All quiet on the Windows 7 tablet front? Well, no, but we haven’t exactly seen many shots fired lately. Sure, HP recently refreshed the Slate 500 with the Slate 2, but for the most part, products like this have been eclipsed by excitement around Windows 8. Of course, Redmond’s tablet-friendly OS won’t ship for another year, so for now tablet makers are releasing Windows slates with little fanfare. Not Samsung, though. While its mobile team has dug its heels into the consumer tablet market with devices like the Galaxy Tabs 10.1, 8.9 and 7.0 Plus, its PC division is taking a different tack. The Series 7 Slate PC was built by the same team behind the striking Series 9 laptop, making it one of the slickest business tablets we’ve ever beheld. It rocks an 11.6-inch display that handily dwarfs pretty much everything else out there. It runs a Core i5, not Atom, processor, and is offered with a custom dock and Bluetooth keyboard. The Series 7 Slate isn’t just a rare Windows 7 tablet; it’s also one of the most memorable. But are all of those things worth the $1,099 starting price? Could be, but we can think of a few caveats. Allow us to explain.

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Samsung Series 7 Slate PC review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung Series 7 Slate PC review

An anonymous reader writes with a report that Sprint, in an attempt to extricate itself from the Carrier IQ drama, has “ordered that all of their hardware partners remove the Carrier IQ software from Sprint devices as soon as possible.” Sprint confirmed that they’ve disabled the use of Carrier IQ on their end, saying, “diagnostic information and data is no longer being collected.” The software is currently installed on roughly 26 million Sprint phones, though the company has only been collecting data from 1.3 million of them.

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Sprint Orders All OEMs To Strip Carrier IQ From Their Phones

People have been making graffiti since there was writing — everywhere we go we find messages lost in time. Some of these ancient writings give us priceless insight into lost civilizations. Other pieces, though, just give us big lumps of awesome. More »

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10 Pieces of Nasty Ancient Graffitti – Now Translated! [Daily 10]

PolygamousRanchKid tips a story about research into futuristic military technology currently being funded by DARPA. The Disc-Rotor Compound Helicopter ‘is propelled by rotor blades that extend from a central disc, letting it take off and land like a helicopter. But those blades can also retract into the disc, minimizing drag and letting the Disc-Rotor fly like a plane, powered by engines beneath each wing.’ The Vulture program aims to keep a plane in the sky for five years or more, and ‘LANdroids’ are pocket-sized robots which soldiers can scatter around urban areas to seed a communications network. FastRunner is a ‘two-legged robot that can cover a moderately rough terrain as fast as the best human sprinters.’ The article mentions the flying humvees we’ve discussed in the past, as well as projects for ‘smart’ binoculars and a method for recycling space junk.

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The Future of Battle Tech

Services like 1Password and LastPass are life changers, you sign in with one master password and the app logs you into everything. No need to remember how many symbols and alphanumeric codes you’ve used. No need to remember 312 different passwords. Well, Windows 8 is going to have the same awesome password management built in. More »

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Windows 8 Is Going to Have Some Super Sweet Password Management Features [Windows 8]

Responding to the US Senate request lead by Senator Al Franken, AT&T, Sprint, HTC, and Samsung have sent the list of all the phones with Carrier IQ spyware installed in them. More »

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The Complete List of All the Phones With Carrier IQ Spyware Installed [Carrier Iq]

How much do you love shooting galleries? The 240 point ($3) Real Big Shootin’ DLC pack for the Kinect-enabled Gunstringer gives you a series of shooting galleries, and basically hopes you’ll be content with them. You move your hand to aim the reticle at the bad guys, jerk your hand up to fire, and you try to shoot all the targets. That is the entirety of the content.

The good news is that it’s enough. There are dozens of different missions, each one with different bad guys, different weapons, or added challenges such as the limitation of only being able to shoot one bullet at a time. Maybe you’ll get the use of a flamethrower so you can simply wave your hand around and burn everything you see. The more accurate you shoot, the better your score, and there is both offline multiplayer and scoreboards to keep your interest up.

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Real Big Shootin’ add-on for the Gunstringer lets you live gaming’s greatest fantasy

The artificial leaf is poised to be one of the next big breakthroughs in energy. If we can learn to mimic the biological mechanism by which plants convert solar energy into hydrogen, the sky is the limit. Millions of years of evolution have already proved the worth of photosynthesis, even if it’s not all that efficient in its natural state. More »

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Artificial Photosynthesis: Twice as Efficient as the Real Thing [Energy]

We reported that Universal had seemingly inappropriately tried to pull the Mega Song video from YouTube. Now, in a leaked court filing, it claims to have a deal with Google that allows it to censor any video it damn well likes. More »

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Universal Claims a Private Deal With Google Lets It Censor Videos It Doesn’t Own [Censorship]

thomst writes “Russian scientist Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks revealed in an interview with The Independent that his team discovered ‘powerful and impressive seeping structures (of Methane gas) more than 1,000 metres in diameter’ during their survey of the Arctic Ocean earlier this year. ‘I was most impressed by the sheer scale and the high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them,’ Semiletov told The Independent’s Steve Connor. This finding is important because methane is estimated to be 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it could indicate that global warming is about to accelerate dramatically.”

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Russian Scientist Discovers Giant Arctic Methane Plumes