Maintaining a really huge army could prove to be extremely expensive, as the US found out the hard way. Not only do you have to spend a whole lot of your GDP percentage each year to bolster your defences, there is the issue of making sure the army has enough oil, or black gold, to keep its machineries working and combat-ready at all times.

SpecOps Systems has a special aim in its corporate sphere – that is, to design rugged, wearable computer technology which is capable of offering enhanced situational awareness of the battle space for military soldiers while they are in the heat of the battlefield. The special WC2 computer system works pretty much like an extremely powerful desktop computer, although this one is way more portable compared to those netbooks and notebooks businessfolk tote about, since it was specially designed to be worn on the arm and carried by a soldier while he is in the thick of action for extended periods of time. The summer of 2009 was when SpecOps Systems was asked by a customer for a WC2 computer, albeit with the added capability of an integrated keyboard.

Since the dawn of Facebook’s Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could send you inching down the treacherous path toward carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, there’s a way to view hundreds of photos without lifting a finger: a new Facebook Prototype lets you turn these photo albums into slideshows.

So um, remember this crazy 14-inch transparent OLED display Samsung was showing off perched atop a laptop at CES? Yea, that might be in the shops within the next 12 months .

You know how it is — another day, another “magical” and “intuitive” input device — not unlike Immersion’s Cubtile , which we first saw about a year ago. This time around the culprit is Gesture Cube, the heathen spawn of Ident’s “GestIC” electric field sensing technology (for 3D spatial movement tracking) and a couple German design studios.

Seems like Helsinki’s always got something interesting to show in its Nokia Research Center ( NRC ).