The Doppler-based Pocket Radar has the same degree of accuracy as traditional, bulky radar guns (within 1.6km/h) in a unit that’s small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. It can also take up to 10,000 speed measurements on one set of AAA batteries. Of course, it’s probably going to be a lot more expensive for makers to tinker with when it arrives early 2010. [Pocket Radar via BusinessWire via Gadget Lab]

Now, bear in mind this is a concept, but the goal behind it is pretty much laid bare for all to see in the design. Fast. Low to the ground. Crotch rocket for the Arctic scene.

It also kind of looks like you’re riding a big green sperm, but I assume that was a design choice meant to convey a sense of masculinity or something. [Design Blog]

I don’t know how it calculates the numbers. Maybe it’s just a speed display, maybe it uses some logic to come up with the accident bills costs or the chance of a crash. I do know, however, that people respond to fear more than to fines. 46 days in the hospital won’t be fun at all, so grab your steering wheel with both hands, and please drive safely. [Direct Daily]

The spaser works about a thousand times faster than the fastest transistor, while having the same nanoscale size. This opens up the possibility to build ultrafast amplifiers, logic elements, and microprocessors working about a thousand times faster than conventional silicon-based microprocessors.

This new method treats light in a different way than traditional optical CPUs, which are “difficult to miniaturise because you can’t contain photons in areas smaller than half their wavelength”. In other words: Optical CPUs won’t fit in current electronics. Plasmonic devices, on the other side, can concentrate these nanoparticles in spaces similar to current processors. [Technology Review]

The Crucial SSDs are available in the current standard of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities at price points of $US170, $US330 and $US600, respectively. Those prices may seem outlandish if you’ve never browsed SSDs before, but they’re actually pretty fair; Crucial is a respectable company and those prices are even a little below average prices at each capacity, regardless of the fact that they’re among the fastest on the market. If you’re looking to pump some speed into your netbook, and you’ve got enough money to do something silly like spend twice the price of your computer on one component, they’re probably worth a look. [Press Release, Crucial Store]

The New Xbox Experience will provide 360 gamers with the option to preload entire games onto the system’s hard drive. Because of its faster data transfer rate, this should translate to faster load times, especially for earlier generation titles. In this clip, we see a side-by-side of GTAIV loaded on DVD vs. the hard drive. The result? The game loads, according to our unscientific counting, about 12 seconds faster from the hard drive. If you’ve got the space, we’re guessing it’s worthwhile. But our 20GB model only has about 3GB free at a time. [via Maxconsole]

Unmentioned in Laptop’s piece is that the Skyfire browser actually shows you a page that has been pre-crunched by Skyfire’s servers, so it’s essentially showing you an image. And yeah, since the browser itself isn’t doing any heavy lifting, it’s going to fly. But stuff like text entry is annoying, since you have to input text, send that back to Skyfire, and then it comes back to you. Flash works the same way, but hey, at least it does flash. We’re not really sure what’s up with Opera Mobile 9.5 taking twice as long as Safari to render a page, but maybe that’s ’cause it’s big boned feature packed. [Laptop Mag]

This way you can know exactly what the speed limit is at all times, even when you’ve just transitioned from a high speed area to a low speed one that cops like to ticket in. In fact, if this system is good enough, it could be a decent excuse to tell the popos that their speed limit signs were too obscured that even a 30FPS camera couldn’t make it out. [Kicking Tires via Oh Gizmo]

Thanks tipster!

AU: I only put this up to remind you just how bad we have here in Oz. The shame…

[Bits]