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The safety payoff of the big business of gun training
Great story, but I didn't hear the two most important things in firearm safety. A gun is ALWAYS loaded, and don't point a gun at...
JerryCPP | May 22, 2013 Three life rules from Donald Rumsfeld
Journalism: Practiced. Excellent interview. Thank you.
Annapolis57 | May 17, 2013 Three life rules from Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld's interview on Marketplace today was absolutely unbelievable. Really. Is one of his rules not to believe your own spin? I...
jgrothues | May 16, 2013 Three life rules from Donald Rumsfeld
Ryssdal's interview with Rumsfeld was breathtakingly inappropriate. "Marketplace?" If Ryssdal wants to promote his obvious biases...
rcd43 | May 16, 2013
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Apple's iPhone 5 Maps Fail
If someone asks you for directions this week, they may have just updated to iPhone's new operating system, iOS 6. Apple's attempt at leaving Google maps in the dust has been, in internet slang, an epic fail. There's already a blog on Tumblr dedicated to showcasing the worst examples--from the misplaced Washington Monument to satellite views that look apocalyptic. But a rare misstep for Apple is good news for at least one man. Frank Jacobs curates a website featuring strange maps from all over. The Guardian in London had him pick some of his faves, including a map of the U.S. that looks a bit like glowing intestines. What is it charting, you ask? An incredible constellation of McDonalds restaurants, of course.Cell Phone-Capable Airplanes Coming in 2013
You will remember those clumsy airplane phones in the back of the center seat which, for a hefty price, could let you reach out and touch someone from 30,000 feet. What you get these days is an announcement about turning off all your battery-powered stuff until you reach altitude. And don't even think about making a call. The tide, however, could be shifting. The new Boeing 747-8 Dreamliner, now in production, could let people use their cell phones as soon as next year, although at the moment FAA rules won't allow this over U.S. airspace. So there is First Class, Business Class, and here an idea: Quiet Class.Dark Matter Survey Camera: Looking Through the Lens
From Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, it pays to work in high tech
The Internet, high tech and computer manufacturing industries continue to boost local and state economies with competitive jobs and high wages. On average, a high-tech worker in the private sector earns 77 percent more than a worker with a non-tech job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by the industry trade group TechAmerica. But not all states are created equal. Explore the U.S. by the number of jobs and businesses in the high-tech industry, and see how each state ranks in terms of average wage for a high-tech career in this interactive map from the desk of the Marketplace Tech Report. All week, we'll be exploring the technology industry from heart of the third-largest state in terms of the tech jobs economy - New York City, also home to the new Tech Report with Host David Brancaccio.Phone Companies Could Be Overcharging You for Data
Turns out, the phone company could be overcharging you for going online while you're mobile. Researchers at UCLA compared how much data smartphones used while connected to the internet to what the phone company was charging (read their paper here). In areas of lousy coverage, some customers were billed for data that never showed up. Tom Simonite at MIT's Technology Review says one researcher was trying to watch a video on his phone while riding the train... "And then the train went into a tunnel, he lost the signal, and the video cut out and he didn't get to watch any more of it, but the carrier kept sending data his way. As far as their system could tell, data was being streamed to his device. And so when the bill came in, there was about 7 percent more data on his bill than he had actually been able to use on his device." According to paper co-author Chunyi Peng, it's an architectural problem--an issue of how carriers measure data--and maybe not a malicious one. But considering how confusing a cell phone bill can be (have you ever looked at all those separate line items?), it's a problem in need of a solution. Especially now that nearly half of us are using the kind of phones that could potentially play video and use other streaming capabilities.Will Amazon announce a phone today?
Amazon is hosting a big announcement today and for quite a while we’ve been expecting some combination of Kindles and Kindle Fires to be on the launch pad. Late last week, the company said that it was “sold out” of the Kindle Fire, which is a slam dunk indication that the old model, which showed up less than a year ago, is being replaced. From ABC News: The thing to really watch for here is whether Amazon also announces a smartphone at this event, something that The Verge says is very possible: The Verge also reports that Amazon’s new Kindle will feature a “Paperwhite” display - even clearer - and have an 8-week battery life.FCC to test wireless speed
If you ask any salesman at the wireless stores and kiosks at the mall how fast their company’s network is, you’ll likely get some variation on, “Oh, it’s REALLY fast”, which doesn’t ultimately help you all that much. The company’s advertisements aren’t much better, each boasting about speed without providing much in the way of quantification. The FCC is going to do something about that. The Commission will hold a meeting on September 21st to begin to develop a program for monitoring mobile network speeds. The FCC has been doing that with broadband networks for some time. All Things D quotes FCC Chair Julius Genachowski: It will be interesting to see if the Verizons and AT&Ts of the world embrace this testing or if they lobby against anything that could put their claims at risk of being defied by reality.Sec. Clinton calls for joint effort on security between U.S. and China
A big day for people named Clinton yesterday. President Bill gave a pretty big speech at the DNC in Charlotte, meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary was in China attempting to forge a rather bold new initiative: cooperation on cybersecurity. Hillicon Valley quotes her: There’s a lot going on here, obviously. It’s logical for two superpowers to work together on a big effort. China, however, has been the source of a lot of cyberattacks within the United States and it’s often unclear whether the attacks are coming from private citizens, the Chinese government, or some combinations of the two. Then there’s the fact that China strenuously censors the internet within its borders. It might also just be a diplomatic charade: two countries playing nice discussing something that will never come to fruition in a meaningful way.This crazy Romney tax return hacker story is crazy
The value of the Internet currency known as Bitcoin rose yesterday for a pretty weird reason. Hackers claim to have obtained the tax records of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney from Pricewaterhouse Cooper and say they will release the records unless the Romney campaign pays them a million dollars in the hard-to-trace Bitcoin currency. From Venture Beat: The Secret Service is investigating the claims, which were first posted on Pastebin, a message board site commonly visited by hackers. Pricewaterhouse Cooper is denying the claims, or at least saying that it has seen no evidence of a hack. A lot of the chatter in the hacking world is pretty dubious of the claims as well but we live in a world where anyone can go on some website, say they pulled off a big crazy hack, and it becomes news.Farmville 2 launches but does anyone care? I mean, I do, a little, thus the memo item here, but in a larger sense, you know?
Way back when we started doing Tech Report and dinosaurs roamed the earth and the internet was steam-powered, Zynga was a big success story. This was thanks in large part to Farmville, the hyper-addictive, hyper-social game that had millions of people studiously maintaining farms of pretend crops and make-believe livestock. Then things went South: follow-up games from Zynga didn’t make quite the splash and people realized that the games were pretty stupid (a fact that they could have arguably deduced much earlier in the process. Now Zynga’s offering up Farmville 2 and there’s a degree of poetic sadness in the scenario being presented. From the LA Times: “See, the farm represents the ruinous state of our company after lots of layoffs and people realizing our games are lousy!” a spokesperson for Zynga didn’t really say.Pages