It looks like something went really wrong at the Lego factory because when Jenny at The Bloggess got his 30th Anniversary minifig celebration pack from them, she got a hole bunch of transvestite minifigs. "I think Eddie Izzard in drag is 10 times hotter than Brad Pitt covered in nougat, but this is just bizarre," Jenny says. And I agree. Seeing all those moustaches and cleavages up close is kind of disturbing:

And talking about minifigs, in case you missed it, Gizmodo and Lego are celebrating the Go Miniman Go Challenge video contest to mark the 30th anniversary of the Lego minifig. By sending your short video centered around Lego's most famous icon you will be able to win a lot of prizes, including two priceless Lego vintage sets. And if you are into photography, remember that Brothers Brick is running a photography contest too.

Talking about which, we got our second video entry two days ago. You can see a frame above. It is a hilarious 25-second short called titled Attack of the Second Amendment, which demonstrates that you can also do an amazing job in just a few seconds.

If you want to participate, check the contest rules here. [The Bloggess—Thanks Daisy]

TERRE HAUTE, Indiana (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama warned the elderly on Saturday that Republican rival John McCain would put their retirement income in danger.

The search titan has exclusive rights among online mapping sites to images from the new GeoEye-1 satellite, which launched Saturday.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Several Russian ships and 1,000 soldiers will take part in joint naval maneuvers with Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea later this year, exercises likely to increase diplomatic tensions with Washington, a pro-government newspaper reported on Saturday.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Mexican soccer fans dressed in white at an international game in the Azteca Stadium on Saturday to protest rising crime and a brutal drug war that has killed more than 2,700 people this year.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing opened the Paralympic Games in spectacular fashion on Saturday, an event China's leaders hope will show them in a compassionate light.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Right now, one of the stores at Amazon.com—myOfficeSource—is selling a 52-inch Sharp Aquos 1080P HDTV for $38.45 (thirty-eight dollars and forty-five cents). That's $2,261.54 off its list price. New, not refurbished. Obviously, something wrong must be happening at their servers because, right now, you can buy a bunch of products with these discounts. Giz reader Cliff, who gave us the heads up, actually bought the 52-inch Aquos and got a confirmation email from Amazon in which they say his order will arrive in mid-september. Update: One reader is giving a word of caution, so proceed with care.

They charged him exactly what the catalog says. Nevertheless, this must be a bug but, in any case and since they are not charging the original price, I guess it's worth trying.

The question is: if a mail order company is advertising and actually confirming the purchase at these prices, are they obligated to honor the advertised price and send the product? Somewhere in my mind, a couple of advertising law clauses I took while in college are saying "yes, they may have to do exactly that". But then again, I may have had a hangover back then and got the whole thing wrong.

Update: a reader has sent us a heads up about a customer review in Amazon.com that says that someone who bought the Texas Instruments calculator got his order switched in his account page for a CD. Cliff says that his Amazon account still lists the Sharp in his order. If this is the case, I don't really know how Amazon can keep such an allegedly shady store in their site. In any case, proceed with caution if you really want to try your luck. [Amazon Sharp deal and Amazon TI deal]

Football fans will get to see live streaming of NBC's Sunday night games via Flash--not NBC's Olympic teammate, Silverlight.

The Eclipse 400 looks is one of those airplanes that you can only imagine in movies or comicbooks. But this is not the Avenger's Quinjet, it is very real, as the video shows. Right now it's being perfected and will be delivered to Tony Starks wannabes in just three years. Its four-seat interior looks more like an expensive sports car than a plane, and it has me saying "want":

A very expensive one: The 330-knots single-engine jet won't come cheap at $1.35 million, so it's not the skycar we were all hoping for.

[Red Ferret]

Demo's impresario goes public with a tart and smartly-written riposte to the shoot-from-the-lip crowd.

HAVANA (Reuters) - Hurricane Ike charged toward Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico as a ferocious Category 4 storm on Saturday, while Tropical Storm Hanna drenched the U.S. Atlantic coast after barreling ashore in the Carolinas.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government plans to takeover Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all shareholders of the two mortgage giants will take a hit, an influential lawmaker said on Saturday.

Blog Vital Security has discovered a fatal flaw in Google's Chrome, which may dramatically affect the lives of the tens of thousands of people who are running the browser right now:

Dear Señor Google, please don't make a new tab automatically display my most visited sites by default. Seriously. Don't. [Vital Security]

It's happening. The Let's Rock Apple event has started to roll. Here's the first photo outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. [iPhone Savior]

Inside baseball: How Webware and other blogs can compete with TechCrunch in covering the TechCrunch50 event.

If you think that the final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope is going to be boring, you haven't seen this video yet. Not only the astronauts will be risking their lives as usual at 366 miles above the Earth, but the sheer amount and the difficulty of the tasks—from repairing components to replacing them to installing new gadgets—makes the mission an almost-impossible one, with soundtrack to match. I never imagined this was going to be such an ambitious and daunting work.

First, there's the pressure the astronauts are going to be facing. In addition to the stress of the spacewalks and the manual work in a weightless environment, they know this is not only the final mission, but also a single shot to service the mighty telescope. If some of the tasks are not completed, there's no way to return back another time and fix whatever is broken. The mission crew knows that Hubble is a vital instrument to science—one that keeps expanding our knowledge of the Universe, helping to answer the most crucial question Humanity has ever faced: where the hell do we come from?—and that the astronauts are men and women of science. And they are going to be the ones responsible for giving science this amazing tool for ten more years.

Then there's the time constrain: just eleven days. As John Grunsfeld—one of the mission astronauts with Andrew Feustel, Gregory Johnson, Megan McCarthur, Michael Good, Scott Altman, and Michael Massimino—puts it: "We got a lot of things we want to repair in Hubble and upgrade in Hubble, and not a lot of time to do it." During that short time, this is all the things they have to do:

Repairs

· Repair two failed instruments in space, which is the first time such a task is going to be attempted. This will be a test to see if Nasa can do this kind of tasks in future missions to the Moon and Mars. The repairs will require removing 110 (yes, a hundred and ten) little screws. While this seems easy, not only it will take a lot of time in zero gravity, but the screws, like any other floating debris, may become a big problem for the security of the astronauts up there.

· The first instrument to be repaired is the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). It was installed in 2002, and then died after being the most used instrument in Hubble for years.

· Then they have to fix the Space Telescope Imagine Spectrograph (STIS). This is a black hole hunter which also did the first detection and chemical analysis of a planet orbiting another star.

New instruments

· They will install the fanciest, most advanced spectrograph in space: the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph.

· In addition to the COS, they are also going to install the Wield Field Camera 3. This new camera is ten times better than the current instrument, and will let us see into the past of the Universe deeper and farther than ever before.

Spacecraft service

· In addition to the pure science aspect of the mission, Nasa also wants to upgrade and fix the spacecraft itself, starting with the gyroscopes, which will be upgraded.

· They also are going to install a refurbished fine guidance sensor.

· The batteries are going to be replaced for the first time since Hubble went into space.

· A new outer blanket layer, this time a solid shield, will be put on top of the current blanket.

· Thermal insulation will be replaced on several bays of the telescope.

· A new capture instrument will be installed to recover the Hubble at the end of its life.

Seems like a lot to me, but maybe is the Jerry Bruckheimerish soundtrack that makes it all more exciting. The really exciting part however, if the mission is completely successful, is that Hubble will be better than ever, ready for action for the next ten years. What does this really mean? Awesome eye candy for the next decade. And maybe showing to us that the origin of the Big Bang is really a huge bowl full of Fruit Loops that went horribly wrong during one of God's breakfast.

Alton Brown of Good Eats fame has a new show airing on Food Network and they’re doing all their HD video editing on location in the Caribbean, usually on a boat. Turns out that he’s a huge gadget/tech fan and Gizmodo has the scoop on the gadgets that Alton likes to use and how they manage to get the show production ready in the field.

This year we decided to go completely tapeless: Panasonic P2 cards on 200s. We’re downloading them into our portable Avid edit system. We take as much audio equipment as we take video equipment. The funny thing is, professional audio hasn’t gotten a whole lot smaller. Although hi-def cameras have gotten smaller, lenses have gotten better and battery time has gotten better, audio is still the tricky part of the process for field reporting.



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Game releases for 9/7-9/13 @ Shacknews

Spore for PC launch coverage @ Gamespy

10 best downloads on PSN @ CVG

New achievements for Halo 3 coming soon @ Kotaku

Steam slashes prices by 50% on id software this weekend @ 1up

Interview with Diablo 3 lead designer Jay Wilson @ Crispy Gamer

Engadget has a fuzzy alleged spy photo of the next-gen iPod nano that is rumored to be announced on Tuesday, 9/9. Check it out after the jump.

You may be looking at a Photoshop spackled together from newspaper clippings, puppy dog tears, and Steve Jobs' fever-dreams. Or, this could be a really crappy, actual photo of the iPod nano 4G in its packaging.

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AT&T’s chief security officer, Edward Amoroso, spoke with Network World about security challenges he’s considering and AT&T’s response to those challenges: DDoS, botnets, and hackers - oh my!

Edward Amoroso is the chief security officer at AT&T in Florham Park, N.J., as well as a professor who has written several textbooks on information security. Amoroso spoke with Network World’s Jon Brodkin this week in Boston, where he delivered a keynote about network security during Forrester’s Security Forum.

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The infamous “Rock Phish” group has upgraded their infrastructure to use the Asprox botnet, according to eWeek. RSA believes this move was made so that the group can step up their phishing attacks. Great, that means more “Hallmark Cards” and other dubious invitations. Oh noes! My nonexistent account at BofA may have been haxed!

“It’s our suspicion that this lull may be calm before the storm,” said Sean Brady, product marketing manager at RSA. …According to research from MessageLabs, one in every 522.7 e-mails they analyzed in August constituted a phishing attack, a decrease of less than one percent from July. In May however, the rate stood at one in 265.6 e-mails.

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Researchers create demo "Photo of the Day" app that turned Facebook users' machines into a botnet.

Who else would spend $25 in a Hello Kitty Action DJ Speaker
—which moves pretending she's a DJ at the rhythm of the music played in your digital audio player—but a twisted disco pussy lover with probably too much Jack Daniels running through his veins and listening to ABBA right now?

FedEx says they are delivering it this monday. Oh. Yes. [Think Geek]