In light of last week’s awful rioting, carrying an umbrella with a pistol attached to the handle is a bad idea. Can’t expect the police to be in a jolly mood these days. If you’re wondering how this works, don’t fret. It’s basically an umbrella that funnels water down to the pistol on the handle, thereby allowing the holder to squirt passers by. Take it form us: This will get you in trouble.

Just imagine squirting some unsuspecting bloke and royally pissing them off. A fisticuff ensues and you go home with a bloody nose, the pistol/umbrella broken in half. While this is mighty entertaining for kids, it’s a disaster for adults considering how infantilized and emotionally immature most ‘grown ups’ are these days.

The state of modern adulthood aside, further research reveals this umbrella pistol is more of a designproject (though not a commissioned design) than a real product. We were actually hard pressed to find a retail price. Oh well, with the likelihood of awful possibilites resulting from a pistol/umbrella in the wrong hands, might as well steer clear from this. If you do happen to be packing a water pistol, it might be good for driving away small feral animals like rabid dogs or zombie squirrels. Better yet go buy a real gun.

Back in July we heard news that Apple had placed an order with Pegatron Technology, which, although sounds like some sort of Transformers character, is actually a manufacturing company that’s better known for its laptop production. The company previously produced and shipped nearly 4 million phones, but was said to be producing 15 million more. That number is small potatoes compared to today’s news from DigiTimes.

Apparently, Apple will be building an army of 56 million iPhones in the second half of 2011. No, not all of these will be the coveted iPhone 5 that we keep hearing rumors about. DigiTimes says about half will be the new model, and the other half will be the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, which includes the CDMA model that works with Verizon’s network.

But why is Apple planning on producing another 25 million units of its older models when the company is rumored to be releasing the iPhone 5 in the next month or two? Could it be that the rumors of Apple creating an iPhone 4S, a phone that will have a few updates but won’t necessarily be anything to write home about, are true? Is Apple manufacturing a mid-range iPhone to try to market towards that consumer base of people who think the iPhone is just too expensive? After all, Apple already sold 18.65 million iPhones in the first two quarters of 2011 and the company has sold 222 million iOS devices since the first iPhone launched in 2007.

Apple was estimated to produce 50 million units at the end of the second quarter of 2011, so the jump to 56 million is an increase of 12-13 percent. We still have no confirmation as to what company or companies are doing the manufacturing, but we do know it’s based in Taiwan. It could most definitely include Foxconn, Apple’s main partner for building iDevices.

A laptop with integrated 3G isn’t at all a rare today. A MacBook with integrated 3G, however, is. If a Cupertino customer wants round-the-clock connectivity, a portable modem is a necessary purchase. There is hope, though: An eBay seller recently put up for auction a MacBook Pro prototype with 3G and an aerial built-in.

The eBay listing is for a 15-inch MacBook Pro Santa Rosa prototype from 2007. The model is outfitted with a 3G antenna on the outside and 3G-hardware and SIM card slot on the inside. The seller originally purchased the prototype from Craigslist where it was listed as a for-parts machine.

Upon opening the unit, the seller realized that it was not a standard issue MacBook Pro. Aside from the antenna, the first indication that something was different was the red motherboard which is a feature of all Apple prototypes. The seller then found a SIM card slot underneath the memory cover. According to the listing, the SIM card board is connected to the logic board via a connector that isn’t present in production models.

The machine recognizes the 3G connector, but it is nonfunctioning. The seller had to add some parts–a hard drive, memory, RAM, and MagSafe adapter–to the prototype because it came without them present.

While the design may be a bit unsightly, it shows that Apple has been thinking about integrating 3G data into its computers for several years now. One of the responders a forum thread noted that 3G connectivity was already present in several laptops in 2007 with the Samsung Q40 and Dell XPS M1210 among them. It’s a common concept day, with integrated 3G being available on most business laptops and some consumer ones as well, though the antenna has been shed from most of today’s models

As we all know with Apple’s slew of copyright infringement lawsuits, the company does not take very kindly when someone even comes close to copying it. For example, Apple will go so far as to sue Amazon for using the word “App Store,” and don’t even get us started with the whole lawsuit between Apple and Samsung halting the sales of the Galaxy Tab because it too closely resembles the iPad.

These lawsuits are debatable to some people, but when a company or store blatantly copies Apple, there’s no way around it. Back in July we heard of a fake Apple Store in the city of Kunming in the southwestern part of China that was so realistic even its employees thought they worked at a real Apple store.

Just a few days ago we heard news of 22 more fake Apple Stores in China – five of which were in the city of Kunming. Two of the Kunming stores were quickly shut down after the news of their existence broke out. Ironically, the stores were simply shut down due to the owners not having business licenses.

After an investigation launched on August 2, the 22 stores were found to be selling either official or counterfeit Apple products in what seemed to be an official Apple Store, complete with the Apple logo and all.

Well, it turns out that to not be shut down, all the stores had to do was change their names. MicGadget is reporting that the store names have now been changed to “Smart Store.” The Apple logo is still there, glowing bright and true. Another store not in Kunming was also found and is called “iParty.”

We’re still wondering why Apple hasn’t put a stop to this altogether. With a population of 1.34 billion people and only four real Apple stores in China, you’d think Apple would wise up and build some more stores so that all these counterfeit alternatives wouldn’t be popping up all the time.