Last night Marty Linn, GM principal robotics engineer and Ron Diftler, NASA Johnson Space Center Robonaut project manager appeared on Dr Kiki’s Science Hour with R2. R2 is Robonaut 2, the dexterous humanoid robot created by GM and NASA. Marty and Ron spent a full hour talking with Dr Kiki about R2 and showing off what R2 can do.
The Republican argument that giving tax cuts to the richest Americans will get them to create new jobs is clearly bogus. The tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and ramped over the past decade. They are currently at their peak so those Americans should be creating jobs at a prodigious pace right now.
Taking a look at the current unemployment rate, it’s clear that those jobs have not been created. So why should we believe speaker-to-be Boner that things will be any different by extending the cuts?
It’s simple, they won’t be any different.
Unless democratic senators stand up and support Bernie Sanders and his promise to filibuster this deal, things will not get any better as a result of this extension. Obama should be absolutely ashamed of himself and rather than whining about “sanctimonious and pure” people that oppose this deal, he should grow a pair and realize that republicans never have and never will compromise with him. He is the only one compromising here and has clearly demonstrated that he has no credibility left.
Adam savage of the Mythbusters demonstrates yet again the ineffectiveness of American airport security theater. Like most frequent fliers Adam has a plan that he executes before heading off to the airport in order to minimize his hassle factor.
For me that includes moving all loose change and other metallic items to my carry-on before even leaving the house so that I’m not fumbling around in the line holding up everyone else. In my case I do it as much as a courtesy to my fellow travelers as for myself. I know I hate standing in lines and I’m sure others do as well especially if they are running late or have kids that may end up whining. But as usual I digress.
The nature of the work that Savage does on Mythbusters means that he frequently has odd-ball items in his bag when he goes home from the “office.” Fans of the show might get a kick out of such items, but airport rent-a-cops tend to have a less nuanced view of things. Prior to a recent trip to Seattle, Savage neglected to remove a couple of items from his bag before heading to the airport while he was worrying about the way his genitals tend to shrivel when observed through a full body scanner. He tells the tale about a minute into the video above.
…between the birds and the pigs? Will we ever be able to return to work?
Probably not!
Earlier this year the spectacular failure of the Microsoft KinOne and KinTwo came to epitomize Microsoft’s efforts in the mobile phone market. The two phones weren’t horrible devices in and of themselves, but they were saddled with a smartphone label and pricing that they clearly did not live up to. After selling fewer than 10,000 units in the first six weeks, Microsoft and Verizon summarily canceled the devices and sent all the unsold units back to the warehouse.
It now appears that the Kins might be back, at least for a little while. A leaked Verizon product roadmap for the rest of this year shows the renamed Kin OneM and TwoM coming back as “enhanced” feature phones. The feature phone designation means that they are no longer subject to the data plans that are mandatory for all Verizon smartphones.
Features like the Kin Studio that automatically backed up photos and video to the cloud are expected to be dropped now that a data plan is optional, although Zune Music is still available over WIFI. Those that want data access now have the option of Verizon’s new tiered pricing that gives 150 MB of data for $15 a month. If Verizon had offered this kind of pricing when the devices had originally launched, they might have had a chance. Unfortunately they are coming back just as a slew of low-end Android devices like the Motorola Citrus are arriving with real smartphone capability and the type of social connections built in to the Kins. This might be enough for Verizon to unload the remaining stock of phones but it probably won’t make it a lasting success.
Recently my daughter’s cell phone line became eligible for its biennial discounted upgrade and she wanted to get an Android phone. When I checked the Verizon Wireless website I found that the company had made a change in policy for online purchases.
For years, Verizon has offered many of its phones in its brick and mortar stores with a mail-in-rebate which typically amounted to $100. Mail in rebates need to be banned and I won’t buy anything with a rebate. If you went to the Verizon website you could generally get the same phones but instead of the mail-in-rebate, the discount was taken off when the phone was ordered so you didn’t have to pay extra up front and then try to get it back weeks or months later.
Verizon has now changed that to a mail in rebate and worse yet now, you don’t just get a check, you get a Verizon debit card so you have to spend it at Verizon. For the Droid Incredible that Sofie wanted I would have had to pay $299 and then get the debit card. After shopping around I found I get the same phone and do the Verizon upgrade on Amazon.com for just $79, no rebates of any kind. From now on I’ll probably be buying new phones from amazon.
When I first got a cell phone back in the mid-1990s, I only used it sparingly because the price plans will enormously expensive and the batteries didn’t last very long. Over time, though using a wireless device for voice communications became dramatically cheaper as providers started to offer plans with hundreds or thousands of minutes per month at pretty reasonable rates. Of course the cell companies made up for these price reductions with volumes as all the kids started to get their own phones each with its own cost.
Eventually, the family share plan was born which helped a lot by providing a pool of minutes that were shared by up to five phones with extra lines only costing $10 a month. Of course this did little to stifle the ever growing phone bill as we soon added text messaging which of course the phone companies where happy to bundle into the plans for just a little more per month.
Now of course everyone is migrating to smart phones like the iPhone and the numerous Android devices available. Providers are requiring that every one of these phones have a data plan associated with it which currently cost $30 a month for 5GB of data. The problem is none of us ever use anywhere close to the full 5 GB on our phones.
Over the summer, AT&T launched tiered data plans that will help a bit for some users and Verizon is expected to launch its own tiered setup later this month. Unfortunately the Verizon plans are expected to be the same $30 for 5 GB and a $15 plan that only gets you 150 MB. Checking our bill, we are averaging about 250-600 MB per month per phone so the overage charges on the $15 plan would make it more expensive than just staying with the existing $30 plan.
Since phone companies are forcing users to get a data plan when they get a smartphone, it’s time for them to provide a little more pricing flexibility too. The shared voice minutes work great so why not offer a shared data plan? If four phones are only using 2.5-3 GB of data, how about offering a 5 GB shared plan for a small premium over the individual price? Perhaps $30 for the first user and $5 for each additional user. That way a family of four would pay $45 instead of $120.
Just as family share plans brought in a large number of new subscribers, this kind of shared data plan could prompt more customers to switch up to smart phones.
There won’t be many more afternoons like this To lay around in the hammock before the snow falls.
Several years ago the Ypsilanti Public Library starting offering its users access to downloadable audio books through a service called Netlibrary.com. Unfortunately that service was riddled with DRM that wasn’t compatible with anything but Windows computers and PlaysForSure media players. Anyone using an iPod or a Mac was out of luck. At least that service offered a choice of a couple of thousand titles and with a bit of tweaking the DRM could be stripped so that the files could be played on any device.
The library has now switched to different service that is apparently compatible with all platforms including iPods. Unfortunately, it is even less useful than the Netlibrary system. The service offers a grand total of 64 titles. That’s not a typo, it’s 64 titles. Loans are only available for one week at time and each title is only available to one user at a time. These are digital files, why are they only accessible to one person at a time? This is absolutely ridiculous. Why even bother to offer a download service with so few titles? It seems like a complete waste of time and money. If the library is not going to get serious about actually making downloadable content useful to patrons, it should just quit trying.
Last fall Long Island newspaper Newsday decided it had enough of giving away its product online for free and put up a $5/week paywall. Given the plethora of free news sources, readers decided that Newsday didn’t need their money and went elsewhere. Three months after the paywall went up a grand total of 35 people had subscribed.
Now Newsday is apparently hoping that Apple’s iPad will help it gain some more digital subscribers. It remains to be seen if the iPad will be enough to get people to subscribe, but the ad above is definitely amusing.