Fling`s incredible price for 6 Twistir is $15.99 delivered to your door. Not a penny more. Don`t miss out, get the one you can`t live without!

Price: $15.99

Quantity Left:79

Condition: Brand New

Brand: Brand Name

UPC: 034869193986

Model: TWISTIR-6PACK

Specifications:

Check out all that Twistir mixes without spilling a drop:

• Baby formulas
• Chocolate milk
• Salad dressings
• Gourmet coffee drinks
• Protein drinks
• Powered baby food
• Fruit juice concetrates
• Gelatin Desserts
• Sauces
• Instante Soups and Drinks
• Diet Drinks
• Sport drinks
• Cocktails
• Iced tea
• Eggs
• Batters
• Smoothies
• Puddings
• Gravy
• Milk Shakes and much, much more

It’s Friday, so empty your head into the comment section below. Just remember to clean up after yourselves.
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This week AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson let it slip that consumers could expect a new iPhone next year that offered HSDPA wireless broadband support. That’s not a particularly bright move for the CEO of a massive telecom empire, whose Christmas sales could be impacted by the flood of users that will wait for the new model. The existing phone only works on AT&T’s sluggish EDGE network.

PBS’s Bob Cringely doesn’t think the CEO’s comments were a mistake. He thinks it was a message from AT&T, who is annoyed with Apple for their plan to participate in the upcoming 700Mhz wireless broadband auction.

Apple’s five year iPhone exclusive with AT&T apparently doesn’t prohibit Apple from operating their own wireless network and providing VoIP via iPhone.

Reports emerged back in September that suggested Apple was at least weighing the possibility of jumping into the 700Mhz auction, though insiders suggested Apple was actually leaning away from participating. Cringely’s theory that Stephenson is being clever, not incompetent, will see confirmation soon enough — the deadline to announce your intent to bid in the upcoming auction is December 3.
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Google has officially announced that they’ll be participating in next year’s 700Mhz auction ahead of the December 3 FCC deadline for declaring intent. The spectrum, considered the last great batch of “waterfront property,” could be used to offer a national wireless broadband network that could challenge incumbent interests.

The FCC refused to meet Google’s demand that auction winners be forced to offer wholesale access to competitors. The FCC did apply some Carterfone-esque rules requiring carriers allow any mobile device to access the network, but some legal experts believe the rules are filled with intentional loopholes making them all but meaningless.

Google had argued that the current auction process was rigged so that companies like AT&T and Verizon held the upper hand. The search giant’s primary concern has been that incumbent wireless operators will strangle Google out of the mobile market with their own mobile services (and advertising platforms).

Google has stated they’ll be bidding alone, but they may sign on partners later to manage the network. They could also lease out the spectrum to another company with the understanding that their content and services would take priority.

“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.”
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AT&T lobbyists rented an Austin theater last night so that local lawmakers could see the Cowboys/Packers game, which wasn’t on many cable networks because of the NFL’s dispute with the cable industry. 181 legislators and their families were invited to the theater, which has been used by AT&T to demonstrate their VDSL-based IPTV platform, U-Verse. “We thought this would be a good opportunity for us to show the staff what was really the fruit of their labor,” says AT&T lobbyist Tracy King.
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The Wall Street Journal (registration required) confirms that FCC chief Kevin Martin did get two fellow commissioners to vote with him to cap the growth of Comcast Communications. After the decision the cable giant will be no longer allowed to own more than 30% of the pay TV market. As you might expect, Comcast isn’t happy. Comments from the now-leashed cable giant courtesy of the Philly Inquirer:

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CNET insists that Comcast’s use of forged RST packets to throttle upstream p2p use could be perfectly legal under the new network neutrality laws being proposed. Just like the FCC’s policy statement (pdf), which insists consumers are “entitled to run applications and services of their choice” except in cases of “reasonable network management” — the bills may do little to thwart anything but the most egregious infractions.

The EFF this week released a report stating that Comcat’s particular brand of traffic shaping is anything but reasonable.
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Verizon’s selection of LTE as their next-generation broadband standard has some outlets (like like Fortune) insisting that WiMax is officially in trouble. It wasn’t supposed to be this way; if you flash back to earlier this decade, WiMax was supposed to do everything from cure cancer to potty train your toddlers. In 2004, Intel called the technology “the most important thing since the Internet itself.”

It’s now almost 2008, and AT&T is only using WiMax as a limited rural DSL alternative. The nation’s largest WiMax company (Clearwire) still doesn’t have all that many customers, and our user reviews for their existing service have never been very positive. Their mobile WiMax network remains largely unbuilt.

Sprint, who was supposed to be the biggest proponent of WiMax, just fired the CEO who championed the technology, and is facing financial and customer service headaches. They recently scrapped a cooperative plan with Clearwire, and their investors are whining about deployment costs for their Xohm WiMax service.

It’s pretty clear the technology has stumbled out of the gate, despite Intel’s marketing bravado. WiMax supporters seem to be clinging increasingly to foreign deployment as a cause for optimism.

Of course even in some of these foreign markets, WiMax isn’t faring particularly well, leaving us to wonder if a decade of WiMax hype was little more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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Oregon refuses to spy on students for the RIAA The Inquirer
Sprint Rebuffs $5 Billion Investment from SK Telecom SeekingAlpha.com
Airvana makes innovations to EVDO CBRonline.com
The three reasons why 3G iPhone won t matter that much ZDNet Blogs
Wainhouse Research and In-Stat combine research and data to create first-of-their-kind unified communications products and services forecasts Boston dBusiness News
World Faces ‘Cyber Cold War’ Threat: Report eWeek
Australia gets new Minister for Broadband APCMag.com
Cisco VoIP bug poses eavesdropping risk The Register

* For those interested, DSLReports.com now hosts some blogs for your reading pleasure. Please be sure to check out the “About DSLReports.com” Site Blog by DSLR owner Justin; keep up with MS related news in DSLR resident Microsoft MVP MSeng’s blog “Microsoft Watch“; read about various interesting computer related tidbits in “The Burnfolder” blog from DSLR moderator rjackson, and you can also catch industry news and commentary in the “Broadband Bytes” blog. The blogs can be found by opening the “News” tab on your DSLR control panel and clicking on the blog you are interested in.

While TiVO is still only available to a limited number of Comcast subscribers in the New England area (mostly employees), the company has clarified the pricing for the service and insisted marketing for it will be ramping up shortly. TiVO says Comcast will charge users an extra $2.95 per month for the popular service. Multichannel News notes that this fee is in addition to the fee Comcast charges for normal DVR service:

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As we mentioned the other day, the nation’s fourth largest phone provider (soon to be fifth, supplanted by Comcast VoIP) is now offering “naked” DSL, or DSL without mandatory phone service. The catch is that they’re using it as a retention tool — offering it only to customers who threaten to cancel service. Embarq tells Telephony Online why they don’t offer up it up front:

In other words, offering naked DSL is only a “strategic fit” for the company if you vote with your wallet and threaten to take your business elsewhere.
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The San Diego-based Utility Consumers Action network (UCAN), a California consumer group, has filed a lawsuit against Sprint, according to RCR Wireless News. The group accuses the nation’s third largest wireless carrier of improperly billing — claiming that Sprint has been charging data card customers fees and taxes that should only be applied to phone bills. In other cases, data card users were billed erroneously for text messaging.

According to a local San Diego NBC affiliate, Sprint seems to acknowledge the error when customers discover it, but hasn’t refunded impacted users. As with many recent Sprint gripes, the mistake appears to be a result of Sprint’s merger with Nextel, and the subsequent effort to merge their billing systems.
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Comcast gave a bit more detail on the state of their DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades at the CableNEXT Conference this week in Santa Clara, California. Comcast CTO Tony Werner told attendees that the company hopes to have Docsis 3.0 technology in place in around 20 percent of the company’s footprint by the end of next year. DOCSIS 3.0, as we’ve frequently noted, should allow the operator to eventually offer speeds in excess of 100Mbps.

Werner wouldn’t elaborate on which markets will see deployment first, but you can be sure they’ll mirror FiOS deployment. You can also be sure that users won’t see full capacity at first, the initial offerings being in the 20-50Mbps range. What about upstream speeds? Light Reading says the upgrades will focus on downstream bandwidth at first:

That’s definitely going to initially hurt Comcast’s fight against FiOS, as Verizon just started offering symmetrical 15Mbps and 20Mbps service wherever FiOS is available.
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