Common Paradox Tech Blog

Superman’s a pretty decent guy and after he falls for Lois Lane, he immediately tries to be completely honest with her. The only trouble is that Lois is a bit confused as to what Superman’s coming out about.

Or maybe Lois is way smarter than all of us and has figured out Superman’s real secret. Who knows. I think I’ll just enjoy the Batman cameo at the end of the clip and not question this too much. [Thanks, Erik!]

As we reported last week, Ben Stiller is out with a new charity campaign called Stillerstrong and is looking to drive awareness to it through social media.

Part of the strategy naturally involves viral videos starring the actor, and today Stiller’s revisiting a past online success and asking the omnipresent Ryan Seacrest to retweet Stillerstrong to his 2.6 million followers.

The result is another amusing video, including a cameo by Robert De Niro and the suggestion of a blockbuster co-starring Stiller and Seacrest. Check it out:

Seacrest is yet to oblige (the video just went up 30 minutes ago), but if you’d like to support Stillerstrong, which is raising money to build schools in Haiti, you can go retweet Stiller yourself.

Tags: ben stiller, charity, ryan seacrest, social media

I’ve definitely wanted to Force Quit some conversations in my time, so a real life spinning beach ball of death would be the perfect excuse. Watch:

Microsoft may have backed out of the show’s live special, but Family Guy definitely has the geek cred thing down. [Nick McGlynn]

At last, here’s the droid we were all looking for. In this frame you can clearly see R2-D2’s cameo in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. This time there’s absolutely no doubt about it: It’s been confirmed by ILM.

Click on the image to see the high resolution version

Can you see him floating there, on the left, right below the huge arrow that I also missed when I saw the movie? That’s obviously him, a fact that has been confirmed to me by one of the movie’s sequence supervisors at Industrial Light & Magic—the same guy who said this previous sighting was just the shuttle.

I don’t know about you but, right now, I feel like what I imagine my dog Jones feels every time I take his collar off to scratch his neck. Oh yesyeyeyeyes. YES. Harf. Woof. [Image capture from Science Fiction Stuff—Thanks ILM tipster]

More Ion-powered nettops are on the way, including three new models from Asus subsidiary ASRock. All three up the ante over the company’s previous nettops with RAID support, eSATA, MCE remote (not on the lower end model), and a few other odds and ends. Blu-ray even makes a cameo in the higher-end unit.

The three new machines consist of the Ion 330Pro, 330HT, and 330HT-BD. Each one comes spec’d with an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz, up to 4GB of DDR2-800 memory, Nvidia’s Ion graphics, up to 1.5TB of total hard drive space, DVD or Blu-ray drive, 7.1 channel audio, Gigabit LAN, 802.11b/g/n WiFi (330Pro excluded), and the usual assortment of ports (HDMI, USB).

No word yet on price or a release date, nor is there any mention of what OS the machines will use (we’re guessing Windows 7).

Image Credit: ASRock via xbmcfreak.nl

ILM Special effects supervisor Scott Farrar said that R2-D2 had a cameo in Transformers 2. My bet was that she was behind Megan Fox’s ass at one point, giving her a back rub. With his special back vibrating thingapparatus. Updated.

Actually, according to this frame captured from the Blu-ray edition, our favorite astromech appears 2 hours 17 minutes and 52 seconds in the movie, during the merge of Jetfire’s parts to Optimus Prime.

It looks like the real thing to me. Those look like his three feet, as he is flying away from the camera. They are too symmetric to be a piece of random metal, and I can see his shape. But then again, I’ve been wrong before.

Update: A reader sent us this other frame, which clearly shows that’s R2-D2. [Transformers Live]

Sorry AT&T. I know CSI never lets plausibility get in the way of a good story, but watching them crawl through an underground tunnel and exclaim the iPhone has “outstanding reception”, made last night’s episode harder to believe than usual.

While that obnoxious gem comes at the 2 minute mark in the video below, the product placement begins even before that. Realizing the electrical conduit tunnel is too dark, the dimwitted “PC-like” investigator is handed the iPhone by his cool, like totally hip partner: “There’s an app for that!” Yep, it’s running a flashlight app. Ugh.

Meanwhile, back in reality, AT&T wants you to use MicroCell routers to fix its own reception flaws.

It’s just weird.

It’s weird that Justin Timberlake, he formerly of *NSync and Emmy-award-winning dick boxing fame, is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies. And furthermore, as if all of that wasn’t just batshit weird enough – I discover that Justin Timberlake – when he’s not dressing up as the dude from the board of Yammer – has started to invest in Silicon Valley start-ups. Weird weird weird.

Those, roughly, were my thoughts on Thursday evening, as I stood – clutching a bottle of water – at the launch party for Robo.to, the latest product from Particle, which happens to be the start-up that Timberlake invested in. Timberlake was in town too – in order to dress up as the guy from Causes – but couldn’t make the party due to work commitments. That was also weird, I thought. Not that he’d bailed in order to dress up as the other Facebook guy, but rather that him doing so had resulted in a reporter from US Weekly (which I discovered is pronounced “us, rather than US – which is also weird, given that it’s not about “us”, but rather about “them”) emailing me for a comment.

gijoel writes “Someone with too much time on their hands and access to Auto-Tune has taken clips from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series to make this fantastic song. Watch for the Stephen Hawking cameo.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.